Season 8, Episode Nine May 19, 2024

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This is the Listening Tube.

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Hello. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we'll hear about where in the world we are and how did we get there. Plus, I'll have a chat with a man who wrote the Book of Persuasion, which is way better than the Book of Love, because the Book of Love doesn't tell you how to persuade someone to fall in love with you.

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But first,

Not the Headlines

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not the headlines.

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There are a lot of headlines recently about things that the Biden administration is doing. Taken individually, they're all headline worthy. But this segment of the listening tube is called not the headlines, so let me explain where I'm going here. All of these headline-worthy stories add up to something that I haven't seen a headline about, and that's how each of these stories is related. First, let's hear about the stories themselves. There are multiple stories, so I'll just glance over them as a refresher as you've probably already heard about them. The Biden administration denied a shipment of bombs to Israel because the Israeli Defense Forces entered the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The final stronghold of Hamas. Clearly, President Biden is trying to dictate to Israel how to fight their war. It's an attempt to pacify the extreme left of his party, especially those in Michigan and Minnesota. Then, a week later, the president approves a billion dollar sale of weapons to Israel. They still can't get the bombs they want, but will sell them tank ammunition, mortar rounds, and tactical vehicles. It's almost the same thing we're doing to Ukraine. Give them enough to keep fighting, but not enough to win. Clearly, the Biden administration has no focused policy on the conflict and are just reacting to how current events might affect the November election. In fact, a lot of what President Biden is doing lately seems to be aimed at the same thing. For three quarters of his term, the southern border hasn't just been open, it's been purposely kept open by federal lawsuits against any state that tried to stem the flow. In addition to lawsuits, federal authorities literally cut razor wire installed by Texas. Suddenly, just months away from an election, the Biden administration has proposed rules that will enable immigrants who have no right to be here to be removed earlier in the immigration process. The announcement from the Department of Homeland Security defines those people as individuals who pose a national security or public safety risk, specifically those who have been convicted of a particularly serious crime, participated in the persecution of others, are inadmissible on national security or terrorism related grounds, or for whom there are reasonable grounds to deem them a danger to the security of the United States. Well, it's very thoughtful of President Biden to take such measures three years into his term. In other words, until now all of those people were allowed in. Not all of them were allowed to stay, but they were allowed to stay a lot longer for the past three and a half years. The longer someone is allowed to stay here illegally, the more likely it is they will end up staying as long as they like. We've had three and a half years of it, and now the Biden administration says, Hey, maybe we should do something about that. After all, it's an election year. Another thing happened just about a week ago. The Biden administration levied tariffs on Chinese products. Products that are top of mind for many Americans right now, like electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells, steel and aluminum, as well as medical equipment. Tariffs on electric vehicles will go from 25% to 100%, according to a story from the Associated Press. In a Rose Garden speech, the president said, For years the Chinese government has poured state money into Chinese companies. It's not competition, it's cheating. I agree with you, Mr. President, but when you say years, do you mean only the last three? Because I'm pretty sure it's been going on for a while. I wonder what inspired the president to impose these tariffs at this particular time. He's also signed into law the requirement for the social media data mining operation TikTok to divest itself from China or become unusable in the United States. There are lawsuits against the legislation in progress. Plus, the Biden administration has also, just this week, ordered the removal of a cryptocurrency mining operation from land near a Wyoming military base because the company has Chinese origins, according to a story in the New York Times. These mining operations consume enormous amounts of electricity that power massive supercomputers that run around the clock. The Chinese own such operations in 12 states, according