Mass Influence Defined: The Shift That Took a Room From 20% to 80%
You’ve stood at the front of a room, a hangout, or a call and given people everything you had. You covered the whole opportunity, answered the objections before anyone raised a hand, and stayed late talking with the two or three who lingered. Then you watched the other twenty walk out quiet, polite, and gone for good.
That’s not a passion problem, and it’s not really about you either. It’s a scale problem. Almost everything you’ve ever learned about selling was built for one person at a time, on a call or across a table, and none of it was designed to work on a room. Dave Wood built the Mass Influence Formula to close that exact gap, after years of training rooms of network marketers on recruiting and team building and noticing that influencing one person and influencing a hundred at once are two different skills entirely.
As someone who’s tried to move a crowd instead of a single prospect, you already know the frustration of watching a room stay arms-crossed quiet no matter how good your material is. Dave learned to sell back in 2006, and for years after that he converted roughly one in five people who sat through his presentations. Then he learned one specific thing, and his conversion on every room after that jumped past 80 percent.
That’s not folklore from years back either. Describing an event from the same weekend as this training, as Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “we had about half the room get up out of their chairs and line up to buy up, to buy something and they didn’t know what it was and they didn’t know how much it costed when they lined up.” Half a room, standing in line to pay for something nobody had named yet.
Why did the same words fail on a stranger in 2006 and land on almost everyone by 2009?
A popular idea in this industry says selling comes down to relationships, that you need some kind of friendship with somebody before they’ll buy from you. Dave disagrees flatly, and his own history is the proof. He doesn’t know most of the people he’s sold to. He’s never met them and never will. What determines whether your words land isn’t how well you know someone. It’s something narrower and far more useful, and he calls it rapport.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “Rapport is responsiveness.” He goes further: “Responsiveness is people responding to you unconsciously.” Not liking you. Not knowing your name. Responding, in their body and their behavior, before their conscious mind even weighs in.
He learned this the hard way. Back in 2006 he worked from closing scripts, calling cold prospects who’d never seen anything about his business and didn’t know who he was. He read the script word for word and people wouldn’t join, and for a long time he assumed the problem was the script, that he was saying something wrong. By 2009 he was recruiting two to eight people a day by phone, and something like 98 out of every 100 joined while he was still on the call. He’d close one prospect, keep them on the line, dial the next with the first one listening silently, close that one too, then introduce the two as brand-new teammates. As Dave describes the gap between those two versions of himself, “if you transcripted all those conversations, they’re just normal, normal scripts and normal ways of communicating. But the difference was, is in 2009, I had rapport.”
Same words, more or less. The only thing that changed was whether the person on the other end already had responsiveness toward him, through his list, his content, his reputation, before he ever picked up the phone. Rapport isn’t a feeling you build with a handshake. It’s something you can build with a stranger who’s never met you, and once you know what you’re actually looking for, you stop guessing whether a room is going to buy and start watching for the signs that tell you before it does.
What happened when Dave sold something nobody understood for eight million dollars?
In 2011, right around when he launched this company, Dave ran an experiment he says he’d never repeat today, mostly for compliance reasons. He stood in front of 250 people in an Orlando ballroom with one goal: sell more than half the room something in under an hour, without ever telling them what it was, what it cost, or why they’d want it.
He walked out wearing a giant Mickey Mouse glove and no shoes, holding an oversized novelty check. His team passed out order forms with a headline in big red letters: only $8 million. Below it sat a single checkbox. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, the form read, “yes, David, give me the secret of happiness for a one-time payment of only $8 million.” An asterisk at the bottom warned there were no refunds.
The room laughed. He kept talking anyway, telling stories, building the case for a product he never once described. Twenty or thirty minutes in, he announced a reduction to four million. People laughed harder, certain it was a bit. Then two million. Then one hundred thousand, and the laughter started thinning, because the number had crossed into territory people could almost picture affording. That’s when he brought up people he’d genuinely helped earn their first real commissions in a previous business, and had them tell the room their own stories. Between each one, the price dropped again. By the time he hit $497 with a three-minute clock counting down to $47, the room wasn’t laughing anymore.
People were literally coming up on the stage throwing money at me and they had no idea what they were buying at all.
Nobody in that room was hypnotized or tricked into anything they didn’t already want. What moved them was a specific, repeatable stack, worth naming piece by piece:
- Genuine credibility, built before he ever opened his mouth that day.
- Real social proof, delivered live, by people the room could see and question.
- A belief and expectation loop, where the story he told became more real to people the longer he told it, whether or not they’d ever seen the product.
- A closing structure with a real, ticking deadline, not a vague sense of urgency.
Strip any one out and the room stays seated. Stack all four and, as Dave found out, people will fight over chairs to hand you cash for something you never described.
Is this just manipulation with better production value?
