 Thanks, Scott, for joining us here today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you got it. You're the creator of Dilbert, among other things, and you blog as well, which I decided, okay, I'm gonna check out this blog, because I'll be honest, somebody who's a fan of the show said, this guy's crazy, what do you think? And that's how I found it. Was crazy the word? Crazy was the word. That's like the best thing anybody said about me this year. Yeah, this year maybe, but it was late last year, so you were in your predictive mode. And the reason that people were saying this was because in large part, you had said some pretty crazy-ish-sounding things about the election, and you essentially predicted a Trump victory. A year in advance. A year in advance. And my prediction was different than anybody else's in the sense that I had a specific reason for it. That was different from other people's reason. Some people said, oh, it's his policies, or it's, you know, people wanna change. You know, they had lots of different reasons. I think CNN printed 24 different explanations after he won. Different pundits said, well, it was this one reason. Of course, there's never one reason. But my theme was persuasion. So I'm a trained hypnotist. I learned hypnosis when I was in my 20s. And when I saw Trump enter the stage, I saw a level of persuasive talent that didn't look accidental. He's someone who has acquired these skills over a lifetime. He wrote a book on it. The art of the deal is essentially persuasion in the form of negotiating. And he talks about persuasion. He talks about it all the time. And when I saw it, I thought, I think I'm seeing something other people aren't seeing because I have a certain training. You know, I've been learning persuasion for decades after I learned hypnosis specifically. And I just saw more technique. And I thought he's bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight, and this isn't gonna be fair. A lot of the predictions were a little spooky, or at least people thought they were spooky, especially after they became true. I guess predictions aren't spooky until they become true. Otherwise, they're just crackpot theories. And that's the way that it came across in the beginning. So you experienced maybe a little bit of like a, what would you even call it? I don't wanna say smugness, because you're not smug, at least not so far. Well, I couldn't be smug at all until the actual election. That was the flagship prediction. If I got that wrong, the other ones didn't matter. But then the election happened, and the strange thing immediately happened, which is you saw the country sort of going insane, because people didn't expect it. It was, they were thinking that Hitler had just been elected, you know, the people on the other side. And it was a dangerous situation. And I went on Periscope, you know, as soon as the election was certain, and advised people to stay cool, you know, and don't gloat. And I tried to not gloat myself for the same reason. It just don't need any more trouble. You know, I mean, it's good enough to win if that's what you wanted as your result. Didn't really need to rub it in. So I tried to resist that. And you just sort of, what did you say, live tweet, or is it live periscope commentary throughout the election and the debates and things like that? That must have been interesting. So I did a combination of lots of tweeting and lots of periscopes. Periscopes for anybody who doesn't know, it's a live streaming service owned by Twitter. So I could just turn on my phone at any moment, hit a couple of buttons, and I was live to usually 1,000 people at a time as soon as I went on. And congrats on being one of the last people to use Periscope, I feel. Kind of not sure how, I'm not sure if that's even still the king of the hill, but you're doing more YouTube stuff now. Yeah, so I'm transitioning to probably Facebook and YouTube. Great, we'll see you on there as well. I do want to say though, a lot of people who say, well, you know, you could have predicted Hillary if you could have predicted Trump. A lot of people predicted one way or the other. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. What makes your prediction different than just you didn't pick wrong? Yeah, so there's always gonna be the survivor thing, right? Like you say, somebody was gonna be right no matter what. And those people are gonna say, because I'm a genius. Right, naturally. And of course I'm doing the same thing. Why wouldn't I? Because I can predict a coin flip and I have a 50% chance of looking like I can tell the future in that case. So what I tried to do since I assumed that the situation would happen, if I were right, I would be one of many people who said, hey, I was right and here's my reason and here's my reason. And so I tried to make a lot of subsidiary predictions along the way so that they could see that mine were being right on a fairly regular basis when other people were less right. So for example, when Carly Fiorina was in the debates in the primaries and she did her big, I would say her big move, she made a big push about abortion and she described in vivid details things I'm not gonna describe for the benefit of the viewers. Just a horrible abortion went wrong scene. And I predicted at the moment, based on persuasion, not based on logic or policies or any of those things which people largely ignore, I predicted that nobody wanted in their head that image any longer than they needed. And electing her kept it in their heads. And that was the top of her polls the day that she was talking about that. And she dropped from 15% to four or 5% within a few weeks. Just because of the anchoring in the negative association? Well, that was my prediction. Based on such a horrible image that is now associated with her brand, she just ruined her brand accidentally. Now, I make a distinction between what I call the 2D world and the 3D world of persuasion. In the 2D world, facts matter and policies matter and all that stuff. But I think we've seen that that's not the case. Right. I mean, when I was saying it a year ago, it was actually radical. And I'm pretty sure no one else was saying it a year ago. But if you look at any of the headlines of the past month, you're gonna see a lot of people saying, why is it that people are so irrational? Why do people make decisions this way? How did we get Brexit? How did we get Trump? So the world has moved over to my point of view. Sure, this is like a Dan Ariely book playing out in real life. I don't know who he is, but I'm sure that's a good reference. Predictably irrational, so essentially that people are guided by these sets of emotions, rationalizing behavior. We can talk about that in a little bit because I know some of that in your blog as well about our feelings and emotions guiding us. But continue. Yeah, so other smaller predictions I made when Trump started going at Ben Carson, when Ben Carson pulled even or a little bit ahead of him in the primaries. If you remember, probably everybody saw this video of Trump acting out the belt buckle stabbing incident from Ben Carson's own book where Trump came out from behind the lectern and actually did a pantomime of the attack where he was pretending to stab and it was hitting his belt buckle and he mocked it and he called Ben Carson pathological because that's a word I guess Carson had used himself in his own book. And I watched that performance and it was so visual that I thought this is gonna be way more powerful than people think and I predicted that was the end of him and that turned out to be the high of his polls as well because the visual persuasion is just so good. It's sort of one of the kings of persuasion up there with fear and identity and a few others that are a little bit higher. So if we can associate somebody with something negative such as Carly Fiorina with gross depictions of surgical procedures and abortions, can we do the opposite and create associations that are positive with people so that our polls go up in theory? Totally, I don't give dating advice but I'll just use this as an example. If you were to meet somebody for the first time, whatever you say first ends up sort of sticking in their mind as their first image of you. So one of the best things you say, hey, how you doing? And if the first thing you say is something that takes them to a visual place like have you had any good vacations or good day for the beach? Have you been to any tropical islands? As soon as you could work that in, their mind goes to their own memory of their best vacation tropical paradise and just puts them in this warm mood and then you're standing there. Sure, sure. So the association happens and people have a hard time shaking a first impression so that lasts longer than it should. So basically we are using their own associations and then taking