005: Foundations to Power; The human traits that create social power

APEX LevelToPower, episode two. Change your level, change your life, change the world. Escape the herd. Rise above the pack. This is the APEX LevelToPower podcast, the only place on the web that teaches you to identify and control the invisible strings that dominate all human interaction. We turn guppies into sharks. A challenge, to be sure, but one that we answer, and answer with vigor. I am your faithful host, Mark Gleason, and I welcome you to the program. I invite you to our little corner of the web, LevelToPower.com, for more information and to support the broadcast.

The title of this episode is Foundations to Power. Whether you’re hearing this material for the first time, or you’re an advanced student coming back to review the basics, I welcome you. Allow me to start off with a disclaimer before we begin. As we flex our new muscles, and learn to see the strings of control around us, we’re going to be forced out of our old patterns of thinking. These experiences will seem alarming at first. All change is, but stick with it, and your old paradigms that are holding you back from achieving your dreams, let them fall away. If you didn’t need to change who you are right now, you already have everything you want. Think about that for a second.

If you were already the kind of person who could attract your vision of an ideal mate, you already would have. If you were already the kind of person that employers would be falling all over to hire for their business, they would be. They would already be, if no change is required. We’re all looking for the result, but there’s an inbred human resistance to change. We’ll get into this in more detail in later lessons, but for now, the brain is hardwired to repeat the patterns of the past, because the patterns of the past have kept the brain alive. You’re brain is not hardwired for your happiness. Your brain is hardwired to repeat what has successfully kept you alive up until this point. That is why change is conscious. That is why change is difficult. Because we must consciously rewire the brain to follow new patterns. Change is going to be necessary here, regardless if you’re a CEO who can’t talk to his family, or a fantastic family man who can’t hold onto a job, or perhaps you’re a fantastic CEO family woman who’s trying her best to balance both her family and career.

In all these cases, we’re going to need to change who it is that you are to become who it is that you need to be in order to shift these paradigms. Let go of the old ideas, and adopt new ideas, and this is going to make you successful. It’ll be alarming at first, but I invite you to do it. I invite you to try it on. Try on success for a few weeks, for a few months, for a few days. What do you have to lose? You could always go back to this way of doing things. Why not try something new? Slipping away of old thought patterns is not something to be feared. It is a signpost that you are on the path to intellectual freedom. There’s great comfort that comes from our old ideas and being part of the tribe, being part of what everybody says we should be doing, but let me tell you. There is no price too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Let’s take a step back and talk about power, in a social context. In every area of our lives, we see the dynamics of human power on display. Maybe you watch the news and you wonder, when looking at people you don’t agree with, how they could be so foolish to hold the views they do, and how anyone can believe the lies that they are being fed by their leaders. It’s always easy when someone else is being fed the lies, you see. It’s always easy to see somebody else being led around by their nose. Perhaps you are a junior executive, and you are mystified as seemingly less qualified people are passing you on the ladder to success. You’ve been at the firm for five years now. A new associate has joined the firm. After eighteen months, they’ve already been promoted past you, and you are mystified as to why. That’s another human power dynamic on display.

Perhaps in your personal life, you’re unable to get the quality of dates that you’re looking for, and maybe there’s good reasons why you’re having difficulty getting dates. Perhaps you have a friend of comparable social market value, who is quite successful at getting dates, and you are at a loss to understand why they are so successful and you are not. There seems to be something else that they are on to and that you are missing. You could be a salesperson who believes yourself to be a very strong salesperson, but at the end of the month, your coworker closes twelve deals, and you close three. You’re wondering how, and you’re wondering why. By the way, it’s particularly galling when this other person you judge not to be your intellectual equal, but they are fantastically more successful than you at this endeavor. It really makes one wonder what kind of magic key they seem to have stumbled upon to have all this success.

This is what the APEX LevelToPower framework is. Yes, it seems like there’s a magic key, but how magic is it? What is the nature of that key? Can anybody have it? Can anybody harness that same power to improve their lives? Well, I’m happy to tell you the answer is yes. There’s no magic here. There is only perspective, and a deeper understanding of the power of human dynamics that stands between you and the attributes of success that you have set your sights upon. As the introduction to the framework, in this lesson, we’re going to start off by laying out the four basic foundations of power. I’ll lay these out one by one. Keep in mind that all that stands between you and personal power and the life you want and success you desire are mastery of these four foundations.

