Shaun Newman Podcast - Ep. #208 - Jason Andrews

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Jason is a hypnotist. We discuss his road into that endeavour & the art of persuasion.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 

This is Glenn Healing. Hi, this is Braden Holby. This is Daryl Sutterin. Hi, this is Brian Burke. This is Jordan Tutu. This is Keith Morrison. This is Kelly Rudy. Hi, this is Scott Hartnell.

Hey, everybody. My name is Steele-Fer. This is Tim McAuliffe of Sportsnet, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday. Hope everybody had a great weekend, enjoying the nice weather while at last. I know nobody wants to talk about snow. I certainly don't.

But if we get a few more days like that in October, the more days we get, the happy I am, because we all know that means hopefully a shorter winter. But man, beautiful, beautiful days on the weekend, got the kids out, enjoyed some of the sun, and just a nice weather. So I hope wherever you were at, you got to do the same. Now, let's get on to today's episode sponsors.

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I'm talking about Jason Andrews. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Jason Andrews. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Well, welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Mr. Jason Andrews. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Now, I got to get a little background on you. I think the audience would love a little background on you as well. Just maybe a little bit about yourself. And I mean, before we started, you were mentioning the journey into becoming a hypnotist. Man, laid on us. Yeah, it's been an interesting path for me. So it started when I was in high school.

And there was this religious group. that got a hold of myself and a couple hundred other high schoolers, right, in my high school, and did a ton of religious programming. So this was, you know, looking back, this was good for actually some of the kids. But for me, it was not good. For me, it was really bad. It put a lot of things in my head that really just didn't work for me. So from age 16 to about 25, I mean, I was a wreck.

I was on all kinds of, you know, every antidepressant available. I went through all of them, you know, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, all that stuff, right? Because of this, this, this, just extreme religious programming that it had been put in my at that age. And what happened was around age, I don't know, how long was I, 22 or 23, I found this funny book called Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. The interesting thing about that book was that I noticed that the things that he was talking about in that book were about as strong as some of the things in my head that I didn't want there anymore. Does that make sense?

It was the first time I realized, now, wait a minute, these things that I don't want in my head, this stuff in this book seems to be able to like, you know, go toe to toe with those things that I didn't want and kind of, you know, change them when nothing else was working. So I started looking into it and I discovered this funny little discipline called neuro-languistic programming. And I was, man, this was in the early days. I was on this Yahoo message board, right? This is 20 years ago.

It's like cutting edge. Yahoo message boards. And I was talking about some of this stuff. And there was a guy on there. And he said, he wrote to me, he's like, I know what you're trying to do, but you're not doing it right. He says, give me a call. and I'll show you how to do this.

He was like, all right. So I give this guy a call and he just tells me stories for an hour. I thought we were going to be like talking. Now, he just told me stories. I barely got a word in. Tell me stories for about an hour. And the only thing I remember about the stories, at the end of the story, this giant hog got put on an altar and slum.

That's the only thing I remember about this whole hour of stories. And the result was all the anxiety went away. Bam. I mean, it was gone, permanently gone, just from this one hour, this guy telling me stories. At that point, you know, I started going off the medications and have had nothing, taken nothing since.

It was one of those experiences that was so mind-blowing to me. I thought I have to get in on this. This is something I have to learn more about. Because for nine years, my brain had just been, you know, hijacked and taken over with all kinds of stuff I didn't want. And this guy, like... Can I hop in for a second?

When you say it's been hijacked with things you don't want, can you give me an idea? of what you mean? Like, what was going on inside your head that you're just like, I can't handle this? So I'm going to try not to be too specific here, but the standard things of religious fundamentalism. Extreme guilt, mechanisms of punishment and reward.

Right? you know, hell and heaven, okay, but not in the abstract sense, right? These guys were doing things like, you know, literally feeling the pain of being on fire as the, you know, to motivate the person, okay? That's the kind of thing that they were doing. And those things created motivations that were real to the subconscious. mind to the point where certain things, you just could not think them without feeling a lot of pain. You couldn't do things that were triggered by this.

Or you couldn't do things that would trigger that pain because the pain on the inside would be too great. I don't want to ask again, I'm trying to be a little more general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. When you say literally, were they actually physically put? Like when you're talking, I don't know if we're talking pastors. No, no, no, no, not like here's a match, put your hand or it.

No. More influencing your brain to understand that if you're bad, you're going to hell. And going to hell is like being on fire all the time. Right. And this was things like, you know, week long summer camps and weekend camps and things like that. You know, you're away from your family and your whole friend group was there. and, you know, it's a lot of, you know, looking back, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. The only thing they didn't do was that they fed us well.

Great. You're really going to try to, you know, since then, I've studied a ton about cults and programming and things like that. But so the point is this, you know, and teenagers are very impressionable. to begin with, right? They don't have the experience to understand worldviews. They don't have the firsthand, hey, when I do this, that happens. And it's all abstract in their minds. They don't really know much.

So they take what they've been told as more of a truth. Well, after this guy completely destroyed all the anxiety I had, I was like, hey, man, you got to teach me this stuff. And we started. reverse engineering all the stuff that the religious group had done to me, right, figuring out how it worked, and he knew a ton of stuff already. But adding to that with some of this other stuff we reverse engineered over a few years, I was able to get rid of all that stuff out of my head. And we learned just a tremendous amount in the process. So since that time, you know, it's been, I took a long time.

for me to just get to a normal, what I would call a normal life, right, getting rid of all the stuff that had gone wrong that they had put into my head. And then correcting for that time window of 16 to 25 when I was, you know, on all the medications and my brain wasn't working right anyway and all that missing time, right? You know, all that, all that missing developmental time. And then you get to correct for that. And then, you know, build up a normal life. And I'm and when I got to that point, where I was basically, yeah, this is, you know, I'm free. I'm pretty clear, you know, I thought, okay, now I'm going to be normal, right? This is what normal is. Well, I was way off because when I looked around, I realized that everybody else was just as programmed as I had been just by going through their

normal life. It completely blew my mind. I thought, you know, I was the weird one. I had been programmed and none of these other people had been programmed. That's not true. Everybody's been programmed. Everybody. Everybody's in their own little, you know, I don't want to use the word cult, but every, you know, sometimes people will say they're in their own silo or they're in their own bubble. In their own bubble, yeah. Echo chamber, whatever you want to call. Yeah. Where certain things are accepted as true and they're no longer questioned. And everything just becomes a matter of, well, now what do we do now that this is true? Because I think it's true and all of us agree with it that it's true.

Don't we and everybody nods their head yes. And yes, we know this is true. Now what do we do about it? That's the only thing they question at that point. And we see this in the left and on the right. We see this with one religion, another religion, a third religion. You see this with different families. You see this with different countries.

