Mike Cernovich

An admixture of mindset and media

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Zero to One and the Contrarian Question

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Zero to One begins with what Peter Thiel calls the contrarian question (and it’s a question he asks during job interviews): “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question serves as the basis for Thiel’s business ideas.

The contrarian truth can be political, social, or financial. I have used the contrarian question without knowing it existed for my own journalism. “What important stories are the media refusing to cover?”

Thiel later applies contrarian thinking to starting a company, “The business version of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building?”

While we take PayPal for granted, the idea of sending money via email was a contrarian truth. It’s obvious to us now. It wasn’t obvious then.

PayPal had to pay people to use their serve ($10 for each new user, with a $10 affiliate bonus for every friend you referred.) If you have to pay someone to use your product, then clearly it’s ahead of its time.

“Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.”

zero-to-one-book-review-peter-thiel-blake-masters

Today a contrarian truth could be that BTC and other cryptocurrencies are the future. When I mentioned opening a BTC account, most people told me it was a scam and crazy. Maybe they are right, or maybe BTC is the future.

My own contrarian truth hit me years ago. I believed that masculinity and free speech were the future. Rather than write a general-interest mindset book, I put a Gorilla on the cover and sold my book primarily to a male audience. People said this was crazy, bad branding, and that I’d alienate 50% of my potential audience (women).

Men loved Gorilla Mindset and I have a large female audience, too.

Thiel is a magician (masculine archetype)

Zero to One mentions the word secret dozens of times. There’s an entire section devoted to secrets, and Theil asks in his book, “Why aren’t people looking for secrets?”

Those who have read Carl Jung or “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine,” would see Thiel is a magician.

Indeed Zero to One is premised on the idea of alchemy. When you take a business from 0 to 1, you create something out of nothing.

(Guardians of the Secret, Jackson Pollack)

art and unconscious mind

 

What is your contrarian truth?

When I ask that question, even of people anonymously, the answers are often disappointing – too banal.

Finding a contrarian truth requires you to love secrets, to marvel at life’s mysteries. Without that genuine curiosity, you’re unlikely to see what others miss.

A contrarian truth should be shocking and outrageous, as by definition you are going against the crowd. As Thiel later writes, “If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.”

What is Peter Thiel’s mindset?

On conflict. “Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground; either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.”

On free will. “You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.”

On vision. “In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be viewed as hubris.”

Go from Zero to One.

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Zero to One is a must-read for anyone who wants to think more deeply about the world. Yes, there’s a lot of stuff in there about start-ups and business, and that’s what most reviews focus on.

Most news and commentary is a commodity business. Why read Carlos Slims blog (NYT) when you can read Jeff Bezos blog (WaPo)? It’s the same SJW, anti-Trump hoaxes. The same is true of Vice, Buzzfeed, and Daily Beast. If every newspaper except for one failed, would anyone notice or care? If every basic blog except for one closed down, what would be lost?

I treat a business book like a work of philosophy, which the financial and tech press lacks the intellectual depth to do.

Zero to One is not another basic bitch business book. It’s a work of philosophy by a philosopher.

Buy it now.

How to Become Impossible to Ignore

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Imagine you’re give a rousing speech. The crowd applauds. You have their attention. And then what?

Dr. Carmen Simon explains what happens next in Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions.

Soon you’re forgotten as the crowd moves on to the next speaker or event. Indeed, this is why media appearances are overrated. People see you on TV (and I’ve been on the biggest shows in the world) and then forget about you. It’s not what people see, it’s what people remember.

“People act on what they remember, not on what they forget.”

 

How can you be memorable?

Everyone is a content-machine. Being remembered matters even if you’re not giving speeches, it matters if you meet someone you’re attracted to. Will an attractive person who is hit on many times throughout the day remember you when you send that text asking for a date? What content are you creating in your day-to-day life?

The guiding principle of your content is to ask, “What do I want people to remember?” Recognize that if you’re going to make 20 points in a slide show, people will only remember between 5 and 9 of those slides (the Seven-Plus-or-Minus-Two principle), and that’s if they aren’t scrolling through Twitter, feeling self-pity, or fantasizing about something else.

Choose one or two points or take-aways, and emphasize those points. One of the many helpful charts Simon includes is, “Decide the Salient Point and Repeat it.”

Consider my own videos. What do you remember from them? Chances are not much, well you do remember one salient point. You remember my name – Cernovich.

“Aaaand we’re back, it’s Mike Cernovich of Cernovich dot com.”

This video by Soros-funded Media Matters was edited to make fun of me. I’ll admit, it was funny. But was it effective in discrediting me?