The four foundations are, number one, human beings are social creatures, deeply wired to belonging in social and tribal groups. Number two, like all social creatures, every individual is suggestible to their own tribe to varying degrees. Number three, anyone who deeply understands how suggestible humans function will wield a great deal of power in the tribe. Number four, tribal power is such that money, looks, or even intelligence are not the biggest factors. The one thing required to wield power in a tribe is perspective. These four things were standing between you and your hopes and desires, you and your dreams, you and a better life for your family, so let’s break down each one of these things and examine what’s standing between you and your vision of success.

Number one, human beings are social creatures, who are deeply wired and have a need to belong in tribal groups. This seems to be a relatively noncontroversial foundation. Humans self segregate into sports teams, countries. They break down by group, by race, by sex, by religion. Almost any group you can name is broken down by some genetic and/or ideological difference, so it’s certainly easy to assume that humans are hardwired to break themselves down into some kinds of groups. Elementary school children, by nature, will immediately know who is in the ingroup, and who is in the outgroup, and then mock the outsiders mercilessly. I’m not saying that’s a better part of our nature, I’m simply saying that it’s human nature, and it’s important part of human nature to understand. Remember that five thousand years ago, everybody you have ever met lived within five miles of your house, and you were likely related to them in some way.

A foreign person arriving from a strange land, invading your space, was probably the harbinger of invasion, plague, and death, so it’s a good reason that we are hardwired to group ourselves into teams. As a matter of fact, humans were bred over long periods of time to see who could collaborate best in groups. It started off with the family, and each family fended for itself, but families that had the traits that allowed them to work with other families formed clans, and clans were much more successful. Clans became tribes, and tribes became nations, and then humans learned to group themselves according to ideological alignment, versus regional geography or who you happen to share some DNA with. A person living in one part of the world who subscribed to the ideology of Christianity, for instance, or Islam, as another example, could be working toward a group goal with people all over the world whom they’d never met. That was the power of ideologically based groups. Humans were hardwired over generations of selection to collaborate well in groups. The groups that were unable to collaborate well likely perished at the hands of the groups that could collaborate well.

Now let’s move to the second foundation, which is, like all social creatures, each human individual is suggestible to their chosen tribe to varying degrees. Again, this seems like a noncontroversial statement. Certainly we can all agree there is such a thing as social pressure, peer pressure. What will my friends think if I do this thing? What will my parents think if I take this action? What will the neighbors say when they find out I’ve done the following things? This is all for good reason. Our legal system is based upon a jury system, a jury of our peers. Every action we take, we have to keep in mind how a reasonable neighbor would judge our actions. You see, there was sound logic when my mother used to caution me, “What will the neighbors say?”

No matter how reasonable we think we are, I may have a medieval sword collection which I practice every single day, and I practice medieval swordsmanship, and a burglar breaks in one day and I grab my claymore, which is a large broadsword, off the wall and I cleave him in two. This is the dream of every sword owner. Unfortunately, I am forced to consider how reasonable my neighbors might think my actions are. How reasonable does it seem to them that I grabbed a broadsword off the wall and struck down my burglar? I had better hope that there is a lot of Game of Thrones fans in they jury pool of my town. There is definitely a social pressure, as enforced by the group or tribe upon the individual members. That social pressure could encompass a range of pressures from shunning or banishing of an individual, all the way up to, of course, jailing or executing them.

A third foundation is, someone who deeply understands how suggestible humans function wields great power. Again, this seems quite logical. If there is such a thing as a power dynamic that occurs within a group, anybody who can intercept those messages and insert their own message will likely wield a great deal of power. Take any social creature, let’s say bees. Bees communicate via a dance they do in the hive, which other bees read and they use that to judge what they should do next. Let’s say a individual bee hacked the beehive. Perhaps you have a robot bee, or a rogue bee. Bee gone rogue. You’re the bee who’s hacked the beehive, and you’re not the queen, but you want to take control of the hive. By taking control of the dance, you can get your fellow hive mates to follow any preprogrammed actions that you want, and you’ve pretty much taken control of the entire hive.

This is why hunters use duck calls. They are hacking the hardwired social communication of the duck community, and the same is for any social group, including humanity. Politicians, marketers, community organizers, CEOs, anybody who wants to take control of a human tribe will look at the members of that tribe for the source of truth and source of approval and attempt to gain control of it. How do we seize the source of truth and source of approval for our own purposes if we are Budweiser? If we are the government? If we’re the Yankees? If we’re a foreign power? How do we appeal to the members of this tribe? What is their source of truth? What is their source of approval? How do we hijack it for our own means? This is what all advertising, governments, corporations, and societal rules are based upon. They’re based upon these underlying behaviors that are brought about because of how humans function in groups. I believe that foundation three is also very noncontroversial, that anybody who deeply understands how suggestible humans function would wield a great deal of power.