Here’s the objection this training answers before you can raise it. If belief and expectation can move a room that hard, doesn’t that mean you can talk anyone into anything? Dave’s answer is no, and he’s specific about why. As he puts it, “You can never, ever, ever get somebody to do something they don’t want to do.” Not through a script. Not through rapport. Only through physical force, which obviously isn’t what any of this is about.
His proof comes from watching stage hypnosis, most of which he calls cheap trickery, except for one show in St. Pete, Florida, where a man on stage was clearly in a real, deep trance, dancing and clowning exactly as instructed. Then the hypnotist told him to turn to a woman on stage and kiss her like she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The man started to turn, then snapped fully out of the trance, pointed at the hypnotist, said no, and sat back down. Dave talked to him afterward: married, a committed Christian, his own daughter in the audience. As Dave explains it, “the hypnotist asked him to do something that’s against his values. What happens? His unconscious mind boots you out.”
That’s the ceiling on all of this. You can build rapport with a stranger. You can construct belief and expectation that makes a story feel more real the longer you tell it. None of it will move someone past what they actually want or value. It only works on people who were already willing, and it only clears the hesitation standing between that willingness and a decision.
Why doesn’t any of this work the same way one person at a time?
Here’s the part that separates this training from everything Dave taught before it. Sponsoring one prospect on a call and moving half a room at once aren’t the same skill scaled up. They run on the same underlying principles, rapport, responsiveness, belief and expectation, but the mechanics of applying them to fifty strangers instead of one person are different enough to deserve their own training, separate from what he taught on recruiting and team building before it.
And even Dave, running these principles as well as almost anyone in the industry, is blunt about the ceiling. As he puts it, “I only, like I market on the internet, I only sponsor 15% of my list or something like that. That’s about all I do.” An unusually high number for this business, and still nowhere near everyone. Most people who see his material don’t join, and some never will, no matter what he says. The goal was never 100 percent. It was moving the number that matters, the size of the yes, from a sliver of the room to the majority of it, exactly the jump he made once he understood what was really happening in that Orlando ballroom and on those 2009 phone calls.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: the specific beliefs about people that make this approach work, how language shapes unconscious responses in a listener, how to spot responsiveness happening in real time, and how Dave ties it all back into a model for building a team that runs into the hundreds of thousands. The entire course, including this lesson and everything built on top of it, is available for $99 through the Mass Influence Formula course.
Get the course, watch how the rest of the room gets built, and start paying attention to responsiveness instead of applause.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Are you guys ready? Are you guys ready? Are you guys ready? One, two, three, let's get them out here, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome this morning Mr. Dave Wood. All right, one, two, three. All right, hey guys, welcome. Who's excited today? Now who's a little tired? You know, I have this never-ending ability to just talk all night. Last night I was actually, you know, I started talking and then I ended, I think, an hour later than I originally planned on ending. And then I met with my team who are now staying alive from caffeine, right? You know, so everybody in the room today is special, and here's why. Now some of you guys have been at the last couple of trainings that I've done. You were at the Seattle training. Who in here was actually in that training I did in Seattle? Raise your hand. Okay, we got a couple of people in here who are actually in that training. We'll give them a hand, come on. All right, I did a training in Seattle and then I did a training in New Orleans. Who was there? All right, they're at least the best trainings that I've ever done, and the reason is because I put a lot more thought into them and I've got a lot more experience than I used to have on how to do this stuff. Now just as a quick recap, because it's leading into what we're covering today, in Seattle I'm actually going to review some of this stuff, but it's going to be put into a different context. In Seattle I trained on how to become a top producer, which I kind of define as the ability to recruit and sell, right? Because if you're building a business here, you're either going to be selling and recruiting or not making any money at all, right? And that's kind of the rule. Right, some people they get in and they say teach me the secret, and in the process of that I want to avoid that: selling and recruiting. But unfortunately, you don't make any money in any company ever without selling and recruiting, unless it's a Ponzi scheme, in which case you only make money until it kind of implodes on itself, because that's what we make money for, selling products, right? Does that make sense to everybody?
So then I came back in New Orleans and I talked about the art of team building, all right, which specifically is a unique skill set and not very many people know how to do it that well. Now we've got some great team builders in the room, you know, Tracy Walker, Tony Rush, Aaron Rashkin. We've also got some people that recruit a lot and suck at building teams, right? And then they just have to keep recruiting and recruiting and recruiting and joining new things and joining new things and joining new things because nobody ever sticks around, right? And that training, I've had feedback from like a zillion people that was like the best training they've ever been to, right?
And those of you who were there, just scream if you think so. So today is a little bit different. Today is kind of tying all that stuff together. So I'm gonna be going back through some of that stuff but with new principles. Now today is specifically on influence, right?