one wire out of there and disconnecting it to ourselves. One of the tricks of persuasion is you wanna directionally tell somebody to imagine a certain thing but you don't wanna over-specify because as soon as you over-specify, people say, oh, that wasn't what I was seeing or yeah, I don't have a memory of that exactly but if you say, imagine you're in nature or you're in the forest, people just see their own forest and then that makes them happy. Then they're on last month's hike through the redwoods. Yeah, takes them back to a happy place. We wanna let their mind fill in the blanks. Yes, you have to be careful about it. You need to bound it intelligently so that when they fill it in, it still works for you. Right, otherwise we end up with the misuse of persuasion which I saw this weird example of this. There's these, it's the name of this. It's like regressive hypnosis therapy where they basically are programming people who think they've been abducted by aliens. They're implanting these memories by letting people go back and associate things but they're also adding this little creative element in there that kind of runs away in their subconscious mind. So I have done a version of that. When I was learning hypnosis, we had to practice on real people and it was better if you charged them because one of the things you learn in hypnosis is if somebody pays for something, they give them more credibility. And once they've given the credibility, you actually are a better persuader. They've actually given you that. So I would charge people to regress them to their prior lives under hypnosis. Now I don't believe that people have prior lives but they sure did. And they would describe these detailed scenarios and they would talk in sort of the voice of the person. But at the time I was doing it, this was a long time ago as a young man. And at the time I was thinking, well I'm open to the possibility that there are prior lives. I haven't seen anything that rules it out, right? But after I was done with this, I definitely didn't believe because all these people had exquisite detailed memories that had a weird coincidence. None of them were Chinese. A quarter of the world was Chinese. Somebody out of 20 people is gonna be Chinese in the prior life. But none of them were. And they were all things that you would see on movies. It was sort of like I'm Cleopatra or I'm a Viking right out of HBO basically. I noticed that people, whenever they tell me about their quote unquote past lives and I tend to limit my contact with people who tell me these types of things. But I noticed no one's ever like, yeah I was just a farmer and before that I was a farmer and before that I was a farmer and before that I shoveled donkey poop into a furnace. It's always, I was a warrior, I was the king's hand. I don't know, statistically speaking, you're much more likely to have just been a stillborn baby or something like that. I mean pardon the crude reference here, but you're much more likely to be some homeless guy who got hit by a horse cart and died young. Yeah, you'd go back a hundred years. There weren't too many happy people. No, no, and you're right. Most of us would have been Chinese and if we go back far enough everybody would have been African. But no, we're royalty from Egypt. But even when they have bad lives, they're always soldiers. Yeah, I noticed that, I know it with men anyway. Right, it's always soldiers. Yes, soldiers who died bravely in battle. And very few people, I don't know if anybody was a different gender. Oh, that's interesting. So. Well, you could do a prolonged study on that if you had all the time in the world. Maybe in your next life you can do that. You mentioned that Trump is a master persuader that he's a hypnotist. And when you write master persuader on your blog you're capitalizing master persuader. Is there a reason that you do that? Is that just a term that you've coined? Or are you? Well, it's to call it out so that people can see it's a sort of a term that I'm trying to popularize, at least for Trump in particular. So no other reason. And you mentioned some specific examples such as the Rosie O'Donnell comment and things like that. Can you explain that? Yeah, so the first moment when I thought to myself, oh my goodness, he's gonna win. And I noticed his skill. It was during the first debate in which Megan Kelly had set a trap for him. She had a question about his past crude comments about women, which if you imagine this happening to any other candidate up there, just being asked and quoted back your own just horrible quotes, it's just a death trap. He should have been done on the first debate in the first minute. That should have been the end of it. And that's what I sort of expected at that moment. And she starts bringing up the comments he's made about women. And then he just sort of semi interrupts her and he says, only Rosie O'Donnell. The whole place goes nuts. And we remember the answer, but we've already forgotten the question. He made the answer so much more interesting than the question. And by the way, it wasn't even an answer to the question. It was just something he said that was sort of related. Now what's beautiful about that is that Rosie O'Donnell is a character that the Republican base, the people who cared about the primaries, have a strong feeling about. So he immediately got a motion on his side. He was against her, then they must be on his side, right, because they're against her. But she's also visual. Everybody knows who she is. And so you imagine her, right? So this will be a theme you'll probably hear a few more times in our time together. As soon as you can make something visual, you're already the king of the senses, right? So what Megan Kelly had were a bunch of words that we don't have a person to put to, you know, it's just sort of this- It's an abstract concept. Abstract. And then he just moved that off the page with this perfect visual motion, you know, attracting reference. And I literally stood up and I just said, okay, that's not normal. Right. That's the best you've ever seen. Anybody handle any question, that was a hard question of all time probably. Because if you get that canon aimed at you from Megan Kelly and you start going, well, you know, I meant it in this context and this other thing is taken out of, you're just digging. You're just continually digging a nice little grave for yourself with these words lining the sides. But instead he took the canon and he twisted the barrel around and basically aims it at Rosie O'Donnell, a common target for his own base. And everybody just goes roaring with laughter and they forget about everything that came before that because he managed to just dodge that. And then he used it as his platform to talk about political correctness. And I have to admit, when I first heard him talk about that, I thought, well, people have been talking about political correctness forever and it's never really gotten any kind of purchase. But he made it such a brand that you sort of almost wanted it and expected it if you were a Trump supporter. You just wanted him to be politically incorrect. It was just more fun after a while. What's going on with his, he likes to obviously attack the media but he does it in a way that's not just, well, this journalist, this, that and the other thing. He really does aim specifically at credibility targets. So he'll say something like, check your facts and then he'll name the person. Check your facts. And then you're associating in a way that person with, well, they don't do their homework, even if it's completely unfounded. By the way, I have adopted that very phrase, the check your facts thing, because on Twitter often people will say, hey, you said blah, blah, blah, it'll be just something I didn't say or anything. I used to try to correct it. Right. And like we said earlier, as soon as you start explaining, somebody immediately says, ah, you're back peddling. You can't win. I'm not back peddling. I'm just explaining what you got wrong. So instead I say, check your facts. It just ends the conversation just so perfectly. Because all they can say is I did and you still said that. But by then you're calling on someone else or there's another part of the conversation. Yeah, life has moved on. Yeah, exactly. And the same thing with fake news. It's constantly saying fake news, fake news. Is this just a matter of say it enough times and people start to believe it? What's going on there? Well, first of all, I believe he flipped around the attack, which you see him do. So the fake news was really aimed at the Republican side with their literally fake news where somebody just made up stories. Right. When he's talking about it a little more often it's something out of context, that sort of thing. It still ends up being fake because if you leave the context out, it's the wrong