Going Around Humanity’s Instinct Mismatch With George Hutton
Due to rapid evolution in today’s fast-paced world, humanity now has to live with instinct mismatch. We do not know how to feel, act, or behave since everything is moving and changing too fast. Tom Dardick attempts to address this issue with George Hutton, a prolific writer and a persuasion expert. They discuss how to look within and unlock your full potential to navigate the instincts that no longer match the world right now. George also talks about the importance of daily discipline and embracing the present to further your skills in an ever-changing, and most of the time quite unfair, environment we all live in today.
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Going Around Humanity’s Instinct Mismatch With George Hutton
On this episode, I'd like to welcome George Hutton to the show. He is a prolific writer with over 100 books published, and he is a persuasion expert studying hypnotism. He has a practice where he helps people with their abilities to persuade and influence, as well as a lot of other insights. The funny thing is in our discussion, we didn't even get into that stuff. We got into a more broad spectrum of discussion around what makes us tick and why things are the way they are. I found it fascinating, and I hope you do too. Without further ado, let's welcome George Hutton to the show.
The first question I have for you, George, is being such a prolific writer as you are, that separates you. Most people have a book or masterpiece they'd like to get out of, and they struggle for years. My novel took me ten years to write. That came out a couple of years ago, and I'm still working on the sequel. Most people have a tough time with that production that you've been able to do 100 books. The question is, what's your secret? What's your special sauce? What's your unique approach to at least output and a passion that keeps you at it for an extended period of time?
There's a couple of answers in there. The first was that my first novel took about a year to write. When you write your first novel, there are all kinds of doubts and insecurities. You’re like, “What happens if I publish it and nobody buys it?” There's also that fear of success. You’re like, “What happens if I am massively successful?” That fear of success usually lives down in our subconscious because we're afraid of suddenly all this attention coming at us, and we don't know if we can handle that.
After I slogged through the first novel and got it done, it was more familiar. Even writing the first novel, one of the pieces of advice I heard long ago was, “When you sit down to write, don't think about writing a certain number of words. Instead, think about writing for a specific number of minutes. Sit down and start writing.” It also folds in with a couple of ideas. One is from Michelangelo. There's a quote from Michelangelo that says, “When I start to do a sculpture, I imagine the sculpture is already inside the rock. It's my job to get it out.”
Another idea from Hemingway is that when you write, write drunk but edit sober. When I sit down to write for my allotted amount of time for the day, I don't concern myself with the actual quality of the writing that I'm doing. In my mind, I'm creating the rock. Later, I'll chip away all the junk and get to the sculpture inside the rock or write drunk and edit sober. That mindset helped me to write a whole lot of words per day if I had a certain amount of time allotted for that writing.
That built into my daily productivity. When I was starting to write as prolifically as I did after I wrote my first novel, I had a schedule. I figured, “I would take this many weeks to write a book. Every day, I would write for an hour. When I had a certain number of words, I would edit it down. I would release the book and go on to the next one.” It wasn't the way writers who haven't written a lot. You had this idea that, “I had this massive idea. Once I get this massive idea out of my head into a book, it'll have this massive, significant impact, and this's going to be this great, fantastic thing.”
Once you get over that and realize that's not what happens, it's a matter of keeping your schedule. If you write every day, after every many days, you're going to pump out a book, and you keep pumping out doing new books. You get into the habit of figuring out what you're going to write next. It's part of your daily habit. For me, it was doing daily exercise. It's something that you do every day. You can't imagine not doing it every day. Once you get into that habit, it's easy. As long as you write every day, you're going to kick out a certain number of books per time period. If you do that time period long enough, before you know it, you'll have a few dozen books out there.
It’s the Stephen King method. His routine is from 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM every day, and that's it.
There's a story of Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute mile. Once he broke the four-minute mile, a lot of other people started to break the four-minute mile because they simply were aware that it was possible. Another experience I had was when I was reading the book. It was called Going Clear, which later turned into an HBO documentary about Scientology. Early in the book, they were talking about L. Ron Hubbard before he invented Scientology. He was a prolific science fiction writer. He would sit down and bang out thousands of words per day. Knowing that that was possible seemed to make it a lot easier for me to do the same thing. I was like, “If this guy can do it, I can do it. What's the difference?”
