16 OctEpisode 84 | Sociopaths as dog trainers, Negative Reinforcement at NXIVM & how to train humans to wear masks
Creepy Episode alert! It's all about sociopaths and cult leaders today. Some are both cult leaders and sociopaths! And one is a president. And one is the Unabomber. Annie talks about animal behavior manipulation methods observed in the following shows:
The Vow (https://www.hbo.com/the-vow)
Filthy Rich (https://www.netflix.com/)
The Social Dilemma (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaaC57tcci0)
Manhunt (https://www.netflix.com/)
And then she looks at how the President is curing the Coronavirus with positive thinking, and looks at the differences between positive thinking, positive psychology and positive reinforcements. And... Annie offers ideas on how to train people to wear masks. If you like this episode, think positive thoughts about it. Or positively reinforce Annie for doing it by leaving a review on iTunes.
Subscribe: iTunes
Transcript:
Annie:
I have a couple of quotes here I just wanted you to hear and think about whether they make sense to you. I'm going to come back to them in a little bit.
The first is this one.
“Imagine a home for a dog that subjects the dogs to conditions that make the dog terribly unhappy, then gives the dog drugs to take away the happiness. Instead of removing the conditions that make the dog depressed, the dog owner gives the dog antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying the dog's internal state in such a way as to enable the dog to tolerate social conditions that the dog might otherwise find intolerable.”
Second quote.
“Many dog owners tend to regard as a sickness, any mode of behavior that is inconvenient for the people in the home. And this is plausible because when the dog doesn't fit into the home, it causes pain to the dog and to those in the household. Thus the manipulation of a dog's behavior to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as a good.”
**intro music**
Hi, my name is Annie Grossman and I'm a dog trainer. This podcast is brought to you by school for the dogs, a Manhattan based facility, I own and operate along with some of the city's finest dog trainers. During this podcast, we'll be answering your questions, geeking out on animal behavior, discussing pet trends and interviewing industry experts. Welcome to School for the Dogs Podcast.
Annie:
Humans, friends, listeners. I need to talk to you about some things that have been on TV recently which I've just been thinking about so much because there's so much dog training in these two particular shows that I've watched recently. You know, never, ever did I think that becoming a dog trainer would make me think so much about cult leaders and also like sociopaths. One of these stories is about cult leader. The other is about a sociopath, actually, they might be both cult leaders and sociopaths in their own ways. But you know, I think a lot of cult leaders would probably make really decent dog trainers, whether their methods would be humane or not, I guess depends on which cult you're talking about. Sociopaths, I don't know about sociopaths and dog training, but I do know that I was pretty shocked when I watched a show a few years ago about the Unabomber, Manhunt, it was called, about Ted Kaczynski.
It was a little off putting to realize that so many of his ideas and his manifesto made a lot of sense to me from a dog training behavior standpoint. It was almost like this guy realized that we are dogs in a society being trained and he freaked out about it and decided to manipulate behavior by using negative reinforcement, “publish my crazy manifesto or else I will bomb you, like I've bombed all these other people.” I mean, creepy crazy dude, yes, for sure. But his writings actually in a lot of cases make a lot of sense. The quotes that I read at the beginning of this episode are all him. I just changed a few words to make it about dogs in homes rather than humans in society, but I'll link to the actual quotes in the show notes.
A lot of his writings were about how we have created machines and now the machines are controlling us. That technology has shaped and controlled and conditioned our behaviors, oftentimes, not for our own good. And if you have a smart phone in your pocket, I'm guessing, you know, that's true. I don't want to talk about it too much here because I think it's worth actually its own episode.
But another show that I recently watched that I highly recommend is The Social Dilemma, which is basically a movie that points out how controlled we are as individuals and in larger groups, by the internet, social media. Software developers might also make good dog trainers in that they understand our behavior and how to manipulate it. I mean, think about all the things you do, all the behaviors you engage in at this point that are dictated by your phone. But, you know, I think the big takeaway as far as dog training goes of the movie, The Social Dilemma, was that positive reinforcement isn't necessarily a good thing. There's no inherent good. It's just about encouraging behaviors because I think positive reinforcement is the quadrant that most of our behaviors having to do with technology live in- we do these things because there's a reward. But any behavior can be positively reinforced and encouraged, and it's not necessarily a good thing. And when you see how addicted we all are to this amazing technology and the connections we have and dah, dah, dah, dah, I got a little sidetracked.
