Ask Kevin Hogan Anything
July 2024
Q. Dr. Hogan, How long does it really take for a person to change? What do you see when change is present?
Q.Dr. Hogan, You always say to change your environment and the people in it. This stress me out. You told us you spent a lot time in Poland and Bulgaria, you’ve lived there. What changes good or bad will you tell us about? What was it like for you to be the person who was new to the environment, especially in Bulgaria where you didn’t have the support you had in Poland?
Q. Dr. Hogan, in the webinar in April ’24, you mention that your rudeness (being a jerk) could cause another to treat you so badly they might just kill you. Were you exaggerating to make a point?
Q. Kev, People hate their lives or a lot of different parts of their lives. For people who look at today and don’t want to be stuck there forever what should they do?
Q. “Kev, I read an article that said, a lot of people don’t have a voice in their mind, like internal dialogue. I thought everyone did. What’s up?”
Q. “Kev, what’s going to be new in the Persuasion Legend Course?”
Q. “Dr. Hogan when will people be able to get into Inner Circle again?“
Q.”Hey Kev, what’s going to happen to the markets, bitcoin and gold the rest of this year?”
Q. “Dr. Hogan, will you have an NFL Contest this year in Coffee?”
Q. “Kev, I saw you on Leak Project the other day, it seems like you talk more about ancient history and psychology than persuasion and influence the last year. Anything we should know about?”
Q. Kev, I was in the audience and you said, “watch your partners Facebook feed. When your face disappears so does your partner.” I didn’t really understand what you meant. A lot of people looked very surprised but, it could be that my English is no good
Q. Kevin, you often say and write “effective in business, effective in relationships.” (or vice versa) How do I apply attraction in business, time management in relationships, and in general your work across the boards? What are the exceptions to “it works in business and personal relationships.”
Q. “Dr. Hogan, you have mentioned the corruption in the American post grad system, especially when it comes to “new research” yet you yourself use new research in your work. How do you know what is real and what is not? Follow up, what’s your opinion about whether people should go to college and how people are awarded grades in high school as well as at college? What SHOULD kids be taught in school?”
Kev, People hate their lives or a lot of different parts of their lives. For people who look at today and don’t want to be stuck there forever what should they do?
It’s often good to hire a consultant, someone who gets paid to cause you to do behaviors either through scheduling your world,giving you specific actions to take (and that means you know factually this person has a track record), have ONE FRIEND who understands your challenges, your past, your efforts, your weaknesses and strengths, and work with this person to help you leverage the right tools. Make sure you ask people to help you with their areas of expertise.
(Don’t ask me about how to fix a car.)
Ask people to help you make those changes and then recognize that things will take time so you want to record what you are DOING and then MEASURE the results. Do not expect today’s actions to pay off today or even next week. It takes time to have a baby. It often takes almost no time to make one.
Don’t simply piss and moan about unfair something is. Nothing in life is fair. Not taxes, not the government, not the law, not how people treat you when you don’t deserve it. It’s there. Live with it until you break free and you will break free as you break the chains which will take work. Do it UNTIL.
Get help. One person to begin with.
How long does it really take for a person to change? What do you see when change is present?
When change is present, real change you see irritated friends and families because change doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens in the context of friends and families who are not changing at the rate you are. So people are going to be upset with you and you might be surprised they don’t like the changes as much as you think they will. You were hoping they’d be proud and in the change process they probably won’t be.
You will feel stressed in change.
Example: You have a 9 – 5 job. You want to be an entrepreneur. That business with a great project and plan TODAY will take 9 – 12 months to begin to see fruit if you put in 1000 hours this year. That’s on top of your 9 – 5 and you do not want to leave your 9 -5 until you are stable in your 1000 hour (this year) project which will ideally become a long term project so you can leave 9 – 5. Other life changes are similar.
Relationships can end today but the myriad of interconnections between you and that person, friends, family, no one has the rules to make that happen so there will be lots of bumps. Big bumps.
Most things take longer than people are hoping. Get a great consultant it will happen faster. But always be real. Quality time in = Quality Result Out.
You always say that “behavior replicates.” It seems cynical to say this. Aren’t we simply assigning blame to other people for their failure inlife? Is everyone innately the same forever?
