Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - Building a High-Performance Life - Paul Larache

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

In this episode, we dive into the mindset, discipline, and strategy required to build a high-performance life and business. Paul Larache shares powerful insights on leadership, personal development, and the habits that separate average performers from those who operate at an elite level.From lessons learned through years of coaching, business building, and pushing personal limits, Paul breaks down the importance of mental toughness, clarity of purpose, and consistent execution. This conversation explores how entrepreneurs can unlock their full potential by mastering both their mindset and daily systems.Whether you're building a business, striving for peak performance, or looking to level up your personal standards, this episode delivers practical insights and real-world strategies to help you grow stronger, think bigger, and perform at your best.If you're ready to challenge your limits and step into a more disciplined, focused, and impactful version of yourself, this episode is packed with value.💬 Did you enjoy this podcast episode? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️  If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford *************💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.*************✅ Follow John Gafford on social media:Instagram ▶️ / thejohngaffordFacebook ▶️ / gafford2🎧 Stream The Escaping The Drift Podcast with John Gafford Episode here:Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283 *************#EscapingTheDrift #Podcast #PaulLarache #HighPerformance #Entrepreneurship #Leadership #Mindset #PersonalDevelopment #BusinessGrowth #PeakPerformance #SuccessHabits #BusinessPodcast #Motivation #SelfMastery #EntrepreneurMindsetSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

And now escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of like it says in the opening, the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to go. And today, beaming into the studio from the sunny, sunny shores of Fort Myers, Florida, but originally starting on at the very cold part of the world in Toronto, this is a Canadian media entrepreneur and behavioral science expert. He is the author of the book, The Divided Brain, Help Make Sense of What Does It Make Sense,

and he's here to talk about how to understand human psychology in a way that can help you both personally and with your business. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Paul Larche. Paul, how are you? I'm great. Is Paul Larsh, but that's close enough? Then you know what?

Nope, nope, we're starting again because that is not good enough. Oh, okay. I don't know. I should have told you that earlier. No, no, normally, that's my fault. Normally I have a pronunciation on here and I don't have one today for some of this. No worries. So we're going to start again.

Here we go. So, Stu, this will be take two on this. Here we go. Ready? Yep. Back again for another episode. of the podcast, like it says in the opening, gets you from where you are to where you want to be.

And today, beaming into the studio from the sunny shores of Fort Myers, Florida, but originally hailing from the cold, cold, northeast of Toronto, he is a Canadian media entrepreneur, a behavioral science expert. He is the founder and leader. He is a founder and leader

in digital media and performance psychology and the author of the book, The Divided Brain, help make sense of what doesn't make sense, and he's here to help you talk about how to understand human psychology to help you in both life and business. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Paul Larch.

Paul, how are you? Thanks so much for having me, John. I'm excited to be here. You bring a great energy to just the introduction, so I can't help it be pumped. I know, because, well, I figure I set the bar pretty high, and then the only place we have to go is down. That's kind of what it is. You get your guests excited, too.

That's a good thing. I'll completely just run out of energy about it. halfway through this and you'll just see me collapse on the other side of this microphone is what's going to happen. So tell me a little bit about what got you into this field that you have become one of the renowned experts at. What got you into this? Sure. Well, as you mentioned, I was in, most of my career was spent in the broadcast business in radio. And I used to work with big companies that worked with big agencies in Toronto. And then I eventually owned my own radio stations and ended up having five radio stations that I exited with a few years ago, but also had two

marketing agencies, and one of those we actually just sold. So most of my life has been talking about marketing and branding and advertising to potential advertisers, both big and small. And the book came about because over the years, no matter it seemed if we were talking in a boardroom, you know, with sea level offices or just talking to a small business on the street, they often didn't understand some of the basic tenants of branding. And when it comes to marketing and branding, usually the first thing people want to do is talk about all the features and the facts and the great things that their product is. But unfortunately, and this has been proven time again, and I use many.

case studies in the book, it doesn't work. You have to talk on an emotional level and you have to talk to your subconscious brain, which in the book I called the old brain. So really this came about to be a one hour presentation that we would do to often marketing experts that sometimes didn't even know this, but often it was clients to give them a hack on understanding, you know, within an hour, not getting into too heavy with neuroscience and, you know, all of these things that have to do with, you know, studying deep into books and giving it to them in an easy to understand way with some metaphors. So that's where it came about. People seem to react really well and said, yeah, now it clicks.

I understand that and write a book about it. So I did a while ago, and it's been very, very well received. So I'm out there hoping that I can share this with some people and maybe it can make a bit of a difference in their life. no matter if it's a business thing or it's a family situation or it's it's a marketing issue. That's what it is. So let's back up a little bit. So how did you get in the radio business? I started working in radio at 15 years old.

