If only I could help this person get his life back in order.

Here are my reading notes, for Become immune to manipulation.

Become immune to manipulation.

Who is Francis Zhou?

Tribes don't cast out their own members when everything is going well.

map of reality

Reality is out there and infinitely complex, and my map had what I’d always thought was an accurate view.

How could I redraw my map of the new world? I realized I needed a barbell strategy: extremes on both ends. Imagine the two weights connected in the middle. One side of the barbell was conservative financial stability. The other was extreme risk-reward opportunities.

Who else was questioning the doctrines perpetuated by the government, the academy, and mass media?

I realized that the mainstream collective did not accurately describe reality.

I realized that the mainstream collective did not accurately describe reality.

They just wanted us all to believe their doctrines. Jordan Hall calls the mainstream collective the Blue Church—institutions who hold actual and influential power, hard and soft power respectively.

GSRRM. stands for

And that’s when I realized that the Blue Church uses GSRRM tactics to keep people from questioning their narrative, their map of reality they want us all following so they can retain power.

I’m still on that journey of discovery. I probably will be for as long as I live. Reality is infinitely complex. No one map can document all of reality. But the map I now have offers a better description of reality.

I’m now able to seek out my own path. That’s an empowering experience.

I’d been manipulated by so many people into staying in my Mediocristan world with a false sense of security that evaporated the moment my colleagues were shoved out the door. I knew that to be strong, I’d need to make sure I never fell for manipulation again. And Noah showed me how to do that.

GSRRM manipulation tactics pull down a veil in front of your eyes, preventing you from accurately perceiving reality.

You can’t draw your own map of reality and follow it if you’re unable to accurately perceive the world.

Manipulation tactics short-circuit your brain, preventing you from reasoning and only allowing you to feel and react based on those feelings.

This book is for anyone who senses something is wrong but can’t quite put their finger on the problem. It’s for anyone who wants long-term positive outcomes in their life, business, career, and relationships—and who wants those outcomes done ethically as opposed to seeking short-term gain at the expense of others.

If you want to succeed without giving up your principles, this is the book for you.

You must understand how to tear out manipulation by the root and keep yourself and your environment honest and free.

It’s all based on years of experience coaching victims and perpetrators of manipulation. Noah has uniquely coached both sides of manipulation because perpetrators often started as victims themselves.

Noah coaches manipulators to be better human beings, to realize how their streak of manipulation poisoned their own well and made their lives miserable.

That will give you the leverage to build a life based on honesty, integrity, and principles.

And you’ll cross over from a life of control to a life of fulfillment. That will make all the difference. Noah...

Corporate propaganda sells you junk food to maximize profits at your expense, hoping you have kids before you die so they can continue marketing to an eternal customer base.

I just have to accept what they are saying even though I think it’s probably not true, you are being manipulated.

We wish desperately for a way to redeem the situation. This is the sunk-cost fallacy and tends to hurt smarter people more because they are more aware of their losses. The manipulator often senses this and sweetens the relationship to keep you trapped.

So Marco hired his buddy as his money manager. And his account rose 30 percent in value. In a week. Then three weeks later, it crashed. To almost zero. Marco checked his balance and saw a slim 3 percent left of the total, from $100,000 down to $3,000.

If only I could help this person get his life back in order.

Pete took it as a personal attack, asking, “Don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust my friend?” over and over until my client stopped paying such close attention. When Marco raised doubts about certain decisions, he was undermined. “You don’t know anything about this industry. Trust me, I know what I’m doing,” Pete would say.

...then, when the wind shifted, Pete tried to make up with Marco by gossiping about Alexei. This poisoned Marco and

Alexei’s relationship. Who could believe who?

Nobody wants to admit they were manipulated. There is great shame found in admitting gullibility. Nobody wants to be the fool. And manipulators know that. Which is why it works.

“Shut up, keep your head down, and get along.”

...education at church was no better. Their rules were endless and made even less sense. Don’t look threatening. Accept responsibility for doing unpaid work. If you ever say no to any request, you’re selfish at best and unholy at worst. If you don’t use your talents to serve the church, God will take them away.

It didn’t even stop at home. The media and my own extended family bombarded me with manipulative propaganda. I was accused of being selfish with trendy messages. “It’s selfish to want a spouse and children. Don’t you know the earth is overpopulated?”

“If you don’t work with your hands, you’re lazy.”

“If you have to work with your hands, you’re stupid.”

“Nice guys don’t get angry.”

“Turn the other cheek” became code for “Accept every slap without even trying to stop the abuse.”

Everything was “damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” It was psychological judo, using my own energy against me. People who are off balance are easy to manipulate and get forced into submission.

Curt described a manipulation strategy that short-circuits our critical thinking through undermining and reputation destruction. He called it “(G)ossiping, (S)haming, (R)allying, (R)idicule, (M)oralizing, (P)sychologizing, (U)ndermining, (R)eputation destruction, and saving (F)ace or consent,” or GSRRM.

When you refuse to be manipulated, people notice. Manipulators notice, of course, but also the vast majority of people who are sick of being exploited notice.

You cannot be manipulated without your consent.

We pay with our joy, our hope, and our humanity. People who face constant manipulation are overcome with addictions, self-medication to dull the pain of not being able to protect themselves. Even if they quit, they feel miserable, withdraw, and fall short of their full potential. Some even turn into manipulators themselves.

