The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 234 Jonathan Pritchard, Think Like A Mind Reader

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

Jonathan Pritchard, Think Like A Mind Reader

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another most excellent guest. And always, we appreciate you guys tuning in as our most wonderful audience. We have another exciting multi-book author here joining us today. And we'll get into that, but be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, people that you know that would love to have the show. Be sure to share it online, if you would, across your social media. You can go to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, all the different podcast apps that are out there.

You can sign up for the show, subscribe, get your friends to subscribe, all that good stuff. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in and sharing the show. Anyway, today we have a wonderful author. He is the author of Think Like a Mind Reader, a book that you can take and get. And his name is Jonathan Pritchard. He's an entertainer turned speaker, coach, and author. Colleges, businesses, and entrepreneurs book him to talk about his insights into human behavior, success psychology, motivation, and communication. For the last decade, he's been on TV and toured the world as a mentalist, which has given him unique insight into why people do

what they do and how to leverage that process to create a custom fit life. Welcome to the show, Jonathan. How are you today? Doing way too well. Thanks for having me, man. Doing way too well, he says. Yep. It's kind of weird. It's like when you've got full control over your time and who you spend it with, you don't have any boss that can fire you or hire you. It's kind of awesome. So most of the time when I'm out and

about, I tone it down. Like, how are you doing? Oh, just getting along. But really I wake up just stoked to be alive every day. So it's kind of annoying, but when you're on a podcast with awesome people too, you don't have to water it down. Well, let me know when you find a podcast with awesome people. I'm just kind of average. I'm still switching. The, you know, being alive is definitely an important thing. I remember I turned 50 this year and I was, I was bitching about the, the things about being 50. And someone said to me, you know, Chris, a lot of people really wanted to be your age and didn't make it. So maybe we should shut up.

And I thought, you know, you have a point. And I bet they're great at parties. They're great at parties. And hopefully so am I. But no, it's definitely life is a wonderful thing. And, you know, what's the old saying? If you're above ground every day, it's probably better than the alternative.

So let's talk about your book. Give us some plugs of where people can find your book online and learn more about you. Yeah, it's thinklikeamindreader.com. You can read reviews, all that kind of fun stuff. The reason I put it together is basically it's stories from the road and lessons learned on stage. You mentioned me being a mentalist, which is basically like a magician that graduated to mind reading tricks. So I'm not psychic. I don't claim to be psychic and I seriously doubt anybody who does. So there's a definite difference between being or claiming to be a psychic, let's put it that way, and being a mentalist.

Right, right. Like a magician doesn't claim to actually have wizard powers and actually conjuring tigers. You know there's a trick to it, but you can't figure it out because it's really good tricks. Same difference with a mentalist but the main difference between a magician and a mentalist is when a magician makes the tiger appear people go oh my god how did you do that and then when a mentalist does something they go oh my god how did you know that and so that's the kind of the difference but they're just tricks with information and they work because mentalists understand fundamental human psychology of how people navigate reality. And then they figured out how to sidejack that process to create

impossible outcomes. And it was, I've traveled the world, but I grew up as a poor kid in North Carolina, right? I was super shy, all that kind of fun stuff. And eventually I realized, oh, all the psychology I'm using on stage to do what people know is impossible, I've used in my own life to live an awesome life that most people think is impossible. And then talking to people after shows, they go, oh my God, you're living the dream. You're traveling around, you're getting paid. You just, oh, I can't even imagine doing what you do. And that was the magic phrase. So I realized, okay, I got to talk to people after the shows and signing autographs and

started sharing my ideas. And here's how I think about things. And then I started getting emails back going, oh my God, thank you so much for talking to me. It's been a year. Here's how things are better. And it's all because of our conversation we overseas. I performed at the Link Casino there on the strip there in Vegas and performing at hundreds of colleges over the years. So yeah, it's just kind of helping people understand how they are already thinking about the world

and then leveraging that process to enable them to do things that they thought were impossible, but are actually achievable if you're thinking about it the right way. Yeah. And so technically this book is kind of a self-help book, right? It'd improve your business, strengthen your relationships and solve your problems. I'm reading off the cover of the book. Yeah. The, the, I like to call it, it is self-help, but there's a huge distinction

to me from peddling motivation, which is an emotional response or an emotional impetus to do something. I feel like I'm going to do something. So that's why motivational speakers to me are often selling temporary emotions instead of effective strategies. So the difference is like an entertainer, when I'm a mentalist, I'm helping people forget their problems for an hour, which is awesome, right? Everybody needs to be distracted for an hour every once in a while just to forget their problems. But what if you could

