If we aren’t aware of what is happening to our ability to communicate on both an individual and a societal level, we are in big trouble. Expert communicator David Charalambous joins me on today’s episode to break down the psychodynamics of communication, over the past 2 years especially. David is versed in NLP, EFT, General Semantics, System Theory, Process Mapping, Dynamics and Communication. He explains why 90% of opinionated conversations are doomed before the first word is even said, and he gives us the methods, drawing from numerous fields, to be able to effectively communicate.

AUBREY: David Charalambous, here we are. And we have to straighten some things out. There's some issues with the way that people are communicating right now. And I think this is something that we can certainly feel we're not listening to each other. We're not communicating in a way that's healthy or productive or getting us anywhere. And you have some pretty key insights on how to look at this, from a meta perspective, and then actually start to apply some different understandings that can help illuminate how we can start to, instead of just talking at each other, talk to each other and listen to each other.

DAVID: Yeah, I think that's a really a very key point at the moment, Aubrey, and I don't think it's a bold statement to say that 90% plus of conversations from people of different opinions are doomed before the first word is said. And the question is, how do we reverse that? How do we create the situations where we can actually have open and honest conversations where information can flow back and forth? 

AUBREY: That's the key. I mean, we are not going to do this alone. One side is not going to win triumphantly. And then all of a sudden one side wins and they've suppressed everybody sufficiently enough that now we're in the more beautiful worlds because we won. We all have to do this together. It's a group project. We're all sharing this planet. We're all sharing this culture. We're sharing this all together and we must come together. And the basis of that, the substrate of that has to be effective communication. 

DAVID: Absolutely. I think the first thing when we start talking about science, that's when we're straight away. We have a problem. Don't we? Because we're presupposing we're in different viewpoints. And there's a really brilliant psychologist. I think he passed away recently, Lee Ross, his name was, and he coined a thing called the objectivity illusion. So generally as human beings, and this isn't anyone more than anyone else, this is all of us. We think that we're not biased. And everyone else is, so on the road, it's full of maniacs who are driving too fast and idiots who are driving too slow. And then the second part, which is really, really key, I think we've all experienced the last two years, is the undue optimism that other people can be influenced by what we have to share. So, I mean, I spoke to so many doctors and scientists and experts in the last two years. And everyone to a T really thought, I'm just going to share with them the facts. And then that will be enough. And everyone would just come around and I think that's clear that isn't the case. And what's really fascinating about this from my perspective is that it's nothing new. If you look through history, there's quotes everywhere that point this out. So Max Planck said, science moves on one funeral at a time. And what he was referring to is that someone comes up with a new theory, a new idea. And all the established scientists or medical establishment, whatever it will be, will resist that idea because it differs from the one they currently believe to be true.

AUBREY: And this isn't just a philosophy, a theory, um, this is actually, I cited this in my book, Own the day, that when a dominant theorist in science, when that dominant theorist passes away, there is this flourishing of new citations from new scientists in the field, new thinkers in the field. But while the dominant scientist is alive, then there's very few other citations that actually exist. It's like, we're in a certain paradigm of the person who thought about it. And then that person passes, then all kinds of new ideas flourish. And this is the thing. Science was always supposed to be a process to help us get to the truth. It is not the truth.

DAVID: Absolutely. 

AUBREY: Science itself is not, it can point to the truth for sure, and we try to get closer and closer and continue to point to truth. But countless examples throughout history of science evolving, changing from understandings of physics into quantum physics to understandings of health and all in every different category. Science is constantly evolving. So it's like people say, trust the science. It's like saying, have faith in God. It's like, it's this idea instead of being like, all right, well, yes, listen to the science and listen to the continued evolution of it and be curious, not about where it is now, but where it's going, because it's always going somewhere. It's always pointing to an even more complex nuanced and greater understanding of truth. And sometimes a wild reversal of the popular and dominant opinions. I mean, we saw that again, I talked about this in my book where everybody started replacing fat in your diet with sugar and they're like, sugar's better. Low fat, nonfat, well, nonfat milk is just taking out all the fat and then really concentrating the amount of lactose, which is a sugar. That you have in there in the way, which is the protein protein is fine, but ultimately it's not helpful. And then there was this huge reversal and then on the cover of time magazine, it'll fucking stick a butter and people are like, “whoa, actually we got it all wrong.” So this happens continually.

DAVID: Yeah, well, that's so fascinating. I mean, there's so many points. I mean, the Semmelweis was a classic. 

AUBREY: Yep. Ignis Semmelweis. 

DAVID: Ignis. Yeah. Incredible. Like what really is fascinating about that? He had the data. It wasn't a theory. He had the lowest child mortality. 

AUBREY: So for people who don't know the story of Ignis Semmelweis, I can tell it or you can tell it. Might as well have you tell it. 

DAVID: Sure, go ahead. Oh, well, I know this is an overview really. So if you know it deeply, maybe. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Well, fundamentally he was working on delivering babies. He was working, that was his job. And what he realized was that when babies were being delivered by nurses they had a much higher rate, in the nurses were actually washing their hands. And the doctors were actually working on corpses doing autopsies and different things like that so they were coming, actually, from diseased people and not washing their hands and delivering babies, the mortality rate of the mothers and the children, especially the mothers increased dramatically. And so he started to develop this theory that hand washing actually was a crucial step to the safety of delivering children. And this went against all of the mainstream understanding. And it was so vigilantly with so much vitriol suppressed that actually he was thrown into a mental institution for championing these beliefs, where he was actually beaten and actually got sepsis from a bacteria. That actually ended up killing him. I mean, this is one of the great tragic stories where he was championing something that was absolutely true, was suppressed and ridiculed and laughed at to the point that he was institutionalized and killed for the very thing that he believed. And then posthumously, he's awarded the highest honors in science for promoting this. And it's just one of many, many stories like this. 

DAVID: And what's fascinating about this is that 50 years or so later, another person comes along with the story, and then it's widely accepted. Now what's really interesting is what's the difference. So I think, from what we've experienced, cognitive dissonance is the problem. So, I know you would know what this is. For the listeners that haven't come across it, cognitive dissonance is really just two thoughts, or a belief in a thought, or an identity in a thought, etc. that do not match. And what happens is that when someone experiences dissonance, the brain wants to resolve it as quickly as possible. So it's going to change either the behavior, the belief or the identity or any one of those things. If the idea is coming externally, as semiwise presents the information. Most people will reject it. And that's what happened to the medical establishment, that they rejected it outright because it differed from what they believed to be true, regardless of the data. That makes sense. And this generally happens, if you supply an idea to somebody where that idea that they understand differs, it will pretty much trigger dissonance every time. There is a way around it. There's also a very nuanced thing that a lot of people will talk about, “oh, it's good to trigger dissonance in someone.” But I think it's only good to trigger, if you trigger the two thoughts being inside the other person's head, that makes sense. So you're pointing out to them where they've got two things that don't match, and therefore you've highlighted to them an error in their thinking, and therefore they get a chance to resolve it. Does that make sense? Because what we've seen is that nearly every scientific conversation I witness in social media is really people just throwing facts at each other. So what you find is that if we create a visual for this, and we do this in one of our slides where we effectively stand on a soapbox and we project out onto the world, what's in our soapbox? So all our belief systems, our views about the world, et cetera. And so you've effectively got two people just arguing about who's got the most correct soapbox. Now, here's where it gets really interesting because if you ask someone why they believe what they believe. They will actually just go about justifying what they believe. So you won't get anywhere. It's literally the worst question to ask. And what's really fascinating about this, there's so many studies about this recently and there's this term that's called the illusion of explanatory depth. And if you ask that person, not why they believe what they believe, but actually what they believe. So you ask them to explain it. And then you get the most fascinating thing, because we all suffer from this. I've suffered from it a lot over the last two years where I've gone to explain something and I realize, “Oh, actually I don't know that as fully as I thought I knew it.” And then it's given me the opportunity to go and research it further. And that's the beauty of doing so many presentations, is that you get to know what you know deeply. But one of the most fascinating things about this, they ran a series of studies where they would go up to people of a certain political association, and they'd say to them, “why do you believe your political affiliation is the right one?” The person would then just justify it. And then they said to them, “can we make a donation on your behalf?” And what it did, it reconfirmed their beliefs. So they said, “yeah, sure.” But if they asked them, what is it about this political party that you support and what are the policies, the people suddenly realized they didn't know. So then they said, “can we give a donation on your behalf?” And they said, “Oh, actually, no, I'm not sure now.” So it's really fascinating because the brain, what we do is to have sort of this ease of life, which the brain wants. And obviously we're moving around with this as one of our main tools, it fills in so many gaps for us. I mean, it does a lot of work. So, because there's something like a few hours a day, we have no sight, but we don't notice that because the brain fills in the gap. And there's things, so it's really fascinating that I think this really, for me, is one of the main things to have this self awareness of, I think Richard Feynman really summed it up. He said, it's really important. The most important person you shouldn't fall for is yourself because you're the easiest person to fall. So I think when we look inwards, and I know anyone that's done a lot of personal development would have looked in towards their own belief systems and double checked. Makes sense. So when you start exploring, you start journeying. This is why we end up really changing our views on life, don't we? Because we go out searching and then we have, I think as you pointed out, truth that tends to reveal itself to you. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And I think one of the keys here is that we don't attach our identity to our beliefs, right? Like if you have a tribal identity. For example, as belonging to a political party to actually look at that party and go, wait, I don't think I agree with this. It challenges your identity and at that point it challenges your identity. Your identity is your ego structure, your separate self structure. It is literally like a part of you is dying. It's a part of your identity. It's a part of your ego body that must die. And so it's painful. So of course we want to push that away. We don't want to, our instinct is not to die. It's not to allow that part to die because we're attached to it. Whereas the place that actually allows for open mindedness and the flexibility of thought is to not be attached to all of these beliefs. And this gets very difficult in professions where your entire career, your livelihood, the way that people know you is as an expert in a certain in a certain topic epidemiologist or whatever that is and then all of a sudden if you go, “actually. I was wrong.” Then that's so difficult because then you're saying, actually, I don't deserve to be the expert in this situation. And you have to sacrifice a lot. Now, of course, the true expert is always the first to be willing to admit they're wrong. And that actually propels them to even greater heights because they can navigate, but you see this in countless examples. A classic example was when Graham Hancock went to debate the top Egyptologist and the Egyptologist is holding this position that the pyramids are 3000 years old period. There was nothing else to develop before that. And Graham Hancock has countless evidence of different water damage and different things. And he won't even sit down there and talk to him. He just immediately gets up before the debate even starts and then shouts some insults and derogatory things towards Graham and just leaves, just walks out of the room, because he was not willing to actually look at this truth and he had no argument for it. So instead he just went to attack ad hominem, which is one of the cognitive biases. And I know we'll talk a bit about that ad hominem attack. Grandma, he's a whack. He's a kook, he's unscientific. He's not an expert. And so you just attack the person and then he doesn't have to deal with it at all. And then he could maintain his position as the authority on all things, ancient Egypt. 