to the story, but only this one has been ordered shut down because of its proximity to a sensitive military site. The story says the Chinese like to run the operations here because of our clearly written laws and cheap electricity. So what do all these things have in common that for some reason isn't a headline? Here's the headline I haven't seen. Biden arms himself with ammunition for Trump Debates. Donald Trump challenged Joe Biden to debate anytime, any place. As it turns out, the Biden team has been preparing for it. All of these recently enacted policies about China and immigration and Middle East policy are nothing more than performative politics. Right now, Joe Biden will do whatever needs to be done to get more people to vote for him in November. So all of a sudden, he's doing stuff he could have done three years ago. Now he wants to debate Donald Trump not once, but twice, and under his own conditions. He even made a joke about Donald Trump being free on Wednesdays. Because Trump doesn't have to be in court on Wednesdays. That was a low blow, Joe. But Biden feels confident now because he's made all these last minute proclamations that he can now claim in the upcoming debates. Biden can now claim he's tough on China, and his Department of Homeland Security is taking new measures to protect the American public. None of the ABC or CNN moderators will point out that he just started doing those things six months before the election. And for icing on the cake, he's been forgiving student debt through workaround fixes since the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional the first time he tried it. And now the Justice Department recommended marijuana be reclassified from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III drug. That's still a little too high. Pun intended. The Food and Drug Administration is on board, but the Drug Enforcement Agency is still resisting changes to its doctrine. It looks like they'll be pressured to align with the policy of the DOJ and the FDA. The move will improve research into marijuana and lessen the penalties for using it. Forty states now have some form of legal cannabis use, so it's about time the federal government catches up. The FDA acknowledges there are medical benefits to the consumption of marijuana. The Reuters story quotes the proposal as saying, additionally, no safety concerns were identified in the FDA's review that would indicate that medical use of marijuana poses unacceptably high safety risks. In other words, side effects do not include death. The story's author pointed out that President Biden is running for re-election, and he's the guy who got the ball rolling on this back in 2022 to fulfill a campaign promise. The writer noted that it was important to the left leaning members of his political base. That would imply that moderate Democrats and surely Republicans would not find it important. I find that hard to believe. If forty states have laws that allow its use in some form, it wasn't because only the left leaning of us are okay with it. To assume or proclaim that only those among us who are left leaning advocate for marijuana use is not only narrow minded, but also misinformed. You see, marijuana has a stigma. The political parties have taken sides on the issue, but at the ground level there's a different story being told. It's not just hippies in tie-dye t-shirts getting weed for their big dope parties. People are using marijuana to deal with legitimate medical issues, some physical, some not. And they're certainly not just left leaning Democrats. Here's an analogy for you. You might have heard somebody say, Oh, they're one of those people who watch Fox News. They mean it as a way to describe a group of people, usually as an insult. But the fact is, more people watch Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined, according to Nielsen data. So it's safe to say they're not all MAGA Republicans who are watching. With respect to marijuana, the same is true. Those who shun it have no idea how many others are embracing it, or at the very least, interested in it. There are plenty of conservatives who are in favor of relaxing or repealing penalties for using marijuana. Joe Biden plans to use the issue against Donald Trump in the upcoming debates, and hopes it gets him votes from moderate Republicans. Here's the thing: President Biden could have done all of these things three years ago. Now that the election is approaching, he's making decisions based on political pressure rather than national interest. While marijuana is a state's issue in many respects, so is abortion. The Democrats and the Biden campaign will try to make it a federal issue, but it isn't. In fact, the Biden administration has done absolutely nothing to advance the cause of abortion rights. They'll try to persuade you that they can make a difference, but they can't. No matter how many times you vote for them, or how many dead people in Michigan vote for them. Only your state representatives have any say on abortion.

