Allan Pease is an Australian body language expert and author or co-author of fifteen books that are bestsellers in over 100 countries, are translated into 55 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. Allan runs his own company «Pease», conducts numerous training seminars all over the world. He is the Member of the Royal Society, Australian Institute of Management and International Writers Association. Allan visited Kyiv for a business forum where he was one of the speakers, and we decided to invite him for a Special Air with Yaroslav Lodygin.

– Allan, how would you describe your purpose of visiting Kyiv? Is it your first time here?

– It would be probably my tenth time in fifteen years.

– Tenth time?

– Yeah, I come regularly. And probably half of that time the venue seemed to be in Odessa. Odessa is a wonderful conference place. I have made it for probably three years.

– I did read your books when I was a teenager. And they really helped me a lot when I needed to navigate fast in the world of adult people. That’s why I’d like to start with words of gratitude. Thanks to you and to your wife. How is she, by the way?

– Spasibo vam! Yeah, good, she’s great. She travels with me maybe half of the time. And I have six kids and grandkids, so usually a combination or one of those would travel with me. My eldest daughter traveled with me on this trip. She went back to Australia, cause she had to take the kids to school.

– One of your most famous books is a Bible of language of gestures. Few years ago you’ve made an update to this book. What changed in this area? How has the language of gestures changed throughout this time?

– When I wrote an original book, Yaroslav, in 1976, there were 156 pages. At that time it was setting a cutting technology. This is before computers. All research was done by going to Africa or by going to Borneo and recording it all, talking to people that’d been to that all. Or going to libraries that had no computers. The latest edition of it has 410 pages, three times as much. Body language is a reflection of your emotions. Whatever emotion you are likely to feel, that be said, angry, confident, distressed, nervous, anxious, is likely to be revealed in gestures, expressions, movements and so on. So reading a body language is very simply the art of reading a person’s emotional condition. And then matching it up with what you hear they say, and circumstances under which it happens. When you go into this, it allows you to put together what could be going on under their mind. The difference we have in a new book is that we put together science and technology, there were brain-scans, so we could look inside the brain, we could look inside the body to see what’s going on under core of these things. Plus, there are more things we’d noticed, that we wouldn’t have noticed in 1976 – even these basics of body language that have been around since humans became humans, about hundreds of thousands of years or more. And many of our gestures and behaviors are similar to primates and chimps, which gives an interesting question about origins of some of these things. So the application of such changes, for example, what changed in the last thirty years is that women in the workforce have become a big thing. When I wrote an original body language book there wasn’t a lot dealing with women in business, cause there were not any women in business. Now there are more than 50 percent. Women are taking on major gestures. So that change has also added to applications, because 60 or 80 percent of all the impact you are making face-to-face, like you and I now, might stand non-verbally. How successful you might be in anything in life that involves people? That’s going to be determined by how well you can read this. In other words, how well you can sell yourself to another person, get them to feel comfortable. Because if somebody buys you, they are likely to buy what goes with you. Now say, your ability to say: am I making a good impression or am I diving? These are subjects most people never think about, yet if you look at the history of human beings, body language has been for most of their existence the only language, like for other animals.

– Which moves exactly did women who are now more involved in business process take from men?

– What I have seen I wouldn’t have seen a generation ago. Women wearing trousers, wearing pants – that’s a new thing, which gives women a range of gestures and maneuvers that they couldn’t do before. For example, a woman can sit with her knees apart. She can put a leg over an arm of a chair like a dominant male might do. And historically women didn’t have a right to do this, unless you are wearing pants you can do it, and if she does do it, she’s likely to be perceived as being aggressive or masculine, which can have some positive applications and also can have some negative ones. It’s interesting talking about technology. When I think back to 1976 when I wrote the first book, one of the things I knew from television films is that people started to tell lies. Intentional lies. One of the things that happen to most cultures except for Chinese (Chinese people don’t do this) is that hand to face and hand to nose contact increases dramatically when people are not telling the truth. If someone scratches their nose, when it’s too cold or they got an itchy nose, you are locked to jump to an unconscious conclusion that you don’t trust them, you don’t know why, it’s just something about them. Maybe cause they just touched their nose, maybe cause it’s cold. So you can rate gestures to groups and put these things together. Imagine body language like words in a sentence – it’s like an actual language. One word in any language can have maybe 6 to 10 meanings. If I say one word, for example, “dressing”: it can mean something you can do with food, it can mean clothing, it can mean a bandage, it can mean giving somebody a dressing down, dressing is something you can do with horses – these are five meanings for the word “dressing”. If I’d just said the one word “dressing”, you don’t really know what it means. But if I said to you, “I’m from my shower, I was dressing”, – now you know exactly what it means. Body language has sentences, has phrases, has punctuation, that say, you need at least three words to make a sentence. For example, if you got me a proposal, and I looked at it, I touched my nose and I said: “Yaroslav, it looks really good”. And I’m rubbing my nose, would you believe me?