DAVID: Absolutely. I mean, again, that's a very eloquent way because we start to then unravel what's going on. Because Korzybski wrote a very powerful book called science and sanity in the fifties. I think it was, and he coined the identification is one of the most unsane things that we do as humans and the classic example that I think you alluded to was if someone says, I am a teacher, or I am a doctor, then that's how they see themselves, but they're not a teacher or a doctor, they're a human being. Teaching is something you do. Medicine is something you practice. And I think what happens is semantically, we start coding it incorrectly, and then semantically we start changing the pictures by which we represent ourselves, and of course that then causes a problem. And of course, the other point you made, which was on the objectivity illusion, the three steps, the third step that I didn't mention, was actually what you touched on, was negative attribution to anyone that doesn't agree with us. So instantly, they're stupid. Okay? And if you are someone that does a lot of really clear, good research, you can think that someone that hasn't is actually, it will be one of the first things that we do would attribute it being their personality. And of course, in fact, this is what they call in behavioral science or social sciences, the fundamental error. And this is something I think is one of the most fascinating things, is that the fundamental error we make is that when someone behaves a certain way, we attribute it to their personality rather than the situation. And in fact, it's a combination of both. And of course, when you start looking at how children, the environments they're in, that governs how they develop much more. Because I think personally, I think inside of us all is the Buddha mind and also disaster. And which side we tap into. I mean, have you seen Ted talk with the happiest man in the world? He is brilliant. He's a monk and he discusses that they were doing these studies in schools and all they did was to get the children to meditate for 20 minutes a day. They didn't tell them what to do. They just gave him that space and said, look, go off. Quiet your mind, relax. And then after a few weeks, these children stopped bullying each other, they started sharing more, they started just being thoroughly nicer than they were previously. And that really just starts to beg the question, is that their inherent true nature? And is it just that they can't quiet their mind enough to hear it, the whisper? Life's consciousness is always whispering this to us. And I know that Reggie Ray, who does a lot of somatic descent in somatic meditations, he says that we have so much of life and so many experiences that we're not digesting them enough. So it's a bit like eating a meal and then we eat another meal, then we eat another meal. We never really digest them. We never really process our emotions and therefore come to terms with what's going on. And in fact, emotion is one of the most fascinating things that's going on in all of this. And I could share some stories that really sort of were so enlightening and so rewarding, I think, on many levels.

AUBREY: Please do. 

DAVID: Yeah. So one of the most powerful stories that I heard when we started this project, and of course, when I go back to March, 2020, I had 20 years experience in studying NLP psychology, how the mind works. And I considered myself to be a good communicator, but I had a kind of rude awakening because it's really when the conversation is charged that you see how good a communicator you are. So, I found myself going into conversations that just didn't go how I expected them to go. So I felt hopeless for literally a month or so just thinking what the hell is going on. But then I sort of had the question, we need to understand this. And that's when I dived into course after course, after book, after book, managed to talk. And I tell you, one of the things around the ego that my sister crushed my ego with a question. And it's really a brilliant question. Well, she said something to me and then explained it. So she said to me, “you always think you're right.” And I didn't know what to say because I was like, actually, yeah, I do, but I know logically I can't be, that makes sense. So I had these two things bouncing against each other where my brain wanted to always be right, but yet my knowledge of wanting to follow the truth and expand and grow and meditate and follow science, all these things says that I can't be. So what happened was those two things bang against each other and one of them had to give in. And it's nearly always the ego that will collapse because the search for truth is much higher. It's like the purpose. And then I realized that once I realized that I wasn't right about things, then I had to journey to search to find the truth. That makes sense. So it was real, it was very tough coming to terms with that. But then we developed a question to ask lots of people. And so a lot of people, when they are really making a presentation of a case, I'm asking the question, I said, “would you rather be right or find the truth?" Does that make sense? So that pits the ego versus the purpose. And of course the person will, every time they've answered, well, obviously I want to go for the truth, but they do experience some discomfort before they admit that, that makes sense. So it's almost letting go of the ego. So one of the most powerful stories that I've heard and literally it and I told an audience on Friday night and you could, the whole audience just, you could feel the visceral move and it really alluded me to, we were onto something that I think was very valuable. So there's a lady in our group and she's a trained psychologist. We call her Rachel. And this is a true story that she went to the local park during the lockdown and she took a few colleagues with her. So there's three or four of them and they're in a park and there's this elderly lady on a bench and she has a mask on and she starts shouting over. So in the UK we had a lockdown where a lot of people weren't allowed to leave, but you could go out for certain things. So Rachel has gone down the park and that's well within her job description. She's taken a few colleagues and they're there to help anyone that's in need. So the elderly lady starts shouting over super spreaders, what you're doing is wrong, really being very aggressive. And Rachel was getting somewhat agitated by this. As you can imagine, it was very, not very justified. But she remembered a conversation we had where she said one of the most important things is not to step in the ring. So the minute you step in a ring metaphorically with someone, there is no conversation, there's no dialogue. All you're going to do is shout at each other. So this continued, this continued, then the elderly lady walked over to her. And she went to say something, and then Rachel turned around, put her hand on her heart, and she said, “how can I help you, my dear?” And the old lady was sort of taken aback, and then she said, “What you're doing is wrong.” And then Rachel said, “Look, I'm a trained psychologist. I'm here to help anyone. We're within the law. What's happening to you is not fair. How can I help you?” So then the old lady looks up and says, “I don't want to get emotional.” And Rachel says, “it's fine. I'm a trained psychologist. I'm here to help. You can get a motion if you need to.” The older guy then looks up and says, “I just need a hug.” And it was, wow. So that unmet need in needing a hug then manifests as anger for not getting that. And then the anger was attached to this lady standing there thinking that it's because of her, she wasn't getting her hug. Now, if Rachel hadn't transcended that and remembered not to step in the ring, they would have just obviously gone back and forth.

AUBREY: Sure. If she would have started talking about mask science and about studies on different places that locked down and didn't lock down in the aggregate reports of case numbers and all of that. It would have just been an argument that would have gone nowhere.

DAVID: Nowhere. And as it turned out, they spoke for 20 or 30 minutes and really connected. And one of the fascinating things about that story, is that when I tell people that story, because the majority of people, when they think about whichever camp you're in, and you have people that have opposing views, everyone thinks the other camp's wrong. That's the standard view, isn't it? That's why we're in our camp, because we think we're the ones that are closer to the truth. But you see, it's the emotions that each side is experiencing is the key part. Because in fact, they mirror each other's emotions. So the elderly lady was feeling fair, bitterness, anger, all these things towards Rachel and Rachel not liking lockdowns, et cetera, was feeling the same emotions about anyone that's complying. So what you have is this seesaw balance of divide and conquer. And we can look a little bit into that because it's very interesting because Robert Sapolsky is a neuroscientist. I think at Stanford has made some, I think startling discoveries about literally the structure of divide and conquer. So it's really about creating the situations, as I said. So that thing, this thing about, there's a very famous book called The person in the situation. And really understanding, and I'd say this really changed my life when I understood a lot of these a bit deeper. For example, there's a very famous study from 73 from Batson and Darby around, they got these seminary students. So these people are literally studying to be priests. So their whole livelihood is going to be dedicated to wanting to help other people. They told half of them that they were going to give a sermon on the Good Samaritan. Okay, so that's literally in half the forefront of their mind. And then what they did, they split them into three different groups. One group, they said to them, you're going to go to the adjacent building, but you're running late. So you have to rush. The second group were told they were on time and the third group were told you have plenty of time. Then they placed an actor on the journey. feigning in need of attention. Okay. So the good Samaritan. Now the group that had loads of time, 65% of those stopped. But the group that were in a rush, only 10 percent of those stopped. 

AUBREY: So painting this picture again, you have three different groups under a different premise. Some of which think that they have ample time, some of which think that they're late. And then you have somebody who's presumably laying down, saying things like, making comments, gestures, things, saying, groaning, showing that they need help. And they're going to a lecture on the Good Samaritan, the poetic irony of this is very rich. And the difference is that when people thought they were on time, you said 65% stopped. 

DAVID: When they had lots of time, 65% stopped. But when they were rushed, only 10%. 

AUBREY: Huge difference 

DAVID: Which is a huge difference. So what you have, and they call it a narrowing of the cognitive map, but that really jarred me at the time because I thought, I got out myself and thought, there's times when I'm in a rush, where I know I'm not my best self, that makes sense. So if I'm going to be the best me, I need to design my environment and my situations that allow me to be the best me, in a sense, so I've got to eat well, I've got to be rested, I've got to have all these situations, and then you look at the world at large. How many situations are created that people can be their best self?