You see this with different states in the United States. You know, you see this with city people versus rural people. There's so many situations where this applies. And so I flipped around and I was like, oh, my goodness, everybody's programmed. Just blew my mind. Well, so I started with family and friends first. I started, you know, hey, I know that that's bothering. you let me help you out with that okay and um started to get some pretty good results a few years ago

i was on twitter i follow scott adams he was a reason i joined twitter because let me let me back up even further um when the great orange one came on the scene right when Donald trump first appeared I was watching a debate and I knew immediately what he was doing. Everybody else was getting upset in the room that I was in. Everybody else was getting upset. Everybody else was, you know, reacting very strongly one way or the other. And I'm just looking at this guy saying these things. And I'm like, I know he's doing this and I know he's doing that.

And this is the technique he's using here. So what was he doing? Oh, he, the first one, the first debate I saw, this was the one, there was a famous moment in that debate where, who was it, Megan, Megan Kelly was saying, hey, Donald Trump, you have called women this thing and that thing and this other thing. And it's, you know, it would have, all these bad names, it would have ended anyone else's career. And he says, only Rosie O'Donnell. Okay. This was a genius move because It emotionally transferred it.

It was incredible. The technical term is reframe. Number one, it was an incredible reframe. He reframed it from everybody, all women are bad, which is what Megan Kelly wanted him to think, so no one would vote for him. He changed that from all women are bad to this one woman is bad. That one woman happens to be someone that half of the audience already disliked for one reason or another and was a huge critic of Donald Trump.

So in one move plus, it was funny, and it made you, it engaged the human sense of interest in a conflict, interest in a fight, who's going to win, right? Like sportsmen, like, you know, who's going to win the football game, right? That draws people in, who's going to win this? This is exciting. And he brought that element, all of those into that one moment. It just annihilated the entire setup that would have, again, would have ended the career of almost any other politician. And I was there and, you know, I wasn't the only one who noticed this. This is one of the things that's one of the first things, Guy Adam started talking about.

He's like, that was one of this incredible moment. And I had watched this event and I was at this party and we were watching it. And I tried to explain it to somebody next to me. He got so upset at me. I couldn't believe how angry he got at me just for trying to explain what was going on. I learned like, you know, don't talk about this, right? The people get upset about this. Well, I thought I was just going to be, I was like getting frustrated.

I was like, I'm the only one on earth who understands this. I'm going to be like, you know, who was the one in Greek mythology who knew what was going to happen. but and told everybody but nobody believed her. That's a good question. Pandora or Cassandra. I get whoever it was. Cassandra. I'm pretty sure Cassandra.

Yeah. So I was like, that's the, that's the one who screams at the top for lungs, but nobody will believe her. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like,

I'm going to be like that. No one else gets this. No one else sees this until, until I saw Scott Adams say that. And just to hop in for one second. sorry, so the audience knows. In Greek mythology, she was cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed. And Scott Adams, for those who don't know, is the Dilbert cartoonist. I'm sure there's a whole plethora of things you can stick behind that, but I'm going to

assume most of my audience knows Dilbert. Yes. Well, an interesting thing is, and I didn't know this at the time, but when Scott Adams started talking about that stuff, he is actually a trained hypnotist as well. Right. So that was fascinating to me. So, um, sorry, I hopped into your thought process. I just wanted to clear up a couple things because I'm sure there's some guests going, who is Scott Adams? And what? Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah. Yeah, but carry on. So you're, you're watching Donald Trump do it. Donald Trump did. I mean, you're right. Like he had the ability, um, I always call the shock value, right? You're expecting him to be put on his back foot. and be like, oh, I didn't say that, or, you know, what so many politicians did.

Instead, he reframes it and gets a chuckle out of half the audience, because you're right, Rosie O'Donnell, I mean, even when I'm sitting here, I'm going, it's nothing against, like, it's just that's what people view Rosie. You either liked Rosie or you dislike Rosie. And through her career, that changed over and over and over again, because at times she was hugely popular. And other times, not so much. So I understand.

Okay, carry on. Donald Trump and seeing this firsthand, being the only guy to see this first hand. Right. And the reason I'm mentioning, you know, I wasn't the only one to notice this. That was like a huge moment for me. So I actually followed Twitter specifically for Scott Adams. And then I started talking about this stuff. Hey, this is what Trump is doing at this tweet, right?

And then there's some others too. AOC, she's really good. And her group, they're not as good as she is, but they're pretty good. Matt Gates, he's very good at this stuff. So there's a few others, but I started saying, hey, this is what Donald Trump is doing. Here, this is what this person is saying. And I got someone who sent me a message and he said, you know, hey, do you know, help people with stuff you seem to know a lot about how to how the brain works do you help people with stuff and I was

like uh sure right you know and then it started right I started getting more and more um clients people saying hey can you help me with this can you help me with that and it's sort of snowballed from there um it's when you say when you say help me with this help me with that what is this and what is that like are we talking uh depression and things like that Are we talking something? I don't know what the other thing is. Yeah. Well, a huge number of things, really.

At first, I was like, yeah, what do you want help with? And people would just come to me with all sorts of things. A lot of people needed help with anxiety. That's a big, big thing. So I helped a lot of people with that. Things like, you know, I'm very negative about myself. I'm always, you know, saying negative things in my head and I feel bad and I can help people with that. I'm not going to go as far as to say the word depression because there's laws about,

you know, being licensed and saying you can do certain things and I am not a licensed medical professional. So there's certain words in terms I can't actually use. Okay, fair. I am a coach, right? The coach thing is like, I think a new revelation of, I don't know, the last decade maybe, maybe less. Like the coach thing, like before I would say people had mentors and maybe they still do have mentors. But it was never looked at as like a, or maybe it always was. I don't know, geez, I can't seem to go back that far. But it was never to me looked at like, I'll give you something, you give me some advice.

it was always like all tutelage under you and you show me the way quietly and that was kind of the quiet mentor and then as people get more interconnected over the planet coaching has become a giant thing like tons of people uh you know like one of one of the most popular is either a business coach a life coach um but you put something and coach behind it and that's out there right now like it's it's a huge thing it's a popular thing yeah absolutely a lot of that again, has to do with these laws, at least in the United States that I'm talking about. Okay. There are a lot of this with neurolinguistic programming and the renaissance of hypnosis

came in the 80s with Baylor and Grinder and then in the 90s and beyond with Tony Robbins. There were people who were getting really, really good results, but there wasn't any credentialing authority, there wasn't any, you know, so there were some legal challenges and then everything got worked out. It's like, as long as you call yourself a coach and you don't, you know, portray yourself as a licensed therapist or something like that, you're pretty much okay. So the coaching business gives you a lot more more leeway. I know a couple of former PhD therapists who now are are just coaches, quote unquote, because they can do more things. They're not bound by, you know, certain associations and certain rules. So I think that's one of the big, one of the big values

and one of the things driving that, that, you know, surge in the number of coaches. So is it Tony Robbins who sucks you into becoming a hypnotist then? I guess before you It was... Before you answer that question, I assume then Tony Robbins is a hypnotist. Oh, yeah. I guess I didn't realize. I've watched his documentaries,

and I've heard a lot about him, know exactly who he is, but I never, like, pieced together. And maybe it's because I never really cared that much until you mention it, that he was a certified hypnotist. Like, I just, I didn't realize that. Well, I don't know if he's certified.