Not only do people’s current behaviors tend to replicate but their friends behaviors are replicated by you as well far more often than you would have without the influence (for better and worse). People CHANGE the person they live with, whether the changes are good or bad or both. Change is rarely fun, or easy. It’s work, and effort is required even when the status quo is a disaster.
Breaking chains takes time.
You should assume other’s behaviors will replicate until they CONVINCE you they won’t because of a list of things they are DOING, that have been MEASURED and that OBSTACLES have been calculated and that there is a good reason the plan will work.
You always say to change your environment and the people in it. This stress me out. You’ve spent a lot time in Poland and Bulgaria, you’ve lived there. What changes good or bad will you tell us about? What was it like for you to be the person who was new to the environment, especially in Bulgaria where you didn’t have the support you had in Poland?
I am just like you. I get stressed out in big change situations. One of the things that makes a big difference for me is a temperate and spacious living space. In need square feet (square meters) and I need a cool environment to work/live in. Fortunately I can make sure those things typically happen.
But when I go into the store in for groceries in Poland and all I see is food I can’t eat (pork, etc.) I do get uncomfortable. You revert back to survival mode (bring home the blueberries and other fruit!). You lose weight. Traveling to Poland is always good for my waistline. I eat the Jewish diet, if you will and it’s a catholic country. And because it matters, it’s a definite point of discomfort. But yes, I do have support in Poland I don’t have elsewhere Europe.
In Bulgaria, the store clerks weren’t always as kind as I’d like them to be and my Bulgarian/Russian skills amounted to about one word per day. After awhile I could read a sign or a few words as well as greet people, say thanks, goodbye. All of that is tough. I have a lot of empathy for people who come to the U.S. and think they know english only to discover they will understand half of what is said on average, if they are lucky.
My time in Eastern Europe and living a very, very different lifestyle was fascinating. It was typically uncomfortable and I have nothing but gratitude that I had a chance to do both. You learn a lot about yourself, your nation or citizenship vs. other countries and cultures. You begin to see a lot of good in your nation and a lot of bad that you didn’t see before. People also respect you more when they know you have “been around” and aren’t simply talking about circumstances from one kind of life.
If you want to grow, be better, you have to change your physical environment, the people in your environments, a person in your environment. Some things in your environment are very good for you long term. Others are bad for you long term. It’s not easy to measure who has what impact on you.
And you are right humans blame others for all kinds of things that happen to us and shape us as people. And that isn’t necessary. People are who they are and they are not likely to want to be changing at all. Remember as change happens to THEM stress happens to them AND YOU.
It’s not necessary to blame a person for the impact they have on you. You can simply begin to distance yourself from certain people and engage others.
I went through a massive search a few times in life for finding the right people to work with, live with, love with, you name it. And those relationships can go from fair to good and from great to poor over time. Sometimes there is “fault” and sometimes there is no fault. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. What matters is you will live once. You will have some people who attempt to cause you have a better (that is not the same as stress less) life. A better life is more reward, more fulfillment, more fascination.
But there’s no need to blame people. If necessary, as in a marriage, “I need to be with someone who wants to take me camping every weekend.” That’s fair. Probably should have talked about that on day one, but if you don’t or can’t do that and it’s a deal breaker then you break the deal. Life isn’t fair. Relationships aren’t fair. Circumstances do change. But blame, doesn’t have to enter into the picture and can be dismissed fairly quickly.
Dr. Hogan, in the webinar in April, you mention that your rudeness (being a jerk) could cause another to treat you so badly they might just kill you. Were you exaggerating to make a point?
“Everything influences.” (KH)
Rudeness is being studied like never before. A paper will be published next month that reinforces how one specific bias (anchoring or “flagging”) occurs at a much more hidden but intense way than one might imagine. Here’s a quick release from the U of Md. that beautifully describes what I was talking about.
Have you ever been cut off in traffic by another driver, leaving you still seething miles later? Or been interrupted by a colleague in a meeting, and found yourself replaying the event in your head even after you’ve left work for the day? Minor rude events like this happen frequently, and you may be surprised by the magnitude of the effects they have on our decision-making and functioning. In fact, recent research co-authored by management professor Trevor Foulk at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business suggests that in certain situations, incidental rudeness like this can be deadly.