AUBREY: Yeah, most people are like the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, who's always late. “I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.” Like we go through our entire life from one thing to another. And then even in the in-between time, we're so wound up into this high paced thing that we actually will whip out our phone and start going through different things and refreshing this post or refreshing our emails. They're just ready to like. Do something else. Because we're moving so quickly and that's not going to allow us to actually be a good steward for ourselves or for the culture at all. 

DAVID: Exactly. And of course there's so many, cause that starts to unravel a lot more things. So you've got all the dopamine. You've got the needs and wants, you've got the compulsion loops that are built into all the social media, the smart tech, all these things. So we live largely addictive lifestyles and most of us are not aware. So, I’ve, very on purpose, turned my smartphone off all the time, and then become aware of, if i felt anything about that. So if you said to the average person, go out and leave your phone at home a lot of the time you'd feel this emotion and then you'd think, “do I want to be that way?” That's the question is it? Do I want to be that way? Do I want to be living in a ditch of lifestyle? But I think what's key about this is that it's unfair to criticize us because a lot of this doesn't make it into our awareness. Because the brain's covering up the gaps. So, and this is the beauty, I think about really understanding these situations, because then you can start to create learning experiences for people, where they can start to really experience it. And that's the beauty of stories as well, because stories can create that. So the majority of people that challenged the narrative. I think I've done a lot more research than anyone that wouldn't challenge it. That's just usually a given, but we often misattribute someone that is not challenging it to them being not intelligent or any other number of things. And I don't think that's true. I think the situations that they've been put in a lot of the time have not warranted them developing the critical thought or any other number of things. It could be a hundred different things. But creating the right situations, and this comes back to, I think I was watching a bit of the circling video that you had, and that's the kind of key stuff that you create a dialogue that no one's right or wrong. There's no ego and all those things. And then what you see is you see people flourish. You see people really open up because there's another very interesting thing that you can create the right conditions to corrupt about 65 percent of the population's moral compass. Which seems crazy, but there's four conditions. You, you just create moral justification. You minimize the consequences, you dehumanize the victims, and you displace responsibility. And then two thirds of people will start to have their moral compass distorted, beyond their awareness. 

AUBREY: So how would you apply that? So let's apply those four principles. Apply that to, obviously we have the idea of the seminary. The seminary members and the being late and not late, which is their desire to be on time and be a good boy or a good girl in the eyes of some authority rather than actually being a good boy or a good girl and helping somebody who needs fucking help actually being a good Samaritan. So it's this misguided value hierarchy of what is actually important in your moral hierarchy, but so that we have that example, but let's apply it to something that's more culturally relevant. 

DAVID: I think if you took a product, say some asbestos or anything like that, where someone's selling a product that might not be in the best interest of the person purchasing it, that's a real classic example. Because what you'll have people say is they will go, “Oh, the end justifies the means we owe it to our shareholders.” “I've got a mortgage to pay,” et cetera, et cetera. That's more justification. Minimize the consequences will be, “Oh, well, we've got insurance. If we get caught, it doesn't matter.” All these things. Then dehumanizing the victims will be, if you call a group of people, a consumer, they're no longer humans, are they? They're just a name or a concept because there's this thing, which in you'll see a lot of the advertising, where they have a single person looking out from the poster, making a statement, the very clear reason for that, that if you say 10,000 people experience, blah, blah, it doesn't really mean anything to the person. You know what the words mean, but you don't experience it, but you have a single person looking out from a car accident saying, drive, then suddenly becomes very real. So the dehumanizing. The victims are a really key point because every war you'll notice the propaganda is always the other side are bad people, they beat animals up, whatever it is to bring them down. And the last space is the displaced responsibility, which, “Oh, I'm just following orders, et cetera, et cetera.” So you fill those four things and then you'll see that people really will go, “Oh, it doesn't really matter.” It'd be okay if I do this. And it takes a strong gap character, especially if the whole group goes in that way. But what Sapolsky showed, which is really fascinating, is that in the sort of divide and conquer, which also has these dehumanized victims, is that there's a part of the brain where we code morality, which is the insular cortex. And what happens is that when we see another group of people as immoral, we start seeing them as dehumanized. But we feel disgust towards them because only by accident, that's the same part of the brain responsible for the gag reflex. So it's only because morality developed when the brain was fully developed, that we just used a different part of the brain. And I think a lot of the problems we've got are basically just misattribution and misunderstandings. So when we know thyself better, when we know thyself more, we can create the situations where we won't encounter this. And things like the circle and other things like that. I think they create those circumstances. That makes sense. 

AUBREY: It's interesting to think about how, because the body does things intelligently and I don't think it's an accident that disgust was linked to immorality, right? Like it seems like in the infinite wisdom and of our own consciousness, it was like, all right, what can we attach to immorality that will create the strongest averse reaction? 

DAVID: The visceral.

AUBREY: Visceral, where it's like, oh, disgust, great. Like we have this tool that's built in to keep us from eating feces or rotten food or something like that. We have that thing that's very strong that helps keep us alive and we're going to attach our morality to this thing. And that will actually ensure that humans follow it, but without some straightening of the codes, without some ways in which we understand that this is happening and what the heuristics, these little shortcuts that the brain is using to fill in, then the system has gone awry. And it's actually spitting out a different outcome than it was ultimately designed. So it's not that it was a design flaw, it's actually the software that was put into the hardware. 

DAVID: We're not using it the right way. And also we're being misled in a lot of instances as well. Like the social structures don't really reflect what our needs are today. So, it's just a lot of the time, it's like when you look at CEO’s, it's like three times the average CEO has a psychopathic nature than the average person 

AUBREY: Or sociopath 

DAVID: So, actually, I think we did actually look at this friend of mine. It's actually a psychopath. 

AUBREY: A psychopath.

DAVID: Yeah. They literally display that. Because he said that to me, said sociopath and I said I'm not sure. So we googled it and looked into it. It's actually a psychopath. Because they say a lot of corporations actually act like a serial killer because they don't care for their actions. They're about making money, but I think it's the conditions again. So the divide and conquer that Sapolsky talks about, and he tells a really beautiful story and it's really got three elements to it. The first one's classification, which is just given a group label, them and us. The second one's identification, which you already touched on, which is really key and something we do in an unsane way a lot of the time. Third one is comparison. So we always compare ourselves as being in the better group, because that's why we chose that group. That inherently isn't that problematic, unless one of the groups is seen as immoral. Because once that is coded as immoral, The human brain will then start to support violence against that group, as a group. It's really straightforward to break down because once you connect past the group to the human to human, it then disappears really quickly. And the beautiful story that Sapolsky tells is in 1914 in the first world war, it's Christmas. And they had a ceasefire. I'm not entirely sure why it was, I think it was because there were so many bodies in no man's land that they were having trouble killing each other. So they had the ceasefire to recover the bodies. So, then what you found was, each side the Germans and the English troops knew that they weren't going to shoot each other. So then, they started helping each other recover the bodies. And then they started helping each other dig the graves. So then you had this thing where they started relating to each other as people, rather than as a German soldier or an English soldier. So it went beyond the symbolic nature or where they were. And then what happened was that they started exchanging addresses to communicate after the war, and then famously they had a football match. They literally playing football in no man's land. And then the following days they didn't want to fight anymore and it took officers going into the trenches to threaten to shoot them unless they started fighting again. And for me, that gives me so much hope because in such a short space of time, they've been trained for years and then in the space of days, they're like, I don't want to do this anymore. And he also says that so many of the guns during wars are not fired. And I didn't realize this. He said, there's a high percentage of guns that are not fired.

And the person would rather die than kill someone else, but we're not told this. It's incredible, isn't it? When you start to see that, and I think that's that sort of Buddha mind, Buddha nature thing that when you can reconnect someone back to their self and seeing each person as another unique individual, I think it breaks through all that conditioning is such a quick space of time.

AUBREY: Yeah. And we see it on, the thing is that you may be thinking like, “yeah, that other side dehumanizing me, those sheep over there dehumanizing me.” And then you're like, “wait, did I just call him a sheep? Wait, that's not a human, what did I just do?” And we'll slip into these traps, like, yeah, all right. Of course it hurts if you're being called a fascist because you support your sovereignty of your own health or your Q adjacent because you question the effectiveness of masks or like whatever the different labels or a domestic terrorist, because you choose not to take the vaccine. Like all of these different things. And then you say, then your natural vitriol will rise, and then you wanna dehumanize the other side and you get in these hatfields and McCoys of dehumanization until you're literally ready to go to war against each other. And the powers that beat understand this. And understand these tribal impulses and the ways that you can rally and like, get people to, again, divide and conquer, be at each other's throats and be fighting amongst each other, which obviously serves a greater power because it's easier to control when people are not united. And this is where obviously there's whole rabbit holes of conspiracies and different things, but whether or not there's an intelligent force that's actually doing this, or whether this is just a product of what's happening because of our own inherent nature, it doesn't matter. Ultimately, the solution is the same. Like we have to go back to what we were talking about before. And see the individual, like see the person who's on the other side and understand. Okay. Like we're looking for the same things, we're looking for safety, we're looking for a place to feel comfortable and also recognize that that comparison thing is a slippery, seductive trap for the ego, because the ego only knows itself in relative position. Are you a good basketball player? I don't know. It depends on who you're playing. If I'm playing against fourth graders, I'm fucking LeBron James. If I'm playing against LeBron James, I'm a fourth grader. It entirely depends. And we have that as far as our personhood. And again, I'm not. One of the things that we'd like to think about ourselves the most is that we're the most moral. So when you have morality linked in, Oh, I'm helping other people. I'm doing this for the greater good. And you have both sides vehemently believing that they're doing something for the greater good. That's the deepest part of the identity and the ability to say, I'm better than all of those people. I'm better than Joe Rogan. Like he has all of these different things that secretly you may want, but if you're more moral than him in your framework, then you get to stand your feet of your ego right on his head and piss on him and be like, look at me pissing on Joe Rogan. That must mean I'm fucking special. And I'm just using Joe as an example. There's countless other people from both sides. That people are doing this. I'm pissing on Joe Biden. I'm the president of the United States. I'm pissing on this person. I'm better than them. And it's so seductive for the ego to pile bodies of people's identities underneath you to say, “well, I may not be happy with my life, but I can tell you one thing I'm better than all these fucks.” And at that point, it's something that feels really good to the ego, but it's incredibly damaging and it will never actually make it

DAVID: It’s destructive.