...more clinical terms, I’m delivering a society-wide dose of a social antiparasitic vaccination.

There are also the more mundane but equally exciting benefits. You’ll pay less for cars, houses, and other higher-priced items and services. You’ll avoid scams. You’ll ask for the raise you always wanted.

Manipulation is a virus. It’s also psychological warfare on a personal scale. And I’m preparing you for battle.

The famous strategist Sun Tzu wrote, “Know thy enemy.” Manipulators are everyone’s enemy, and it’s time to learn about why they’ve been so effective at hurting you.

Know thyself

Microsoft poured more than $2 billion, two years, and millions of man hours into getting it done. Everything seemed set up for success. But no one accounted for the factor that ruins so many projects, relationships, and dreams: manipulation.

That’s when, according to Dennis, bizdev leadership began to distort reality. They couldn’t accept that they’d overpromised and misunderstood engineering’s capabilities, so they got defensive.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t think you’re going to hit those numbers,” Dennis said at a meeting. A bizdev manager replied, “We don’t need

pessimism at Microsoft.”

They looked down on the WinMo team’s (apparently failed) software-only strategy: starting years earlier than Apple yet being leapfrogged overnight.

The engineers who were building the phone and software were made to feel like idiots who didn’t comprehend bizdev’s grand vision.

Rallying always brings that danger. Pulling together at the expense of some of your own teammates eventually destroys the team mentality.

You just don’t understand marketing. Let me educate you.” It’s a brute-force way to tell someone to shut up and stop voicing their opinion.

“Are you doubting the entire mission?” was...

They assigned psychological issues to the victims and made them feel they were inferior to the bizdev staff.

There were layers of shielding within the project. When engineering raised concerns, they were stopped from traveling up the hierarchy.

That’s why CEO Steve Balmer was kept from hearing any bad news and therefore had every reason to believe Kin was a multibillion-dollar business in the making.

It’s hard to get hired anywhere else after presiding over a multibillion-dollar mistake, one ranked among the three worst products Microsoft ever released. But mistakes of this magnitude demand blame, and that blame was placed on the EVP.

Letting the rest of the blame fall on the engineers is how bizdev protected themselves at the expense of everyone else on the team.

The EVP took the full blame. Talking points rolled out to protect the company: “The product was way ahead of its time,” and “The market wasn’t able to comprehend our value.” So the bizdev crew was free to scatter into other projects and other companies as if they’d had nothing to do with the disaster.

Manipulation was built into the system from the start.

But just like animal abuse, manipulation has no error-correction mechanism.

Destroying your relationship through manipulation means the victim won’t help fix the disaster they saw coming and tried to warn you about.

...the opposite of manipulation, does have an error-correction mechanism.

You can always launch a new product, but you can’t attract top talent once you get a reputation for ruining careers.

They had to first manipulate themselves. And everyone else had to agree to be manipulated.

Time for some harsh truth—the number-one reason we are so easy to manipulate is that we manipulate ourselves in dozens of little ways every day.

Instead of dealing with uncomfortable responsibilities, we stick our head in the sand, pretending we don’t have a problem when we actually do. Think...

So I’ll drink coffee and eat sugar to stay awake today.” That is self-manipulation.

It’s OK. I need it. You manipulate yourself.

“triggered.” I’m telling you that this trend is based on manipulating yourself into believing it’s OK to never heal.

Nobody should have “inner demons.” Those are the result of self-manipulation and create a constant cycle that prevents you from becoming the best version of yourself.

“This advice is my business, but it’s wrong. If I stop doing it, I’ll stop earning... ...a living.”

Worrying about teaching other people wrong information turns into “I will never have an honest, authentic connection with a woman.”

Those are all reasons we continue to self-manipulate; it gets us short-term results, which are what most of us care about.

This happens on a corporate level, too. Microsoft tarnished its reputation with Kin, so people viewed Windows Phone, a later product that was the true competitive answer to the iPhone, with a critical eye. Did you even know they released another branded phone later? That’s their consequence for manipulation.

Again, we’ll come back to this later. And we’ll differentiate manipulation (win-lose) from persuasion (win-win).

My parents didn’t manipulate me...

Many kids feel manipulated by their parents, the same way that many wives feel manipulated by their husbands and vice versa.

Social exclusion has meant death for most of history because without the “tribe,” we cannot survive on our own. And social exclusion still means gene death if no one wants to partner with us. Loss of connection and loss of meaning are still dangerous to the human animal.

You might be thinking right now, I hate manipulating people. I’d feel horrible about doing it. Excellent. But many people are not like you. And you need to understand the minds out there trying to manipulate...

Because it works great for getting short-term results. Sometimes. Look at developing countries.

That’s how they make a living while tarnishing their nation’s reputation and ability to attract productive investment.

Another reason manipulation is popular is that power is addictive, like a drug. Manipulation appeals to people who feel they have no power (even if they do have power).

Some women manipulate men. This is true of sex workers as well as serial divorcees who hunt for rich husbands.

Zeus and Hera.

When he wakes up, he’s annoyed but admits he was about to do something stupid, and she saved him from himself. She didn’t harm him through her manipulation but did what was actually best for him long term.