In “Trapped by A First Hypothesis: How Rudeness Leads to Anchoring” forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Foulk and co-authors Binyamin Cooper of Carnegie Mellon University, Christopher R. Giordano and Amir Erez of the University of Florida, Heather Reed of Envision Physician Services, and Kent B. Berg of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital looked at how experiencing rudeness amplifies the “anchoring bias.” The anchoring bias is the tendency to get fixated on one piece of information when making a decision (even if that piece of information is irrelevant).
For example, if someone asks, “Do you think the Mississippi River is shorter or longer than 500 miles?,” that suggestion of 500 miles can become an anchor that can influence how long you think the Mississippi River is. When it happens, it’s difficult to stray very far from that initial suggestion, says Foulk.
The anchoring bias can happen in a lot of different situations, but it’s very common in medical diagnoses and negotiations. “If you go into the doctor and say ‘I think I’m having a heart attack,’ that can become an anchor and the doctor may get fixated on that diagnosis, even if you’re just having indigestion,” Foulk explains. “If doctors don’t move off anchors enough, they’ll start treating the wrong thing.”
Because anchoring can happen in many scenarios, Foulk and his co-authors wanted to study more about the phenomenon and what factors exacerbate or mitigate it. They have been studying rudeness in the workplace for years and knew from previous studies that when people experience rudeness, it takes up a lot of their psychological resources and narrows their mindset. They suspected this might play a role in the anchoring effect.
To test their theory, the researchers ran a medical simulation with anesthesiology residents. The residents had to diagnose and treat the patient, and right before the simulation started, the participants were given an (incorrect) suggestion about the patient’s condition. This suggestion served as the anchor, but then throughout the exercise, the simulator provided feedback that the ailment was not the suggested diagnosis, but instead something else.
In some iterations, before the simulation started, the researchers had one doctor enter the room and act rudely toward another doctor in front of the residents.
“What we find is that when they experienced rudeness prior to the simulation starting, they kept on treating the wrong thing, even in the presence of consistent information that it was actually something else,” says Foulk. “They kept treating the anchor, even though they had plenty of reason to understand that the anchor diagnosis was not what the patient was suffering from.”
This effect was replicated across a variety of other tasks, including negotiations as well as general knowledge tasks. Across the different studies, the results were consistent — experiencing rudeness makes it more likely that a person will get anchored to the first suggestion they hear.
“Across the four studies, we find that both witnessed and directly-experienced rudeness seemed to have a similar effect,” says Foulk. “Basically, what we’re observing is a narrowing effect. Rudeness narrows your perspective, and that narrowed perspective makes anchoring more likely.”
In general, the anchoring tendency is usually not a big deal, says Foulk. “But when you’re in these important, critical decision-making domains — like medical diagnoses or big negotiations — interpersonal interactions really matter a lot. Minor things can stay on top of us in a way that we don’t realize.”
To provide additional insights into this phenomenon, the researchers also explored ways to counteract it. Rudeness makes you more likely to anchor because it narrows your perspective, so the researchers explored two tasks that have been shown to expand your perspective — perspective-taking and information elaboration.
Perspective-taking helps you expand your perspective by seeing the world from another person’s point of view, and information elaboration helps you see the situation from a wider perspective by thinking about it more broadly. Across their studies, the researchers found that both behaviors could counteract the effect of rudeness on anchoring.
While these interventions can help make rudeness less likely to anchor people, Foulk says these should be a last resort. The best remedy for the rudeness problem?
“In important domains, where people are making critical decisions, we really need to rethink the way we treat people,” he says. “We never really did allow aggressive behavior at work. But we’re fine with rudeness, and now we’re learning more and more that small insults are equally impactful on people’s performance.”
And it needs to stop, he says.
“We tend to underestimate the performance implications of interpersonal treatment. We hear ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ It’s almost like being able to tolerate people’s treatment of you is like a badge of honor. But the reality is that this bad treatment is having really deleterious effects on performance in domains that we care about — like medicine. It matters.”
This is the fourth paper in a string of Foulk’s research showing that rudeness negatively impacts medical performance, where the impacts can be much bigger — and much more dire — than the insults, he says.
“In simulations, we’re finding that mortality is increased by rudeness. People could be dying because somebody insulted the surgeon before they started operating.”