We said that there are four things standing between you and personal power, and the first three are pretty noncontroversial. They’re very easy to accept, or at least stipulate for the moment. The fourth foundation is very important to understand. That tribal power is not about money, which is frozen effort, and it’s not about looks, which is social market value. It’s not even about intelligence, which is enhanced decision making. Great power is not even about charisma, which is the ability to influence those whom you have direct contact with. The biggest factor to tribal power is perspective. Let me say again, the single biggest criteria to seizing tribal power so you can get the promotion, get the date that you want, advance in your society, whatever the society is, advance in your tribe, whatever that tribe is, it’s about having the right perspective. Those who have the right perspective are leaders. Those who do not are the led. Those who have perspective are the alphas. Those who do not are the betas. Those who have perspective are the pack, and those who do not are the herd. This fourth foundation is where we’ll be focusing a lot of our effort in explaining why this is true, how this helps you, and how you too can grab the reigns of power and use them to advance your own personal success.

The APEX LevelToPower framework is meant to address, how does one achieve one’s goals, all the while being buffeted about by the tides of humanity all achieving their own goals? This is what we’ll be examining. We have spoken in previous lessons about the concept of perspective, of paradigm, of a subjective view of reality that each person has. We’ve also spoken that while everybody has their own subjective view, some people have a very high level of cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to approximate what another’s subjective reality looks like, to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. People who can do this wield a huge amount of power. They have a built in advantage in any kind of social interaction. This is the equivalent of, play a game of chess where one of the players is blindfolded. Sure, the blindfolded player can still win if they have an extraordinary high level of ability to play chess, but being blindfolded to play chess is to handicap oneself unnecessarily, and this is what people do when they refuse to develop their cognitive empathy skill.

Remember, IQ, your inherent intelligence, is not something that science right now understands how to modify. IQ seems to be a lot like height, where we have a genetic capacity to reach a certain height, given full nutrition and vitamins and other considerations when we’re young, but eating a lot more food will not make you taller than your genetic maximum. IQ appears to work the same way. There’s many ways we know that you can hurt IQ, malnutrition being one, abuse being another, but there’s no known way to improve IQ beyond your upper limit. However, the same is not true for cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is a skill, and perhaps like all skills there is some upper limit in our ability to practice it, however the value in cognitive empathy is in how it is learned.

A good comparison would be a singing voice. When you are seven years old, you may have a very naturally good singing voice. The person sitting next to you may not be as naturally inclined toward singing as you are. However, if that person works for ten years on their singing voice, they will be opera quality, and you will still be singing in the shower. That is because singing is largely about the skill in which you develop it, because for the average person, singing is mostly about the training and practice that you undergo. This is the same for your tennis game, and the same for your basketball game, and the same for your painting and artwork. A certain amount of natural ability gets you only so far, but hard work will distinguish you from the vast majority of the population.

Cognitive empathy is no different, but what separates cognitive empathy in importance from all these other skills is, cognitive empathy is the key to understanding, and eventually influencing, the perspectives of others. One must understand another’s perspective before one can reliably change that perspective, whether it’s sales, or whether it’s promotion, or whether it’s getting a date. Anytime you go to recruit somebody else into a new way of thinking, you need to understand their start point, their end point, and how to get them there. A lot of the work that we will be doing is on understanding and improving this skill set that revolves around cognitive empathy.

Let us start off laying out some basic vocabulary from the APEX LevelToPower framework, and then we can see how it applies. Imagine that you have four states, level zero, level one, level two, level three, and these are people who are in social who fit into one of these levels. These levels are in no way relevant to your IQ, and how smart you are, or any other social standing. The only thing that these levels measure is your ability in cognitive empathy. Let’s talk about how profound this one difference can make in the power dynamics between humans.

Let’s say that level zero are people in our society who live in a daze. Let’s say, a heroine addict who just drifts in a sensory way, from experience to experience. They barely even know what they think, much less what other people think, when they’re deep involved in their drugs. That would be level zero. They’re even unaware of themselves, much less anybody else. Level one we would define as somebody who has a subjective view of reality, which is everybody, but that is the only reality that exists for them. In other words, they believe their subjective view of reality to be objective truth. We have to understand this concept that there is such a thing as objective reality, something outside of us. We have our rose tinted glasses on, and we have our subjective view of what we believe to be true, and so does everyone else. If we acknowledge and understand that we have this subjective view, then that gives us a certain amount of power.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say somebody is born into a cult, and they are taught a very strict and limited view of what is true in the universe, and they believe their view to be the only valid one, the only one possible. The only possible reality is the one that they, “Know to be true.” This would be a level one, because if they were to meet another person with a radically different viewpoint, they certainly could conceive of this person existing and being wrong about the universe, but in no way can they conceive that this person’s alternate viewpoint may indeed be correct.