Persuasion is about long-term wins with much higher payoffs. Manipulation focuses on a short-term high score with a worse long-term outcome.

One person is just manipulating themselves and creating an opening for the other person to manipulate them.

In game theory, we call manipulation a zero-sum game. It’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma...

All sides are manipulating themselves and others. It’s creating the worst long-term outcomes, all done so that a few can make short-term gains and get out before the consequences surface.

Manipulability is built into our biological... ...hardware and software. We have a tripartite (three-part) brain, and manipulation targets two of the parts.

Manipulators just have to be aware of the neocortex so they don’t trigger any of its alarms while they attempt to work on the other two parts.

Last is the lizard brain. This is where your basic impulses and desires come from: food, pleasure, sex. And this is what marketing targets most of all. “If you don’t buy our product, you won’t get laid.” Our lizard brain doesn’t want to miss out.

It’s crucial that you understand what manipulation does to you. Manipulation is like psychological junk food. It meets the dopamine need to feel an accomplishment.

More manipulation fills that gap, for a while.

...siblings, extended family, friends, colleagues, corporations, government agencies, and con artists looking to steal your money.

Some manipulations are obvious. For example, “Accept everyone just the way they are” is society-wide manipulation. But that doesn’t work when the other side wants to harm you.

“Take your brother along because he’s family. And you’re building a bond with your younger sibling that you both will rely on later in life.”

Manipulators throw fearful scenarios at you very quickly to trigger your fight-or-flight response. When the amygdala gets hyped up, you get a cortisol rush and are open to suggestions.

“Fix the immediate problem or we won’t have a future to worry about.”

When I’ve asked people I knew were being manipulated if that’s what was happening they said, “No, absolutely not.” Then when I asked if they were being shamed, they said yes. I’d tell them, “That’s manipulation.” That’s when it finally clicked.

Prior to deploying GSRRM, manipulators will “prime” you so your resistance to the manipulation is softened up. Influence author Robert Cialdini calls this “pre-suasion.” Another common term for this phenomenon is framing.

Framing, pre-suading, priming—whatever we call it—is a technique that drags you into the manipulator’s reality.

I have to make all your decisions for you because you’ve got that diagnosis and that means you’re helpless without me. I’m the only one who’s smart enough to decide for you.”

One of the most common methods of undermining is changing the definition of a term.

...editing the internet means editing reality.

Only information workers are capable of doing this, not carpenters, plumbers, engineers, et cetera. Information workers are the ones who shape the collective sense of truth, for good or for bad.

Changing the descriptions of events is even worse. Stealth editing on Wikipedia can erase facts and create an alternate timeline that didn’t happen. Those events can then be used as justification for future decisions.

Position the information to look bad, and people will assume it is bad. Remember that the next time you hear about a “controversial” public figure, “settled science,” or “mostly peaceful” protests.

If the undermining fails, and they get called out, they deny it all. This is also called gaslighting. “I never said that. Are you crazy? You might be. And you are.”

An abusive female partner who pushed her male partner to the edge and beat him up psychologically until he fought back

can use his fighting back as proof that he abused her.

Often, manipulators resort to solving for face when someone they know catches them in a lie. As the truth finally comes out, the manipulator spins one story after another...

In child abuse cases involving stepfathers or boyfriends and underage children, often the mother of the victim, afraid of getting embarrassed, losing her new man, and causing additional strife with the child’s father, decides instead to manipulate the child into silence. This is the extent to which manipulators will try to solve for face—they will keep their own family under the same roof as a sexual predator.

Elizabeth Holmes is a famous example of a master manipulator.6 She misled patients, doctors, and investors about Theranos’s blood-testing technology. Through the leader, an entire organization and its shareholders got manipulated.

Look at multilevel marketing. This is also called a pyramid scheme. They use every GSRRM tactic as the business model to get people to sign up.

Manipulation happens every day. You need to understand it to defend yourself and those you love.

...high-IQ individuals run on logic and functionality. What worked best became the rule.

Now, standardization was coming. Individual expression was about to be eliminated. Those high-IQ individuals doing the programming were being forced to work in an inefficient environment tailored to average employees from the general population.

Scaling to the top of any industry is hard, even when your company is run by and hires only geniuses.

It was like shoving an average person into a Special Forces team for political reasons while the other Special Forces members think, This guy is going to get us killed.

The thing is, only 1 to 2 percent of the entire population can work in this challenging industry. If the company wanted to maintain their previous quality and output, they did not have room for low- or middle-range performers.

In actuality, the acquisition was a disaster for both groups. David’s company went from a “product launch” focus to a “social good” focus. The corporation hired social changemakers, not engineers.

Everything became about identity instead of capability. Feedback was silenced to protect feelings. David’s company went from a software company to a low-performer babysitting service. Who would want to stay and watch their career grow stagnant?

The original team had a strong spirit, but after the acquisition, everyone stopped caring. They shut up. Even those who stayed didn’t care anymore. The purpose for hard work was gone. Why work yourself to exhaustion for people who don’t care about you or the product? Put in the minimal effort, get your paycheck, and go home.

It went from a logical environment to an emotionally sensitive one.

...the feelings of the protected social groups, that is.

That’s what manipulation does. It disregards the long-term benefits of healthy behavior to prioritize the short-term rewards of unhealthy behavior.