Simon’s work is supported by Dr. Robert Cialdini as well, who writes in Pre-Suasion:

“Even though cut-heavy TV commercials draw more total attention, they produce significantly less memory for the ad’s persuasive claims and significantly less persuasion. It’s easy to understand why: viewers attention isn’t fixated on the ad’s best points but is scattered all over the materials relevant and irrelevant points.”

(Notice the use of a block quote? How much of the above will you remember? Now focus on what’s highlighted.)

Impossible to Ignore gets meta.

“It’s not what you comprehend, it’s what you remember” is a line from Tony Buzan’s books that improved my life. A good student, I could understand challenging material, and yet I didn’t always remember it later. Buzan taught me the power of drilling, and I used this method to achieve high grades in competitive courses. (My exact method of studying in “blocks” is here.)

The end of each chapter contains a summary of the material. Why? Because you’re more likely to remember the content if you review it at the end.

In that regard, we get to Impossible to Ignore’s only weakness – It’s dense. It reads like a graduate school treatise. For someone like me who has done the background reading, Simon’s book is a joy to read and a valuable reference. (Simon’s book may be designed to draw in clients for her consulting practice, in which case Impossible to Ignore’s weakness is a strength.)

Impossible to Ignore is one of the most important books you’ll read if you are a lawyer, saleswoman, public speaker, or parent who wants to reinforce a message with your child.

For example my daughter has taken to pulling on our dog’s fur. Rather than tell her NO, DON’T, I frame it positively, and guide her hand to pet Julius gently. Simon explains:

“If your content is aimed at convincing people to change and existing habit, it’s important to remember that habits are formed by doing, not by not doing. Frame your message in a positive way. Imagine if the famous slogan, ‘Just do it’ was ‘Don’t procrastinate.’

That you should frame a message positively rather than negatively is also keep to NLP persuasion. “Don’t do that,” works far less effective than, “Do something else.”

Thus in Gorilla Mindset I teach you how to improve your inner monologue or self-talk through positive habits, namely Change the Conversation. Rather than NOT talk about something, CHANGE YOUR FOCUS to talk about something else.

Spend some time with Impossible to Ignore. It’s an experience you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

P.S. I take 3 capsules of Gorilla Mind every morning to give myself more focus and better memory. You can pick up a bottle of Gorilla Mind here today.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

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Although life is more than a series of arguments followed by death, persuasion is everywhere. People are selling you and you are selling them, if nothing other than selling them on why they should like you. We don’t like to think of ourselves as selling ourselves, as we’re taught all humans have inherent dignity – in God’s eyes, yes, but this is man’s fallen world. Prove yourself or get wrecked.

Yet persuasion as taught by the greats like Gerry Spence, Milton Erickson, and Scott Adams focuses on the written word. We tend to ignore the visual aspects of persuasion, or dismiss that segment of persuasion as mere advertising.

Virginia Postrel treats visual persuasion with the respect it deserves. Her book The Power of Glamour belongs on your book shelf next to How to Argue and Win Every Time, Metaphors We Live By, and My Voice with Go With You.

What is glamour? In a word, magic.

“Glamour is, rather, a form of nonverbal rhetoric, which moves and persuades not through words but through images, concepts, and totems.”

We speak of spellbinding performances and people, which is a way of say someone has captured our attention, as if through magic. Spectators said figure skater Adam Rippon gave a “spell binding performance,” which means he was doing more than performing an athletic series of movements. He was acting as a canvass for our human desires.

Rippon’s performance was a break from ordinary life, and more than that, his moves allowed the audience to imagine themselves in his position.

Glamour works “by binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning.”

Why Mike Cernovich isn’t glamourous.

One of the huge downsides of having a largely-male audience is the endless hen-pecking, which for an article about glamour would go like this, “I caught you slipping, Cernovich! You’re writing an article on glamour, and you’re not glamourous. You must not have understood the book, as you can’t apply it to your own life!”

No one, let alone Postrel, said glamour is the only persuasion play in this game.

Glamour vs. charsima.

According to Postrel, GLAMOUR is: Cool, Distant, Admiration, Audience defines meaning, Desire, Still Photo, Sales, Good for Campaigning.

By contrast, CHARISMA is: Warm, Personal, Loyalty, Charismatic person defines meaning, Commitment, Live Performance, Leadership, Good for governing.

Glamour is inaccessible. Glamour is the velvet rope, the view of Central Park from Trump Tower, Milo’s wardrobe.

Charisma is the feeling that you already know Stefan Molyneux, and that he cares about you and wants to talk to you.

Neither charisma nor glamour are “superior” to one another. They are different modes of persuasion, both powerful in their own ways.