Let's Go Back

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Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history.

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But don't worry, there's plenty of history left to explore, and more of it being made as I speak.

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That can't be right.

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Squeeze in a couple. This week in 1570, cartographer Abraham Ortelius issues the first modern atlas. Of course, it didn't have the accuracy of today's maps, most of which aren't even printed, but just an image on an electronic device. But the end result was still the same then as it is now. Undeniable confirmation that you're lost.

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The 1900s.

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That's why this week in 1908, the Wright brothers registered the flying machine at the U.S. Patent Office. If you get a chance to visit Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, take it. My wife and I were there a few years ago, and once you see it for yourself, you can imagine it happening, and you understand why they chose that place for their experiment. Air travel has come a long way since then, but it seems to be taking baby steps in the wrong direction. While space travel has become more common, travel within the atmosphere may have become too routine. The Boeing airplane manufacturer is going through some real self-reflection right now, and consumer confidence in their product is waning.

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The listening tube will return at the speed of sound.

Carlos Alvarenga

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Contact the listening tube by calling 570-601-1101 or email thelistening tube at outlook.com.

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Take a moment and think back to the last time you were persuaded. Persuaded to do something or feel something or think something. Odds are the last time wasn't the time you recall, but much more recently, you just didn't realize it at the time. My guest today literally wrote the book on persuasion. Carlos Alvarenga, author of Rules of Persuasion: How the World's Greatest Communicators Convince, Inspire, Lead, and Sometimes, spoke with me from his home in Maryland about the origins of persuasion and how we're subject to it today. You've traced persuasion all the way back to Aristotle. Certainly, Socrates, in my opinion, was too much of a jerk to care what anyone else thought, and Plato neglected to include emotion in the debate scenario for which he's famous. But despite Aristotle being a scientist, he's the one who brought ethics and character to the table of philosophy. So I'm guessing, if persuasion only goes back as far as Aristotle, that ethics and character are a part of the persuasive equation.

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I think it's important to note that Aristotle was not the first writer on persuasion. There were others before him. I think the reason why his work persists, it's A, because it's Aristotle. Of course, it had this remarkable influence on Western thought, uh, but also because I think that what he said was correct. And as you point out, Bob, he he notes in this remarkable statement that when people are communicating with other people, there are really only three psychological modes of persuasion. The the character, not in the ethical sense, but in almost like the dramatic sense of a play or movie. Who is speaking to me? What is speaking to me? What are the traits that uh define the communicator uh that I am listening to at this moment? There are, of course, arguments, the logic and evidence, the facts that a communicator can present to us. And then as you note also, right, emotion, which is critical. And I think it's one of the great observations that what we feel as someone speaks to us, speaks to us, and when they're done speaking, it has a huge effect on whether we are persuaded or not. It was a trait of Aristotle that the more obvious something is, the less he explains it. I think it also was so obvious he didn't want to need to explain it. And so uh I try to unpack what do you mean what did he mean by character, by art, by emotion? And then I I wanted to explain what exactly happens when we are persuaded. What is the the process that occurs in our mind when this uh important phenomenon takes place? And so uh it was really an attempt to update and expand what he uh discovered or presented for a mind. How easily are we persuaded simpler uh than people imagine to get a group of people to believe something and uh the the good communicators understand this? I I think that people think that they're harder to persuade than they really are, and I think persuasion is much more effective than a lot of people understand at any given moment.

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Is there a difference between persuasion and propaganda? Would truth be the difference?

SPEAKER_05 18:41

I think it's a couple of things, right? Truth certainly is one, is also intent. What I according to Aristotle, the right way to persuade is to try to persuade get you to believe that something is true. Ideally, I'm trying to persuade you to believe things that are true, or and if it's an action, then it's an action which is as he would say, in accordance with virtue. And so propaganda doesn't care about virtue, propaganda uses persuasion, but it also uses other things, things like manipulation and psychology to get people to accept a political position or to take a political act. And so it is uh persuasion can be can be uh a technique of propaganda, but there are techniques of propaganda that are not that are not persuasion, there are other things that are happening.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

You break down persuasion into three basic parts. Paraphrase the presenter, the information, and the emotion with which the message is processed, both by the presenter and by the receiver. Which of the three is most important to the person doing the persuading?