And I was a grade nine. I was a part-time announcer at our local radio station. And I did the midnight to 6 a.m. shift on weekends. And nobody listens. but it's a great, it's a great, well, I mean, a few people listen. I shouldn't say that, but not many, but it was a great time to, you know, get used to it, get comfortable being behind a microphone and just getting comfortable with the whole thing. And I always loved radio.

You know, it's something that I got into my blood. And as soon as I actually finished high school, I went into radio full time and eventually went from on-air to management. And then I was, I, I grew up. grew up actually in northern Ontario, moved a couple of times to Toronto in the 90s and worked there primarily with the Toronto Blue Jays and the Maple Leafs doing their radio broadcast, the syndicated broadcast for them. So we were dealing with, you know, all of the advertisers you see on Major League Sports.

And that's where I got a lot of early exposure working with some of the best agencies in the world. Yeah, that's interesting. Now I know you're in Fort Myers now. Were you ever in, this is going somewhere. Were you ever in radio in Fort Myers? There's a reason I asked. I've never been in radio in Fort Myers.

I used to go come down to Dunedin, Florida to watch the Blue Jays training camp. Just north of Clearwater? Sure. Exactly. I did that for several years when I was working closely with them. But actually my father had a place in West Palm Beach. So I used to come here as a kid too. Do that.

That's another story. Well, the reason, the reason I, ass free plug for her i wish i could say i was the most talented of my siblings behind a microphone with this podcast thing but my sister has been in radio for probably 25 years was in naples at one point she's now number one in her marketplace in denver um she's okay how she does talk radio and she's number one in her market and so that's why i was wondering i'm like i wonder if you might know who my sister would be from from fort mires but yeah probably not anyway but yeah if you're listening to this and you want to Check her out. Mandy Connell. She's amazing. Check her out. She's on syndicated through the I Heart Network. She's

amazing. Anyway, so back to what we were talking about, we're supposed to be talking about, which is going to be psychology and sales. So let's get a little deeper into that as to why people buy stuff. Sure. Well, probably the best thing for me to do first is just explain the metaphor that I came up with so that people can picture it in their mind. And then once they kind of picture this in their mind, then we can go forward and get into a bunch of different examples. I call the book The Divided Brain because I basically am using a concept around thinking of your brain as two interconnected gears. One of them I called the old brain, and really for all intents and purposes, that is, you know, every part of the brain except for our neocortex,

which is the relatively new part of our brain. So it's the brain stem, the limbic system. And that's where our subconscious is. And that's where we actually are making almost all decisions very, very fast in parallel, everything from making sure that your body is, you know, your heartbeats going. Everything is working the way it's supposed to be. When you think of moving your arm, you don't think of moving your arm. It does it automatically. This is all happening in the old brain. And it's very fast and it's very efficient. And it is what primarily has, keeps us alive. And then I refer to something called the new brain as and the reason I called the new brain is because from an evolutionary point of view it hasn't been around that long just a few hundred

well maybe a hundred million years in mammals but really got a lot bigger with with homo sapiens and that is it's very slow it's not an efficient part of the brain because in terms of like software it would be we're still in beta we're it's still ironing out the kink so it's not efficient it requires effort. And that's why when we think hard about something, it is hard. We can, you know, you can only keep one thought in your mind when you're concentrating. That's why when we're starting, you know, when you start to think of complex issues, you really have to sit down and think it through because that is the new brain working. So it's deliberate. It's effort. And that's the language. So I picture in the book and I have videos on this and when I talk and but there's pictures in the book of thinking of it as two gears and they're interconnected. But, the old brain is a bigger gear and it runs the show. And if we understand that concept, then everything else I'm going to talk about from here on in is going to make sense. Because pretty much every decision people make, it doesn't matter if it's not just in advertising and anything, it's done in the old brain first. And this has been, you know,

researched and proven without question with fMRI imaging. And your conscious brain really will hear your old brain decision within milliseconds of the decision being made. And its default position is usually to back up that decision. And the reason it does is because more often than not, the old brain decision is correct. It kept us alive for, you know. We didn't get eaten by the dinosaurs. There you go.