Influencing people to do things. Specifically though, it's on mass influence, which is a little bit different, right? It's a little bit different. Now a lot of the stuff that I've been teaching today, I've taught in parts in different places, and a whole bunch of it I've at least never taught anywhere, either because I've never taken the time or I've never thought it through, right?
But today, as you're listening to this training, you're gonna be learning things that work unbelievably well for influencing large groups of people, unbelievably well. In fact, you'll be amazed at what can happen from it. You know, when I first started learning some of these concepts, first of all, I learned to sell back in 2006. And some of the things that I'm gonna teach today, I learned back in 2006, and one of the things I learned, I was getting about 20% of the room where I was doing presentations to join my business, right? Which isn't really that bad.
It's not really that great either though. You have to have a lot of people to make a little bit of money, especially if you're not earning a lot of commissions from what you sell. But, right, I learned one of the things I'm gonna teach today, and I went from getting 20% of the room to over 80% in every meeting that I ever did after that. Right?
Just one, right? Just like last night, now some of you don't really realize what happened last night, who was at this event. But what happened was we had about half the room get up out of their chairs and line up to buy something, and they didn't know what it was and they didn't know how much it cost when they lined up. Right? How many in here realized that happened last night?
And how many of you just realized it when I said it, right? We had half the room get up and line up to buy something before they knew what it was and before they knew how much it cost. It didn't matter. Now here's the interesting thing.
I actually, back in 2011, when I originally launched this company, I wanted to do an experiment. Now I wouldn't do this again, mostly for compliance's sake, right? But I wanted to do an experiment and I wanted to just see how well this stuff worked. So I got in front of a room in Orlando, and there's about 250 people in the room. And my goal was, in an hour, to sell a product where somebody didn't know what it was, didn't know what they were buying, didn't really know why they were buying it, and to sell more than half the room, and to just see if I could get people to buy it because it only cost a certain price.
Right? So I started talking and I started telling stories. Right? And in an hour, I went from people laughing and thinking I was just joking, to people sweating because they didn't think they could afford it, to people thinking maybe I can afford it if I put it on two credit cards. Right?
To, by the end of the presentation, like half the room got up and literally people were throwing money at me on the stage for something that I never described. Right? How many of you were there? There's a few of you that were there. Right?
You remember that, Chris? Most crazy thing you've ever seen in your life, isn't it? Right? People were literally coming up on the stage throwing money at me and they had no idea what they were buying at all. Right?
And I literally just did it because I thought it was funny. I just wanted to see. You know, because people get up there and they're like, you know, this is really worth $20,000 but only today, you know? And so I went up there and I passed an order form out.
Some of you were there. And at the top of the order form it said, only $8 million, in big red letters. Right? And then I had a checkbox and it said, yes David, give me the secret of happiness for a one-time payment of only $8 million. Right?
And then you had an order form to put your credit card information, and I had an asterisk at the bottom that said, no refunds. So what I did was I got up there and I said, just so everybody knows in the room, right, so everybody knows, I'm selling something, so pull your credit card out and set it on the table, and I need my helpers, could you just pass out order forms to everybody and I'll just kind of wait while they do it. And I had this big old check that I'd gotten from this company, and I was just standing there, and we were in Orlando, so I had a big old Mickey Mouse glove on and I had no shoes. And I was standing there just like this, waiting as people got the order forms.
And as people got the order forms, they just started bursting into laughter. Right? They totally didn't think I was serious. So I started talking and I started telling stories, and then like 20 or 30 minutes later I said, but only today I'm going to reduce the price, because I think that there's only a few in here that could afford eight million. So today, and today only, I'll reduce it to four.
So go ahead and cross off that eight million and reduce it to four. Right? And some people started laughing and stuff like that because they thought I was totally joking. And then a few minutes later I said, go ahead and cross off the four million, and just, right, just today, today only, I will give you the secret of happiness for only two million dollars.
Right? And then I kind of kept telling stories and said, you know, here's some more things that I'm doing. And then like 10 minutes later I'm like, but only today, today only, I'll reduce it to only a million dollars. Now at that point it was just still ridiculous, but people were actually getting nervous because they couldn't afford it.
Right? And the funny thing is that I never really described what I was selling at all. It didn't matter. Right? What matters is it was a funny presentation.
I had a lot of credibility. I had good social proof, and I kept reducing the price. Right? So in any case, then I get down to, I think it was like around the time I had $100,000, when people were starting to get real nervous, real nervous in the room. Right?
And then I had the testimonials come up. Right? And Chris was one of them. Rob Four was one of them, because there's a room that was actually about half this size. But about a third of the room, I had helped make more money.
Right? This was before Empower Network started. I'd helped them in another network marketing business. I'd helped them get their first check online. You know what I mean?
And they were in the room, and I had all those people come up and tell their stories. And between each one of them I reduced the price again. Right? Never really describing what people were buying. I just wanted to see if it would work.
