CG - Diamonds, Fitness and Cults: Manipulation for Fun and Profit - Katie Rodzon

there he is yes you don't have to if you don't want time all right go ahead then okay we've already taken enough time from you here we are um you can see that so my name is Katie um I am with mad security and I'm going to talk about diamonds Fitness and qus manipulation for Fun and Profit um I was making a talk okay come on oh of course this isn't going to work whatever I'll just click on here um so I was making my talk and I was trying to figure out um I was trying I can't touch that okay so I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and I went through several

Renditions at first my original concept was we're going to talk about the history of human manipulation let's learn from our mistakes because there's a lot of mistakes that happen um and it's always good to know what they are because I mean just like any other situation if you know the history then you're going to know how to use it to your advantage but I started writing it and it sounded way too much like when I taught undergrads it's big old history lesson I didn't think it was appropriate so I moved on and I went how to get your dog to fetch a beer lessons in training anything or anyone and it was good and it was fun and I again started to make

it but then I started thinking about what I wanted you guys to walk away with and I realized what you were going to walk away with was some scary information in which case everyone's going to run around trying to train everyone to do every little thing you're going to try to train your friend to do the mock before touching the TV um your dogs are going to be doing weird stuff so I was like I don't want to be responsible for that at something like bides and the whole whole black hat deathcon amalgamation of everything so I moved on and finally came to [ __ ] it let's just drink and make some bad decisions so um that's what we're going

to do how's a joke guys good good job I'm going to cue those jokes I'm going to drink uh mainly cuz I drank a lot last night and um I have to be alert so there we go so this is what we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about a variety of things and the first thing is going to be how do you scare someone into a date believe it or not everything I'm going to talk about is small subtle things that are based in Psychology and manipulation um small things you can do to get anything you want so one of the things that happened a long time ago is there was a does anyone know what bridge

this is anyone El it's a very tall suspension bridge New Zealand isn't it I feel like it's not it's not close but I want to give you some credit for trying um it's in it's outside of Vancouver right at sou of Vancouver it's a suspension brid it's really high right you can look down I tried to show really good perspective and what ends up happening is people cross it to tourist attraction and when you get to the other side you have this heightened sense of a so we're not talking sex here we're just talking about your exy well researchers wanted to look into this idea of how do you get someone to like you like what is going

on here chemistry wise and what they did is they decided to hit some put some hot girl at the end of the bridge or at the beginning of the bridge she'll say it was Megan Fox um she she had a lab C on since this was science um so Megan [ __ ] so people they they go across the bridge and at the end we have Megan Fox or somebody of similar hotness and she simply asks them hey how did you like your experience this is exciting do you have any other questions for me here's my number feel free to contact me and the actual study was who contacts her how many people are going to contact her

um and what they ended up finding out was that all these people were contacting her not only for questions but to ask her on a DAT so but that wasn't the only thing too they actually put her at the at some for some people at the beginning of the bridge before they had this heightened sense of arousal to see like oh it's going to happen nobody called her on that one there's like yeah whatever I don't care so what they ended up finding out is that people get this heightened sense of arousal when they cross the bridge they saw hot girl she was nice so they attributed that arousal to her she misplaced the experience onto herself so

ESS getting somebody to trick you into date so that's where you get like you know anyone that uh I talk to about what do you do on a first date and people are like oh sit sit at dinner I'm like yes that's great put her into a food coma that's really going to get your chances real High um but no people they're like we went on a roller coaster usually those dates end end well you understand what I'm saying um because yeah you get your date into a height and sense of arousal you smile at them and then they're like I must like you this is and this is why this guy gets dates so

um and so that's this is this concept of how to trick someone into a date um it's it's this idea you're essentially hijacking their subjective experience you know exactly what's going to happen you put them in a situation um that you know what's going to happen I mean it could be in the negative manner as well let's say that you want somebody to leave you alone you put them in a heightened sense of arousal um you piss them off they're a lot more likely to one to hate you and two want to fight with you um so that's another way to kind of egg people on so this is this idea of trick someone into do a date