help people solve their problems permanently? That would be more effective, right? That would be more helpful. So it's more of helping people solve their problems through better strategies by understanding the effects of communication, how they make their choices, all that kind of stuff. So if you think about self-help, not just as, oh, I need to be motivated to do something, but I need to learn how to be more effective at making choices and using my resources. So it's more self-help through better strategies than self-help through trying to trick yourself into believing, oh, I just put it out into the universe and then whatever happens, I just, I'm not manifesting it, right? So that's why there's the difference. It's more like life

physics than life magic. So you became, it looks like you've done a few different things. You've been on America's Got Talent. Yeah. Went out, entertained millions of people, stepped out on stage in front of the judges, got three out of four yeses. That was fantastic. And it was a wonderful experience. And then like three seconds of that whole experience made it to air. So I was like, I've technically been on it, but yeah. So the judges let through more people than make it on air so that the producers have more people to choose from when they're creating the most

compelling season that they could. Yeah. That's a little peek behind the, the sausage making curtain there for, for public or national could. Yeah, that's a little peek behind the sausage making curtain there for public or national television. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. So what's the secret to magic and mentalism? Are you ready to go through the five stages of grief for your sense of wonder? Because that's kind of what happens. you tell people all right here's how the trick works and then they deny it no it can't be that soon no that's not it then they they

bargain no it has to be something more interesting and then they get angry at you it's like i bet you think i'm an idiot because something that stupid works on me then they get depressed and like i guess i am that stupid because it works on me and then they finally accept and like, I guess I am that stupid because it works on me. And then they finally accept and go, okay, I guess that's kind of neat. Right. But I really am stupid. Oh, well, here, here's the deal. It's really difficult to fool stupid people, right? You can't, you can't fool a camera. You can't fool a computer. The only reason why you can fool a person is you've got assumptions about how the world works that aren't accurate. That's it. Right. So the real, here's the explanation for every their actions, their tone of voice, everything surrounding the experience is the context for the audience to make logical assumptions that are later shown to not be true.

That's it. That's every trick you've ever seen. And in the context of a magic show, that's wonderful. It's delightful and happy. and everybody has a great time. But that process in your personal life is the recipe for disaster, right? So you're walking around in the dark and you make the logical assumption that the nightstand is a foot over here when it's actually directly in your path, you choose to behave in alignment with your assumptions about where that nightstand is,

and then you smash your pinky toe into it, right? Reality doesn't care what you believe. It only cares about what you do. You know, that should be a t-shirt right there. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Reality doesn't care what you do. You know, that should be a t-shirt right there. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Reality doesn't care what you think. Yeah, not one iota.

But the consequences of your choices are always based in reality. But your decision-making is always in alignment with what you believe about reality. And it's the space between those two things that in a magic show, your beliefs in reality, that's the potential for magic. But in your personal life, in your relationships, in your business, I think spending thousands of dollars on this ridiculous TV

commercial will get me business. That's your belief, but then what actually happens, right? So the more clearly you can perceive reality and understand how things really work, then you can make better strategies and choices that'll get you what you want instead of operating off fundamentally flawed beliefs about your business, your personal life, yourself, other people, all that kind of stuff. So the only way to do that is to understand how you think more effectively.

And then you'll be able to achieve the impossible so effectively that people think, oh my God, you got to be psychic to be this effective to do that. So that's why the book's called Think Like a Mind Reader, which is to think about reality so effectively that you can do things that you thought were impossible five minutes ago. So does that help us basically overcome some of our self-loathing belief systems? Is that what you're saying? It's how you identify those beliefs in the first place, because most people aren't even aware of those narratives that are constantly playing in their mind. You've got these experiences as a kid, as a child. You go through these experiences that dictate what it is that you believe about how the world works.

And then based on those beliefs, you take action that then gets you the responses that reinforces your belief. People are fundamentally motivated to reinforce what they already assume about the world than to actively seek out any kind of experience or idea that would disprove that fundamental belief. You know, I heard Anthony Robbins talk one time about how, or someone talked about how the reason that our brains function this way, Anthony Robbins, I think, calls it the reticulating activating system. from my experience in and watching other people and studying this is that is that people somewhere make a belief choice a decision whether it's in reality or in complete fantasy uh they could make a decision that uh martians live among us and are woxing among us or or something really insane like that uh all the way to something that is you know seemingly real but not um but somewhere as near as i can tell and i'll let you correct me if i'm wrong um somewhere in the matrix

we choose a belief we go i'm gonna believe xyz and what happens is is our brains are designed in such a way that we're technically not built to hold to competing thoughts because then that's madness right cognitive brain says we're not gonna let you go mad we're gonna choose this side of whatever that is in XYZ and then out of that your brain begins building all these examples and proof uh proofing of why that belief is true that you've chosen to believe and over time and years and age it becomes this it can become incredibly crazy all the reasons you have support supporting of this one core little belief that you chose to believe and and i think so many people get a lot they can't ever find their way back to where

