Marketers, Cult Leaders & Dictators Use the Same Playbook — Owen Fitzpatrick

If you look at what the best gurus have in common with the worst human beings, but most influential human beings, people like Hitler or Stalin or whatever, it's the ability to tell a story and sell a story to the population. As a result, people will follow the guru because the guru will say, if you do X, then you will have eternal happiness, contentment, everything that they want. But it's marketing. It's the same pitch. It's just different stakes that someone.

Fitzpatrick. He's a psychologist who has spent his entire career learning how beliefs get built up, and therapy rooms and board rooms on the ground in North Korea, Rwanda, Afghanistan, all places he's been to watch propaganda machines work up close. What you just heard is the claim at the center of his new book, Inner Propaganda. And it's basically that marketers, cult leaders, dictators, politicians are all telling the same story. It's basically the same pitch with different stakes. The really challenging part is your own brain is basically running that same operation on you to develop the beliefs that you have every single day. And Owen breaks down how that story works, how to spot it, and then how to use it ethically. If you market or you sell or you lead other teams. So let's dive in. Owen. Welcome, brother. Um, very, very stoked to, to have you on the podcast. I told you like, as we were talking in our, in our warm up, man, I said, I've, I haven't finished a book like this quickly and devoured something so aggressively that in a long time. And I'm not saying that just because I know you, I'm really looking forward to diving into inner propaganda and kind of the backstory to all of that. Um, and welcome aboard. Glad to glad to have you here, my man.

Thank you so much, Ray. Always a pleasure to chat to you. And really, you know, pumped that you enjoyed the book. Uh, I really enjoyed the process of writing it. So whenever I hear, um, someone went through and read it and enjoyed it, it's the, it's the best feedback in the world. So thanks a million mate and great to be chatting.

It's not just the content, by the way, like the content was phenomenal and it's well researched, but your writing style, I told you, I was like, there's times I'm, I'm laughing. There's times like the storytelling. It's, it's a, it's a very, very, um, well written nonfiction book. So, um, looking forward to diving in, in the book you talk about, you visited North Korea and you're the, the guide in North Korea. Like while you're, while you're there looks at you and asks you what therapy is like, what is what a therapist is? What did that moment do for you as a psychologist?

I think it was one of many situations when I conversed with her over the time I was there, and she hadn't heard of stuff that I thought everyone on the planet had heard of or didn't know, stuff that I thought everyone knew. And it kind of kept reminding me how cut off or, or different. A lot of people that live in that kind of regime are from the rest of the world. But I think I went over there as well with a kind of an arrogance of thinking that like, these are all going to be people that are just brainwashed and they'll just believe whatever it is that they're told and all that sort of stuff. And what I found was they're really smart that the guys that work with me, they're really smart, sarcastic, uh, funny, fun, clever in the way in which they think. And I think when they talked about therapy, having to explain what psychology or therapy is for the very first time was something they never had to do. And I was like, stumbling. I was like, well, like, I talked to people and she's like, so you fix the brain. And I'm like, no, like, I don't fix the brain. I fix her mind. And she goes, well, what do you mean? Like, like, how do you fix the mind if you don't, you know, do surgery? I'm like, no, it's like I talk to them. What do you talk to them about? So I had to actually break it down. And it was weird that I was just not able to answer that question because it was kind of like as soon as you mention it, people automatically at least have some representation of what you do. So that was very interesting. But it once again spoke to the fact that we walk in with, um, almost. I was blindsided by the realization that I have many times, which is that we walk in with this attitude that everyone understands what we understand. And the more you understand that people don't understand what it is that you understand, the more you can start to make better connections, communicate better, and hopefully to be able to influence them more successfully in the work that you do. So for me, it was one of those moments of going, wow, now I have to explain something that like, I thought everybody like knew what it was. And that reflection made me challenge my own assumptions about how things work.

It takes me back. Like a few years ago, you spoke at the mastermind that we that we had here in Cabo, and I spoke as well. Everybody cared about your speech like it was everybody that walked away. You know, we had so many great speakers while we were there. But your speech about belief leadership, which I can absolutely see in the book today, like it's like the, the essence of it was a fascinating topic. And you left me thinking about that for years now. And so like reading the book was actually, in a lot of ways closing the loop on something that you had, you would open before because I walked away from that talk. And then and then now the book understanding that for all of the if we change the way we think and change the way we do, there's like this meta blanket and it's so much of it has to do with what we believe and like what you believe is what you think and what you think oftentimes influences what you're doing and shit like that. So where did this start for you? Like the, the beliefs, leadership, inter propaganda, like take, take me back to the beginning.

Everything started. And it's the old cliche story of the psychologist who went to pursued a career in psychology because they struggled with their own mental health. But when I was a teenager, I was suicidal and I was very close to ending my life. And I was in a situation where I remember sitting on a bed when I was fourteen years old, writing a suicide note to my parents, and I started off with to, you know, dear Mom and Dad, I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do. And I was explaining all the reasons logically. And then there was a sentence I wrote where I said, you know, I love you both so, so much. And then in the back of my mind, from wherever I. I can't tell where it came from, but a voice said. And I wrote it down. Is this how much you love them? So it was kind of like a sarcastic, sort of provocative sentence, a provocative question that says, so this is how much you love them, is it? And then I went back and forth. It was almost like there was two voices then at war. But I kept coming back to that sentence. I instantly, in that moment, got this feeling whereby I kind of felt like I imagined myself dead. And I imagine my parents and I really vividly experienced it to the point where I saw how broken they both looked. And I was like, I can't do this. There's no way I can do this. And in that moment, everything changed. Not in my life. My life still was a struggle. My mental health didn't suddenly magically improve. But the one thing that did shift was it was the last suicide note I ever wrote. So in that moment, I went from believing I needed to die, to believing I needed to live. And two things drove me to want to know more. One was I needed to change my attitude And because I made that belief shift, I thought, well, maybe I can change in other ways and maybe I can, you know, change my mind about myself in other aspects. But the most important one was I was obsessed, obsessed with trying to understand why I managed to successfully change that belief from believing I needed to die to believing I needed to live. Like what went on, what led me to make the change that I made. What gave me that ability? And so that became a sort of a journey for me, where I started to study everything I could. I started studying therapy. Initially, I went to university and I was studying psychology and human development history. I also did did a degree in history as well and started to research into propaganda. I was really fascinated with how propaganda works. I looked into cults and cult deprogramming and how that works. I looked at persuasive speeches. I then decided I was gonna, you know, while I worked with clients, helping them to change their beliefs, I started to travel. And so I traveled to more than one hundred countries, including North Korea, including Iran, including Afghanistan, including Rwanda. Again, when I was there in each place asking questions, interviewing people, learning as much as I can about what their beliefs were and why they believe what they did, and how their beliefs might have changed and shifted. The more I experienced that, the more I kind of reflected on my own mental health journey. And I realized that the very same mechanisms I experienced, let's say in North Korea, were identical to what I was experiencing inside whenever I struggle with my mental health. So, for example, when you're in North Korea, they control the state media. So it's the state media dictates what your attention is on. Whenever you're in a situation whereby you're exposing yourself to the news there, they tell you what the news is. They orient your attention to what they want you to focus on. They indoctrinate you to the point that when you're a member of the DPRK, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, you are a certain type of person with certain types of beliefs. And if you are a good citizen, this is what you will stand for. So they controlled your identity. And then they also engineered the truth. And for me, the more I thought about it, the more I realized when I struggle with depression or anxiety, my brain acts like the news channel. It orients my attention to everything that I have to feel bad about. So when I'm depressed, my brain focuses its attention on everything that I have to feel worried about or stressed about or or sad about. Whenever I'm in that state, I'm identifying as a, as a person who's worthless or useless or my life is pointless. And that's the internal doctrine. And it also engineers the truth to fit that narrative. So, you know, if you take any experience, that's a data point. And the interpretation we have over that data point is the story or narrative we tell, and we can call it the truth. It only feels like the truth in that moment. It's not like most data points. We observed them when we use science in order to investigate what's really going on, most of the time we reach conclusions or jump to conclusions based upon whatever happens. Someone doesn't text you back and your brain goes to. The reason they don't text me back is because of this. Because they no longer want to be friends with me. Or the reason they didn't text me back is because they're so busy they probably didn't see it. Or the reason. Like we generate most of the reality or most of the truth that we hold in our mind. And the more I understood this, the more I realized this is exactly what happens in propaganda regimes. It's an inner form of propaganda, and it's only when you understand what's going on inside your brain and how you actually convince yourself of things that you have the ability not only to improve your mental health, but you can make smarter decisions, but by understanding how someone else's inner propaganda works, you have the capacity, your ability to influence them more effectively. And not only that, but from a polarization standpoint, you can connect with people that have different points of view. I have so many different friends with different political perspectives, and everyone is so sure and so certain of their point of view, including me. But the more you can be intellectually humble enough and cognitively humble enough to recognize I'm just as just as much a victim of propaganda as everybody else. And it's not only outside, it's also inside. The more that gives us the freedom to be able to go. Maybe it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe the beliefs that I'm buying into the reality I've crafted for myself. Maybe it's just a story. And maybe as soon as I realize it's just a story that I'm selling to myself, maybe I can start to elect a new story, choose a new way of thinking that is still plausible, but empowers me and helps me to overcome the things that I'm limited for based upon the current narrative that I'm selling to myself.