this is what we've done this is exciting now we know but let's just say that we're talking about these two love prevails and now it's time to buy some diamonds everyone know what diamonds are right how many of you guys are married some of you right how many of you had to buy a wedding ring or received a diamond ring okay how guys how many of you really understood that and why couple of you Chris just cuz she's she in the room no she's in her speaker room okay last time she was in the room I asked something about being happily married CU like me I'm so happy married my wife is right there so

happy um so yeah Chris is always raising his hand so we have diamonds here and it's an actually a really interesting story does anyone know the story of how the diamond became the sign of love and all that stuff no okay beers well yeah tell us Kati oh thank you do you have a question no I know oh good good so you can add um so you can blame for all of you either men that had to buy the diamond ring and you were pissed about it or for all you women they're like why do I have a diamond ring believe on this guy his name is Cecil rhods and basically long time ago down uh when everyone's trying

to colonize to get over to the spice area they had to stop in South Africa and then swoop around people stopped in South AF Africa and then all of a sudden they realized there were diamonds down there and they went crazy and there's a whole whole bunch of story behind that but people were getting all of these diamonds because that this is great and this guy went down and essentially got a monopoly over it and he could because it was down in South Africa he bought up all the mines um by by the time he died deers had a n had 90% of the world's diamonds in their vault and they locked it and they're like oh good there's tons

of diamonds out there um the thing about it though is what he did is it's it's not rare at all there's so many other types of diamond like this's one called the tanzanite most people don't know about it it's extremely rare nobody wants it but we we've outlined it like already um but what they ended up doing is they manipulated the crowd they took all of them they locked them away made it rare like oh there's not that many of them we're only going to release this many that means there's not that much and then they came over to the United States where the market and the marketing team was relatively cheesy and easy um and they said this this is the

Rock of Love this if you love her you give this to her and we bought it we absolutely bought it what what he did is it's very big on behavioral economics and he made it a rare commodity um even if you're lying like you can do similar to with back to the date concept similar with this you have this idea that uh all those kind of games that Everyone likes to play and they're really poorly played now they're rooted in this concept if you like oh I I called you I'm not going to call you for a couple days you're making yourself a rare commodity so that all of a sudden back to hijacking the

subjective experience they go oh I wonder oh I can't talk to you I well I wanted this but I can't get it because everybody's not everybody has it I really want it now so this suddenly hence the reason you see on those shows they're like we only have five left we only have 25 left they count down because they're making it a diminishing commodity so you suddenly feel oh my gosh I need this so that's what happened with diamonds it was it was just delightful everyone bought it everyone's like oh great everyone has to have diamonds unfortunately um all of a sudden the diamond industry started going down so then De Beers brought in a

diamonds forever so not only which is now what they do all the time and they just went the extra step they said it's rare it's love and you're telling her it's forever all in one rock isn't that amazing um so it's actually like I said it's actually quite hilarious because there's um I actually have friends both male and female which is not all of it um so and even if they're not the biggest fan of of diamonds for some reason they feel weird not having a diamond as their wedding ring it's like it's a judgment for some some people were like forget it give me a topaz like I'm on it um but it's odd because it's been ingrained for

so long as a social Norm of that is the sign of love it is forever it at one point they even uh started calling it since it's a really hard rock um they started calling it resilient to time it is timeless because it is resilient I mean it was really weird because essentially they didn't come over and go yeah we found this rock it's clear nothing special there um it's shiny it's kind of hard and uh buy it they didn't do that they stole subjective experience they manipulated the situation and have continued to do that and there's entire Industries based on this you have the Tiffany Diamond it is the sign of love which is ridiculous but then did also

which is great now that we all know this we also have you know pessimism we also have parodies out there like if we said you would chop off your arm if you really loved her youd probably be stupid enough to do that De Beers it's just a rough I found several of these I like them a lot you also have 50 years from now she's not going to lovingly recall the time you gave her a salad spinner a diamond is forever please get better hey what do you think what do you know she thinks you're funny again diamonds are forever then we have another one no tech support required diamonds are forever and this one of my personal

favorites because you felt a 60-second blow job was worth $50 a second a diamond is forever and it gets to the main concept which is [ __ ] love just give me diamonds so that's pretty much what we have here I mean it's hilarious because you even have women that will I mean sometimes men that feel the same way it's just I want diamonds my friend is getting ready to get married I'm not terribly just about that um but it was really funny I let her try some of my rings on to be like what do you like she just wants it to be big and shiny it needs to be a diamond and it needs to be expensive