Have you noticed that people are legitimately terrified of me? To those who know me, this is laughable. I’m one of the nicest people you’ll meet. Postrel explains:

“Charisma in either sense is a personal characteristic like intelligence. A place, an idea, even an object can be glamorous, but only a person can be charismatic. And while glamour depends on the audience’s receptive imagination, even unsympathetic audiences can feel the power of charismas. (Charisma in someone hostile is quite frightening.)

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/879424495613865984

A glamorous person is someone whose life you long for. A charismatic person is someone you want to join.

People don’t want to be me, they want to roll with me. Do you see the difference?

You’ll adore The Rock, but you will follow the lead of Trump. (Even people who hate Trump are forced to admit they are trapped in a world where every day is Trump-Trump-Trump.)

The Power of Glamour is required reading for anyone who wants to work closely with me.

I stopped mentoring people because they wouldn’t do the reading. Working with me requires people to put in the work, and these books are required reading:

 

Watch Virgina Postrel talk about glamour:

 

Watch Mike Cernovich’s video review of The Power of Glamour:

https://youtu.be/DJrM5s3nSXs

P.S. If you’d like to meet Molyneux or me, come to a Night for Freedom in D.C.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

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Disguised as an autobiography, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big is one of the best books on mindset you’ll ever read.

That Scott Adams Wrote a mindset book?

Although How to Fail at Almost Everything does not mention mindset once, the title itself is an inside joke to students of mindset training. Adams immediately signals a growth mindset by treating failure as part of the path to winning big. Adams failed again and again (he goes into great detail) and yet he is a world-famous multi-millionaire with immense personal freedom.

Unlike most people, Adams did not treat his failures as end points. Adams treated losing as an opportunity for personal growth.

Failure can be a short-term event in your life. Or it can be a mindset. It’s your choice.

Create a Model of the World.

My favorite living thinker is billionaire investor Charlie Munger. Munger’s advice is to find a mental model about the world and how it works. Your mental model should include lessons from physics, psychology, economics, rhetoric, business, accounting, and every other subject under the stars. Your mental model should be updated regularly, as new information about the world arrives and as you process your own observations about the world.

Adams takes a similar approach to Munger, building his book around his model of the world:

  1. Goals are for losers.
  2. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer system you can program.
  3. The most important metric to track is your personal energy.
  4. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
  5. Happiness is health plus freedom.
  6. Luck can be managed, sort of.
  7. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way).
  8. Fitness is the lever that moves the world.
  9. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

Many of Adams’ concepts will sound familiar, as he and I seem to share a similar outlook to how the mind works. Adams also uses many of the same techniques covered in Gorilla Mindset.

Why Do Adams’ Affirmations Work?

Adams uses affirmations in his life and like the rest of us realized that affirmations are powerful. Before releasing his first book, Adams made an affirmation: “I, Scott Adams, will be a number one best-selling author.” Sure enough, he hit #1 on the New York Times best seller list.

Yet Adams remains skeptical of affirmations, or at least he pretends to for his audience. Often times the book felt like it was written defensively. Adams spends pages telling his audience that what he does might not work. I suspect that Adams has written about his thought processes only to find himself attacked by “skeptics,” haters, and other toxic people.

Adams believes his affirmation worked because he used them only when he had a 100 percent desire for success.

When you speak an affirmation, you hold yourself accountable.

Affirmations provide a singularity of purpose by proving a clear vision for what you want in your life. This improves your focus.

When you say, “I will [accomplish some goal,” your mind will start to demand of you, “What have you done today to bring yourself closer to your goal?”

I bet Adams put more time into selling books than he would have without the affirmation. I bet he avoided distractions. I bet he did not talk to negative people. He didn’t have time for drama. He focused on living his affirmation.

Affirmations have less to do with woo-woo alignment with the universe and more to do with your own alignment of your conscious and unconscious minds.

For example, my affirmation was, “I will sell 10,000 copies of Gorilla Mindset in its first year.” For a first-time indie author, that’s a lot of books. But I’ll hit that mark in 3 months.

My new affirmation is, “I will sell 100,000 copies of Gorilla Mindset.”

When I repeat that affirmation, my self-talk changes to something real and concrete. “What have you done today to sell books?”

Treat your affirmations like commitments rather than empty promises, and you too will succeed.

Scott Adams gives great “life advice.”

A lot of questions like how to find your life purpose and discover your talents are answered. Adams has a fascinating approach that I hadn’t considered.

To find your talent as an adult, think back to what you did as a kid. What do you enjoy doing before you had any obligations or responsibilities?

As a kid I liked reading and running my mouth. Sure enough, that’s my talent and it’s also how I pay my bills.

Another great tip from Adams is to quit quickly: “Things that will someday work out well start out well….Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.”

Scott Adams’ Boring Success Formula
You have to read between the lines for the boring (yet common) reasons Adams succeeded.