And then, right, I got down to the last testimonial. I said, you know, the price is going to be $497. Right? And I said, but the clock has three minutes left. So if you get me your order form before that clock hits zero, it's only $47.
But if the clock hits zero and you give it to me after that, it's going to be $497. You got three minutes. And literally people were clawing over the chairs. Right? I had people throwing cash at me in a complete frenzy.
And a couple of my friends who actually make a lot of money in different things, they came up to me after that, and they were like, what did I just buy? I was like, I can't believe that worked. I can't believe that worked. But people are really predictable in why they do things.
I'm really predictable in why I do things. Right? And so are you. And that's the thing that you've got to understand. If you understand that people do things for certain reasons, it's really easy to create different kinds of results.
Right? It's easy to influence people. It's easy to get people to make decisions. Right? Now, everything that I'm going to teach today is going to operate in a series of concepts that are important, and some of them are a bit weird.
Right? Some of them are a bit weird, right? Number one thing that's important to understand, especially when we're talking about influencing people, which I'm going to define in a moment, right, is that all of this stuff works in the presence of rapport. None of it works without it.
Right? And what's rapport? See, sometimes people, I hear this in network marketing all the time. People are like, you know, relationships are the key to selling.
No, they're not. You know what I mean? Who said that? Right? Like, I need to have a friendship with somebody to sell them something.
I don't know most of the people that I sell to. I've never met them. Right? Most of the people I've sold stuff to, I'll never meet. Right?
What rapport is, is different. Rapport is responsiveness. Right?
And what does responsiveness mean? Responsiveness is people responding to you unconsciously. Right? Now I'm gonna actually tell you today how to look for unconscious responsiveness. Right?
Because it's not something that you're used to looking for, if what you learned is what most people learn in school, right? But I'm gonna teach you how to look for unconscious responsiveness.
And if you know what you're looking at and you know how to look for it, you can learn how to create it. So all of this stuff that I'm gonna describe works in the presence of rapport. In fact, there's a famous guy and he said that anything is possible in the presence of rapport, right? How many people in here have seen me do abnormal things influencing people? You know, like yesterday.
We got the people, you know, everybody stood up and they went back and they were ordering the videos. Now it was actually a good thing that we were selling, but people got up to order before they really knew what I was selling or what it cost or what the bonuses were or anything. It didn't matter, right? They were standing in line, right? Because of running through the formulas that I'm gonna describe today, right?
So how did I do that, and how do you create responsiveness like that? Well, I'm gonna talk about it today. But the first thing that I'm gonna tell you is that all of this works with responsiveness. None of it works without it. Nothing works without it, right?
If you go try to use some sort of ninja closing tactic on somebody and you have no rapport with them, it never works, ever. I used to be really perplexed by this years and years and years ago, because I had no real connection with people. I had no real rapport with people, right? And I was reading these closing scripts that I'd gotten from a training. And I would read the scripts and people wouldn't join.
How many of you have experienced something like that, right? And I used to wonder, what am I doing wrong in the script? Right, like I'm saying a word wrong, or I'm saying them out of order, or maybe if I learned the magical way to say it, it will work all of a sudden, right? But what I learned after a while is I learned that the script doesn't really matter that much. Because later in my life, when I started recruiting people, I was recruiting a lot.
2009, I was bringing in two to eight people every single day. And I was actually recruiting on the phone back then. And I was recruiting everyone I talked to, with very few exceptions. It was like 98 out of 100 people that I talked to were joining while I was on the phone with them, right? Some of you actually in the room, I recruited you back in 2009 or 2010.
I used to get on the phone with a person, close them, and then they'd ask me, what do I do next? And I said, just stay on the phone and I'll show you. And then I would dial in and I would close another person with this person silent on the phone. And they would hear me close the second person. And then I would introduce them to each other and say, hey Billy, I just got Fred started.
And by the way, Billy, I just put Fred in your downline. Right? And he'd be like, really? And I'd say, yeah. And then I'd get Fred on the phone and I'd say, all right, Fred, and Fred would say, well, what do I do?
How do I get started? And I'd say, well, just wait on the phone, call another appointment, I'd close that person. Right?
And I used to do that and keep four people, five people on the phone, all listening to me recruit the next person, getting literally 100% of the people to say yes while I'm on the phone with them. Right? Now, if you transcripted all those conversations, they're just normal scripts and normal ways of communicating. But the difference was, is in 2009 I had rapport and responsiveness with the people I was connected with. I had rapport and responsiveness with my list.
And when I was trying that stuff in 2006, I was calling cold people that had never looked at any information, that didn't know who I was. Right? And therefore they didn't listen to me. Does that make sense to everybody in the room? Right?
