Obedience & Conformity: 5 Experiments That Demonstrate How We Are Programmed

00:00:07:17 - 00:00:35:00
Speaker 1
Welcome to radically Genuine. Tracy. Good to see you always. So we've been talking about this a lot about human nature. And I believe most of us. I know I'm certainly been in this camp in my life. We assume that our decisions are well thought out, and that coercion and control are often something that we would see as threatening.

00:00:35:03 - 00:01:24:17
Speaker 1
Right. You put a gun to our head. That's clear. Violence. That's clear. Covert coercion. Somebody making you do something. We also assume that all of our thoughts are our own. Today's episode is designed to be a bit uncomfortable at first. Meaning, what we're going to show you today is five experiments. We could probably do 50 if we had to, but we're going to take five key experiments to communicate what is known about human nature that could lead us to be obedient in the face of something that we would probably all deem to be incongruent with our values.

00:01:24:18 - 00:01:49:22
Speaker 1
Like what forces somebody to do something that later on in history reveals that to be an atrocity or egregious? Or what about human nature allows us to do this? Additionally, as we are in a time of technological advancement and exposure to the internet and such, we have at our hands our fingertips more information than we have at any other time in history.

00:01:50:00 - 00:02:28:13
Speaker 1
And the assumption is that that leads to knowledge that now we have similar knowledge as an expert or an authority. But the larger question is, can that information be manipulated and how? So the ultimate goal of today is how are we influenced without our consent? What studies exist throughout the 20th and 21st century that help us understand why we may be led down a direction, or led down a path with out our full conscious understanding of what that is.

00:02:28:14 - 00:02:45:08
Speaker 2
And better than all of that is, what can we do about it and how? How can we influence others around us to follow their own consciences rather than follow the crowd? Which is my favorite part of all of this, because it's what these studies actually unlock. If you read below the surface.

00:02:45:09 - 00:03:06:05
Speaker 1
Yeah. And we're going to read below the surface, and we're going to provide our recommendations on what a conscious being. So we're going to probably use two words that sound similar. You used one of them conscience, write your own morality and then conscious your awareness your full attention.

00:03:06:08 - 00:03:18:21
Speaker 2
Break down what you mean by that, because when I first heard that term used in this context, I didn't I didn't fully grasp what it was. And I'm guessing I'm not the only person.

00:03:18:23 - 00:03:45:19
Speaker 1
It's a great question. And so when we talk about being asleep or even sleep walking, there's this reflection on your conscious understanding of reality, conscious being, your awareness, what you know and your connection to the present. Two of those things are really important. So we know human beings have a tendency to retreat inward into our own minds, our own imagination.

00:03:45:19 - 00:04:11:12
Speaker 1
We have this ability to go into the past, reflect on things that have already occurred that could be days, minutes, or years. Our mind also wants to predict the future. So once to also go into the future. Worry. Create scenarios to allow you to feel prepared for that. All of those scenarios, they come with consequences because you are retreating yourself from the present moment.

00:04:11:12 - 00:04:32:11
Speaker 1
And then your attention, which is the most powerful aspect of your life. What you focus on is screened into your reality. Your attention is taken elsewhere. It's fragmented, so you miss things that are right in front of you. And when we miss things and we're in that unconscious state, that means things can be slipped in.

00:04:32:13 - 00:04:46:17
Speaker 2
So it's basically like a person goes into some form of autopilot while their awareness is elsewhere. And in that state, it's very easy for things to be slipped, slipped into their mind without them fully grasping it.

00:04:46:19 - 00:04:57:07
Speaker 1
Yeah. Word we can use for that is being in drift. Know this is something that is a word that I've written about that comes from a specific book.

00:04:57:09 - 00:04:58:10
Speaker 2
That's worth an entire episode.

00:04:58:13 - 00:05:27:14
Speaker 1
It is, and it will be outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill. Fascinating book, but talks about how human beings can be influenced. He's in a conversation with Satan and how Satan influences the human race by putting us into drift. That's distraction, and there's so many ways we can be distracted. In modern life, distractions come into forms of technology from many years ago, the advent of television or even radio.

00:05:27:14 - 00:05:53:09
Speaker 1
And now it's, you know, it's accelerated 500 fold. Technology is that your fingertips? You can be distracted any time. So we're less of a conscious and aware group. That means we are more vulnerable to influence. And so today we want to go over some key studies. Some of them are dating back to the 1960s. But the information is valuable, really valuable.

00:05:53:10 - 00:06:14:05
Speaker 1
So to make this easy for the viewers, instead of us describing the study, we found some key videos not long, usually in a 2 to 3 to four minute range. That explains this study and what the outcome means. And then we're going to extrapolate on this.

00:06:14:09 - 00:06:19:18
Speaker 2
Because sometimes what we're told the outcome means isn't the full story.

00:06:19:20 - 00:07:01:05
Speaker 1
It's a it's going to be a podcast episode on influence. And we are consistently under the influence of people who benefit from controlling our consciousness or understanding of reality. So if you think you're free, you're not necessarily free. If your own consciousness, the sovereignty of your mind is captured. So there could be an illusion of freedom, which we will argue has happened, has occurred and is accelerating rapidly.

00:07:01:07 - 00:07:03:22
Speaker 1
So let's start with the first experiment.

00:07:03:23 - 00:07:05:03
Speaker 2
Which one are we going to do first?

00:07:05:04 - 00:07:32:04
Speaker 1
Well, this is the one that if you went to undergrad and took any psychology course, so you go to college, even if you're not a psychology major, you were probably exposed to the Milgram experiments. Many also were exposed to this in high school. We're going to expand on this and give you the parts of this study that were kept from you.

00:07:32:06 - 00:07:38:19
Speaker 1
Sounds good. Without further ado, check this out.

00:07:38:21 - 00:08:01:09
Speaker 1
A decade earlier, psychologist Stanley Milgram had also looked at how we respond to authority in order to understand how people were induced to obey unjust regimes and participate in atrocities such as the Holocaust. He set up an experiment. Volunteers were told they were taking part in scientific research to improve memory.

00:08:01:11 - 00:08:08:13
Speaker 2
You open those and tell me which of you is which. But the teacher learned.

00:08:08:15 - 00:08:22:08
Speaker 1
Separated by a screen. The teacher would ask the learner questions in a word game and administer an electric shock when the answer was incorrect. He was told to increase the voltage with each wrong answer.

00:08:22:10 - 00:08:31:08
Speaker 2
Cloud horse Rock House answered wrong.

00:08:31:10 - 00:08:48:06
Speaker 2
Unwrapped festival's answer. Horse experiment. That's all. Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Please continue. Please go. Right on. Go on. Let me out! The experiment requires you to continue. Teacher. Please continue.

00:08:48:07 - 00:08:54:13
Speaker 1
Participants didn't know that the learner was really an actor. And the so-called shocks? Harmless.

00:08:54:19 - 00:09:01:17
Speaker 2
You're going to get a shot under an 80V.

00:09:01:19 - 00:09:18:13
Speaker 2
I can't stand the pain with me. I don't understand. I'm not going to kill that man. I mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman? I'm responsible for anything that happens here. Continue, please. Next was slow walk dance truck music.

00:09:18:15 - 00:09:31:07
Speaker 1
Two thirds of volunteers were prepared to administer a potentially fatal electric shock. When encouraged to do so by what they perceived as a legitimate authority figure, in this case, a man in a white coat.

00:09:31:12 - 00:09:42:09
Speaker 2
375V. I think sometimes that I fall in there, I don't get no answer. He was hollering less voltage. Can't you check in to see if he's alright, please?

00:09:42:11 - 00:09:54:22
Speaker 1
Milgram's findings horrified America. They showed that decent American citizens were as capable of committing acts against their conscience as the Germans had been under the Nazis.

00:09:55:00 - 00:10:18:12
Speaker 2
So a lot of us probably remember seeing that in like a high school or college psychology class and learning basically what we were told just there about the Milgram experiment, that this was proof that we and our fellow humans could very easily commit atrocities. But of course, we know now there was a lot more to the Milgram experiment than that.

00:10:18:13 - 00:10:22:19
Speaker 2
Do you remember the first time you and I discussed this?

00:10:22:21 - 00:10:53:08
Speaker 3
I was, I do I was exposed to the conventional study. Yeah. Of course, I got a doctorate in clinical psychology. So all the other variations that were run were not told to me. They were not part of my education. And here you are, somebody who had no training in psychology at all, had all this in depth of information on these variations of this study that were kept from us.

00:10:53:11 - 00:11:28:15
Speaker 2
Yeah. And, you know, I had spent years fascinated by the topic of of compliance and control and had consumed I was I was disabled for years. So I had time and I spent years watching, reading everything I could on these topics. And there's a guy called James Corbett, a podcaster. His site is Corbett. Com and he was the one who taught me that this, what we think of as the Milgram experiment, is just one iteration, that this had been done 23 times, I believe, and 18 of them have been published.

00:11:28:15 - 00:11:48:21
Speaker 2
But the public only really knows about one of them, and I don't think that's accidental. So this must have been this winter. Some time you and I were talking. I had just introduced you to the work of Chase Hughes on mind control, and you were going to start writing the mind control series. And so it was one morning, the two of us were talking and you told me you were going to write.

00:11:48:22 - 00:12:09:21
Speaker 2
You would. You were already writing a piece on the Milgram experiment. I read what you had written, and that was when I asked you, are you aware of the rest of the Milgram studies and was shocked to find out that with the high level of education you had, that you had no, no professor had ever put these in front of you.

00:12:09:21 - 00:12:26:04
Speaker 2
And that was when I realized this likely isn't likely isn't an accident. So we should get into what those what those other studies show. And because I think that the conclusions from them are really much, much more useful to us.

00:12:26:06 - 00:13:01:06
Speaker 3
Yeah. Let's first start with what we do now and how it's used against us. So the most important aspect of that study right there was there was an authority figure. That authority figure was wearing a white coat. They were in an academic building at Yale University. And when the subject questioned, there was four prompts that were provided. The first three were really follow my orders because I assume responsibility and this is for the greater good, right?

00:13:01:07 - 00:13:24:08
Speaker 3
So when the subject, even though he was exposed, he or she was exposed to somebody who's not visible to them, actually in pain, up to 300. What's the volts? 300V, which is extremely painful. 100% of people complied with that order.