You saw that it was possible, and the word that strikes me as you relate your story and approach is discipline.
Daily discipline is necessary. It's about 180 degrees away from the stereotypical fictional author who wanders around town with his laptop, waiting for inspiration to hit him and trying to come up with an idea. It's every day, the daily grind, the same thing day in and day out.
The same thing applies across disciplines in different areas of our lives. For you, it's writing. For other people, it might be getting in shape or some other goal that they might have, a project of some kind, a business, or some other artistic expression.
If you can figure out a measurable way to do a daily grind, like if you did a certain number of pushups every day, or you wrote for a certain number of minutes every day, and you practiced some skill every day as something you would do forever, within a year or two, you would be fantastic at that skill.
That brings me to the next thing I was wondering about, which is, as you've applied this discipline over a long period of time, you find things out about yourself. You find find commonalities. Things emerge that you wouldn't predicted. My question to you, George, is what emerged for you that is most noteworthy and might be of value to other people?
The thing that I discovered most about myself is that when I was a lot younger, I had the common idea that here I was in my present state. There's this future state that I hope is better. I get this thing. I get this income. I get a girlfriend. I lose this weight. It's a transactional imagination that I do this to get that. What I realized is that it's not so much what I can do to get that one thing. It's the continuous feeling of continuous improvement once you're on that daily grind where you're doing the daily discipline.
You look back on the past several months, and you think, “When I first started, I could only do two pushups. Now I'm doing 100 every morning. That feels fantastic. What might I be like a year from now?” That's the biggest a-ha moment I've had about not just myself but the structure of continuously moving through your life and getting better.
It’s that joy of progress and enjoying the journey.
That's what they mean when they say, “The road is better than the end.”
Why do we think that isn't something that we are taught? Why do we have to learn that the hard way? Why isn't that the normal thing we would think, like enjoying the road, journey, and each day? We say it, but it's one thing to hear and another thing to internalize it.
I have a weird idea about how that is. A lot of my understanding of human nature, conditions, and problems is because of what anthropologists or evolutionary psychologists call instinct mismatch. I honestly believe that most modern problems are because the instincts that we have were generated for a world that was much different than the world we live in now. That creates a lot of confusion.
Most modern problems are caused by instinct mismatch. We are generated for a world that is much different from the world we live in today.
If you think about a group of ancient hunter-gatherers who were migrating to follow the animals, if you have 50 people in an ancient tribe of humans, that's 50 people that each need 2,000 calories per day. It means that a group of 50 people needs to extract 100,000 calories from the environment per day. The only way to do that is to take down a big animal. They were following these big animals. They were always on their purpose, but it was something that they didn't have to ever think about. They kept following the animals because that's what they had to do. They didn't have a choice.
Ancient humans, with our collection of instincts, were constrained by their environment. It's similar to the problem of obesity in modern society. Back then, because food was scarce, nobody had to worry about getting fat. People were always hungry. The hungrier you were, the more motivated you were to find something to eat. Nowadays, that massive hunger instinct can kill us. In a lot of similar ways, the instincts that helped us back then are making us go in the opposite direction.
One subtle idea you can think about with a group of hunter-gatherers chasing some big game animal is that you can do a split test between two tribes. They have everything the same except for this one instinct that this tribe has over here. This tribe, when they're chasing after a wooly mammoth or some big animal, has this false idea or belief that once they get that big animal, everything is going to be perfect. It's an irrational belief, but it would make them more motivated than this other tribe who has this Vulcan-like logical understanding that once they get this big animal, it'll last for a week. They'll have all kinds of problems. They'll be itching to get hunting, and they won't be as motivated as this tribe.
We have this belief that this next thing is the one thing that's going to make everything better. If we get that thing and it doesn't make everything better, we get a letdown. We have to wait for our environment to force us to get back on the hunt again. That doesn't happen as effectively as it used to. This tribe that believes that this next big kill will be the greatest thing ever gets the big kill and feels good for a couple of days, but their environment forces them to get back on the road. Nowadays, that doesn't happen nearly as naturally as it used to. It's easy to feel let down, even when you achieve a fantastic goal.