Manipulation accomplished the corporation’s immediate goals regarding feelings at the cost of their long-term financial goals.

The possibility of having to face GSRRM tactics makes it attractive to work for yourself, at a start-up, or at a smaller private business to avoid the corporate mess.

The system of manipulation in the acquiring company overtook the logical, persuasion-based system at the company that was acquired.

Great people leave good jobs because of bad people (manipulators). That manipulation created competition by pushing the best people away, and they created their own rival company. By manipulating their employees, this corporation sowed the seeds of its own demise.

When trust was lost, the flow of vital information closed down. The leaders said, “The company is failing, and no one will tell me why.”

It’s impossible to maintain trust when you’re forcibly silenced and placed in groups with potential hostiles. Slowly, the entire company becomes a human resources department.

As bad as the manipulation costs are for businesses, they’re worse for families.

One of my clients was a doctor whose wife had an addiction. While he and I worked together, her alcoholism worsened. Then he found illegal prescription drugs she’d left in his car. That alone could have lost him his professional license. I tried to help them improve their marriage. When I met her, as good as I am at detecting manipulation, I could not tell when she was lying and when she was telling the truth.

Her thefts and lying cost him money and put his livelihood at risk. But the personal manipulations caused their marriage to fail. He truly loved her and would have done anything to help her if she’d just been honest. It was the saddest divorce I ever saw that didn’t involve kids.

“Do as I say, not as I do”

“Rules for thee but not for me.”

“We’ll lie to you until you figure it out. But if you lie to us, we’ll spank you because lying is bad.”

“Your child is too young to reason, so hit them to make them learn.” That stunts their development and undermines your ability to communicate at their level.

Kids who end up destroying themselves by working in the adult entertainment industry often come from the most conservative religious homes. They do it to spite their parents. These parents manipulated their kids to feel shameful about themselves and about sex, and the kids want to get back at them.

Millions of seniors are abandoned in nursing homes.

People who were manipulated often end up manipulating their own kids, and the generational cycle of trauma continues.

...echoing consequences of family dynamics repeat for generations.

The grandparents may not even see the children. You may feel like you’re starting from scratch with yourself and your own kids, and you have to learn to use persuasion with yourself, your spouse, your kids, your friends, and your parents. Manipulation destroys families and destroys their future.

Rwandan genocide manipulation drove citizens from animosity to violence, in which mothers killed other mothers in front of their children.

And that fear often leads to violence—even self-inflicted. Consider the Jonestown cult. What they did was mostly legal but threatened the US power structure.

More serious than reputation is the destruction of people’s lives. An organization can issue press releases and give rehearsed public apologies, but in most cases of public manipulation, it’s too late to recover anything close to what was lost.

Divorced households in the U.S. could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households.

More marriages could be saved if couples switched to persuasion. Imagine the positive impact on the environment of win-win relationships. Marriage and family experts discuss divorce as a personal, private issue. It’s not. The planet itself feels its impact.

Another notable example of manipulation’s effect on the environment is the ghost city phenomenon in China.11 Over fifty new, planned cities sit empty and crumbling across the country. As many as 64 million empty apartments have wasted $6.8 trillion from 2009 through 2014 alone.

In China, 600 new cities have been created over 65 years—the fastest pace of urbanization the world...

This has been accompanied by rapid building and rebuilding, with one estimate stating that the average building in China is demolished every 25–30 years. Frequent demolition and construction—just like John Maynard Keynes had advocated—is perceived as an economy-boosting activity. But its darker side involves forced evictions, conflicts over land and significant environmental damage.

A “do to them before they can do to me” mentality perpetuates the cycle. It’s a mind virus that manipulators spread.

There are also other personal costs. The chronic distrust and commitment issues make future relationships difficult. Old wounds can make it easy to be revictimized by manipulators who promise to heal the victim.

...here is no such thing as bad publicity. All publicity is good publicity.”

...survived cancel culture and came out stronger.

They called me a white supremacist and said I was running a seditious organization.

A public figure threatened to beat me up if he saw me.

I post regularly on social media about lessons learned while coaching private clients to overcome manipulation.

“People without a mission.” But I thought, Why not run an A/B test? I can tweet separately about men and about women to see which gets more engagement.

And the audience can tell me if it is men or women who are more interested in getting manipulation defense insights from my tweets.

I got little engagement on the tweet about men. The tweet about women got 1.5 million impressions, 250,000 engagements, and nearly 17,000 comments.

I did not use the most persuasive framing of the topic. I used traditional terminology that some might consider politically incorrect, which was OK for the test I was conducting.

Agency means getting control of yourself, not control of others. It’s about improving the self-sufficiency of ordinary people.

This does not mean “how to stop paying taxes and drink only rain water.”

In both instances, once the tweet and the organization began getting attention, the manipulative mob came after me.

A major reason the manipulation failed is that I was prepared to withstand manipulation. I resisted from the start and maintained my defense until the tactics got so extreme that casual observers who didn’t even know me took my side.

“A man has got to know his limitations.”

This is key to defense in every arena, including against manipulation. You must know who you are and your personal limits.

One of my personal limits is to always be truthful in my public and private life.

Whatever I say in private matches what I say in public. People who maintain different values in public and in private are duplicitous. When the storm hits, the clash of values breaks them.