00:13:24:08 - 00:13:30:19
Speaker 2
And I believe in some cases, the the person who seemed to be getting shocked would appear to go unconscious.

00:13:30:19 - 00:13:32:18
Speaker 3
That's when it went up a little bit higher.

00:13:32:19 - 00:13:33:22
Speaker 2
Okay. That was when it went for.

00:13:33:23 - 00:14:02:19
Speaker 3
50, when it went up to 450, which would have been a fatal shock with some people actually saying, I have a heart condition, I will die. 65% of the subjects administered a fatal shock. And so they did present that as the vulnerability to an authority figure. And they compared it to Nazi Germany. It's of my opinion. These tests were run by US intelligence forces.

00:14:02:21 - 00:14:27:00
Speaker 3
They were. We'll go on other episodes where we'll talk about the influence of Nazi scientists in, in America for understanding how to coerce and control a population, but we won't digress from that. Here are some important things to know is that 65% of Americans will follow through on a fatal I mean, they will kill somebody if they were ordered to.

00:14:27:01 - 00:14:32:05
Speaker 3
That was proven by that experiment. However, here is what you don't know.

00:14:32:07 - 00:14:55:09
Speaker 2
So again, this was done 23 times. We know of 18 of them were published. And there were some really interesting variables. So they moved this out of Yale University and moved it to an office building. That was one variant that was done and it dropped to, I believe it was at 48% compliance rather than 65, which is a I mean, that's that's a significant drop.

00:14:55:09 - 00:15:23:01
Speaker 2
And I think what we see there is it's the authority bias was dropping, right. You're no longer on a prestigious university that you assume is only doing the right thing, that you are unconsciously handing authority to, and now it's just in an office building. Maybe you're a little more conscious and a little more feeling like you aren't below and subject to to the environment you're in.

00:15:23:03 - 00:15:28:14
Speaker 2
They varied it by taking off the white lab coat, and I don't remember what the percentage of compliance dropped.

00:15:28:14 - 00:15:30:01
Speaker 3
To dropped another 20%.

00:15:30:02 - 00:15:41:22
Speaker 2
Okay, so that's huge. That's huge. Because that that further indicates to me that the the authority bias was making a big difference there. It does. And.

00:15:42:00 - 00:16:05:19
Speaker 2
The there's one that when I heard it it shocked me. And I think you'll probably guess which one. This is when you took away the prompt of it is important for the experiment that you continue. And said stead, you have no choice. Tell the audience what happened.

00:16:05:20 - 00:16:17:13
Speaker 3
Well, what we saw was when that happened, people quit. So I can't remember the exact details, like it was close to near 100%, which.

00:16:17:15 - 00:16:33:19
Speaker 2
Is that one blew my mind because it's almost like it brought people's consciousness back online, like they were being delivered a psychological shock of their own by being told you have no choice. It's almost like it makes you stop and go, do I? And then you remember that you do.

00:16:33:20 - 00:16:40:09
Speaker 3
Well, and then you start questioning whether the authority figure is working on behalf of the common good.

00:16:40:12 - 00:16:41:02
Speaker 2
Right?

00:16:41:03 - 00:17:15:06
Speaker 3
Right. And so human beings then become much more aware of potential consequences when you're given an order like that, which is important for later discussions. When we understand points throughout history and how we were coerced, it's rarely we're told, you have no choice, right? That's when we talk about the illusion of freedom. It's more it's more coercive. It's not so in your face.

00:17:15:08 - 00:17:24:14
Speaker 3
It's covert. And it gives you the the belief that you are doing something that is for the collective good, because that.

00:17:24:14 - 00:17:25:03
Speaker 2
Was to.

00:17:25:03 - 00:17:48:22
Speaker 3
Do it. That's that's an important piece of this is because when the compliance subjects were interviewed later, they actually said they were glad to be a part of it. So they were glad to contribute to the scientific good. They assumed that the authority figure would not create a study, or any scenario or situation that would do deliberate harm to another.

00:17:48:22 - 00:18:11:08
Speaker 3
So you just are now living in this alternative world that you believe you did something for the collective good, when indeed you were actually harming somebody. And that was the difference in the first three prompts. The fourth prompts, you have no other choice right now. You know that you're an enslavement. You are a slave. You have lost your freedom completely.

00:18:11:10 - 00:18:14:10
Speaker 3
Now people will resist.

00:18:14:12 - 00:18:36:04
Speaker 2
Interesting. So do you know if they ran any variants where you could see the person being injured? Or was it always behind a screen? Because I've always wondered about that and I don't know the answer. If you could see what you were doing, would it impact you? Do you know if they'd ran any of those?

00:18:36:06 - 00:18:41:23
Speaker 3
That's an interesting question. I'm not aware this would definitely be one of the variations that we.

00:18:41:23 - 00:18:44:19
Speaker 2
Were, and I wonder if that was one of them that wasn't published.

00:18:44:20 - 00:18:56:13
Speaker 3
Yeah. And we're going to get into the Ash experiment later. My guess is that it would not have made a big difference. And kind of.

00:18:56:15 - 00:19:03:16
Speaker 2
That's horrifying to me because my my gut would say it would make some difference, but maybe not. I mean, the other.

00:19:03:17 - 00:19:12:04
Speaker 3
Whether somebody screaming, someone's still screaming, they're still hearing it. That did not make a difference.

00:19:12:06 - 00:19:34:06
Speaker 2
Now, maybe it's just I'm so much more visual than an audio person, but for me, I feel like it would. I feel like it would have made a difference. Interesting. So the other, another one that made a big difference was if you if so, if I was in the experiment and I gave the order but someone else pressed the actual button, it went up to what, 90% I think went along with it.

00:19:34:07 - 00:19:55:19
Speaker 2
It went up significantly. So even though so when the person administering the shock and the person giving the order to administer the shock were separated and would, would you consider that in some ways related to the bystander effect, that you had a little bit of separation from the damage you were doing?

00:19:55:21 - 00:20:15:11
Speaker 3
It's absolutely the bystander effect, the diffusion of responsibility when it's no longer on you. It's much easier for a human being to step back and say, I'm not the one who's making that decision. And there are other events, I mean, very typical events that demonstrate the bystander effect.

00:20:15:13 - 00:20:39:15
Speaker 2
I mean, that one reminds me of, you know, in the way that so much of warfare is going now where, you know, you can have someone in an office building in Maryland running, drone warfare, dropping, you know, making the decision to drop a bomb overseas on a government contract. But they are not themselves actually on the ground witnessing it in the way that would have happened for most of Modern Warfare.

00:20:39:15 - 00:21:20:02
Speaker 3
It's. Yeah. So what happens is that you become desensitized, like it's a video game, right? Where you don't see the suffering, you don't see the atrocity, which is a little bit different for like what's going on right now with the war in the Middle East. And when we saw Israel's bombing campaign of Gaza, when they would put images up of women and children that affected the world population differently and how they understood the war, if you're just getting reports on a screen and or you're being told that you eliminated the enemy, who's on your mind?

00:21:20:03 - 00:21:41:03
Speaker 3
Well, it's the terrorists or whatever the government will proclaim to be the enemy. But when you humanize this, it affects these mirror neurons, right? Where human beings have this shared empathy and this connection with each other. And so there's a different emotional reaction when it comes to war.

00:21:41:04 - 00:22:07:00
Speaker 2
And this isn't just Israel-Gaza. I mean, this was when with the, you know, the Iraq War, when we were sending we continued bombing Iraq between 1990 and the second Gulf War. I think most Americans don't know that we did that. And, you know, there were children dying in hospitals because we were blockading the supplies. But as an American people, we were blind to it.

00:22:07:01 - 00:22:26:15
Speaker 2
And, you know, there was a campaign to bring children to the US who had been horribly harmed by these campaigns in an effort that Americans would could set their eyes on these children and see for themselves what had been done, because we were being so protected from the actual human suffering that that our tax dollars were paying for.

00:22:26:16 - 00:22:42:22
Speaker 3
Yeah. So I think this is an example of how powerful media is in shaping perception. You only know what you're exposed to right now. So let's let's go on because we can talk about this one for two hours probably. So let's move forward.

00:22:42:23 - 00:23:09:15
Speaker 2
So there was one variation though that we haven't got to yet. And it's the most exciting one of all of them. And I would if people are watching this and you don't know take a second here to guess what is the one thing you could change in this experiment where almost nobody would comply? And and what would that say about what we can do as human beings to resist tyranny?

00:23:09:17 - 00:23:12:01
Speaker 2
So, Roger, what was it?

00:23:12:03 - 00:23:42:21
Speaker 3
Well, when they observed somebody in front of them. So another participant, participant resist. So they had to observe someone else non complying. Right. Resisting to engage in that atrocity. Then the noncompliance skyrocketed to 90%. All you had to do was observe someone else say, no, I am not going to do that. And now it provided permission for others to resist it.

00:23:43:02 - 00:23:45:08
Speaker 2
It brought consciousness back, in a sense.

00:23:45:10 - 00:24:13:15
Speaker 3
Gave permission, and which I think is something that's really important in understanding obedience and why we why I say things like there's more of us than them is because it lets you know that the only way that we comply with any form of tyranny is through fear and believing we would be alone on that island, and then that we would face punishment.

00:24:13:16 - 00:24:19:16
Speaker 3
Once that is lifted. Now it's like we're free to act on our conscience.

00:24:19:20 - 00:24:49:18
Speaker 2
And we're very tribal as humans. And so there is this deep, deep seated fear of being, being kicked out of the tribe alone into the desert to survive with nobody else, with you. And I feel like this is the critical piece that can get past that, one of those ultimate survival fears of being the only, you know, the only one who's dissenting is for one person to be courageous enough to follow their conscience and do it publicly.

00:24:49:20 - 00:25:11:21
Speaker 3
Very, very important. And don't forget about the conditioning process, the white coat, the authority bias that's in play. This is why experts were paraded on television over and over again throughout all of our lives. It was for us to be able to submit to an authority in a time of stress or a time of crisis. So why you go on the news?