SPEAKER_05 19:49

Here I'll echo uh recall Aristotle, who says probably the most important is the character of the communicator, and he emphasizes that, especially in times of uncertainty, which I believe to be the case, the the less sure we are about the argument, the less sure we are about even our own emotions, the more critical the role that the person speaking takes on. And we've seen this in movies, right? When there when there's a crisis or there's some terrible event happening, and a character will say, if you want to live, follow me. At that instant, the the communicator isn't giving you complex arguments, right, or or trying to get you to feel a certain way. He's simply saying, I'm an ex-special horses person, or I'm an engineer who built the ship, or whatever it happens to be. I am the person, the individual who will keep you alive. And um in those moments of stress, the the character of the person talking to us carries an immense amount of weight.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

That seems to be what's important to the person per being persuaded. But what about the person doing the persuasion? What what's the most important part of the toolbox to that person?

SPEAKER_05 20:59

Well, I I think they're two sides of the same coin, right? In the sense that if I know that at this moment it is my character that will carry the most weight, then it's imperative upon me to present a character which is self-persuasive, which is which is what leaders do. The character works bidirectionally, I mean history, excuse me. I can persuade by affirming history, by reinforcing everything you know about me, but now and again it also works by negating history. If I if I turn on my path, if I convince you that something that a lifetime of doing, let's say, bad things or not caring suddenly have been reversed, that can have an uh an important force. As you see, for example, these documentaries of prisoners who go into talk to kids, the famous scare straight idea from many decades ago, or uh a person who was a racist who now speaks against racism, that is the negation of history. And that can be a very powerful force. And I think it's what you see in the case of Zelda's cutter.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Speaking of war, i it seems like the Protesters on college campuses recently were easily persuaded. One could argue that very few of them were even aware of Hamas or Israel until just weeks ago. Then all of a sudden, thousands of them are waving Palestinian flags and wearing Palestinian garb and Hamas headbands. How were they persuaded and mass like that?

SPEAKER_05 22:25

I don't think it was easy at all. I think what we're seeing is the outcome of a process which has been taking place for decades. There is uh a field of study called colonial studies, right? Or post-colonial studies or decolonial studies. And this is a scholarship that looked at colonialism, um, that looked at uh phenomena such as the conquest of the West in American history. And it laid out structures, it laid out taxonomies, it laid out language that said when this type of group takes land away from this other type of group, that is what colonialism does. And here are its effects. Now, I think what the students who who learned these things in college, when they looked at the conflict, what they did was superimpose this colonial structure and taxonomy on the conflict in Israel. And so um, and and it was like putting a template over something and saying, okay, I know what this looks like, right? It looks like a powerful, lighter skin, quote unquote, right, um military force, which was a country that was created by the British, who have a certainly, you know, have form, as they say, when it comes to colonialism. And they said, okay, here we have this people of color who are who seem to be oppressed, who's who are being attacked, and and that structure in their mind fit what they were saying. So while that while the while the the last couple of months seem to have gone quickly in this shift, I think it's the the result of decades of academic work in places like the United States that's being used. Now the question becomes, is that a is that a correct application of that framework, right? Are these students applying it correctly? And I think that's the that's the more important question. But what we're seeing I think is the final step in the process, which has been which has been decades in the making.

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It's interesting because according to the way the federal government breaks us down by race, both Arabs, Europeans, and North Africans are all part of the same race, yet somehow they've been persuaded to believe that skin color is uh is a factor here. Can they be persuaded to think otherwise? Or I think so.

SPEAKER_05 24:43

I think it it you know there's a concept called entrenchment in there uh in I think it was Corey Robin who wrote the book, and and he Robin explains there there comes a point where an idea becomes so fixed, so reinforced uh intellectually, legally, culturally, that it becomes possible or almost impossible to unto remove yourself from that point of view. I get the impression sometimes that the the concept that violence will solve this conflict on both sides is now an entrenched idea. I I don't think personally that's gonna be the case. I don't believe that either side will win this conflict by trying to kill each other or annihilate each other, but it seems like they do, or at least big blocks of people on both sides do. And and unfortunately, it's the civilians on both sides that are caught in the middle of this horrendous reciprocating violence cycle that you know that we have in that, you know, in this particular conflict. It would be wonderful if people came along, leaders, and said, we're not gonna solve this by killing each other. There has to be a different approach. And because it's happened in other places, right? We have seen that happen in other countries, in other contexts. So I I would hope that it's the case because I don't think that either side trying to annihilate the other is going to get either side what it wants.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Does or can the news media play a role in persuasion?