– No!

– Well, nobody does, that’s the point! But it’s one degree here outside the studio and it’s pretty cold. Maybe I have an itchy nose. There are too many possibilities. It doesn’t matter why I did it. You have decided that you are going to watch every move I make. You just decided that there’s something suspicious about this guy. So I’ve created a bad impression of myself by having a cold. I looked at your proposal and I rubbed my eyes just a little and said: “It looks good, and I’m sure we can do business (as I rub my nose). I’ll get back to you (as I cross my arms) next Monday (as I close my eyes and shake my head). You are watching this. Anybody who sees that would say: “This guy is lying!” Well you asked me how do you know he’s lying, most people would just say: “Oh, I can just see”. We think that most of these gestures appeared to be inborn, but many of them appear within six minutes of baby being born. It looks at your face: if you are making expressions with a face, it will copy those expressions. And this copying is a form of a survival instinct.

– How would you explain the importance of a body language in some cultures where it’s much more bigger, much more developed than in other cultures, for example, Italian body language is very rich, very useful and they use it as an alternative language even excluding some verbal communications, but in other cultures the importance of body language is not that strong?

– Well, it’s not that is not that strong, it’s not that is recognized or well known about. For example, when we are talking about Italians, they are very expressive in their movements, let’s relate those to the British, who are the complete opposite, they stand very still, they use words. The higher the vocabulary a person has, usually the less gestures he tends to use. And the reverse is true. The lower the vocabulary the person has, the more gestures he uses. Because they are using the gestures to make up for the fact of not having the words. Now the difference with Italians, and I’d start with Italians at an early stage. Their gestures tend to be grosser, bigger; they put their hands wider in the air. And they touch. Their touching is a different thing compared to British. British are one of the world’s non-touching races. You just don’t touch a British person when you are talking otherwise the might think you are either aggressive or trying to be intimate. Whereas with Italians, if you don’t touch an Italian when you are talking, he might think you don’t like him. That’s why they are kissing you, and petting you, and hugging you, and talking. Those are the sober ones too. In Ukraine I noticed you are not as placid as British, and you are more towards the Italians. The Ukrainians would touch me and hug me if they want to ask me whether I’d like any more to drink.

– Did you notice any specific gestures here in Ukraine? Something that stroke your eye?

– Well, in Ukraine it’s a generational one. The older the generation, the more likely that they have more specific gestures. For example, I did a film about three years ago. We went to forty-four different cultures, and we filmed kids under the age of twelve all playing and interacting. And we put all these clips together, in 10 to 15-sec per clip for each culture. And we showed these clips with the sound off. And we asked people where was this filmed, who were these people and their cultures. And most people watching it didn’t know, if it wasn’t identified by buildings, which we tried to avoid and put kids in those situations, which couldn’t help to identify where it was. We did it mostly inside of the buildings. Most of the viewers did not know where those kids were from. Most of them thought those kids were coming from America. That’s because under age twelve kids are all on mobile phones, or on computers, or video games and are put together by using American gestures and cultures. The new generation, Gen Z, who is under 22, in Ukraine, the same as everywhere else, they are behaving like Americans because of the television and video games. But if you look at their father or grandfather you won’t see the same behavior, because they never had that influence. They are less flamboyant with their gestures, they are more static with their faces, what I call the “Soviet Face”, they don’t have much expression. Those under 22 are more like Americans and Australians. They are showing more expressions face-to-face, more hand gestures, unlike the elder generation. Practically all developed countries in the world will have American behavior, because of an American television, movies and video games.

– Well, will it help to unify the world if everyone understands and communicates with a body language in the same way, even if it’s America?