they they need that turn we talked about this in pre-show that there's people that you know i've seen that are well let's just say there's people that are not seen that are crazy i mean they have to be put into a rubber room um and and and sometimes and sometimes that's chemical because maybe they were they have uh uh schizophrenia or something like that i don't think sometimes that's a choice you make but i think there are some people who do make a choice uh and because they followed that wormhole um they end up with a gun at a synagogue like we saw in the last few weeks sadly right right and what's weird is most of this isn't even a conscious process you're not sitting down and filling out the spreadsheet of here's my

belief system right and here's why I'm doing what I do you're very rarely if ever consciously aware of the non-conscious processes that are going on that lead you to believe things, right? So you're not even consciously aware of why the magic trick is working. You're not consciously aware of the magician's methods. You just know that that's impossible. Yeah.

Right. But there are, there are definite processes in play that the magician has accessed and is allowing to happen that leads you to believe those things that aren't true. So here's a way to help people understand it. There's a psychology researcher, B.F. Skinner, who is just fascinating. So here's an experiment he would do that helps you understand this process a little better. So you'd have a whole bunch of cages, like one foot cube with a door on the front, right? So he'd put a pigeon in there and there would be a lever

that just like Pavlov's dogs, if the bird hits the lever, food drops out so that's classical conditioning of the bird figures out oh if i hit this lever then food drops out and the bird lives in that that cage long enough to figure it out and to reinforce that belief so then it figures out okay if i hit lever then food drops out then once the the bird has been accustomed to that dynamic skinner would then make food drop out at random time intervals so the the lever wouldn't work anymore it would just be random time intervals so what's happened is the logic of the box has been changed from the outside but due to being inside the box the bird isn't aware that anything has changed so within the context of the bird's experience it still makes sense that its input is required for the food output which means that it might be looking over its left shoulder and then food drops out.

And it goes, oh, oh, okay. Now I need to look over my shoulder if I want food to drop out, because clearly that's what happened. So then the bird tries to reinforce that belief. So it tests and it looks over its shoulder, nothing happens. And then it looks over its shoulder and then it happens again. It goes, oh, there it is. Now, here's something fascinating. Intermittent reinforcement is more effective than every time. You live in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is built on that fact.

If you don't believe it, I don't care if you believe it or not. Vegas wouldn't exist if that weren't a fact, right? Because people are gambling. I give you a dollar, you're going to give me 94 cents, but sometimes you're going to give me $2, right? So the bird now believes that it's looking over its left shoulder is what makes food drop out. You know what we call that?

Superstition. Superstition, yeah. Its behavior has absolutely zero impact or influence on what's happening in the outside world. But it believes that it is because it's internally consistent with the logic of its experience. Yeah. Right? We see that all the time of its experience. Yeah. Right. We see that all the time here in Vegas. In fact, you've probably seen that if you're studying it here.

I've had friends and associates that they carry around a wad this thick of their gambling losses. And the one thing about gamblers here is they will never tell you about their losses unless they're trying to borrow money. But usually they don't even tell you about their losses then because they don't want you to know they're a loser. But they will tell you, you know, sometimes you'll hear like, God damn, I lost $4,000 today. Didn't win anything. It really sucks. And you're just like what but when they win you know two or three thousand dollars or you know whatever um you you hear about them and they and every one

of them that's an addictive gambler has will tell you what their strategy is they actually have a strategy and you're like wait this is a totally random fucking process to winning. And the machines are actually geared to certain odds against you for payout. And you think that you have a strategy, yet you're always broke. And I've had some of my friends will be like, I won $4,000 today. And I'll be like, so pull out your wad of losses and how much money did you lose this week? Or how much money did you lose since your last one? Well, that doesn't count.

You're like, yes, it does. Right, right. I remember going to lunch with so many friends. And here we have the bars at the lunch table that have the gaming built into them and so they would they would uh they would pay 20 bucks for a meal uh 15 bucks for meal you know tips and drinks and everything and then you would see them put 40 dollars into the machine and then they would win 20 and they they'd be like, I just paid for lunch. And you're like, no, you're not doing the math here.

And they have a whole different level of math equations that they're using. And they'll be like, no, I paid for my lunch and I'm ahead. And you're like, no, you paid 20 for lunch. You put 40 in the machine and you made 20. You're down 40. No, no, you don't understand,ris right and that and that's the thing everybody has those experiences that to them make sense that this is the conclusion that they take away from it and i i call that cartoon logic right it's kind of like when wiley coyote runs off the the cliff and he's just hanging in

midair and then then eventually looks down and then he falls that makes sense now that's not how physics works but it makes sense within the context of that cartoon you go yeah that's totally consistent with that world right so so that's why everybody is constantly living in their own cartoon version of what they think their life is rather than paying attention to what is actually happening and then wonder why they're they're constantly blowing up their life right right? So yeah. So it's kind of like, I get it.