AUBREY: It's destroying. 

DAVID: Yeah, it's destructive. I was sent an article some time ago. And I think it was a very deep article and it explained that there's four dynamics. And in any relationship, you are always going to be one of these four dynamics. And when I started looking at the world, I mean, it literally changed my life because I realized when I would be doing that. So there's the four dynamics. The first one is called supplicative, but what it really is, it's the parent child. So for the first six years of life, the child is at the full mercy of the parent. They kind of look to them as God. Whatever you say, I believe, okay. And the parent has all the power. The child is just following whatever is said. There's a lot of people that are in a relationship with the government in that respect that it's still in that sort of format. The second one was combative. And that's what you really described there is that people will get their sense of value by bringing someone else down. Because if you think about it, you're always trying to look bigger. So there's two ways you can look bigger. You pull the other person down, which is combative, or you start to go up, which is competitive. Now there's nothing wrong with being competitive in a lot of environments, particularly sport, because you're just trying to do better. When it comes to conversations, obviously you don't want to compete because then you're not listening, you're just trying to win the argument. But the fourth dynamic was really profound, and then I kind of made the decision to really build everything around that, which was cooperation. And if you create that cooperation, then if I see a group and I don't think that they're messaging correctly, I want to cooperate with them and influence them by just showing them what I think is the better way. And if it's self evident, a lot of the time they shift, but if I start having a go at them and saying, you're doing it wrong, or I do it better, that's a terrible way to approach it because that triggers the ego, doesn't it? And I think that the ego is a big problem that we have and we run a lot of sessions to show people how to start unraveling that. Because it's really nice when the ego is quite useful as a sort of map to the world isn't it. But when it starts driving the bus then yourself then that becomes very problematic.

AUBREY: The key thing from my perspective is, I call the ego in my own model. I call it the player. And I call it the player because there's the athlete, which is the body, that's just the one that moves and reacts and the instincts and the sweat and the muscles and all of that. Well, and then you get a Jersey. And the Jersey has your name, and the Jersey has your number, and the Jersey has your team and you're a player. And there's a set of rules for how you play. And the player determines how good it's doing, based upon the set of rules, whether it's actually, if the rules are, you have to score this many points, you can't get this many fouls, you're trying to win this game. It determines the game and then you try to win. And then your superego or your judge or your coach is actually helping to try and guide you. The thing about it is that we have the ability to change the game that the ego is the player is playing. And just determine the rules. So yes, it's very painful when you're identified with being right. If that's a part of the game that you're playing, where you're saying, “my player wants to be the most right.” All right, well, that's a very dangerous game because then it's going to be really hard for you to acknowledge when you're wrong. Whereas if you change it and say, “ah, my player wins the game by having the highest mental flexibility and the most compassion for other ideas.” And that is your guiding. That's your guiding star. That's how you score points as a player. Like that's what defines you. Is your willingness to admit when you're wrong, and that is the highest virtue that you've placed in on the game board that's etched into the game board that your player is playing, then actually the ego can serve your purpose, because then you're saying like, “okay, I'm, I'm winning. I'm winning because I'm the most mentally flexible.” So instead of dismantling the ego, it's just changing the rule set. Let's put actual virtues in place of the pseudo virtues that we're currently using to win this win-loss finite game metric and say, “all right, let's replace it with some more infinite game metrics.” And then allow my ego to fuel me to be the best, because it's going to do that no matter what. Be the best at this different game and its different set of metrics. 

DAVID: That's a really good analogy because that's what happens. I mean, a lot of people, the majority of people from what I can see, mean good. There are some people that do deserve to be in jail and there's some people that are quite nasty, but the majority of people have good intentions. Yeah. So when the one thing that really struck me was when two people came to a conversation, just how convinced each person was that they were correct. And so it's the circumstances. So when you look at society as a whole, we tend to reward the things that don't create a good society and we don't reward the things that do. So the game, the metrics you're talking about, the metrics, I mean, like every sport and game is all about winning rather than ethically, honestly, and all those things. But when you shift the game and the metrics. Everything changes. It's okay because it's like the laws of life, isn't it? I know there's, there's many books written on this. And the thing is that you do feel greater contentment. I worked on projects, some of the projects I worked on in consulting were just soul destroying. I mean, I've worked on projects where I've moved like half a billion offshore and done all these things. And everyone on the project is generally a nice person. But they're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Because they're effectively doing a job very well without realizing, where is the general society going? And I think a lot of it's to do with holistic thinking isn't it. So if we only think about what we're doing in isolation without what it means in the bigger picture, then I think we missed the bigger picture. I think as a society, if we start to think that way, it's pretty incredible. I mean, like rat park, have you come across rat park before? So this is really fascinating. So in the 70s, they did these studies trying to understand addiction. And what they did was they put a rat in a cage and they gave it two water bottles. One of the water bottles had heroin. And the other one was just water. And pretty much every time the rat would just overdose and kill itself. And that's when they said, “Oh, okay. Addiction is just driven by an addiction to the substance.” And then Colin Alexander came along, who is a brilliant psychologist. And he said, “well, the rats in the cage on its own, confined. It's got nothing to do. It's isolated.” So he built this thing called rat park where it was just this big amazing place, loads of rats in there. They could eat whatever they wanted. They had loads of toys. They could make, they could do anything. He then put the two water balls in there. The rats never overdosed and they hardly ever touched the heroin. 

AUBREY: Wow. That's profound. I'm surprised I've never heard of that study. It's incredibly profound.

DAVID: Yeah, it's mind blowing, but where it goes even deeper, then they said, “Oh, maybe it's just a part of the rat mentality.” Maybe it's not humans, but there was a human study and it was a Vietnam war. Millions of soldiers come back addicted to heroin. 95% of them quit overnight, cold turkey, with no assistance because then their life was back and that's when we get onto the wants and needs. And this is when it gets really interesting because in those situations, there's a case to be made that when the people have their needs met, they don't get addicted. Because I think from the research I've looked at, and there was a brilliant book called The Brain That Changes Itself, that I interpreted it as that, and this really just comes back, I think, to evolution and knowing thyself. There's two parts of the brain. There's one part of the brain that governs your wants, and there's another part of the brain that governs your needs. And historically, they were like a railway track. They were always connected. For instance, if you went back 100,000 years and you had a sugar craving, what could you get? Vegetables, fruit. If you needed connection, you had to meet someone. So every time, And I think it's because of modern society that we've been able to distill the trigger from the substance and our brain is not able to differentiate the difference between them that once we get the want met. We get the dopamine here but we never get the need met and that's what ramps up the addiction. So it's the hungry ghost isn't it the expression where the ghost has no neck. So it's an itch you cannot scratch. And what you'll see is that I think when you look at a lot of society and a lot of the way that a lot of the businesses function is to on purpose not meet your need in order to get repeat business

AUBREY: Yeah. I mean, this is the top criticism of the medical industrial complex, right? Is its perpetual treatment without cure. 

DAVID: Yeah. And many other businesses the same way, is that they even like candy crush is structured to keep hitting the dopamine receptors. Because what happens is you get in games now, I started to look into game design. They create these things called a compulsion loop. So what happens is you get this cycle of the desire, you get the reward and you get the dopamine and then you want to go up to the next level. Now you have people sitting there, well meaning people that 3am when they could be doing something much, much better. But you can become a victim of your own brain. It's very easily done. I mean, I've got kind of a highly addictive personality myself. So if I'm not conscious of these things, I could find myself doing any, it's only because of my awareness of what they do that I protect myself from them. But I would quite easily sit there for five, six hours playing a game and not realize that, and what's really fascinating about this is that when you spend all that dopamine, there's none left to spend on life. So in fact, motivation just goes through the floor, they said. So it's like a bank account. And of course, if we had too much doping, we don't have enough serotonin, then we don't experience those special moments, all these things. But it's so easy to go out of balance, especially in the whole of society's built on it, isn't it? 

AUBREY: Yeah. These problems, these challenges that we face are unique to our evolutionary history. We've never had to deal with things that can offer dopamine at such levels. I mean, there were always different things in different ways that you could find some kind of satisfaction in something, but not at the level that we're experiencing where every drug, every substance, every game, every aspect of your phone and everything is just available, all the porn, everything that you could possibly imagine.

DAVID: The food, the sugar, the distilled, yeah. 

AUBREY: It's available. 

DAVID: You're absolutely right. 

AUBREY: It's available at unprecedented levels. And to me, this is where when you have unprecedented challenges, you need an unprecedented solution. And I think this to me is the psychedelic revolution, the new Renaissance is coming in. To me, this is one of the ways in which we can use tools that are a lot stronger than tools that most people use. Of course, the histories of thousands of years of utilization of these as sacraments, but I think for much of history, we didn't need these tools because the challenges were actually manageable. If we were riding a horse and you had to go from Tucson to Tempe, well you got a fucking seven hour ride where it's just you and your horse and some sunsets and that's a very grounding experience. But when do we get that? When do we get that in our life? Unless we're doing some crazy excursion. It's just we're inundated constantly. So finding tools that are of equal power to the challenges we face, I think are important. It's not just psychedelics, it's breathwork and ecstatic dance and all of these practices that can meet the challenges of our unique time. 

