Manipulation

But he was short on details.

And Philip said that one has to be careful about people who tell you everything about their life because it's easy to move from information to manipulation.

And I mean, keep in mind, manipulation tactics are the same tactics or, or a lot of the same things that you use just teaching people.

You're just using them for a different purpose, right? Um, a manipulator, at the end of the day, is someone who thinks, is just wired this way, that the way for me to get what I want out of life is to make you do it for me, to make everyone else around me do it for me versus, you know, using the same, um, you know, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, um, to make sure people are doing what's, like, best for them or best for society or something.

Manipulator uses this for, for, uh, himself.

But yeah, so, um, punishing people when they're not doing something you want.

Um-

Today, we're talking about the book Harvard University Press, 2026, Captive Minds, A Study of Manipulation by Avishai Margulit and Asaf Sharon.

Welcome, gentlemen.

Happy to be here.

And from the get-go, it seemed to us that this was getting something right, but also something wrong.

Both truth and rationality play an important role in unpacking how manipulation works, but they are not the essence of manipulation.

Manipulation does not have to be rational, nor does it have to be deceptive.

And the way that we wanted to approach it is by looking at manipulation not as a primarily as a kind of interpersonal kind of relationship or influence, but more as a social or political phenomenon.

And when you think about it in that context, the notion of power, not in the Foucauldian sense, but in the very common sense, I would even say Hobbesian sense, of the ability to influence what other people do, Manipulation becomes a central means of exerting power over other people.