– Exactly! The basics of body language are expressions of emotions. People in every country have the same emotions. That’d be said, love, hate, grief, confidence, so on. Therefore, using the same gestures to express the same basics. What I predict would happen within a generation – all local things would disappear. The only countries that would hang on the rules of their origin are the Arab countries, cause I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. That’s because their kids don’t watch television, they don’t play those video games, they don’t get involved in all of these things. They tend to have a lot of local gestures that don’t exist anywhere else. For the rest of us it would disappear. But the advantage of that if you are dealing with American, with roughly the same gestures, you are able to figure out what’s going on. At the same moment, if you are doing a face-to-face interview or a Skype call with an Indian or with somebody, say, from the Central Africa, it’s hard to figure out what they are talking about. Because there are gestures you might not recognize, at least, some of them. So the advantage is that you will be able to communicate, but disadvantage is that local traditional gestures that existed from eighty to a hundred thousand years ago would all be gone.

– What tradition would you miss the most? Maybe some of the weird ones?

– I’ll give you a good example. The “OK” gesture. If you and I were talking, Yaroslav, about something and I showed you that signal, what would you read behind this?

– Well, it’s OK.

– Yeah, it’s OK. In most countries now in the world it’s OK, but going back 40 years ago when I first documented this, it had 17 meanings depending on where you came from. If you were French, for example, it meant zero, because the French count zero with their finger and it goes one on their thumb, two three, four, five. So their “five” goes with a little finger. How do you count from one to five? You’ve got one on your index finger, so your thumb matches five. We did an experiment, where we got British people to go to French hotels and order two drinks with their index and middle fingers, and they’d be given three drinks. Because the French were seeing three not two. So the body language was over-adding what the French person actually heard. Because 60 to 80 percent of the volume pack is done non-verbally. And if you had to present yourself to a new person, the way you move is forming up to 90 percent of the impression. The difference is that 30 years ago in most countries it didn’t matter if people liked you much at all, because if somebody had a product or service, only they had that product or service and you couldn’t get it anywhere else, so you had to buy out that person. It didn’t matter how they treated you, even if they treated you badly. But today whatever service or product you’ve got, everybody else has got one, at a similar price. Therefore, whom do you give your money, your business your love and your trust to? We give it to people we like, who we feel comfortable with. I had this experience about three months ago in Australia, I went to buy a television set for my office and I went to an electrical shop. It was a SONY, it was about 500 dollars roughly, and I know that in every other electrical store there’s the same TV-set for the same price. They didn’t treat me very well, they didn’t even noticed me, nobody talked to me, they kind of dismissed me. So I got in my car and I drove 5 km away, went to the same electrical store and bought the same TV for the same price, and the guy at that place was very friendly. You can no longer think what kind of business you are in – you are in a people business first, and you just happen to be trading this product or service.

– People from politics or diplomacy evaluate body language very much, they are very into it. They regard it as very important, it plays a very important role during some international meetings and so on. Now we have this flamboyant politician Donald Trump. He’s known for his extraordinary body language. Especially his handshakes – long, strong handshakes. What would you say about this man looking at his body language?

– Well, when you are shaking hands for the first time you’ve got one to three “gut” feelings. You may think: “This is going to go well”, or you may think they are threatening you or intimidating. Or you feel they are a little bit soft and you can probably control it. It has to do with two things: the angle of the hand and the amount of strength you put through it. When you and I met today at the front, we shook our hands.

– That what I learned from your book, by the way.

– Well, you are a cheater, Yaroslav. You are using my hand-material against me.

– After your book, when somebody gives me a handshake, I’m always trying to control it.

– Sure, the more dominant the person is, the more they try to control you, the more their hand is likely to be on top. As you may have read, this has something to learn from a Roman history that is more than two thousand years old. It was done between Roman leaders. And it was dealing with an original position, which converted to a modern handshake. You keep your palm absolutely straight, not facing the floor, facing out, which is submissive and you give the same pressure they are giving you, so if you’ve got nine out of ten in strength and they are giving you six they have to back off these 30 percent, otherwise, instantly they will take a dislike to you.

– Returning to Donald Trump. His publicly observed handshakes are too long. They’ve become weird. What kind of motivation could it be behind doing such weird handshakes?