I watched a fantastic interview with the guy who played Jack Reacher on that Amazon show. He was talking about the massive letdown that he had. He'd been trying so long to make a breakthrough in acting, and he finally got his first couple of big roles. He was horrified because he thought he'd been chasing an empty dream because when he got there, there was no magic payoff. That's the feeling we get when we're chasing these big goals. We have this false belief that this next big thing is going to be the one thing that fixes everything, but we get it and that's not nearly as great as we thought. It can leave us very depressed, let down, and off that path.
It's not natural in modern life to feel, based on our environment, that we're always on a good path. It's something you have to understand and manage on your own like you have to understand and manage your own hunger instinct if you want to stay healthy. The key takeaway is that to be a successful human, you have to understand and manage all of your instincts as much as possible. If you let your instincts drive your life, you're going to be a train wreck.
If you let your instincts drive your life, you will be a train wreck.
I've got a few questions based on what you shared there, George. One thing is the distinction we make between instincts and emotions. In other words, some people are guided by their feelings, “I feel this way. I feel like this.” How might somebody distinguish between instinct and emotion? Is there a distinction? What does that difference look like? What are the tools that we use to manage those perceptions?
There are a lot of interdependent variables inside our own instincts and our own emotions. A lot of it is our capability of going meta. One of the problems humans have is going meta too often. We have a desire, but we think about our desire. We think about how we think about our desires. We start to get feelings about how we think about our desires, and that can get confusing.
Another variable that a lot of people have trouble with is short-term desires versus long-term desires. When we focus on short-term desires, they come at the cost of long-term success. When we want to build long-term success, we have to pay a little bit of short-term discomfort. It's fantastic to have a six-pack, take off your shirt, and get all the girls looking at you, but to get that, you have to not eat what you want to eat. You have to not eat as much as you want to eat. You have to suffer short-term discomfort to get that long-term desire and outcome.
The interplay between instincts and emotions is complex. There's no easy way to get a handle on them. There are a lot of consistent things you can do on a daily basis to manage them on a consistent basis, but there's no understanding or a way to think about them to make it easy. One way you can do that is to always be aware of both your short-term behaviors and what they'll create in the long term. Whether or not your long-term behavior is creating that road is better than feeling and having an understanding of what your instincts are telling you to do versus what your rational mind is telling you that you should do instead.
One of the best ways to manage all that is to have what I call directional goals or horizon goals, where you're going in a direction. A lot of goal programs say that your goal should be well-formed and time-limited. I disagree with that because that is dangerous. Once you put a time limit on something and you're starting to fall behind, that can create a lot of stress. I recommend instead having directional goals or horizon goals where you say, “One year from now, I'm going to be healthier than I am. I'm going to have better social skills than I have. I'm going to have more income than I have.” Every day, you do something to move towards that.
All of these directional goals are based on our basic instincts. Everybody wants to be healthy. Everybody wants to have a nice set of friends, social status, social validation, and a nice romantic relationship. As long as you're moving in the direction of those instincts, or you're letting those instincts guide your horizon goals, and you keep track of what you do every day to get there, that can help you keep everything in balance so you don't spin out of control and start to be manic.
When you were talking about instincts and the environment, one of the things that came up for me was how our environments continually change. With the advent of AI and automation, we're entering a new place where the rules are changing rapidly. It's hard to orient. What's your view as to how things are evolving, will evolve, and continue? Does any of this change your approach in any way? What would you advise other people to think about?
In a general recommendation, it's always the individual's responsibility to understand their environment as much as possible. After World War II, in the ‘50s, the American economy was booming because every factory in the world had been destroyed or hadn't been invented yet. You could stumble out of high school, wander down the street, get a factory job, and make enough money to support a family. You didn't ever have to think about what you were doing.
This has been the way humans have been living since the dawn of time. We've never had it forced upon us to think about our environment. We always were constrained and controlled by our environment, which now, if you do that, it's going to be disastrous. You have to do a lot of proactive thinking and proactive understanding of the environment and be responsible for your own livelihood, health, and well-being.