Binyamin Cooper, Christopher R. Giordano, Amir Erez, Trevor A. Foulk, Heather Reed, Kent B. Berg. Trapped by a first hypothesis: How rudeness leads to anchoring.. Journal of Applied Psychology, 2021
Q. Can I use your articles in my new book?
A. You need to get written permission from me with specifically what you want to quote. If you want to reproduce an entire article, it’s possible I guess, but you’ll have to tell me why I’m excited about such an action.
Q. Dr. Hogan, In your presentation you said you weren’t so concerned someone’s honesty as you were integrity and loyalty in the people “I care about and work with.” You got cut off by the end of the day but a number of us talked about this at dinner that night. Can you finish our conversation!
A. Sure, and by the way, this was off the record. 🙂 And I’m not sure the quote is quite correct, perhaps a translation error, but I know a dozen people heard this answer to a question which was something like, “Is honesty the most important quality to you in someone?”
And the answer is- no. The most important quality in someone I care about or love, do business with, is loyalty. Loyalty predicts integrity which is significantly different from honesty. Honesty implies you are going to tell the truth. Humans are deceptive by nature. (I wore make up that day for example because I hadn’t slept in over 36 hours and I looked beat up! That’s deceptive.) But loyalty means that when I’m gone, you pave the way for me to safely arrive without wondering if I’m OK. The lights are working, the stage is set, the right person is in bed next to me, you spread positive gossip about people. Loyalty is unbeatable in people that matter. It’s the core reason that they matter.
Integrity follows right behind loyalty because integrity is really about predictability of behavior. For example, if I tell you that you will learn a lot at the event, you simply will. Integrity means that my actions will match my words with follow through… unless someone dies or a crisis happens and even then, the chances are, I’m predictable. I expect other people I care about and work with to be the same way.
And to answer the other question that we talked about at dinner; honesty as a principle is obviously valuable in relationships. But there are things that are actually a little more important. I wasn’t disrespecting the value of honesty. We’ll talk about this next month.
Q. Kevin, you often say and write “effective in business, effective in relationships.” (or vice versa) How do I apply attraction in business, time management in relationships, and in general your work across the boards? What are the exceptions to “it works in business and personal relationships.”
A. one of the most frequent questions I get. Last week we talked about attraction. It matters in business. Attractive people hold the attention of the other person longer than unattractive people. (Women in particular hire and promote attractive women in business.) Being your physical best you can pay off. It won’t be charisma, identity or a lot of other things but all things being equal, you want to look good.
Then you mention time management. Look how much time you put into social media being social online. And you’re good at it. Then look at time management in business. If you don’t work from a solid calendar you are dead in business. But then people neglect time in their relationship. The very same discussions you have about business must happen in relationships. A once a week talk on Friday evening after dinner is a great time to talk about what’s working, what’s not, what can change and then isolate 2 or 3 things to create habits around this week. It IS just like business. Time management is about calendar, planning, prioritization, strategy for future.
Planning the relationship the same way will bring similar results. The best work I’ve seen on the what to do is from John Gottman. Nobody sharper on the planet.
Exceptions. People have asked why I strongly encourage roles in a relationship. The reason is they work. I like to do the dishes. Live longer and don’t ask me to cook. Roles are not an exception. But there are exceptions. When you are clearly superior to your partner, it’s important to talk about these areas of weakness and excellence in your weekly planning (as well as yearly and monthly). Sometimes the person who is doing X wants to learn Y and they need to be given that opportunity. In business you try to keep your best person at each position. You have more fluidity in a relationship which means it’s a lot easier to screw up a relationship…
Q. Kev, I was in your audience and you said, “watch your partners Facebook feed. When your face disappears so does your partner.” I didn’t really understand what you meant. A lot of people looked very surprised but, it could be that my English is no good.
A. Your English is fine. I remember you! 😉 The research is simple. If there are lots of pictures of you and your husband or boyfriend, the relationship will predictably be long running, until the frequency reduces. Once the number of images reduces your relationship is in serious trouble.
There are apps you can use to mirror the Facebook experience and calculate how long your relationship will last. (I haven’t tested them.) Gottman’s 7 keys pretty much tell you all you need to know about longevity. If you put effort, time and brand your relationship, it’s hard to go wrong. Facebook is currently one of the top three “causes” of divorce cited in the U.S. I suspect it will catch up there soon.