DAVID: Absolutely. I think, I mean, I do a lot of breathwork myself and I've studied a lot of these endeavors and then the question is, what are they doing? And I think they're reconnecting the person to themselves, to the wider consciousness, to all these other things. And then you tend to get guided better. Your intuition starts to work and the other things don't feel good anymore. They don't feel fulfilling. You see them for what they are, the empty promises, as one scientist was pointing out, false fixes. And you touched on pornography and the sugar. I mean, this is where I think the thing where, it's now, this is an area where it's not so much that we don't have self control. It's that a situation is so created, to make it almost impossible to have self control. So they design foods where they take out elements, so you'll never be satisfied. Yeah. So you could eat that food all day and all night and never be satisfied. And there's a part of a lot of people's awareness that don't realize this, cause we could sit there and go, “Oh, would it feel nice to have a cake?” And it'd be like, “well, yeah,” But what would it feel like after? When you reconnect to yourself, I think these are the things that change. And then what's really fascinating about this with the needs and wants is that in Joe Denny's book, he quotes a study at the beginning, where they had baby turkeys and the baby turkeys would move towards the mother. And the question was, are they moving towards the mother because they're seeing her or because she's making a noise? And in fact, it's both. But what happened was they put a predator and it was only a toy predator into the cage and the baby turkeys moved away from it. But when they had the predator, the toy, make the noise of the mother, they move towards it. So in fact, a lot of the time, and this actually works for humans as well, and this is what Skinner and all the behaviorism, that's why the slot machines are so addictive. Because they've got the flashing lights. So what they have now

AUBREY: Toy predators, 

DAVID: Yeah, exactly. So what you have now is the behavioral sciences. And my view is the behavioral sciences have made some startling discoveries about behavior, and they've made some startling discoveries about the way we make decisions. Okay, then what they've done is they've mapped out all this choice architecture. So they map out all these sorts of options of the decisions you've got available to you, and then they nudge you to one of those decisions. But here's the problem from my perspective, is the nudges are nearly always for the person nudgings benefit than the person being nudged and they said, so in fact, if the influence, cause influence isn't a bad thing, I mean, you influence many people from podcasts, but hopefully in a very positive way, because you're putting stuff out there, people have the ability to see it and then go, ah, I didn't think about that, but when you start nudging people using guilt, shame, all these things. It's really disastrous. So one of the basic models we show is that, imagine you got two choices, there's one choice to comply, and there's one choice to not comply. The ‘comply route’ is painted with Teflon. And the ‘not comply route’ is actually painted with sludge. So what they do is they create, so then you take all these triggers. So what they then do is realize that as humans we often respond to the trigger rather than the substance. So then, all the authorities telling you to go down the comply route get airtime. All the ones telling you not to, get censored. So then what you have is that pretty much from what I can see is that because behavioral sciences have made such startling discoveries about human behavior, if that was given to the public and then we were able to live our lives in a much more know-thyself way to understand how we work. I think that would be just incredible, but in fact, what's happened is that it's been used by corporations and the government to influence people to buy more stuff that they might not need, or to do, for the greater good, be a good citizen. And they effectively throw all these biases at them. Does that make sense? Like the trigger of listening to a personal authority, which is quite a sensible thing, evolutionary. But, why are you only seeing certain authorities? Does that make sense?

AUBREY: Yeah, it's a manipulation of our inherent impulses because ultimately we don't have the time to be an authority of everything. We just don't. So we have to rely on the specialization of people. Like if you go back all the way, there were stone masons and stone cutters. Like if you want your house built and you're a forager, a hunter. Well, okay, I'll give you some meat and then you work on the stones and we'll focus on our area of genius. And if there's an issue with stones, you ask the stone person. If there's an issue with the hunting, you ask the hunting person. We just don't have time. Like we were supposed to be in this cooperative society where we can rely on other people to, “Oh, I'm glad you figured that out.” “I'm glad you know how to shut down a nuclear power plant. Cause I certainly don't, but thanks for the power.” You know what I mean? But the problem, yeah, as you said, the problem is, when there's not this free and open discourse and it's a selective amount of discourse, then it's difficult to actually know what to do. And I think we're in this time where now we're really being asked because of the situation, because the epistemic commons have been polluted and manipulated, and it's so difficult to understand that we almost have to become like mini authorities on many things so that we can actually. Have at least enough sense to choose which authorities we're going to listen to.

DAVID: Yeah, that's a really key thing. I think there's, yeah, unraveling it again and unpacking it, is that if the person that's looking to influence you, does not have your best interests at heart, then that is a recipe for disaster. And if a certain company or institutional government has unlimited access and resources to all of these nudges then they can make it so it just look like it's correct and that's the thing and it's not a measure of intelligence because there's some super intelligent people that I, in my opinion, believe in things that aren't true at the moment. So when you start to look at the specifics of these and really understand how we interpret the data is the key part. What it really did for me was it answered why people were acting the way they were acting, why people were being irrational, why people were saying. So as an example, more people die from falling coconuts than they do from sharks. But people won't really worry about falling coconut. But because of their jaws, so many people are worried about sharks. Because it just has that different appearance, doesn't it? So all of these biases I mean, I find them very fascinating. There's roughly like almost 200 of them. But it's almost like the fact that they've mapped them all out. It's a bit like almost the human genome project in that you can look into them and go, right. Oh, well that's kind of almost a manual on how my brain works. So if I start to understand these at a deeper level, then I can start to use my brain or drive. I use a very nice analogy of the rider and the horse. And this comes from Milton Erickson, very, very powerful, where Milton Erickson said that the conscious mind is the rider and the unconscious mind is the horse. And he'd say, who do you think is in charge? And at the end of the day, the horse has the last say, but it's our ability to be very conscious to communicate with the horse. And when we think about what we're conditioned to do as children, and we may go somewhere that's not the best way, but when we learn to retrain that, that it becomes really powerful. And I think one of the biggest problems we face as a society is the ego's refusal, and Mark Twain said this, so beautifully, “it's easy to fool someone and convince them they've been fooled.” I have only ever met two people that thought that they were affected by advertising. Everyone else generally believes, Oh no, it doesn't, that affects other people. It doesn't affect me. Okay. They spend billions. So I've been working on a way to, cause we're all vulnerable to influence. That much is clear. The behavioral scientists I talked to, they don't watch advertising. They are very selective about what they watch. It was all data. They do it in the written form, so they're not going to be influenced as much. And we were talking about the best way to get this point across. And we came up with this story. Do you know Derren Brown?

AUBREY: No.

DAVID: Oh, okay. But you know, David Blaine. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Actually not in person, but yeah.

DAVID: Okay. Perfect. So Derren Brown is. A UK mentalist is brilliant in the way that he is very much an entertainer and very skillful and understands the biases, but let's say you go to a party, David Blaine's there.

AUBREY: I've been there. 

DAVID: Yeah. So he says to you, “Aubrey, I'm going to show you a card trick.” So he does his charming distractions and you pick a card and then you put the card back and then suddenly your card is in the fish tank. Now you know there's no way that he could have got from where you're standing over to the fish tank. So what's the only solution? That he somehow forced you to pick that card. Does that make sense? So in magic that's known as forcing. But you know that you've been fooled, don't you? Because there's no easy skill for what he does. But what if the barrister, the barista at the coffee shop, what if the person in the supermarket the grocery store, what if those companies know how to force you in a similar way and that's what we're seeing so we have loads

AUBREY: We're fucked. If they're as good as David Blaine, we're all fucked. Actually, we should just end the podcast now and just be like, well, it was fun. It was a good ride. We're fucked. Because he's so good. 

DAVID: Yeah, he is so good. But here's the good news is that people like Devin Brown and David Blaine are just unique. You get 6, 12 for generation, that's the good news. However, you do have a lot of academics and they still, from what I can see, they're still clumsy. But it's almost like an arms race in that when the public starts knowing myself more, there's going to be a huge blowback, by the way, because you should only ever influence someone for their benefit, in my opinion. And it should be completely consensual, like they should know what's going on. It shouldn't be underhand or any of those things. Now, when people start to find out about this, I think it's going to create a show, it already has in the UK. The UK, a number of psychologists have written to the government to complain about this, the use of behavioral sciences in government policy. So there's a document in the UK. It's called mind space. If you Google mind space in government, they tell you the nine main ways that they're influencing you, but they don't tell you this publicly. You have to go and find it. And when you read about what they're doing. Even on their page 66, they say, well, if the public finds out about this, they might not be happy, but on page 67, they say, and we can manipulate people's identity. Now that's when you've got some pretty big stuff, but of course the blowback is, is that by us studying all this data, because now it's readily available, we can take the power back. We can take the control back. We can start creating the situations where people understand things. For instance, I'll give you one of the least unethical ways that they use it. If you go into the coffee shop and you have three options, small, medium, and large, the majority of people choose the medium. So what did the coffee companies do? They removed the small and they put an extra large in. So now they're selling the large. What they've also done, which I've literally watched the videos of people being recorded and it's mind blowing that if they change the price of the medium to be more and to be closer to the large. People now start choosing the large because now that looks more value. So what you've got is there's two things that go on. They either manipulate the environment, knowing we have hardwired things that we choose, or they manipulate the way we see things. But here's the thing, when we start to take control back of that and we understand them, I never fall for the decoy effect anymore, but I used to. That makes sense? But now I know what they're doing, it changes. So then you've got this whole sort of experience opening up of all these other ones. And what's fascinating, jokingly, I think you touched on it where, do you know that 90% of people think they're better than the average driver? But 94% of professors think they're better than the average professor. So as it turns out, the more education you have, and the more intelligent that you see yourself, the less chance you'll have of admitting you're being wrong. So in fact what we need to introduce into this, and of course the brilliant minds of the past knew this, so they allude to it in their quotes, that's what Richard Feynman said, “the easiest person to fool is ourself.” He was a true genius in many respects. But I think the true geniuses are very humble, aren't they? They see how vulnerable they are. 