You have to do a lot of proactive thinking and understanding of the environment, as well as be responsible for your own livelihood and well-being.
That's hard because that's never taught by anything. You go through the school system, and you're taught to show up, do what you're told, take your paycheck, and go home, but you have to be proactive in understanding the environment. With the rapidly changing environment, there's going to be a lot of people who get left behind.
That's something that I think about a lot. Part of what we're doing with the Eye of Power idea is those who come in will be using the latest tools to help them, whatever the problem might be. Some people are jumping in. There are lots of people that are running with it. I'm taking an AI mastery course and learning all these different things. It's changing every day. The same tool that you used a few weeks ago is different now.
We're in the steep part of the curve at the moment. We'll reach a plateau where it's possible to figure things out. What you pointed to there, George, is important because part of our instinct is this, “I don't understand,” and that puts that thing that's different and troublesome at arm's length. I don't think participation is optional if you want to be competitive and productive in the modern environment.
If you want to be successful and earn ease in living, it's incumbent on the individual to proactively understand their skillset and the marketplace to always be looking for ways to maximize the interplay between their skillset and the marketplace and always looking for any way possible to improve their skillset. That includes all the advances in technology. If you can proactively do that, you can thrive in the coming changes. If you're not willing to do that, and a lot of people have that attitude, “Why should I do this unless I'm going to get this first?” that's the recipe for homelessness in the next several years.
This might be a turnoff of the turnpike here. We don't go too far, but what do you think happens? I don't know what the percentages will be. Pareto's rule tends to work out well. 20% of the people are going to run and produce 80% of the goods, and 80% of the people are going to be stuck with the rest of the 20%. That's not a tenable way to run a society or a world. Something's got to give.
It's always been that way. I watched a series of lectures once on the changes during the Middle Ages. The Pareto principle still played out during the Middle Ages. The top 20% made most of the wealth. The bottom 80% were showing up every day, trying their best, and hoping to get in that top 20%. Because the growth of the economy was slow enough, everybody could be part of the rising tide that lifts all shifts. Now, there's a disconnect. It's almost as if the top 20% or the top 10% are about to reach escape velocity from everybody else and leave everybody behind.
One thing that can skew the Pareto distribution is if the people at the top are actively rigging the system in their favor so that they can leave the people behind, which makes it even more imperative for people to take control of their own skillset and future. If you even blink, you'll be part of the group that gets left behind as the people in charge take over. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I see a lot of these big-name people who work for Google and all these other big companies that are saying, “AI is dangerous. We need to have some regulatory body to manage this.” That sends off my alarm bell because it seems like they want to use that as a backdoor to help control things even more than they already are.
I tend to think that way myself. The fact of the matter is that these tools are great democratizers. By their nature, they take away the barriers to entry. What you're pointing to would be, “We need a barrier to entry here.” They might not even think of it that way. That's the thing about these ideas. A person who believes that that's the right thing to do may not be thinking, “I need to slam the door on people behind me.” That's the way these ideas tend to work. They're self-serving. They have these organic elements and instincts. They have these survival instincts around ideas themselves. We fall into these cognitive traps.
There is an actual theory and evolutionary psychology. Back in the day, when we lived in small tribes of people, no one would ever think to lie to somebody else because if you lied to your tribal member, you'd get kicked out. When they discovered agriculture and people started living around people they'd never seen before, it became profitable to lie to somebody.
You could sell them a bag of corn that was half corn and half rocks, and you never saw them again. The people being lied to, as the theory goes, evolved the anti-lying intuition where they could suspect that this guy is not altogether congruent. The liars evolved an anti-lying strategy, and that was to first lie to themselves. They could more effectively lie to somebody else. That's where we are now.
A lot of the ideas we have are not what we think they are. These guys on top might not be blatantly saying, “We're going to run everything.” They might be thinking in terms of, “I need to help these people.” In reality, that's a self-serving false belief that will allow them to subconsciously take over everything.