– He’s a dominant character. I did an analysis of Donald Trump, back to when he was a kid. For all his life he had his hand completely on top of the handshake. And his father was the same. Power placement, control and domination have been the large parts of the Trumps family approach to people. In the old days you could probably do that more, but today we don’t usually vote for people who are controlling and aggressive. When he first got into politics, in his first year, he was using this dominant handshake on all the world leaders. In fact, when he met with Abe – the Prime-Minister of Japan, he gave him a hand on top and shook it so hardly, that he pulled the guy out of a seat. It was terrible. The world leaders all wondered what is up to this. Before you pull the shoulder out of the guy, you have to have a And the one guy, who had that strategy, was the Canadian Prime-Minister – Justin Trudeau. When he met Trump, he put his hand out first. Donald Trump grabbed his hand, what should he do – he put his left hand on top of the Trump’s. And he held it.

– It was also strange!

– It did look strange! What he said: “You are not going control me!” And a second thing what Trump did recently – he met Macron. Macron is a little guy, and this is a disadvantage with a big guy like Trump. Well, Trump went forward with a big top handshake, and he squeezed Macron’s hand so tight – I’ve got that in films which we show on seminars – that all the blood and fingerprints have left on the Trump’s hand – that is from the amount of power Macron has put through this handshake. There are only two occasions that I’ve seen Donald Trump presenting his hand with a palm facing directly up – was it submissive like a dog rolling over or showing it’s right. It did it with Kim Jong-un in South Korea. What he did with him was quite remarkable, because all presidents tried to buy out Kim Jong-un, threatening him, or tried to get rid of him. And all he keeps doing is firing rockets at the rest of us. Donald Trump turned up for lunch and made the guy to sign the document agreeing to never fire a rocket again. Whether he does or doesn’t – not a question, he agreed to do it and so far he hasn’t. In fact, he loves Donald Trump so much, he said the other day, that he wants his hairdresser to shape his hair to look like Donald Trump.

– It’s a bad idea! He’s got such a good hair now.

– Yeah, Kim Jong-un has better hair than Donald Trump now. So when he met Kim Jong-un Donald Trump presented his hand, if you look on the Internet, Trump had his palm up, and Kim Jong-un got his hand on top. Kim Jong-un was like a kid in a Lolly Shop. He just thought: «This is wonderful! I’m having a great time!» The second person he would do this was Putin. Trump got his hand up, he presented it, and let Putin put his hand on top, and then Trump put his hand on top of the Putin’s. Because Trump knew that if he’d put his hand on top of the Putin’s, then the Russian papers would be writing the next day «Donald Trump’s a bully». And this way they wrote «Donald Trump is a great guy». Even though people and writers are not consciously aware of what they saw. It just said: «Yeah, he’s letting the boss be in charge». So here are the only two noticeable moments when he had a palm up position.

– But do you think he’s intentionally using his hand-shaking strategy depending on his political goals?

– In the first year he didn’t. It just came aggressive and rough. He didn’t have any advisors like me. “I have a big business, why should I bother?” Which is a disastrous way to go, for politicians especially. Because we vote for people we like, not for people who are aggressive. So now he’s softening self up. He’s got a lot easier on the eye, but he’s still as aggressive as he ever was. So if you soften your body language and people don’t mind looking at you, you can say tough stuff. But if you look tough and you talk tough, like George W. Bush, no one’s gonna like you at all, even if what you are saying is a good idea.

– But from the other side. Just a few minutes ago you’ve said that you consult and you work with politicians in terms of body language. In an essence, it’s an attempt to lie to voters.

– Of course, it is. It’s their job.

– What should we as voters do? Very important presidential elections are coming up here next month. As voters, what should we look at, when we are looking at politicians in terms of body language, to not be fooled

– The reality is that, Yaroslav, if you were to tell every person you meet every day and every time exactly what you were thinking about…

– I’m trying to do that!

– …you’d be in a hospital, you’d be sued! You’d have no love life. Your love life would be over. If you said everybody you meet: “Hey, you’ve got a big nose, nice to see you! I hate your breath!” You don’t say that! So we lie. We say “That dress suits you!” even though we think she looks like a bag of cats heading down the river. I did a study on lie, I wrote a book about lie that’s called «Why Men Lie?» It counted that about 70 to 80 percent of all conversations between humans is a lie. Not necessarily malicious lie to get people to get an advantage. For example, a woman says to you: «Yaroslav, how do you like my hairstyle?» She’s just been for three hours in a hairdressing. And you think it’s like hurricane just hit it. What would you say?

– Well, it’s a good point! Well done!