You mentioned something on and I love how the book starts, right? Like how to, how to write a suicide note. And it's jarring. You're like, wow, okay. You kind of inadvertently wrote this, this statement or this question. Is this how much you love them? And then you debated with yourself a little bit like, well, okay. And then you couldn't see yourself going through and doing that. And it kind of strikes this. We all have, at least to some degree, a little bit of like a duality, like there's like competing beliefs in our heads sometimes. And all the research that you, that you did in writing this and, and studying it over the years, how does when you've got two competing beliefs in your head and you've got a duality that's happening, how does one win, like between the two when they're when they're arm wrestling back and forth?

I think the mistake a lot of people make is they think that, you know, you win by giving positivity to the negativity. So your brain is saying, oh, you're useless. And then I go, oh, I learned that a positive thinking seminar to say, I'm a good person, I'm great. I'm a good person, I'm great. But the voice that's telling you you're useless is still there. So it's still saying you're useless. If you multiply one by minus one, you get minus one. I think you do anyway. But the reality is, is that when you've got a negative and a positive and you put them together, often it will go to negative. So it never really worked for me to just try to try mantras or try to just to be positive about things. And so what I realized was, is that a big part of this sort of inner war, and I kind of demonstrated in my Ted talk. So I did a Ted talk ten years ago. It's been seen by more than one point four million people. And it was basically a rhyme, a poem from the start to the end. And inside of it was a sort of a rap battle between my negative and positive voice. But actually that's just a sort of a metaphor to describe what goes on. We really have a multitude of different voices inside our head, and the problem isn't what we think. The problem is, what we believe. And the difference between a thought and a belief is that the belief comes with a feeling of certainty. So whenever you're competing in it, it's a little bit like if you're listening to a politician or a group of politicians talk at a debate stage, whichever one you believe is the one that increases your level of uncertainty in what they have to say. The problem is, is that oftentimes some of those will come into the debate already with preconceived sense of credibility for you. And so when you feel anxious, your brain will be much more likely to believe the thoughts that you're what I call your inner dictator says that are promoting that anxiety. Whenever you're depressed, your brain will be much more likely to believe in anything that aligns with that negativity. This is known as mood congruent cognition. Your brain will orient more towards whatever lines up with the feeling that you're already feeling. So it's almost like our feelings dictate what we will believe in that moment. This is known as affective realism. Our brain tends to interpret the world through the feelings that we feel at this moment in time. So in order for us to ensure that the inverted comma positive feeling works or the positive voice wins, we have to first make it so we, I believe, take a step back and recognize what's going on. We need to recognize the game we're in. One of the most important things to succeed with regards to the external propaganda is we need to first realize it's propaganda. Let's imagine I've got two people. Let's imagine I've got Ray and John, and John's telling me I'm useless, and Ray's telling me I'm a grace. If I believe John, in order for me to believe Ray, I first need to stop believing John. Which means I need to realize that the reason John is telling me that is not because it's factually true, but it's because it's his agenda to try to make me feel bad about myself. So once you recognize the game, once you recognize you are the victim of the propaganda, it helps you to nullify the impact of that propaganda. And even if John keeps talking, you're less likely to buy into it. And then once I'm in that situation where I'm no longer buying into what John's saying now, it gives me a chance to buy into what Ray is saying. Now, if Ray turns around and does or ignores anything negative about me, then he loses credibility in my mind. So whatever Ray says should feel right to me and should fit in to who I already believe I am. But the first step is to stop believing or disbelieving, or start to doubt more whatever the negative voice is saying at that moment, by recognizing it is under the influence of the emotion. So the first thing I would do is if I find myself in a struggling with my mental health, which happens every now and then, I first notice and recognize right now, this is your inner propaganda talking right now. Your brain is convincing you that everything is hopeless right now. Your brain is convinced you that you're useless right now. That's what your brain is. It's, it's goal is therefore, whatever decisions you make, whatever conclusions you reach are going to be tainted by this hidden agenda of this double agent, your brain pretending to share with you reality. But actually it's presenting to you a totally different way of the world that's giving you a story. And I think the more you do that, it's a little bit like you've got Fox News or CNN, and so many people turn around and go, well, come on, you watch Fox News. That's such a bunch of liars. And then somebody else, come on, you watch CNN. That's such a bunch of liars. And the truth of the matter is, is that both channels take pieces of the truth and then craft the narratives that support their editorial argument. But our brains do the same thing depending on how we feel. And so step one is we need to go. When I watch Fox News or when I watch CNN, that's not necessarily reality. That's just a narrative about data points in reality. And the same is true in my brain. Whenever I'm feeling like everything's worthless, that's not necessarily reality. It's my brain crafting a narrative about specific data points that it's selected to drive that point home.

The metaphor that you, you break down in the book about the, the journalist, right? Like the how your brain works with editorial board, the, the journalists. I thought that was one of the most powerful metaphors in the entire thing because it put into context exactly how I process information, how we all process information and what's at work in order to, to reinforce that information and why, like how we get to certainty, like you were talking about, you know, belief is, is when you have certainty behind it. You did a, I thought a very good job of articulating how we develop that certainty. Do you mind sharing like the summary of that, of that metaphor.

