 Alright, welcome everybody. Quite the crowd, very cool. So, welcome. I'm going to talk today a little bit about hypnosis and social engineering and NLP and just all of the things that allow us to persuade other people. And you will notice that there are two names on the presentation slides and on the program, but my partner Anton is not going to be here today. I got an email yesterday and just sort of out of the blue. Two line email, hey Mike, not going to make it. So, you're on by yourself. I was like, okay then. Little bit of confusion. Not quite what we had planned, and of course we had a plan for how this was going to go. And so, sort of winging it, but that's how things go sometimes. And actually, which that sort of reminds me of a bit of a story, because I had the weirdest experience yesterday. I was walking into Caesars. I spoke yesterday on security careers. I don't know how many of you were there, but I was walking into Caesars to meet with my co-presenter on the career talk. And as I got out of the taxi, the weirdest thing happened to me. And I was walking up to the front door and this girl comes running out of Caesars, runs up to me, grabs me by the hands and starts spinning me around dancing. She's out of nowhere. And I have to tell you, I was like what the hell is this about? It was very, very, very confusing. And I had no idea what that was about. But she reminded me of another story. So, the thing you'll notice about hypnotists is we like to tell stories. And I will explain some of that later, but for the time being I'm just going to tell the story that she reminded me of, because as I was spinning around in circles out in the middle of the taxi stand at Caesars, I got to thinking, as I'm sure all of you would, about a story that a coach of mine once told. And it was an ancient story about a young boy in a monastery in Japan. Because of course, a girl dancing with you in front of Caesars would remind you of a kid in a monastery. But he was a particularly mischievous young boy. And his name was Koji. And Koji ended up in the monastery because his parents had shipped him there. He was just a royal pain in the ass. It's really what it came down to. And he kept getting himself in trouble. And when he went to school, you know, he didn't listen. He didn't pay attention in class. You know, he was always playing tricks. And the more bored he got in school, the more trouble he got into. I'm sure there's nobody in this audience who can relate to that. And so his parents shipped him off. And all was good for a couple of weeks. And Koji eventually, when he got to the monastery, got himself into trouble. And he got pulled into the headmaster's quarters. And remember, this is a Japanese monastery in the 17th century. And the headmasters were not exactly as nice as they are today. They had canes and liked to use corporal punishment. So when Koji was in the headmaster's office, the headmaster gets out this boy-sized jar of candy. He's sitting on this couch, eating this jar of candy. That's absolutely huge. And the headmaster, as he was doling out Koji's punishment, just kept eating his candy the whole time. And, you know, this is a boy in a monastery who is mischievous and all that. And he asks the headmaster if he can have some candy. And the headmaster says, no, this is candy to adults, but it's poison to young boys. Kind of lie that adults often tell young children. And so Koji received his punishment and he was asked to do extra chores. That was fine. Koji did his extra chores. He was punished and all was monastery life. But soon enough the headmaster was called away. The headmaster had to go on a trip as they often did. Back then you didn't just get on a plane, you went on a long trek. And so the headmaster was away for weeks. And while the headmaster was away, all was well for a little while. Koji was doing his extra chores. And then one night all the boys were laying up in bed and all was quiet. And Koji said, hey guys, I know where we can get some candy. And they were like, yeah, whatever, there's no candy in this monastery. And he's like, no, seriously, I know where we can get some. And so they snuck up to the headmaster's office because Koji was a troublemaker and liked to lead his friends in getting in trouble. And when they got to the headmaster's office, you know, I mean it's a huge jar of candy, right? And they were only going to eat a little bit. They ate a couple pieces off the top. And they ate a couple more pieces. And then a couple more pieces. And then a couple more. And soon enough the jar was empty. And of course their thought was, well, you know, if we only had a few, he wouldn't have noticed. But how are we going to hide this? You know, because the jar is empty. I mean, this is a huge jar of candy. It's not like the guy's not going to notice. And so Koji goes, no, wait, I've got a plan. And in the headmaster's office was a vase. And this was a vase that was a very special vase. It had been around for hundreds of years. It was the prize possession of the monastery. And Koji walked over to the place where the vase was and picked it up and slammed it on the floor, breaking it into a million pieces. And the boys just all stood there, gaping with their mouths open. And so hypnosis and influence. I'm going to talk about all the different ways that we influence each other while I'm up here today. It's funny, I can't stand still while I'm talking, so I have to move around. And this mic's actually a little bit restrictive, but I'm going to do my best. So we use language to influence each other. And when we talk about social engineering what isn't social engineering if you really think about it? I mean, when we talk about social engineering in this context, we're usually talking