I was gonna share a clip from the movie Manhunt where the investigator and Kaczynski… the investigator has kind of come around to understanding Kaczynski’s arguments and the two of them are talking about how they are controlled by technology. And in dog training world, the technology that's us humans in this critical interpretation and the humans or the bird this clip are the dogs.
**audio playing from show clip**
Investigator:
What was it just between us? When did it all click?
Kaczynski:
Well, for me it all began in Chicago. Monday. This mockingbird began singing in the backyard there, you know, that puffed up confidence, just belting out a song. And I began to realize that the mockingbird, the singing, the car alarm,ba beep ba beep. One night I just sat there listening to that poor dumb bird for maybe an hour straight thinking, “what we have done, how wrong that was and stuck with me. And I kept coming back to it, just trying to figure out where in the world we had gone so wrong that it had ended up here.
Investigator:
For me, it was the part about driving. Every time I got in the car, I thought about it more. The more I drove the more it made sense. There was this one night I was driving home from work and there was nobody on the street. I mean, nobody. I'm sitting at a red light, just waiting, waiting. And there's no cars anywhere. Still, I sat there. I obeyed. That’s when I realized it's not about technology. It's not about machines. It's about what they're doing to us. It's about what they're doing to us, what they do to our hearts. Because our hearts are no longer free.
Kaczynski:
You wanted to be free, right? Dignity, time, autonomy, everyone wants that. People want it so badly. They're dying by the thousands every day, just trying to salvage some of their humanity. Think about it. More people have died from suicide in just the time of we’ve been talking, then I allegedly killed him my entire career. More people died from anti-depressants, plastic surgery, fast food. Why, why, what, why is everybody so terrified of me and ask yourself this question? Why are these men in suits so desperate to prove that I'm crazy. I will tell you-it's because they know that I'm right. I'm awake, they're asleep and they're terrified they might have to wake up to turn off this cell phones and their TVs and their video games and face themselves the way that you and I have.
Annie:
This is a creepy episode of a dog training podcast. If this is the first time that you're listening, I promise go back and listen to some other episodes and I will tell you how to keep your dog from peeing on rugs and how to teach your dog to sit. Tt all connects. I think. I'm pretty sure. Anyway.
Moving away from sociopaths who are just sociopaths and towards sociopaths who are also called leaders, you know, it kind of makes sense that a cult leader would have a pretty good understanding of how to manipulate animal behavior, whether they figured this out by accident or through careful study or just through, I don't know, figuring out how life works. The Vow is an HBO series about a cult called NXIVM, which I think thought of itself more as a professional, personal development organization rather than a cult, of course, most cults, I guess don't consider themselves cults.
And that it was based in the suburbs of Albany led by this kind of troll-like, volleyball-playing guy named Keith Raneire, who had supposedly a very high IQ and was clearly very charismatic. And for first, you know, 15 years or so of the cult, which started in the late 1990s, it actually seems like they were doing quite a bit of good and kind of developing a sort of psychotherapy, which interesting was about helping people understand Pavlovian conditioning and then helping them like sever the ties between the stimulus-be it a conditioned stimulus or not, and the behavior or feeling connected to it and they called this “exploration of meaning therapy.” And, you know, it sounds actually quite a lot like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy or what I know about Lacanian therapy and even aspects of Freudian therapy.
So nothing was like that revolutionary about this way of helping people, I think. But it was interesting to me in that they at least referenced Pavlov, which you don't hear very much on TV or at least people referencing Pavlov correctly. But I also thought it was interesting that his whole goal for his disciples is to help them have more joy in their lives, which, you know, is kind of a way of trying to use positive reinforcement to get people, to do things. It's like, how can I help you feel better about the world you live in and everything you do and then you will associate those feelings with me. And they show this one conversation that he and one of his senior co-conspirators, Alison Mack, shows a scene where they first meet. What's amazing about this documentary is like all the original creepy footage of this dude.
But she's talking about art and what art means to her. And he is explaining to her that the joy that she feels from the beauty, the beauty she sees in art, that all of that, you know, actually exists in her and that it's not produced by the art that the art is just like a stimulus that's like turning these feelings on and that his therapy is, can help her feel those feelings of joy without having to have the art present. Anyway, that's how I understood it.