To explain what goes on in the brain? I talked about I actually talked about two stories. I talked about a story of a lady that I met that's a friend of mine that I got to know, and I interviewed her and her son because she used to be very religious. She was very, very, a very strong Christian. And then she went from being a Christian to be an atheist. And I also took a story of an atheist, uh, who became a Christian, who was very skeptical, atheist, who did some investigation, became a Christian. And I used both stories in parallel in the chapter to talk about what goes on in the brain. Whenever we make changes, whatever our beliefs change, what actually happens? How does it work? So the metaphor I use is really relates to three systems in the brain. You have number one, um, the salience network, which is a network of our brain where we look to try to figure out what's going on in the environment. So our brain scans whatever is relevant in the environment, whatever we need to pay attention to. And it also connects with what we call the amygdala, which is a part of the brain, which is really looking for opportunities or scanning for threats. And that along with the salience network, which is really identifying whatever is happening in our environment, that's what our brain tends to look for information from, but it doesn't look for neutral information. It looks based upon what we already believe. So our brain also has a network called the default mode network. And this is the network of collection of parts of our brain that is all running whenever we're not actively occupied with something. So when you're just sitting there and you're just thinking and your mind is wandering off and you'll think about yourself, you'll think about your life. And that's where a lot of our mental health struggles can come from, because we can find ourselves spiraling, thinking about our worth, thinking about our value, thinking about the people that haven't responded to us or the people that rejected us or whatever that is, is really it's a narrative that we tell about ourselves. It's very much in connected to our identity and sense of self and sense of status. Um, and that directs and dictates largely what we're paying attention to in that moment. So for instance, if you believe that you're destined to fail, then the researchers or the research team, as I call them, the salience network, are more likely to go out and find evidence that backs up that particular conclusion. So like your brain is trying to figure out what's true, it's not really trying to figure out what's true. It's trying to tell you what's true. So the brain's default mode network is you're useless and you amount to nothing. And then what it will do is it will look for evidence. The research team, it will send out the salience network to pay attention to every example where that is so and everything that you have to feel bad about. And then the journalists, which is along with the researchers and editorial team, which is the DMN, the default mode network, the journalists are responsible for crafting the story. So they do the true engineering. So once your editorial team. In other words, once your default mode network, once the story you tell about yourself has decided on the information you're collecting to support its conclusion, then it will start to craft the narrative. It'll start to describe. This is why you're useless. This is all the reasons why you're useless. These are all the ways in which you are useless. This is why you'll never be anything more than useless. It will craft your past, present and future. And that will then feed back into the identity that you hold. So in order to change it. It's not enough for us to just try to work at a journalist level and go, hey, here's a new story. You could write about yourself. It's about how great you are and how amazing you are, because ultimately, that journalist is going to be challenged because the editorial doesn't fit in with that. In order for you to make a change, you have to be helping the person to transform the beliefs that they are building about themselves, which is the default mode in which they communicate about themselves. And so the way in which we need to do that is we only have a shot when we change the way in which the person feels at that moment, and then whatever we say should fit in with the narrative that they tell. So if you talk to me and you go, oh, and you hate reading books, then nothing you say after that will get into my brain. I will just dismiss any of your attempts to influence me. Why? Because you've said something that goes directly against my identity. Because I believe I'm the kind of person who loves reading books. Whereas if instead you turn around and go, oh, you're the kind of guy who loves reading books, my brain is now more open. I'm more listening to you and my default mode network. My editorial team is now more receptive to whatever you're about to say next, and therefore the surprises you give me, the challenges you might have for me, the different perspectives or alternative perspectives that you might share with me. I'm much more likely to at least inspect them. At least absorb them. At least consider them. that I would be if I immediately was to reject what it is that you're saying at that moment.

I'm fascinated by the topic. Right? Like just as a psychology nerd, like on its own. But I think there's really practical elements of this. And it's, it's not, it's not just at the very high level of, hey, convincing yourself of self-worth. It's all the way down to like very tactical things that, that you decide on a day to day basis, say like in your business, like I are based on beliefs. No, I can't do that. Like that's, I'm not good at that or that channel doesn't work or that thing doesn't work. Like we're, this is happening all day long. Like we're, we're, we're processing information in a way that's consistent with what we already believe. I think the decisions that we make oftentimes are based on beliefs that may not be true because we, we don't, we're not even aware of them, right? Like we're, we're not even aware of some of these deep seated beliefs. How do you, how do you spot them? Like, how do you, how do you uncover how do I know what's real and what's not?

The first thing is, is that inner propaganda is everywhere, right? And by that I mean everything that you believe your brain has convinced you of. That doesn't mean that some of it isn't true. It just means the first place to look is to recognize everything that you feel a sense of certainty about is on the table, right? It's something that we need to look at. But then the second piece is, is going, how's it working for you? Right. So one of the things I like to do as a belief audit, and the belief audit starts with, you know, identifying what is the belief. To select the belief though, you have to identify are there beliefs that are problematic for you. So you, you will identify certain beliefs, limit me or prevent me from being as successful as I want. So for instance, you believe I will never be good at business. I will never be successful at at running an organization. I'm just not good at entrepreneurial ism, right? It's just not I'm not a good entrepreneur. Someone believes that the belief of that. I often ask, what are you trying to achieve with that belief? And more often than not, if we take the belief I'm not a good entrepreneur, you might be trying to manage expectations. You might be trying to not set yourself up for disappointment. You might not be. You might be trying to be the underdog, be not that good, but actually overcome and suddenly manage to be really successful as an entrepreneur despite the fact that, you know, you're not naturally that way. So there's all sorts of potential positives. But once I ask the question, what are you trying to achieve with believing that? The next question is, how's it working for you? If you believe that you're not good at being an entrepreneur, how is that actually helping you in your ultimate goal? And the answer is almost invariably, well, it's not. And then the final piece is what other narrative or story or belief could you have that would be plausible to you that would be more successful. And this is where we get to the most important distinction. Too many people are trying to figure out what's true or what's real. The reality is, for most things, it's not about what's true or real. It's about what's useful. Like if if you believe that you're a shitty entrepreneur, you can find reasons. You can find the mistakes you make. You can find your inability to to delegate. You can find the inability to be able to scale. You can find the fact that you're working too much. You can find the fact that you haven't hired anyone or you haven't hired the right people. There's loads of ways, loads of evidence out there that can prove to you that you're a terrible entrepreneur. At the same time, you probably have loads of evidence that could prove to you that you're an amazing entrepreneur. You've been doing this so long, you can do this. You managed to succeed in this way and that way, you're actually making a business of it. You're still around so many years later. Like we all have the ability to argue almost any way. And the smarter you are, the better you can argue for bullshit. That's why the smartest people sometimes have the dumbest takes. You have someone like, you know, one of the smartest people in the business world, like Elon Musk, who in some areas is a genius. And then some areas he has the most ridiculous takes you can imagine, right? And he's not alone. A lot of podcast hosts, they're an expert in psychology. But don't ask them about politics. They're an expert about politics. But don't ask them about some other topic. Like, we live in a world where we are falling for this perception, right? Falling for this myth that because someone is smart, it means they're accurate, but just because they're smart doesn't make them accurate about everything. All it means is that they are a remarkably good ability to logically argue for what they want, because they can convince you, and they can select and cherry pick the evidence to convince you of a point of view if they're really strong mentally. But the problem is, is that when we believe that the belief itself can get in the way. And that's why I sort of say the wrong thing to look for is, is this true? Because we can make an argument for it being true, and we can probably make an argument of the opposite being true. And it's not like it's science or engineering where, you know, you, you won't be able to survive. Like if, if we're building something, it either works or it doesn't. The predictions that we make have to be fulfilled. Otherwise it doesn't work. We can't build a plane and go, I think that'll work. It has to work or it doesn't work. But in most cases, in life, in the business world in general, in almost every conversation we have, that's not a that's not a the way it works, right? Most of it is interpretation. Most of it is narrative. Most of it is story, most of it is angle. And so in that kind of world, what matters isn't is this true? Because again, we can argue for it against. It's. If I believe this, does it help me? And sometimes believing in what you want to believe is the very thing that will help you succeed, right? If James Dyson, uh, he tried five thousand different prototypes before he managed to invent and became successful five thousand in order for him to keep going, he had to believe in something that that was not objective evidence to that would suggest that he was going to be successful, but he had to believe. And similarly to if you just believe in what you want to believe, and it's all rosy in the garden, but your company is hemorrhaging money, that's also a problem because that means that now you're because you're not looking at the objective truth. You're looking at what I call the desired truth, what you want to believe. The same thing that helps you and saves you in one area can be the very same thing that destroys you in another. And that's why I think usefulness is a much more useful, if you'll excuse the pun way of thinking about it moving forward.