00:25:11:22 - 00:25:33:12
Speaker 3
The doctors, the same doctors over and over again, many of them wearing white coats. It doesn't have anything to do with their level of expertise. They're talking heads. They're reading a script that was given to them by the government or the CIA. We know some people who go on every single show, regardless of what their specialty or not.

00:25:33:14 - 00:25:40:21
Speaker 3
They are only paid, quote unquote experts to get you to believe a certain truth.

00:25:40:21 - 00:26:02:05
Speaker 2
And and he says, we know this. We will we know these people personally, and we can tell you the things they are saying, things that they don't know about or in some cases, truly don't believe in. But when they are told to say them, they do. And there's no way that the people we know that do this, or the only ones, this has to be an established pattern.

00:26:02:05 - 00:26:38:19
Speaker 2
And during Covid, I think it's a time that that this happened at a massive scale. Like I think every person listening to this can remember watching, you know, Sanjay Gupta, Liana, when all these various doctors get on TV over and over again and tell you the same lines to the point where they were almost hypnotic. And this is this is a point where I'd love to bring up something that was so clear to me during Covid, but that was a disagreement point between me and some other people who were refusing to take the vaccine.

00:26:38:23 - 00:27:10:13
Speaker 2
And that difference was, should you get a fake vaccine card to avoid taking the shot? Now, I want to be really clear here. I was not in a position that was high risk to refuse to get a vaccine card. I wasn't going to lose my job. I wasn't going to lose my ability to feed a family. So I was not in a in a position where the decision not to get a vaccine card and just refused to take the shot was going to cost me what it did.

00:27:10:13 - 00:27:34:21
Speaker 2
Many, many people. So this is not said in any way in judgment of the people who chose to get when. I don't want to be very clear about that. I'm simply making the point that I think the ability to get fake vaccine cards easily was probably intentional. Think about it. They were really easy to reproduce. There wasn't a special watermark.

00:27:34:22 - 00:28:01:11
Speaker 2
There wasn't like a special stamp. You could get them pretty easily. And I'm sure we both knew people, quite a few people that did in order that they could pretend to get the shot, keep their job, but not actually get it. And when you consider the Milgram experiment, would it basically did was there were a lot of people who figured out how to not give the shock to the person in the other room while appearing to do so, right.

00:28:01:12 - 00:28:20:07
Speaker 2
So you didn't you appeared to comply, but you didn't. And this actually, in some ways, I would argue, potentially helps the tyrant because fewer people are standing up than publicly and actively not complying.

00:28:20:09 - 00:28:55:21
Speaker 3
It's providing them the authority. Right. It's like we because the authority told us we require this card, then we have to fake it in order to have our freedom. So it's again covertly providing them more and more power. We give up our power pretty consistently out of fear. And so I think the next study that we go to talks about the power of conformity, how easy it is for you to deny your intuition or even to question what you know.

00:28:55:23 - 00:29:04:10
Speaker 1
When an experiment is not a public opinion poll, it examines behavior under the pressure of social forces. As the experiment of Solomon Ash reveals.

00:29:04:11 - 00:29:22:07
Speaker 2
The experiment you'll be taking part in today involves the perception of lengths of lines. As you can see here, I have a number of cards, and on each card there are several lines. Your task is a very simple one. You're to look at the line on the left and determine which of the three lines on the right is equal to it in length.

00:29:22:08 - 00:29:24:21
Speaker 2
All right. We'll proceed in this order. You'll give your answer.

00:29:24:22 - 00:29:42:17
Speaker 1
Only one of the people in the group is a real subject. The fifth person with the white t shirt. The others are confederates of the experimenter and have been told to give wrong answers on some of the trials. The experiment begins uneventfully as subjects give their judgments. Two. Two two.

00:29:42:19 - 00:29:51:07
Speaker 3
223333.

00:29:51:09 - 00:29:53:23
Speaker 1
But on the third trial, something happens.

00:29:54:00 - 00:30:00:12
Speaker 3
2 to 2.

00:30:00:14 - 00:30:03:23
Speaker 3
Two.

00:30:04:01 - 00:30:05:02
Speaker 3
Two.

00:30:05:04 - 00:30:21:18
Speaker 1
The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence. Ash found subjects went along with the group on 37% of the critical trials, but he found through interviews that they went along with the group for different reasons.

00:30:21:20 - 00:30:28:16
Speaker 3
One one, they must be right there for them and one of me won.

00:30:28:18 - 00:30:36:13
Speaker 1
This subjects yielding is based on a distortion of his judgment. He genuinely believes that the group is correct.

00:30:36:15 - 00:30:52:14
Speaker 3
11121222.

00:30:52:16 - 00:30:54:14
Speaker 2
I know they're wrong, but what should I make?

00:30:54:15 - 00:30:56:07
Speaker 3
Waves two.

00:30:56:09 - 00:31:05:08
Speaker 1
In this case, the subject Ngozi is right, but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group. Here, the distortion is at the level of his response.

00:31:05:09 - 00:31:11:16
Speaker 3
To two, two, two.

00:31:11:18 - 00:31:25:01
Speaker 1
In the previous experiment, the naive subject stood alone against the group. In this variation, ash gave the naive subject a partner here seated in the third position, who also gives the correct response.

00:31:25:03 - 00:31:31:20
Speaker 3
One, one, two.

00:31:31:22 - 00:31:35:09
Speaker 3
One, two.

00:31:35:11 - 00:31:58:17
Speaker 1
With a partner yielding drops to only 5% of the critical trials, compared to 37% without a partner. Although subjects report warmth and good feeling toward the partner, they typically deny that he played a role in their own independence. The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came not merely from its numbers, but from the unanimity of its opposition.

00:31:58:17 - 00:32:25:13
Speaker 1
When that unanimity is punctured, the group's power is greatly reduced. Sometimes we go along with the group because what they say convinces us they are right. This is called informational conformity. But sometimes we can form because we are apprehensive that the group will disapprove if we are deviant. This is called normative conformity. The strength of the normative factor is shown in another variation carried out by ash.

00:32:25:15 - 00:32:41:00
Speaker 1
In this variation, the subject is told that because he had arrived late, you would have to write his answers. Subjects in this private response experiment are exposed to the same amount of misleading information as other subjects, but they are immune from any possible criticism by the group.

00:32:41:02 - 00:32:44:03
Speaker 3
111.

00:32:44:03 - 00:33:06:17
Speaker 1
And this enormously reduces the pressure to conform. Conformity drops by two thirds. Ash's experiment is a classic. It reveals how people will deny what they see and submit to group pressure. It allows us not only to observe conformity, but to study the conditions that increase or reduce its occurrence.

00:33:06:19 - 00:33:48:20
Speaker 3
So there's a couple important takeaways because this does hit home for many of us because we experienced mass indoctrination during a crisis. And in that mass indoctrination, many people were led to believe that if they followed that authority recommendation, they could save lives of other people. And we're going to just talk about what? Vaccination. Six feet, wearing a mask and isolating actually, you know, meant on its face value, right.

00:33:48:21 - 00:34:22:05
Speaker 3
The idea that this would be a pandemic of the unvaccinated or the unvaccinated could harm the vaccinated made zero sense, logically correct. If a vaccination was going to protect you, then how could an unvaccinated harm the vaccinated? So this was a clear example of most people would understand that logic. But we had PhDs, MDS repeating that same thing.

00:34:22:06 - 00:34:39:08
Speaker 2
And often literally the same words over and over. So you'd you'd hear the same phrase again and again and again, which I'm guessing is probably more effective than hearing kind of the same idea, but said 15 different ways.

00:34:39:11 - 00:34:43:09
Speaker 3
So true. Like you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes a collective truth.

00:34:43:10 - 00:34:44:14
Speaker 2
Was that Goebbels I think.

00:34:44:15 - 00:35:14:19
Speaker 3
Yeah. But here's here's the interesting part. Like what? This what this experiment informs us is that we will deny what we know in order to avoid the discomfort of rejection, or what I would say is perceived rejection. Most of this is in our own minds. So when I refuse to wear a mask now again, no judgment here.

00:35:14:19 - 00:35:37:19
Speaker 3
Because I owned my own business, I made the rules. There was no risk to me other than offending somebody else. What I saw is clients who would come in to see me would come in with a mask on. When they saw me not wearing a mask, they would walk back. They would take their mask off.

00:35:37:21 - 00:35:42:14
Speaker 2
Would they wait until they got into the room with just you to take it off? Or would they take it off in front of other people?

00:35:42:14 - 00:36:08:09
Speaker 3
They waited till they got into my office. They would take it off and then they would ask my permission. Is it okay to take it off? When they clearly saw that I wasn't wearing a mask, so they were still conditioned to ask for my permission to not want to offend me. Many people would say, oh thank God, right?

00:36:08:15 - 00:36:42:01
Speaker 3
Someone else is not doing it. But as soon as they would leave my office, the mask would go back on. Okay, I would engage people in these conversations because the mask was often a paper mask, it was clearly going to provide no protection. This was another aspect of this where there was no reason or logic behind it. If it was an airborne illness, that paper mask wasn't going to protect them at all, but it became a symbol of compliance.

00:36:42:01 - 00:36:53:15
Speaker 3
And then we saw this, like in social media profiles, where people would put this up to let everyone know that I'm part of this group. I care about you. Right. It became this.

00:36:53:15 - 00:36:55:00
Speaker 2
Symbol, good member of the tribe.

00:36:55:01 - 00:37:03:21
Speaker 3
I'm a good member of the tribe. Please don't reject me. And in some instance, it it led them to communicate a sense of moral superiority.

00:37:04:02 - 00:37:24:07
Speaker 2
And I don't think I, I think we have to be really clear that we're not in judgment of anyone who did this, because I think we all do this in areas of our lives that by virtue of being human, some of us maybe do it less than others. But we're all really prone to this.

00:37:24:09 - 00:37:58:21
Speaker 2
And so the areas where we have succeeded in breaking out of it, it's not that we're different than other people. And in some cases, it may have been because we had examples of other people choosing to break free to follow. And I do think one of the things on this experiment that it teaches me is that we'd be foolish to deny that we're tribal, very foolish to to pretend that this isn't part of human nature.