message. And I think he does it strategically and he does it to lower the credibility of the, I would call them the opposition media. Because they're definitely not there to help him. No, that's definitely true. And I think they're also pretty pissed that he's treating them the way that he's treating them and they're pissed that he won in the first place, which is understandable from their perspective. Why not just go with Occam's razor on some of this Trump stuff? Whereas people say, well, look, if you think about it this way and you look at it that way, then it's really skilled and it's really clever. What about the Occam's razor explanation, which is, nah, he's just the jackass. That wouldn't explain his consistent success all the way through. He went from nothing with no experience to president of the United States. You don't do that by being a jackass that just is fun to watch on TV. Firing it, ready, fire, aim type situation. There are just too many things that he did right. I mean, if you even look at the things that people say he did wrong, the chaos and whatever, if you look at the people he fired and when he did it, first he had, it was Corey, right? Corey Lewandowski. And Corey had some issues with touching an elbow of a woman in public or something. And he wasn't exactly the right person for the next phase of the nomination and securing the nomination. So he got rid of, he fired his friend who got him that far and did probably an amazing job for that phase. He was the right person. He was a scrappy, street fighter kind of personality. Then he got Paul Manafort who was the smooth operator, got him through the convention and then he went with Kelly and Conway to close it. So a lot of the stuff that looks like, what's wrong with him? He can't keep his staff together or whatever criticisms people are making. They all seem to work. Like you can very easily find the business reason that any of this happened. I'm not saying they didn't make mistakes because it's a long, long process. They do a lot of stuff. He made a share. But the mistakes tended to be fairly trivial in the long run. What do you think will happen with this Jeff Sessions mess? Too early to tell. Too early to tell? Yeah, we just need to know more about that. Yeah, I was trying to nail you down to a prediction here and then we could look at it again in a few months. Well, you can't make a prediction if it's based on the facts that you know are coming tomorrow that you don't know. I know, I'm just basically trying to get you to paint yourself into a corner in a friendly way, of course, as a guest here on the show. What you mentioned with Trump in the blog as well, and we'll of course link to that in the show notes, you mentioned a concept called pacing and leading. And this is familiar to me from my hypnosis NLP stuff that I took a million years ago that I did not really keep certification on. Tell me what's going on here. Tell us what's going on here. What is pacing and leading? And ideally, how can we maybe take a page out of that manual? So pacing and leading is the most fundamental hypnosis technique, right? There are lots of techniques that you have to layer together to get a result. But pacing and leading means that first you match your subject in some way. For example, I'm matching you right now. Was that an accident? Did you do that or did I do that? No, you did that because I paced you earlier. But that's another story. So you match somebody either physically or the style of their talking. It could be emotionally you're matching them. So you're matching them in some way that they recognize as, hey, you're one of me. Because people are not really that rational. If you act like them, you talk like them. And it must be a family member. I don't mean literally, but in some part of you, some part of your brain, you just have an automatic trust for somebody who's doing whatever you're doing at the same time. So Trump does this with emotion. Meaning that all the things that he says that are just wrong, like factually wrong, they don't pass the fact-checking. And we all know there are lots of them, right? Whether you're a supporter or anti-Chomp, there are a lot of things that didn't pass the fact-check. But if you look at all of them, they're all directionally, emotionally correct. Meaning that if he said, blah, blah, blah, terrorism is bad for 10 different reasons that aren't exactly true, the people who have the same fear of terrorism said, yeah, he's sort of where I am emotionally. The facts really didn't matter that much. But he agreed with you and he agreed with you more than you agreed with yourself. If you were a little bit afraid of terrorism, he was a lot afraid. So he sort of paced everybody in their emotional state. Once he had that, the second part, people trust him and then he can lead and he's obviously doing that now. So if you watch the number of things which he said he was gonna do in the primaries and you see sort of a softening and moving to the middle and you see very little complaint from the far right, the people who you would expect to complain. And the reason is, he brought them a victory. He brought them a unified Congress. He emotionally agreed with them on every issue from abortion to terrorism to jobs through immigration. And that was enough. So that gave him the credibility to lead. When you say pacing and leading in the concept or the context I should say of, well, I paced you earlier, are we talking about mirroring body language and things like that? Because I feel like I do a lot of that as a habit. I learned it back in law school because it works. But it can be really clunky when people are starting to apply this when they're new. So for example, I notice when I have people on the show that they'll often do exactly what I'm doing or face me in a certain way and I do that deliberately to make people comfortable most of the time. I don't really care about how they sit. I just want them to feel good. But I do find it that it's very hard to resist that because you actually want to create comfort physically with somebody if you have rapport with them. And of course, if you don't, then it becomes a whole different ball game as I cross my leg, right? Is this something you do consciously now or is this something that is so autopilot for you that it just happens? The pacing is conscious, but it's also the details of it are somewhat automatic. It's like anything you learn. It just becomes part of you. It's not something you think to apply. But if I'm meeting a new person, I'm very much thinking, how can I make this a good situation? And I think that people who have high emotional intelligence tend to do at least some elements of this almost automatically. Would you agree with that? Well, maybe, but I'm not sure what the correlation is. I'm not sure if there's a causation there. I think it's because people with high EQ often are trying to gain rapport with other people and one of the great way to do that is typically to pace and lead or at least to pace. That would make sense. That would be a good tool. And so this just happens for you automatically in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, I'm always looking for the way to match somebody when I first meet him. What elements are there of matching? Body language, are you talking about verbal and nonverbal communication, eye contact? Yeah, it's everything. So it's from the physical to the emotional to the specific way you word things. The best example is this is straight from NLP, hypnosis training. If somebody uses, let's say, a lot of war analogies, like, oh, I jumped on the hand grenade. We have to take that hill. Any number of war analogies. If you also do that, they will feel more comfortable with you. They won't know why. They'll just think, yeah, this is a good guy. Can you ever go overboard with it? And I'll ask you this in the context of this example. When I was in college and I started learning this stuff, I started to do it with everybody a lot. And what would happen was if I were drinking, which I don't do that much of anymore, I would get into a cab with, say, a driver from Samoa. And towards the end of the ride, my girlfriend, after we get out of the car, would go, okay, did you do that on purpose? And I would say, what are you talking about? And my friends are all in the back with my girlfriend. And they go, we thought that guy was gonna get mad. You talked with the same accent as him, same cadence. We thought you were imitating him. And just because my calibration was so far off, because I'd had four beers or something like that. But the person never noticed. The person never noticed. If you hadn't said that, that's the very next thing that was gonna come out of my mouth, is that you can pace people in the most obvious ways and they do not notice. In fact, for practice, I was working my day job