Everybody has had experiences that lead them to the logical conclusions of, of whatever their principles and beliefs are that then perpetuate the decisions that will further reinforce those beliefs by getting them those results again and again and again. But that's, that's it george carlin talks about this and growing up from like i talked to you in the pre-show i grew up in a very religious background uh and uh you know even even my mother bless her heart uh if i'm going through some sort of a crisis usually uh sometimes financially a financial pinch or because you know i'm self-employed or uh sometimes when i've gone through an emotional one uh she'll she'll be like well i'm gonna pray for you and then because i'm in a pinch and i'm an

entrepreneur i just work a lot harder to to get out of that pinch because i can control my the amount of money i make by how hard it worked uh usually um and so you know i'll just i'll just you know quit distractions quit screwing around and go work really hard make the money and come out of whatever pinch i was in and and then she'll be like i prayed for you and see prayer works and you're like no mom it says and i think george carlin did a thing he does a whole bit where he talks about how how how uh people think prayer works in his studies they found that it that 50 of time whatever you're praying about will come true but it's usually because you've asked your brain to to go take care of that and you focus in on it with with with prayer you focused your brain on how we need to resolve this issue and the issue gets

resolved and you're like oh god made that happen and you're like no you're right right and that's the thing if you haven't ever sat down and really thought through this stuff and really understood how to examine your, your life structure and how you think about things and how your mind works. You're, if you haven't done that, you're basically still running the software that you installed when you were a child. Yeah.

It's like, what decision that you made as a child, would you still think is a good idea 40 years later? Right? Like none of them. It's like, I'm going to eat strawberries for dinner every night this week. Just whatever it is, right? It's just that's the level of analysis that you're still working on because that's the part of your life where you're figuring out how things work.

So I think a lot of people do a lot of internal introspection that you're talking about. No, not at all. Not at all. In looking inside and going, why am I this way? I mean, I've gone through a lot of catharsises in life, not a lot, but a few catharsis in life, where I've had to look in the mirror really hard and go, why are we built this way?

What got us here? What's failing? But a lot of people don't look at what's failing. We had this discussion in the pre-show where I was talking with a friend of mine about why people go into these ugly states of life because of their belief systems. And a lot of times, like you say, it comes out of their youth, or sometimes it comes out of a failure, and they decide that this is because of someone else externally,

when really we need to sit down when we fail and when we have crisis as a challenge, and we need to look inside and go, what's not working inside of us? Or what are my belief systems? Or why do I believe the things that I believe? And how is that causing me to fail? Right. The way I like to think about that is there are essentially two types of people in the world. The first is the person that is willing to take credit and the second is the person who's willing to take responsibility so when things go right everybody will go i did that i'm i will take credit for that

that was all me the instance of a line from the rush miracles always have their claimers i always like that line it's like you'll see a lot of you'll see a predominantly religion or sometimes politics and other places where people would be like, see, it was us all along. And you're like, no, you didn't really, you're just, you're just claiming a miracle that you had no influence. Exactly. But then when things go the wrong way, oh, it's somebody else's fault. Somebody else's fault? Yeah.

Nope. It's not me. That's another thing that's always in me studying religion from growing up, from being scarred from it as a child. That's the funny thing is, and you hear a lot of communities joke about it. They're like, why does the person who, when they, you know, the football player, the sports basketball player, the baseball player, whatever, why is it when they win a game, they're like, thank you, God.

It's God's fault. But someone lost that game. Was that God's fault too? And why does God hate the Dodgers over, you know, whoever, or in my case, the Oakland Raiders? Clearly God hates us. If that mathematics is what you want to use, the system is what you want to use.

But when they lose, they don't blame God. They're like, I don't know, we had bad coaching or something. But when they win, it isn't because they got better coaching. It's because of some empirical vapor. Right, right. But that's the thing. They like to right dodgers yeah but you can't control anything until you accept responsibility for it exactly right because if if you're constantly saying

oh it was god that did this or somebody else that did that you're giving up your ability to control your decisions in relationship with whatever that is your Your self-actualization. Is that really the problem we have in our society? We're not self-actualized enough. We're not taking enough responsibility for our own internal mechanisms in mind. Oh, man, that's a whole nother one. Let's just not say it's the most important, biggest issue. But is, I mean, because that kind of gets into self-actualization right the enlightenment of one's being the understanding of one's way or am i over uh most most people all right so

most people will tell you i believe in the law of cause and effect you do this you get that yes i believe it yep totally 100 but then they believe they they behave in a totally different way and it shows up like oh well i'm not flexible so i can't do yoga oh i'm not so strong so that's why i don't lift weights right that's that's a fundamental inversion of how reality works that it's kind of like they would say, yeah, I, I, I want to grow watermelon. So I planted squash. What are you doing? It's like, you're planting squash. You're going to get squash. No, it's going to, it's going to be watermelon. Right. So do have these dichotomies of life where they say one thing, do another. Me, you know, the reason I don't lift weights is

because I'm just fucking lazy! You accept responsibility for your choices. You get it, right? It's no mystery why it happens, right? But to me, it's just fascinating when people are like, I don't understand! I don't understand why I don't lose weight. I'm eating all these Big Mac burgers.