00:37:58:21 - 00:38:13:23
Speaker 2
And so when one of us has the courage to follow our, you know, our own lying eyes, as Richard Breyer would say, you know, for those who are old enough to get that reference. But when we when we have the courage to follow our eyes, we give people the option of a new tribe.

00:38:14:01 - 00:38:40:05
Speaker 3
Yeah. There was an interesting follow up, this ash experiment, where they put people in an fMRI machine. So they examined brain scans. And what's important to know about this is that two step outside of what is consensus activates fear in the brain, right. So in a lot of ways this comes about the the influential and controlling aspect of fear provocation.

00:38:40:07 - 00:39:25:21
Speaker 3
People don't have a great tolerance for fear. If we had a greater tolerance for fear, we would experience more courageous behavior, we would be more comfortable standing outside of consensus. We would be more willing to reject authority. And here's another piece of this from my field. If you want to understand why anti-anxiety drugs have been pushed to the extent that they have, and so many people take drugs when they feel fearful or anxious, it is because you've been told that that emotion is a symptom of an illness, and you can't live freely without it, right?

00:39:25:22 - 00:39:50:01
Speaker 3
Like with it to that extent. So you've developed a fear of fear right now that's so dangerous to approach your life, being afraid of that emotion. Because what's going to happen is in the face of situations where you have to allow for that to be present and act according to what your values are or your long term goals.

00:39:50:01 - 00:40:16:08
Speaker 3
Well, then you don't have that capacity to do it. It's like when I was working in schools, I saw this horrific pattern of people wanting to get this diagnosis of an anxiety disorder to get out of anxiety provoking situations, like doing a presentation in class, like public speaking. So this was when you're 12 years old or 13 year old, 13 years old, whatever that is in middle school, that's a school I was in.

00:40:16:08 - 00:40:34:08
Speaker 3
This is your opportunity to practice. Can you speak while experiencing anxiety and you build that, that tank for it right now? What happens if you don't? Well, then you set up for the rest of your life. Whenever that emotion comes up, you run away from it. You avoid true, right?

00:40:34:09 - 00:40:35:07
Speaker 2
This is so true.

00:40:35:08 - 00:41:01:21
Speaker 3
This is part of targeted indoctrination to get a more subservient and compliant population. So people who are not willing to face their fears will fall in line to the authority figure. The more of there's a consensus of a way that one should act, then we know by evidence that people are going to follow that consensus regardless of what they actually believe, and they adopt those new beliefs to be their own.

00:41:02:00 - 00:41:25:10
Speaker 3
This is why you were flooded with trust the science. Trust the experts. You see, it's all coming together from those two experiments. Obedience, conformity, obedience, conformity. That's how you get Americans to walk in to an enslavement camp, right? We imprisoned ourselves during that period of time.

00:41:25:10 - 00:41:48:10
Speaker 2
And one piece that was really interesting to me here was that it didn't even have to be the same, different answer to get someone to stick with their own perceptions. So like, let's say there's four lines and everyone's saying it's one and I know it's three, but you say it's two.

00:41:48:12 - 00:41:49:03
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00:41:49:05 - 00:42:17:04
Speaker 2
That was enough to trigger me. Even though I didn't agree with your answer, it was just somebody else breaking out of the conformity for me to know, okay, I can stick with what my you know, my what I know the truth to be. So that was that was a fascinating piece for me. Because we don't have that. We don't have to have the same answer as someone else to still be able to give them permission to stick with what they know to be true.

00:42:17:05 - 00:42:34:19
Speaker 3
Yeah. So let's talk about how do you protect yourself from this. So if you now know if you're conscious that this exists, how do we as a collective group not fall into the dangers of conformity?

00:42:35:00 - 00:42:54:19
Speaker 2
Well, I keep going back while you're saying this to this memory from last year, I was there was something I was experiencing and I was experiencing fear around it. And I have a friend. He's a Catholic priest. Lovely guy called doctor, called Father John Nagl. You've met him as well. And I called him one day when I was experiencing fear over something.

00:42:54:20 - 00:43:22:05
Speaker 2
And he told me, Tracy, your fear doesn't make you not courageous. Courage isn't continuing because you have no fear. Courage is continuing in the face of your fear. And I think that is a piece of this that you can. As you said, the brain scans show this triggers fear in the human mind, period. Right. We're not going to magically prevent that from being the case somehow.

00:43:22:05 - 00:43:59:22
Speaker 2
That's not the ticket here. It's understanding that we can observe the fear in ourselves and then breathe and still choose the truth in spite of the fear, and that we will often then find perhaps, that what we had feared would occur maybe doesn't work. Maybe, yes, some of the people around us reject us, but we find that there are others who stand up with us, and so that often the fear is, can end up being a gateway to a world that only opens to us because we made a different choice.

00:44:00:00 - 00:44:22:05
Speaker 3
I'll take a greater perspective here. The one thing that separates Father John, maybe from others is, you know, a clear faith and understanding that it's more than just this life. You're an eternal being. So the more that you get attached to just this life, then you make decisions just to protect yourself in safety. And that's not the higher perspective.

00:44:22:09 - 00:44:46:21
Speaker 3
If we think about life as a journey, the hero's journey, for example, and you have a number of obstacles that are placed in your way, in your path, and to be able to advance in your life, to expand your consciousness, you have to jump over those obstacles. You have to complete that course in the face of fear. And once you face that fear, come to the other side.

00:44:46:21 - 00:45:16:05
Speaker 3
You grow. You learn something. Usually what you learn is, oh my fear. What I actually imagined would happen was not as bad as I thought it would be. We sometimes you just realize there was nothing really to be afraid of at all. So people who are willing to face that fear, to kind of expand their understanding of what life is, you begin to jump levels in this game, and it's the same thing with any aspect of your life.

00:45:16:05 - 00:45:49:18
Speaker 3
When you can, you can compare it to career or relationships. If you approach it with lack and limitation and fear like this is the best that I can get, you never jump that next level to experience something new. Fear is constricting. Love encourages can be a form of love is expanding. So the expansion of consciousness is being able to face new situations and say, oh, this might be novel, this is new, but I have this all these new opportunities and these experiences, and I'm now different.

00:45:49:18 - 00:46:01:12
Speaker 3
I've changed from facing that fear. Now you're going to get another obstacle. It's a in my opinion, there's it's nonstop. That's what this human experience is.

00:46:01:14 - 00:46:03:13
Speaker 2
The the obstacle is the path.

00:46:03:14 - 00:46:03:22
Speaker 3
It is.

00:46:03:22 - 00:46:25:11
Speaker 2
The way I love that I love that line. And but when you've finished five obstacles, you've got a history of five that you bring with you to the sixth and the seventh and the eighth, and you start to learn that, you know, as one of my favorite sayings, it goes, you know, you can jump off a cliff and trust you'll grow wings.

00:46:25:13 - 00:46:37:21
Speaker 2
That can be something that you learn only by doing. And once you've done it a few times, the next time you come to a cliff, you're like, oh, I got this.

00:46:37:23 - 00:46:58:00
Speaker 3
All right. So let's let's move on to a new subject. So we've already talked about obedience and conformity, but let's talk another about another aspect of human nature where we have the ability to rationalize and convince ourselves of something that is not true in order to.

00:46:58:05 - 00:46:59:05
Speaker 2
Oh, this is one of my favorites.

00:46:59:06 - 00:47:12:04
Speaker 3
Yeah. Like, this is a great experiment. Keep this in mind as you watch this. Like, our minds are beautiful, but our minds can do a lot to accept things that are not in our best interest. Check this out.

00:47:12:06 - 00:47:38:09
Speaker 1
Each subject assignment. To turn each of the wooden pegs a quarter turn to the right. Then to start over and turn them again and again and again until the experimenter tells him to stop. It is the most boring and fatiguing task we could devise. Our purpose was to provide each subject with the same dull job, so each would have a similar negative experience.

00:47:38:11 - 00:48:01:06
Speaker 1
In order to obtain the scientific data we need. We use a little subterfuge and say we're studying motor performance. Afterward, they will be told the truth. Okay. That's fine. Let me tell you now, what we're actually studying here is the effect of the mental set on performance. Half of the subjects are doing the job cold, just as you did.

00:48:01:07 - 00:48:20:17
Speaker 1
The rest of the subjects are prepared by being told that the experiment will be very interesting and enjoyable. In fact, lots of fun. Now I have a somewhat unusual request to make a view. The next subject is waiting right outside, but the fellow who ordinarily gives the spiel isn't here. I wonder if you could possibly take his place.

00:48:20:20 - 00:48:39:05
Speaker 1
As a matter of fact, we figure we'll be needing someone in the future. So I'd like to offer you a $20 retainer and have you remain on call for us. Would that be all right? $20. That'd be fine. We'd like to give you a dollar as a sort of a retainer, and have you remain on call with us.

00:48:39:07 - 00:48:41:14
Speaker 1
Would that be all right with you?

00:48:41:16 - 00:48:43:04
Speaker 2
Yes, that'll be all right.

00:48:43:09 - 00:49:04:23
Speaker 1
So we'd like to offer you a retainer of $20. We divide the group. Half will get $20 to tell someone. That dull task is interesting. The other half get $1 for the same job. They all agreed to tell an obvious lie. Thank you very much. The next subject is waiting right outside.

00:49:05:01 - 00:49:22:23
Speaker 1
In reality, the subject meets one of our assistants, trained to get them to publicly commit themselves to this untruth. They gave us some pegs to turn turn up for a while, and it was a lot of fun. It was sort of interesting, I guess. Really? Well, that's strange because a friend of mine took the experiment in last week.

00:49:23:00 - 00:49:44:13
Speaker 1
I think it was the same experiment, and he said it was pretty miserable, and that I should do everything I could to get out of it. Well, I think maybe your friend was wrong. Perhaps was a different experiment because this was a lot of fun. It appeared to me as if as if it were a puzzle. We had to turn these knobs, and I tried to figure out what we were doing it for, but I really couldn't figure it out.

00:49:44:19 - 00:49:46:01
Speaker 1
She'll have better luck.

00:49:46:04 - 00:49:55:17
Speaker 2
Well, what do you have to do exactly? Well, we turned pegs and knobs the same way each time, and that's about what it was. But it was very interesting. Do you.