Exactly. Yeah. So all of these things have been really fine-tuned so that our instincts are for the most part, right. But these instincts are not made for. the world we live in today, unfortunately. They were, they carried a lot more weight on the Savannah and if you were, you know, some, some Russell in the bush, your immediate response was to think it was a threat and act accordingly. And if you did that, you stuck around. And if you didn't,

you didn't stick around. And only the ones that stuck around were able to pass their genes on to the next generation. So I try to get people to at least understand that. analogy or metaphor first and understanding that decisions are made in the old brain and that again this old brain this old part of our brain is is very set in its ways because it's arguably being around for 475 million years if you consider the lizard part of our brain and it's kept so are you are you saying that okay so like in the sales process for for me the way that I look at it is people are they're moving towards status, they're moving away from pain, towards something pleasurable. But are you saying those are the decisions that are taking place there?

Yep. You're absolutely right. The old brain has a bunch of characteristics that are again built in that we have no conscious control over, even though we think we do. It was built for survival and reproduction. It was like survived long enough to reproduce. And then technically your genes were happy because then you would pass on your genes to another generation. And that's what evolution is all about. And that's why through, you know, evolution, I mean, we're a masterpiece of evolution when you think about it. But most almost all that history of our evolution was in an environment where things like food were scarce. You know, things like you just mentioned status were very important within a tribe. All of these things were much different.

The world we live in today, when I say today, you could even argue the last 10,000 years since the industrial and agricultural revolutions have kicked in. Put us in an odd position. But like the old brain, for example, it's very, like I said, it's fast and it's simple. It doesn't want to use much energy because it wants to conserve energy, which suited us well at one point. So it likes to make really fast decisions. It doesn't use much wattage. it likes familiarity because it doesn't it's resistant to change because it doesn't want anything that's like you know considered to be out of the ordinary it's always looking out for itself

which makes perfect sense when you think about it it's it's tribal in the sense that we need to cooperate with others to to survive but there's other things in it like you mentioned status and appearance you know that makes our old brain actually quite vain and thin skinned but all for a good reason because if it made people focus on their status and appearance and where they were in the pecking order, then they would have an opportunity to find a better mate and pass on better genes to the next generation. So it all keeps coming back to evolution. Okay, well, let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. If I'm marketing somebody and there's powerful motivators that exist within the old brain, if you had to rank the top five with one being the most powerful, which what you should

try to appeal to. How would you rank those? What would that list look like? My, well, my marketing hat would say it would depend on what the product or service is. In the book I talk about, yeah, in the book I talk about there's three, we are, you know, we are basically emotional machines that think. We're not thinking machines that are emotional. And people have to, once they grasp that, then they, then they say, okay, if it's emotion, what emotion is driving it. I break the emotions into kind of three areas. One is the heart, which has everything to do with love, belonging, family, just as the metaphor

says, the heart. Then I talk about the gut. And the gut really was because, again, through most of our revolution, food was scarce. And you really went out of your way to hoard and, you know, hunter-gatherers, to make sure that you had something for a rainy day. Today we never even, that doesn't even cross our mind, but it did for most of our evolution. So if the, and then the third part is actually your genitals, your sexual reproductive organs, because that has a lot to do with status and appearance. And the reason that those are big drivers for us, particularly in luxury items, is because status

is our peacock, right? Feathers. It's the way that we show our position in, in the marketplace if we're looking for a mate. So you asked earlier what would be the, you know, the top markers, I would say if you are in any type of business that has to do with people or with relationships, it would be through the heart. It would be anything that you would tug at the heart with. If it has anything to do with saving for a rainy day or making sure that you're never going to run out of a certain thing, you know, Amazon, for example, is great for, for, for, for the gut because you can get things at a cheap price very quickly or Walmart or anything like that where you can accumulate.

So they will market at that level. And then almost all luxury goods and certainly anything that has to do with appearance, makeup, so on and so forth, clothes will all revolve around our genitals and how it works. So that's how I would answer that question. I hope that makes sense. No, it does. Well, there's obviously within that list. There's obviously techniques in phrasing and ways that you can get to that subliminal old brain.

So what would you, let's break that same list down again and say, what are the things that you should be doing, depending on which of those vanity metrics or those safety metrics you're trying to hit? Well, if I was talking to a new advertiser or a startup business, for example, I would ask what their product or services will do on three levels. What does it actually do? What is the benefits or the, you know, what are the tangibles that it provides you with? Then I would also ask what pains does it take away from your competitors in that field? And the third thing I'd ask is how would it compare to your competitors in terms of how

they have positioned and marketed it because you want to make sure that you're not going to do something that your competitor is doing because you're going to be fighting in a different space. So, you know, with that, what you're trying to do is, again, find out what emotions are we touching even on a dry type product or service? What emotions can we tie in? If this is a, is, if it's a software, a piece of software and it can make somebody's job more efficient, then the underlying appeal there could be on an emotional level that it's going to save you time, that you could spend that time with your girlfriend or your family, or it's going to help in your job, which is going to be coming back to your status. You might be able to move up