Dr. Hogan, you have mentioned the corruption in the American post grad system, especially when it comes to “new research” yet you yourself use new research in your work. How do you know what is real and what is not? Follow up, what’s your opinion about whether people should go to college and how people are awarded grades in high school as well as at college? What SHOULD kids be taught in school? Why get a college education in a corrupt system?!
Is that all? OK let’s just hit the highlights. This requires a book.
- Teachers are no more or less qualified than they have been in the past. They are more monitored and policed in 2024 than they ever have been in the U.S. If a kid causes trouble the teacher has to be careful how they handle it. That’s insane. You come to my class, you be quiet, you take notes or sleep at the back of the room. You take tests and you get the grade based on objective data. If a teacher has to punish a kid, punish the kid. Their parents obviously don’t know how to parent so set the kid in the hall with a desk until the end of class and get the pollution out of the room where people need to learn. Teachers need to be given the right to teach EVERYONE and not the trouble maker.
- Teachers at all levels are giving more “A”‘s than they ever have in their life. This is indefensible. And to fix the system you must return to standardization. You need students to LEARN and then MEASURE what they have been taught against the standard. If they can’t multiply in their head, read at will with desire, have curiosity about life… you have a systemic problem. An “A” meant you met standards of excellence. Today you get an “A” or a “B” you don’t get on the honor roll, because there is no honor, just “ha ha, told you you had to give me an “A.” The joke is that other countries have caught up to the U.S. in education where the U.S. was a standard in itself for decades. You learn when you feel pain and/or when you feel rewarded (both can easily happen simultaneously and should). There is no excuse for 2/3 of students to get an A or a B in every class they take. Failing grades are even more important. If you put ignorant people on the streets you mess up society and the future of a nation and a human.
- The notion that standardized tests aren’t fair because of language and cultural barriers is a GREAT argument. I’m there. I get it 100%. But you can’t CHANGE or eliminate the tests, you have to cause adoption of education that brings people to a HIGH STANDARD so they can succeed in real life post school. Standardized testing allows for accuracy in the directions a person can best move forward in. What we have today has become an embarrassment. Parents need to sit their kids in front of books. Take the tablet away until after 7 PM and homework (yes homework) is done. You can’t learn without homework, except learn how ignorant you are.
- My kids brought me books to read to them and then I brought them to bookstores. If they went to a bookstore they could ALWAYS go home with a gift from Dad. Go to Target? 1 out of every 10 visits. You go where your kid will be prepared for life.
- I’ve been through curriculum for years. I’ve taught school superintendents, principals and teachers what and how to teach and they always had a response like, “Why aren’t we teaching kids like this?” My response is that you have to be straight with parents. “This curriculum is garbage. You don’t need any story to go along with 3 x 2 = 6. You do it by rote and quickly, in a couple of DAYS not years. Then you learn applications after you have the ability to do more complex problems and that’s where stories can come in handy.
- You don’t graduate a kid that can’t read at least an 8th grade level. No exceptions. If my job is to hire someone that is competent and will be able to work fluidly in my company you better someone who can read, write, communicate and if they are led toward specialties like the sciences, the arts, whatever, great, have those available in the schools.
- Kids should be taught the truth. Life is HARD and today, in class and when you get home it’s going to be HARD. THEN if magic happens it gets less hard as they are more prepared to handle with the overwhelming number of problems there are in the world.
- Kids must be taught that you don’t have to make exceptions as to how you FEEL about the girl wearing a hijab over there, but instead a) ask her what causes her to wear it so they learn about her culture and then b) what causes her to not just set it down for the day, so they learn just how important that culture is.
- Kids are not stupid by nature, they are intelligent beings waiting for teachers who can teach and interact. The educational system panders to points of view. “Be careful what you say, that’s a black person.” “All white people get off without tickets.” No, never. Kids, people need to say, “I don’t want you to treat me better or for you to feel worse about yourself because we are different.” The bar has to be the same except where SEVERE disability is experienced.
- Teachers need to be given latitude and parents MUST teach their children from day one. 95% of kids can learn and do well enough to pass in a standardized world. In 2024 we’re passing 95% of the kids that should be failing. The diploma should mean a) you stuck to it and survived and b) you learned the bare minimum necessary and my name is on your diploma so do me right.