AUBREY: Yeah. I mean, so there's a lot that comes to mind. Number one is obviously you think about Starbucks and they obviously exemplified this, and again, it's one of the more benign little tricks that are played, but even the naming conventions are like grande is the medium. It's tall and grande and venti. And then you're like venti. I don't even know what that is, but grande great. That sounds that's the middle size. Like, all right. So you have these little subtle ones, but then when you start to understand it, you're like, okay, all right, I kind of get what they're doing. And then you can immunize yourself to the spells that are actually happening. So that's one point I want to touch on. Another is I did a podcast with Brett Weinstein and he's kind of very keen on the fact that so much information has changed and so many things that people were vehemently being attacked for, whether it was mask policy or whether it was the side effects and unintended consequences of vaccination, or whether it was all of these things, which were, if you talked about, or the effectiveness of certain other alternative treatments like vitamin D, all of this, then you were a terrorist, you were a fascist, you were whatever the fuck they wanted to call you, you were an insane person, science denier

DAVID: Right wing conspiracy.

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. And now, so this new science has evolved or maybe it was just the understanding of the mainstream science, right? Science is never singular, but the truth has been now illuminated and people are just like, letting it go and not really, and what he wants to do is, he's like, “no, no, no, we can't let it go.” Like we must learn from this example. So it doesn't happen again. 

DAVID: We gotta do a postmortem. 

AUBREY: Exactly. And we have to stick with it and stick with it and stick with it and keep talking about it. I know you're fucking sick of hearing me talk about it, but we got to keep doing it until we get what happened because it's going to happen again and again and again. So if we don't hold the people accountable. For these different actions and allow the people who were out there, criticizing, yelling at people, denigrating them, dehumanizing them. If we don't say, “Hey, you remember, remember when you were doing this? Well, it turned out to be wrong. Can you understand where it came from?” All good. Total forgiveness. Like we all do this, but let's look at this. So I think that's an important point, we have to look at it. 

DAVID: Absolutely. Well, Brett's actually going to be at the better way conference next week. Have you heard about this conference? So you've got pretty much, I think 70 plus speakers from around the world. So pretty much everyone that you've known speaking out for the last two years, nearly all of them are going to be there and they're converging in bath for three days. I'll be speaking on Saturday about this subject. And I think what you're going to see is a lot of this. So there's going to be a lot of conversations, a lot of dialogues, how did this happen, et cetera. And I've watched some of Brett's podcasts. So I think he's just, the way he looks at things, I really agree with, so I think that's going to be one of the staff, the post mortem is going to be in a bath in the UK. And I think it's going to be really good because people are starting to ask questions at a much deeper level now. But a lot of people just want to get on with their lives, but I think we've got to be a dog with a bone about this because it's the structures that were in place that created this. And I think the behavioral sciences was a big, big part of this. Because I've spoken to a number of behavioral scientists and I asked them all if they expected that what happened could have happened to the degree that it happened. No one expected it. Now, this follows one of the real basic errors that we make. So we will know about the Milgram studies. So Milgram did studies on compliance. And what was fascinating about the studies is that Milgram, surveyed a lot of psychologists and experts before commence the studies

AUBREY: And just share the Milgram studies for people who don't know. 

DAVID: Yes. So, Stanley Milgram was really, like a few people investigating how the second world war really occurred. How many of the people in Nazi Germany, why did they follow the orders? Why did they follow the rules? So he set up a study where they had an actor who was wired up to a machine and they had the participant in the study sitting there who was asking the actor questions. He didn't know he was an actor. He thought he was another participant. And if the actor got the question wrong he was supposed to push a button to give the actor an electric shock and they were told that it was to see the reinforcement of punishment and rewards, but in fact the real study was on compliance to how high the person would push the button to execute the person on the other side. Now, Milgram, they say he surveyed a lot of psychologists and experts before the studies to see how many people would press the button. And most of the experts said less than 1%. It turned out that 65% of people would actually press the button that could give an electric shock to death, which is mind blowing. So this pops up time and time and time again where what we estimate would happen and what actually happens are massively different. And this is where the real clever people in social psychology, the social sciences, and the behavioral sciences have stopped relying on what they think will happen. And start to create the situations to measure to actually see what would happen. And as a result, they get past that fundamental bias in thinking, we know what's going on, it's everyone else that's wrong. Once you get beyond that, you start to get the true numbers. And this is the key information. This is to really see how we fundamentally operate as a human being and then how we can transcend and get to higher states of consciousness to build better software. But that information is not making it to the people. It's literally now used by the big companies to know how to create the situation, to manipulate people's emotions, whether they're acting a certain way or decide on purchase a certain product. And one of the classics is really this function of cognitive dissonance that you can create the circumstances, create cognitive dissonance, and they know what will happen. So the mask was a classic example that they said, wear a mask, so you're not selfish. So then the person is faced with two options. I have to change my behavior. Or I changed my view of myself. And if you didn't have the awareness to go when I'm not going to listen to that person and you trust what they say you're going to change one thing. And they also did this very keenly with if you don't do XYZ you're selfish. So what that does that create this dissonance that people can't experience, they can’t last a long. And they change the behavior, because what usually happens is that you'll change the easiest thing to change basically. But if they bring in the mask as a mandate, and that comes from authority, then it's actually easier to change your belief system. So this is what happened about this. It's really fascinating. People didn't believe that masks would work. But once they wore the mask. They're now experiencing dissonance because they're doing something they don't believe is true. Do you know what they did? They changed their belief system. You don't think this happens, but this happens all the time. And this is what Leon Fessinger showed that he did this really famous study. He's the guy that coined cognitive dissonance. So he got a group of people in and he said he gave them this really boring experience. I mean, it was tedious as hell, for like an hour. And he said, “there's a new subject coming in. Can you please tell them that this was really interesting?” They gave half the subjects a pound, sorry, a dollar. And they gave the other half 20 dollars. Now this is where it gets really interesting. The ones that got 20 dollars. Afterwards, when they were interviewed, they said, “Oh yeah, that exercise was really boring.” Because they got the 20 dollars, they felt suitably rewarded. They were fine. They had no dissonance, but the ones that paid a dollar, they actually started to believe that the task was quite interesting. So they literally changed their belief system about it. And you watched a video. You can't believe it's true, but this is what people do. It's literally mind blowing. It was like the ash studies. Did you hear about the ash studies as well? 

AUBREY: I did. Yeah, that's what the people, there were different sizes of lines and they had multiple actors and then one actual live subject. And when all of the actors would say that these two lines, which were clearly of a different length, were the same length, then a majority of the actual participants, subjects in the study would say, “yeah, same.” Even though it's clearly obvious that they weren't. 

DAVID: Yeah. What's interesting about this is it's all about the situation. So if they had one person in there, get it correct, then people didn't comply with the group. This is why it's so important to stand up because the illusion of consensus becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because social proof is so powerful to our behavior. Incredibly powerful. So this is another one of the biases and just the people that haven't heard about it, social proof says that a lot of our behavior, we look around to see what everyone else is doing to see what's acceptable, what's normal, and normalization is very key. So there was a study at Cialdini quotes in one of his books where “they had this forest and lots of petrified wood was being stolen.” So they put a sign up. Now they put a sign up and it said, 12 tons are being stolen a year, please don't destroy the natural landscape. It turned out that that sign increased the theft of natural wood, of the petrified wood. So Cialdini came in and they set up three controls. And they had one sign that they used very good wording. I can't remember what the exact wording was, but it was along the lines of, it's very bad to steal. Yeah, so it played on that. The second sign said, X amount's been stolen. The third sign didn't say anything. The sign where they told people how much was being stolen actually was a crime promotion strategy. More people stole wood than if there was no sign, you see how incredible that is. 

AUBREY: What’s the social proof of other people having stolen 12 tons are like, well, maybe I should steal some. 

DAVID: Yeah, it's not going to make any difference, et cetera. So you'll see so much of advertising, so much of pushing people to do things during the narrative was painting the picture. The good citizens do this and most people are doing it. But I think a lot of times the numbers have been very questionable, but the mistake that we shouldn't make as being people that speak up and there are a lot of people speaking up is we shouldn't point out that there's a few people because there's a lot of people. So we need to emphasize. The acceptance and the normalization of doing what's right. Because these situations, these conditions, they shift things like massive amounts of percentage. So then when you look at the narrative, what they've done is they've effectively like Swiss cheese, they've used every nudge possible to make the narrative look as strong as possible 

AUBREY: And I think, one thing that's worth mentioning at this point is, you could be listening to all of this and say “look at the evil of these bad actors, who are doing these things intentionally to manipulate people and to actually influence them in ways to support their own greed in their own agendas and you can go down a whole rabbit hole of that.” But actually, that would be ignoring another very simple bias. And the bias is the self serving bias. The idea that you can convince yourself that what you're doing is the right thing when really you just want to do it for some selfish reasons. So all of these people who are pushing the narrative. They're probably not evil people. They're probably just convinced themselves, whatever pharmaceutical tycoon or whatever, advertising executive or politician they're saying. Well, we may be manipulative, but nonetheless, it's the right cause and we need to manipulate people because this is what is actually going to save our world, and this is what's going to end the pandemic, this is going to flatten the curve, and we got to use all of the tools necessary, this is war, and we got to have a war against this virus and whatever we got to do, we got to do it. And so they paint themselves as a hero when really actually what's going on, their true drive is, well, actually I just want to make another 40 billion this year, or I want to get in power in the next election cycle or, but they'll convince themselves that they're doing something right. Just like, as you mentioned, in all of the tyrannical desperates of our time, very few said, “yeah, I'm going to fuck people up because I like it.” They're like, “no, I'm going to build a better this.” “I'm going to build a better Germany.” “I'm going to build a better Russia.” “I'm going to build a better Italy. I'm doing it for Italy, mother Russia.” And the Aryan race or whatever the fuck justification you have. People think that they're doing it, and it's this self-serving bias. Really, they want power. Really, they want control. Really, they want resources. But they're convincing themselves constantly that they're doing the right thing.