So the responsiveness is the key to influence. Here's the next thing that's gonna control all of this. And that's the placebo effect. Right? Now I'm going to talk about some weird stuff here for a second.
And to really do this, I want to tell you a story. Right? And this is a story, actually, that comes from hypnosis. But it's a really useful analogy for what's possible. I'm not going to be teaching hypnosis today.
This is just a story from that. Right? Who here knows who Mesmer was? Anybody know? Right?
Well, Mesmer is a really fascinating historical character. And he's kind of known as one of the people that hypnosis sprang from. Right? But he lived in Europe. And at the time, there was a medical practice called bloodletting.
Right? Anybody here know what bloodletting is? Right? It was like this old, archaic thing, where it's like, you get sick, so we need to let your blood out. You know?
Because it must be poisoned. Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? There's some really other weird medical practices back in the day too. So anyways, there's this guy named Mesmer. Right?
And he does this. He does bloodletting for people to heal them. Right? So in any case, one day he's doing bloodletting, and he sees this priest. Right?
I think it's a Catholic priest. And this guy does bloodletting too. But this Catholic priest would do the bloodletting, let blood out of the patient, and let them bleed out until their disease was out, or whatever. But then this guy would look at his patient, and he would say, I have this cross in my hand. And this cross has been blessed by the Lord, and, I don't know where people come up with stuff like that.
But that's what he said. And he said, this cross has been magnetized, and when I wave it over where you're bleeding, the bleeding will stop. Do you believe? And the person would say, yeah. And then he'd go like this, and the bleeding would stop.
Right? And Mesmer kind of looked at that, and he said, how did you do that? Because you have all these people, of course, that bleed to death, because we're letting blood out of people to heal them. Sounds fun.
Right? And he was like, look at that. And he said, what are you doing? And the guy does it again, and he gets a patient, lets their blood out, and then he says, I have a cross in my hand, and I'm going to wave it over your wound. And when I wave it over your wound, your bleeding will stop.
And they go like this. Right? And the bleeding stops. Now that sounds super weird, but the unconscious mind can control bleeding. It can't, right?
There's a bunch of studies done on this. So in any case, you know, he does this multiple times, and Mesmer says, what are you doing? Right? And the priest says, well, I have this cross that's blessed.
And Mesmer says, can I have one? Right? And the guy said, yeah, sure. Right? And gives him a blessed cross or whatever.
I don't know how that works. Right? So anyway, he's probably prayed over it or something like that. So then Mesmer goes out with his clients and his customers, and he says, you know, lets their blood out. And then he says, I have this cross, and it's been blessed by a priest.
And when I wave it over your wound, your bleeding is going to stop, because this cross is magnetized. Right? Now that would probably not work on modern Americans very well. Right?
A couple hundred years ago it was a little bit different. Other countries, actually, this would be different too. So in any case, this starts working, and he's just amazed by it. Right? He's amazed by what's happening, and people's bleeding will stop and things like that.
Actually, in deep trance, you can cut people in two places and control where the blood comes out from their body, because your unconscious mind can't control your bleeding. Right? So in any case, he keeps doing this. But one day he's doing bloodletting, and he forgets his cross.
Right? Which presents a problem. So he's reaching in his pocket, and he's like, shit. Right? But he has keys in his pocket.
And of course he thinks, well, the cross was touching the keys, and therefore the keys are magnetized. Right? So then after that, he's like, oh, I'm going to die.
Right? So then after that, he looks at the person. Right?
And he says, I have these keys that have been in my pocket. And these have been resting against a cross that's been blessed by a priest and magnetized. And this has this magical characteristic, that when I wave it over your wound your bleeding will stop. Do you believe? Yeah.
Bleeding stops. Right? He's like, that worked. It's amazing. Right?
Well, time goes by, you know what I mean? And some of you guys totally don't believe this story, and that's fine, you don't have to. Right?
I'll tell you some more that you'll have to believe by the end of the day. Right? But in any case, then after that, one day he forgets both. So now he doesn't have keys, he doesn't have his cross.
And he's like, shit. Right? So what does he do? Of course he does what all these guys do. He made up a story.
Right? So here's what he does. He does this leap in logic. And he says, wait a second, I've been touching this cross every day.
You know what I mean? My hand is magnetized. Right? So he goes, you know, my hand has had the privilege of touching this cross that's been blessed by a priest. Right?
And this cross has actually stopped the bleeding of thousands of patients. And I've been touching it every day. And my hand is blessed because of that. And when I wave my hand over your wound, your bleeding will stop.
Right? Their bleeding stops. Like that. Right? And then he goes, you're kidding me.
Right? Now this is where a person usually starts a religion. But, you know, it's really easy to make a leap all of a sudden when weird stuff's happening. You know what I'm saying? And so where does he go?
Where does he go next after that? Right? Really interesting leap in logic. He starts just using his hand. Right?