The number-one most effective defense tactic is to always tell the truth. Tell the truth in public and in private so there is no difference.

Tell the truth in the simplest, most persuasive way possible. Know that you are telling the truth as you see it, and there could be variation based on other perspectives, but always know that you were honest.

I was angry at society for giving them bad advice and sad for the victims. And I noticed that men who have wives and children they love are deeply motivated to change, to improve, to build. Single men without kids are difficult to motivate.

Every client I had said, “I wish my father had set me on the right course to begin with.” I’d ask them, “Why don’t you ask your dad about that?” Their fathers were always dead, didn’t care, or were incapable of offering good advice.

I cofounded the self-sufficiency organization because I noticed clients were surrounded by manipulators at work.

Worse, they needed the money or health care those jobs provided. Being manipulated at work ruined their lives, and they had no other options because they had no networks outside the office.

Big corporations have an abusive relationship with female employees.

Their benefits packages often include egg freezing to give the illusion they can put family on hold to pursue their career. Egg freezing is not itself the illusion; the illusion is that women can build a successful career and still have a happy family later in life, which does not comport with human biology.

Recent studies show the pregnancy rate of thawed eggs is as low as 1.8 percent.15 Companies manipulate women into believing the success rate is closer to 100 percent, even if they don’t explicitly state as much.

“Give us the best years of your life, and we’ll give you children one day.”

These same companies manipulate women into taking more responsibilities and more stress with the same pay. Having so many women crying to me in private made me angry at their manipulators. I realized I had to tell the truth.

Mental defenses against manipulation are no different. You need to build a castle and put on your armor so that manipulation attacks bounce off your defenses.

Some people call this “mental frame.” This is your relationship to the world and how much you will allow yourself to be moved.

Manipulation attempts bounced off me because I’d built my defenses knowing that attacks would come.

Don’t become overconfident in your defenses.

Shame over being manipulated makes future manipulation easier. Accept that some people will try to manipulate you. When you fall for manipulation, don’t be ashamed. Learn from that gap in your defense and fix the weakness.

Another way to stay safe is to trust but verify.

Build defensive measures into your information networks.

Manipulators will call you a number of horrible names to crack your defenses. When you recognize their tactics, you remove their ability to hurt you.

For example, I never respond to insults. If you insult me, you get blocked. I always avoid answering insincere questions. If hostile? Ignore. If not hostile but curious?

Make them do the work. It’s jujitsu. Hold on until they get tired. It’s easier to deflect a punch than to throw one.

They reach the point at which the insanity is unbelievable, even to strangers who don’t know you. That’s when the Hitler comparisons come out. They hang themselves with their own rope.

Sometimes. You can remain silent and let the insanity speak for itself, unless you’ve got a killer reply that deflates enemy momentum. In that case, insults help you.

Manipulators are trying to break you down in front of the audience. But their tactics are disgusting, and if the those watching ever recognizes what the exploiter is really doing, they will turn on them.

Nobody likes a puppet master. Everybody hates having their strings pulled. They can easily imagine being used. So you can simply persuade the audience by telling the truth.

The manipulators kill him in the end, but the audience respects the protagonist for holding his principles. The more disrespectful the deceivers, the more your audience will respect you.

In business, you want decision makers to know the truth before they hear lies from manipulators. The first story people hear is the one they’ll believe.

Contrast this with President Joe Biden, who has been photographed doing what looks like fondling underage children. He’s a target for accusations because he already looks guilty.

That means be authentic and look authentic. Dishonest curation is fragile. If people find dishonesty in one area, the house of cards collapses.

You cannot shame a man who has nothing to be ashamed of. If you’ve always told the truth, you won’t be ashamed of lies told about who you are, so you probably don’t have chinks in your armor.

Most shame is uncovering something you’ve been dishonest about.

Avoid fights you can’t win.

Do you suspect someone in your life has an issue like borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder that makes rational discussion impossible? Consult a professional, then cut ties if possible. Block abusive users online. Remove potential fights before they happen.

Enforce reciprocity. If people come to me with sincere, honest questions, I give sincere, honest answers.

+

Tell the truth, and you’ll be surrounded by people who want the truth. Without effective lies, they cannot manipulate; they must persuade. You want people in your corner, friend group, and network who are persuaders, not manipulators.

This means you’ll have a smaller but more reliable social network, which matters for what’s next.

Manipulation is social warfare. You need people who will help with your defense. In my case, those friends were people who defended me in the comments.

I recruited ten friends to report people who posted death threats or used words offensive to protected classes.

At the corporate level, you need employees who are sheepdogs to find manipulators. Most people do not have the personality to protect...

That also means teaching your people how to become immune to manipulation.

If people defending you are manipulated, that’s worse than no one defending you. Numbers are not important in social warfare. Behavior is. I blocked twenty thousand people and had ten friends on my side. I even gave them admin rights to my business profile. Those angry mobs got no value from the experience. I did, and I won.

“All these women are talking about my genitals.” Shame had no power over me.

Some people on your side are not honest. They are willing to use manipulation as their primary strategy. When they come to your defense with those tactics, you look like the bad guy.

I’ve been a part of an organization in which a spouse was manipulating an individual in leadership to spread specific messages. We had to remove that person from the team.