SPEAKER_05 26:16

It certainly does, it certainly can. I think about the the Vietnam War, for example, right? And how when the frontline reporting started to come back to the United States, and we saw images from photographers, from videographers, firsthand accounts that were coming back that began to shift public opinion away from this is a uh necessary war to one where this was a wrong and b futile. So futile at best, wrong at worst. And in large part, that was done by the American media. The challenge we have today is that at that time, American media represented, when we used that term, we talked about a handful of newspapers, a handful of broadcast networks, right? Maybe a half dozen outlets, maybe 10 at the most. Today we're talking about hundreds. And so it is very difficult for a highly dispersed media ecosystem to have that kind of collective effect that you would have had uh right, sort of in late 20th century. It's just no longer possible. Or it isn't, it isn't possible at this particular moment. Maybe things will change 10, 20 years from now, but it isn't right now.

SPEAKER_01 27:24

Other than human interest stories, I would prefer news to be factual and statistical. Why do they feel they need to persuade us?

SPEAKER_05 27:36

Because I think journalists are are human beings, and so the the news isn't written by uh, you know, some kind of like objective machine that doesn't have opinions. All journalists, and I started my career as a journalist uh in Latin America. There is a place where they are where they are grounded, right? There is a place where they start when they take on a story. And in fact, the kinds of people who become journalists are are by already by definition people who care about issues, people who care about reporting, people who care about social uh evolutions and social events. So I think the it is the job of, and funny enough, it is the job of great editing to remove those things. It is it is not necessarily the job of the journalist, but it's the edit editorial process in the real team that's supposed to keep a journalist right uh within that band of objectivity. Unfortunately, as we know, journalism has been has has suffered as a profession immensely. The financial pressures have cut editing down. So the the structure, the superstructure of the editorial function at a at a newspaper, at a media outlet, probably isn't as strong as it was a few decades ago because it's expensive and it's time consuming. And I I think, for example, just to pick a site, the New York Times, it it would have been a catastrophe in 1975 to have a typo in a New York Times article. Today it is impossible not to find a typo or more somewhere on New York Times.com, either because of volume or lack of editorial control. But this used to be a catastrophic thing. Today it's sort of accepted as part of the game. And a place like the New York Times, which is a very successful digital and print outlet still. But even they allow things that were not allowed in the past.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

The New York Times, for example, they would be considered by many to be a left-wing uh or a liberal uh publication. You have uh right wing or conservative publications. They're both trying to persuade us, but at the same time, we have the option of which news sources we use. So is their persuasion being successful if only the the people who already think that way see it?

SPEAKER_05 30:02

And this is you're right. This is uh this is one of the problems of modern media, is that the since the arrival of CNN, I think, which is where things begin to really change with this movement to a 24-hour news cycle, 24 hours is a long time. If you think about a half an hour news program in 1965, and and you think about that moving to a 24-hour cycle, that's a lot of time, a lot of space when it's copied by two, three, four networks. You're talking about hundreds and hundreds of hours that have to be filled. So, what happens? You what's cheap is commentator. Commentary is cheap and relatively easy. And so you pay someone to talk for an hour. What happens then? I I talk about whatever it is that's on my mind. If you happen to like it, you'll watch it and listen to it. If you don't, you won't. And so, as many people have observed, we have moved to this echo, and I think it's correct, this echo chamber model where for the most part, people don't tune in to be informed, they tune in to be reinforced. Right? They listen so that for validation, that my like or dislike of a particular thing or person is validated and justified by the people I see on screen rather than challenge. I think it's hard to find a case where someone is saying, I'm going to listen to the exact opposite perspective that I have just in case I'm wrong. I doubt that happens too much in the lives of sort of most people.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Then essentially the only thing they're doing is being persuaded that they're right.