about tricking someone into giving us their password or giving us access we wouldn't normally have. It's really the same act as any act of influence. We do all sorts of things to influence each other on a daily basis that is really social engineering. And when it comes right down to it, language is really the primary form of influence. Language is what we use to influence each other every day. When talking about language, language actually has three main functions when it comes to representing experience. Let me back up for a second. First, let me just assert that language is what we use to map experience to each other. If I want to tell you about my day, for example, if I want to represent to you about the day I had last night or yesterday or the party that we had or what we were doing at the bar last night I have to use language to do it. But in so doing I do three things to that piece of experience. When I have a piece of experience it's a rich model. I have rich sensory representation of all the parts of the experience. I have awareness of how my left foot felt in the experience. And I have awareness of every piece of visual information coming at me. I can notice that the lights dim over there and brighter over here. But when I'm talking to you I can't do that. Because if I gave you that much information while talking you would be bored instantly. It would be like it would be information overload. So language is actually used to do three things. We delete parts of experience. If I was talking about my experience of this talk I probably wouldn't mention that that corner of the room is dark. But it's part of my experience. I would just delete it while I was using the language. I distort things because language is by nature distorted. You can't translate the experience directly into language. Language has a function where it changes the quality of the experience and we generalize. Because if we didn't generalize it would be absolute information overload. And so when people started really researching the way that language works in influence they found that there were really two models. There's two models for using language and one is really an information model. It's called the meta model. And the other is an influence. It's a model for influence and it's called the Milton model and we'll get to both of those. But the meta model is really about understanding precision in language. It's about overcoming those three things I was just talking about. It's about overcoming the deletion, the distortion and the generalization. So for example let me use a really simple example. If I said the cat chased the rat it's a simple sentence, simple example. How much information is actually left out of that? Where was the cat chasing the rat? What color was the cat? What color was the rat? How fast were they going? There's all these pieces of information that are not part of that sentence that if you're trying to get information from me and think about an influence situation if someone says something to you you often need more information from them in order to go anywhere with it. You often want more information. I think about if you're thinking about trying to influence your wife or your husband or your significant other you think about the number of times that they come to you and they make a statement and you're like, man what the hell are they thinking? And you realize that what they just said to you is but a small part of what rich experience is going on in their mind no matter how crazy that experience might be, right? And the meta model is really about pulling that information back. And so if you read about the meta model you'll find that it's mostly concerned with how do you get the information that's left out. Chomsky called the difference between the two sets of information the surface structure of the linguistic act and the deep structure. The surface structure is what you hear. The surface structure is the sentence that I'm saying. The deep structure is all the representation that underlies it. So for example if I were to say what color is this dog sitting on the table right here? You all, I mean there's a surface structure there you all probably have a different deep structure representation of that. How many people thought the dog was black? Nobody? So really what it comes down to is recovering the information that was deleted and distorted. Now that's incredibly useful but it's not that useful for influence. Because it's really about recovering information rather than actually making people do things. And what they found was when they started studying people who knew how to make people do things they looked at this guy. That's a picture of Milton Erickson. Erickson was, is widely regarded as the world's greatest hypnotist. He died in like 1980 but he was a, I mean he was the leading practitioner of hypnotism from about 1940 to about 1980. I mean the man published volumes of work on influence. And Erickson was a particularly interesting character. He was, when he was a young boy he got polio. And he was forced, he was basically immobile for about a year and a half. And all he could do was lay in bed and watch the people around him. And so he became very precise at watching people. And he started to notice how people interacted with each other and what language did to them. And so Erickson developed this style of influencing people that was unparalleled. And his quirks and idiosyncrasies are well-known in hypnosis to this day. But Erickson was easily the most brilliant communicator probably of any generation we've ever seen. Because he started to realize that there are, there is a way to communicate with someone. And it's been described as artfully vague that allows a person to remain in their