in a big corporation at the time. And they would tell us to sit across from somebody in a meeting and do the pacing, where if they're like this, you do this. Right, the clunky, precise mirroring of body language. And then you change, and then you do this, and you watch them do this. Just immediately. Same process as a yawn, yawn makes everybody yawn. Why does that happen? Do you know why that's contagious? I've read about it, but there's a reason, right? I think there's an actual reason. I actually don't know, I wasn't testing your knowledge. I actually don't know. I remember, at the Art of Charm, our live programs, we teach a lot of special forces and intelligence guys. And one of the tricks that I'd found a long time ago, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with this, was it's a counter surveillance technique where if you're sitting down and you think, is this person paying undue attention to me? If you can get a very real yawn going, which you often can by tweaking with your jaw, and you see them yawn, it's not a guarantee because often people are seeing us out of their peripheral vision and it has nothing to do with their focus. But if you can do it a few times and they do it each time, you start to get the feeling that that guy right there is not reading because every time I yawn, he's yawning and it's so involuntary. And if you get really good, you can see their jaw muscles tighten when they try to hold that yawn in. And that's been pretty effective for some sort, at least in some scenarios, or it's just a good gimmicky thing to teach, but we've had good results with things like that. So I love your example of watching the jaw tighten. Like you're talking about a little. Yeah, the little, is it mandible, mandibular? I can't remember the name. Let's say it is. Something like that. Let's say it is. Yeah, so one of the things you learn from hypnosis and apparently you learn the same stuff is that detailed observation, looking for very small changes in skin tone, muscle tone, posture and all those things. And I know she's sad about that posture. This chair for me is a, and I don't know how it is for you, but for me, this chair kind of constantly makes me feel like I'm just slowly hunching into it. I was having the same feeling as. So I tend to straighten up, but now of course I'm self-conscious about it because I'm like, you didn't pace me, this is just the chair. It's just the chair. That's what my rationalization is thinking, right? I have to justify my behavior because my conscious mind doesn't know I'm doing it. That's right. I was gonna ask you, my observation after learning these skills is that you can detect lying really easily. Really? Have you found that in your life that you're the one in the room who can tell if somebody's lying? It depends, actually. I would say I probably should be better at it than I am, but I tend to, in many ways, overthink that situation. When I finally get my conscious mind out of the equation as much as possible, then I'm much better at it. Let me give a demonstration for your listeners of a lie versus the truth. So ask me twice, are you the murderer? And I'll give you two different answers and see which one is obviously the lie. So ask me if I'm the murderer. Are you the murderer? Where do you get that information? Who told you I'm a murderer? Right, now ask me again. Are you the murderer? What the hell are you talking about? No, I'm not a murderer. I don't even know what you're talking about. Which one of those was the lie? Well, this is all dependent on whether or not you've actually killed someone. Yeah, right. So let's assume you haven't. I would say the second is the most authentic or immediate reaction. Yeah, so the person who says what is your evidence is always the lie because if you have good evidence, then maybe they have to confess and they better just do it in the best possible way or just start running. And if you don't have good evidence, maybe you just got a lucky guess and they can stick with their lie. So the liar always asks you about the source of your evidence. The person who didn't murder anybody doesn't need to ask because there was no evidence. Right, or they assume the justice system will prove me innocent because that works every time. That works every time. I think that there's a lot of truth to that. I'm sure some people are better liars than others. We know the body's really, it's tough to get your body to lie in concert with your mouth. People who do that well win awards on stages in front of millions of people. My old boss who taught interrogation to police and military gave me a really good trick which was if you ask somebody who's guilty, what should happen to the person who gets caught perpetrating a particular crime? They usually start rationalizing. Well, it depends how badly was the person beaten up. Because if they just got their stuff stolen, they weren't hurt, then maybe we're a little more lenient. Whereas the normal innocent person just goes, I don't care, hang him, shoot him. I don't give a crap. Because it has nothing to do with them. It has nothing. And they know it. So their emotional reaction is total indifference or super harsh punishment because they're not that kind of person. Can you imagine being that guy's kid? Yeah. It would just be terrible. It would be tough. He was a parent. So I have to get back in touch and see how his now teenage kids are doing or if they've since been locked in the basement for life. So pacing and leading involves matching people, creating a bond with them. Can you give us some examples of Trump doing this in things that we've seen or we'll be able to see on YouTube? Yeah, primarily the emotional stuff. So he goes hard on the immigration thing because people are afraid, hard on terrorism because people are afraid of that. But he'll also quickly change if he needs to, if he's made a mistake. Like he said something about abortion. Maybe he should be a penalty for the woman who seeks an illegal abortion. And if you didn't know anything about politics and he was new to it, right? It was almost reasonable because he was just thinking, well, people commit crimes, they should be punished. But it turns out that is a special case in which it just makes more sense that the doctor is the only one you punish. Sure. So it'll sometimes change. But when you see him with his extreme anchor, I call it, his extreme emotional anchor, he's getting everybody to not only imagine the extreme so that when he moves to the middle, it doesn't look so extreme. He does that all the time. And he talks about it. He says I do that. But it's also emotionally bonding with people. So really, everyone of his policies has an emotional hook to it. How is it different from just flip-flopping, right? Because if he's pushing us in one direction and then goes, actually just kidding, we're gonna go over here. If it's not somebody who's a master persuader or a hypnosis trained person, it just looks like they're changing their mind because it's convenient. Maybe there's an example that I can't think of, but with Trump, I've only seen him on the far end of the spectrum and just sort of move in the spectrum. I've never seen him go to the other side. Is there an example of that? You know, I should have come armed with one. I think I was mostly looking at things like the wall. Well, maybe we'll do a fence. No, we're gonna have a wall now. I mean, it just keeps constantly bouncing around. Well, let's talk about that. This is one of my favorite examples, the wall. So when he first started saying wall, wall, wall, everybody said it can't be a solid wall the entire way, maybe some fences and drones and water hazards and whatever. And at one point he... Sounds like a mini golf course. And at one point he said that, oh yeah, it might be different solutions in different places. But he rapidly and wisely went back to the incorrect statement that it's gonna be a wall. And here's why. The incorrect statement makes you talk about it all the time and the stuff you focus on just becomes more important to you because it's the only thing you've been talking about. So this whole wall thing, the whole immigration thing, before he ran, I didn't even know it was a big issue. I thought it was an issue, but not really the biggest one. But now it feels like it's the biggest issue just because he made it so. It's so important in our minds. But the wall, when he says it's a wall, it's a big, beautiful wall. It's a great wall, if you will. Yeah, and it'll have a door. You can picture it, but he didn't give you so many details that you can't picture the wall you want to see. So everybody's seeing the wall they wanna see. It's incredibly visual. Compare that to, well, we need border security in a variety of ways. Each section will have its own solution that matches the section. And our eyes are glazing