DAVID: Yeah, that's the moral justification. That's one of the main steps. Very few people think they're on the evil side. 

AUBREY: Very, I mean, it's actually very hard to actually point to one who really does. Maybe a few psychopathic serial killers who are like, and you see him in like the occasional Batman villain, like Bane, where it's just like, yep, he knows he's evil and he's down for it.

DAVID: Yeah, there is a term with those psychopaths, I can't exactly remember is now, but they do it where they're interviewing a serial killer and then they slow it up and then they see the smirk and it's where they get off on misleading people, but that's a very small percentage of people. What you'll find is that most people, I think most people can't comprehend how it's possible for things to happen. And the fascinating thing about history is that we never learn from it. And then I have the question, can we learn this time? There's always an opportunity. I think now, you've only got to pick up a history book to see what's happening now. I mean it's obviously on steroids now. But yeah, these things happen always. And how can it be, see this always troubled me when I was growing up, but they said “oh yeah.” So you got a war and then one side they're all bad people and this side's all good and And I'm like, what are the odds on that? Seriously, what are the odds that every bad person was born in that country? You know what I mean? It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever, does it? And then you understand that it's ideology, it's belief systems. It's if you can convince someone to do something, and then of course, what we have to do is work out. Well, how do we evolve? And I think it's relatively straightforward. It's connect to self, break the group identities. There's this thing of a caricature, which is obviously, if you go and have one of those characters painted like a cartoon picture, when we're talking to people, we very much often will orient ourselves to the caricature of how we think that person is. But then when we truly connect to them, we break the caricature, nothing about that group applies anymore. I mean, since we can really transcend it and go, actually, this person's a really genuine person. And I think that's where we've had the greatest success on the project is really showing people, once you connect, you break the caricature, there's two things really, which is the situation's the biggest thing. If you're in a situation that's completely negative. It's very hard to connect, but if you get the context right, then you connect right. And you stay calm and then you start talking to each other. People do listen. You know what I mean? It is very, very different. It's very kind of profound. And I think one of the funny ways that people talk about this objectivity illusion is that, if you think about a baseball, what are the judges called in baseball?

AUBREY: Umpires. 

DAVID: Umpires. So if you think about the umpires, there was a very famous quote where they said, one umpire says, I call it as it is and the other umpire says, I call it as I see it. Now that's very different, isn't it? Because the second one's very aware. Is this is my perspective of what's going on, with the first one, thinks he's connected with objectivity which is an illusion. I think if we all take that second perspective and then we create the right situations we have these conversations, I think that things could heal so quickly. I think there's another big piece actually which is unresolved emotions and obviously breath work and so many other things are fantastic for that. So we create situations to actually resolve these emotions because in dividing, conquer, that's where you've got that seesaw of emotions. It's confiningly balanced, isn't it? The people that are complying are pissed off with the people not complying and the people not complying are pissed off with the people complying. Who's missing from the picture? The people pushing the bloody policies. So you have people divided against themselves. And it's almost like if we just say, hang on a minute, let's stop fighting, it's down tours. Let's have a conversation. I think it's almost that ability to step up, we're stuck in a game, aren't we? We're stuck in a game of chess and just go, actually, I'm just going to step back for a minute and that's what we've done really, a meta level is, as you pointed out. How's the game playing out? And then almost, how can I break the game to create a situation? 

AUBREY: Yeah. To change the game board.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly. That's it. I think that's so key. Change the situations. There's so many ways of doing it. And I think, I mean, I'm fortunate enough to have spoke to so many of the scientific groups now and really relayed a lot of this information to them. And I think we've had some really good discussions about, I think it's self evident. That's what I think is so fortunate about it. There's so many of these things that are self-evident that if you can portray it and explain it in the right way. People go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. 

AUBREY: It's the fancy word of saying that there are certain things that you hear that are anthro ontologically valid, like where you, anthropos, like you understand the meaning of it in your own self, you feel it, you feel the truth of these things. And you're like, Oh, that's true. And there's a lot of ways that your mind will try to convince you otherwise. And there's all kinds of biases, but we do have a pretty good truth compass again. But like you said, in that study about the kids who meditated for 20 minutes and cleared their mind for a moment, and now the bullying and all that went down, it's just taking a moment. Listening, like getting quiet, and then you'll start to understand and feel what feels true and what doesn't feel true. And that'll help a lot. 

DAVID: Absolutely. And of course, when we look at, there's some really fascinating studies as well, about how we present information. So if we present information to people just in raw fact form. If they already believe it, then it's fine, but if they don't, they're going to reject it almost 100% of the time. But if we write that fact in a story, it will land 22 times more effectively according to Jerome Bruner's work. The brain. And this is where you, I'm sure you've heard of Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey, this incredible work. And of course, Joseph Campbell actually worked on Star Wars with George Lucas that was the underpinning of the story. So what Joseph Campbell did was, he traveled all around the world and he discovered that pretty much every culture had this storytelling process. So we would tell the next generation stories. And they would learn through the stories. And in fact, a lot of people now say that we're governed by the stories we tell ourselves. And that's the key because if you think about a conversation. What I was doing initially is I'd tell people, “don't do this, do that, don't do this, do that,” but it wouldn't have much effect. But when I started to tell them stories. It changed because in fact, what stories do stories talk to the unconscious mind, as does metaphors and questions, obviously the Socratic method. And what's fascinating is when you go back to ancient Greek, Plato said, those that tell the stories will rule society. And Aristotle said, the greatest thing to learn is metaphor. And obviously Socrates was responsible for the Socratic method. So the three methods to start really communicating with people are via stories, by the use of metaphor and via the use of very artistic questions. Because questions, you can really guide someone's attention and you can set up, also the questions we asked ourselves because we didn't start to look inwards and start to really question our own belief systems. Because that's the growth, isn't it? To say, okay, I thought it was this, but actually maybe it's not that.

AUBREY: Yeah. And this is now in some ways, an arms race of some sort of like, who's telling the most effective stories. It's like memetic warfare is using memes, using these ideas, short little stories. People don't have the attention span always for longer stories, although of course we watch a lot of movies and shows. There's a lot of opportunity for longer form stories, but it's these quick things. And I noticed, just a pop culture reference of something that was highly effective. It seems as if Johnny Depp in this Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial, which is getting a lot of publicity, obviously he was canceled for, I don't know the details, but some act against Amber Heard, some I think domestic abuse, some claim that was made and he hasn't been in movies and since that claim. And then now it's in trial and he's suing her for 50 million defamation and believes all of those facts are accurate. I apologize if they're not, but fundamentally, I don't know shit about shit. I actually don't know anything, but I saw one video that was hilarious and it was a video where she had taken a shit on his side of the bed and he actually took a picture of it. And they made a compilation set to Metallica's Nothing Else Matters and the chorus was human fecal matter and it went through this whole thing and it was hilarious. But ultimately I recognize like, of course, it's telling the story of her potentially taking a shit on his side of the bed, but all of a sudden in my mind. Partly maybe because it was funny. Partly because it highlighted the fact that she did this one thing. I started to feel, “Oh, Johnny Depp's innocent.” Like he's innocent. I don't know that. I have no fucking clue. I have no fucking clue what happens. But because that meme was so effective in telling this one story in a funny way, in a way that got me laughing and like it won and I have to be vigilant. I have to be vigilant in my own mind to be like, all right, I know that video is hilarious and I know like you want that to be your version of the truth, but my vigilance has to come in and say, still, you don't know anything, but laugh at the video. Great, but don't be seduced into believing something based upon this meme.

DAVID: I think the level of awareness there is really key isn't it? To think okay we're all easily forward. But the other thing is just how stories are so compelling. So, as a bit of a project, generally I watch tv. But I watch movies and a few things and then I'll look from the story teller's perspective and see what's going on. So you think with the Jack Reacher show, so what they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to associate with the character. So what they had was the character, the first scene, he walks into a shop and then there's a guy that's abusing his girlfriend. And Jack reaches like six, four, six built like a brick shit house. So he just walks over and just stares at the guy and he just stands it. And the guy goes, “what's your problem?” And of course, Jack reaches massive. And then the scene just holds and holds. And then the guy goes, “Oh, I'm really sorry. I got angry. I won't do it again.” So now you're, Oh, I like this Jack, creature guy. He's got very good moles and there's another scene where a gentleman's not really looking after his dog. So Jack goes and punches him and does his other thing. So, it's all building this emotional association with a character. And that's what they do. It's very well storytelling. Now, the media knows about this. And the media was losing money hand over fist, but yet suddenly all these influential people bought the media. And there's a reason because those that tell the stories, rule society. But we don't realize, and obviously you did in the story that you told, most people don't realize the effect the stories have on us. And in fact, most people dismiss them as entertainment. But in fact, stories are the way that we've always, through generation to generation, passed down important information and morals. The moral of the story is so key. And then what you see is someone like a character like Sherlock Holmes, who's one of my favorite characters. I very much like detective work. And then in the news series in the UK. And in the third series, he kills someone in cold blood to defend part of the establishment. Now think about what that's telling people. It's okay to commit cold murder as long as it's for protecting national secrets, et cetera. Now there's an Italian researcher that showed some of the power of stories. He did research on, I think it was Harry Potter and he showed children that had read Harry Potter when actually less, were very more tolerant to immigrants. And those that hadn't. And there's in fact, there's a body of work now, I think by Lisa Krohn that suggests that the civil rights movement was kicked off to kill a mockingbird. There's a lot of data that says that we're really shifted, not by facts, but by stories and what touches us. And I think what you touched on, when you, when you feel, it was someone that said, truth is not the center of town. You always know when you're there. You kind of, you're like, Oh, this makes sense. 