But there was another use of classical conditioning that I thought was interesting in his methods where he was really into figuring out some kind of belts system, which I'm laughing cause we've tried to figure out, we've been talking about figuring out some sort of like leash-coded system, similar to a karate belt at School for the Dogs and he that's what he was trying to do, but w with the people who were in his organization, like, they would get different sashes to wear, different colored sashes, and then they'd earn like stripes on their sashes. And then they, you know, graduate to the next sash until they were at, you know, the peak sash, which was, I don't know, the white sash or whatever. And they interview some of these former, followers of his who talked about how much their sashes meant to them and the importance of these really not that special pieces of fabric that had been imbued with meaning because of all the associations they'd made with these garments and that they also created a kind of shorthand. So if you knew someone wearing a yellow sash did this kind of job in your organization, that could actually be a shorthand for you to associate certain things with them, have certain feelings about them even.
All of us wear things all the time that are signaling things to other people, whether we mean to be signaling or not. And also we wear things as like reminders to ourselves, which again is just, you know, associations that we've, that we've made because of repeated pairings.
And then towards like the last five or so years of his cult things get really creepy and he actually starts branding women. Which, you know, again, giving them some sort of arbitrary symbol on their body that is going to retain meaning to them and signal something to others as well.
He also starts to demand collateral from these women. And, you know, it was at that point where I was like, “oh man, this guy really understands reinforcement.” How can I get stuff from people either I'm going to, you know, make them feel good, give them good things they want, or I'm going to say, you need to do what I want you to do or else! Right! That's negative reinforcement-encouraging behavior by taking something away, which is, you know, at the diagonal of positive punishment. So now, you know, I have something that I can use to discourage behaviors I don't like.
So as these women sign up for this cult, they have to give him embarrassing photos of themselves or the deed to their house or something. And these women do it. I think it's because there was so much positive reinforcement used on them- used, to get behaviors that this guy wanted for so long that then he like makes this subtle shift and they're so conditioned to do what he wants, I'm guessing, that was part of why he was ultimately pretty successful.
He also, begins controlling what they can eat. And, you know, one other way to control an animal is to control their food, control access to their food. Right? We can do this with dogs without a lot of effort. We can use their food, certainly to encourage behaviors, forge associations we want etc etc. And by controlling these girls’ food- I think it's actually a common thing in cults where people's food intake is controlled. I think he could also provide access to their food, access to food for them, in order to encourage behaviors he wanted and also keep them in kind of a weak state.
Certainly I do not think this is a good idea to control food with dogs, to the point where you're starving them, that would be cruel. And this guy is clearly cruel with these women. But also if you're holding people captive, keeping them in a weakened physical state is probably a good idea.
But my big takeaway from The Vow was just the sort of interesting switch-watching this guy, manipulate people, using positive reinforcement. I mean, they show all the things these people do, I mean, they're literally playing volleyball at the time and like going to adult summer camp and, you know, blowing out huge birthday cakes with the thousand candles on them. I mean, like they're like having fun times, fun times, and then it seems like they have developed so many good feelings about the organization and this man that a lot of these women are deftly manipulated, where he starts to use negative reinforcement, rather skillfully.
The other creepy guy I recently watched a show about was Jeffrey Epstein, or was Jeffrey Epstein. He is no longer Jeffrey Epstein.
Anyway, Jeffrey Epstein who is now dead spent God like 20, 30 years trafficking girls to this private island that he had and paying young girls to have sex with him and then paying them to find other girls that he could have sex with. Like total sicko, awful person. So, so creepy and crazy. You know,, I think that, you know, they talk about the definition of crazy being, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
I think another definition of crazy is when, what is rewarding to you is so far from the norm. Like most people, you know, like food and sex and sleep and taking walks by the beach and, you know, eating ice cream, dah, dah, dah. But then like some people what's rewarding to them is causing pain and suffering to others by branding their skin or forcing children to have sex with them. Or the opposite, like the thing that's punishing to them, the thing that's most likely discouraged their behavior is like something that everyone else likes without question, like, I don't know, puppies and kittens and an ice cream and sex and all the things that other people generally agree on. Like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz doesn't like Dorothy, doesn't like her dog. Like that makes her crazy -how could you not like Dorothy and her dog?