over. Concept, concept, where's my picture? Give me a picture. Trump gives you a picture every time. Sure. And he does it at the cost of being wrong, meaning it's not gonna be a solid wall the whole way. He said it won't. Everybody says it won't. That's 100% true, but he still says it's true. And it's the wrongness that actually keeps you thinking about it. That's not a solid wall. And of course, the term great wall is just a hat tip to the big wall that everybody knows and has known since they were a kid. Right, and contrast is always an important thing, right? So if you can get the right contrast, you can sell anything. So people are saying, we can't possibly build a wall. But if he calls it the great wall and you think of the great wall of China, well, they were doing that stuff with, I don't know, did they have the wheel yet when they built that? I would hope so because I've been there and it's amazing. But they were sticking these rocks together with, I believe, rice gruel. And it's still there. I mean, the dang thing is still there. It's incredible. There are buildings in San Francisco that haven't been around nearly as long that are in worse states of repair than the great wall of China in certain places. So it's a good thing to pair yourself with if people are wondering if we have the where with all to build a wall. Yeah, we can build a wall. We just have to make it a priority if we care. Sure. On the blog is speaking of the great wall of China and the great wall of Mexico slash Santa Fe or El Paso or whatever we're gonna call it here. You read in the blog, there may be an objective reality in our world, but our brains did not evolve to be able to see it. This is fascinating. Can you tell me about this? Yeah, so this is not based on science. It's based on sort of a common sensical look at things. Evolution doesn't care about your feelings. Doesn't care about the details. Doesn't care what shirt you're wearing. It just cares if you create more of you. So winning in an evolutionary sense is just being able to make more of you than other animals are making more of them. There's no part of that that required us to be right all the time or even much of the time. All we need is a consistent view of the world that fits. So the example I like to use is that if you believed you were reincarnated from a Tibetan monk, and I believe that my prophet flew to heaven on a horse, we're not living in the same reality, but we can both go to the grocery store, both buy our groceries, have a conversation, go out for a drink, none of it matters. So it turns out you can have entire weird fantasies in your head that usually don't matter. If you look at the country now, right after the election, it immediately causes cognitive dissonance of the people who lost, and they started thinking that they were literally living in 1930s Germany, and the Hitler had just been elected. And this is real. I mean, they were actually living in this hallucination that the world had fallen apart and this was the worst thing. The people of one just thought, hey, we got some policies we like. Right, finally, yeah. But we share the same highways we're all living, we can all reproduce. It just didn't matter. At least one side was completely wrong. Right, sure. I've seen a lot of the fear recently, I think everybody has unless you live in the middle of the desert somewhere, or maybe especially if you live in the middle of the desert somewhere. But it does seem that every election cycle, if I look back at really old writing, it's hard to find this stuff. But if you look, you find that when Obama was elected, oh my God, it's the Antichrist. Before that, when Bush was elected, this is gonna be a police state. It's the same fatalistic crap. It just has a slightly different meme, a different picture. Or now people are talking about it on Snapchat, whereas before they were talking about it on Usenet, which nobody knows what the hell that is anymore. I remember, I think it was three years into the Obama presidency. I was talking with an older gentleman and he mentioned that Obama was a Muslim. And I said, you don't really mean that you think he's actually a practicing Muslim. And he said, yeah, it's well known. He's actually a Muslim. And I had to go to the internet and show him that wasn't true. But- And you were able to prove to this person from the internet that that was not the case? I don't know if he changes his mind in the long run. He probably wouldn't know. You're pissing into the wind. Yeah, that may have been a waste of time. But the point is, his world of living in what looked like a caliphate forming in the United States, it was just pure fantasy. But it didn't stop him from reproducing or anything else. So essentially, all we need is a model that's loosely tied to a few pillars somewhere on the shoreline. Other than that, we can bounce around all we want in between those constraints and we'll survive just fine. And you see it all the time when people go on pharmaceutical drugs. Somebody will have one personality in one way of looking at the world and either they're afraid or whatever it is. You give them the drug, you check back in a week. The drug works. They have a different personality and the world is different to them. The whole world looks different. Like all the things, all the cause and effect looks different and it's completely upside down. But they can still function better actually because if the drug were. So yeah, we don't really need any kind of sense of actual reality in order to survive. It just was never necessary. We didn't involve to have it. And so we're essentially run by social programming, cultural programming and our emotional filters as to how we perceive cause and effect and then beyond that. Well, a lot of variables bumping us around, but yes. Yeah, sure. Also at the bottom of your blog post, every post says you might enjoy reading my book either because you vote or you don't or you might like reading my book because kittens are so cute. Is this the copy machine effect where you just use the word because and then everything after that is irrelevant? Yeah, so the copy machine effect you're referring to Robert Childini's book, The Reluence, in which he talks about when you use the word because it almost doesn't matter what you say after because people register it as a reason and if you had a reason, well, I guess I'll give you what you want. You had a reason. So yes, I actually have been using nonsense reasons because I talk about that effect in my blog so that people get there and know exactly what I'm doing. So it's both funny to them cause they see it in context, but it also works. People have been telling me that damn it, that actually worked. I bought your book because of that. When I tested that, cause I like to test things that I hear about on the show. Otherwise it's just another podcast slash YouTube channel where people say things that have zero basis and everyone goes, ooh, that's amazing. And then never does anything with it. So I tested the copy machine effect and it's disturbing how effective this thing really is. I did it in the exact same context. Well, Sounds Cop Coffee Machine or Copy Machine, I went to Chipotle, which is the modern day coffee shop, Kinko's, whatever. Hi, can I cut in front of you? Because I have a scooter. I literally just had a manly razor scooter with me. Oh, sure. And very few people go, why would that affect the need for you to get him? I think one person went, what does the scooter have anything to do with it? And I just went, ah, I'm just kidding. And then he went, what are you talking, I'm trying to figure out, you can go ahead of me. I just wonder why the scooter has anything to do with it. So it still worked. It still worked. It still worked even though the guy went, scooter. Right, and I picked dumber and dumber reasons that were more arbitrary and I even tested not picking a reason until it came out of my mouth, which forces ridiculous things to come to light, to come to the surface. So one of the ways that I use that, even before I'd read about it in the book, is you always have this awkward situation about who picks up the check. Sure. Especially if you're a guy, you know, there's a little more social pressure. And so I'll have these situations where, you know, you go to dinner and you're thinking, okay, in this situation, it's sort of a tie. I could pick up the check, the other person could. But sometimes you want to be the one who picks it up because it's better to be the one who does than the one who didn't. Yes. If it's sort of a tie. Definitely. It would just feel a little better. Here's the way I always win the tie. I will come up with a fake because before dinner, it'll be something like this. I'll pay because you drove. Or I'll pay because it's your birthday. I'll pay because you had a bad day. I'll pay because you had a