into the ranks and so on and so forth. And then to position it through that frame, not through all the features that it has. So let me, so let's let's pretend we got a pitch. Are you trying to hit, let's say we got a pitch. You got your three silos. you're trying to hit of your of your positioning are you trying to hit 33 percent 33 percent or does it matter as long as it equals 100 no it it's all it's 90 percent the old brain it's going to be 90 cent of motion because the one thing we didn't talk about yet is what what does the new brain do what is this new brain with those two gears and the best way i can describe what the new brain does and i wish i invented it but it's from jonathan hate and from one of his books and he refers to the

new brain as like the press secretary. So think of a press secretary for the president, prime minister, no matter what. Their job is to justify what, you know, and rationalize whatever the boss said. And they're paid to do that. And so that is really the new brains de facto mode is to to basically rationalize what the old brain's decisions have made. Now, you can put the brakes on sometimes, and I literally talk about putting the brakes on, you know, hit the clutch, take the gear off so they're not connected and think things through. And I have a chapter on the book that is related to critical thinking to say, okay, listen, we have to slow down.

We have to use, you know, what we call metacognition to say, let's think about. about our thinking here, are we being just led on the emotional tugs of our old brain here? And if you get pretty good at it, then you can actually start noticing that, yeah, maybe I am just falling into this trap of wanting to be in this tribe, or you may be following, you know, certain,

I hate to use the word traps, because at one point they really kept us alive, but I call them errors and thinking, like cognitive biases. And we're very, the old brain is very good at pattern recognition. Again, it's that pattern recognition that that saved us many times in, you know, in our old day. But now we often see patterns where they don't exist or we make them up because we, because our

old brains so much wants to believe that there's something there. And there's a term for that. It's called patternicity. And it's, and again, it's finding, you know, meaningful patterns. in meaningless noise. And that happens all the time because we just feel that we see a pattern there. And then the old brain, when it starts talking to the new brain, if those gears are connected, this is where, and maybe some of your viewers have heard this, but it's a term called confabulation.

And it's used often by lawyers, especially during trial. Because if you're putting an eyewitness on the stand, often they will say that they heard or seen things that when they look back and are able to prove without a doubt that that didn't happen through video or whatnot, it doesn't necessarily mean that that person was intentionally lying. It's just that the old brain, new brain connection confabulates because it wants to tuck that issue away and move on to the next thing. So you will, some people will believe that, you know, that actually happened. And the other thing, too, is we're very blind to abstract concepts. So, you know, we never, we never in the Savannah thought about probability theory or statistics or

scientific principles or so those are very, very counterintuitive to, to the new brain. So you, I want to go back and I want to talk about pattern recognition because we skipped sure quick. Yeah. Because I actually give a talk. And one of the talks that I give, one of the points that I'm making is about pattern recognition in the sales industry where the worst thing that you can say. to any prospect that you ever call is, how are you doing today?

Because every human on earth now is just conditioned. Like you would never call your friend to go, how are you doing today? You just would never do that. So when you hear that through the phone, I don't care who it is. You're immediately just conditioned to go telemarketer. It's the first thought that it's your brain. And I make that point when I give that talk and walk out and I said, hey, odd question.

Did anybody in here almost die this morning? And there are no hands go up. And I go, I beg to differ. I think Ollie almost died. And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, did you drive here in a 4,000 pound death machine that was going 65 miles an hour, probably five feet away from a bunch of other 5,000 pound death machines coming the other way. And all it would have taken in one moment is one person to swerve over and you'd have been dead.

But your brain has just patterned recognize. I said, listen, that's okay. That's not going to happen. And that's what your brain does. The old brain, I guess, does. Is it recognizes those things because otherwise we would just walk around all day, like, ah, ha, waiting for a rock to fall on us all the time. So we start to see those things.

Great analogy. And you're right. What you did is you disrupted that pattern that people are used to. And again, certain patterns, the reason we like patterns, the old brain like patterns, sometimes from a marketing point of view, we can use that to our advantage. How? Not with. How?

How? Sure. Well, again, in the book, I talk about how familiarity in branding is misunderstood. Because often a new service or products says, I want to be so different. I want to be out there. I don't want to be like anybody else. And often, unfortunately, that can be a death trap to get the product blanche. You have to, there's the term called it's Maya,

Maya, Maya, however you want to pronounce it. But it's a marketing term that has to do with the fact that you want to be familiar, but a little bit different, not too different. Because the old brain, like I said earlier, it does like to be comforted with stuff that it feels, doesn't put it under threat. In the book, I give a few examples, but for one example, I talk about music. Because in radio, you know, I have a guitar player and an amateur brand. and I talk about how about 70, 75% of the number one hits over the last 30 years

have followed pretty much the same four-cord pattern. You know, the 154, 6 pattern. And this is country, rock, pop, it doesn't matter what you look at, those are the songs that will sell the most and be the most successful. And the reason is they follow a certain pattern that, is very familiar to our brain. If you come out and you play something that doesn't follow a familiar pattern, it will sound so foreign that it would take a long time for that to build up.