00:49:55:17 - 00:49:55:22
Speaker 1
Try.

00:49:55:22 - 00:49:57:04
Speaker 2
To find.

00:49:57:06 - 00:50:23:02
Speaker 1
The $1 subject sells just as hard as the $20 one. But which of them will come to believe what they are saying? Other theories might predict that the man who has paid most would have the highest motivations for enthusing over the dull task, and would be most sold on it himself. Cognitive dissonance theory leads to an exactly opposite prediction.

00:50:23:04 - 00:50:49:06
Speaker 1
The man who is paid $20 knows that the task is dull, but he also knows that he had sufficient justification for saying that it wasn't. How much did you learn from this experiment? Learn? Well, I don't think I learned too much from the experiment. Did you enjoy working on the manual test? Well, it really wasn't too enjoyable. In fact, it was rather boring.

00:50:49:08 - 00:51:17:15
Speaker 1
How about the man who has paid $1? He knows the task is dull, but he has two discrepant thoughts. He also knows that he did not have sufficient justification for saying that it wasn't for him. There is dissonance. Time after time, we have seen what follows. He reduces the dissonance by changing his opinion about the dullness of the task.

00:51:17:17 - 00:51:21:00
Speaker 1
How much did you learn from this experiment?

00:51:21:01 - 00:51:29:16
Speaker 2
Well, at first I don't think I was learning it too much, but when I got into it, I think it was quite interesting. And after a while it got better.

00:51:29:18 - 00:51:32:15
Speaker 1
Did you enjoy working on the manual test?

00:51:32:17 - 00:51:35:01
Speaker 2
Yes, I enjoyed it.

00:51:35:02 - 00:51:40:15
Speaker 1
Would you like to participate in such an experiment again?

00:51:40:17 - 00:51:43:22
Speaker 2
Yes, I think I would like to.

00:51:44:00 - 00:52:06:09
Speaker 2
So this one for me is one of the most fascinating ones, because it actually went against what I would have anticipated when I first saw it. These people are asked to do something that is as boring as watching paint dry, and then they are paid either a dollar or $20 to lie. And this is years ago, where $20 was equivalent to what I think 200.

00:52:06:10 - 00:52:06:22
Speaker 3
220.

00:52:06:23 - 00:52:08:00
Speaker 2
220 okay.

00:52:08:00 - 00:52:09:21
Speaker 3
At least now. Okay. With inflation.

00:52:09:21 - 00:52:29:15
Speaker 2
With inflation. Yeah. So, you know, if you had presented this to me, I would have thought at the time that the person getting paid more to lie would be more likely to lie, and instead we see the exact opposite. And I'd love to hear your take on why this is the truth.

00:52:29:17 - 00:52:52:00
Speaker 3
Yeah. I mean, as we heard on the video, cognitive dissonance, when you receive a substantial amount of money for doing something that is boring or menial, you could at least justify that it was worth your time. You don't necessarily have to lie about it, right? Like I did this for $220. But what if you get a very small amount?

00:52:52:00 - 00:53:15:00
Speaker 3
That's not meaningful? How do you justify that lie? So that's called cognitive dissonance theory. And you have to try to make sense of it in your world to be okay with it. Right. So you have to change it, almost change the event in your mind. No, it wasn't that boring. I've learned something. I learned how to maybe tolerate a discomfort.

00:53:15:02 - 00:53:43:17
Speaker 3
Uncomfortable feeling. I've learned how to do a task more rapidly, whatever that may be. You can change it in your mind. Now let's talk about what that means for modern day, because the pharmaceutical industry and other industries and sales and so forth, learn something really important. If you're going to influence a doctor, for example, to sell them a drug, you would think if that if you paid them a large amount of money, you could get them to lie about the drug.

00:53:43:17 - 00:54:14:17
Speaker 3
And they're right, but it does not benefit them to pay all doctors a large amount of money to sell the drug, because that is going to actually cut into their bottom line. Right? So what you do is you get a few influential doctors from academic institutions, prestigious academic institutions. So now there is the authority bias. Well, if this doctor from Harvard says this drug is safe and effective, well then it must be right.

00:54:14:23 - 00:54:52:00
Speaker 3
So the authority bias gets kicked in, just like we saw in Milgram. But then there needs to be a personal relationship with these doctors. So they set out an army of pharmaceutical salespeople. And the pharmaceutical salespeople do not come in and say, well, offer you this kickback. If you sell this drug, that's too obvious right now, a doctor might realize that they're doing something unethical, but if they give them a pen, if they buy them a lunch, if it's just a kind conversation with an attractive woman, right?

00:54:52:01 - 00:54:57:11
Speaker 3
Doctors in their minds do not believe they are doing anything unethical.

00:54:57:13 - 00:55:00:00
Speaker 2
So they don't actually believe they're being influenced at all.

00:55:00:00 - 00:55:27:18
Speaker 3
They do not. And we have plenty of evidence to support this, although just from a marketing standpoint, we know that the pen or the pad of paper does influence someone subconsciously. But what you can see is from the from the cognitive dissonance theory here. They would then have to rationalize that relationship to the pharmaceutical salesperson. It's often I'm just getting information.

00:55:27:18 - 00:55:39:18
Speaker 3
It doesn't influence me. I am still independent, right? But we know that these small increments over time influence behavior. And that's what you see here.

00:55:39:20 - 00:55:59:16
Speaker 2
And there are probably a lot of people that don't know that, you know, pharmaceutical reps are going into their doctor's offices and bringing their doctor lunch before the doctor recommends the drug that company is selling. I'm trying to remember the name of the website, but I know there's a website you can go to where you can look up your doctor and they have to report this stuff.

00:55:59:16 - 00:56:25:10
Speaker 2
They have to report the lunches. They have to report the gifts that are brought to them. So you can go in and see and you'll realize it's really common. It's really common that this is brought to doctors. I'm sure. You know, it's easy to find on the internet what this website is. I remember looking it up once and finding that there were meds I was on that were being recommended by by representatives who were going to the doctor's office and bringing lunch.

00:56:25:16 - 00:56:28:16
Speaker 3
I wonder how old how old that might have been.

00:56:28:17 - 00:56:30:00
Speaker 2
This was maybe five years ago.

00:56:30:01 - 00:56:50:13
Speaker 3
Okay, so it's still current. We know it wasn't aware of that, and I have a hard time imagining doctors have to do that today. I've never heard of doctors having to go report that somewhere. But also most doctors work for corporate medicine. So it's possibly maybe the the institutions that they work for have to do some reporting on that.

00:56:50:14 - 00:57:01:22
Speaker 2
And if you're if you're watching this on our website and you're one of our paid members, if you find the website that this is on, put it in the comments. And if you find out that this is not required, go ahead and put that in the comments to entrust it to know.

00:57:02:00 - 00:57:36:17
Speaker 3
Okay, so let's talk about what this means right now. It means when somebody does something, let's say they voluntarily take a Covid vaccine and it's mRNA and they are exposed to a lot of information and studies which are clearly out there. That suggests that there is damage done by that vaccination, not necessarily being identified on a mass scale, but we're seeing an uptake uptick in turbo cancers, autoimmune conditions.

00:57:36:18 - 00:58:08:03
Speaker 3
Basically, it's impacting our body in unforeseen ways because of that spike protein, and it is actually impacting our natural defense mechanisms that have evolved since the beginning of, you know, of human evolution. Right? So this is something that's novel, that's new, it's a technology, and there's unforeseen consequences to be exposed to. Something like that would create fear. There will be an emotional reaction to it.

00:58:08:03 - 00:58:39:20
Speaker 3
And now a human being knowing there's nothing they can do, it's already done, has to now cope with it. And cognitive dissonance theory will inform us that someone will now create a justification justification and create a new reality, even if it's not real, even if it's not true. In order to decrease that dissonance, decrease that fear. So one simple way is just to deny that exists at all.

00:58:39:20 - 00:59:07:02
Speaker 3
That's a denial coping mechanism most people have a hard time with. There's a percentage of population where denial is their primary coping mechanism, but most people can't move past denial that they just can't deny the facts, so they have to rationalize it. So there's many ways you can rationalize it. One, you can try to dismiss that as real evidence.

00:59:07:02 - 00:59:35:01
Speaker 3
Look for something that fits your worldview, and the authorities will do that. They'll populate the internet with things like misinformation or disinformation. And what that does is it will decrease the anxiety of the individual and what they have to then devalue that opposite information. So how do you do that? Well, that's a conspiracy theorist. That's a right wing nut job.

00:59:35:01 - 00:59:54:21
Speaker 3
Whatever it is, you devalue that person with an ad hominem attack. You don't ever really look at the validity of it. You post something online, you get a reinforcement signal from other people in your tribe who did exactly the same thing, and then you can breathe. I'm going to be okay. Right? So it gives somebody a false sense of security.

00:59:54:21 - 01:00:21:00
Speaker 3
But that's cognitive dissonance where our mind can create new realities to deny the original one. Now why is that dangerous? Well, because you're subjected to do it again and again and again in the face of the same psychological operation. It's really important we face reality as is. It's really important we tolerate discomfort. It's very important we say, I'm sorry, I made a mistake.

01:00:21:06 - 01:00:38:12
Speaker 3
That's how we influence others and that's how we evolve as an individual, because there's nothing you can do about it anyway. And people, you know, this is a part of the collective human experience. We're fallible. We are prone to errors in judgment. We make a lot of mistakes.

01:00:38:13 - 01:00:39:05
Speaker 6
I actually.

01:00:39:05 - 01:00:44:22
Speaker 2
Trust someone more if they will tell me that they've made a mistake.

01:00:44:23 - 01:00:46:02
Speaker 6
Of course.

01:00:46:04 - 01:00:53:08
Speaker 2
I mean, there's I'm thinking of one, you know, famous podcaster right now who's very open about how earlier in his career.

01:00:53:08 - 01:00:54:18
Speaker 6
Who's that? Tucker Carlson okay.

01:00:54:21 - 01:01:18:04
Speaker 2
Right. So earlier in his career, he says, like, I was completely wrong about the Iraq war. I was one of the main people out there pushing it. I was so wrong. And I bear responsibility for what I did. For me, that only increases my trust in the things he says. Now, I'm not going to say I'm trusting everything Tucker Carlson says.