[ __ ] the the love part of it it needs to be expensive so it it's really interesting how far this has gone and she's like a scientist and a researcher and she understands all these Concepts and she still can't see past it so that's because other people can't see past it it's just yes it's because other people can't do p and it's it's really very interesting because it has been so well ingrained as that science if you love me you'll give me a huge Rock so this is an example the reason I bring this up is this is an amazing example of manipulation on a worldwide level one person took behavioral economic concept of rareness and changed the opinion the

industry made zillionaires out of all these people forever because they manipulated a group of people effectively that's where I mean the marketing for this amazing because it lasted forever I mean you have all these Geico commercials where you had a gecko and you had a caveman they can't keep those Forever The Diamond industry deers gets to keep that logo forever because it is so good at what it does I mean it's it's truly I mean my I find it absolutely amazing because think about what other Industries have been able to do that to change a behavior of an entire nation in one Fell Swoop for many lifetimes it's absolutely ridiculous to think about so it's it's a great thing

of uh of manipulation for fun a profit what's my time I know that I I'm suddenly going to get like 10 minutes and then I'm going to have to like Speedy Gonzalez through this do we know it's 1118 you got plenty of time great minutes 30 minutes okay so the next thing let's just say that okay we we've scared the [ __ ] out of somebody to give us a date we bought them diamonds to tell them we love them and now we are going to have animals kids which could be very similar um and now we need to know how do we need to train anyone in anything because this is important which this is this gets at the

core of behavior analysis from like a p like a human perspective or just from an animal perspective um there's two B basic things that you need to know for training anyone punishment and reward these two things are extremely simple so sorry just so for clarification this would be the punishment this would be the reward um you know um this is one of the commonly unknown things anywhere I go and that somebody will be talking and they'll be like oh well somebody made a loud noise when I did something wrong that was positive reinforcement like nope that was not absolutely not um there's two things to consider here you have punishment and reinforcement and this is the main thing

punishment you want to get rid of the behavior you want it to go away don't reinforce somebody if you want it to go away I mean it makes sense if I want you to take out the trash which I feel I've asked Chris this before and he says I do that all the time for my wife I love her so much um because Chris is a good guy ped you don't you I said I'm pwned he's pwned any so with the if you wanted somebody to take out the trash you want to increase Behavior you're not going to punish them every time they do it because that's going to make them stop so punishment is all about taking away

Behavior reinforcement is all about bringing in behavior when somebody does something you like you give them something whether it's social reinforcement whatever it might be good job um that that that's that kind of thing then you have the positive and you have the negative side the positive being you're adding something makes sense you can have positive punishment you're adding an aversive thing to take away Behavior so if you made a really loud noise because you want somebody to stop doing something you are adding a punishment it's positive punishment so how do you use this to train anyone in anything so I mean everyone knows how to train that I feel is anyone of dogs yeah

I don't have kids I hate them so we have to talk about dogs um I'm sorry uh I mean kids are cute for everyone else and that's completely fine but I get on planes with them and I bastards there's one little I'm sorry I'm going to digress since I have 30 minutes um I I sat in a plane and I was it was long plane ride the stupid little kid behind me sure none of your kids are like this um started kicking my seat and I was like okay I can handle this for like 30 seconds really kicking my seat and I turn around I kind of give the the parent like hey your little Offspring is

uh kicking my seat and they're like oh so of course they do like a oh Pat the head kind of thing like oh my child you know kids do things I'm like no sit back around kid continues to kick my seat I turn and look at the parent again one more time kid does it again and by this time I'm pissed because I've now spilled something on myself almost on my laptop in which case that child would gone out the window um and I turn around and go you don't want to kick my seat anymore he's like why he's like because the pilot will throw you off the plane and it K stopped I know it was really mean

but I was really tired but he stopped the hor the worst part about it and I feel bad for this part the parent did not do anything they didn't go hey lady that's me she was just like hm it's like I just threatened your child you should not be a parent um so on that note though I don't kids are cute but we're going to talk about dogs so because I have an amazing one uh so to train animals uh I uh my boyfriend decided he wanted to give the dog a leash or not a leash a collar that had a beer open on it um I I think he was wanting to call it the beer