It's the same thing in the movie industry where, you know, so many movies are built on an arc. You know, it's called The Hero's Journey, Joseph Campbell, where, you know, it's the Star Wars and so on, where you have a, you know, the hero doesn't want to be a hero and runs into all these trials and the wizard. Exactly. They have the wizard. They have their enemies. Then they, you know, they have their enemies.

And somehow miraculously at the end, they become bigger and stronger. These are things that are built into our DNA and feel very comfortable. So the challenge when you're introducing a product or service is to wrap it up in something that is familiar. Another good example I give in the book is how, So if you change your marketing too much of your branding, I tell people, don't change your logo unless you really, unless something really, really bad happened to your product. Or don't stick with what you got because you've built brand. Again, with the old brain, you're building inventory in the part of that brain that's going

to store your long-term memory. And that's in the old brain. So it recognizes your brand. It recognizes whatever values you stand for, what your product is all about. And often marketers, after a few years, they go, you know what? I think it's time to switch everything up and come up with a new brand. And there's, again, there's many case studies in the book that I talk about, that reference how brands have lost, you know, tons of money, like just by doing a brand switch

that they shouldn't have done. Well, the first thing that comes in mind for me, the first thing that comes in mind with that with me is like Pepsi. Like they're every like 10 years, they have to redesign their logo and redesign everything. And Godot knows how much they pay those firms to do it. I saw a thing one time where it was like they pay millions of dollars for these marketing firms to do these rebrands. I never understand.

Yeah. But often you'll note, like look at the Coca-Cola logo, for example. I mean, you could go, that logo is 150 years old. And it, it's still not that different. And even Pepsi, to a certain extent, they keep these things for a long times. It's, it's often when you just really go and step out there that you'll run into, you know, issues that can really turn people off and, and, and or, you know, people don't recognize what you're up to. So to answer your original question about,

you know, how do you, you know, how do you separate yourself? You've got to be careful that you don't separate yourself too much if that makes any sense. Yeah. No, it, no, it does. Let me ask you this. Because obviously, we're in the world now, you talked a little bit about it earlier. One of the things that you said was when you're talking about we're emotional creatures that try to think intellectually. And I guess I had on not too long goes an incredible, a incredible agent or change agent for big corporations. And with the advent of AI, we were talking about AI replacing jobs and doing these things. And he said, well, the problem is humans are emotional trying to get to intelligence and AI is intelligence trying to go to emotions. There's still this

disconnect as to why companies that choose to have AI as their front-facing customer experience are not doing very well with it right now. But in the age of AI as it's coming up, I know you talk a lot about this. You know, how is that going to become a medical? of credit, but how's that going to change this stuff? Well, I do put a whole chapter in the book about that because the thing is, we're for the most part already being played by AI and certainly by media, different type of media because everything I talk about with the new brain, old brain and how the old brain works, AI already knows that.

It knows what emotions that it should be touching to, you know, connect with us. It, you know, big tech, media, advertisers, politicians, they all know how the old brain works perfectly, and they use it to their advantage. And every time we click on something or we share something, we're actually helping it and reinforcing it based on that. Because sometimes, again, we're not engaging that new brain to say, okay, is this information I'm getting? Is it actually true? Or, you know, are these people being sincere? Is this product really going to do what it has to do? So the reason I talk about that now is it's only going to get worse.

I mean, AGI's around the corner. You know, now you can do these deep fake videos. That goes right to the old brain. And if people don't start, you know, actually saying, you know what, I'm going to really start implementing a bit of creative, or not creative, but critical thinking in what I do. And, you know, at the end of the day or at some point in the day, I'm going to disengage the old brain from the new brain and I'm going to start trying to

think through all of these things in a logical fashion and say, hey, have they been hitting these hot buttons? Is this triggering me to either like or dislike sometimes some of the messages that they've got to get across? So a lot of the book, what I'm trying to do now is tell people that, you know, you really have to check your ego these days. And because we all have intellectual pride. We all feel that we, you know, we're smart and we know things.