Well, Robbins, I don't know if he's certified or not. I know he studied a little bit with John Grinder, but he did a lot of stuff on his own. The terms are going to vary, right? Let me talk about hypnosis in general and various related disciplines and how they interrelate. Hypnosis started in the ancient world, like way back.

Everybody, you know, the shaman would go into trance. You know, you do the drums and the chanting, you go right into a trance, right? You know, there were, you know, the shamans would do the mushrooms. That's an altered state. Okay. Now that's a mechanical or physiological way to do it rather than like a verbal way to induce it. But there, the general catch-all term is altered states.

And you have meditation. Guided meditation is essentially a form of fitness. And that's a state where the mind goes into a relaxed, normally quite a relaxed state, and the conscious analytical faculty takes a break. And nothing gets analyzed. Is this true or not? It just gets accepted as if it were true. And then when you bring the person out of the trance, those things are still accepted as if they were true, whether or not they are true. Now the term for that is post-hypnotic suggestion. That's the technical terms.

Bring them into a trance, give them some idea. They will accept it as true. Bring them out a trance. They still think it's true. Now, you can do some things like this. I don't know if you've ever seen a stage hypnotist, one of those guys that does all the really weird stuff. Everybody's been to the hypnotist at a company function or, you know,

the fair, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, wherever they go. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's a one example of it. You know, they'll bring everybody up on stage and like, yeah, you got no clothes on and they're like, oh, no. You know, and they act as if it's true. Now, all those guys will do something that will do cleanup, right? So they, so nobody still thinks that after they're done.

Right. But that's an example of what you can do, right? You can just get the mind to accept something whether or not it's actually true. Now, there are, I'm going to fast forward. There's a guy named Mesmer in the 1800s, mesmerism. He brought it back. He figured out that he could cure a huge number of health ailments by bringing people into trance and getting them to sort of undergo this cross over this nervous system threshold of intensity. Once you get past a certain level of intensity, they would have this kind of the moment and release whatever was bugging them.

And when they came out of it, a lot of times not only were like psychological issues cleaned up, but also a lot of health issues. Then William Sargent in Britain with World War I and World War II vets, he did basically the same thing with barbiturates. then there's a guy named Milton Erickson. And Erickson was this fascinating guy, one of the just incredibly fascinating guy. He learned hypnosis. He basically taught himself hypnosis, and he did it in a way that no one who came to him

was not hypnotized, right? Hypnosis works some of the time, but it never worked on me. Nobody ever said that about him. Everybody who came to him got their result. They got hypnotized and they got their result. Fast forward even more. In the 70s, late 70s, Richard Bandler and John Grindr,

Grinder was a linguist, Bandler was, I can't remember what he was doing. He was doing some technology related things and they got together and started studying people like, Virginia Seteer, who was a very effective therapist, Fritz Perl's and other effective therapist, Milton Erickson, Gregory Bateson, and there's a few others, right? And they studied these guys and said, what are they doing that they get these results that no one else is getting? And they had a huge particular focus on Erickson. And what they did is they took all of those

specific little things that Erickson did, all those components and boiled them down to little protocols, tiny little protocols, and then they repackaged them together and called a neuro-linguistic program. Now this is where Tony Robbins comes in. He studied with Grinder and then started figuring some of this out on his own. The, where it went from there is what is known as there's conversational hypnosis, meaning, and that's normally what I do with clients these days. I used to bring people into formal trances, you know, changing, changing, and then bring them back out. Now I do conversational hypnosis where I just, we have a quote unquote normal conversation, but I'm doing things under the hood that are going to change the way

you perceive the world, right? That is what a lot of these people do who are in politics, who are in, you know, major influential figures. If you've ever watched a Scott Adams podcast, oh, my goodness, like front to back, conversational hypnosis. He's really good. So that's a basic summary. I haven't listened to it. I've watched some of his stuff on YouTube for sure, but I've never gone at it from the lens

of what you're talking about. So I guess I've never, I don't know, I guess I just. had no clue. How was that? No clue. Exactly. And that's that's the thing. That's that's the rub, right? People think Tony Robbins talks funny, right? They notice that there's something very slightly stilted about the way he talks about things. But they don't catch that that they are deliberate structured techniques designed to get people to think differently. I just let that sink in for a minute. Well, I find it fascinating. I guess I've just, I don't know, you just don't look at things that deeply when you, when you watch it, I'm just going to take Tony Robbins, for instance,

when you watch his documentary, it's fascinating, right? Like, it is fascinating. And he's such a presence. But that's all I ever took from it. I didn't look at what he's at, you know, I didn't try and take apart what he's doing to see, you know, to put it together, I guess, for myself or for anyone else for that matter. I just watched it and was like entertained, right? Didn't ever think of anything under the surface more than that. Yeah, he's

very subtle. If you've ever, here's the thing, Donald Trump was not subtle. His techniques were usually hidden by the outrage he generated. Right? It was fascinating for me to observe because he would

do things, maybe I shouldn't use him as an example. Because people love him or hate him, you know, that's. But in fairness, Donald Trump, love him or hate him, everybody paid attention. Everybody knows exactly what you're talking about. When you say Tony Robbins, I think most people can kind of be like, yeah, I know Tony. Like, yeah, I got a good idea. But you say Donald Trump, everybody's like, I know exactly who you're talking about. I've seen firsthand the things he did.

So when you say Rosie O'Donnell, can I remember that exact moment? No, but I can remember moments where I'm watching him going like, this is absolutely insane that a politician is like this. And everybody can relate to that. I'm sorry? Everyone can relate to it. And like everybody can go back to a moment in the four years he was the president and has a moment where they can remember Donald Trump doing whatever Donald Trump did. Yeah. Yeah, it was very attention getting an attention directing thing.

There's this thing he did all the time. He would say something that was mostly correct, but with one very noticeable mistake. Right? He would either spell, at first he would just spell something wrong in the tweet. And then everybody, you know, that's how he started out. And, you know, he'd get like 10,000 retweets about, look, the president misspelled something. And they would quote the exact message that Donald Trump was trying to get out to the world.

He got them all to spread the message by triggering that sense of, oh, I want to correct this guy. Now, he did this. He continued to do this for the media who absolutely hated him. he would do things that he knew would get them angry and want to write about how much wrong it was. So I'm curious then. He loses the election.

Everybody up here, where I am, Canada goes, if he just would have turned off Twitter, he probably wins the election. Do you think that's wrong or right? I think the longer he, the more time went on, the more time his enemies had to learn how to adjust to what he was doing. And at first, he was running circles around them.