01:01:18:04 - 01:01:41:06
Speaker 2
That's not my point. But when I compare that to there was a debate between I think it was Dave Smith and the other Cuomo brother that was not not a governor, not Andrew, the other one, his name. But anyways, there was a debate between those two and he had an opportunity to say like, look, I was wrong on things Covid related as Dave Smith is hammering him and he just wouldn't.

01:01:41:12 - 01:01:56:20
Speaker 2
And I actually, I think if he had been able to own, own the places that he had made mistakes rather than in going into full blown cognitive dissonance, he would have been more trustworthy to people afterwards. But he he just couldn't release the cognitive dissonance.

01:01:56:21 - 01:02:29:23
Speaker 3
There's the there's the assumption that these people are sociopaths and can be and that they're intentionally lying. The truth of the matter is, is they are lying to themselves and they don't know it. And that's important. And so we have to talk about how you can resist this. And this is where you and I both share concerns about the public school system, is because it really trains you into compliance to authorities and to assume positions that they tell you is truth, and then you adopt them as your own.

01:02:30:00 - 01:02:37:08
Speaker 3
When the most important thing to do in anything like this is to be able to take a step back and say, where could I be wrong?

01:02:37:13 - 01:03:11:09
Speaker 2
This is actually where I think a meditative practice or prayerful silence, is such a helpful practice to have in one's daily life. Because for me, that is where the greatest self honesty happens. I am. I've tuned out all the distractions around me, and it's just me and my connection to the divine, and I can become very quiet. And the things, the mistakes I've made, the places where I've gone wrong, or the places where somebody else is pressuring me into a viewpoint.

01:03:11:09 - 01:03:52:08
Speaker 2
And the fact that what I feel is true, all of those will surface in that time, but it requires me to tune out everything happening around me and listen, to listen to the silence inside me and feel for what is true for me. If I get my ego and like the chattering monkey of my mind out of the way, and I really do wonder how different our world would be if the majority of people had a practice like this, rather than spending all but 10s of our day in some way in taking information from outside of ourselves.

01:03:52:13 - 01:04:18:13
Speaker 3
Yeah, in Buddhist philosophy, that's training the observer mind. So to not be automatically reactive, which leads you to be controlled, you become an observer of your experience. So your consciousness sits and observes the mind. And I agree with you. I think that's radical. Honesty is when you can truly be an observer versus a reactor. My suggestion is a couple things.

01:04:18:18 - 01:04:45:22
Speaker 3
Bring back the the phrase I don't know. So many people are fearful of not taking aside. Right. Because that's a tribal aspect. But if you really say, I don't know when you don't know, what that means is you're open to discourse, you're open to examining evidence, choice, free will, uncertainty, all of which we have a difficult time tolerating.

01:04:45:22 - 01:05:09:05
Speaker 3
And the scientific process in itself needs to play itself out, right. Science is the search for truth. It's a it's replication. It's seeking out ways to set up an experiment, to really test out if your hypothesis is accurate. There is. There's no shame in saying, I don't know. There's no shame in saying I possibly have made a mistake.

01:05:09:08 - 01:05:18:21
Speaker 3
In fact, that's a much more mature way of approaching your life, much more realistic and easy for people to connect with.

01:05:18:23 - 01:05:21:06
Speaker 6
This is true.

01:05:21:08 - 01:05:50:14
Speaker 3
The other I think that's really important, especially in today's digital age, is that comment section that we have after reading something and just having at our fingertips the ability to put our thoughts out there so quickly is that we are prone to impulsive reactions, emotionally driven reactions. So that's where emotion can be a real, real problem. Because if you experience that fear, you want to do something to alleviate that fear.

01:05:50:15 - 01:06:12:01
Speaker 3
If you feel anger for some reason, instead of looking at it as an opportunity for you to examine yourself more deeply, you direct your rage outward at someone else. And this is where you start creating this division online, you know, perpetuates these type of things. And this is why psychological operations are so profound on our society through social media.

01:06:12:03 - 01:06:23:06
Speaker 3
There's these bots and they're pushing out narratives to get people to align. They're going to provoke emotion, dissonance and tribalism. And that is done intentionally.

01:06:23:07 - 01:06:57:00
Speaker 2
Yeah. That's actually where I was going to go with this, is that the comment section is probably minority humans at this point. And this the, the these conformity experiments are being run in the comment sections on YouTube are being run on X every single day. Because when you watch a video and the comment section is completely filled with bots all coming to one conclusion about it, you may have watched it and felt one thing, but then you read the comments or all the comments on a Facebook post or an ex post.

01:06:57:00 - 01:07:12:02
Speaker 2
And if everybody is seeing it differently than you do, there's a real possibility that you may look at it and think, oh, I must have gotten this issue wrong. Everybody else sees it this way, and in reality it's the everybody else is a bunch of computer.

01:07:12:02 - 01:07:12:18
Speaker 6
Bots.

01:07:13:00 - 01:07:22:21
Speaker 2
Who are there because this experiment exists and what's been learned from it to nudge you nudge your opinion. And so much of our modern world is nudging.

01:07:22:22 - 01:07:38:23
Speaker 3
Well, let's talk about how we can easily get nudged. A more modern experience on the role of social media has occurred within the past 15 years. Check this one out.

01:07:39:01 - 01:08:06:05
Speaker 1
New research indicates emotions are contagious even in the digital world of Facebook. Researchers at the Big Blue Social Network conducted an experiment on nearly 700,000 of the network's users without their knowledge. They removed a mostly positive post from one group of users and removed emotionally negative posts from another. Any such emotionally loaded posts had between a 10 to 90% chance of being omitted from user timelines.

01:08:06:06 - 01:08:30:12
Speaker 1
The researchers found the behavior of their subjects match their altered timelines. Those who saw more positive posts posted more positive updates of their own, and vice versa. In their paper, published this month in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They explained in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion.

01:08:30:13 - 01:08:51:04
Speaker 1
It's not the first study to find a motion propagates through Facebook like a contagious disease. There was another one earlier this year, published in the medical journal PLoS one that found similar results. But it's not just the findings that are getting attention. Facebook is drawing fire for not letting its users know the social networking site was altering timelines and conducting a study.

01:08:51:07 - 01:09:22:05
Speaker 1
Facebook says in its terms of service, it reserves the right to use user submitted data for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement. So, by its own terms of service, Facebook's research appears legal, but the ethics are a bit cloudier and are being criticized as tone deaf and unsettling. At Pando Daily. The whole point of the News Feed algorithm to hear Facebook tell it is to give users an experience tailored to their wants and interests.

01:09:22:06 - 01:09:45:02
Speaker 1
Clearly, that objective falls by the wayside anytime Facebook wants to turn its user base into a science experiment. University of Maryland technology and law professor James Grim told slate. If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that's experimentation. This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent. And take the Atlantics headline.

01:09:45:03 - 01:09:56:17
Speaker 1
Even the editor of Facebook's mood study thought it was creepy. Facebook told The Atlantic, it's only doing this research to improve its services. For newsy, I'm at Merino.

01:09:56:19 - 01:10:34:17
Speaker 3
Yeah. So here we're definitely being emotionally manipulated. Our own mood can be impacted by what is presented to us. And we're on that phone so often. Or you're being exposed to television. The images and the stories that they are presenting have a clear emotional impact that influences your behavior. This is called mood congruent behavior that when people are in a certain state of mind or a certain state of emotion, they're more willing than to, or they're more susceptible to filtering out information that is aligned with that emotional state.

01:10:34:17 - 01:10:59:12
Speaker 3
So we see this in the literature. And depressed people, depressed people pay attention to sad content, and then they filter out anything that is going to be competing to that same thing. If you're getting some really fun post or a story about the goodness of humanity, it's almost like it's priming you to pay attention to things in your own life that are also uplifting in that way.

01:10:59:12 - 01:11:05:23
Speaker 3
And so it's very important for us to have awareness of what we are consuming.

01:11:06:01 - 01:11:33:10
Speaker 2
I mean, we'll get into this in much greater detail in another episode that we do. But this whole idea of of where our attention goes, our energy flows, this this is such a powerful example of that, that when our attention goes to the negative, it is visible in an experiment that it's gone to the negative. Because what we see is then the posts we make following it are negative posts.

01:11:33:14 - 01:12:04:04
Speaker 2
And another piece here that's worth bringing up is that there have been a lot of whistleblowers from these social media companies coming forward and saying, hey, besides the fact that we've done these experiments where we see that, you know, that the rage is contagious, the sadness is contagious. We've also figured out that when you are in a state of outrage or upset, you're more likely to keep scrolling, you're more likely to stay on our app.

01:12:04:04 - 01:12:43:18
Speaker 2
And so we are intentionally prioritizing things in the feed that create a sense of outrage in agreement with your existing viewpoint. So like an echo chamber outrage machine, because we know you will get angry, but you'll stay on our app and you'll keep scrolling. And so these apps are literally, I think, poisoning our minds. I think they're poisoning our social relationships, too, because they are getting us deeper into an echo chamber and deeper into judgment against people who don't share our outrage of the week.

01:12:43:20 - 01:13:09:16
Speaker 3
Yeah, if it bleeds, it leads. And you know who's most vulnerable to this? Our adolescence. They're in a period of development where they're experiencing much more greater shifts and lability in emotions, and their brain is becoming developed in a way for as a survival mechanism. Right. So when you're a child, you're by your parents. You don't have to attend to threats.

01:13:09:18 - 01:13:51:00
Speaker 3
As you begin to evolve into adolescence and your brain begins to shift, you're now moving towards independence, and your mind is now consuming or attending to or recognizing potential threats, interpersonal threats, threats to your well-being, to your esteem, to your reputation. So you're driving in attention in that direction. And these apps really take advantage of that period. And you're seeing the mental health effect of screen exposure to really escalate during this period of pre-adolescent through adolescence.

01:13:51:00 - 01:14:16:17
Speaker 3
And when I was doing therapy and working with adolescents, one of the things I would always tell them is when you're seeing someone else's social media feed, remember that's their highlight reel. That's intentional. They're trying to create a version of themselves. Now imagine the teenager whose home alone on a Saturday night, and they check out their feet, and there's a friends out and they're having a great time.