success of that contract that we're just talking about. And it doesn't matter what you say after the word because, people go, oh, thank you, and they'll put their wallet away. But if you don't say that, if you say let me get it, you'll be there all day. You'll be in a conflict and now you're starting to write. The only thing that wouldn't work would probably be some sort of negative connotation, like I'll pay because I heard your business is doing terribly. I'll pay because I heard your book is not doing so well. I hear you're a cheap bastard. Nobody likes you. I love I'll pay for this one. You get the next one because oftentimes it's somebody that maybe you're not going to see for a long time. You're not going to remember this and nor should you try. Don't be the member when I paid last time and said you get the next one. You're up, buddy. But I do, I love the copy machine effect of the because technique if we can coin that. It's so representative of what our minds do, which is just kind of accept any reason given to justify the previous request. And this is almost universally applicable. Yeah, that one and the McGurk effect, you may be familiar with that or not. I'll tell you about it. Are the two things that are simplest to explain with the most profound changes in your life forever? So the McGurk effect, if I'm saying it right, is the observation that I'll just tell you what the experiment was. So they have somebody just say the words, bah, bah, bah, B-A-H like a sheep. And they just show the lips going bah, bah, bah. Then they keep that tape on the same words, bah, bah, bah, except they do a close up of the same person's lip, except he's forming the letters that we would have said, bah, bah, bah, bah. Your brain instantly translates bah to bah. In real time, while you know it's a trick, while you know that the word is bah, they tell you. And all it is is the visual completely changes your sensation to a whole hallucination. And it's instant. And you can go back and forth as many times as you want as long as you're showing the lips going bah, bah, bah. You'll hear bah, even though that's not what it is. And when you see that, you can't unsee that. How quickly the brain is reprogrammed and fooled, even when you know what the trick is, every part of the trick. There's nothing about the trick you don't understand and it immediately works. Why does this work? Because it would make sense to me if we learn speech by reading people's lips and talking, but blind people learn how to speak fine all the time. I'll tell you why it works because the visual persuasion just is so powerful. It overpowers the auditory perspective. Yeah, if there's one thing that people could take away from this whole thing is that if you're describing things in a visual way and someone isn't, you're gonna win. It's just that powerful. Wow, that's a really good takeaway. The McGurk effect? Yeah, I think it's... We'll have to Google that and throw it in the show notes. McGurk doesn't sound that easy to spell, unless it's just like it sounds. MCGURK, man? Hopefully, otherwise, Google will tell us. Google knows all. You mentioned also in the news that, or in your blog, in the news that Google is trying to de-hypnotize potential ISIS recruits by manipulating what content they see when they try to search for pro-ISIS stuff. Have you been following this at all recently? Well, I suspect there's a lot going on in that regard, both in and outside the government. So yeah, I would imagine that the government has contacted the search engines to serve up the kinds of things that would help the national security. I don't have any details on that. At one point, I did have sort of a connection into that world, but I didn't really follow up on it. I think that having a master persuader, Trump, in the White House, is probably the only way ISIS could be defeated. Because if you think about it, war itself and killing people is just persuasion. You're not trying to kill every single person on the other side. You're trying to kill enough of them to persuade the others to stop fighting. So war is persuasion. Trump just has another weapon that isn't just a military. He can frame things differently. And I think you're gonna see a lot happening in that regard. Well, you may never know what happened. I think you'll see it. Take, for example, Trump's idea of the safe zones in Syria. That's, on the surface, it's just a way to keep people safe and separate the bad guys from the good people. But it's really persuasion. Because think what's gonna happen when all the fighters are on one side and the women and children have been filtered out to the safe spaces and they can't get to them. What are you fighting for when all the women are gone? Just think about that. From a persuasion perspective, they still get all the weapons. They've got all the anger. They've got all the religious reasons. But all the women are gone. Or enough of them are gone that the average person has no access to mating. When you take it down to mating, now you can't mate. I think that's pretty powerful persuasion. I think you throw your gun away at that point. Yeah, all you got is just this sweaty guy next to you that's also hungry. Yeah. Yeah, let's not get into that. Yeah, yeah. That's a whole other can of worms. That might be persuasive enough for some folks. You do mention that Google, Facebook, the internet, things like that are already kind of taking our political choices and even our free will away. I would love to hear more about that in the context of persuasion and things like that because it does seem, and we have seen that things like Facebook, even when they're not trying to be biased, the algorithm still filters for things that we click like on, which are things that we agree with and shows us more of that. So we can end up segregating ourselves into these little bubbles which inform our political choices as well. Which is why everybody who voted for Trump thinks the whole country must have voted for this guy and everybody who voted for Hillary thinks, who in the heck voted for this guy? How did this even happen? Because of what they're seeing in large part in the media and especially social media. Yeah, I've been testing that with some of my liberal friends who will love to send emails to criticize what's happening or what was happening. And I just simply ask them, are you familiar with, say, Project Veritas or anything that is well known on the right? Have you even heard it? Forget about whether you agree with it, forget about whether you think it's pertinent. Have you even heard it? And it's shocking that things that I think are just common knowledge are only common knowledge on one side. And I'm pretty sure that the same blindness works both ways, it's not a one-way thing. But it certainly tells you that reason, if it ever had a role, it's certainly less now. Sure, and I think it's becoming easier and easier because our brains do look for facts to back up our existing beliefs. That's not new to anybody who's been watching or listening to the art of charm for any period of time. However, now it's so much easier to find facts that fit our narrative when we're essentially training computers to then train us that those facts are so easy to access that they show up everywhere whether we want them to or not. By the way, there's something way bigger than just influencing politics going on. And it comes down to the nature of the human being. Free will, in my view of the world, is nothing but an illusion. Our brains are subject to the rules of cause and effect and the rules of physics. So a certain number of inputs for a certain condition at a certain time is only gonna give you one output. We have an illusion that we're deciding things, but science has also done a pretty good job of showing that that's not the case. In fact, our rational faculties don't even fire until we've done things in some cases. That's a recent discovery. I was reading a lot of news about this in the past couple, now we're both straightening up these damn chairs, or you're very persuasive. I went first, I'm just kidding. No, I know, you did. That's why I had to call it out because I'm like, dang, that looks more comfortable. But now everyone's gonna think I did it because you, we've seen a lot of brain science recently where they're actually able through, I think FMRI, to find that they can predict within a few milliseconds or seconds before somebody does something that their brain had already decided subconsciously to take that action. I first heard that in a hypnosis class. I heard that the science had already discovered that in hypnosis class in the 80s. Maybe now they just have more proof that that's the case? I think they have better, yeah, because of the better imaging and stuff like that. So it wasn't new to me, but it's certainly getting more attention. Well, we know, and again, things we teach at the Art of Trum all the time, rationalization of behavior is kind of a cornerstone of persuasion, influence. Talking with Robert Chaldini on this show before, anytime you can get someone to take an action first, you can change their belief. Even if the action is seemingly unrelated to the belief, you can get people to then wrap their beliefs around that action nicely. I mean, if you can get, and this is for good or bad, if you can get someone to go to the gym, even if it's just to pick up a power bar for a snack for me, you can get them to work out that much more easily the next time they walk in there. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy things that our brains will do because as you mentioned, we're involved to simply wrap ourselves into that. But now let me complete this thought, all right? So right now, people are programming computers and software and then those things are programming humans. So your Fitbit, your search engines and all that. So it still seems like humans are affecting other humans. They're just using this tool in between. But we're very close to the point where the machines will make those decisions themselves. So imagine, and this is not science fiction very far away, imagine you've got a few more sensors on your body, just normal stuff that we could already do. And the machine says, hey, you're a little dehydrated. Take a drink. Well, the first few times it does that, you're gonna say, well, I might, I might not, it's inconvenient, I don't wanna walk over there. But as you continue to follow the direct, the suggestions of the machines, you'll find they work because they're all based on science. They've studied, they know you need this. Eventually it won't be a choice anymore. On some level, you could force yourself not to have the drink. But it would require a lot of willpower. But why would you hurt yourself? Sure. So your free will is gonna be basically, the illusion is gonna disappear, I think, in our lifetime, that we will actually feel like we're just sort of going along with the plan, because the machines are telling us what to do and where to go and when to do it. And we're just sort of doing it. Do you have a problem with that type of guidance and persuasion? Because just to bring back the comment you made earlier, well, I straightened up first, we almost don't want to admit that we're under any sort of influence, even though it's completely normal, completely human, and we're doing it to other people deliberately. We don't want it done to us. Yeah, ego is the enemy. Another persuasion important element is that if your ego is making your decisions, they're just all gonna be bad. So the more you can tell yourself that ego is just a problem and not a thing to protect, I see it as a defect, like any type of ego crawls in when I don't want it, it's a defect. But I also think it's a tool, because I sometimes will amp up my ego because it makes my physiology change. When you act confident, you know, this basic persuasion, if you stand up straight, if you do the victory pose, that your body immediately changes to match what you're doing physically and what your mental state is. So you can change your health, your performance and everything else by manipulating your ego. But if you start thinking your ego is sort of important and you should bow to it, like if it's embarrassed about something, you shouldn't do that thing, that's, you know, if I'm embarrassed by something, I'd do that thing. Sure, that's the idea, that's how you grow, right? I think somewhere along the line, and I want to say probably somewhere in puberty, at least for me and for guys in general, we go from our ego being something that's used to protect us to us protecting our ego and everything that happens after that is a freaking disaster, an absolute disaster. Yeah, you can actually look at people who are successful and I think the people who can manage their ego the best almost always do better. You find that because then it becomes a non-consideration when they're trying to get somebody else, for example, in a persuasion context, if you're trying to get somebody else to do something and you have a choice between doing exactly what needs to get done in order for them to do that or you have to somehow damage your ego, you often end up fighting against yourself and you do the wrong things, which is unfortunately why sociopaths are so good at what they do in many ways because they're completely unafraid to just ignore everything beneficial and negative about their own ego if it's going to get a desired result and then after that they'll get their ego back tenfold by essentially getting one over on their victim and we find that those people are highly effective in part because they are able to just separate themselves from that ego for just long enough to manipulate the heck out of somebody in a very desperately way often enough and get it done. That's why accusations of narcissism, whether it's Trump or me or anybody else, are somewhat missing the point that there is a positive amount of narcissism, healthy, good feeling about yourself, that just makes you more effective and then there's too much that just makes you a jerk who can't see the world clearly. But if you know the difference between those two states, it's pretty useful to be a little bit narcissistic. Just enough, just narcissistic enough, that might be the title of this episode. So what are you working on now? Well, I'm writing a book. It's going to be called Wind Bigly. And you can imagine what that's about but it's mostly about persuasion but the context is the election. I also have a startup called the Wend Hub and we can tell stories with time. So it's a platform for telling any kind of story about things that happened in the past or schedules of the future in a visual way. Again, it's visual persuasion. So instead of a text-y little calendar, you can have video and pictures and graphs and maps and stuff. And we will link to all that, of course, in the show notes as well as your book. I wanted to ask about the, there's a concept that you have on your blog that's about checking with your body for creative ideas and I thought that was interesting. I never heard that before. So I like to think of creativity not so much as a process of creating something like out of nothing. If you think of it that way, it's just hard to do. I think of it as more of a fast iteration process where I clear my mind and you can't really sit around with nothing in your head if you get rid of the thought that's in there. If you flush it, that's a hard part. A new one just fills it in. So I try to do that as quickly as possible. Boo, boo, boo, boo, you know, one idea enough and then just flush, flush, flush until one moves me physically. So I'm using my body as a sensor. So if I have an idea and I laugh, well, that's my comic for the day. But if I cycle through ideas, I go, interesting, interesting, sounds like a joke, sounds like a joke, that's the one. That's the one. So you're always looking, the only thing that matters, the X factor of any kind of creative effort, any kind of art, any kind of product is that little thing that just makes you go, ah, you know, like you feel it. I was just opening up a new Apple device bought a new Apple computer and just the process and the thought that they put into that of the tabs that just make a great sound and it feels right, it looks right. Satisfying at a visceral level, isn't it? Yeah, it is just almost a sensual experience. And I wanted somebody to be there because I kept looking around and going, oh, oh, look at this. Oh, and it's better than the product itself. That's the funny thing. In many ways, it depends on the product as it goes. So you don't have anything if you haven't moved somebody's body, right? And I also use that as a way to know if your product or your idea has any value. So if you ask your friends, hey, what about my new idea and my product or whatever? And they say, that's really good. That's great. You should do something with that. That's terrific. You got nothing. That is zero. But if you say, what do you think of my product? And they say, hand me that. Play with it. Do you mind if I borrow, is this the prototype? Could I take this? I gotta show this to a friend. I gotta show this to a friend. That's a physical action, right? That's almost a guarantee that you have the X factor going there. So you look for the physical change, ignore the words. Are there anything that you, are any drills or exercises that you do to make yourself in a more receptive place, especially when you're thinking, what Dilbert comic am I gonna draw today? Sometimes you might just not be in the mood to laugh. Maybe your oatmeal's not sitting right. How do you get yourself in a receptive mode? Well, there's a lot of tricks, but I'll give you the big