Right. So it's it's really most people have absolutely no concept of the law of cause and effect. And it might be because they had parents that protected them from the consequences of their decisions right so if we have today maybe right so if you if you protect somebody from the consequences of their choices they will now have a warped view of what those consequences are. Yeah. I think, wasn't it, who was the author from the 1800s who wrote, there's something that you can learn from holding an angry cat that picking up an angry cat by the tail

that cannot be learned in any other way? That's pretty great. I love that. I love that. But you know, this shows up in business too right entrepreneurs like oh well i believe i feel that this is gonna work and then they don't manage it they don't measure the results they don't have an accurate perception of reality so they're going based off their feelings which reality doesn't have any care about right and then they will then blame anything other than their lack of accurate understanding

of how things work yes it was mark twain who said if you hold a cat by the tail you will learn things that cannot be learned in any other way that That's fantastic. And as well, it should. I mean, we all, I think we all have to go through the experience of where your mom says, don't touch the oven, don't touch the oven, don't touch the oven. And as a kid, invariably, you touch the oven and that's a lesson you can only learn by touching the oven, sadly. Right, right. You can read it a million times. You can hear it a thousand times. You do it once, you get it. You get it, and hopefully you walk away from it. So same thing with holding the cat by the tail.

But yeah, it is an interesting discussion. I mean, I really think one of the big challenges we have in life with people's self-understanding is we don't spend enough time teaching mental health. We don't spend enough time teaching real psychology. It seems like in psychology classes, we teach all this bullshit about everything, but we don't teach people, like, what do I do with what's going on in here and the information that's in here? Well, to that point, I love this is most psychology research is maybe 100 years old, right? Accurate, testable claims that are evaluated through the scientific method, that kind of thing. But magicians have been doing magic since before recorded history now here's another detail i don't care what culture you're from when that tiger shows up in that cage you're amazed yeah so magicians are leveraging psychological processes that are pre-cultural that are pre-cognitive awareness they're fundamental processes that are in play.

No matter what person you are on the planet, this is how your mind works. Now, most of the psychology research is bounded by the particular culture of whoever it is they're studying. So whatever the understanding of that psychology research has, very little bit transfers

across cultures, but magicians cross-cultural appeal, man, they, they, they understand something that psychologists haven't yet even touched on. So magicians and mentalists, which is a subset of magician,

we've got tens of thousands of years of tradition to pull from of experiential knowledge. Every time I do a show, every time I do a presentation, every time I train in a company or anything, those are hundreds of data points of the human experience and insight that most psychology will never even be able to touch. Right. So I've had 45,000 hours of thinking about and experiencing this stuff on a level that most people can't even begin to approach. So that's why I just needed to share this with the world because it's literally life-changing stuff. I grew up, like I said, a shy kid, poor as hell. Some days my parents had to make the insanely tough choice of do we give them lunch money or is it our gas money to get to the factory?

Literally, they had to make those choices. So it wasn't that I was born into some family with money that has a performing pedigree that then got me contracts to travel the world. I had to figure that stuff out myself. And I figured it out. And then I've been at it long enough that it feels like second nature, but it's not my inborn person yeah so the

fact that i figured it out that i've made the the the choices and effort to make it work and i've i've crashed and burned a lot i was married i i got married got fat got divorced got fatter right and so i've i've imploded before and then figured how to get my way out. So it's interesting to go through those catharsis of times. That's the points that we that we are forced to look inward. And what I realized over life is maybe we should spend more time looking inward so we we don't hit these giant catharsis of things. And really question, you know, I remember Anthony Ramos talked about this. He said, you know, when you start building, when you take a belief

and you start building the support systems around it and belief system around it that support this one belief, a good example is like anytime anyone's ever bought a car you buy a blue you buy a red corvette you start driving down the road and right away you start noticing like you've never noticed before everyone who has a red corvette or any car i've bought bmws and i'm like look at that smart guy. He bought a black BMW. He is a very smart person like me because that validates that there are other people that have bought it. And therefore, they must be smart.