Anyone who would use manipulation cannot be in your life. Fill your circle with people who will reject all GSRRM tactics no matter what. You must know they will take your side against the mob.

On old battleships, crew members could mutiny, but it wouldn’t work if the officers held firm. As long as your castle holds, you’re safe. The biggest threats are the people inside who would open the doors to the enemy. Make sure you curate your allies.

She realized after twenty-one years of marriage that she was nothing more than a trophy wife to him...

In truth, the husband did not know how to respond to his wife’s sweetness, honesty and feminine vulnerability. She fell for him because at the start he was kind, loving, and romantic. After they got married, he undermined her sense of self while pushing her into acting against her wishes.

Manipulation can be healed, but not without help. Manipulation in the family usually gets no blowback. People will drop hints, but society forbids your friends and loved ones from saying, “That person is manipulating you.”

People don’t speak up because they’re afraid you’ll hate them for it. Or that the manipulator will come after them next. Those fears may be justified, since built-in plausible deniability makes manipulation legal.

Now, what is built-in plausible deniability, and how does it make manipulation legal?

“I’m his parent. It’s for his own good. Besides, that’s how my parents talked to me, and I turned out OK.”

Why do manipulators choose to hurt honest people? Because they’re trying to get the best outcome they can, even if it hurts others.

He was selfish, and she was high in conscientiousness, the type of person to do what was right even if it was painful. Manipulation made him feel secure in their relationship because it made him feel powerful, in control. Without manipulation, he feared that he couldn’t keep her, so when he did, he felt accomplished.

Corporations manipulate employees in similar ways. Manipulative bosses fear workers will slack off and steal if given an inch of trust.

Manipulation means treating people like objects. They’re obstacles to be removed in the pursuit of goals.

Persuasion is when you treat people like people. You need to work with them to accomplish your goals, which means helping them meet their goals so they have an incentive to help you.

Persuasion applies outside relationships, too. For example, persuasion is when a dating coach says, “I will teach you how to understand women and build healthy relationships.” Manipulation is when a pickup artist guru says, “I will teach you seven ways to trick women into bed with you, and you won’t believe number six. But if none of them work, women are broken, and it’s your fault, loser.”

Some fitness product companies market their goods with messaging like “Healthy at any size,” accompanied by pictures of morbidly obese individuals using those products.

The company could feature fitness journeys of unhealthy people who, using their products, transformed their bodies, improving self-confidence and overall happiness.

If it’s hard to picture companies using persuasive marketing strategies instead of manipulating customers, it’s because we’re conditioned to accept manipulation as normal.

Individuals and corporations aren’t the only manipulators. Governments also manipulate their own citizens. They often follow up their propaganda by applying force to coerce their people’s submission.

China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and the forced layoffs in US Federal Services in response to President Biden’s vaccine mandate are clear examples of manipulation, propaganda, and use of force against dissenters.

“Is it ever moral to use manipulation tactics?”

“When is it OK to be inauthentic?” I approach this topic the same way I approach the question “When is it OK to harm someone?” The answer is when self-defense demands it.

The book The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker details stories of women who escaped from serial killers by manipulating them.

That really is the line. Justification for harming someone else requires clear and present danger without other options. If you’ve got the time and ability to use persuasion, you should. Otherwise you’re choosing to manipulate out of convenience or comfort, which is irreciprocal and immoral.

It often seems easier to move someone by force than to take the time to explain. How do you resist the temptation?

The answer is learning to prioritize authenticity and openness over convenience. Using persuasion instead will pay dividends in the long run. You...

Spend a little time now to avoid a big disaster later.

If you believe that persuasion leaves you vulnerable and that vulnerability is bad, the barrier to persuasion might seem too high for you to climb. You may feel like manipulation is your only option. That’s why serial manipulators keep coercing others even as their consequences pile up. They don’t believe there’s any other way.

If your parents aren’t reliable, you cannot see anyone else as reliable.

Even after twenty-one years of being married to a sweet woman who worked hard to nurture him, my client’s husband couldn’t bring himself to say, “I can trust my wife.” The healing can’t begin from outside. It has to be a personal choice first.

His betrayal by a previous wife had left him determined not to trust another woman again.

I see that problem a lot in second marriages. When both parties lack trust, the relationship ends quickly.

“People can be trusted. And I can trust people.” To replace manipulation with persuasion in our relationships, we need to believe both.

Showing vulnerability to trustworthy people requires you to be strong. Showing vulnerability is like kryptonite to untrustworthy people. It’s a test. Your intentional display of vulnerability reveals who the other person really is.

For example, before I accept a new client, I want to vet them. I admit I’m busy and that I don’t have time in my schedule for clients who will not do the work. So I ask them if they’ll do the work. If they answer with absolutes and speak with extreme self-confidence, that’s a tell for self-manipulation, meaning I likely cannot trust them.

The vulnerability is brief and intentional, not sustained or accidental.

I’ll let you initiate this fight and still kick your butt.” Matt Dillon showed strength by intentionally selecting when to show vulnerability. And the other characters trusted him. Even his enemies trusted that taking a swing at him wouldn’t work.

Persuasion builds bridges. Trusting you allows your enemy to open dialogue instead of jumping to violence. Through honest conversation and persuasion, you can come to an agreement with most people who would otherwise have stayed your enemies.