experience. So if I was taught, let me actually demonstrate with an example. So if I'm talking about, you know, we're outside walking and we're walking along and it's a beautiful sunny day and you can look up and you can notice how blue the sky is. And then as you're walking a little farther you notice that a rhinoceros walks in front of you. How many people had the rhinoceros in the picture before I said it? Yeah, exactly. So the point was, I know it's a strange example but there's a point there. The point was you didn't have that as part of your experience. What Erickson would do was map his communication to the experience that everyone already had. So Erickson was brilliant in using things like sensory generalization. If he was talking to you and, you know, trying to influence you, he wouldn't say and you can notice that it feels kind of warm in here. Because to some people maybe it doesn't feel kind of warm in here. He would say something like and you can notice that there's a sensation in the air and it might be warm and it might be cold but you can feel something. And you notice it's a true statement no matter where you are. No matter who you are in the room it's a true statement. And so you're pacing the person's experience. By talking about something that the person has to experience, they have no choice but to agree. And agreement is fundamentally the base unit of influence. Everyone's been in a situation where you're trying to convince someone else that they're wrong and convince them that your point is right. And that is usually the hardest way to get anyone to do anything. It's usually the hardest way to get influence is to try and convince the person that you're smarter than they are. The real way to actually make influence happen is to convince them that it was their idea all along and they were smart all along right? So Erickson was brilliant in making sure that no one ever disagreed with him. And yet at the same time he would lead the person through that agreement to the point that he wanted them to make. The other thing that Erickson did really brilliantly was understanding the way that language can create confusion. Erickson would use, Erickson realized that negation doesn't exist in language. Or sorry, negation only exists in language. It doesn't exist in the human mind. Think about this. Well, alright, let's try the same example as before. The cat's not chasing the rat. What does that sentence mean? How do you represent that sentence? You probably did something like, and there's a whole bunch of variations of this, you represented a cat chasing a rat and then wiped it out. You can't imagine the cat not chasing the rat. You can only imagine the cat chasing the rat and then not doing it. And so by using negation he realized that he could force people to think of things that they weren't willing to think about otherwise. We've all probably experienced this in some way at some time. Another one that he liked was tag questions. And this is one that's incredibly powerful and I would urge you to play with it because it's a really cool one. Tag questions are using negation at the end of a sentence. So, you know, you can imagine that things are going well, can't you? Or you will, won't you? By using the positive form of the sentence and the negative form of the sentence, the mind gets confused. You probably find yourself wanting to agree with that sentence even if it doesn't actually map to your experience because by putting both of those things together, it's incredibly confusing for the mind. And confusion is really where it all comes down to. I mean, the mind has a limit on processing power, just like a computer. I mean, literally many of the same concepts, I did a talk last year at Hope called Hacking the Mind where I actually spent the whole time mapping all of the things that we do in terms of breaking into computers into the way that we can use language to influence each other. And one of the ways that we do that is by creating processing lag. A great example is that one of the things that they found is that if I use a non grammatical sentence and then follow it up with a command, you are four times more likely to follow through with whatever I command you to do than if I use a grammatical sentence in front of it. So if I say something that's complete and utter nonsense, and I stand up here and I'm talking, and just throw in a ridiculous non sequitur, it's really easy for you to start following that. You will follow it whether you like it or not. It's really kind of funny. And it all comes down to confusion. I had a hypnosis teacher who once got up in front of the audience and said, do you realize you're not thinking right now of what I'm not saying? And can you realize that it's not that easy to not know what I'm going to say next? But even when you're not knowing it, I'm knowing it and you're not. And he would go on like that for like 10 minutes and by the end you're just like your brain shuts down and goes somewhere else and then he has you of course, right? Brilliant stuff. Milton realized this really early on. So Milton would do really funny things in the middle of talking. He'd just leave out words. He'd just be talking and he'd be saying a sentence like, and you don't know whether your right hand or your left hand is going to lift or it's going to. And then you'll find that you don't know what's going to happen. And he just leaves words out of the middle of sentences. And it's incredibly, incredibly powerful because while your brain goes back and goes, what was that word going to be? And fills it in, the next thing goes directly into the unconscious mind. It's literally, it's almost like a buffer overflow. You know, it literally just you know, it just jumps into the