Right. The process that's going on there is that we think that our senses bring in information. But we actually-cognitive level processes that filter out most information. And what is filtered out is dictated by what it is that you value. Right? So before you buy the car, that car is not valuable to you. Therefore, your pre-cognitive processes do not allow you to be consciously aware of those details. Isn't that interesting? Well, you would have seizures. In the 2016 election where people played on people's darkest prejudices and people played on the thing and how we really don't process information from everywhere. We process information that we're looking for,

that we choose to believe in that which validates or supports our belief systems. Right. And another example is if you're at a party, a cocktail party, and it's really loud, you can barely hear the person talking to you, and you have to really attend to them to hear what they're saying. But then clear across the room, somebody said, Jonathan, you're like, yeah, right. You, you're, you're hearing everything, but you're aware of very little that is making it through the liminal barrier.

That's why subliminal advertising right below the level of conscious awareness. You've got so much more awareness in your mind than what your consciousness is working with so what so as a guy if i'm watching tv or playing a video game and my girlfriend starts talking to me i have a tendency to not hear her is it so basically what you're saying is i'm not hearing her because i really don't want to it's that your current value structure does not reinforce attending to what she's saying. So that's what you're saying. You know,

I mean, we all did that. Like as a kid, your mom would start calling you. Yeah. You know, of course this is right. I grew up in this weird era of childhood where we actually played outside.

Yep. Play with sticks and leaves. Yep. So your mom would have to yell down the block chris you know and and whereas you're you're in on the couch working your ipad or your phone um and uh and you would ignore her and then you know she would you know she would amp up the the rhetoric of of how painful it was going to be if you didn't show up for dinner right um and then finally when you know usually by the time she would use your middle name that the rhetoric of how painful it was going to be if you didn't show up for dinner.

And then finally, usually by the time she would use your middle name, that's when you knew that mom was gone. All three names, you're like, okay, now I got to go. Your middle name came up. Then you're like, okay, she's pissed. We pushed this sucker as far as we could go. There was another detail I wanted to make sure I touched on

about when you're going through the catharsis, the horrific experiences that finally teach you a lesson and why that is. Success teaches you nothing. It's only your failures that will teach you something, right? So if you go back to the example of the nightstand, well, you could believe something that's wrong. You could believe it's somewhere else than where it is, but you could believe something that's wrong you could believe it's somewhere else than where it is but you could successfully make it to the bathroom in the middle of the night in the dark and not stub your toe so your belief which is wrong is still there even though your behavior was not in alignment with reality it's just just when that belief is wrong that causes

pain that shows you you need to update your internal maps of external reality. So successful behavior won't inform you at all. It's only the failures that will force you to change or update your models. So in the, like in the example of the bird uh does success sometimes give us false um what's the word i'm looking for false uh false positives false positives that's the word yeah yep exactly positives because i've certainly been successful in certain things and i thought i'm fucking fucking great at this. And then sometimes looking back when it failed, you realize that maybe sometimes you just got lucky. Exactly. So that's it. You attribute success

to your skill and you attribute failure to external circumstances. So then no matter what happens, you don't know what is responsible for that success but you believe it's you so let's keep doing more of that one of the things i learned a long time ago uh and i was very lucky to get into a seminar with lou tice and i remember um he did this thing and i've done the videos on it and stuff where he took and he did a he did this thing, and I've done the videos on it and stuff, where he did this experiment where he put nine dots that look kind of like a tic-tac-toe box, basically a box, and there's nine dots, three down one side,

basically three on each side, technically, if you overlap them. And he would do a premise where he's like okay take these three these nine dots and in this box and connect them with four straight lines without lifting your pen and they have to be straight lines well you can't do it within the confines of what is an imaginary box that you create in your mind by looking at the nine dots uh you actually have to take the lines outside of the box and outside once again as you cross through and then back over and then you can create four straight lines.

But people create this, this scotoma in their brain where they lock themselves inside the confines of that imaginary box and they don't go outside of it. And so I learned from that concept to start thinking outside the box to asking why do we do things how do we do it and I'm sure you've touched on this in your book and we should probably maybe speak to the business aspects of it but one thing I learned with my businesses was constantly questioning my business and going why do we do things this way why

do we make this happen and there's a lot of books that address this because uh businesses will do things and you'll be like why do we do business this certain way and they'll and people will say because we've always done business a certain way and you're like but why and then and then once you start questioning why you do stuff and challenging why you do stuff i mean i've, I've even challenged my own process that I built. Like, why did I build it this way two years ago? Is it still valid? Does it need to be changed?

Is it, you know, why did I build it this way? Right. Instead of going, well, I built it this way, so I'm therefore the most smartest man in the world. And there can be no right. Yep. Well, that's the thing. That's a fundamental cognitive bias is you assume there are limits and then

behave as though they're real and then go so far as to assume everybody else is limited in that same way. So you think everybody is limited like you. And then kind of like, oh, who are you to write a book? Why did you write a book? I couldn't write a book about that, so you can't either.