I relate it to a lot of books I've read have talked about the importance of identity, right? Like if you can change your identity, you can change your outcomes. If you change the way that you believe about yourself and who you are and who you believe yourself to be, if you just imagine it and believe that you're a successful entrepreneur and you're capable of doing that thing and all of that, then you will, will likely are you dramatically increase the probability of that happening? How do you change your beliefs about yourself when you're the gatekeeper to the belief? Right? Like I'm, I'm the person that I already believe that I may not be a good entrepreneur. I want to believe that I'm a successful, I'm a good entrepreneur, but I'm the one that has the beliefs. I'm like the gatekeeper and I have this desired truth. How do you get from here to there?

As you pointed out, Ray, most of the time people say you need to change your identity. Great. You need to change your beliefs about who you are. Great. But how do you actually do that? Right? That's the question we're trying to ask. And so the way in which I look at it is, is I think we're asking the wrong question. So if we ask, am I a good entrepreneur? The answer is yes, I am or no, I'm not. And once again, we can find conclusions for either. But think about it. What is the benefit of you believing you're an entrepreneur, a good entrepreneur? Well, maybe it'll give you a boost of confidence. What is the benefit of believing that you're not a good entrepreneur? Well, maybe it'll mean that you get a real job, as people will say, and then you walk away and it means you're not taking risks. What I prefer to do is look at everything as like, well, this is about whether or not you can improve on it, right? So when I think about identity, I'm drawn to this concept by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile Anti-fragility. And I have what I call the antifragile identity. And so if you take, for example, someone who believes they're not a good entrepreneur, if you try to turn around to them and you try to convince them, hey, you are a great entrepreneur. Look at all the great things you've done, right? You've done this, you've done that. You've done the other right. Oh, and look at all the ways in which you've killed that. You've done this, that, and the other. Everything you say is just logical reasons as to why they're a good entrepreneur, and they can give you logical reasons as to why they're not. And you can get into it. They think this. You think that in an argument or whatever the case may be, that's the way it works. So instead of playing that game, what if you were to go? It doesn't really matter whether or not I'm a good entrepreneur or not. What matters is how can I improve? Because ultimately, if I'm an entrepreneur right now, I need to become better. And so one of the ways in which I can get better. So this night have I got what it takes? AM I good enough? AM I, you know, a natural? It's all nonsense. Because at the end of the day, what matters is can you improve? Can you learn? Therefore, when you notice the gap between where you are and where you want to be, most people go to I want to be like, if we take me right, I want to be a best selling author. And I'm not a best selling author. So therefore I feel bad about myself because I'm not good enough, or I want to be a best selling author. I'm not a best selling author. What do I need to do to become a best selling author? How do I pursue it? And to me, that's just a much more useful way of thinking. We're focusing on how we're improving and how we're moving towards our goal, as opposed to some desire. We have to be able to evaluate ourselves. If you turn around and you go, I'm not as successful as I want to be cool, get more successful. And the way we do that is by learning what we need to do and applying it, and then working on it and then iterating. And every time we fail and every mistake we make, it makes us better. It makes us stronger. And to me, that antifragile identity, where every negative experience we have serves to help us to become better and smarter and more effective, uh, allows us to become more skillful as an entrepreneur. That's what we really want. So I think that when we're trying to change the belief from, I'm a bad entrepreneur, it matters what we're going to change it to. And the problem isn't that you think you're a bad entrepreneur. The problem is how believing that you're a bad entrepreneur causes you to not be very effective. It's the impact of that belief. So my question is, what is a more useful belief? And if I'm somebody that's quite negative about myself and believing I'm a useful, useless, um, uh, entrepreneur. Well, if you present the belief, if I consider the belief, I can learn to be better, that's a lot easier to buy into than believing that I'm a good entrepreneur. It's a lot easier for me to, uh, it's all harder for me to challenge the idea of if I'm talking to you and you say, I'm a useless entrepreneur and I turned to you and go, well, you know, is it plausible that you could get better? You're like, well, yeah, I suppose so. And are there skills that you don't have that you could learn and you go, well, yeah, of course there are. And is there anyone that you know that could potentially help you to learn those kind of skills? And you go, well, I suppose there is. And before you know it, now you're going in the direction and your identity is being opened up to go. And right, right now, here is where I am. I'm in a location as opposed to I'm in a sort of a being. And I think that the more we start to adopt or change the vocabulary we use to describe our identity, because fundamentally your identity is two things. It's the story you sell to yourself about who you are, and it's the observation of your behavior. When you observe your behavior, you also have the ability to change your behavior. So you want to become a fit person. Well, you exercise, you train regularly, you want to become healthy. Well, then you eat healthy, you sleep more. You take time off. Like these are ways to be able to change your identity through behavior. James Clear talks about it every time you engage in a behavior, it's a vote for the person you become. But then on the flip side, we also have the stories, and the stories is the interpretation. And that's also down to us. So how are we going to appraise our behavior ourselves? What are the stories we're going to sell? And if you try to sell yourself a story, I'm a great entrepreneur. When a part of your brain says that's bullshit, it's not going to cut it. But if you start to believe, well, I'm the kind of person that can improve and I'm better at this than I was before, therefore, I can improve. And if I can improve, then what do I need to do to improve and become a better entrepreneur moving forward? Does that make sense?

It actually ties in like, if you break it down, like one of the things that I see a lot because I work, I work with a lot of IT business owners, right? And so there tend to be more technical by nature. And what I hear a lot is I'm just not a, I'm not a sales person. Like I'm not good at sales. And it's like an identity that's been stamped in and it's something that they believe I really liked in, in the book, I liked the Maria math, right? Because like you have a, you have an identity that's based on something that's not necessarily true. Walk me, walk me through how you would use what we'll call the Maria math on somebody that says, I'm just not, I'm just not a sales person.