There’s an old story which might make this more clear. Three men are blindfolded and an elephant is brought in, and each man is asked to describe what it is that they know to be true about the elephant. The first one grabs the trunk, and explains that elephants are supple and tubular. The second man grabs the tusks, and describes that elephants are hard and bone-like. The third man grabs the tail, and describes that elephants are light and airy. A level one in this story would be any man who believed that his answer was the only right one. In other words, the man holding the tusks disbelieved the other two men, and said, “No, you’re wrong. I know what an elephant is. It is hard and bone-like.” The possibility that there could be more to that story is not even in his mind.

Let’s imagine that the first man holding the trunk was level one. When the other two men spoke about what they were experiencing, a level one says, “They’re wrong. I know what’s true. I know what I felt. I know reality. This is reality. I felt the elephant, even though I was blindfolded, and therefore to describe it as bone-like is absolutely wrong, and there is no other reality other than the one I am experiencing, and therefore they are wrong. They are flawed. Their differing stories deserve no further serious consideration.” The second man, let’s say he’s level two. He understands that he’s holding something that feels like a bone, but he also understands that it’s possible that the first man is onto something, that perhaps there is a piece of this elephant that he does not quite understand. The second man hears the first man saying, “You must be wrong.” He understands that the first man is closed minded, that the first man has shut down any experience beyond the one that he himself is experiencing. The level two, which is the second man, sees his side of this argument. He also sees the first man’s side of this argument, and he understands both sides.

We can say that the third man is a level three. A level three is someone who can stand effortlessly in all places at once. Very high cognitive ability. Could re-create the perspective of the first man and the second man and himself, and synthesize them together into an overall context. Therefore, while the first man is truly blind, because he has only his own perspective, and the second man with some effort can approximate what he believes the other two to be thinking, the third man deeply sees the ins and outs, the mental blocks, the constraints, the mental barriers, of both the first man, the second man, and therefore when it comes to any kind of strategical maneuvering, the third man, the level three, will dominate in most social and strategic interactions.

To recap, a level zero is someone who lacks all cohesive mental functioning. They are in a coma, they are on drugs. They are so deeply in a cult, they barely understand how they themselves are distinct from reality. Level one does have a sense of self, but they have a very difficult time re-creating the perspectives of other individuals, so they experience reality as they see it, and they project onto other people their own experience. Whereas a level two is able to see their own perspective, other people’s perspectives, and perhaps even a third perspective of where they want that person to be.

A good example to visualize the difference between a level one and a level two is, you come across your five year old, and he has his hand in the cookie jar and he’s convincing you that he was putting it back. As you’re engaging with this child, you will understand your perspective and you understand the child’s perspective, and you even can see the play of thoughts and emotions on the child’s face as they are trying to talk their way out of this situation. You can’t help but chuckle, internally at least, because this child is boldly trying to get away with something, but is so clumsy and child-like, if you will, that it is amusing. Often times as adults, our cognitive empathy, our ability to read others, is not much better than when we were children.

A level two will look at a level one, and that level one will be maneuvering, or covering, or trying to persuade, or trying to influence. Level twos tend to look at that with amusement, because it is perfectly obvious to them what the true intentions are of the individual. For instance, a level one salesman going to a level two client. The level two will sit there and ask questions, and they understand what is true, and they can see when the salesperson is just trying to say the right thing to make the deal, and is not being very authentic in their answers, and more importantly, they can see the salesperson is oblivious that their mind is being read.

To sum up today’s podcast, we have established that humans are highly social creatures, in some ways hardwired to accept and pass on social messages of communication throughout the herd. The ability to understand and hack these messages is both valuable and not automatically available, even to the most rich and powerful among us. We also learned that the key to social power is one of perspective. If you are racing in the forest against a group of people, but you alone have Google Maps on your smartphone, you can see the forest and the trees. You have a huge advantage in your ability to navigate the treacherous pathways that lie between you and the finish line. It is these concepts, and others, that we will be examining in future podcasts to give you this power of perspective. Again, be sure to like, subscribe, post a review. It really helps to empower the podcast. Change your level, change your life, and you can change the world. Welcome to APEX LevelToPower.