buddy and I was like who there bra let's back out of the Fred house just a little bit um so but I was like okay well so what if he has it on there he's like he's got to bring it to you so we discussed the logistics of how to do this so in case you're curious this is dangerous but in case you're curious what you have to do is you have to implement punishment and reinforcement across a period of time one of the things first thing you do we put a towel on the handle to where the dog had something rather than just Chow my great day in Golden Retriever which you start eating the handle so okay here's the

towel now you know good job and if the towel is on there that means you can get into the fridge so you put a towel on there of course this is very and you start rewarding the dog giving him treats whatever it is that they want um you start rewarding the dog for touching and pulling open the fridge right great good job you're doing this this is exciting and then you start fading that out to where they're in the fridge but they need reinforcement for something then you start labeling something in there usually I just put like a like a toy in there like a very distinctive red toy that he likes a lot he got the toy he opens the fridge gets

the toy out of it good job you have reinforcement wa go we keep going with this now we put the like red around the beer which is really easy if I guess if you do red label or something um and then now you start rewarding the dog for bringing it to you so you have the activity and the reason that this gets a little dangerous is well now your dog has ultimate access to the buffet known as your fridge so that's not very good because they're suddenly going to realize holy crap this is where they keep the mate I mean that and it's reinforcing in itself so before that reinforcement comes to play you have to

start punishing them for touching anything that's not red or whatever you've trained so suddenly we now have the dog and go to go into the fridge if you just take the towel off when when you leave and they will they know they'll get punished for anything that's not red so make sure your beers are red put AC on or whatever you want and Tada your dog can now train can now fet you a beer you could do the same thing with your child but I feel like once communication is established you probably just do it that way but yeah so to train anyone on anything this is another way of manipulation it's kind of interesting because punishment and

reinforcement can be subtle it can be enormous um it can be big grand gestures of large things or it can be as simple as social reinforcement a lot of what we do um and a lot of what happens like training a big thing with Cults uh the big success behind a cult is that you isolate and everyone around you is on the same thing and Conformity is your reinforcer everybody believes the same thing and if you ever go I don't know how I feel about that you're going to get kicked out of your conformist group your group they're going to shun you and that's punishment that's why nobody Rebels and if they do you have shows

like the Amish group or whatever those Amish shows are on TV where the Amish kids like left oh my gracious anyway so this is always fun here sorry guys it keeps going away so how to train anyone and anything so that's fun well now we have our kids we have all our stuff now we want to live we have our we've scared the crap out of our wife husband partner whatever it is um we are training animals and kids and now we want to live a long and healthy life and one day we look at ourselves and realize that we look like this but want to look like that um and we think it's that but it's

really this we are large we are smoking or doing some other funky habit and now it's time we've implemented all these like manipulations upon everyone else now we have to manipulate oursel which always happens and that's fine um and this happens so how does how do these things come about there's a lot of people that are completely comfortable with how they are and that's totally fine but then you have people that suddenly wake up one day and this could actually be the partner go oh my gosh you're you're different than you used to be why is it so suddenly that way and of course now you have like do my jeans make me look fat no your ass makes you

look fat and it's a problem so why does this happen well for the top one it's usually desensitization what you have here is if you see the person every day and they're slowly changing into something different it could be something amazing and you suddenly realize oh this is great I need to have a glimmer of hope in here I feel bad I feel very down with marriage right now um so you have desensitization you you don't have enough of a change just called the just noticeable difference and I'm sure most of you know what it is to where you can't just small changes throughout you're not going to notice them necessarily it has to be a certain

magnitude so when somebody it's not like somebody walks in the next morning holy crap I gained 50 pounds yes you would notice that um it's slowly over time and usually what ends up happening um that's desensitization usually what ends up happening is there's a comparison that comes about um if it's yourself you usually end up standing next to somebody that you know what you look like before you see a picture and go my gosh what am I going to do um or it could be that somebody else does the same thing and it comes to your attention all of a sudden you realize holy crap most people don't necessarily look at themselves if if clothes just kept fitting the same way