Nope, I am not bound by that limitation. Thank you so much. And yeah. And that's us projecting our limitations on someone else, right? Exactly. And in, so it's projecting our limitations on someone else. Right. Exactly. And in the business world, especially entrepreneurship, is everybody's looking for that that trick or that hack or that that insight. OK, you need to click this button on your Facebook ads and that's the secret. And then you'll suddenly be successful, right? But the problem is no amount of business tactics are going to address a personal problem showing up in your

business. To me, there is no separation between business and personal life. It's all a function of your relationship, which is a function of your communication skills, which is a function of your relationship which is a function of your communication skills which is a function of how well you understand people that's it that's it so everybody goes oh so you're uh i want the business stuff enough talking about all this personal and and and understanding mindset and in this kind of junk i'm like you know that's the only thing you're in business with people the robot revolution hasn't happened quite yet so if you're doing anything that has anything to do with a person and oh by the way you're a person you need to understand this stuff the better you do the better your business the better your relationships personal family across the board

so like but i i wanted to talk about Facebook ads. And you're like, your Facebook ads, your tactics, your techniques will naturally flow from a more accurate understanding of reality and nature. Because those people are the ones that you will have seen the ads and that you'll be appealing to. Exactly, exactly. will have seen the ads and and you'll be appealing to it exactly exactly so i always think about it from the business world from kind of three levels that i took from being a performer in a world class speaker is that you've got the public which is every single human being on on the planet

which are most people haven't heard of you so So you would, you would speak to them in a particular way to get them in the door, to sit down in your audience. So an audience member is somebody that is already kind of pre-qualified to like what it is that you do based on whatever it is you said in your advertising and your marketing to appeal to exactly the right person that you want for your experience or show. Then from that audience, you might get a couple people who will then be lifelong fans. People that love you will tell their friends about you and sign or buy the VIP experience to get their t-shirt signed by you, that kind of thing. So you would speak to your fans differently than you would an audience, which you speak to them

differently than you would the public. But you need to talk to all of those people in order to be successful. So that's kind of how you filter your marketing, your general message to the public to get them to your website. And now they're your audience. Then you get your audience to take action, to sign up for your email list, to then be a fan that they want to hear from you every time. So that's how these strategies play out

in the business world. Whether your strategy is a brick and mortar company, how do you get people in the door? How do you get them to buy more once they're there? How do you get them to come back? That kind of thing versus from how do you design your website to get people to take action? Like that's a magic trick. What magic trick do you want? Oh, I want them to sign up. All right. So now let's design an experience like the pigeon box where the most likely behavior will be for them to sign up. Are you offering more options than that? Well, then you're now giving them options that you don't want.

So remove those options from their choice. Leave them the only option that you want, which is to sign up, not call now or find out more. Click over, watch this video. I don't want them to watch a video. I want them to sign up to the email list, right? So many people don't even define the behavior that they want from their clients, from their customers, from their girlfriend, right?

They just, they never specify what it is they want out of the relationship. So they have no way of building an effective strategy because you haven't even defined the bullseye you're aiming for yet. So short of buying your book, give us a few final tips. How we should approach. I guess what you say, identifying either what we want or looking or self looking inward at our, at our,

or what would you recommend? Let's just say that maybe a few tips you can throw. Right. I would say, ask more questions, ask why five times for everything that, that kind of thing. And if you have, if you're not in the practice of doing this just for a day try radical responsibility take responsibility for every single thing that happens right and then just be aware of how your choices are helping continue the experiences that reinforce the situation

you're in. Right? So if you're used to blaming anything other than yourself, try blaming yourself for once and then accepting responsibility, which will then give you the control to make better choices. Definitely something I think we all need to do. We need to start going, did this start with me? Hint, it does. Where they go, what did I do to cause this?

And maybe that's what we all should maybe do a little bit more. But definitely taking personal responsibility for stuff. I really think, like I said, more people need to be self-actualized. But, you know, it's not the sexy answer. It's not the cool answer. It's not the latest tip, trick, or mind hack. It's not a push-button solution. Everybody wants the push-button solution.

Oh, I wish I could push buttons then lift weights. You know, you could just go lift weights. No. So for the one or two of you out there in podcast land who are going to take action, I salute you and I can't wait to meet you in Valhalla. Yeah, it's interesting how far we'll go in work and distance, either mentally or physically, or just bulging ourself with the answer. Where we'll go to avoid having to face the reality of ourself and our own wilderness. But you know looking over your left shoulder will get you food, right?