So so there's a couple of things that come to mind. So the Maria story again is many years ago, I was doing a coaching workshop helping a group of coaches to be able to see how habit change works. One of the people that volunteered, I brought her on stage and I said, is there a habit you want to change? And she says, yes, but I know everything that you could say to me to change. I know all the skills to do it, but it's not going to work. I said, why? She goes, well, it's smoking and I'm just a smoker. That's all there is to it. And I said, uh, let me ask you a question. How many cigarettes do you smoke in a day? She said, I don't know, about twenty. I said, how long does it take you to smoke the cigarette? She said, I don't know, three or four minutes each. I said, so that's about what, eighty minutes a day? She goes, yeah. I said, if you spend eighty minutes a day smoking, how much time a day do you spend not smoking? She goes twenty two hours and forty minutes, I say, so if you had two jobs, one of them was for twenty two hours and forty minutes, and one of them was eighty minutes a day. Which would you describe yourself? She says, well, the one that I do most of the time, the one I do twenty two hours in forty minutes, I said. So by that calculation, you're a nonsmoker who smokes for eighty minutes a day. And in that moment she sat back and she said, I never thought about it like that before. I saw her like five or six years later. She hadn't touched a cigarette since that conversation. And that wasn't because of me, because she obviously had the tools to help her, to stop smoking, to help her deal with the craving, to help her, you know, implement the plan. But what allowed her to do that was the shift where all of a sudden, the very impediment to her success, which was this identity she was holding so tightly, she was able to open up that identity and recognize she didn't have to live in it. There was an alternative identity that was just as plausible for her. And she came to that conclusion simply by the conversation that we had. The other example is I worked with a I work with a sales coach in an accounting firm, actually, and she believed that she was a useless salesperson. And she actually had a really negative feeling about selling. And so we talked. And one of the questions I asked her was I said, so what, you know, how do you think or how do you feel about sales? And so it was our beliefs about sales that was the problem. She felt that salespeople or, you know, trying to con you and try to push you and they're pushy and they're this and that and the other. And I said, uh, the folks that you work with, the folks that you train, what is it that they're selling? And she talked about the accountancy software and I said, and, um, are they just trying to screw over the customers to try to get as much money? And she goes, no, of course not. I said, so why are they bothering to sell it? And she goes, well, if people have our software, it's so much better than the other software. I said, so really what you're prepared to do is you're prepared to, um, allow those clients to go to their, to your competition and get subpar software just because you don't want to have a conversation with them. And at that moment, she sort of to realize that sales is not what she thought it was. And therefore that allowed her to incorporate into her identity. Because if you believe sales is a con job. And you believe that you're a good person, then, of course, your identity is never going to fit in. But when you start to realize again, through her own way of coming to that conclusion, well, actually sales helps my clients to solve their problems in the best way possible. That can line up with my belief that I'm a good person. Then all of a sudden, her entire way of thinking about it changed. Because now the belief that she could be a great salesperson, it felt right. And it fit in with her identity. And once it feels right and fits in with who you are, it will make sense. You will find the logical reasons as to why it's a good idea. But the problem is, a lot of times we're so caught up convincing ourselves that it's sales is this and that and the other, and we listen to things and we jump to conclusions and we don't really think it through enough. Once you change the identity, that's what opens up. And the way you do that is by recognizing what the identity is and then finding ways to shift it.

There's layers of belief even within that example, because there's the belief about what sales is to begin with, you know, and then it's like, what does it take to be a good good at sales? And, you know, and so you can like stack it. And when you get down to the root of it, you're like, oh, shit. Like it's actually sales is actually just helping people. So long as you're selling something that you actually have some degree of conviction in that you believe betters people. I've changed my thought about sales because when I got into sales decades ago, I, I didn't like sales. I was like, I'm just going to hold my nose and do this thing because ironically, I wanted to get into politics. I left politics holding my nose about politics and loving sales. But when I, when I went into it, my belief about what sales was, even myself and what a good sales person is. I'm an introvert. I'm quiet, I'm shyer. I'm, you know, I'm not super charismatic. All of which decades later, I realized is bullshit. Like the, the idea of what sales is and how you do it successfully. It's a skill. It's something that's learned that every, it's not like a necessarily a born trait that you that you either have or you don't. And you can and you can change it. Why do we hold beliefs that are counterproductive to ourselves?

Largely because our brains want that to be so. Like our brains are like double agents that aren't optimized for our happiness or success or even accuracy. They're optimized for our survival. So our brain has two core needs. One is and wants to keep us safe. And the other is it wants to keep things stable. The reason it wants things to be safe is because when things are safe, we're obviously going to stay alive. The reason it wants things to be stable is because it wants to conserve as much calories as possible, and it wants to make it so it's not being used that much, because it already accounts for twenty to twenty five percent of the calories that we take in on a daily basis, and it only represents about two percent of our body mass. So it looks for shortcuts. It likes to keep things simple. So when you think about the beliefs that we build in the world, those beliefs are influenced, number one by our fear of the negative. So our brain has a negativity bias. we're more likely to pay attention to the risks or the dangers in the world than we are to the positive things. So our brains are naturally going to be more oriented towards protecting us. Therefore, our beliefs will be whatever feelings of certainty can help us to protect ourselves. Therefore, a lot of times they might be more limiting or negative. But second of all, to be safe and to survive, our beliefs will also often be whatever the people around us agree with. So if you're in a world where, um, everyone around you is telling you that being an entrepreneur is just a dumb thing to do, then you're never going to go out there and be an entrepreneur. Why? Because you're subscribing to the beliefs of everyone around you. That's why it's so important to spend time around successful people or spend time around people that can inspire you, because that's how you're able to grow. The more that you spend time around good people, the more you are soaking in their beliefs as well. Because to a degree, we believe whatever others believe, almost like a membership fee to be part of that group. And then the second, uh, need that our brain has is this need to keep things stable, to be as economical as possible, to use as few calories as possible? The challenge there is, is that our brain tends to crave the simple explanation. It tends to try to jump to conclusions. Let me keep everything nice and simple. And so instead of me going, I'm a multi-layered, uh, nuanced person with lots of complexities and lots of, you know, um, uh, multi-dimensional characteristics that exists differently depending on who I meet. Instead, we go, I'm an introvert. I'm an extrovert, I'm a neurotic, I'm this, I'm that and the other. I believe I'm an introvert. You believe you're an introvert. And that's true in the sense of our observation. We know what gives us energy and takes away energy, but it's still a label that we use that isn't always true. So therefore, when we use it, the benefit of it is it gives us a way of understanding ourselves, which makes us feel a sense of certainty to go, oh, I know more about who I am. Therefore I feel safe because things are stable. But the problem is, is if you believe that you're an introvert, that can, as it might have in the past, for you or for me, it can prevent you from actually pursuing something because you immediately jump to a second conclusion, which is, introverts are not good at sales, and it's only with the likes of, you know, books like Quiet by Susan Cain that people were able to challenge their perspective of what does it mean to be an introvert? And then also we look at, to your point, sales and sales is, you know, sales is a multitude of skills. So some aspects of sales might be, you know, uh, let's say someone who's just calling up to try to get a meeting, right? So your cold calling and you're going to get one hundred rejections or one thousand rejections or whatever some elements of that means. How do you deal with a no? And again, you see it more like you gamify it and you go every no. I'm just going to tweak and iterate and do it. That's a skill that you learn. That's not a personality characteristic, nor is building a relationship. And so what we need to recognize is because let's say in this context, being a salesperson is lots of different skills put together and some skills are more important depending on what kind of salesperson you are. Then we realize that the labels we give ourselves are so limiting because they're so simple, and sometimes they can be useful if you believe, look, I'm pretty, I'm pretty good on my feet, then that belief will give you the confidence to be pretty good in your feet. But it goes back to Carol Dweck's, you know, growth fixed versus growth mindset. The fixed mindset usually will not always serve you well because if you think you're bad at something and you just assume that's part of it, it's easy on your brain. Your brain likes it to have a nice simple way of going, this is what I'm bad at. But if it gets in your way and prevents your success, that's the problem. So the reason why we do it is because the brain likes that, and our brain wants to get simple, quick conclusions so we can bring to the bank and keep us safe. And unfortunately, a lot of them limit us and hold us back.