most people would have a very hard and then you lives in a bubble most people have a very hard time realizing how they look if it was any different if they were smaller if they were bigger whatever it is because the they have no way of seeing it so the way you battle this it's not this has really got to be for yourself unless you really don't like your relationship is that you make that's that's where you have all these uh kind of like like biohackers but uh people that really measure everything they do you got wait you got all this stuff it's an attempt to see this change and watch it to where you know you have

visual indicators you have all these metrics you all these all these graphs to see holy crap a month ago I weighed 10 lb less and I also started running this is interesting now I know it's an attempt to gain control of this desensitization to where you don't become desensitized and go to this point of no control so that that's one of the things you can do I have a I have another friend I don't suggest this habit but she does it anyway she takes a picture of herself every week in the same outfit so that she knows what she looks like I think it was a kind of like a egomaniac thing at first but then she

was able to see like when things change so now she's like obsessed with it but still like I said don't suggest it um but this that's her to get over desensitization what about things I want to go back second what about things like social smoking how many of you guys are a social smoker okay do you how many of you actually think social smoking is [ __ ] okay some of you okay regardless um it's not actually [ __ ] um social smoking is an interesting phenomenon of pairing it's an effective pairing technique um where because I I've had friends that in Behavior analysist they're like this is ridiculous you're a smoker you smoke you're like no I don't smoke I I don't

personally smoke but the other argument is no I don't ever have a need to smoke unless I'm doing X most people it's a good old bar or you're around a certain group of friends that smoke for a lot of people I had uh my a really good friend of mine he smoked at work because that was how he was able to get a break which means that when that was no longer like you could just take a break he had still paired that and that's what this concept of social smoking is is that you don't actually have this generalized idea this generalized pairing of smoking it's that You' or some someone else has effectively paired that activity with

that environment and this can happen with anything this can be with eating this could be with smoking exercising some people exercise around other people better it's a lack of generalization um and generalization is that is when you've effectively trained someone and it goes across all aspects of their life essentially you like that to do it with users you don't want users to just sit in their office and do everything you tell them to you want them to go home and apply it as well usually so that you don't have to deal with their [ __ ] when they're at home um this is the same thing you want to generalize all this stuff um social smoking is one of those

things that it's not that way um they've effectively isolated it to hear I'm in a bar I want a cigarette when I leave the bar I don't want a cigarette because I want to do this um this is one of those things it's it's one of those ways to create habits and superstitions and stuff like that it's how you effectively pair stuff um actually uh back on to marriage uh one of my old professors who's now divorced uh used to describe his wife as effective parent of a euphoric stimulation of cigarettes that was that was their marriage uh the reason that they got together and he says and she just loved it was that they would go on smoke

brakes together so he effectively paired back to like scaring the [ __ ] out of your date he had effectively gotten himself paired with the euphoric experience of cigarette smoke and she attributed to him so they got married had two kids got divorced and he's now with some French girl so anyway here you go more manipulation now you know give me a second I'm going to speed through this for a moment so we got desensitization effective pairing and delay of consequences as far as um the living the long and healthy lifestyle and how to how to really bring it in for yourself and manipulate yourself one of the biggest problems with any sort of health related thing is me eating a

Twinkie today does not translate to what it's going to do to me later it's so far removed it's essentially like back to the punishment consequences if you wanted to train your dog to open the door he opens the door and in two days you reward him he has no damn clue what that's to he hasn't effectively paired it it doesn't work that's the same problem when it comes to any health related thing it's not an immediate reaction you have nothing to show the immediate consequences so a lot of people try to hack this as well um which is where that that measurement comes in you're like hey I ate this I know what this does look at my predictive

measurement kind of thing um and the other thing that you have is they'll start associating other things that's why you have other people that are like oh when I don't go to the gym I don't get I don't know to play video games I have no idea uh my friend my friend uses other food it's weird if she doesn't go to the gym she doesn't get certain food but I feel like it's the wrong paing um so anyway but this is this is where you see a lot of those uh weight loss programs and all this good stuff things like the biggest loser it's all about effectively pairing right there but the problem with the Biggest Loser

is it doesn't generalize the the minute they leave we're all back to our same habits whatever so delay of consequences this is another way to really create a habit and hack that whole thing so that's fun so we've we've living a long and healthy life we have our partner we have our dog we have our our kids we have all this stuff now we have to deal with our nlaws which if any of you love your nlaws then just ignore me they're just stubborn habits and superstitions that's all they are right you that's all they are to me and's suck so anyway what you have here is essentially you have an older a older group of people and they they have