He was playing them like a set of fiddles. It was, from my perspective, it was almost comical. For most people's respective, they were supremely angry or very excited. That was, you know, 95% of the world was in that, those two countries. of Gordy's, you know, those who cared about it. And from my perspective, it was absolutely hilarious because I could see what he was doing. But as time went on, they started to figure out what he was doing and how to counteract it. I think probably the last year before the election, it started, the tide started to turn.

He started to get, you know, it started to be more of a negative than a positive for him. what do you think about currently with current politics and everything that's going on around the world you're a guy who watches the world leaders uh i would assume you watch biden then and everything else what do you make of it if you you know you're seeing the words they use and how they frame things what do you make of it these days a lot of them learned from what trump did but a lot of them are doing it kind of wrong. There's, there's, there's a sense in which the actual facts no longer matter. What matters is the narrative you can get into someone's head, right?

Does that make sense? It used to be here is, here's what actually happened. And more or less, people sort of agreed that, yes, this is what happened. And then they would try to interpret it. These days, there's like, I'm just going to flat out make up a story that I know is wrong. And I'm going to print it because it's going to trigger a confirmation bias in people's heads. Oh, I knew Trump was an idiot. Right.

Oh, hey, you know, if I'll give you a great example of this one. I'll tell you about how it worked against Trump and then then I'll talk about how it's being used today. There was a time when there was some research into injecting ultraviolet light through the blood veins because ultraviolet light will kill COVID. Right. And Trump started talking about that, how, hey, you can put, you know, this ultraviolet light in it, it, you know, clears out, it disinfects the, you know, COVID from the bloodstream and people are researching this stuff. And there was something else on the board about using bleach to wipe down surfaces and, you know, something got confused. Anyway, the idea was Trump said everybody should drink bleach. complete lie

complete lie I checked out all the transcripts for myself it was a complete lie however the narrative had been built up so much oh Trump is an idiot that millions and millions of people believed that the president of the United States

on live TV suggested that people drink bleach doesn't that blow your mind I mean well the the most common one that I see play out here is ivermectin. Ivermectin being an animal

drug, which it is. Of course, dewormer. Right, which it is. But, I mean, I mean, you just got to do just this amount of digging to understand that's not exactly only what it does,

and that actually it was built for humans and, and, and it just, the thing just rolls out, except that's not what happens. Now there's commercials built on the radio where they make fun of it with horses and everything else. It's quite wild actually to just like take a step back and they're like, and this is where we're at.

I don't get it. So these narratives, I see them on both sides. And with Donald Trump, for sure, both sides, right? How, I'm curious, do you have any ideas or is it impossible to get people out of their narrative? Because I'm in a narrative. You're in a narrative? So many people are narratives. How did we see or see past the narrative?

there can we it's there's two major ways one of them is to have a conversion experience and you see this a lot with in the religious sense people will have their convergence conversion experience in the religious sense there that same mechanism can also happen politically it happens a lot with feminists i've seen a a lot of feminists who become non-feminist, and they have a similar kind of conversion experience. And that's one, and that's hard to do. That's kind of a challenge.

The other way is to, how do you describe this in concise words? If you take their narrative and try to show them that it's not true, that will not work. You ever tried to argue someone out of their position does not work. A man, no, what do they say? A man convinced against his will. His will is still unconvinced.

Yeah, is of the same opinion. Thank you. You read my mind. Yes. Yeah. And so that doesn't work. So the idea is to supply a new narrative. You said people are in this one narrative.

You can supply a new narrative. This is also difficult and part of it is because it plays into our need to be in a tribe. We want to be on a team. We want to be on the winning team. Okay. So it's a it's a difficult and thorny problem. There's a saying in science that science, what is it? Science advances one funeral at a time, meaning that the scientists who make the great discoveries don't keep moving.

moving on. Once they've gotten to a certain point, they keep those ideas. Once they've died, the next generation will take up those new ideas and move forward. And that's some of what is going on. People after, you know, once people are setting their ways, it's much harder to change them. This is incidentally, or not not incidentally, one of the big reasons for the people, push of what is known as CRT. You guys have that in Canada? You probably have it in Canada. What is CRT? Critical race theory. Okay. Okay. It's this, there's been this big push to teach critical race theory in schools. And it's basically the idea, it's basically intersectionality taught in schools. And they know that if they get the next generation to start thinking that

way, it'll be very hard to change it later on, right? They're planting seeds for the next generation. Even Donald Trump, as the president of the United States and immensely skilled in persuasion, he didn't move that many people. I mean, how many, what percent do you think he moved? Five, ten percent? Tops? I mean, probably not even that much. So, you know, it, in a large-scale sense, it's very difficult. Now, on a tactical sense, right, you put someone in front of me for an hour or two, and I can change their belief systems pretty well. But it's only, it's not scalable in the same way. When you say change their beliefs, are you saying with facts change their beliefs or with linguistics change their beliefs?

linguistics. Facts don't work. I know that's like backwards. The idea is that the human brain actually does not engage the analytical faculty until after a decision has been made. The conscious mind basically is a giant prover or justifier. It's backwards from the way most people think. well the big you know here i know i'm then that here here in here in western canada right like the big push is on this has been you know uh the last i don't know month let's say of having doctors on different people to discuss vaccines get it don't get it whatever what you're saying is is if you're unvaccinated, if you just got the shot,

you'd eventually believe it afterwards. You don't need to believe it before you take the shot. Am I thinking that right, or am I wrong on that thought? Not quite. It's more like once somebody has adopted the belief that the shot is bad or that the shot is good, they're going to filter out things that contradict that. They're going to scan for things that validate that.

Right. It's the idea of, the idea that oh, Trump is an idiot got into the consciousness of a bunch of people, then someone could come up with a lie like, oh, he wants you to use bleach and now they believe everything and they don't even, they don't fact check nothing. Right. Right. So when, when if you are someone who wants to convince someone to take the vaccine or not take the vaccine, right? There's, there's certain things that you're going to want to do. If you want to, I'll go over both sides. I'm an equal opportunity. Sure. Yeah. And I'm, I guess I just look at it like I see the two

positions and they are very like they don't want to move. And at some point, at some point, I don't know what happens, but it feels like society's like pulling against each other or about to smash headlong into each other. And the government is saying you need to be on this side. And there's part of the population going, fuck you. For whatever reason. They got all they got all of them have different reasons. There's not one reason because it was just one reason. You could probably go, this is the reason. And away you go.

But that isn't what's happening. So you just stem back and you go like, I don't know how this plays out. So I'm curious. Carry on. So let's say someone comes on and they're very pro vaccine and they think everybody should get the vaccine. And they'll say, hey, look, if you have the vaccine, you have an 86% chance of not getting COVID if you get exposed. and you have, you know, if your symptoms are 46% less severe and this, that, the other end, when we get, you know, 50% of the population who are vaccinated or whatever, I don't know what the actual

percentage is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, we have herd immunity and everybody's happy and we can, you know, that doesn't work. How many people change their mind based on that? A few. A few who are like, yeah, let me really think about this. and they have an iterative process in their mind where their conscious mind and their subconscious

mind keep going, you know, in an iterative back and forth process to converge on a good idea. Like that's the ideal. That rarely happens. What normally happens is people are like, you know, lies, damn lies in statistics, whatever, you know, your statistics are wrong or they'll make up whatever. So if you want someone, let's see, I'll start with the side of you want someone to take the vaccine, right? And, you know, I would say it's a little bit hard for me because I, my personal opinion is that people should choose individually for themselves based on their own medical needs, right? And own their own set of personal responsibility.