01:14:16:17 - 01:14:27:03
Speaker 3
And they were not invited. Right. How painful that is. It's a real rejection that previous generations would have been protected against that.

01:14:27:04 - 01:14:52:01
Speaker 2
I'm honestly, I just have to say this. I'm so thankful to have grown up in an era where I didn't have social media in my teens. I feel like my heart breaks for some of these girls, especially because I think in some ways it's worse for the girls because the social, like the social mind of a teenage girl, is like we're they're more socialized to to wanting to fit in with their peers even than the boys are.

01:14:52:02 - 01:15:15:02
Speaker 2
And I think of the the research that Jonathan Haidt has done, we'll get into this on other episodes. But like, my heart breaks for these girls because they're exposed to a pressure that no other generation of humans before them has been where the pressure of the public square, the pressure of the school, follows them home into their bedroom.

01:15:15:04 - 01:15:40:11
Speaker 2
And, you know, I think parents are starting to wake up to this. There's great work by a woman called Claire Morrell, tech Exit, who, by the way, I very much hope you get on our show. But, you know, Facebook and meta, all of these like meta is settled a lawsuit where they're now supposedly going to make these sites safer for kids.

01:15:40:13 - 01:15:57:22
Speaker 2
I don't have teenage kids, but if I did, I would go and read Claire Morales work and work, Jonathan Heights work, and I would be looking for other people who could join me in not having my you know, that we all agree our kids are not going to be online.

01:15:58:00 - 01:16:18:04
Speaker 3
It's it's clear. I mean, the only way out of this imprisonment is to significantly decrease your time on these apps. I mean, there's some things that are just a very clear line. And you're right. If communities decided, like we all decided or parents all decided.

01:16:18:04 - 01:16:20:17
Speaker 2
That we're like a group of parents in a school, right? A group of friends.

01:16:20:17 - 01:16:28:22
Speaker 3
They're not getting a phone, right. They're not getting a phone to until this age. Or if you need something for communication purposes, it's something limited.

01:16:28:23 - 01:16:50:23
Speaker 2
And this is happening. There are groups of parents all over the world. In other words, these huge WhatsApp groups that have formed of of parents in various regions who are looking for each other and meeting each other so that you know you're not the only your kids, not the only one in ninth grade who's not walking around with a, you know, a social media and porn device in their pocket.

01:16:51:01 - 01:17:24:03
Speaker 3
Yeah. And remember, these algorithms are feeding information to your kids, to you as well, to provoke this emotion, to use that emotion to nudge you towards a conclusion. We see this in elections. They push something. It doesn't matter if it's true. Most of it's false. It's not even real. It's not even the position of the candidate. It's just designed to get you in a certain state of anger, to push that emotion, to nudge you towards a decision they want you to make.

01:17:24:04 - 01:17:49:14
Speaker 3
And these are powerful because it's done repeatedly over time, to the point where it is influencing your subconscious, where you come and make you come to the realization that your decisions are not your your own. That's why they can predict. They can actually predict the outcome of an election. Perfectly, absolutely, perfectly. This is another episode. There are no free elections.

01:17:49:15 - 01:18:07:16
Speaker 3
The candidates chosen for you, they're an actor. They're told what to say and everything that is filtered throughout the media scape throughout online is purposeful, intentional, and they know statistically how that election is going to turn out ahead of time.

01:18:07:18 - 01:18:14:08
Speaker 2
And you'll know a candidate who hasn't been selected by the massive effort, likely by both parties, to keep them off the ballot.

01:18:14:09 - 01:18:15:00
Speaker 3
Exactly.

01:18:15:00 - 01:18:32:19
Speaker 2
I have a friend running in New Hampshire right now who has faced massive opposition to keep him off the ballot, and that's basically your one sign. You're going to get that, you know, somebody is throwing sand and some very well honed, well greased gears by running when they're unapproved.

01:18:32:20 - 01:19:09:15
Speaker 3
So remember that emotion is contagious, right. So you can experience it from another person. You can experience it from an image or a story, and you're going to then express it in some way. It's going to fluence your behavior which will influence another person. Environment matters. Who you surround yourself matters. Like minded people tend to cluster together. So if you're in the experience of of people who have these strong views that in all likelihood not their own, they were purposely and intentionally conditioned into them.

01:19:09:15 - 01:19:44:20
Speaker 3
And there's an expression of it you are absorbing not only that energy, but you are. You are absorbing those ideas. And just from conformity alone, you're going to start adopting those ideas and you're going to start it's going to influence your actions or behavior. A conscious being is very clear about who they choose to be around, somebody who's draining of your energy, somebody who's negative all the time, someone who's pushing ideas very strongly, obviously with limited information, has a huge effect on our well-being.

01:19:44:21 - 01:20:12:09
Speaker 3
When I write in my book that the energy that we emit to to others, even without our words, just the expression of what we're experiencing internally, can affect another person's well-being. That doesn't make a lot of sense to people, right? But that's not thinking about the human experience in terms of we are emitting energy, that everything is energy.

01:20:12:09 - 01:20:37:05
Speaker 3
Even this table here is waves, right? So we can only see it in its physical form. But what we don't see, we still experience. Right. How do you get information on that phone. Right. How does that come to you? You don't see that, right. That's invisible those waves. Right. And so you should not be then to judgmental of yourself.

01:20:37:05 - 01:20:51:16
Speaker 3
When you experience waves you can't see and it affects your mood and you have no idea where you where it comes from. And you're like identifying it as something being wrong with you. It may not be you could be absorbing energy from a person or an.

01:20:51:16 - 01:21:18:03
Speaker 2
Idea, and they may not even be in the room. You and I have both had experiences where we be. We were experiencing significant like negative energy or significant emotional turmoil or distress or even physical illness, that of a type that's related to stress. And we don't we can't determine where it's coming from. Our mind can try to come up with reasons, but we know.

01:21:18:03 - 01:21:47:03
Speaker 2
But in reality, we're both sitting there going, look, I don't know why I'm feeling this way. I'm just telling you that I am. Yeah. And then the next day we find out something major happened with someone that we love, that, you know, when we, when we find out about it creates a lot of stress for us. But we were picking it up in the field at the our body was picking it up on an energy level when it happened before we found out.

01:21:47:04 - 01:22:08:23
Speaker 3
That's why the materialist viewpoint is so limiting and why we'll never advance. Health care will never advance human freedom and sovereignty without acknowledging the unseen and without being aware of such things. Because we see things in the limitations of time and space and matter. But we digress.

01:22:09:01 - 01:22:09:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, there's.

01:22:09:15 - 01:22:11:03
Speaker 10
Going to be there's going to be at least.

01:22:11:04 - 01:22:26:21
Speaker 2
An entire episode just on, you know, the scientifically validated studies that are out there on exactly this topic, where it's been, well, well established with, with double blinds and everything that these things do occur.

01:22:26:23 - 01:22:58:11
Speaker 3
One final study that we want to demonstrate is how knowledge is curated for you, and how your own unique psychological vulnerabilities lead you to assume something to be more valid and true than something else. Only based on where it's positioned or in terms of sequence when you learned it. Check this out.

01:22:58:13 - 01:23:33:13
Speaker 1
This phenomenon that we discovered a few years ago seem. Search engine manipulation effect is a list effect. List effect is an effect that a list has on some aspects of our cognitive functioning. What's higher in a list is easier to remember. For example, seem is an example of a list effect, but with a difference because it's the only list effect I'm aware of that is supported by a daily regimen of opera and conditioning that tells us that what's at the top of search results is better and truer than what's lower in the list.

01:23:33:15 - 01:23:59:08
Speaker 1
Most of the searches that we conduct are just simple routine searches. What is the capital of Kansas? And on those simple searches, over and over again, the correct answer arises right at the top. So we are learning over and over and over again. And then the day comes when we look something up that we're really unsure about. Like, where should I go on vacation?

01:23:59:08 - 01:24:25:00
Speaker 1
Which car should I buy? Like which candidate should I vote for? And we do our little search and there are results and what do we know? What's at the top is better. What's at the top is truer. That is why it's so easy to use search results to shift people's opinions. This kind of phenomenon, this is really scary compared to something like fake news because it's invisible.

01:24:25:00 - 01:24:52:14
Speaker 1
There's a manipulation occurring, they can't see it. It's not competitive because, well, for one thing, Google, for all intents and purposes, has no competitors. Google controls 90% of search in most of the world. Google is only going to show you one list in one order, which have a dramatic impact on the decisions people make on people's opinions, beliefs, and so on.

01:24:52:16 - 01:25:21:04
Speaker 3
So this is how you manufacture consensus. And I knew this back in 2018 or so, when I was deep diving into SSRIs, I had exposure to all this competing literature that demonstrated that these drugs were quite dangerous and not in the least effective, but it ended up getting buried in Google searches. So what I was started to do and I started promoting some of these ideas.

01:25:21:04 - 01:25:48:05
Speaker 3
And then people do people do is they they do a quick Google search, which at least 90% of people are going to use Google as your search engine. And I would see what was on that first page, the studies people would site to defend their position were the ones that were pushed by the pharmaceutical companies through various means, non-profits.

01:25:48:09 - 01:26:11:06
Speaker 3
WebMD was a big one, right? So WebMD would always come up on the front page and they would have their stories about SSRIs being safe. Effective would be the farm and narrative. It had the illusion of expertise to it. WebMD. Right. Like this is your doctor's consensus and the studies that people would site. I mean, they never read them.

01:26:11:06 - 01:26:36:20
Speaker 3
They would look at the title, which potentially the abstract, but they had no idea the limitations of the study, how it was constructed. And sometimes, as we know, the titles misleading and the conclusions can be misleading. So this is how you manufacture consensus through website optimization by paying for Google search placements. And it's where you flood people with the narrative you want people to believe.

01:26:36:21 - 01:26:54:07
Speaker 3
Same thing with the Covid propaganda. And people are just not going deep enough into what this literature actually says. They're somewhat lazy about it, and they have the illusion that they are knowledgeable because they have Google at hand. And that's been so dangerous.