SPEAKER_05 31:35

They're being told, and I and I think that that's exactly the case. I think they're being re- it's it's really reinforced, right? They're being almost re-persuaded, I suppose is is the better term. They already are persuaded, but you're you're holding on to that persuasion because there's a concept of persuasion that I talk about in the book called adherence. So adherence refers to once you are persuaded, how sticky is the persuasion, right? Because let's say we decide to start working out every day and it lasts a couple of days, then you stop. The adherence level was very low. That's different from somebody who says, I will never drink again, and they never touch another drop for the rest of their life. The adherence is very high. I think the function of these uh what I would call very biased outlets, because they have a bias, it's very clear, is more about adherence. It's keeping that position inside of you, holding you, holding that point of view, right? If you dislike person A because she's a liberal or she's a conservative, it takes work to keep you disliking her. And so the job most of the time isn't to get you to dislike her unless unless you're you're being exposed for the first time, it's to is to keep you in that position, right? To to maintain adherence is the function of a lot of these outlets, more than it is to initially persuade uh, because that's there, people are probably coming to that outlet already holding a view, but it needs to be reinforced, I think.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

In addition to the three basic elements of persuasion, you've also in your book broken those three elements down into seven subsets. Tell me a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_05 33:13

The book, as I mentioned earlier, Aristotle says in his work is treatise, which by the way, it's important to note, wasn't meant to be a book. It's it wasn't a book for publication. How we conceive of that term today, it was in all likelihood just teaching notes. So it wasn't a something that you would sit down and read from start to finish, like you do with my book, hopefully. So he has these three terms, right? And sometimes you hear them called ethos, logos, pathos. But the question is, what do you mean by that? When we say character, what does that mean? So I I wanted to come up with a construct to make that term understandable. So I break character down into seven parts, I break argument down to seven parts, and I break emotion down seven parts. And what I what I had in front of me was these 21 things. And so I needed a metaphor for the reader and for myself to put it all together that was that was kind of easy to understand. And I said, well, let's go back to high school chemistry class, which is a periodic table. And so I call it in the book. These this is the periodic table of persuasion, and and messages are built from these rhetorical elements. And as I say often, I've looked at thousands and thousands of messages, people to people, people to gods, gods to gods, gods to people, and every message ever looked at is some combination of these 21 things. Has been across time, place, culture, society, and I think it continues to be the case today. They're all some combination of these elements, I think.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

What is the best persuader? Is it the the news? Is it the government? Is it advertising? Who who does the best job at it?

SPEAKER_05 34:48

That's right. The best persuader is the person who has the best chemistry for the task at hand. For example, if if you have a headache, is the person who has the medicine for a rash helpful to you? No. The person who's the best chemist is the one who can make you some headache medicine, right? And so the challenge becomes when you have all these tools available to you, understanding the task at hand and what you're trying to get someone to believe, the best persuader is the one who does that consistently over time and is able to meet the communication goals that person has.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

Can anyone learn to be persuasive?

SPEAKER_05 35:29

Almost anyone, or most people can get better. Can you can any can everyone master it? No. But can any almost anyone get better at it? Yeah, and getting better at it isn't even that hard because the bar is set so low, right? There the because we haven't studied this, because you don't learn this in school, because no one has taught you for the most part these things that I write about. Then it's easy to get better because you're starting usually with no information. No, it's like cooking, right? Imagine you had just you had learned to cook your whole life without ever seeing a recipe or without anybody ever helping you. You just made you just threw things in a pot and you ate it. And then one day somebody goes, Wow, listen to this. Here's how you make pasta. Your pasta would be immeasurably better from the first time you followed the recipe, even if it's not perfect. And I think that's the case with persuasion. You just by showing you a couple of recipes, it's so much better because most people are just winging it. Most people operate at a persuasion level. If a scale is one out of 10, the average person is working at a two or a three. And getting to five is not that hard.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

President Biden has spent a lot of speech time recently trying to persuade the American public that Bidenomics was working, and recently told a CNN reporter in an interview that his administration already took care of inflation. Polling shows that Americans just don't agree. They're not feeling that persuasion. Why isn't his message resonating? What part of his persuasion equation is underperforming?