That's that's my opinion. So this is a little bit hard for me to take this side of it. But if I wanted somebody to take the vaccine, I would say, you know, I heard this story about this person who didn't take the vaccine and she was in college and she got COVID and she died. I mean, she was in med school. So we just lost the doctor. Here's a picture. See how pretty she was?

And now she's dead because she didn't get the vaccine. Okay. That moves the needle. That is CNN. That is, you know, you know, and we know, we know consciously that it's not statistically valid. That could have been a one in a million shot. It might have been the only person under 40 to have died from COVID.

Again, I don't know the numbers. I'm making this up completely. But, you know, if you highlight that and make it seem like that's the norm, that's the thing that impresses upon the person. psyche and emotions, it's going to loom so large that it's going to distort everything else out of the way. And again, go to CNN.com. They have a new story on like that every day. You know, oh, there's this person here who, you know, she got the vaccine, but, you know, her father didn't. And her father got COVID and gave it to her and she died.

And if you go to Fox, you get a completely different side. Well, I'm going to do the opposite side of this now. If you didn't want people to take the vaccine, you would say, well, you know, this person took the vaccine. He was an Olympic athlete and he had a died of myocarditis a few weeks later, a few days later, whatever it is. Right. again, this could be a one in a million thing. But if I tell you about an Olympic athlete who died after getting a COVID vaccine, you're going to go, I don't think so.

You're kidding me? I'm no Olympic athlete. Right. And this is what you see. If you go on to the other side, these are the types of things you see. Oh, this person got the vaccine and they still died. So why even get it? Right. Those are the type of things. Those, those that, that go after the big three. The big three in the human psyche are survival, reproduction. And for us as social mammals is position in the tribe, position in the herd, position in the hierarchy. And you can even, you know, position in the hierarchy affects reproduct.

and survival, so you could even say it's just reproduction and survival. But those are the big three. If you go after any of those three, you're going to get an impact. Okay. Well, how come you're not wearing a mask? You're endangering me. Survival. Okay.

Could you talk to me about position in the tribe? Can you explain that a little bit more just for my brain? Yeah. It's a sense of hierarchy. it's regulated by serotonin. Those who are higher up in the hierarchy of the society feel better, do better. Every metric in their life is better. And this is because human societies have forever been hierarchical.

And this is also true for animals. Chimpanzees are that way, you know, dogs are that way. Jordan Peterson makes a big, you know, he had a big, what of his big thing is lobsters. Lobsters are hierarchical. If a lobster loses a territory fight, it like,

it's depression. Yeah, it grows a new brain or something. I can't remember exactly what it was. It's like a severe, you know, reaction to losing a fight. And that's a very, it's a very important thing.

So if you can get people to think, hey, you wear a mask, you're a good person. people like you more because you wear a mask you're not a harmful person you're a good person and if you think about it isn't that the message isn't that the message they're sending to get people to wear masks it's that one and it's survival you will survive and you will help other people survive i'm curious with the invention of social media and people you know i don't know

just whatever that is in society. I'd read something years that talked about, you know, Twitter, use it to network and market and learn and find those who can teach you. And I thought that, I'm like, you know what, I should take that thought process more because I just, I struggle with going on social media. Social media is such a dark place at times.

Is this something, you know, we talk about these two narratives. Currently right now. They're very prolific where I, I live, certainly in the United States. I'm sure it's there as well. Is this something new because of the ability like the internet, the ability to have multiple narratives pushed on people, right? It isn't just, you know, back in the day you had the radio and you listen to the radio and you went to work and you carried on with life, right? Now with the internet, the ability to connect with people and see, you know, right now, you can see what's going on in Australia. You can understand that Sweden's at a

lockdowns. You can understand that the U.S. is kind of in like this hybrid. You can understand here in Canada, we're in, I don't know, whatever we are. We're in an outbreak, right? A state of emergency. Like, you can see what's going on in all these different places, but you're all these different narratives. And I always think it's like trying to drink water by a fire hose, right? Like, it's just so much information. Is the time we live in right now, do you think something new to the human experience or is this been going on for, I don't know, centuries. It's been going on ever since the written word, really. But every advance in communications technology has increased the pace, the speed.

Before it was, you know, everything, before the written word, only, it was only verbal. And then you had the written word, and then it was only the priests who knew how to do it. They were the only ones you could spread ideas and culture. And then you had the printing press. And suddenly you could publish books and get them everywhere. And then you had, you know, the next big one was the radio. Now I can send messages to everybody. Then television.

Now I can I, not only can I send words, I can send images. Then you got the internet. And so with each of these, it gets faster and faster. So the other thing about it is that throughout most of the, of human history, communication was dominated by the elites of society, those people who were the, you know, I mean, generally speaking, the most educated, the most capable, the most, you know, but nowadays, you know, you've got geniuses and mouth breathers on Twitter. And they both, you know, get equal airtime. Carry the same size of stick, right? Like honestly. Yeah.

And sometimes the people will very much speak outside their area of expertise. Oh, I'm a celebrity, so you should wear a mask. Because you're a good actor, I should wear a mask. Right? I mean, that doesn't make sense. They are not the expert in that field. And yet they have more of a reach. So those are the two big things.

you have an incredible increase in the amount, the volume of information going on. Oh, and there's one other thing. The more information coming at someone, the less capable they are of analyzing it, and more of it goes in without being checked to see if it's true or not. One hypnosis technique is overload.

If I tell you, if I start telling you three, four, five different stories at a time, you're going to go right into trance because you won't be able to keep them straight. And you're just going to start accepting the things that I say. And it's the same thing with social media. You get, you get that same effect. It gets into people's heads that way. And then the second thing is, as I said, there's people who don't know what they're talking about, still doing a lot of the talking.

It's a big challenge. I mean, I recommend, I take weekends. The only social media I do is Twitter and I take weekends off of Twitter and I take Wednesdays off of Twitter. And the three best days of my week are Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. I mean, it's social media is, in my opinion, it's extremely destructive. There's value there, but it's hard to get at the value without also getting, you know, wading through the cesspool of all the other stuff. Yeah, it's one of the things that I enjoyed about searching your feed.

You know, I told you I'm going to pick through your feed and find some things and we'll see where the conversation goes. And one of the things I enjoy is, well, see you later, Twitter. It's Wednesday and I'm off. Some of my most popular posts. I think a lot of people get that, right? Some of your happiest days currently, or is if you just put the phone away, you know, I got three young kids. It's just better to put the phone away. go hang on with them and live in real life and see them and deal with them.