they definitely have stubborn habits just like we all have stubborn habits but they've been doing it for a long time and they've also been doing it with these officers they established these habits within there unknowingly sometimes um and it it kind of kind of sucks sometimes to deal with um it's also kind of interesting to see the pairing like you see oh this happens to my partner and there it is and their parents there you are so as an example I uh my my partner's mother-in-law or mother came to visit us the other week and she's really she's in a habit of not trying food that has not is outside of her wheelhouse um which is

everything that is not McDonald's pretty much so we look at her and said hey would you like some fish and she's like yeah well I only like one type of fish what type of fish is that I have no idea what it was but it was only indigenous to Australia she's never been there don't know why she likes this fish I don't like like fishy fish oh but I do like not trout um what is the fishiest fish you can think of mackerel I feel like she liked that one wasn't H it what wasn't how yeah it it was I wonder if it was mackerel she basically the only fish she liked were the ones

that went into fishing chips and I don't like fishy fish every fish she named to me was the fishiest fish I've ever eaten so I was like I eatting there so all of a sudden we have a habit we have a problem here because she's also going to complain she acts like she's five um she's also going to complain we have a habit I don't eat anything outside of my I don't I don't know what that is I'm not eating that how do you break this well for me I just said well this is what we're cooking we're making carneada what's that it's meat eat it um but this is another one of those things it's realizing habits that occur

and a lot of people if you have a habit um again dealing with - laws or even with kids um you like to just kind of feed it well this is what they always do you're rewarding a stubborn habit and that's a bummer so with habits one of the things um because my partner uh has a very he had a very similar stubbornness uh when it came to eating food as well so what we would do is anytime I would make something and he'd go I don't want that I was like have you ever tried it no so I would reward him for trying it he always liked it but I would reward him for trying so suddenly

I have broken him out of his habit as a matter of fact I've rewarded him and given him a habit of actually going outside of his wheelhouse where so much so that I think we had octopus one time and he' never had it before and he's like I had octopus and he looked at me like a dog waiting for a treat he's like I octopus and I was like good dog we're in public I can't reward you um so it was it's really interesting so now we've created a new habit you address the habit and you deal with it accordingly if I were to just be if he was like I don't like this i' like

fine I'll make you something else or even worse which is my AC ual like gut reaction I don't like this [ __ ] eat it anyways it's not going to work that means we're going to have a problem so this is this St habit um I know I have another story the other thing that we have um is habits is usually with ways of life um setting things up how many of you had have had a little bit of friction in moving in with somebody it could be a partner it could be a roommate whatever oh yeah abely yeah a little bit of friction there's a lot of people that have issues with roommates because when you get together in one

space you'll have the way your space is set up these are where the dishes go and this is where this goes and I don't like doing this and the toothpaste is this way and it's essentially one of the biggest parts of moving in with anybody is establishing the habits and figuring out e one nobody's going to sink completely so you either do the completely weird OCD thing that my two roommate friends did and they essentially like had two parts of the kitchen there was two parts of the fridge like they just were like no I'm not compromising at all I'm setting up the way I want to um which is is really interesting or you have your partner

where you have to figure out a way to coexist um and then of course when your in-laws come into play and they are like no this is where the spices go and you come home and you go what the hell did you do to my house which has happened before I came home and all my dishes were in different spots because this is where they go I was like um one I can't reach that CU I'm a little short and their entire family is tall and I'm like and now I can't find anything uh so I essentially walked out I looked at my I looked at Greg I walked out I said I need all that to be fixed when I get

back okay yeah I um but this is what these habits are in manipulating the situation is realizing what's going on and again this this gets back to very you have to manipulate yourself as well you have to figure out what is a Do or Die thing for me and pick those things let's say it happens to be that the spices are on the counter for some reason and then figuring out how to get them to change rewarding them for it punishing them for not doing it that way who knows depends on what's most effective but that's that idea of of co-creating habits because if you actually don't manipulate the situation whether you or them what you end up