SPEAKER_05 37:18

Well, I it's it's probably this claim butts up against reality, right? For a lot of Americans want to lease a car over the weekend. The the lease rates are not what they were even just two or three years ago. And so you can be told inflation is under control, but when your lease interest rate is three times what it was put six months ago, it's pretty hard to believe that statement. So that there may just be an empirical problem that he has, which is that what people see in the headlines, in their interest statements, and in their credit card bills, and when shopping for a car just doesn't match.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

So then it would be the second part of the equation, the argument part that's not getting through. Now, if people don't believe that argument part, does that also have a negative impact on his character?

SPEAKER_05 38:13

It does because someone may disagree with an argument and your character may still hold. But if it gets to the point where they begin to think that you're making spurious arguments, you're just making false arguments, then that will then revert to your character as a liar, as someone who's not worthy of trust, which is pretty much destroying your persuasive power. When executives come out and say, I'm so excited to be at this three-day event, right? You know, you're not, right? I can tell you're not. You're not excited. I'm not excited. None of us wants to be here. We're here because we have to be here. But if you said that enough, you you look like you're just dishonest. Because I know you're not. I know you'd rather be party anywhere but here. And yet you walk on stage and claim that this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to you when I know that's not true, you know that's not true. So why not just come out and say, hey, we have to be here for three days, let's make the best of it. That's a much more honest position and a lot less damaging to character than somebody who says, you know, this is great.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

Everything we've talked about so far, as far as persuasion goes, is an individual attempting to persuade another individual or an individual attempting to persuade a group of people. Is the converse possible? Can the collective influence people as well as an individual?

SPEAKER_05 39:32

They absolutely can, and it's a great question because no one's asked that question before. And you're and you're right. And it happens in multiple ways today. When something goes viral, right, and we suddenly believe that we need to go see a clip or hear someone say something, watch them do anything. We have been persuaded by the collectivization of what was originally an individual opinion or the opinion of a small number of people that then becomes millions. There are persuasion factories I talk about in the book, which are companies that you can hire to take a message and distribute it among hundreds, if not thousands, of micro-persuaders, right? Social media influencers, for example, and you harness the power of people who have small audiences, but collectively can deliver a message to millions of people. And so, yeah, absolutely. When we saw Arab Spring, for example, which was a movement that was a collective movement, right to try to topple what were considered to be oppressive regimes in the Middle East, right? That was that was an a moment of collective, an attempt to make collective persuasion. And back to the thing we put earlier, the pro-Palestinian protest today. What are they if not an attempt to collectively persuade university administrators and politicians, right, to alter positions on campus? And so um, yeah, we that is that is the phenomenon which social media enables, right, in a way that that wasn't possible 10, 20 years ago. It's it's one of the things that is a significant change, is simply the scale at which you can persuade collectively today that that wasn't possible a couple of decades ago.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

Is there a way to avoid being persuaded?

SPEAKER_05 41:09

Understand the chemistry of persuasion. Uh if you understand how it works, you you can you become better and better critic of it. You understand you see it and you recognize it when it's being delivered to you, and you're better able to assess whether the technique is being used for the right reason or it's being used for a reason which is unhelpful at best or even corrupt at worst.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

I hope that people take the opportunity to read it and learn about it because I think not only will it help them be more persuasive if they have that need, but it'll also help them guard against being persuaded if they don't wish to be.

SPEAKER_05 41:44

Couldn't say it better myself.

SPEAKER_01 41:46

You can learn more about Carlos and get Rules of Persuasion at CarlosAlvarenga.com. I want to thank Carlos for allowing me to speak to him more than once. Subscribe today.