It's compared to waiting into some of the conversation that is put online that I get what you mean. Everybody online has an equal length of stick. And if you are charismatic and can speak well, your stick is a little longer because your voice is heard and gets pushed more and more and more because it makes sense to people. people. And you find that with a lot of people, right? Like, it's, it's interesting to watch the, narrative constantly evolving on social media every month, every couple weeks. The things change and it's on to the next and onto the next and on to the next and on to the next. And it's, it's odd to watch. You know, you talk about certain words like being, you know, in Jordan Peterson, be precise in your speech. I find certain words really described today's,

world and odd is one, weird as one. You know, like these words really describe what's happening right in front of her eyes, but it's hard to make sense of it. The word I would use for modern society is imbalanced. Everything is off balance right now. Everything. There's no stable institutions. There's no stable polarities, right?

We used to have a situation, I'm a, used to have a situation where everybody was like, yeah, I mean, the two things are like male and female, right? This goes back so far through all of history, yin and yang, you know, all that stuff. And it was a stable situation where they're, you know, balanced. And everything got way out of balance recently. Okay. Now, it's possible, you know, their one interpretation is that, hey, the last 10,000 years have been two male balanced, you know, now things are going to be on the female side. Well, you know, I don't quite have a reference for that, but as far as I can tell, a balanced situation is not what seems to be going. The society doesn't seem to be aiming for that balance. If one side was too far, it seems like they're aiming way too far the other side. Okay. That balance is gone.

I keep coming back to that word. You know, there's no, there's no ebb and flow. It used to be, you know, you work your 40 hours, you go home for the rest. Now everything's like, well, when, you know, at three in the morning, I'm answering work emails or, you know, because I'm on the phone. And there's no, there's no back and forth ebb and flow on and, off anymore. Breathe in, breathe out. It's always on all the time. And it's, it's, disconnected and it's in balance. You know, I noticed a really funny thing. And I'd watch the social dilemma, uh, about social media. And just how it tries to get you to interact with it

when you stop. And so what I did was I turned off all my notifications because I'm just like, you know what? I'm, I'm done with you. I'm notifications off. And, uh, except for two. I left Twitter and Snapchat. Snapchat, I have family in the States, and we have a family chat. And so if they want to see pictures of the kids or vice versa, you know, kind of thing I want to know, right? So then this funny thing started happening on Twitter. It would say I'd have 20 notifications. And when I go on, there would be no notifications.

I'm like, this is in like the last two weeks. I'm like, oh, screw you. So notifications are gone. I don't even care. Like, I'm just like, whatever. So, and I'd forgotten about Snapchat. And then it started happening on Snapchat. Snapchat says I got notifications.

Like, what? Who's, who's messaging me? Nobody's messaging me. So now I've just turned them all off. I'm like, it's all off. I don't care. Like, you're not getting me to interact with you when there's nothing there for me to see. They absolutely have addiction models that they are for engagement.

They absolutely do. And one of the best ways you can do, best things you can do to get. get rid of that. There's two things, right? My iPhone, there's a accessibility setting where you can change it from color to gray scale. And you can set it to be, you can't see my phone here, right? You can set it to be the side button. If I click that, turn black and white. Right. Okay. Okay. That is extremely effective. If your kid is stuck on Instagram, Turn it to gray. Turn it to gray.

That will kill that addiction. And one of the reasons is this is actually something, and I'm going to do some wizardry here, okay? The thing is, if there's something that's bothering you, that in your mind you see it as colored, as brightly colored, as, you know, exciting, moving around as large or it's front and center and face. And let's say this is something that's bothering you. And maybe it's been bothering you for a long time.

You know, I don't know how far back you have to go to find something that fits that description, but something that's been bothering you for a long time and distorting your behavior, distorting your feelings. Okay. Everybody's got stuff like that. And when you find something like that and take that representation in your mind and set it to black and white. Right?

Set that thing to black and white. Not only do the emotions dissipate and maybe drain out of it somewhat, but then you can think more clearly about it. So you're not distorted by the emotional charge of the situation. You have a lot more clarity there. You can see more clearly. And maybe like the sound, sometimes the sound, it's too loud, right? Mute that thing, or at least turn it down so it's not, you know,

so invasive, turn it down to a level where you can manage it better and understand it better. It doesn't overwhelm your senses. Maybe you want to take it and move it into a place that it's not, you know, maybe you want to move it out of the way and put it somewhere that it's going to be more useful. Because when you do those things, you're going to start and notice that your feelings are going to change about it. It's not going to grab you the same way. It's not going to distort you the same way anymore.

And you can leave it in the new way as long as that's useful to. That can be something that can be really helpful to a lot of people. Because sometimes they get this new clarity about the situation and they go, you know what, I don't want to go back. I like it the way it is. And that's totally fine. End of wizardry. I'll say, let me say one more thing.

Sure. One of the best things you can do about social media to get it on control, turn off all notifications. And I'm talking badges. I'm talking sounds. I'm talking banners. Turn all of that off. If you want to look at something, you log in and look at it.

You are in charge. You don't want to be that hamster in the cage pushing that button for the pellet every time he hears a ding. You know, ding notification. You know, grab your phone. Who said something about my post? Oh, I got a like. Yay. don't be that person.

Turn those notifications off. You choose when you access, when you access to social media. They'll make a huge difference. I think it's really good advice. I just go back to the social dilemma, right? I'm talking about, it's a documentary where they talk about

all these different social media and how they try and get you to interact. That's what they're trying to do. You mention addictions and using different things like that. to cause that. You can see it happening. Like just,

I'm telling you, take your least, try a little experiment just for me to the listener, right? Take all your, all your social media, turn all the notifications off, except for the one you probably access the least and leave it on and see what happens.

You'll see it in real time. Like, the Snapchat thing blew me away. Like, it just kept digging at me, like once every, I don't know, I don't even know maybe twice a day but does it matter and you'd open it up and there'd be nothing

there you're like what the hell was that like what was that right so now it's just off and I don't know you mentioned you've been you've been clean for you know a few weeks would you like some heroin I certainly do not want any heroin it's the same thing yeah it's the same thing it's a dopamine hit sorry I don't know if you go ahead No, I just, I think it's, I think it's really good. One of the things before I let you go, I'm not sure how much time I got you for. We started a little late and then now I'm looking up the clock and realizing we've been talking for over an hour. So I got you a few more minutes, Jason.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. You written, and I can't remember if I stole this off your website or if I got this off of Twitter, but you said the current narrative is not your friend. The classic narrative is your friend. I enjoyed that. you know, read not as much as I want to, but I read certainly more than I ever have.

How's that? And that there's a lot of, well, I believe there's a lot of like knowledge in that sentence. Like to me, people should think about that and think on what it actually means. You did do some research. Yeah. Yeah, the older I get and the more I clear out the things in my head that are distorting my perceptions, right? Those emotional backlog, right? The more I look at things going on and realize that nobody realizes what's going on.