I love that because it gives me a little different way to look at it. I always framed it thinking people believe what they want to believe. You gave a better framework or an expanded framework that says, “This is a strategy that, under these circumstances, pays off.” It helps us make sense of things of why things are.
We don't have to play a game of blame. We don't have to be resentful or guilty. We can acknowledge and move on with that discipline and responsibility you've already laid out, which is critical. We have these challenges with new tools and rifts. Do you think about or write about this in any way? How does this affect your strategy or your personal path going forward? How are you adjusting?
I’m always a fan of new technology. I've been looking at some AI tech I can use in my business. The act of discovering what's possible is making my brain go on fire about some of the new products that I can make with this new AI technology. In a lot of my books on income generation and careers, I say, “It's incumbent upon the person to always spend at least a portion of their time looking at new skills they could learn.”
If you were a factory worker in a factory, you wouldn't have to think about this because the factory owners would figure out the new technology. They would make sure that employees learned about the new technology. That would be that. If you're in charge of your own life, everybody should think as an entrepreneur, even if they work for a company, because if you don't think ahead of what's coming and don't proactively figure out what you need to do next before the pink slip comes in your mailbox, you're going to be left behind. New technology is always fascinating. It's always interesting. It all helps me to come up with all kinds of better ideas about how to do stuff and get the message out that people need to be as proactive as possible.
If you don’t think ahead of what’s coming before the next pink slip comes into your mailbox, you will be left behind.
Do you have some projects coming up that you're excited about?
I don't want to say too much because one of the things about being an entrepreneur is you're always worried about the competition. You always want to get these news tools. I have this new idea that I've been cooking for the past couple of months that I'm going to test out with a few early products. If it's successful, it's a whole new area that I can promote and create stuff in. I'm excited about it. I want to experiment, but I haven't found the time to create some experimental products with this experimental AI tech. If it works even half as good as I hope it will, it will be fantastic for my customers.
The thing that piqued my interest was a video I saw. People will have virtual companies where they don't have to do anything. They create a money machine that has automation that provides some service that is close to hands-off. There are some things that are getting close to that. I heard another person say, “There's going to be a $1 billion company soon that has three employees.” Those things are shocking to me. It's a new dawn when we think in those terms.
There are two ideas that I would offer to counter those future dreams. One is that every time money is exchanged or someone gets money for a business, there are two people on both sides of those things. There's a guy paying the money voluntarily to get something that he doesn't have that he wants. There's a person producing that thing.
You can use massive economies of scale with AI for one person to produce a lot of stuff and make a lot of money. That will still fall under the Pareto distribution because everybody will be trying to do that. 20% of the people might make a profit, but 80% of the people who will try this new technology that will let you run a company by yourself won't make much. That's still going to fall under the Pareto distribution.
There might be a few companies that are $1 billion companies that have been run by one guy, but that won't be the norm. For most people, most of these new tech things will be helpful at best and insignificant at worst. It's easy, interesting, and fascinating to dream about these magical futures where nobody has to do any work and everybody gets $1 billion. That's unrealistic because if nobody's doing any work, and everybody owns a $1 billion company, that means there are 8 billion people on Earth, each of whom owns a $1 billion company. That means each of the 8 billion people on Earth is somehow receiving a billion dollars from who?
If that's true, other people will have money to spend. I heard a statistic that it might be as high as 50%, but it's a high percentage of all the classical music that is performed, and all the revenue generated in classical music is generated by five composers. That's hundreds of years. It's been around a while. It seems like you're pointing to a similar thing. That part of how things work isn't about to change.
That's based on the Pareto distribution. The Pareto distribution has nothing to do with human nature. If you took all of the lakes in the United States, 20% of the lakes would've 80% of the water. It's a regular way that reality spreads itself out statistically. The Pareto distribution doesn't stop at that 20%. 20% of the people get 80% of the stuff, but 20% of the 20% get 80% of the 80%, 4% get 64%, or 20% of the 20% of the 20% get 80% of 80% of 80%, which is about 0.8%, get a little over 50%. It makes perfect sense for a statistic that says that five composers have 50% of the revenue for music because that's the way reality spreads itself out. It seems like it doesn't make sense because our monkey brains don't have an intuitive handle on statistics in large numbers.