Even when you think you're good at something still has some some limitations because a lot of times what you'll do is you'll avoid putting yourself in a position where you, you might be challenged or might have to try harder than you otherwise would because you want to maintain that identity and you believe that it was inherited or natural or gifted. And so you're like, I think I'm just like, you moderate yourself when you could actually excel, you know, you did your, your master's thesis on, on how gurus persuade. And, and now here we are. Like, there's elements of that psychology that are baked into to inner propaganda, obviously. What did you find when you, when you did that study or when you did your thesis on, on gurus and how they persuade.

Gurus are probably some of the most powerful storytellers in the planet when they're good, when they're successful, not when they're morally good, but when they're successful, they're impeccable storytellers. And if you look at what the best gurus have in common with the worst human beings, but most influential human beings, people like Hitler or Stalin or whatever. It's the ability to tell a story and sell a story to the population. When you look around the world, even to this day, there's a story war going on. So in order for me, if I run a country and I go into another country and invade, or I murder a bunch of people or whatever, or start a war, um, I can tell a story about that. And usually it's the same old stories. We're doing it for our protection. Maybe it happened years ago, but nowadays, the last one hundred years or so, no country ever turns around and goes, you know, we invaded them and we killed them because we wanted to, or we did it because we wanted to have what they owned. Right. That's not the way in which it works. We will never hear a country going out going. We invaded this country because we wanted to have their mineral resources. Now we all kind of know that's why they do it a lot of times. But nowadays it's almost always the same narrative. If we didn't do it well, well, then they they do it. And it's always the same reasoning that we use. This is the idea of the narrative, the story. So the best, the most successful gurus are the ones that sell the stories in the most powerful way. And usually that story is always the same. It's why conspiracy theories work. It's like I said, why propaganda machines work. It's the narrative war, and the story usually positions the guru as the guide, right? If we take the hero's journey of, um, once upon a time there was a hero and they were a victim and they were struggling with a monster and they were trying everything and nothing worked until finally the guy came along and helped them. And then they overcame the monster with the help of the guide. And then they live happy ever after. That is the ultimate hero's journey. Story is what sells most products. Let's imagine I use a fitness app. I will tell a story. If I'm marketing, I'll go, you know, I used to be seven hundred pounds overweight and all of a sudden I was miserable and my life was rubbish and crap and I struggled and I tried everything. I tried every diet, nothing worked. And then I came across this fitness app called Fit app. And I tried it and I entered my details and all of a sudden it allowed me to lose the weight. And now I'm so happy and successful and more effective. So that's the the narrative or story expert who's the great marketer? Now let's take that to the next logical conclusion, which is let's take it and give the example of the cult. So the cult works based upon you are unsatisfied in your life. You're struggling. Well, I get that because right now, here's how the world is working. We are living in a time where we are dealing with so much negativity in the world. And the reason for that negativity isn't because of the people that are existing. It's because actually the conventional way in which we live is full of all these puppets and full of all of these different, um, dangerous, uh, agents that are, uh, doing what they can to ruin your life and to destroy you. And meanwhile, we've got all this negative energy or the aliens are coming down at some point, and that's why they've been infiltrating our minds since the dawn of time, they've been doing what they could to make it so that we are in the worst day possible, so that they can invade. I'm the only person that can save you because I'm the one with this knowledge. And so they share this story. They convince a group of people of it. The more those people are convinced, they have this person who seems so certain, who's charismatic, who seems to have all the answers, and who's telling them this story that, you know, the reason for all of my my bad feelings is not because of me. It's because of the world. And in order to save me and save everyone I love, this person has the answers. So this person is telling a story. This guru shares the story that makes you go, oh my goodness, they're the thing. So the monster in this case is the nefarious agents or whatever the aliens or whatever is wrong with the planet. And the hero is the person who's listening to the story, and the guide is the guru who's saying, believe in me, I will take concubines because that's what the God intended, whatever bullshit they come out with. They will create this world for the folks that are there. As a result, people will follow the guru because the guru will say, if you do X, then you will have eternal happiness, contentment, everything that they want. But it's marketing. It's the same pitch. It's just different stakes. And then you take that one more level up and you take it to the dictator or even just a general politician. What is that story like? So the story is, if we take it to an extreme level, uh, Hitler. Hitler talks about the fact that he talks to the, the, the Germans and he says, look, we are the victims of a terrible treaty of Versailles. This, uh, humiliated us. And we are strong, good German people. So he's appealing to the Germans that are listening. They're frustrated that the economy is tanked. This is, you know, uh, Wall Street crash, uh, of of of nineteen twenty nine. This is a nightmare. And so what now you're having is you're having this guy who's demonstrating full certainty, charisma, intensity, and he's reflecting the anger you have and the fear you have and the and the, you know, frustration you have at being victimized like this. And he's saying you are the victim and you know who the enemy is. The enemy are the Jewish people, the Jews, the enemy are the Soviets, right? Uh, the communists. Right. So these are the enemies. And then the Reichstag fire, you know, more than likely was, uh, I would expect most are certainly a good proportion of historians that believe that that was, you know, a false flag, uh, example. But once again, look, look what they're doing. So you galvanize the negative feelings, the energies of the people, and then you win them over. And once you win them over, then you craft a sort of an indoctrination where they become fearful of each other. You get that in North Korea, you got it in Nazi Germany, we better not tell other people if we disagree, because we are all good citizens and we all believe the same thing. And if you don't believe it, you could be cast out. And in Hitler's Germany, if you're cast out, that could mean dead, right? So that's the stakes. Now I'll do one more. And that is and I probably shouldn't do this, but I'm going to do it because, you know, I think it's important. Politics in America. So you have politicians that are going to turn around and tell you the narrative and you know who the problem is. First of all, choose the group. So it could be the minority group or it could be the elites, right? But it's choose the group. They're everything that's wrong, not some of the things that's wrong, not nuanced, wise going. You know, if we look at, you know, this particular group, there are certain people in this group that we need to be able to identify as problems. They are causing more problems in society and we need to look at it. No nuance. We don't need nuance if we're leading the political party. Instead, what we do is we say, look, they're the problem. And once we do that, we convince people that these are the enemies. These are the monsters of the hero's journey. We are the heroes, the good people. We're just trying to get on with the, you know, the the trusted and true Americans. And they're the problem now. They're the problem could be they're the problem, as in the other political party. So they're the problem because they're fascists or they're the problem because they're communists. But it's the same deal. It's the same trick. It's the same narrative. It's the same war. I need to convince you that our side is the right one, and their side is the wrong one. So the exact same story is told by people in marketing. Cult leaders, dictators and everyday politicians in the modern world. And it's just different stakes. It's different extremities. But they're all one point of view, right? Some of them are obviously more extreme than others. Some of them lead to way worse conclusions than others. Some of them absolutely devastating destroy, you know, lives. But we need to, I think, become more aware of the game that is being played. We need to be aware of the storytellers of society, how this is working, because it's only in recognizing it and not feeding into the typical bullshit, which is, you know, Ray, I mean, you're a victim of propaganda, but I I'm the one who's free from it. No, we're all the same. And this whole notion that I know better than everyone else is called naive realism. It's like, ah, I, I know what's real, but but Ray, oh, he's brainwashed by the, the the Republicans, he's brainwashed by the Democrats. He's brainwashed by this politician or that we need to recognize we're all victims of the propaganda. We're all victims of the, the information we're taking in. Um, so to me, I know it was a simple question. Sorry, I went on a bit there, but it's the first time I've ever explained it like that. So I'm hoping it makes sense.