Over the summer we’ll do a nice big article about the corruption in school and also why we MUST have our kids go to public school so long as the kids are physically safe in those schools. Schools must prepare kids for the real world where they can’t say “I want a minimum wage, I deserve it.” They deserve nothing until they earn it, neither do I, neither do you. Leave politics and the b.s. for some other institution to deal with.
“Hey Kev, what’s going to happen to the markets, bitcoin and gold the rest of this year?”
Based on technical analysis (there are few fundamentals in bitcoin/crypto) but technically speaking the action shows, as I said when bit coin hit 70 K, that it was rolling over and would take a correction equal to 68.125% of it’s value. That would bring it to about 47K. It would not be fast. It would take time. It will jump around but now bitcoin is trading with investor sentiment and not like a scam where it goes straight up. So bitcoin will see 47K before it will see 80K and it WILL see 80K and probably a lot more, but I’m short bitcoin as I trade. (When it hits short term bottoms I buy short term, put in stops and let it play out.) Don’t be surprised if bitcoin is predictable based on Elliot Wave theory for the next 20 years. Also don’t be surprised if it is manipulated like gold and silver have been for 50 years. So bitcoin to 47K then a reversal. THIS YEAR? That’s not possible to know. We haven’t experienced enough of these situations yet. Probably. Will bitcoin hit a million bucks? I doubt it. Will some crypto? Coin flip.
Gold has sat on it’s hands when every major country is buying the heck out of gold. Yeah it’s at 2400 and yes, I said it would go sideways and it has. And it will for awhile. Whenever the Fed drops interest rates you can expect gold to go up and fairly quickly. Until then it’s likely to continue to go sideways.
Silver and platinum are both waaay too cheap. It’s almost concerning. Silver is considered cheap when it’s 1/50 the price of gold. Well it’s 1/80th. It’s like watching a rocket on the launch pad. When something SHOULD happen and doesn’t, assume manipulation. The markets have ALWAYS been manipulated but eventually gold becomes a currency (it is a currency but I mean a viable daily currency again) as bitcoin is doing now in some parts of the economy.
The U.S. stock market will likely do nothing this summer. In September I expect it to be right where it is NOW. Then going into winter I would expect a 10 – 15% rise closing that much higher than it is now for the year.
The market is NOT healthy however. Only the biggest stocks (like Alphabet/Google, Nvidia, Meta, etc.) are making earnings to drive the SP500 forward. Nevertheless 2025 is likely to be a flat or down year so buy before the kids go back to school.
“Kev, I read an article that said, a lot of people don’t have a voice in their mind, like internal dialogue. I thought everyone did. What’s up?”
There’s actually a lot of real research on this and about 1/4 of people don’t have a voice in their head they can bounce ideas off of. In other words, yes, most people do, or they bring the voice out and talk to themselves like you and I do. Here’s the good news. People who talk to themselves, scold themselves, have real “conversations” end up with better results are more intelligent, etc. There’s nothing wrong with NOT having a voice in your head but those discussions with the self in or out of the head are really important to have.
“Dr. Hogan, will you have an NFL Contest this year in Coffee?”
Maybe. We’ll see. I’d like to.
“Dr. Hogan when will people be able to get into Inner Circle again?”
As soon as I can fulfill the promises we make for those in Inner Circle. We still have a few international people and we did have a meeting in Las Vegas this year BUT we’ll get serious about it when I put out a schedule for a year in advance.
“Kev, I saw you on Leak Project the other day, it seems like you talk more about ancient history and psychology than persuasion and influence the last year. Anything we should know about?”
I get invited I go if I think it will be fun. If I’m not interested, I say no.
“Kev, Are you still working on the TV Series?”
It’s a streaming series on a streaming network and my part of the project is essentially complete. (I wrote the story) So mostly, no, I’m not working on it as I was the first four months of the year. But now it’s in the producers hands and I see nothing happening until they collect enough people to make the series. (about 100 in the cast and at least 30 on a crew) This is not my field and I let the people who know the field to take care of their work.
I have a short patience span and if they don’t have it out by spring 2025, I’ll release the story as it book. It is truly something special. Apocalyptic. Very exciting stuff. We’ll see.