Because it transfers to lakes and things that are not anthropomorphic, the idea there is, why are we upset about these distributions? Why do we say, “This person has all the luck?” We have this jealousy where if we're not in that obvious sticking out percentage that we say something is wrong or there's been some moral transgression.
That is down to what I mentioned before, which is instinct mismatch. We evolved to live in hunter-gatherer communities where everybody knew everybody. When the alpha came back dragging the woolly mammoth behind him, and his job was to share with everybody, it was the owner's or the leader's responsibility to share the wealth with everyone and redistribute the wealth.
If he was an alpha and went out and killed a woolly mammoth by himself and didn't share, that would set off all kinds of cheating instincts in everybody. That kept tribal cohesion. We have this tribal mindset that we apply in the modern world. If we see somebody who's making a lot of money and they're not helping us, it triggers that cheating instinct. That's another instinct that we need to understand and manage, but unfortunately, most people can't do that.
According to one of my favorite writers, Thomas Sowell, an economist, he points out that one of the most common political lies since the dawn of time is a politician says, “Your problems are not your fault. Your problems are those people's fault. Vote for me, and I'll fix it.” Leveraging that instinct that says they're cheating if they have more than I do.
That drags us down with all the dumb things we tend to do.
With social media and instant information, that idea has permeated through society. It's not my fault that my life sucks. It's somebody else's fault. I have to sit around and wait for someone to come and fix it, punish them, or take their stuff and give it to me.
Many assume they are not at fault for why their lives suck because of social media. Many just sit around and wait for someone to come and fix them.
That's in diametric opposition with what you were talking about earlier about discipline and responsibility, which is where you're going to find your joy there. As soon as you start putting on the victim hat, it ropes joy off from your life.
You're cutting off your own source of your greatest power.
Something to talk about a lot in the Power community is that whether you're a victim or not is beside the point.
It might be true that something's wrong and it's somebody else's fault, but it's not your responsibility to sit in that. It's your responsibility to fix it. Even from a strategic standpoint, the other person is not going to say they're sorry and come and fix your life. It's a horrible strategy to wait for somebody else to come and fix your life because nobody cares about your life as much as you do. If you are outsourcing your greatest power to somebody else who doesn't care about you, that's got to be the dumbest strategy in the world.
We could go down the political realm of ways, but that's not the focus of what we're talking about here. It's more the personal power rather than authority over others or what policy should be. These things do ring true at the individual level as well as at the societal level. It is important to look at these patterns that help us better understand what's real and what's not.
We've packed in a short amount of time, George. You put some serious knowledge bombs down here with discipline. I love the instinct mismatch. That's a great way to frame to try to understand ourselves better and give ourselves permission to say, “That's why I am having this reaction or feeling and why I did this dumb thing 200 times.” You can give yourself a little grace and enjoy the journey as you add skills and move on.
The instinct mismatch idea is my modernized understanding of Young's famous statement, “Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life, and you will call it fate.” A better description would be, “Unless you understand and manage your instincts, your life is going to be a train wreck.”
Thank you so much, George. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Tom. It was a great conversation.
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I'd like to thank George Hutton for being on the show. I enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you did. I got a lot out of it. Some of the things that I thought stood out were the daily discipline that he shared that allowed him to think in terms of productive minutes and sustained over time, led him to over a hundred books and counting, as well as a thriving business and a lot of insights that he was able to bring about for himself and others that he works with.
The instinct mismatch that he spoke about, take riffing off of some Jungian knowledge. We talk about that a lot in the Eye of Power. We talk about integrating the shadow, having the courage, and looking within and how important that is to unlock our full agency and potential. When we play games driven by instincts that no longer match our world, it's not a character flaw or fault. It's what's going to happen.
Unless we find ourselves exercising discipline and responsibility to further our skills and abilities in that new environment, which is changing all the time, we will cut ourselves off and have to learn many lessons the hard way. I thought the way that George, some of these things put a fresh perspective and a new spin on things that we talk a lot about in the Eye of Power. I'd like to thank George very much. Until next time. Thank you.