It all ties back to like elements of marketing, right? Like there's like it's whatever message you're marketing idea, your marketing product, you're marketing like any like movement, you're marketing the psychology of it underneath is like a strikingly similar, you know, and at at scale. How critical is the bad guy in marketing any of those messages, products or movements? Do you need a bad guy in that?

You don't always need a bad guy, but you need an enemy. And to make that distinction, if you're trying to sell a product, oftentimes the bad guy is like, let's say you're selling headache tablets, the bad guys, the headache, right? So you always need something to defeat. A story doesn't work if there's no bad guy like, you know, tell me any movie you like that's any good. Uh, in fact, almost every movie has to have a, you know, a goody and a baddie. They have to have some sort of. Now the goody can change into a baddie, or the baddie can change into a goody. And sometimes they can be complex enough that you walk away and you're like, well, they're kind of a baddie and a goody in some ways, but there's always those polar, uh, there's all, all always those polarities in anything. Because in order for a story to work, it has to use what we call cortisol and dopamine. From a neurochemical perspective, there has to be the stress or the things are going wrong. And then the turning point of things are going right. Like to keep people's attention. There needs to be the ups and downs. So even when you, you describe the, the, the writing, one of the things in telling stories is I did my best to make it so that when I was telling the stories that you were wondering as you were reading, what happens. I want to go back to that. I wonder what is going to happen. And then I would give you what happens a little later on. I was generating the right kind of chemical hits, if you will, as we go through the story, because when you tell a story, what makes it interesting is turning points. Well, if I tell you a story right where I go, you know, once upon a time there was these two people and they met and they fell in love and they kept falling more and more in love. And then they got engaged. Um, and then they had the most amazing wedding. And then they, you know, added the most beautiful honeymoon. And then they had children. And then the kids turned down, were really healthy. And then their kids grew up and were successful. And the, the couple kept living forever and they were so happy for that year. Tree. It's not even a story. It's a bunch of events that happens. It's all the exact same thing. What you want is you want the ups and downs because that's what gets your attention. Why? Because that's how life is. Life is good things. Bad things. In the last few weeks with the book launch, the amount of ups and downs like a roller coaster, constantly. One minute Tony Robbins endorses your book and it's, like, incredible. The next minute you've like disappointed notice about, you know, the printing problems with the printing. The next minute something else positive goes on. And this is life, right? Life is full of ups and downs, and it's part of why when we get a story and the story has those ups and downs that we connect. So does your story need a baddie? Yes. Does the baddie have to be a person? Not necessarily. The baddie could be depression in many ways. One of the baddies in inner propaganda depression, right? It's anxiety. It is the mental health problems that we face, that plague society today, that cause millions of people, if not billions of people, to suffer. They are the baddies. And that's what I'm attacking. And that's what propaganda is designed to attack. Who are the baddies in the polarization piece? Well, the the baddies, they're the storytellers, the society that drive us apart, that build these stories to convince us that the enemy is the other side, that convince us that the enemy is some other people. There's baddies all over the place. And I think that's what allows us to be successful with the messages we have.

You know, it's funny as you're as you're thinking about this because I'm thinking in terms of marketing to like specifically to, you know, the technical services to say you're selling something like IT services, you have a tendency to jump straight to the logic, like the features, the tech stack, the because one, your technical experiences and expertise is in that area and you value it more than other people. And I imagine I'm picturing myself sitting down and saying, hey, we've got to tell a story about about this. If we want to launch a marketing campaign, how would you apply that psychology to sales and marketing for something that that's more technical, like IT services, something like that and that and that domain that so you don't get stuck trying to feature yourself.

If we take, for example, let's say AI, just as an, as a, as a form of technology that we're bringing in, right? So you're trying to sell in a AI consulting. What we have to do is we have to look and go. One way to sell that, which wouldn't work very well is to give them statistics on. Well, eighty seven percent of companies now are embracing AI, and forty three percent of them are finding this and thirty two percent instead, what we want to be able to do, and I'm not saying that giving them statistics or data or research isn't useful, but it's table stakes, right? You should have the data that supports what you're doing and the value that you bring. This will allow you to move from x to Y, right? You want to be able to know those numbers, but the story that you would sell would be something along the lines of. What is the problem that AI solves? Right. So it will depend on the organization. But let's say at a very simple level, one of the things it solves is that there's an awful lot of, uh, time that is spent a lot of time that's wasted on some of the analysis that's being done in the work that you do for your clients. So let's imagine you're a firm and you sell, for example, financial products and you spent a lot of time analyzing, and you've got your analysts that are analyzing the financial products and analyzing what the needs are and stuff like that. There's a lot of time that's being sent. There's a lot of energy that's being spent on that. Now, if you were to be able to get back that time and get back that energy, what might be possible for you to be able to spend that time and money on? And so if I just logically walk you through that, you might cognitively know it. But if I share a story where a client similar to you was facing the, the, the, the fact that they were spending so much time doing something and it wasn't actually earning the money that they needed to earn. So their profits were significantly down and they were spending way too much time on work that, you know, was taking longer and longer because things were getting more and more complex. And so what they did was they were able to leverage this AI solution and this AI consultancy that built them agents that allowed them to be able to take it so that as a result of implementing the agents inside the organization, they were able to do that analysis in one twentieth of the time that it normally took. Not only that, but they were able to spend more of that time that they got back having better conversations. So the company didn't actually lose any staff. In fact, it gained staff because now it was able to expand the operations, have more clients therefore needed more relationship managers. So as a result, the organization was able to increase their profit because they were increasing their revenue, because they were increasing their client base, because they increased the amount of time they had to spend doing the kind of outreach that they needed to because their AI system did most of the analysis, and they were able to stress test and use it in that way. And that's a story that when you tell that, that is something that's much more likely to resonate with your client than giving them the statistics of that, which is something that they might know intellectually, but it doesn't have the feeling attached, which is what we're looking to, to build.

It reminds me like the, the term logic bullying that you use, like we don't change our mind based on like debate or facts. Like it's, we think we do and we want to, we want to believe that we do. Like I'm rational, I'm fact based own like the shit that I believe is always true. And here are the facts. It doesn't actually work in terms of trying to change the minds or influence people, whether it's your team or customers, whatever it is.