And then he tries to come up with a way to explain what he's doing. And he calls this force he has animal magnetism. Right? If any of you have ever heard that term, animal magnetism, that's where it comes from, is Mesmer. Right?
Animal magnetism. So in any case, this is the way he describes animal magnetism, which I think is the most hilarious thing ever. But, you know, all organisms in the world are blessed with a certain amount of animal magnetism. And he says, and I, Mesmer, have more animal magnetism than them all. Right?
But what's really happening there? What's happening is he's creating, essentially, a placebo. So here's what happened, is he got challenged, actually, by a scientific body in Europe. And they said, that's bullshit. Right?
You are not healing people with animal magnetism, this is a force we can't track. Right? Sounds familiar. Right?
So they say, and he says, fine, test me. Because he's having people at this point, you know, he has a bunch of girls come over and he touches a hot tub and they just sit in it and they're healed. But they have to take their clothes off, of course. Right? So, he's built this whole life around this.
So he's like, you can test anything you want to test. You know, I have more animal magnetism than anybody in the world. Right? So in any case, here's what they have him do. Right?
They have him go into a forest and magnetize certain trees in the forest. Right? And the goal was he was going to invite a bunch of sick patients, right, to go into the forest and touch trees. And only the ones that would touch the trees that he magnetized would be healed. Right?
And he was like, easy. Right? Easy peasy. In fact, the other day I saw this YouTube video. There's this, like, martial arts master.
You know what I mean? Paul Gardner will laugh at this one. And he's, he was like a chi master. He could knock you out with his chi. Right?
And you look at his students, and this guy is, and his students are, like, flying and doing flips and getting knocked out. You know what I mean? And it looks like he's got superpowers. I mean, it looks like this guy's got Jedi powers. Right?
So in any case, you know what I mean? So he puts this challenge out. Anybody who wants to come and fight me, come fight me. Right? Come fight me.
Right? So some MMA guy sees this bullshit. Right? And he goes into his student. Now he's not under the trance.
You know what I'm saying? He doesn't believe he could be knocked out by this guy's chi. You know? So this guy goes in. This is on YouTube.
You should look this up. It's a really funny video, because this guy is totally convinced that he could knock people out with his mind. Right? And this MMA guy goes up to him, and he just goes like this. And the guy goes like this, and he starts going like that.
And the guy just pounded him in the face. You know what I mean? And there's another one, and there's this other guy who thinks he could knock people out with his mind. Right? And this skeptic goes in there, and he just stands there.
And this guy's like this. And, of course, he doesn't get knocked out. You know what I'm saying? And then this video's funny too.
I've got to find this thing. But then after this, it was like ten minutes. Right? Ten minutes. And this guy is just making up explanations for why the guy didn't get knocked out.
And it's the most ridiculous things ever. He's like, actually, this guy probably just knows the secret. Actually, if you just lift one of your toes off the ground, like your big toe on your right foot, it disconnects your magnetism from the earth, and I can't knock you out. So anyways, Mesmer, he's in this forest. Right?
And he touches these trees. And then they get all these people with these random sicknesses that can be removed from placebo effects. And he sends them into the forest to go touch the tree. And he says, when you go into the forest, I have magnetized certain trees. And as long as you touch one of them, you'll be healed.
Right? So they walk into the forest, and a bunch of them get healed. Right? But they get healed touching any random old tree. Right?
So the scientific body just ridiculed him and laughed him out of town. But Benjamin Franklin was alive then, and he had a different response to it. It was a really interesting response. He said, right, isn't it interesting the effect that belief and expectation have on the body and mind? Right?
Because a lot of times, you know, science, we do double blind controlled studies, you have a placebo and you have something real, and you don't tell people what's what. And a lot of times the placebos work almost as good as real drugs that are sold in the market. In fact, for antidepressants, right, placebos work like 80 or 90% as well as like Prozac. Right?
A sugar pill. Because if somebody credible gives something to somebody and tells them it will work, it works unbelievably predictably. Right? So a lot of the concepts work under that. And I'm going to talk about belief and expectation and fitting this all into a model of how you can create things, kind of as we go through the day.
But they work under the effect of placebo. They work under the effect of rapport. And here's the next thing that's kind of a weird concept that all of this stuff sort of operates in. And I call this constructs, okay?
And the reason I call it that is because I like the matrix. Right? And if you guys have seen the Matrix, you know, they've got this Neo, which I think is a hilarious name. He gets pulled out of the matrix. And I think a bunch of marketers, they like the word the matrix.
They like that movie, because they're like, the government's a matrix, you know, and they're watching you. You know? We got a bunch of paranoid people. But also a bunch of people, a bunch of rebels.
And rebels tend to like that movie. But in any case, so he gets unplugged from the matrix. Right? He gets unplugged from it. And then he's in this world where he gets exposed to this whole world that he didn't know existed.