things, but it's going to require a lot of humility in the future in the world of AI for us to be able to separate truth from fiction. Well, what's worse is in the age of social media, it is required that you have an opinion about everything. You know, I've often said on this shit program, one of the most valuable things that you can do is master the phrase, I don't have an opinion on that. it's just there's a lot of there's more power in that statement than saying something dumb that you're regurgitating that you heard online it is so true because it's not our natural evolutionary way of thinking that that's why I use the metaphor of the the two gears because the new brain

will go along with the old brain and in fact more often than not it'll rationalize whatever the decision is even if it's wrong and you know in marketing that's great like because you you know, you can justify why you need 50 pairs of shoes or you can justify why you paid 150,000 for a watch. The new brain can rationalize that very easily. It's the craftsmanship. It's the, you know, we can come up with all those rational excuses in the world. That's all the new brain doing what the de facto motive it is. It's not sometimes disengaging and, you know, entering that metacognition and saying, okay, at the end of the day, is this really, do I really need this for what I thought it was for, or is this information I'm getting actually, you know, benefiting

me or my tribe and, you know, and looking at it through that lens. So what I'm telling people is you have to, like you just said, embrace skepticism, even a little bit. Like you have, I think everybody has to become a little bit more skeptical, no matter where you are in politics or marketing or business the age we're entering into especially with the amount of biases and that that that AI can touch on and and and and and and it can just pinpoint the exact way to get to us that we don't even understand is happening but i think that's getting harder and harder because with the algorithms through social media and twitter and there's they have one job keep you on the platform that's it yeah so they've placed you in this echo chamber of just the

same repetitive voice coming through you and you're most people don't take the time to say hey what is the other side maybe of this coin look like what is the other side of this issue look like and i and i have found i mean that's the majority of the american population now is incredibly polarized because of this so from a behavioral science standpoint two point question number one how important is that we break that cycle and two how do we break that cycle well again using my little metaphor in my Again, my book is not for PhDs that have already gone to school and understand, you know, the way the brain works or neuroscientists. It's a bit of a hack to think of it as, again, your old brain is running the show. Your new brain is for the most part going along with it, these two interconnected gears.

But you can, with effort, you can disengage that. But it does require effort. You have to literally sit down, you know, maybe in a quiet place at some point in the day and just reflect on, okay, What got my who touched my buttons today? What riled me up? And if you think back to what it was, maybe it was a social media post. Maybe it was a news story you saw. Maybe it's something a friend told you. Then you say, okay, now let's just, you know, not try to get emotional about this.

Is there any, you know, could we back any of this stuff up? Is there any, you know, is there any proof? Is there any, you know, can you. and often you will find that there isn't. What I was going to say is my default mechanism for that is literally just to say that any time that I am triggered emotionally by something that is not living and breathing in front of me, there's a excellent chance on being manipulated somehow. You just have to go to default. You're ahead of 80% of the population. Good for you.

Oh, I'd say 98% of the population is a little closer. You know what? You're right. I was trying to be polite. No, but how many people, I mean, I know, I mean, people that I know that I'm friends with that are so, get so angry over things that are being like, this is just being fed to you. Like, you have a choice of what you can, what you can do. And it's so funny because we're, I was talking about this the other day. We're entering this age of, of advanced health enlightenment, I feel like.

I think, you know, alcohol consumption is down. people are eating better. You know, now peptides are the rage. You know, we're all trying to live forever. If you're north of 50, you're like, I just got to make it 15 years and AI is going to keep me alive for the rest of my life forever, whatever it is. Whatever it is. I just got to make it like 15 more years than AI is going to keep me alive. And, you know, everybody's trying to be more healthy.

But yet there's some of the same people that are in the gym and doing all these things will put the just nonsense into their head, a steady diet. of just absolute garbage into their head. And I think, I think the way that it triggers these people and the people, and I'm telling you, I think nothing affects your health more than stress. I think literally how stress you are, way more important on you than your diet.

And these people get so wound up, so wound up. Yeah, and the thing is, if with a little education, and, you know, not, this not the Jinsu Knives part of, buying my book, they can buy lots of books on this, but with a little education, why do you get riled up? There's really good explanations for all of that. Why your cognitive bias is so strong? Again, all of these things at one point in our revolution kept us alive.

And thank God we have it or we wouldn't be here today. It's just that in the world we live in today, it's not serving us well. It's not serving us well all the time. It's serving us well most of the time, but in those cases where once you stake a position with your tribe, it's very hard for you to change that position because you don't want your tribe to think that you're turning on them. And then you're going to be worried about your status within your tribe. And like people consciously don't think these things through. Of course they don't.