No, exactly. And look, that that term logic bullying came from from Adam Grant. Right. And he was making the point that oftentimes we think that the more logic we give, the more data we give, the more statistics we give, the more the other person is going to turn around and go, you know what? I'm wrong. But remember, every time you think that way, you're trying to get a person to admit they were wrong. Now their identity is that they're a smart person. So if you're turning around trying to prove to someone that they're wrong, well, they've got an ego. But not only that, they've got an identity of someone who's a smart person who thinks logically. So if they're wrong, they have to admit that they were wrong in total, which means that they might not be as smart as they think. So you're effectively impacting their identity. There's a concept in psychology called identity protective cognition, and studies by a guy called Dan Kahan and colleagues, where they looked at the fact that our brains tend to reject information that negatively threatens who we are. So we bully someone. Logically, we use all the data. We try to prove they're wrong, not realizing that that us trying to prove them wrong is the one thing we can use to guarantee that they're not going to listen to a word that we say, because, again, they can find plausible reasons why their point of view is right. Earlier we were talking about how you can prove anything is true. Well, they have the ability using confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. They have the ability to look at whatever evidence they want to to counter what you're saying. And they will look for evidence to prove that they're right and dismiss evidence that challenges them. So the problem isn't that you're like, being right is not enough. The problem isn't that you don't have enough logic or data or evidence. The problem is they're not going to care unless you change the way they feel or unless you identify their identity and you fit it in with who they are. If you do those two things, great, your logic will go over beautifully. You will effectively change their mind. But the tricky part isn't the logic. Anyone could put together a smart argument. We've been doing that since we were kids in order to really be successful, you need to change the way they feel and you need to fit it with their identity. If you look at one other quick example on it, right? So they did some studies on what makes AI persuasive, right? And they looked and they found like AI systems were three to six times more likely to persuade you that it is. It was an unofficial study that they didn't publish because there was ethical problems with it. But they basically went to a Reddit community called Change My View, right. Hashtag change my view and unchanged my view. People put up a point of view and say, change my view on this. This is what I believe. And then humans normally will go in and try to convince them that actually they're wrong. So they created bots to do this. So bots went around to try to change these people's views. And the bots were three to six times more successful at changing their views. But when they looked at the data and they have other studies that were published that have similar findings. When they looked at what made the AI so successful at changing the view. It wasn't because of the quality of the logic of their argument. It was because they did due diligence and studied the beliefs, the past posts, the profile of the poster that had the change. My view, I believe x. They went and studied that person to try to understand everything that they could about that person. And that was one of the single most powerful part of the persuasion process. So it wasn't the fact that the AI was logically better. It was the fact that the AI paid more attention to the person and the person's identity. And that's what we need to be better at, too.

Yeah. It's while the context is, is really powerful. What what surprised you most in writing this? Of all everything that you found and learned, what what surprised you most?

I think the more time I spent looking into the stories that I generated. So I spent a lot of time researching for stories or examples, and I remember being blown away like the the one Joanne Pujol Garcia story of this double agent during World War two. It's one of the most interesting and enjoyable stories I've ever come across. I was fascinated, that's why it kind of operates almost like a spine of the book, right? It shows up in multiple places because there were so many surprising things about it and how it keeps twisting and turning. And I'm like, the more I dove into it, the more I was like, blown away. My mind was blown every single day I studied it. And that's why I wanted to transfer that experience over to, uh, to the reader. But the more time I spent doing that, the more I found myself in a position where I was like, learning about the fact that whatever changes that happen in terms of our beliefs, it doesn't really matter if the content of the belief. Right? I knew that logic wasn't that powerful, but I didn't realize just how important, let's say, identity was. I didn't realize how important our feelings were, and the more I came across research that showed just how much our emotions determine how we construct beliefs, or how our identity completely obliterates the possibility to change minds because we hold on so tightly to it. That fascinated me completely, and I guess I was also pretty surprised at the examples that, you know, some of the business examples were just so perfect. You know, some of the examples I use showcase exactly the kind of mechanisms that are taking place in the area, because sometimes it's hard for you to take some research or psychology or study and make it as applicable as possible. And often I didn't even have to do it because the real life cases that I had from a business perspective, or even from a historical perspective, fit so perfectly. It kind of solidified the message in a really real way. Um, so, so those were some of the ones I definitely was surprised at the whole process of writing it, I think I, um, as I worked on the craft, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the process as well. To be honest, I was surprised at how much I relished every second of it because I've written books before, but I never felt like this about it. And I think a large part of it was because the subject matter itself is constantly stimulating. Like, what better to study about than why we believe what we do then? Why our beliefs change? I mean, it's fascinating. And I've always been obsessed with understanding the biggest events in the world, like power rests on belief before rests on force, right? So in order for us to be able to, um, let's say, understand how wars are, are, are created or how wars are made, we need to understand how does somebody convince a group of people in this desire to murder lots of other people? And, and that's the story. And so the more I learned about the stories and the more I saw surprisingly, the same thing. That's true in terms of marketing one on one and cult programming and dictatorship and politics in twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven. The more I was like, wow, it really does come down to the same kind of mechanisms over and over again.

The business stories were on point. The history was on point, the personal shares that you have and some of the vulnerability vulnerability that you have in there. I think we're all on point. It also put into context stories that I've read elsewhere, and this added a lens to it, like a, like a filters, like just one examples. You know, Netflix has their book on, you know, the, on their culture. And one of the stories I tell about that book all the time is as a leader, how do you invite criticism? How do you invite candor? How do you get people to tell the truth? Because, you know, groupthink kills a fucking business. And it's, it's easier said than done. And that the Netflix book brought it to light as a principle and something to talk about. Your book put so much more context to it. And I went, ah, like things just clicked that I've read elsewhere. So I think overall was it was it, was it history, business psychology, all of it hit on point because of that, you know, like there's too many insights to go through on, on this podcast. Um, what's the one takeaway you wish everybody would would take from it?

Stop trusting yourself so much so you can believe in yourself more. Stop believing in yourself so you can start believing in yourself. And what I mean by that is so much of it's bullshit. Like the things we convince ourselves of, it doesn't mean it's true, and we have a false sense of certainty that lies to us. We we think because I feel like this will never work out. It will never work out. We're convinced that that's the reality. We don't think of it as I'm thinking negatively right now. We're just convinced of that reality. And I think the concept of inner propaganda is whatever you're convinced of its propaganda, that doesn't mean it's nefarious. It doesn't mean it's wrong. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean it's not true. Sometimes it will be. But you're not in a position to make the evaluation that it is true. When you're hijacked by the feeling that it's dictating the way in which you're perceiving it. And so I think letting go of this need to be convinced and have a sense of certainty that this is the way the world is, is something we could all benefit from. And I want people to be better at challenging their own inner propaganda. And that starts by recognizing it is propaganda. And the more we recognize the propaganda is happening inside our head, the more intellectually humble or cognitively humble we can be, the more we can then start to, number one, believe better, which means finding ways to be able to believe more useful ideas that improve our mental health. Number two, it can help us to make smarter and better decisions because we're. Our judgment is now no longer as clear as as clouded. Number three, it allows us to become better belief leaders, where we're able to lead others to believe in the things we're believing in. And we're not just spreading ideas. We're not just thought leaders, we're belief leaders building a sense of certainty and ideas worth sharing. And then finally, my other hope is that it can help us to find the commonalities that we have with others, right? We have been torn apart by this bullshit story that we're being fed from all sides, which is you we good, they bad. And it's such a simple, such a cliched, stereotypical, nonsensical. It's always this way. We've lost the art of nuance. And to me, when you recognize it's all inner propaganda and you know that you can update your beliefs, you can adjust your, your the way that you feel, you can adjust the level of certainty you have. It means that you have a better shot at understanding others and connecting with others, and hopefully healing the polarization that exists between you and and others in your life as well. So those are the, the things that all come around to the one idea of stop believing in what you think and feel so much. And by doing that, ironically, it'll actually help you to believe more in yourself.

It's impossible to to read this book and not have a shift and start questioning certain things for the better. Like to, to make room for like the opportunity to believe something better that's more self-serving. So, um, I appreciate you coming by, brother, and look forward to following up and wish you the best of success with it.

Thank you so much. If anyone does want to know more, um, go to ohm Fitzpatrick dot com. And, uh, I also have inner propaganda dot com where you can find the book and you can get some free bonuses. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Instagram, and I also have a podcast, inner propaganda as well as a newsletter, inner propaganda. And that's on Fitzpatrick dot com.

Again, go find him. Audios.