instruction stack and you have no power over it. It's not so good for you. So if anything you can do to literally, anything you can do to overwhelm the senses creates an opportunity for influence. You will notice that, I mean, I'm sure everyone's been in a room with a professor who's up in front of the audience and talking and your mind just goes somewhere else. Guess what? That stuff all went right into your unconscious mind. A great, great study just, I read about like two weeks ago, they did a really cool study where they were trying to figure out how to, I don't remember exactly what the details of the study were. It was, they took a bunch of college kids and they were trying to educate them on the evils of fraternities. I mean, just some random thing, that was what it was, but totally random. And they took two groups and they put one group in a room and made them listen to a lecture. And they put another group in a room and made them listen to the same lecture but made them watch TV at the same time. The ones that watch TV were 50% more swayed by the argument than the ones that didn't because there was confusion at the same time. Their senses were overwhelmed and all of that argument went directly to the unconscious and it made massive, massive influence. So you'll find that if you're trying to do two things at once, that stuff goes in really well. So it's one of the reasons, and you know, when we bring it back to social engineering for a second, it's one of the reasons that overwhelm works so well in social engineering. You know, we set up a situation where either you try and emotionally overwhelm them by throwing, you know, you're yelling or whatever, throwing a lot of information at them at once, or you try and set up a situation where it's a really busy situation and you're just trying to bypass because of the busyness. That overwhelm allows you to create influence far more easily than when you're not overwhelmed at the same time. So switching gears for a second, because overwhelm is just one piece. The real thing about influence is that it's all about framing. Framing is a word that was coined by George Lakoff. It actually stands for contextual or cognitive frames. And basically really what it means is context. If you put anyone in the right context, they will do anything. Erickson, you know, we have this sort of silly social mental image of hypnotists as sort of this evil influencer and hypnosis as this state where people will do anything, but actually what's really interesting about hypnosis is no one will violate their own ethical code. If you won't do something, you know, I actually, I always use alcohol as a great example. If you won't do something drunk, you won't do it under hypnosis. So if you guys have all probably seen stage hypnotists, yeah? You know how they always get someone up on stage who wants to take off their clothes? Guess what? They wanted to take off their clothes, you know, before they got on stage. So, and actually they didn't, I'm being flipped because they didn't want to take off their clothes, but it wasn't a violation of their ethical code to do so. But what Erickson found is he, and this was a really interesting experiment. He did an experiment with the military and he took all these soldiers, and he was, this was in the 50's they were trying to figure out the limits of hypnosis. Could he make soldiers you know, the experiment they decided was, could they make soldiers kill their commanding officer? Because they're so trained not to do so, right? There's so much training to obey orders and there's so much, you know, in built ethics around not doing so, he was trying to set up a situation where that would work. And they found that hypnosis wouldn't do it. You could not hypnotize anyone to do that. But he, I mean Erickson was the kind of guy who was like, he had to find a way. So what he did was he set up a frame, and the frame was really simple. The CEO's a traitor. And as soon as he set the frame that the CEO's a traitor, and convinced them that was true, they were willing to do something that wasn't ethical, you know, that was against their ethical code. And what it really comes down to is framing. I had a frame up here as I was telling the story, and it's because I was using the story as a frame for this entire talk. Because what we find is that if you set a frame everything else that follows falls into it. I was reading yesterday, a good friend of mine sent me a story that was in the New York Times the other day about an experiment they just did in a university setting. And basically how it worked was they had this, you know, they had the student subjects come to the, come to the lab and they were to work together with somebody on a problem. And then they were to rate the person as to how much they liked them. And this is not a particularly interesting study except the difference between the two groups was that before they got into the room, someone ran into them in the hall with a cup of coffee, dropped their book and said for half of the group said, can you hold my coffee while I do this? And had the person do them a favor. You know, before they even got to the study completely unrelated, had them do them a favor before they got to the room. And they found that the reactions of the people who did the favor for someone before they got to the room to the cooperative, you know, their rating of the cooperativeness of the person they were solving the problem with was significantly higher than if they didn't do that. And it was all about the frame. You'll find that psychologists also call it priming. Basically they set up a situation that primed the person to be in a mood where they wanted to work with someone. Where I had done a favor for someone two