– You’d lie! I’d lie too. Because if you don’t, you are gonna be in big trouble.

– Actually, it depends on what kind of person is in front of me. If it’s my best friend or a really close friend, I’d say the truth.

– But you’d still be frightened when you are saying it!

– Yeah, a little bit shaky. Well, I’ll go through questions from our listeners and viewers. “Why do managers prefer to lie in a context of instincts?” We just discussed it in terms of politicians, but what’s about business people and managers?

– Managers are kind of half-politicians, and they have to make everybody feel good. Politicians are everywhere and senior managers are now as well. On courses I run everywhere including the one I’m doing here in Kyiv we have a lot of managers who come, cause they want to make a good impression. They want to stand up and look like they should be followed. The people listen to them, give an opportunity to say «yes» and follow their language. If they don’t look good, people won’t follow. It doesn’t matter how much you know, how much experienced you are – people don’t feel comfortable with you, they don’t want to follow your language. Well, 78 percent of people know that politicians lie, but they still believe them. Everybody keeps asking me, how do you know if a politician lies. They don’t necessarily give you an opinion – they give you a party policy. Cause it’s just their job – to reflect party policy. Whether they agree with it or not. Our trick as voters is to try to separate what they really believe in versus what they are saying. Those who are really good at putting themselves across are Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, for example. Even Obama was pretty good at this. When you look at them, you don’t really know what their opinion is. They just look like they are not aggressive they are friendly people, who are saying stuff. And managers to a large extent have only to do a half of that. They only have to say things that you expect them to say. To show leadership, to show courage. And you must have have gestures and behaviors that reflect that. If you are asking someone to step forward, take the plunge and do it, overcome fear, if you are not showing it in your body language you cannot convince someone to do it.

– Another question: “Maybe that’s better to avoid gestures rather than to be misunderstood”?

– Then you’d probably be Putin here.

– Putin?

– Yeah, he’s got no gestures at all.

– Really?

– The Russians really have what I call a “Soviet Face”, no reaction. When you put it on an international TV, it scares people. Showing your teeth, as a human, is perceived by other humans as submissive and friendly, cause we have herbivore teeth. If a dog smiles at you, you know you are in trouble, cause it’s got attack teeth. We don’t have attack teeth, we have herbivore teeth, so when we show them, people say “I like you”. Because that gesture shows that we are not threatening.

– I really want to spend some time discussing your legacy in books, about this “men versus women” etc. But finishing with body language, what should a man do to self-analyze himself in terms of effectiveness or correctness of his own body language. Is there any self-test?

– Yes, there is. I just want to finish answering this last question on showing no gestures. If you show no gestures, you may as well not be there, it’s easier to send a text or give a call. Because 60 to 80 percent of face-to-face communication is the way you look, appear and behave. If it’s gone, it’s much harder to be convincing on the radio, for example, on TV. Cause on TV you have full range of things to work on. You don’t have to think intensively on your words and tone of voice. So how do you practice to learn to do this? All of this again about the “Body Language” – the book which was sold about 20 million copies in Russia. It’s been a blockbuster in a former USSR – it was bigger than anywhere else.

– That’s explained by the thing you’ve told before, what you called the “Soviet Face”. People had to learn.

– Yeah, I think so. In the army in the Soviet time, if you were smiling, you’d be locked up. Because you clearly aren’t being serious about your job. Still we have this new generation wearing a “Soviet Face” in situations where you need to be friendly, you really can’t do a “Soviet Face” and do well with people anymore. You have to practice. Watch television with a sound off, when all you have is body language – that’s what deaf people do. With the sound off on TV you can try it on yourself pretty quickly exactly what’s going on, because 60 to 80 percent of all the messages is the way people look and behave. Take one gesture – when people touch their nose. Say yourself: “This week I’m going to watch people touching their nose”, next week I’ll watch for people crossing their arms on their chest. Isolate one gesture at a time. When you’d be able to identify, you’ll see people doing this gesture everywhere. In a context, as what I said before, of standing out in front of your studio, Yaroslav, with their arms crossed, you’d probably determine that they are cold. If they are face-to-face with you, and you are trying to put on an idea or proposal, and they sit back in their chair, cross their arms on their chest, do slow-blinking with their eyes. What can you determine in that context? – They are not buying what’s going on. Try yourself to look at things. When a student goes to a party, and he sits there on his own all night, is he having the best time? In a restaurant. I love sitting in restaurants and watch couples. You can work out pretty quickly who is with whom. Who’s masquerading an affair, who’s sick to death of each other, who are newly weds, who are lovers, who are odd.