That was a totally complex sentence. But the idea is the clearer I get, the more I realize that so many people, are absorbed in temporary fashions, so to speak, that hold their attention. They're not tuned in to the things that were true a thousand years ago, are true now, and will be true for another thousand years. What are some of the, curious, what are some of the truths that you've stumbled upon that have stand at the test of time? You don't have to give me all of them, but I'm just curious.

Sure. Things like, I'm not trying to ignite a culture war here, but men and women really are different, right? I mean, biologically, mentally, you know, in almost every dimension that's possible, men and women are different. Now, there's, you know, all kinds of downstream debate on that stuff. I'm not trying to get into that. All I'm just trying to say is, like, men and women are different. That's, I keep coming back to that. Now, I didn't always believe that. I didn't always believe that.

I was taught, you know, there's no difference. And the older, you know, and then I got a girlfriend and things were completely different. I'm like, what is this weird thing that I'm talking to who doesn't understand a single thing I say? and I can't understand her at all, but yet she's incredibly fascinating in ways that I don't quite understand yet, right? That was what was going through my head, right? We very much are different.

Another thing is that humans are irrational. And for the most part, humans are fairly mechanical. Once you understand how people get persuaded and how they change their mind and you start to see what is going on, you notice how much of human behavior is driven by subjective narratives. And this has always been true throughout history. I mean, you go back and read Julius Caesar's speeches. Man was just a genius in every area of existence. And he, his speeches were absolutely incredibly well done.

He had a bunch of army, his all of his army veterans. They were claiming they wanted a raise after he came back to Rome one time. And they were getting really, you know, riled up. And these are military veterans. They were going to, you know, damage, you know, if they rioted, things would be really, really bad. And so he came up to. them and he walks up to them and gets up front and he says thank you for your service you may go right and then they freaked out right eventually they turned around this idea and that they decided

they were going to follow caesar even if they weren't paid at all and so here was this guy who had this his army was basically muting and he turned it around to get a free army. These things have been true. That has been possible since the time of Caesar, since before the time of Caesar, it's possible now and it will continue to be possible. In fact, it's only going to get worse

because of social media and the distribution of this communication channels. Only going to get worse. Geez, you're supposed to give me some uplifting information Jason. You're supposed to be like... Black pill everyone. Man, like...

It will help if you turn your notifications off. That will help. I'm absolutely serious about that. Yeah. Well, I always tell this story. We went, we flew down to the States in Lhaws or in Minnesota. So we fly down to the States. And while I'm there, I turn off everything about Canada.

I don't have my phone on me. just everything. And when I came back at that time, they had just announced that the pandemic was endemic, that they were going away from everything. But I didn't know this yet because I literally haven't been listening to anything. I haven't been talking to friends, family, nothing. I mean, I am like, I'm just in la la land. Come home. I'm talking to a buddy. And he's like, uh, something about quarantine. I'm like, yeah, I got a quarantine in two weeks or whatever. The border guy was kind of weird about it though he's like if the rules even matter anymore and i'm like kind of like i don't know what that means he's like well haven't you heard i'm like haven't i heard what and then he tells me

like shows me to our officials um press conference where they're talking about it being endemic and i'm like oh my god what planet did i like did i just time warp a couple years or what the hell happened i mean since then it's changed all over again but that's that's that's what turning everything out went to is like you just didn't really really realize what was happening in the world anymore. Like, I mean, I just was enjoying life and came back and found I was in a different time and place, it felt like. Let me ask you this. Does what you see on social media match what you see when you go outside your door?

No. When you go outside your door, do things seem pretty much okay? Yeah. And yet you look on your phone and the entire world is going to hell by noon tomorrow. Well, I've been saying this, you know, for sure for the last month, the power of fear is unbelievable to watch. And that's on both sides, right?

And I'll bring it back to the vaccine because the vaccine for all the listeners around here, that's the most, you know, the biggest topic right now, right? is we got emergency rooms overflowing. Everything is, everything is emergency. Get the vaccine, save lives, et cetera, et cetera. So the power of the fear on one side to get it is you're otherwise you're going to die. And you're causing horrendous things for life, right, for all of society. On the other side, there's people saying if you get the vaccine, you're for surely going to die because haven't you seen all the ill effects of the vaccine and what it does and it's going to mess with your brain and whatever. And all it is is fear on both sides, holding people at bay so that they do what this side thinks is right and what this side thinks is right.

And it's just all fear at play. And I stand back. I'm like, this is something else. Like, this is really something else. It is. Fear is a huge motivator mostly because it's, I mean, it's survival based. Let me do one more thing here. Let's do this.

Don't tell me what it is. But if you think of the thing that you are most afraid of on a scale of one to 10, how bad is it? You can do this if you're listening to. It'll work for you too. I don't know. Five? Yeah.

Okay, good. Now, there's a lot of people for whom that number is going to be a 10. Okay. Five is fine. I'm not, you know, that's really good if your biggest one is a five. Well, the idea is if you've got something that's bothering you like that. And, you know, most of us will try to do something about it. We will mentally try to do something about it.

We'll try to change it. We'll try to fix it. We'll try to engage with it and somehow manage it. Okay. So just for a moment, stop doing all that and just let it exist for a minute, okay? Just let it be. Okay. Got it? Got it. Sorry. I'm listening. Yes.

Okay. Okay. So then the question is, could you let it go? Let go of the fear. Let go of what's bothering your brain. Yeah. Like, could you do it? Yeah, I think you can. Okay. Would you do it? So then that becomes a question of, for me, sitting here, will society like, you do it. Interesting. But when you do it? Yeah, I think so. I think that's what all these conversations have let me get to is, um, I'm just dumb. I'm good. Like I'm good. Well, so when would you do it?

What do you mean by when would I do it? When would you let it go? Hmm. Well, what it's sitting on my brain is something that society is pushing for, pushing very, very hard for, which means I want to let it go, but society doesn't want me to let it go. Does that make sense? I know I'm speaking cryptically. But at least on your side of the equation, though. On my side of the equation, that's why notifications are off. That's why, heck, I'm having you on because I'm curious about how the brain functions, the hypnosis of it. I'm just, I'm ready to move on.

I'm, I'm ready to talk about some, some different things. So the win would be now. Okay. Yeah, because the mind can let go of things. And that's really interesting. Most people don't understand about the brain is, is what, one thing most people don't understand about the brain is that all the negative things that are still in your head from a long ago are being you are still hosting those things in some manner right it's not that it's not just that

oh they're there but you are still actively hosting them and so all you have to do is like it's like taking a if you're holding something in your fist and you're clenched it totally open your fist and you let it go right and you do that you do that mentally, emotionally, and just let it go and you feel better. I've done this with meditation. Like, meditation is one of those, you know, I don't know, maybe you know more than, or had more experiences, I mean, Jason, than I have. But meditation is one of those experiences that is very spiritual.