Men I call friends are men I would trust with my life.

Therefore, I only do business with friends. If I can’t trust you with my money, then I can’t trust you, so you can’t be my friend. Better to find out you are untrustworthy and lose a few dollars than to find out and lose my life.

It’s also a chance to see how other people respond when you share total openness. If they run from vulnerability or attempt to overcome your boundaries, you dodged a bullet.

That’s true in financial dealings and in marriage.

My client’s husband saw her as a social-sexual object—a means to an end. He had no concern for her needs.

...school teachers often act this way toward little boys. My son was resisting his teacher’s authority in the classroom when she tried to act on him like an object—a student who must be made to obey instructions, even unclear, unnecessary instructions, without question. My wife had to tell her to ask for our son’s help instead of ordering him around.

Breaking spouses, children, and employees like horses harms them. If you care about their needs, you won’t do it.

Yes, it’s harder to reason with children than to command them. But no sensible person wants to live in a system where might makes right. People living under tyranny eventually rebel against it.

The cooperative, persuasive approach takes more energy but creates better outcomes. You offer people enough value to change their preferences, which improves their view of you. Your preferences may also need to change, but that’s OK because preferences are malleable.

Overt manipulation would be holding your kids down and brushing their teeth for them. Coercive manipulation would be shame. “You get a sticker” quickly becomes “You don’t get a sticker, and look how many you’ve missed this week.”

The cooperative, persuasive approach also works in business. LEGO Group is an example of healthy products and persuasion. They will only hire people who are already Adult Fans Of LEGO (AFOL). And they treat people like family. Need to attend your kid’s birthday? Pregnant? Injured? Take plenty of time off. LEGO only fires people for truly terrible behavior. They have fifth-generation employees. I’ve met hundreds of LEGO employees, and every one of them loved the company.

“What’s your secret?” Often, they lie. “I worked hard and got lucky. You can be anything you want.” That may be true, but it deceives the public into believing work ethic and good fortune are enough. They’re not. The unintended consequence is the mass disillusionment of millions of failed entrepreneurs and entertainers, many of whom...

“I have a high IQ, I came from a supportive family who gave me funding to get started, and then I worked hard and got lucky. Not everyone can be anything they want.”

Lying for your own benefit, even to save face, produces low return on investment (ROI). Yet reciprocity for mutual gain yields the highest ROI.

Manipulation requires constant reinforcement. Persuasion is self-reinforcing because both sides want to sustain the relationship. So put in the time and effort to create a cycle of perpetual good. You’ll be glad you did.

Let’s take this chapter to explore what your life and the world at large can—and will—look like once you clean out the manipulators and start implementing healthy persuasion in every relationship.

When you’re immune to manipulation, no one can move you against your will. People have to persuade you or get out of your life.

That means you don’t manipulate others either—you have to persuade. You must consider how to give value.

Becoming a net value creator changes everything. No more fear of job loss. No fear of divorce. You become too valuable for anyone to get rid of. That means they’ll work harder to keep you and provide more value in return. You’ll get back more than you give away.

You may have fewer relationships overall, but the remaining relationships will be high trust, lower maintenance, and low frustration.

Five close friends are worth more than fifty acquaintances trying to manipulate you.

Embracing persuasion also brings lower anxiety. You’ll be able to relax because you’ll have a passive manipulation detector running in the background keeping you safe.

Once you stop manipulating yourself, you can trust your own judgment. You make the right decision rapidly without second-guessing. And if a decision doesn’t work out, you let it go because you know you made the best decision possible with the information you had at the time. No self-doubt or blame.

From fitness and finances to career and long-term relationships, you won’t wait for others to tell you what to do.

Every relationship will be a team effort. With persuasion, you can relax into love.

Manipulation-free marriages build emotional intimacy. Each spouse can be honest without fearing the other will exploit secrets. Once you share your wants and needs, you’ve taught the other person how to hurt you. It’s not a lack of communication skills that hinders most marriages; it’s the fear of vulnerability from sharing needs and wants.

Manipulation and even the fear of manipulation can drive a couple toward divorce.

Children who have to “be good” to get rewards learn not to trust those they’re most emotionally intimate with—their parents.

Compelling a virtue is not virtuous.

Manipulating your spouse into giving you sex or money is unethical. If you are manipulating, you are not offering value.

We needed to offer emotional, mental, and spiritual value to each other. And we knew that manipulation would ruin us. So we agreed never to manipulate each other about household chores, childcare, budgeting and finances, spending, or even sexual intimacy.

Reciprocity does not mean tracking who did what for whom, like a business agreement.

In contrast, reciprocity means policing yourself to avoid taking more than you give.

Transactionality is exactly why “choreplay” doesn’t work. The woman wants the chore done, so she pays her man with attention. Or the man doesn’t want to level up his career, so he offers to do exactly 50 percent of the chores...