seconds ago and now I walk in to work with somebody and we work together and I think for some reason that this person is more cooperative than I would have otherwise. Because I'm already in a cooperative mood. The interaction in the hallway set the cooperative frame. And I'm sure everyone's had that situation where, you know, you're going to work and you just have like the crappiest morning and everything after that seems like it's horrible. It's because you set the frame in the morning. The frame was set before you got there. Now, I mean this is obviously a key of influence. If I can set a frame for an interaction, if I can set a situation and I can prime you to have certain responses, then everything that follows can also fit in that frame. And that's what, so there's a brilliant researcher named Robert Cialdini. And he is this incredible PhD researcher, and I don't remember what university he's at, but has done some of the coolest research on influence out there. And though he wouldn't call it this, it's all about framing. And the three frames that I'm going to, you know, talk about, he's done more than this, but these are the three that I particularly find interesting are reciprocation, social proof and authority. So reciprocation is a pretty easy one. If someone does something for you, you will do something for them. You know, it's why time shares get sold. Everybody knows that time share is a bad deal. But you know what? They give you all this stuff. They give you a free trip, they give you a TV, they give you all this stuff, and they know that if they've given you something, you're going to give them something back. In this case, your money forever. Right? I mean, you know, call them evil, call them whatever you want, but they're smart. They know if they give you a bunch of stuff, you're going to give them a bunch of stuff back. I mean, the same thing for infomercials. But wait, there's more. We'll give you a free gift. And suddenly you're picking up the phone. They haven't even given you the free gift yet, and you're picking up the phone, because reciprocation is that strong. If I do a favor for you, you will do one back for me. It's inbuilt into our evolutionary circuitry. Right? If you think about why in terms of natural selection, it actually makes sense. Humans aren't fast or strong or particularly well suited to survive out in the wilderness, except in our ability to cooperate. So the people who are most built to cooperate, back in the 10,000 years ago caveman days, were the ones most likely to survive. So the people who had this reciprocation gene built into them were more likely to be here. So we have this hard wired desire to reciprocate. I read another study recently and sort of back to the priming one that I was just talking about that actually showed that if you really want to cement a friendship, if you really want to make someone your friend forever, have them do a favor for you. Seriously, and it's bizarre. I've actually tried it. It's really quite cool. If somebody gives you a ride somewhere or whatever, they are much more likely to remain your friend and to solidify that relationship than if you do a favor for them even. And I don't know why that is, but there's something about doing something that makes a person cooperate with you that is evolutionarily just a draw to remain in relationship. I'm sure you can figure out how that's useful in any sort of social engineering sort of situation. So social proof is another interesting one. And social proof is sort of the, everyone's probably experienced it most usefully in restaurants. You're walking along the street and you're looking for a place to go to dinner. There's two restaurants next to each other. One is completely empty. One is lined up out the door. Which one do you go to? 99% of people go to the one that's lined up out the door even though it means they have to wait. Why? Because when we look at it we assume that if everybody is going there it must be good. Even though they all assume that too. At the beginning there was one person in that one and nobody in the next one and the second person went to that one. And so that is the theory of social proof. Literally if a bunch of people believe something's good everybody will believe it's good. And if a bunch of people believe it's crap everybody will believe it's crap. As long as you believe in the judgment of the people. And that sort of goes right along with authority. And both of these, I was talking about stage hypnosis a little bit earlier. Both of these are really what stage hypnosis is all about. Stage hypnosis is a really funny thing and it has almost nothing to do with real hypnosis. With real therapeutic hypnosis or real influence. Stage hypnosis is really a situation of these three things. The frame is really simple. I'm the guy on the stage. I have authority just by nature of being the guy with the mic. And if everybody's in the room I already have social proof. So if I get you up on stage you're very likely to listen to me. Because the frame is such that you have no real choice. You have all the things working for me. And if I do something good for you well then you have to reciprocate. Seriously next time you see a stage hypnosis show just focus on how the frame is set up. They get a whole bunch of people up on stage and they're all set up in a situation where they have to go along it has nothing to do with the hypnotist actually influencing them. The frame influenced them before they even got up on the stage. There's a whole lot of hypnosis. Let me backtrack a little bit and explain hypnosis. I mentioned we all have the cultural biasing of what hypnosis is. It's like the evil looking guy with the goatee swinging the watch in front of people. I like to say