– Most of the time, especially at a current time, people make one and only gesture. They bend their neck over smartphones.

– Well, you are right. This creates a problem for people under the age of thirty. Which are the Gen Z and Millennials. The brain study shows that the Millennials especially at the end of their 22 have 20 percent less connections in a brain that deal with recognizing emotions and the face. Because they are looking at the screen all the time. They are different to their parents and their grandparents who were raised looking at people’s faces, working out with somebody else’s emotions. If you are talking to a 21-year-old today, that 21-year-old is less likely than his parents or grandparents to know if you are upset, angry, in love, crazy, confident – they can’t recognize your emotions. They are likely to be seen more disconnected, which in fact they are. The key is that with your mobile phone you lose a practice to look at the faces, and it’s hard for a new generation, cause they don’t do it. They all sit together and send each other texts around the table.

– Moving forward, I’d like to talk about men and women concepts that you developed with your wife, and you’ve been together since 1993, and you have two kids.

– Six kids.

– Six? I’ve seen only two on a photograph.

– Four of them are adults, so they have their own kids. Two are younger ones, and they travel a lot. So I have six kids and nine grandkids.

– So you can be a good consultant both on a modern family and a traditional one.

– Yeah, I’ve got my own social experiment, at my own home.

– The books you wrote, they divided men and women quite differently. Even in the names of your books, which are quite long.

– Well, I’ve got the longest name in history which is «Why Men Don’t Listen And Women Can’t Read Maps?» A lot of journals said, in print they don’t even have enough space to put it all in one line. Long titles now became very popular. The book title says what the book’s about. Barbara and I when we were married for three years it was like a Hollywood movie. And new love lasts between three to nine months, and it’s driven by hormones, when you refuse to say the other person negative parts of liabilities. And after nine months you wakeup and say “Whose the hell is this leg in my bed?” The first threat is for nine-months relationships to break up, then it goes 3 years and 5 years – these are key points. We were crazy in love for three years, but we got to the point after three years, as many couples do, “can’t live with them, can’t live without them”, which is a pretty bad place to be. So we decided rather getting divorced – we never considered divorce – murder – yes, but not divorce. We wrote a list of all things about each other that we just couldn’t stand live with. So we figured out that if we had a good strategy, we could have a good chance of making our marriage work. The book was about differences, because we are living in a politically correct world today. It’s fashionable to get around pretending that men and women think the same way, want the same things, have the same reactions. And many young people believe this. This is a disaster! Because if you had any experience with men or women, an opposite sex, you know that they are not the same. They think differently, not better or worse – they are just different. This is because governments and political parties confuse equality with difference. Equality is a political and legal concept. As men and women, it says, we can do whatever we like, we can choose whatever we want – that is equality. Even though I don’t believe it still exists, cause women are underpaid in many countries of the world for the same job as men. Difference is a science question where we start poking around with your head, your brain. It doesn’t work the same way. Man’s and woman’s brain functions very differently to each other which is good because you don’t want to wake up in the morning and look at you, you don’t want to listen to you, you want something that is different. You want something that is stimulating, exciting, and not too different, otherwise it’s going to break up. As someone’s said the opposites are really attractive. Yes, they are. But they have a higher separation rate as well, higher divorce rate. Brain scans show that we are dramatically different. When I speak about this subject with government departments and on the seminars, which I did many of, they will not let me show these brain scans. Because it conflicts with their concept with equality. I say, this is not equality, this is difference. If you do not understand that men and women think differently, your life is going to be hell. When you understand that they think differently and manage them within these two concepts, then your life is going to be absolutely terrific, and you’ll be appealing to a 100 percent of the population.

– Is it getting more difficult for you to publish books on such divisions in a contemporary world, where there’s some kind of crisis of self-identification? Third, fourth, fifth sexes are discovered. Where in some places, very progressive ones, in some campuses, you need to wear some badges that mark if you are “he” or “she”, or “they”. Is it harder for you to keep going with this? Is there any pressure from the publishers?

– Well, not from the publishers. The publishers print books, they love it, because it’s controversial. If it’s controversial it’s more likely to sell and go well. Do you know this culture where it’s hard to talk about this? About the differences between men and women?

