Q: Who knows you better than you know yourself? A: Everyone who is successfully milking you.

I wrote the DISC of PUA this morning:

The skank every idiot is chasing is Is. The demi-skanks those idiots actually have a shot at are Si. A quick tell? Posture.

I hate PUA. I think casual, indiscriminate sex is the express lane to self-destruction. Need proof? Abre los ojos. But I happened to think of it because my friend George Kellas reminded me that in 2014 I presented DISC-my-way to a conference room full of PUA “coaches” and their self-selected victims.

Real-world consequences?

Zero, as far as I can tell.

Mostly they learned nothing. A few, including my young friend, learned the lingo, but so far it’s just been so much Klingon even to them: An arcane notation system useful, mainly, it would seem, for talking to me. 😉

I’m happy for those few, anyway, and they’ll catch up eventually. My failure to make any bigger dent in the universe is sad, but, understanding DISC the way I do, it’s not hard to see why people deeply invested in lifelong habituated errors might not want to make any changes.

Especially, I might add, if one’s income depends on people being weak and stupid – blinded to the people all around them, with each one invisible to all the others.

I wrote this, too, this morning:

Q: Who knows you better than you know yourself?

A: Everyone who is successfully milking you.

I don’t know that there is anyone who understands DISC the way I do. I’m not special, mind you, just early; reality was here all along. But there are many, many people who understand the why of DISC without even suspecting the existence of the what – of 12 easily-discernible categories of habituated errors (where any choice is erroneous if you cannot defend it rationally in terms of your pursuit of continuous lifelong self-adoration) that will tell you, with a high degree of accuracy, how and why people will make the choices they make.

What do we call those people – the folks who seem to read minds? Carneys, if we can recognize them. We might use adjectives like lucky or smooth or charming or manipulative if we don’t realize we are being worked by skilled semi-professional con-men. And that’s what makes a con-man: An experience-borne ‘feel’ for your greed bone, the seed of larceny that was cultivated in you long ago by a smirking relative.

Con-men go for the loot, but you have other currencies that other manipulators in your life compete for – almost certainly without your fully-conscious awareness. Accordingly, that’s the second-best reason to master my way of thinking: To figure out what the people around you are up to. You’ll be surprised to discover who is not your friend – and who really is.

This is the note from George that wound me up this morning:

> Do you think it’s possible to see traits of DISC or personality disorders in people’s faces?

Both. All the time. Practice.

Personality disorder is a reach, but evidences of it, if it’s there, should be obvious all the time. DISC is very simple, from all of body language, not just facial expression.

C’s are nerdy, should be easy.
I’s are showy; the color red is a huge tell.
S’s are schlubbly – poorer posture, e.g.
D’s are hustling; their movements tell on them.

People are who they are any time their behavior is unaffected – when they’re not consciously faking behavior. They cannot hide their DISC predispositions, since they are what predispose them to choose one way and not the other three ways.

Watch someone, then approach to check your work. Rinse and repeat – all the time. You’ll have the dominant DISC attribute at a glance in no time, and you’ll start to be able to see the tells of the subdominant traits.

Carneys, con-men, sociopaths and other schnorrers all know this – not the rigor or the notation system but the tells. When I see you approaching me, I know exactly how to get your money, if I want it, and you have no defenses against me. You advertise everything that you are and everything that matters to you. You are duck who comes to me pre-plucked.

Was I another man, I would share none of this with you – for FREE for goodness’ sakes! – instead using what I’ve discovered to fleece you and everyone of everything you have. In that quest, I would have four insuperable advantages:

1. I know what makes you tick.

2. You don’t.

3. You insist no one can know what I know.

4. You have no plans to learn better.

Hence: How stupid am I? I’m trying to treat you when all you want is for me to cheat you, just like everyone else is already doing.

In that same presentation in Tampa in 2014, I did the DISC of poker:

If you don’t know Sklansky, you can’t read that chart – but you have no business playing poker, anyway. But the Cautious strategy, Tight-Aggressive, is pure Sklansky poker. With big-bankroll no-bluff perfect-performance bots – in other words, playing nothing but the odds, no guile – Tight-Aggressive will always grind the other three strategies to bankruptcy.

So how does an Id like Gus Hansen win so much? In the second place, the con-men running ESPN don’t show you when he loses, but what’s more important is in the first place: Hansen wins by putting Ci’s on tilt. They can’t stand it that a buffoon like that should ever win at anything, so they lose and lose and lose to him. Sound familiar?

The actual secret to winning at poker is noodling out how to put the other guy – the whale at your table, ideally – in a graduated state of being on tilt. It’s called ‘steaming.’ Steaming players make steady mistakes – and the other’s guy’s mistakes are the entire source of any profits in poker.

What if you worked out how to consistently put the other guy on tilt? Any other guy? Any game, any contest, any conflict, anywhere? What if you knew how to suss out how to make anyone weep uncontrollably with just a few seemingly-innocuous questions?

I quit playing poker – and I became very scrupulous in the way I sell. I was never a con-man, but I am a closer. By the time I wrote Nine empathies, I had quit doing everything that had been giving me unearned advantages with other people all my life. Instead, I set about trying to teach people what I know.

I might be Diogenes squared: I know every man is honest, and I’m showing those who will listen how to turn on their own lamps.

Why? What’s in it for me? Self-adoration, of course, the cardinal value of the truly-human life. And that’s the best reason to master DISC my way: To be better at being who you are – the person you’ve always wanted to be – fully, openly and without self-betrayal.

So who knows you better than you know yourself?

After I’m done with you – if we could ever get started – no one will, but you will have a far better understanding of everyone around you.