that that's as much real hypnosis as the movie Hackers was. Real hacking. Seriously like hypnosis and it's actually a really good metaphor because much like real hacking is really boring to watch. Real hypnosis is really boring to watch. There's nothing exciting about it and there's really nothing sort of uber cool about it. But what it really is is the art of using attention to put someone in a place where they're critical faculty suspended. The mind is basically a two part entity. There's the conscious mind which is about that big and then there's the unconscious mind which is this vast ocean doing all this cool stuff that you're not even aware of. I mean how many people sitting out there right now are actually sitting thinking about making their heart beat or aware of the feeling in the pinky on their left hand or noticing the background noise instead of my voice. All that was available unconsciously. Your unconscious was taking all of that in as I was talking. But you weren't aware of any of it consciously until I pointed out. Now the barrier between those two parts of your mind is known as the critical faculty. It sort of filters the stuff that gets to bubble up. Hypnosis is really just using attention in such a way to suspend the action of the critical faculty to allow anything to go in and anything to come out. It's why it's particularly interesting in using it for therapy. Things like stopping smoking and all that sort of thing because you can actually use it to help a person do the things they want to do. And in the old days it was really about structured attention. Hypnosis was very much the watch-the-watch induction. Your eyes are getting very sleepy. You're getting tired. All this kind of stuff. That was really sort of the old school way to do it. The tone in my voice probably makes it very clear that I'm not a fan of that. It's sort of hitting a mosquito with a sledge hammer. What they found when Milton Erickson started to do things, they often describe therapy with Milton Erickson as you walked into Milton's office and you sat down and Milton told you a story and you walked out and your life changed. And if you read any of the things he did he would literally just tell stories. He'd just talk. And suddenly people would have just these massive changes in their lives because he was brilliant at using unstructured attention. He was brilliant at using metaphor. Because what it comes to is that humans think in a very particular way. Which of course reminds me of a story. And this is a story that was told by the sociologist Gregory Bateson. And I've updated a bit for current day because it was told in the 70s so it was particularly lame. So Bateson was telling the story and the story sort of went like this. He was talking about when he was in university and his roommate was a computer hacker. He's actually a programmer but we would call the roommate a hacker. And he gets control of this massive supercomputer. And he's playing around and running commands. And Bateson was a sociologist. And Bateson says to him dude you have like this massive supercomputer and you're just playing around ask it a tough question. And the hackers like what? What kind of tough question? And Bateson says ask it if it computes that it will ever think like a human being. And so you know types it in. And the computer you know words and clicks and does all the things that large rooms of computing power do. And eventually they you know it comes up with a result. And the result is that reminds me of a story. Because that's the way that human beings think. We think in stories and metaphors. If you think about how you learn anything. Almost all learning when you're past you know about six years old is in metaphor. You know you relate this new experience to something you already know. You relate you know water skiing to the way you learn to do you know the way you learn to snowboard or whatever. And the key there is that if you understand the way that metaphor works. And the way that those patterns get embedded into the mind. You realize that these stories actually bypass the critical faculty. Because the conscious mind thinks in data. You know when I'm up here and you're listening to me. Your conscious mind is processing each of the words linearly and sequentially and going through all the things I'm saying. Your unconscious mind is structuring the pattern of what I'm saying. And so if I tell you a story about something that has a particular pattern. You will relate that pattern back to all the things I want you to relate it to. Unconsciously. You won't have any awareness that you're doing it. But you'll do it whether you like it or not. Because that's the way that our mind works. So if I'm an artful storyteller. If I can get up here and structure a story in the right way. I can change the way that you look at the world. And that works even better if I can do it with more than one story. Because the way that the human mind works the human mind thinks in terms of open loops. And when I say an open loop it's literally just the number of bringing it back to Unix for a second. It's literally the number of processes that are running in memory at any given time. If I open a whole bunch of loops and don't close them at some point you just lose the ability to continue to keep track. And it all just starts going haywire. It's very interesting. You can ultimately fork bomb the human mind. It's quite a cool experience. And really it works pretty simply. I start telling you a story. I start a loop. And I don't finish the story and I start telling another loop. And I don't finish that one. And I leave it open and I open another one. And then bad things happen. Well actually, bad things if I'm nefarious, right? You'll notice this