It's almost like you can feel that immediately. It's not like taking, I don't know, like, I'm trying to think of like some, you start drinking more water. People say they can, they feel different. And it's like, well, maybe. I don't know. Like, not everybody says that. But most people, if they meditate once, after they come out of that, they're like, and that, that was good. Like, I liked that.

What was that? Right? And to me, the letting go thing that, like, you talk about anxiety. We talked about anxiety right at the start of this. I've done it many a time where I've been extremely nervous for not only a podcast or, you know, I presented to some college kids once upon a time. And I don't know why I was so nervous about that, but I just was. And I meditated before.

And it was, well, it's just one of those experiences where you see it firsthand. Everything just faded away. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm not. Why am I nervous about this? Like, I'm not. This is fun. Like, let's go have some fun. Right.

And that's just trying to get the brain to work through. some things or maybe not to work through some things to let go of some things is probably the way you'd frame it for me it's just got to work through some things these conversations that I do really have benefited me since the start of COVID because I'm a I'm a social being I want to I know we all are but I'm kind of like on steroids I want to talk to people for 12 hours of the day which a lot of people are like oh don't want that but you can imagine then when we get locked down and there's nobody around any and everybody's like everybody you know they see me coming and they're kind of like distancing and you can you can just feel the body language the energy and you're like this sucks

so then I started doing more of this and the more I do this the better I feel it's just as simple as that good I mean we didn't talk about you know the the persuasion of the existence of COVID itself but the idea that there is an invisible omnipresent threat. Those three make people crazy. It's everywhere, but you can't see it. So you start seeing it everywhere. And the people who are at risk factors or are having more naturally anxious mindset in general, it's going to really bother them. And I think all of us have seen a situation where you're in a coffee shop and like, you know, your kid coughs. And then somebody looks like, yeah, it's like picks up their stuff and moves to a farther away table.

I mean, like, okay, you know, that might be a little extreme of reaction, right? But it's it's because that's on their mind, that invisible omnipresent threat. And so then, you know, when you, when you get outside of that mentality, it stops being, you know, okay, well, it's not everywhere. Right? I mean, it's not. There's places where it's just, not every human has it. Right. So it's not everywhere. And then, you know, it is invisible, but there are symptoms and people can tell. Right. And how much of it is a threat if you've been vaccinated and you're wearing a mask? And even if you're a high risk factor, if you're vaccinated and wearing a mask, like, what are your chances really? Right. So then the threat level goes way down. out. And if you address those three things and people start going, you know what, this isn't as scary as I thought. And they start to think more clearly about it, more rationally, more,

what's the right word, appropriately about it. And that's really what you want. You want people to think that way about it. Because people have died from this thing, right? It's not nothing. Right. I mean, it's just that you want to address it appropriately, not too much, not too little, but addressed it appropriately. And the only way to do that is to have a clear head. I've really enjoyed this chat. It's, you know, sometimes sometimes when I, I don't know, I call it following your gut, right, you see where it leads you. You have no idea what's coming. And some of the most interesting people I've met doing the podcast have come from exactly that. just finding somebody.

You mentioned using social media for the positive, right? Networking and finding information, et cetera, leads me to people like yourself and others that have had on this podcast, which is enjoyable to hear other people's perspectives and takes and et cetera that way. Before I let you go, for the last little bit, I haven't been doing any of the final segment. It seems like I've been on such a time crunch to get as many questions in as possible. I haven't been doing my crude master final question or final five and it kind of varies.

But for you, sir, I'm going to give you one final one. I'll give you a final couple maybe. The first one I always ask is, you know, like I get to sit across from some pretty cool people. The guests get, the audience gets come along for the ride. They get to hear, you know, me interact. If you could sit across from somebody and pick their brain, who would you take? I would probably I probably

actually pick Donald Trump because he's the most impactful guy of the last you know certainly the last 10, 20 years, I think and I want to know what's in that dude's head because I can tell what he was doing

but I had no idea why he was doing it. Trump would be a fantastic conversation. Like there's a lot of people on that end that would be interesting to sit across from and get to pick their brain for sure. Do you read a bunch? Yeah, not as, I mean, you should see the stack on my nightstand. It's like this high. Sure. What's one book? Listen, I don't know if I'll ever get around to all the suggestions guests give me on books, but what's one of the books that's impacted you? Hmm. There is a book called Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson.

And this book is not outside the box. It's there is no box when it comes to this book. It is so far beyond any frame of reference. The idea of the book is that there are, seven components of the human psyche that are set after birth, but once they're set, they're very hard to change. They're almost permanent. And he talks about how they affect people and how you can, you know, do make changes to those. And it is one of the deepest, most fascinating books I've ever read. It is not light reading, but it's, it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read.

I'll give you one more though. If you're interested or curious about hypnosis, there's a book called Monsters and Magical Sticks. And it's a fantastic intro. It's really enjoyable read. It tells you a bunch of good stuff that you need to know. And it will actually use some hypnosis on you while you read, which is pretty neat to. Who's the best at using persuasion or words or words or.

both in your mind. I'll give you sort of the top five-ish. I have to put Trump in that category. He was the messages he was able. The effectiveness of his messaging was just incredible. AOC, she's in the top five. She is astoundingly good. I suspect she will be president one day unless something derails her.

Tony Robbins is good. Tony Robbins is one of the few people who could run for president and beat AOC. Who else? There was a guy, not Joel Austin. He was a preacher. Schuller, Robert Schuller. Robert Schiller. He learned a ton of this stuff back in the 80s.

He had a Crystal Cathedral. that guy is astoundingly good. I mean, he knew every word he said was precisely engineered. And let me give you one more. Kanye West, I think. Kanye West? I know, right? It doesn't seem right.

But he's got several million followers and he's so outside the box, he drives attention. And the things that he says, the way he says, the way he structures it is extremely well done. I wrote a blog post once about one of the things he did with his social media to dissolve a huge conflict between the people. And he's very good. I might say Scott Adams too. I feel like that guy is behind so many things that we just don't see.

I just get the sense when I watch his coffee with Scott Adams thing. Here's your final one then. Fake news. What is fake news? There's a sense that all news is fake. I mean, I literally mean that. I mean, there's every headline you read, every article you read is going to be a subset of what actually happened.

And it's going to have a narrative. imposed on it. So there is a very real sense in which all news is fake to some degree. If you want to not get the fake news, there's only a couple ways to do it. Turn everything off and find out for yourself with your own direct experience, what happened, or read both sides. If you read something on the left and read something on the right, and wherever they overlap is probably pretty true. Well, Jason, I do appreciate you hopping on. This has been a lot of fun, like I said,

and appreciate getting to know you and some of your thoughts. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, this was fun. Hey, folks, thanks for joining us today. If you just stumbled on the show, please click subscribe. Then, scroll to the bottom and rate and leave a review. I promise it helps. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday,

we will have a new guest sitting down to share their story. Sean Newman Podcasts available for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you get your podcast fix. Until next time.