He didn’t quit his day job to “follow his dreams.” Adams worked full time even after Dilbert took off. He didn’t lose that source of income until he started doing speaking gigs, which became a river of income.

He worked long hours. He woke up at 4 a.m., went to work, and then worked on Dilbert at night. Those of you who “don’t have time” to follow your dreams are looking for excuses. No one has time. You make it.

He never gave up. He had a career-ending issue arise with his hand. He found a solution. He also had a problem arise with his voice. He kept searching for answers until he found one.

He has a growth mindset. Adams views challenges as opportunities for growth. The very title to his book signals this.

He choose himself. Dilbert had stalled after the syndication company quit promoting it for other shiny comic strips. Rather than cry about how no one would promote him, Adams went to the Internet to promote the strip on his own. “The turning point for Dilbert came in 1993 after I started putting my e-mail address in the margins of the strip.”

He separates hate from criticism. Adams got a lot of nasty feedback. He learned to separate critics from haters to find out what his readers wanted. “They all preferred the comic strip in which Dilbert was in the office.”

He’s a driller. Remember what the wrestlers say, “Drillers are killers.”Adams wanted to charge what in his view was an obscene speaker’s fee. He practiced asking for this fee out loud by himself until he was comfortable requesting it from others.

He built his network. One person can change your life. Adams made a small fortune by asking a friend about how the speaking game works. (Books are your best friends, and Scott Adams becomes your friend in his book.)

(Inside baseball: I use a lot of the language patterns Adams uses, and thus wasn’t surprised he is a fan of Erickson hypnosis.)

Adams plainly shares my influences. I thus wasn’t surprised to see him mention hypnotist Milton Hyland Erickson. (The Persuasion Reading List by Scott Adams.) I use hypnotism in my writing and also in conversations. I recognized certain patterns of speech immediately.

Read this line from Adams’ book: “You already passed the first filter for success. By reading this book you’ve established yourself as a seeker of knowledge….Your decision to read this book is confirmation that you are a person of action who has a desire to be more effective.”

Now compare that with this paragraph from Gorilla Mindset: “You now have all of the tools you need to live your life. You understand mental strategies like self-talk, framing, mindfulness, and state. You are able to change how you think and feel, leading to improvements in your personal and professional lives. You also realize that mind and body are connected.”

  • Read more: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

UPDATE: I interviewed Scott Adams. We talked about persuasion, marketing, his book, and Donald Trump.

Scott Adams on Donald Trump, Mindset, and How to Win at Life: Part 1

Scott Adams on Trump, Mindset, and Winning at Life: Part 2

Snow Crash – Virus, Drug, or Religion?

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Cast as a cyberpunk story about a young girl caught between the mafia and a primitive version of Scientology, Snow Crash is a non-fiction introduction to memetics and cult psychology.

“This Snow Crash thing–is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

The story centers around a phenomena known as Snow Crash. As Hiro Protagonist travels between meat space and virtual reality, he sees dealers hanging out Snow Crash as if a packet of drugs. But is it a drug or a virus, and does it, as one character asks, matter?

We now know, for example, that viruses (biological or computer, and what’s the difference?) alter human behavior. The type of bacteria you have in your gut, as Dr. Rhonda Patrick explained on a Joe Rogan Podcast, can influence food cravings. Obesity may be in large part due to certain species of gut bacteria increasing your cravings for unhealthy foods. A virus inside your stomach is controlling you. (So much for human rationality!)

The dichotomy between hardware (body) and software (mind) is an illusion. What you put into your body influences your mind, and the ideas you put in your mind influence your body. If you meditate on negative thoughts, your body’s fight-or-flight response will be engaged. Cortisol levels rise. Your body changes due to thoughts in your mind.

You’ll appreciate this digression into probiotics once you’ve read Snow Crash, as the theme of the book is that ideas are a mind virus. Ideas control human behavior.

Before you shake your head and say, “Duh! I’m a veteran of the Great Meme Wars of 2016,” check out Snow Crash’s publication date – 1992. Before the world wide web, before social media, before meme became a household world, Neal Stephenson wrote the treatise on memetic warfare.

A number of factors make Snow Crash an excellent book, including his observations on social psychology and human behavior, which he makes through fictional characters.

  • “Ideology is a virus.”
  • “All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us.”
  • “We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.”

Stephenson even sneaks in some Benjamin Franklin esque homespun wisdom.

  • “If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.”
  • “When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”
  • “The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness”

(Yes, there is sword fighting in Snow Crash!)

Stephenson may be the most intelligent writer who has ever lived, and Snow Crash is certainly one of the best books ever written.

If you like fiction with complicated characters, anti-heros, and sword fights, you’ll like Snow Crash. If you enjoy studying influence and persuasion while reading about sword fights, you’ll have found your new favorite book.