Right? And then Morpheus takes him into this white room. You guys remember that? Right? And Neo says, what's this?
And he's looking around. It's this white room with no walls or anything, and no floors, just this white space. And Morpheus says, this is the construct.
Right? This is the construct. This is where we can create anything that we want to create. Right? And what we're doing all the time when we're communicating is we're communicating within some kind of belief construct that may or may not be true.
It might be true, and it might not be. But most people's beliefs are probably not true. There probably aren't. Right?
And if you question that, just kind of look around the room and realize every single person in the room believes different things than you believe. Right? And if we're going to operate on a right-wrong principle, probably not all of you are right about everything. But also, there's a really interesting effect when you're communicating with people, and when you're talking to people, that what you describe to people tends to seem to be true. Right?
And that's because your subconscious mind tends to start happening as you're describing it. Right? Let's take an example from the mind. Right? If you look at the conscious and the unconscious minds.
Right? Which is a relatively newer concept, isn't it? But if I start talking about your unconscious mind and what your unconscious mind does, I start creating it by talking about it. Let me give you an example. Let me give you an example of that.
As you're listening to me speak and you're paying attention to the sound of my voice, your attention can be directed to the bottoms of your feet. You can't even control your response to that, can you? Try to stop it. Right?
As I'm describing the effect the unconscious mind has, the effect that I'm describing is created in your perception. And the reason for that is because your unconscious mind controls the direction of your perception. Does that make sense to everybody in the room? At least a little bit. Right?
These are kind of like bases that we're going to operate off of. All right? Number one, number one, all influence principles work when you have rapport. None of them work when you don't have rapport. Right?
Number two, number two, almost everything you ever do when you're trying to do something, it doesn't work. Right? Everything you ever do when you're trying to get people to do things will only work with belief and expectation constructed properly. Number three, right, most of the principles that we're going to be operating in aren't a perfect description of what's going on in the world. And there's a reason for that.
Human beings are really unique organisms. Now I talk about this a lot, but I want to talk about it again within this context. Here's why we're unique as human beings. Right? We have five senses.
We take in a lot of information from our surroundings. A lot. There's a lot going on right now in this room. There's noises going on in the room that you're not hearing. You can actually hear breathing and some of the heartbeats around you if you pay attention.
However, you're not paying attention to them, are you? Right? You're looking at me and you're listening to me, and everything else fades out of the background until I mention it, and then your eyes start just looking around. Right? You're breathing.
Well, you're feeling things through all of the parts of your body, but your attention isn't on everything. Your attention is only in parts of it. But here's the thing that I want you to understand about your body and mind, is that your nervous system takes in a lot of information. And I'm not going to go through the whole spiel on this right now, because I've talked about this so much. Your nervous system takes in millions of bits of information, and it's kind of like a funnel.
Right? And you only consciously perceive a very small amount of things that you're paying attention to. And the ratio is just ridiculous. We're talking, you're consciously paying attention to four to seven plus or minus two chunks. You're taking in two million chunks of information at the same time.
Right? That's a lot of... There we go, I actually wrote the right amount of zeros. Right?
That's a lot of information you're taking in that you pay no attention to whatsoever. And whatever you're not paying attention to is being run completely unconsciously. And here's another interesting thing about your mind, is that pretty much all of your behavior is unconscious. I'm going to talk about this here through the day. Behavior is unconscious.
Right? It is. Most behavior is unconscious. And why is it like that? I actually think all behavior is unconscious.
Because studies on the mind have shown that even when you make a decision about something and you think you make it consciously, the decision was actually made several hundred milliseconds before you became aware that you made a decision. In other words, when you're making a decision about something, you're actually making it before you're aware you even made it. And therefore, almost all of the behavior you generate and create, even things you think you're in control of, are first generated unconsciously, then you become aware of them, and then you do them. And if you want to consciously gain control of your behavior, you have to constantly consciously challenge what you're doing.
Right? Because most people's unconscious minds just kind of run literally their entire life. That's one of the reasons why personal development is so important for people, because if their unconscious mind is all screwed up, they're really screwed up, and they don't know why, they feel kind of out of control. Sometimes people feel like success is out of control. Right?
Does that make sense to everybody in the room? Here's the next really important thing to understand, and then I'm going to get into kind of a conceptual framework for a lot of cool stuff. One thing to understand is you can't really manipulate people. You can try, but really you can't. Right?
Sometimes people are looking for something that doesn't exist. And sometimes people get the ideas wrong when they listen to something like this. It's like, I'm learning these principles, and you're talking about placebos and all this stuff, so you're talking about manipulating people. No, you actually can't. And people who try to manipulate people generally are perceived as slimy assholes.