But if they educate themselves a little bit and understand, again, that those things are all being driven. driven based on really powerful evolutionary traits that they can, like, and we can. I mean, humans, I mean, look what humans have done and created, you know, civilizations and science and now AI and so on and so forth. When we do engage that new brain, it does, we can do amazing things, but you have to, you have to make sure that sometimes you put the brakes on saying, you're right, what are triggering those levers. Can I, you know, reframe the situation or the argument?

And at the end of the day, you might come back and say, no, I feel really good with my decision. I've vetted it in, you know, my own way. But often people, again, they can be just a little bit, you know, sometimes I don't want to use the word cynical, but a little bit of skepticism. You don't have to be the biggest skeptic in the world. But if you should seek solid reasons before you accept a claim, like you just shouldn't accept a claim just because somebody in your tribe that told you that. Sometimes you've got to be willing to revise, you know, your position because sometimes some new evidence, credible evidence will come out and you have to, you know, have the, you know, the intelligence, the mental intelligence to actually be able to accept that as truth. Yeah, I find one of my favorite questions when somebody I know starts babbling on about something that's just insane that they got from the interwebs is I asked them something like, what would have to happen for you to change your opinion on that?

What would have to happen for that not to be true? Like, what would you have to say? And then it starts the thought of, well, maybe I need to look for something that might make this make a little more sense, right? Let me ask you this. So obviously with the internet, man, in videos and trainings and all the stuff, and course, and, you know, the hustle culture that exists within sales and you got the super meathead guys that beat their chest and I'm going to put you through my sales course and teach you how to make you an ultimate alpha closer and all this stuff. Well, through that, obviously there's a lot of behavioral

science in it. And there's, you know, things like NLP and all of this stuff, which there might be some ethical questions for these closing techniques. So what for you would you consider is ethical persuasion? Well, I mean, the truth will set you free. As soon as you, you're not dealing in truth, you're going down a slippery slope. So when you're, you know, again, your product or your service, if you're saying that it'll do things that at the end of the day, it really not necessarily going to do, but you're just, you know, trying to get sales. That will catch up with you at some point. It might not be right away, but it will catch up with you some point. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, too, is the old brain

is very tuned through evolution to be wanting to be treated fair. And there's, again, a lot of great examples that have been done with, you can watch videos on YouTube of what they've done with, you know, monkeys and cages where they, you know, they won't give them the same treat and how they will consider it so unfair. And I mean, there's so many of these things come into play in the context that they're put into. But the old brain is really good at sniffing out bullshit. And it doesn't necessarily happen right away. but you'll pick it up and I catch it all the time I you know I was listening to an advert like a radio commercial the other day and the guy was I can't even remember what the product was but he says it only cost 20 yes $29 well no it's $29 it's not 20 yes $29 like you know trying to people

the old brain will pick up on that right away and go okay you're just trying to shiast me here like nice try and well most people but sometimes you can run a business with that that 0.1% that will, you know, be gullible and buy into those things. So when you, when people on that, in that respect, when you talk to people, do you tell them the gut, you know, that gut feeling is normally better than your thought process? Your intuition and your gut is probably better? Well, again, the old brain runs on intuition and, or you can call it gut. And for the most part, it is right. It is right most of the time because, you know, most of what the old brain does is not just evolution.

I've been talking about a lot of things that are built into our DNA that kept us alive. But a lot of it also comes from our childhood and how we were brought up and how we were educated and who we hung around with, with schools we went to. All of these things will have some type of bearing on it. But these things are called heuristics in psychology, and they're really, they're like mental shortcuts. They're like rules of thumb, for lack of a better term. So that is usually what intuition is. And again, I keep on going back to it.

But for the most part, it is right. It's just not always right. And if somebody's trying to manipulate that, it's easier to manipulate these days. So you really need to be tuned up for it. Well, let's talk about this then. So we know the old brain's running and that's our gut feeling. So how do you develop what like what practice? What can you do to make the new brain more effective, more efficient, more profound in your decision making?

Again, what I tell people in the book is disengaging those two gears and and actually studying critical thinking. I have a whole chapter on basic critical thinking techniques. You mentioned a good one a while ago. One of the ones I say, one of the first one is to use a, it's a principle called Occam's Razor, which, you know, means in a lot of scientists use it. It is usually the easiest answer is usually the correct answer. If you have to, that's why conspiracy theories always tend to fall apart because so many things have to happen for their conspiracy theory to be a, to be actual, true that that's where the argument falls apart. If you have to go through 15 hoops,

you know, to make your your argument, then there's there something's wrong with that argument. It wouldn't hold up to, to good scrutiny. So, you know, the critical thinking isn't like people think, oh, what it is like you're, again, you're going to be so skeptical. It's not. It's just taking in what we have learned. And some of those things are, you know, the scientific method, where, you know, if you have a hypothesis, you go out and you test it and you, you know, you prove or disprove it and you shouldn't care what the answer is. All you're trying to do is prove or disprove a hypothesis. And then, you know, you just move that way.