a lot if you watch political speech. They will open so many loops in the middle of a speech that you'll just sort of stop paying attention. Has anybody ever noticed how boring political speeches are? You know why? Because they're structuring it so that your mind goes somewhere else. Because when your conscious mind goes somewhere else they're speaking directly unconsciously. The whole purpose of that type of speech is to literally open a whole bunch of loops. You know they'll be talking about taxes and then they'll be talking about immigration and then it'll be foreign policy. And then you don't know what they're talking about. And then you'll notice that at the end of the speech they'll finish all those thoughts. But in the middle all that stuff went just directly into your mind. And it's really quite messed up. And it's really quite interesting to be able to structure attention that way. And to structure language that way so as to have that kind of influence. But there's another language pattern I actually want to get to. Because humans actually have one of the most insidious backdoors around. And I mentioned the negation backdoor earlier. You know if I negate something you must process it. You must actually run the instruction in order to figure out what it was you were negating. But there's another one that's even more insidious. And so seriously can you imagine what it would be like if there was a language pattern that you actually had to process in order to even eat. Anytime you heard it you had to process it before you could do anything with it. I mean this pattern exists. Anybody know what it is? No not body language. What is it? Nicely done. Yes that was the answer. The answer is questions. In order to process a question in order to hear a question you have to execute the instruction. Can you imagine what a purple elephant looks like? Just by me asking it you did it. In order to hear the sentence you had to imagine what a purple elephant looks like to understand the sentence. So if I ask you a question like could you imagine what it would be like if you gave me your password? You all just imagined what it would be like to give me your password. Now none of you are necessarily going to do it. But the point is I'm standing up here controlling all of your minds. I saw a t-shirt earlier this week actually which was my favorite t-shirt that I've ever seen. I've seen it twice. I saw it once last year before Hope. There's a guy walking around and the t-shirt said by reading this you have given me control of your mind. And I was like oh brilliant because literally by reading it he was inputting instructions. And if it had been a question in order to process it you had to realize that it was giving you control of the mind. Sort of tying it all together. There are some really interesting tricks you can do with language. And I mean obviously I've just sort of scratched the surface here. I've not gone particularly deep on a lot of this stuff. I could talk for days on it mostly because this stuff is so fascinating. I mean there are massive books on all the neat tricks you can do with language to influence another's mind. The meta model and the Milton model are two really interesting ones. Questions, I mean play with questions. I urge all of you just to see the things you can put in other people's brains with questions. I had a friend in college who liked to pick up women who was brilliant. I don't think he ever told anyone anything. He just asked a lot of questions. And if you ask artful questions you have people imagining things that they wouldn't have been imagining otherwise, right? They have to process it. Especially if they're in the right frame. If you put someone in the right frame and start asking them the right questions and start using language the right way, you can do some really interesting things. And so closing the frame because we left good old Koji with a broken vase on the floor. So the headmaster comes back and I mean obviously this is the prized possession of the monastery and he finds the vase on the floor and he calls all the boys into the common room downstairs and lines them up and says who did this? And boys are all like oh we're all going to die because Koji's a pain in the ass and he's not going to own up to this. And Koji steps forward and he says I did sir. All the boys are like oh god he's dead now. He is toast. And so the headmaster grabs him by the ear and drags him up to his office and demands an explanation. And Koji says you gave me extra chores. So I came up here and you were away and I decided to clean your office. And I knocked the vase over with the broom and I was so upset I couldn't handle it. I just wanted to die. I couldn't even handle it. So I started eating the candy. And I didn't die and then I ate more. And I guess I'm immune to the poison. So Koji went back to his room and all the boys are like what happened? Is he going to kill you? And Koji said no, when I left his office I bowed to him and he bowed to me. And this was all inspired by the girl who was dancing with me. And I was saying as she stopped spinning me around she literally starts running the other direction. I'm like hey, why are you dancing with me in front of Caesars? She said that. And just kept going. And so, yes I do still have a wallet. So that confusion was also inspired by the email I got from Anton who I really wish could have been here. But I certainly hope he's alright and I certainly, we would have had a lot of fun if he was here but I've had a lot of fun even with him not here and I hope you all have enjoyed it. I'll take questions. I don't know, do I have time to take questions up here? So I'm going to go to the Q&A room. If anybody wants to ask questions please come there.