Opening that gate is terrifying. It's scary out there. But I know how things work in in here so i'm just going to stay here yeah nope you don't it's so easy to it's so easy to blame other people to blame externals uh to point to things to use superstition um to to use uh i don't know what would be a good word for it? To use logic that is convenient. We see this with our purpose in politics where people read news now, and I forget what they call it,

but people only read news that instead of informing them, like you said earlier, we don't process all the information. We process what we're prejudiced to um you know people are just reading what they want to believe um and uh answers are comfortable questions are uncomfortable so we're looking for answers questions get you into really sticky territory really quickly because the answer is always it's you only common denominator inside each one of us not each one of us but but if you you're asking

those questions you may not like the answers you find but facing them certainly is one of the biggest things that can cause you the most growth because once you face those catharsis those challenges of belief system that you put yourself through you get a better understanding of yourself and why you failed and then you can prevent it from happening again

it's amazing how people go through all life with just these odd belief systems and they can't figure out why they keep failing or they can't even reason to themselves the fact that they keep failing or they can't even reason to themselves the fact that they are failing like everyone else around them is going you're really failing at this consistently um and they're like no i'm not i'm really good at it the rest of you suck i have a job i hate i spend 50 hours a week with co-workers i can't't stand. My boss is awful.

I hate my spouse. I resent my children. I hate my family. But you know what? I'm living the dream. It's good. What more could you ask for? It's like the... Living the dream, yeah.

Yeah. But freedom and control over your own life feels scary if you're not used to it. And I've lived with that. My father, God bless him, his soul, he was a really nice guy. But he had severe narcissism. And he literally believed that he was the man with all the answers and all the right belief systems and that everyone else was wrong. And I remember getting into an argument with him one day and challenging him and i said i want you to tell me one thing that

you did wrong today or this week i want i want one thing from you i don't care if it's like you were driving down the road and you should have turned right you turned left or you should have turned right, you turned left, or you should have turned and said you went straight. The fact that you, I don't know, didn't flush the toilet. I just said, look, I want you to admit to me one thing that you did wrong. One thing that you did wrong. And one of the challenges was he was such a narcissist, he couldn't do that and uh it became a physical altercation as a result of his ability to not only unresolved that in himself but he felt that was the resolution uh he was a good man he he was uh sometimes a confused man and i i'm not sure i'm

the better man either because i i have my own scotus that I built in these paradigms where I don't see reality or the real results of what I'm doing or my vapid or failing belief systems that aren't working. You can't

think outside the box. Like the pigeon, it's not free to leave the box. It can only understand the logic of its experience. So you can never experience or understand meaning outside of a context. So you can never think outside the box. You can only think into a bigger box, which is why one, anytime somebody tells you, you need to think outside the box. If they can't explain that bird's story, they don't understand what they're talking about. And two, you have to understand that

here's a, here's a handy heuristic, a filter for taking advice from people. Only take advice from people who are living a life that you would want to live because the instant you start putting into practice their strategies, you're going to start getting their results. So if they aren't living a life you want, you can ignore their input all day long yeah and then some people don't have good perceptions of what those strategies are like i've seen people that are like i want to be like that person who posts those pictures on instagram i want to be the person you know they have that fomo a thing where they where they want to be the person who's on facebook margie always shows pictures of where she's always traveling on vacation.

I want to live her life. And you're like, I don't know, Margie's just running out of credit card debt and getting guys to pay for her vacations and whoring herself out or something. I don't know where Margie's getting all that money, but maybe it's not the best productive way that you would choose or anyone else would choose or anyone else would choose to go about that i'm just kind of making up an example there yeah um the uh and and in the social media there's a lot of deception of what people's strategies are and how they got

there and how they're successful when i've been successful in life and maybe it was lucky. I'm not sure if it was self-made. I always wonder whenever I hear that line, I'm a self-made successful person. You're like, you did it alone? Like with your own money? Like you didn't use anybody else's or sell products that people gave you? Right. The weird thing is the only way you can get wealthy is by providing solutions that people want.

You have to sell something to people. Exactly. And so other people are involved. So thereby, you are not self-made. But it's interesting how people get in their thing. So anyway, thanks, Jonathan, for sharing some of the tips from the book. I'd encourage everyone to check out, read his book, get into it. I got a chance

to look over his website. It was pretty intuitive and interesting. It's some of the different things I can learn about myself and different strategies I can use and all that good stuff. Give us your plugs once again, Jonathan, so people can take a look at them. Yeah, you got it. Visit thinklikeamindreader.com to check out the book in the video series, which has over three and a half hours of this kind of mindset training to help you reset your heuristics and strategies, that kind of thing. And then you can find me at Twitter at the underscore Pritchard, where I tweet all the time. So those are the two best places to go to get in touch. And if you're ever planning an event where people are getting together and you want them engaged, look me up. Sounds good. Well,

thanks for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate your answer for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com for us as Chris Voss at that bell notification button. Go to iTunes, Google Play and Spotify. Refer the show to your friends. Share on social media if you would, please. We certainly appreciate that as well. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. We'll see you next time.