01:26:54:11 - 01:27:23:21
Speaker 2
This is where I'm going to mention someone called James Corbett again. So he had an episode, I think he called it Open Sesame. And in this episode he talked about the, the fact that there were terms which, if you put them in on Google, had clearly been blacklisted, where all you were going to find for multiple pages down was content smacking you on the hand for even thinking of looking up such a term.

01:27:23:21 - 01:27:44:02
Speaker 2
An example for that would be controls, right? So if you put in chemtrails, the first five pages would just be you getting slapped on the hand for even thinking about wanting to learn about that. Everything was just Kim. Trails aren't real stupid, right? But that if you knew the.

01:27:44:04 - 01:28:05:04
Speaker 2
At the academic term for the same, well, they hadn't thought of blacklist that and suddenly all the information was available to you. So look up chemtrails. All you're going to get is is you dumb conspiracy theorist? What are you looking this topic up for? If you put in stratospheric aerosol injection, you'd find the academic papers and the white papers discussing doing this.

01:28:05:04 - 01:28:38:02
Speaker 2
And I bring this up because I think this is a moment to mention to people. It's really important to step outside the Google Gulag. Google controls so much of what we see, what we hear, what we experience digitally between YouTube and Google search and all of their other products and many people listen to this, may not actually know there are a lot of other really good search engines, and it's worth giving them a try.

01:28:38:07 - 01:29:02:06
Speaker 2
There's Swiss cows, there's brave. There's even one called cirques where you can run your own, your own search engine, where you can select any of these, your own search instance where you can run any of your own search engines. There's a great website called Private Phone Shop, where you can buy two phones, and also learn about all these ways to get out of the Google Gulag, as I like to call it.

01:29:02:07 - 01:29:41:17
Speaker 2
But I think it's really important for us to recognize how all of these things are being used to direct our attention and direct our desire for knowledge, right? It's like we're being pushed into a shoot toward a specific conclusion. And unless we know that's happening, it's really hard to resist it. So really easy thing. Just go try a different search engine, see if you survive the experience and discover that it's really easy to get outside this this one little area of control.

01:29:41:17 - 01:30:07:14
Speaker 2
It's not hard at all. Actually. I don't use any Google products in my life and I think I'm doing okay. I had a completely gold phone for a long time and you know, I do use an iPhone at the moment, but it's very possible for people to live without, you know, the big tech giants controlling their information feed.

01:30:07:14 - 01:30:15:18
Speaker 2
And for a lot of people hearing this, it might actually be news that, you know, so much of their life is controlled by just a few companies, but it's worth learning.

01:30:15:18 - 01:30:41:00
Speaker 3
About. Convenience is the cage, right? With my Apple accounts, everything is so easy, right? Your passwords are saved. You can you. It's connected to your bank account, your your phone and your computer or synced up. Right. There's just a fear of moving away from something that is so easy. And yeah, Google is just a huge part of our lives.

01:30:41:00 - 01:31:18:06
Speaker 3
But what we've done is we've made them an oligarchy. They have so much power over our own mind and our own actions and behaviors, that it's really difficult for us to be free, sovereign, conscious beings. When everything's done for us, we think it's being done for us and we assume that it's accurate. This is the challenge with AI right now is people believe that if they pop something into AI now, it's absolute truth and they believe they have some form of a PhD, but they're just reading off AI, another form of control.

01:31:18:12 - 01:31:38:05
Speaker 2
The if you're asking about like, you know, what is the wavelength of the color blue, you'll probably get a great answer. But if you're asking anything that is more from a dissident space, you are likely to get nudged back toward a conclusion that is more, you know, considered to be mainstream or in line with the technocracy.

01:31:38:07 - 01:32:05:11
Speaker 3
Yeah. One final statement on this is remember primacy and recency effects. What that means is you're most likely to remember the first thing that you were told and the last thing. So what is at the top of Google is critically important. They fight for that space. They'll pay for that space. That's why you see so many media outlets working in concert with each other, right?

01:32:05:11 - 01:32:25:07
Speaker 3
So it's the same headline, the same idea spread across all these media outlets. That's to build up the amount of reads, that's to push it on the algorithm, to get it to the top of the feed. More people are going to watch or read it. They're going to ingest it even when they're not conscious. It's going to seep into the subconscious.

01:32:25:08 - 01:32:52:02
Speaker 3
And now you you know something? Something's been planted. You don't even remember where you got it from. You just assume it's truth. Same thing with, you know, recency effects. So, you're more likely to share, you know, what you saw initially. Someone else might share something to you as well. Now that's the last thing you were told. So these are the two things you're going to remember.

01:32:52:04 - 01:33:19:15
Speaker 3
And in all likelihood they're similar. And so our memory works that way. Let's take a step back. Let's what are some key points here for our takeaways. Because I like to put things in. Sometimes I just like digestible like easy quotes to share with people. Like what is your take away from these studies?

01:33:19:17 - 01:33:52:15
Speaker 2
The biggest one to me is the power of the individual to change the collective by having the courage to be the first one to stand up, that following one's conscious can be just as contagious as anything else can be. And so, to never discount the power you have as an individual, when you stand up in a room full of people who are seated and say, guys, it's okay for us all to stand up now to be that person with their, you know, in that famous photo with everybody standing with a Nazi salute.

01:33:52:15 - 01:34:00:08
Speaker 2
And there was that one guy with his arms crossed, the power of being that person and be overstated.

01:34:00:10 - 01:34:25:01
Speaker 3
For me, the the information and the news that you have is the information in news they want you to have. So until you learn the rules. How do you win in this game? So to me you have to disconnect from the control mechanisms and regain your own independence. Does that mean you have to cold turkey never use technology?

01:34:25:02 - 01:34:57:18
Speaker 3
No, I don't believe that. It means that if you're going to search for information, become skilled at it. Look for something that is competing to your current worldview. Question how you attained that knowledge. Where are the holes in your argument? And the other thing is, just understand how easy it is to manipulate you emotionally. Emotions are contagious and so be mindful and conscious of what you're feeling.

01:34:57:19 - 01:35:28:23
Speaker 3
If it's a low frequency emotion, in all likelihood, if there's no major event that's going on in your life, you are influenced to feel that way. And then what we do is we compound it by acting on it. So going back to something you said earlier, a more mindful approach to life bringing meditation, periods of silence, disconnect from technology allows you to become grounded and present in your life, to be more observant versus reactive.

01:35:29:00 - 01:35:54:07
Speaker 3
A reactive population is a sick population. A reactive population is one that is doing exactly what they want you to do, right? They're trying to create a reaction. You are not morally superior when you're in judgment of the alternative group, you're manipulated. How does that feel? Right? Let that sink in that you're not as free as you think you are.

01:35:54:12 - 01:36:25:14
Speaker 3
You are controlled. You're a controlled opposition. You're being you're serving some greater narrative for people in power. And until you free yourself from that, it's going to be nearly impossible to think independently. Here's a telltale sign and be aware of the tells. If you start feeling rage full or angry at another person who is holding a different opinion, you have been nudged.

01:36:25:15 - 01:36:52:15
Speaker 3
You have been conditioned. You are now a soldier for that army, if you approach it as someone has a different opinion than me, and I am curious to know how they arrived at that opinion, two things can happen and they both benefit you. One you learn something new. Awesome. That's how we work through those obstacles in our life.

01:36:52:15 - 01:36:56:19
Speaker 3
We grow. We expand. Love expands fear contracts.

01:36:56:20 - 01:36:58:00
Speaker 2
I want to jump on that for.

01:36:58:00 - 01:36:58:10
Speaker 10
A second.

01:36:58:11 - 01:37:27:07
Speaker 3
I'll get you back to that because there's two things. So the second one that and I said they're both good is you strengthen your position. Right. You now understand it maybe with greater depth even what somebody who doesn't hold the same viewpoint as you do, you might know a little bit more. Right? And if you're loving right, if you're not antagonistic or confrontational like they're trying to do, they're trying to divide us so they can act without our attention on them.

01:37:27:09 - 01:37:35:10
Speaker 3
If you're not confrontational, then you have the ability to potentially influence another.

01:37:35:12 - 01:38:00:22
Speaker 2
So we have two signs behind us here in the studio on this side over here. We have been on afraid on this side. Over here we have love the people. And to me, one of the things we learn from the studies that we talked about today is that fear is one of the easiest things to use to manipulate human beings.

01:38:01:00 - 01:38:14:00
Speaker 2
Fear of the other, fear of being the outcast, fear of being wrong. Fear of an authority figure disapproving of us.

01:38:14:02 - 01:38:39:09
Speaker 2
But love is one of the few things that can get us outside that, or can allow us to overcome the fear and still act for the good of our fellow man. And so if if we find a way to be not afraid and to love the people, we will find ourselves in many ways stepping outside. So many of these control mechanisms.

01:38:39:09 - 01:39:09:07
Speaker 2
And any time somebody else tells us another group or another person is not worthy of our love, our, you know, the agape love that that is available in us for any other human being on the planet. Anytime anyone tells tells you that anyone is not worthy of that, in that moment you will. You can know in your heart you are being manipulated.

01:39:09:07 - 01:39:14:12
Speaker 2
You're being manipulated into fear. And it's time to make a choice between love and fear.

01:39:14:14 - 01:39:30:16
Speaker 3
Very clearly, we can deep dive more intensely on a lot of these subjects. If you are interested in that, join our inner circle. Go to Radically Genuine. This is where we will create series we will have.

01:39:30:18 - 01:39:36:21
Speaker 3
Open discussions, question shapes from our members, live events.

01:39:36:21 - 01:39:42:22
Speaker 2
And we're going to have members voting on which of these topics they want us to go into more depth on, and then we'll create special episodes for them.

01:39:42:23 - 01:40:11:22
Speaker 3
Yeah, I said in the beginning, we could do, you know, 500 studies where we could take one and then talk about how that's used in so many ways and what our response is. Hopefully today, I think we what we did is we I think we increase people's appetite maybe for this, maybe under how people become more aware of things that they probably know, but they don't really think too deeply about.

01:40:11:22 - 01:40:27:18
Speaker 3
And if so, if we can nudge people in a direction to be more conscious, then we're going to slowly start winning this battle. Thank you. Tracy Thurman, what a radically genuine conversation today was.

01:40:27:23 - 01:40:29:00
Speaker 2
Always a pleasure.