Anyway, what's pleasurable to Jeffrey Epstein is basically holding young girls, hostage in one way or another often as sex slaves. But what is notable from a dog training perspective…by the way, neither of these shows have any dogs in them. Only pretty young girls are the victim to these master behavior, manipulators. Jeffrey Epstein, and his co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell, their method is really more about what we call like the dog training triad: the management, the timing, the rewards, particularly management. I mean, he's literally putting women on a remote, desert Island and he's manipulating all the resources,food, yes, but also money. He has just like endless amounts of money. And another interesting thing is that he is, his victims are super young and, you know, the saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You certainly can teach an old dog new tricks, but it can be harder to break them of some habits because they have a lot more years under their belts creating those habits.
But also I think it could be harder to teach old dogs new tricks sometimes because they're actually smarter and can learn faster in many ways and are less likely to be convinced to do something really stupid, like go sleep with a creepy old man for $200. This is actually something I've seen working with human students. You know, dog trainers we like to brag that we're one of the few kinds of teachers who has to work with the two species at once. Anyway, I've seen working with adults and kids at the same time that, you know, when we play like the shaping game, for example, which is a game where, through successive approximations… it's a game. Kids love it. There's clicks and treats, but inevitably the adults do better at this game than the kids do. I think it's just because they have more years under their belt of having to problem solve.
But if you are a sociopath cult leader and you are trying to select your victims, you actually probably don't want the smartest one that's going to be really good at problem solving. You'd probably do better with the waif- like 15 year old, who has no money of her own. She's going to be easier to socialize, as it were, to indoctrinate into your world -just like a puppy who is still at a stage of life, where he is expecting to be given food and care and you can be the one providing that. And your puppy is not coming into your home with all kinds of preconceived notions without having…with a brain that's already been sharpened. One reason people get puppies is so that they can socialize them to their world, which I hope, and I can't stress this enough, I hope the world that you're socializing your puppy to is nothing like Jeffrey Epstein's world. Let's all commit to being as unlike Jeffrey Epstein as possible.
One last Ted Kaczynski quote:
“A chorus of voices, exports kids to study science, no one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate when skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo retraining no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity and for good reason. If human needs were put before technical necessity, there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages, or worse. The concept of mental health in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress”
I'm going to make that last sentence about dogs. Now let's give it a listen.
“The concept of mental health in dogs is defined largely by the extent to which the dog behaves in accord with the needs of the home he is in and does so without showing signs of stress.”
I actually want to mention just one last sociopath that has been on my TV a lot lately.
Donald Trump voice:
I just left Walter Reed medical center and it's really something very special. The doctors, the nurses, the first responders, and I learned so much about coronavirus and one thing that's for certain, don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it. You're going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines-all developed recently, and you're going to beat it
Annie:
In her recent book about Donald Trump, his niece, Mary Trump writes about how her grandfather, Trump's father, was a big fan of the book, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. And I've never read this book, but I feel like it's in my DNA because I think it really affected both my parents, both of whom, always considered themselves, Pollyannas, like, you know, looking at the bright side no matter what. Imagine that good things will happen and they will happen. Put good energy out into the world and good energy will come back to you. With my mom, it was always more like working to see the bright side of any situation where I think my dad internalized it more like we would be late for me to get to school, like all the time and I remember we would be looking for a cab. And my dad would say that we needed to imagine a cab coming down the street right when we got to the corner to pick us up.
Now, I really think it's actually fine to imagine cabs as a way to affect change in the world. I don't think we should be imagining that we are healthy and invincible,and I'll have nothing to be afraid of when we've seen what the coronavirus has done. But I am not so much criticizing Trump here eh, am I? As much as I'm criticizing this kind of positivity because I think that it's often conflated with the kind of dog training people think positive reinforcement dog training is. Positive Reinforcement is not positive reinforcement because it's happy, good and sunny, like, I was talking about. Positive reinforcement can be used to encourage behaviors that might not be so great. It's also not a positive psychology, which is its own branch of psychology that's really devoted to using proven methods to make ourselves happier in our daily life. So there certainly is some overlap there with positive reinforcement training, but not fully overlapping.