having is 20 years later this thing I did you say you were ped yeah yeah not for Chris but you have people that you essentially all of a sudden look at your life and you realize I still have these habits and it annoys the [ __ ] out of me that we're not doing it okay so this this is essentially what happens so you have these habits it's way fun um do we know what time it is now 10 minutes 10 minutes is just about to put my whole side up well then the other thing we have here is superstitions I always like to talk about superstitions when you come to habits CU superstitions are

essentially a slightly neurotic habit okay uh what are some does anyone have a Superstition here at all nobody what what kind of superstitions do you have what do you have um probably my biggest Superstition is like no matter what like even if I'm on a small blind I will never play with hand 71 never why is that because it reminds me of 710 splits and bowling and 710 splits suck okay so no no S10 on in in poker what was yours just about how things have to be cleaned or set up um that if like I have certain knicknacks and if they're not where they are when I leave then I'll have bad luck the

whole has to be that way any other ones that you yes my mom taught me you never throw away keys because you're throwing away your security so I have a key holy crap your mom's a genius I I have a key ring at home that's about this big that's filled with every key that I've for every apartment every place I've ever lived wow anyone else any or or superstitions you know good don't ever say seven at a craft table okay have you ever yeah no I mean this it's all different I me and then of course you have the knock on wood thing you have to knock on wood or something that's around you if you say something

throwing salt over your shoulder you have B I love baseball I was going to tell you guys about the Superstition do you know does any raise your hand if you know that baseball players don't step on the foul line I'm soy I'm sorry somebody told me that nobody would understand anyway baseball players going to step on a foul line because they think it's bad luck but there's baseball players are some of the most superstitious athletes in the world disgusting yeah some of them were really um this is Giants uh the beard but he's a pitcher and there's a lot of guys that do the same thing they have the playoff beard they do not cut their beard during the playoffs um

because they're scared of bad luck uh you have things with socks you have boxers that won't have sex before um a fight there's a whole bunch of superstitions and some of them are personal to where we've learned them through life and some of them are things that have been passed on and the difference it's essentially a Havoc because like you described the nickn it's a habit but it's associated with an outcome It's associated with a performance and that's exactly where they stem from um usually uh baseball superstitions and other athletic based superstitions were based in Extreme Performance you did something really good and you're not going to attribute it to yourself because that's hard to

control you're just like oh well then if I messed up it's me um you start finding something else you're like oh I I didn't I have a longer beard I've been doing this I need to keep doing this I don't I need to not change anything oh my gosh um and that's what this is associated with is an Extreme Performance that you externalize in which case it's extremely easy to make a Superstition because all you have to do is find like a TV Scrambler or anything that messes with things like artificially and you get your friend person dog cat whatever um to suddenly associate their performance with doing some crazy thing you've asked them to do and i' I've seen um I've seen

this done I used to undergrads in which case I'd bring somebody in and beforehand I would have the class 300 people decide on a behavior they wanted them to do sometimes it was crazy like take off the tie and sometimes it was like get on the desk for some reason and the person didn't know what was going on but they would start rewarding them the closer they got to this behavior and one person really backfired on because it was really really effective and they had no idea what was going on I didn't tell them because it was funny and they were my friend um but it was to take off the tie thing and from this day he always

takes off his tie because he thought it was an amazing class he had such a great class well of course 300 people are clapping at you so you're like oh this is great they just love me he takes off his tie before every lesson um it's even after I told him hey dude no I kind of planned that he doesn't care so how do you break people that's really it's a very good question and it's very hard to do because you essentially have to put them in a situation where that like they performed and it they didn't have it anymore like okay we cut off the beer for some reason but the problem with it

though is superstitions are just like habits you can explain them away so easily you externalize it to something else oh well I didn't have you didn't have your playoff beard but you were it was the best pitch of the season for you yeah well I didn't change my socks they you find something else to externalize yeah you it's they'll find something else to replace it that's why I mean even been to it there's times where I'll say something like I'll say something that I really don't want to happen and even though I don't believe in it I might it might not even be wood but I'll knock on something it's ridiculous but it's it's also this