AUBREY: I mean, I had a really powerful moment the other day. I was talking about justice. And there's so many stories that highlight and have a hero who carries out vigilante justice, right? Who takes justice in their own hands. And you actually want that because I think we have this justice is a virtue that, it's something deeply encoded like we want people to get their just desserts. Like this idea of justice is very big. And we also have this doubt that justice is actually being served by the system. So the vigilante goes out and he carries out all of the different acts. But really, all of that is, it's reinforcing and denigrating the idea that there is a system of justice and that it's important that you have due process. And that you're innocent before proven guilty. And yes, there may be a rare circumstance where some vigilante-ism is necessary, but it's the most extreme circumstance. And actually, I recognized in my own, my own understanding of things, certain cases where, and you see this in the way that the internet tries to carry out justice on some supposed perpetrator. They hear a story of a victim or they hear something, and then it's like, we have to take justice in our own hands. But that person never went to trial. They never got to tell their side of the story. I mean, again, to go back to the Johnny Depp Amber Heard, at the very least now, they're both getting to tell their story. And like, this is a necessary part of justice. It was not justice before both stories were heard. It just could not be until that was done. So really the hero of the Western is not the person who's going around killing everyone. It's the one who says, I know you all want to lynch this man, but we're taking him to trial. And if you try to violate that code of justice, cause I stand for justice. If you try to violate that code, like I will defend him and I'll defend his right to trial. And like, there are some of those stories, but they're overshadowed by the other stories of the vigilante taking it into his own hands. And I think that story has got us to the place where we feel like we have to carry out social justice ourselves. Because otherwise, it's all up to us when that ultimately just denigrates and defames lady justice herself.

DAVID: Yeah, I think the system is, obviously, it's the situation around, isn't it? And I think that was a big, it's a really key point, because my initial reason for kicking off the project was that I was seeing that the media painted a very one sided thing. So I was like, okay, well, I've got to show people the other side. And then I quickly realized. It's not about being on a side, it's about creating a situation where you get free flow and information, people don't feel the need to demand themselves and then you've got proper dialogue, proper connection, all those things. So I really shifted the view there, but I think people do want justice. I think inherently most people want to be fair. The majority of people. The problem is, and I think it was Plato that said, is that you don't need laws. Good people don't need laws and the bad people will find a way around them. So we find ourselves in these paradoxes so often. And this getting justice is a big thing because it really drives a lot of people. People can't stand injustice. 

AUBREY: Yeah. It's a deep, fundamental, distaste that we have for injustice. And it's about really understanding. Again, having a greater awareness. This all goes to greater awareness. Like, yes, maybe for this one time, this lynch mob, this social lynch mob is correct. Certainly, there's been cases where that has been correct. And I'm not saying it's not correct, but actually the correctness is limited because even in that instance where it might have been correct, it's actually defiling the whole structure, the entirety of justice itself. So it's something that we can't stand for. It's just like, you might be right in a single instance to censor someone from speaking something. From a very pragmatic standpoint, maybe censoring this thing actually, causes less harm and helps more people. But it's such a slippery slope because the moment you do that, you start to denigrate free speech. Which is then this giant umbrella structure like justice, freedom of speech, all of these different things when even in the specific, if you believe you're right, and again, it's just you believing you're right. And maybe you are, but at what cost? At what cost to the greater whole at what cost to the whole system?

DAVID: I think that again is another very important point because, I think it was Chomsky who ironically degraded his own view, I think in some ways. But he said if you don't support freedom of speech for those that you detest then you don't support it. It's not only for the people you like and I think there was a Cole Popper who was a scientific professor of philosophy, I believe. He made a very important point, which he said there's an asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability. And what he was referring to is that most people would just nod their heads and say, yes, I agree with that, but the people that are saying, no, that's not true are the ones that we need to listen to. Now, that's quite complex to try and get your head around. So then we turn that into a story. And I think that's one of the things that I think we're bringing with, we're looking to provide a service in taking a lot of complex stuff and making it easily accessible in simple stories. Because the thing is, have you heard of this cursor knowledge? It's one of the biases and it's really profound because what it says is, if I tap out on my desk here, a tune, and I asked you to guess that tune, I'm going to be bound by my own cursor knowledge. So what they did with all these studies is that the person tapping would guess. That the listener would get it right 50% of the time, and in fact, they only got it right about 5% of the time. So what you have is that I'm bound by the fact that I'm listening to it, but I already think. So anytime I describe something, there's a thousand ideas wrapping around that subject. And likewise. So anytime we're talking to each other, we've got much deeper knowledge of what we mean than what we're saying. So how do we explain it in such a way that it's really clear? And this really shows why there's some incredible pieces of work, thousands of them, sitting in people's desks. Because they never found a way to translate it in a way that most people could understand it. So we created a few metaphors to get around this. And one of them was the hotel of knowledge. So if you imagine all that you know about health and fitness or anything like that. So you've got floor by floor. And then you get to your penthouse and it could be a very tall hotel. And you're trying to talk to someone that knows nothing. They haven't even come into the lobby. So you can't talk to them from the penthouse cause it doesn't make any sense to them. So you've got to go down to common ground. So what we found is that most conversations because people like to talk about advanced stuff, it's kind of interesting. So people would be talking about all these concepts that the other person hadn't even heard of and they would lose them. And of course, what they often reply is, Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist or whatever, because they hadn't heard of it. So that's a really key point is this curse of knowledge. And additional to it, what Popper said was with this asymmetry. Which is a lot of the time, driven by aspects of the curse of knowledge is that it's the people that speak up, it's the few people that the canary in the common, we need to listen to those and history has always shown that it's always one or two people from the limey is, english is unknown as the limey. Because of the vitamin C deficiency we'd call scurvy. And the guy that discovered that pretty much similar to Semmelweis was told it was nonsense. 200 years went by before they actually realized he was right. But what Karl Popper said, and I think we tell a little sort of kid story about it. I think it's very, very easy to understand. And it's very funny. It's like, let's say my theory or we is that in my local park, there's no squirrels. That's my scientific theory. I sent a hundred people with cameras to the park. They come back three days later. Only two of them have got pictures of squirrels. Are there squirrels in the park?

AUBREY: Yes. 

DAVID: Okay. So what if I sent to those two people,

AUBREY: No squirrels.

DAVID: No squirrels in the park. And that's what we've done. We've taken the people where we should be listening to and they're not always going to be right. But what Popper said is, there's such an asymmetry between force of viability which is, can I prove that theory to be false? If I can, the fear is not true. All the people that can prove it to be true really doesn't add anything to it. I'm certain. That's what he was really pointing out. It's the ones that say hang on a minute. There's something here that doesn't make sense, and if you can prove that. So if I get two pictures of squirrels, it doesn't matter how many people tell me they didn't get any pictures, there's a squirrel there. And obviously, as long as those people aren't taking pictures from a different park, but let's assume that we can trust. 

AUBREY: And that's what everybody would say. And if there was a narrative about no squirrels in the park, because if there was squirrels in the park, they couldn't develop a fucking high rise in there and there's billions of dollars to build this high rise. And there was a squirrel protection committee and they would say those pictures are not from this park, even though it clearly looked exactly like the tree that was in this park. They'd be like, “nope, it's photoshopped squirrels, whatever, discard.” And they would have the force to do that. Well, this has been an epic conversation, David. And I think we could carry on and continue doing this, and maybe we will at some point, but you've mentioned your project a few times before we get out of here. Where can people go to find a little bit more of what you're up to? 

DAVID: Okay. So, if you go to the reachingpeople.net website, everything's found there really. So we spend a lot of our time, basically donating to a lot of the academic scientific groups. That is challenging the narrative. I think to level the playing field. So there's three pillars of the project. One pillar is how to have good conversations and that's not how do I convince someone or something? That's how do I get a good conversation? How do I connect with someone? How can I get them to listen to me and me to listen to them? The second. Pillar is how to message effectively. If you've got a very important message, how do you get that out there without triggering people to get people to look at data? And then the third piece, which is, I think we touched a lot tonight was, how we influenced and how can we know thyself better? So, I think that's what we do. And it's been great. I've watched some of your podcasts and it's really funny when I listened to them, I was like, “ah, you already know so much about this.” And I think that comes from just looking at ourselves, doesn't it? I think when we know the vulnerability of ourselves to fall ourselves, to misinterpret things and all those things, and we think the best of others, until they prove us otherwise, then I think we create better conditions to connect. And there are people out there, when I say to people, I think it's important point is, it's not fair. And what I mean by that is if you're going to have a conversation with someone that couldn't give a shit about. Whether you're right or wrong or whatever, but you are caring about creating the right situations. That's not fair, but would you rather be in their shoes? Because we get the control back. Don't we just say, okay, I'm going to, regardless of what the other person does, I'm going to create the situation that either person in the conversation would accept them to be the right conditions. 

AUBREY: And so it is. Thank you for your work, David, really appreciate this and appreciate this conversation. Onward we go.

DAVID: Yes. Thank you for the time and energy and the conversation. It's been great. 

AUBREY: Absolutely. Take care, everybody. Much love.