Only with persuasion. But few couples discuss these arrangements…

I’ve built a manipulation-free career. The men’s group I run has outlawed manipulation. We persuade each other by giving encouragement, which adds value and helps us grow…

My goal in the men’s group—and in all professional relationships—is to choose persuasion over manipulation. Using persuasion to get the new client, promotion,…

My instinct is to add more value than I promised. Underpromising and overdelivering are powerful persuasion,…

Beware niceness. It’s inherently dishonest but deceptively friendly manipulation that…

The question is how to spot the signs of niceness. “Love bombs” and feel-good promises that bait you into hazards against your better…

Love bombing is an attempt to manipulate a person by excessive demonstrations of attention and false affection. The target is overwhelmed by the emotion and is often shamed into reciprocating…

Many people have terrible family lives. Manipulative business leaders realize that and promise a replacement family without delivering on the implied guarantees. It would be honest to say, “We’re like a family—a…

“We’re not a family. Every year, we fire the bottom 10…

Similarly, companies that call their workers “family” and treat them like it with flexible hours and industry-leading benefits are practicing reciprocity. Often, multiple generations have worked for the company,…

Usually, reciprocal organizations are open to blunt internal feedback. Truth comes before face in…

Both mercenary and family-style companies generally foster openness and transparency. They’re governed by the rule of law, so everyone knows where they stand, but the…

Respect is what guides them. When they act upon individual members in their network, they act with respect for the dignity of that individual beyond…

In a world without manipulation, there are no massive propaganda pushes that benefit the elite class…

Once liberated from manipulation, people will find irreciprocal arrangements unacceptable and intolerable, thus outlawing such behavior at all levels of…

Does this mean we must all protect ourselves from manipulation? Yes, for a start. The people who are strong enough to protect themselves must learn how. From there, we offer…

My friend, ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, pointed out that journalists, politicians, and institutional experts who use superfluous…

Joshua has been effective at changing perceptions of leaders. Manipulation through the written word is now easy to spot. The meme is spreading. Even if people who practice Joshua’s adverb rule don’t…

Excessive use of adverbs discredits a public figure as a manipulator not to be…

Can we get rid of these liars? No. Those journalists are not going anywhere. But when we shift away from manipulation, their lies won’t be effective. When we withdraw our consent to hearing lies, they lose the incentive to tell…

Consider the Covington kid—Nick Sandmann—who the media lied about but later received a settlement from several companies over those lies. We can…

A world without manipulation is within our grasp. We just need to find the…

Imagine an economy built on companies demonstrating value to sell rather than using…

Secret shame and people’s programmed ability to manipulate themselves define our economy. Imagine if it…

What if politicians, leaders, and public authorities were forced to deploy persuasion…

The problem with identity politics isn’t identity itself—it’… ...manipulation used to divide groups along religious, racial, and…

Honest leaders should resolve conflicts between groups through win-win persuasion. This may not be a quick process, but it is…

Where manipulation masks over problems or creates new problems, persuasion prevents future issues. Abandoning manipulation and using persuasion…

Isn’t that a world you want to live in? You can. The first step is to reject all manipulation and…

Refer back for a quick antimanipulation refresher as needed.

However, if being honest destroys a relationship, it was already too late to save it.

Setting boundaries is changing the rules of the relationship, a rejection of behavior that was accepted in the past. You need to be clear that your partner is not being rejected, only the manipulative behavior.

Young men are told to manipulate women through a push-pull tactic of offering and then withdrawing attention. Many wounded partners come to me for help figuring out what they’re doing wrong to be treated poorly.

...had become normalized in that family. It takes a delicate touch and a lot of patience to help someone realize their partner is manipulating them.

I can’t bluntly say, “You’ve been manipulated into thinking this person loves you.”

Mark 8:22–26 tells how Jesus Christ healed a blind man. First he restored a little of the man’s eyesight and asked, “What do you see?” And the man said, “I can see people. They look like trees, but they are walking around.” It took three tries to give that blind man all his eyesight back. Could Jesus have done it in one try? Sure. But he chose to ease the man into sight so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

“Your wife is cheating on you!” He’ll direct his fear at you in the form of anger. Your first step is to stop denying the manipulation’s existence. If you can take that first step, everything else will follow.

Almost all in-law problems follow that pattern. They want you to be more like they think they are. The way to gain their respect is to boldly resist their attempts to mold you.

Manipulators will come to see you as a real person, not an object. Or they’ll reject and avoid you. Either way, you become free.

These harsh criticisms or forced expectations may lead your child down dark paths if they stop feeling safe with their family.

If they reject this approach, that tells you they’re unsupportive of your parenting. That’s a red flag that they may undercut you with the children when you’re not around.

Maintain open communication in your marriage. Spouses should tell each other if parents, in-laws, or friends deride them. Don’t let those secrets fester. Air them out and handle them right away. The backbiters will complain because they want to gain leverage over the two of you.

“My in-laws told my wife they could not manage her, so she was broken.” If his wife hadn’t told him that, she would have been stuck with that message inside her head. Because she shared it aloud to her husband, he was able to help counteract the messaging.

That sort of manipulation is designed to leave just enough doubt that you won’t feel comfortable acting decisively because you could have heard the story wrong. When everyone hears it, there’s consensus, and you can react with confidence that you’re acting on the truth.

That breaks the connection between spouses and allows your parents to dig in even deeper with their manipulation. Present a united front.

Resetting incentives is key. Talk with your manipulative family members and ask them what they really want. Then show them how to achieve those ends through persuasion instead of manipulation. Make that conversation completely transparent so they see how they’re ruining their own hopes. Help them target new incentives and give them the appropriate way to reach that incentive. Guide them in taking the new direction under their own internal motivation.