whole it's almost like a just in case it's not a lot of effort um and you just don't want to go through it so yeah it's very very difficult to to break superstitions because it can always always be externalized and that's why somebody that they're in life is is B with superstitions it's really you can't really break it from them they go through therapy for a fair long time and it just does not work so more manipulations of superst so all in all what we have here today we're going to wait for it to do it thing I had diamonds Fitness and Cults manipulation for Fun and Profit and eventually just turned into Diamond Fitness and in-laws

manipulation for life love and awaken six pack than I think I have five minutes do you guys have any questions kind of what's what the the hypnosis how come some people hypnosis yeah some people are I went to the show I wasn't Hypno yeah you know did you believe it would work I was just kind of hey give it a try but I wasn't everyone else seemed to be everyone else seemed to be in it hypnosis is um it's a it's a great uh manipulation technique but it only works on people who believe it's like kind of like seeing ghost if you don't believe in ghost an actual like ghostly figure could go in front of you and it's very

similar to the Superstition you explain it away to something else but if you believe in stuff like that if you believe in hypnosis if you believe in ghosts you can create anything um so yeah hypnosis is all about the ability to influence you so yeah like I can't get hypnotized uh because I don't yeah but statistically seems a lot of people Bey yeah a lot of people able to be influenced yeah um I actually had a couple of questions um the synthesization uh how's that different from intenal change blindness in the current environment is there a different all neurological basis for one versus the other that's a good question um so attentional like the attentional blindness um and anything

like you have something in your glasses and it goes away that is like basic neural level where desensitization is it's not a it you're not noticing the change uh because you're not getting enough change that is a matter of like for example in the glasses um an intentional blindness it's this idea that something's staying there and your neurons are extremely effective so it it basically goes okay I don't need to pay attention to it anymore it literally is leaving it alone and it's ignoring it whereas desensitization is the it's kind of like the the volume knob it's exactly the volume knob that just noticeable difference is that it doesn't actually go up the same degree every number it

has to increase by a certain percentage um otherwise you won't notice the change so like say from 1 to two was actually 1 to two 9 to 10 you're not going to notice it it actually has to increase by a certain percent which is usually about 10% so that's the difference it's a very good question but that's the differences one is actually a neural level some are neural level I'm ignoring it and the other one is just that I haven't given you enough information to even notice that it's different you said you had another question yeah I did um so when you mentioned smoking um what about other behaviors and if the environment has changed so a

big like not allowed to drink in a certain area or not allowed to uh congregate because somebody's moved to a table from a location can that be enough to break those behaviors or does it require even more dislocation it really that again it depends on when you're training up these behaviors um it really depends on how well you have generalized or specified um sometimes you want it to be this table in which case moving the table taking the table away changing the tablecloth color could be enough to be like oh I don't really want to do that anymore but for some people even though it's at the table they might actually consider it the room or they might have

generalized it in general you have the people with you and they've generalized it all around is there a way to to figure how how people respond to those things is there a a way that they respond to an environment differently uh that you might be able to draw away so you can say that that's been affected oh yeah um there's entire Behavior Analysis uh model plans essentially that are all about that you do something called the functional analysis and then you do um an analysis of its generalization um and then you start doing a whole bunch of things and you real you figure out okay how far have they I've trained up to behavior how far has it gone and you

once you figur that out then you start expanding it out or narrowing it in um through punishment and reinforcement so yeah there's um an entire area of people pretty sophisticated it's pretty exensive there's entire there's people that their entire job is to just do a functional analysis I had one moreone else do J have any questions he has one more okay okay super sistance versus other belce systems uh either like uh you're saying like religious belief systems religious or uh I don't know Mark yeah multi level marketing yeah are they the same psychology pretty much or is there a is there a contrast between simple superstition a greater belief system um the greater belief system anyone that's M the religious

don't don't like hurt me later um they are bore on a lot of superstition um but it's not just Superstition I especially especially the original uh like form of Christianity that was a lifestyle um in which case there was Superstition behind it to kind of get things going and and to be like why is this well because because this happens but the biggest a big part of it was the fact that it wasn't just Sunday your entire life was dictated by this belief system so that's why it was so close to ingrained and getting to a political it's very is the similar as well is that it's so ingrained in there as a lifestyle so it's it's hard to to

separate it up look like done so if you guys have any other questions let me know thank you all up next in this room is vulnerability and exploit Trends I have swag for the folks that I could