So critical thinking is really the only way. All right. So as somebody that wrote a book on it, it is critical thinker, are there any random conspiracy theories that you tend to say that might be what I'm into? Do you have one? I got one. I got one I can't get away from. I'm curious to give up.

You know, at the end of the day, I have a Rolex watch. I mean, I do a lot of the things that I say that, you know, I got manipulated on. And I'm not giving them up. I don't care. Like, you know, they're making me happy. There you go. So, you know, I'm certainly not a hypocrite. I understand how the world works and I understand how I work.

And sometimes I'll want to tend to believe things. And I have to catch myself and say, I'm falling into my own trap. I'm hoping with age that I've gotten, you know, a little better at it. But yeah, I mean, and I don't want to say every conspiracy theory is wrong too. There will be some that are right. It's just that more often than not, the simpler answer is the right answer. And more often than not, if you put up any good argument and you ask for a little evidence or scrutiny, you'll find out that there's nothing to back it up.

So if you, you know, accept those two things, then sometimes your life will come. Yeah. The mood landing thing, I just, I can't get like the science of that just doesn't add up to me. Doesn't add up. Do you believe? I don't wear a tin foil hat. I don't know, but the moon landing thing. Do you believe the world is flat or do you believe?

No, and I can definitively tell you that it's not. I'll tell you how. But this is, things that. Two weeks ago, I was standing at the South Pole. I was in Antarctica standing there. Right as the subject. And I saw a 360 degree sunset all the way around. I know.

I know that I've been there. I have, I've set foot. I did not fall off the edge of the mat. It didn't happen. I've been there. Well, I met a flat earther in Fort Myers here a couple of summers ago.

And just convinced. Nice guy, like smart. His father, he says, worked at NASA. So, I mean,

you know, I'll take it with a grain of salt. But, I know that in his mind, he wasn't lying to me. And that's where, again, I talk about this in the book, like confabulation and the way the mind will work, you can convince yourself of something that you can't get out. And some people can take it to the end's degree. You know, I talked about gathering and hoarding.

Like some people are hoarders. Their houses are, they can't help themselves. It's actually labeled as a disease. But really, this is something that's built into our DNA. It's just that they can't turn it off. Yep. Well, and remember one thing also about the role. My good buddy Bradley says, I don't wear this watch to tell me what time it has.

I wouldn't tell you what time it is. So no shame in the role. You're not going to hear you. You're not going to hear me argue with the Rolex. No, no, no, no. Very effective for that reason in certain rooms, which is good. All right. So if they want to buy the book, where can they buy the book?

You can buy the book on Amazon. It's called the Divided Brain. Paul L.A.R.C.E. But you can also get it at Burns and Noble. like I'm not sure of many stores. I don't think bookstores carry books anymore, but you can certainly buy them online. There's an audio book version of it as well,

if people like that. Yeah. Have you gone to Barnes & Noble and signed your books locally? Have you done that yet? I have not in Fort Myers yet. I have back home in Toronto, though. Yeah, yeah.

You go in and you sign them. I did that here when my book came out. Did you read your own audio book? I'm curious. I did it. Yeah. I did it myself. Was it the, okay.

So I went to a studio in L.A. to do mine. And it was the longest four days of my entire life because of how quickly I speak. I have a recording studio back home in Toronto. So I was able to, with some help from an outside source, a friend of mine who's a producer, put it together. And I'm sure there's better ones out there. But it gets the message across. Well, I love that. Paul, do you have a website?

Social media handles anything else you want to drop? Paul Larsh.com, P-A-U-L-A-R-C-H-E dot com. And that will talk about the book. It'll talk about it. There's a lot of resources in there about a lot of the things I've been talking about. There's some PDFs people can download. And there's also, you know, an exercise people could go through where I call it the, you know, figuring out what the essence of your brand is, what your brand promises.

And they can, they'll find that on the website as well. That's all free. They can play around with it. and see what comes out of it. Love that. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. I mean, it was super interesting conversation, and I do appreciate your time so much.

I loved it. Thank you, John. Cool. Well, wrap it up, guys. Listen, if you listen to that today, I'm going to take away one thing, which you should take away out of all of that, which is the next time you're in the moment

and you see something that riles you up, that just gets you viscerally angry about life, there's a pretty good chance you're being manipulated. Get that new brain. going. Think your way out of it. We'll see you next time. What's up everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of escaping the drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escaping the drift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor. If you wouldn't mind,

throw up that five-star review. Give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.