ones. The big one for a writer especially is the time of day. There's a time of day when your body, and people are a little bit different, but most writers either work early in the morning or late at night, which is really the same zone. Creativity just works better than. I don't know why, it's just something about your body rhythms or something. So the first thing is make sure you carve out that time. That's the big thing. And other artists say the same things. This is probably a pretty good generic rule that you need to fill yourself up with unrelated thoughts, maybe in the same field, but not necessarily related to what you're gonna write. And then you have to get rid of it. So you gotta fill it up and get rid of it. Because most ideas are combinations of things that don't fit together. So I recently wrote a comic, I don't know if it'll be out next few weeks I guess, in which my character Alice decides to date not a robot, but a drone. Right. Okay. So that's the sort of thing that's a combination of two ideas that came from one field and another. And so you have to fill yourself with lots of just ideas so that some of them just accidentally bump together and you say, oh yeah, that reminds me of these two things. You put these together and you got something. I think James Altucher calls that idea sex. I don't know if you've heard that descriptor before. It's a little graphic. Idea sex. Where you're bringing him in and releasing him, does that, what are you speaking? I guess you're bringing them all together and then they just do whatever they do in the conscious mind and they connect and then something else comes out of it sometimes. Okay, I will accept that. Enjoy that visual. That deeply visual persuasion, yes. There you go. I meant to ask you this before, actually before we wrap up on this one. When we were talking about persuasion before and visual persuasion being one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful kind, do you find an advantage since you're a talented and established artist? Do you find that you're better at that in some ways or is that something that even somebody who can't draw stick figures like me can take advantage of? Well, the first place I heard about this was just an ordinary corporate training, learning how to do presentations in a corporate structure, picture, picture, picture. So this is sort of well-known stuff that it just isn't used as much as it should be. So people will remember to put it in a presentation but when they're just talking, it's easy not to do it, right? So I guess the only thing that's different about people who are trained is that they bring it into all their conversations and try to paint pictures. Yes, I think visually and probably because I'm a cartoonist, I have a little bit more, I don't know, either training or natural ability in that some combination of the two probably. So it comes somewhat naturally to me but it is a result of training also. You mentioned some pretty creative stuff in your book and on your blog, on becoming great, you mentioned that every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Of course, we're generalizing the percentages here but tell us what you mean by this. What is the skill stack and concept? I'll give you the quick version and then the long version is in my book, how to fail with almost everything and still went big. The idea is that you have some natural talents, most people do something they're just born with and if you can add on top of those things skills that make sense and just keep adding, you can become unique and the market rewards uniqueness. So it's not good enough that you're just really good at one thing, there's probably a lot of people who are really good at that one thing but if you're really good at one thing and you know public speaking, you're probably gonna be the boss of those people who are only good at one thing but if you can also learn persuasion and you're also good at communicating and writing, these are all learnable things at least within let's say the business realm, everybody can learn this stuff and you just keep going until you have uniqueness that the market likes. Now here's some examples. If you look at my career, I'm not a good artist. I don't draw that well and maybe top 20%. I'd never took a writing class in college but I can put words together, I do it pretty well. I'm not the funniest person in the room even if I have a party in my own house, I'm like third funniest in my own house, right? And I'm not a great business person but I need business skills to run my cartoon mini empire and to have a content to write about. So I have this weird bunch of skills that I intentionally developed because they work well together. Then on top of that, Dilbert came around when I was working in a technology lab at the phone company when the internet was new and so this was a new skill and I said, hey, this could be on the internet. This was before anybody even heard the word internet. So Dilbert was actually the first syndicated comic on the internet and that was because I had that extra skill and that difference was probably the biggest difference in the success of Dilbert as being on early on the internet where technology people cared. So we always look for the skills you've got and then what could you add to that that makes you special, that fits together well? So rather than trying to be the top 1% at drawing, you can say, look, I'm fine being in the top 20%. I don't have to spend the 30 years getting to that top 1% so that I can finally peak in my career. You mix top 20% drawing with top 20% business with top 20% being able to speak about what you're doing with top 20% humor or maybe top 30% if you're at one of your house parties then you end up with a unique enough mix where you're in the top 0.1% for people with that mix of skills in that particular area doing that particular thing. And by the way, that is one of the reasons that I saw Donald Trump as probable winner a year before. Not just persuasion reasons, but he has a talent stack that's insane. I mean, it's everything from business to negotiating to he's got a good sense of humor. He can do quick little tweets. It's hard to write something witty and quotable in 140 characters, but he does it regularly. You know, you can see him give a speech and you say, well, that's really good. He's not the best speaker in the world, but he's got all these skills that are top 10%, top 20%, how smart is he? Probably top 10%, maybe higher, I don't know, but you put all that together. It's extraordinarily powerful, just the talent stack you put together. How do we find what skills we should be developing if right now we're going crap, I'm only good at computers, I'm only good at coding, I'm only good at humor, I'm only good at drawing, or I'm not good at any of that stuff and I just wanna pick a few and get good at those. How do you start to identify where we should even be putting the work? Well, I would say there's some that are so universal, you could just always do those and it would always work. So I'd say learning persuasion is gonna go with everything. Learning to communicate better, everything. Public speaking, that's sort of the, I would say that's the king of a lot of the skills, right? And then if you're in the technology area, if you can code, you probably wanna do interface and interface design and maybe little graphic arts and learn how to use a little Photoshop. Usually people know which skills. You usually know if you're in an area which way to expand. So every time we add a skill, we're essentially shaving down the requirement of being that much better in all of the other skill areas that we have. I like to put it the other way, which is you're more unique and the market is gonna say, well, there's only one of them and if I need somebody who can do these three things, there just aren't many people who can do those particular three things. Right, so if we want somebody who's a great public speaker, that's great. But if we want somebody who's gonna be great at business and is able to communicate that to other people, now we need those two skills together. And if we want them to do it in an Asian environment where we're talking with our Chinese colleagues, well, if they speak Mandarin, they can be maybe a little bit shaky on some of the other areas and get trained up, but hey, look, we're looking for somebody who fits into this box and you've got a foot in each one. Yeah, the second language should be on the short list of something everybody should do. What do you speak? English and? I did not learn early enough, but also I grew up in upstate New York where there was absolutely no use for another language. So I didn't see the need. If I'd grown up in California, obviously I would be speaking this way. Yeah, or Mandarin now. Or Mandarin. Scott, thank you very much. Thank you.