I forgot if I've talked about this on the podcast before, but there was this time four or five years ago that I went to like a yoga and meditation retreat for five days and did a seminar that was about positive psychology. And you know, there was a lot of good stuff in it, meditation and like talk therapy and yoga and journaling and talking about gratitude and thinking about what we wanted in life -ike these are all good things that I think can you know, benefit people in many situations. But at one point though, the person leading the group, an older woman, a PhD in psychology, who had been working as a psychotherapist for many, many years said, you know, “I've studied with Pema Chodro,” who is a, um, I don't know a lot about Pema Chodron, but she's like a Buddhist-y type, writer, I think, who has, um, I've read some of her stuff anyway.
She was like, “I've studied with Pema Chodron and I know how to change behaviors you don't want to have, what you need to do is notice the urge that you are going to do the thing you don't want to do..” -notice the triggers, basically, I don't remember the exact word she used, “and then do something else.” And I raised my hand and I was, “ well, what about positively reinforcing an alternate behavior?” And she was basically like, you know, “that might work for dogs, but it's not gonna work for people.” And like, I shut up because I was like, I'm the dog trainer and you know, like student here, and this is like, nobody wants to hear my opinion really. But like, it was a funny moment where I felt like I had to defend like this science that this person had, like literally never heard, like she didn't know what I was talking about.
Then a week later I went to Clicker Expo, the wonderful Karen Pryor conference that's held a few times a year. Uh, and I saw Ken Ramirez there who is,you know, one of the big honchos there. And, you know, I think one of the best animal trainers in the world. And I said to him, you know, it's so funny that here I'm at this positive reinforcement dog training conference. And last week I was at this conference about basically positive psychology and they, the person running it really didn’t know what positive reinforcement was. And Ken was like, what's positive psychology?
And then there's this positive thinking stuff, which again, I guess, could overlap maybe with positive psychology, if we were making a Venn diagram. There's a single behavior change, I think our president should be working on. A single thing he should be trying to get all of us to do. And that is to wear a mask. It's a very concrete action step. Encouraging us to not be scared, telling us that everything is just going to be fine. It's just not good dog training.
And you know, how do you get people to wear a mask? Telling them they might get someone else sick if they don't wear a mask. Telling them that they may get sick at some point in the future from not wearing a mask, but it could have been at any one moment, they weren't wearing a mask or maybe they wer wearing a mask and they got it anyway. This is the information I think, we have been fed about masks or this whole conversation about masks, wearing a mask, like, how dare you control my freedom, it’s my choice. You know what, like screw all of that. People should be told that if they don't wear a mask, they're going to die tomorrow. Now, is that true? I don't know, probably not in most cases, but if I had a news channel, I would be showing every story I could have someone who didn't wear a mask on Wednesday and was on Thursday. Let people have a choice, but let's figure out ways to make people want to choose the right damn thing here.
Something else the president can do with all the money he claims to have is give a hundred hundred dollar bills to a hundred people in every major city every day, and have them go out and randomly hand those bills to anyone with a mask. You don't need to be the president, I guess, to do that. But what if that were a thing? What if people were out there handing big, big amounts of money to people who are wearing masks, reliably doing it, like all the time in certain locations.
I'm all for brands that are putting out or people who are making masks that are beautiful or that would express opinions. That say what your favorite baseball team is that are expensive, that are handmade, whatever, but like, people should feel like their masks are this like stupidly special thing. I mean, look at how many people wear wedding rings, engagement rings. Nobody's forcing them. I mean, I'm sure in some cases they're being forced, but you do it because it's a beautiful thing that has meaning to you and it's expressing meaning to others. And if that's going to help people wear masks, then look, you know, I am definitely into it. Masks that match clothing, God, there's masks, you could get to match your dog's bandana.
Product plug: we do have a mask that we have made in partnership with Found my Animal that makes… they make beautiful leashes, rope leashes that we sell in our shop. I use one every day with my dog. They're making masks that we have been selling with our…we've put an embroidery on them that says Woof they're super cute. Uh, you can get yours at storeforthedogs.com. Your money goes straight to helping us keep our doors open, keep our trainers employed. And thanks for being here.
Links:
Unabomber quotes
https://www.quotetab.com/quotes/by-theodore-kaczynsk
Manhunt TV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhunt_(2017_TV_series)
The Social Dilemma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma
The Vow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vow_(TV_series)
The Power of Positive Thinking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Positive_Thinking