Right? Isn't that the truth? Right? Somebody tries to convince you to do something that you don't want to do. How do you respond?
You lose rapport instantly. If you're responding to somebody and then they try to control you, how do you respond back? You fall out of rapport with them instantly. Right? You can't really control people.
And here's a really important thing. You can never, ever, ever get somebody to do something they don't want to do. You can't. Right? If they don't want to do something, unless you're forcing them through physical force, you can't make somebody do something.
So don't try. Right? Knowing that should free you a little bit. Right? I could not get you to join a business that you didn't want to join by seeing it.
Couldn't do it. Can't get you to do network marketing if you don't want to do it. If you want to quit, can't stop you. Can't. Right?
Best example I've got of this actually comes from watching people do stage hypnosis, which most of the time are awful, like trickery shows. Right? But it's really fascinating to watch. I went to one actually out in St. Pete's, Florida.
And this guy was really good. He had these people come up on stage. Right? And people see that and sometimes they think it's fake. And they're like, oh, I would never do that.
Right? And you're right, you probably wouldn't. But you also wouldn't volunteer because you're not an exhibitionist, and you don't want to make out with random strangers in front of rooms of people.
Right? When a stage hypnotist gets up and they say, right, I need some volunteers, who goes up for that? Exhibitionists only. Right?
Because people who don't want to go up don't go up. Right? But there's this guy. And this guy is displaying deep trance phenomenon. Now I know what deep trance phenomenon look like.
Right? But this guy is displaying deep trance phenomenon. And I could tell by the expressions on his face, and by how he's responding, that he's displaying real trance phenomenon.
He's in deep hypnosis, this guy. Right? And this guy is up here. And he's having him do all of this crazy stuff on the stage.
Right? This guy is like dancing. He's doing all this stuff. You know, he's just acting like an idiot. Right?
And it's kind of funny. But it's actually kind of creepy too, truthfully. In any case, but I'm watching. But then something really interesting happened.
There's another girl. And she was also displaying deep trance phenomenon. And he told the guy, I want you to turn to that girl and start making out with her like she's the most beautiful woman you've ever seen. Now some of you have seen these adult hypnosis shows and stuff like that. Right?
This guy goes like this. Starts turning. And then completely snapped out of his trance. Looked at the hypnotist. Pointed his finger.
And said, no. Got up. Sat down. Right? That was pretty weird, actually.
And it was kind of a disruption in the show. I'll give the guy a minute to kind of recover from that, because I think that he was really surprised by it too. But what had actually just happened there? I actually went and talked to this guy after the show.
And I was like, dude, what happened? First of all, he said he wasn't in a trance. It's total bullshit. Right? Completely full of it.
But here's what actually happened. Right? Is the guy is Christian. Right? Married.
And his daughter is in the room. Right? So the hypnotist asked him to do something that's against his values. What happens? His unconscious mind boots you out.
Right? So you can't really manipulate people ever. You can only get people to do things they want to do. You can help them do things they want to do. Right?
You can help people make decisions they want to do. Like a sales presentation. A sales presentation can be really good. And you can get massively bigger ratios than you get when you're presenting everything by using these concepts. Right?
Way bigger. But people who don't want to come to the presentation don't even show up for it. Right? And people that don't want to buy, don't buy, no matter what you do or say.
And therefore, if you're trying to get people to do things and you're not doing a really great job, you either need better rapport with people or you need to talk to more people or different people. Does that make sense? Because even with me, I'm really good at all this stuff. Right? But I only, like, I market on the internet, I only sponsor 15% of my list or something like that.
That's about all I do. 15, 20%. Which is super abnormal. And I've got a fairly small list. It's abnormal numbers.
But that means there's 80 to 90% that I don't sponsor. 80 to 90% who drop off my list. A certain percent who probably hate my guts. Right? Another percent that won't listen to me for anything, no matter what I say.
Does that make sense to everybody in here? All right. So that's a framework. So here's kind of what I'm going to be covering today. Number one, I'm going to be covering some useful things to believe about people that, for me, help me influence people.
Right? I'm going to talk about some things. And then I'm going to talk about how to use language to affect people's unconscious responses. I'm going to talk about how to do that.
And I'm going to talk about unconscious responses. What they are. How to notice them. And I'm going to give you some examples of them in the room. Right?
And then I'm going to fit that back into the framework of all of the things that we do while building businesses. I'm going to fit it back into the sales framework I laid out in Seattle. And I'm going to kind of go over that. But also I'm going to show you how to fit this stuff within that.
Right? But then I'm going to show you at the end of today how to kind of fit all the things I've been teaching over the last few events together into a model where you can build teams that expand into hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. Okay? And all of this stuff works because I know it works, because I've been doing it for a long time. And I keep getting better at it.
And the better I get at it, the better it works, folks. Obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible.
Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document. If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.
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