– Well, Americans?

– Americans! They are very difficult, because they don’t want to acknowledge this difference. These are sexes, you cannot say that men can be reverse and be in parallel with women.

– Is it different in Australia?

– It’s similar to America and in the UK it’s the same, all the Western countries generally. Certainly, in Western Europe. This political correctness and this drive to try to pretend that men and women are the same. And what it causes are enormous divorce rates, separation. Because young men now say «now when we are all the same, we don’t have to take women to dinner, bar, buy them roses, give them Champagne. And women say I don’t have to tell him what I think, he should be able to figure it out. Men have no idea what women are thinking. They just don’t know. And this hasn’t changed for about a hundred thousand years. The only thing that has changed is a political climate in which we live, which is causing enormous stress for men and for women. Because nobody knows how to sell, convince, persuade, and live with an opposite sex. If you know how to do that your life is going to be be sweet, if you don’t – your life is going to be hell.

– One of the biggest parts of your concept is setting up goals and the importance of it. When you are telling about your fight with cancer, when you are telling about business issues. I think in your family, in your relationships with your partner, you are setting up goals as well. In a few words, for those who are not familiar with your concepts, why is it THAT important?

– Well, it is. And in fact the concepts you are talking about, were written in my latest book «The Answer», which came out here in Ukraine recently. We’d never talked about these concepts before, particularly cancer. Nobody knew that I had a cancer.

– Yes, I read it on a Facebook-page.

– Yes, when I was 47 I was given three years to live. I had terminal cancer, prostate. When it happens, then you know your life expectancy is very low. I’m 68 now. And they are still telling two or three years to live, overall they are telling me this for 21 years. Right back to where it started and they told me my chances of survival are very small, unless I took another round of chemotherapy, another round of radiation, cancer treatment. Then they were going to cut me, poison me or burn me. These are three options for cancer. I said I didn’t want to do it, and they said your chances of living 20 percent of guys like you are going to die the next year, 20 percent – the year after, and the rest – in a third year. And I said to this very famous specialist: “Has anybody survived of my age?” And he said «Yes, 3 percent will be able to live till 85 and die from heart attack». I said “Ok, I want to be in that group, please give me that group”. And this guy looked at me and said “This is not about choosing a group”. I said: “Why not?” Like, someone’s going to be in this 3 percent. If you take a hundred people in the same condition, the same age, and 97 died in three years and three didn’t. Clearly, those three would be doing something that the other 97 didn’t do. So I spent two years of my life researching and finding these 3 percent and what they did. I became an organic, meditating, vegetarian, vegan, who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and don’t suffer stress which I did before. Because stress is a trigger for over 80 percent of all cancer now, cause it’s only small percent of cancer is genetic one. Most of it we can control. The best thing to do with a cancer is don’t get it. Because we studied some parts of the brain, specifically using MRI scans in my male-female relationship books (on the seminars I show these scans and how they work), which I can’t do for the government because they are supposed to be the same now. We discovered a part of the brain, which has always been there but nobody really knew in medical terms what to do with it. Exploring that part, we found out that whatever car you drive, the minute you decided to get that car, suddenly you see that car everywhere in Kyiv. So you decided to get a Hyundai, Ford, whatever it might be, suddenly every second driver seems to be having that car. Everybody had this experience. We had a woman on one of our meetings recently she said, she has just discovered she was pregnant and she arrived in my town for a seminar. And she said I can’t believe how many pregnant women there are in town, and people are pushing babies everywhere, and breastfeeding babies. There were many more before she arrived and after. What happens is that specific part of the brain will identify in your environment the things relative to your goals. So provided you follow recent performula, the results of it are very dramatic and changing people’s lives seriously. One guy quit the bank and was living in a tent in Ethiopia, helping kids who were suffering from AIDs. Most people don’t know what they look for. They ask «how»: “how would I become a CEO”, “how can I have a house on the beach in Spain”, “how can I become a millionaire”, “how can I become a great painter”. They start thinking about “how”. Once you start thinking about “how” – it’s over, nothing’s going to happen. So what we teach people is «What» – what is it that you want to have, do and become. Forget «how», if you think about how, it’s finished. All you need to think about is what. The minute you think about “what”, your brain will search an environment with all the answers and show you “how”. If you start with “how” nothing’s going to happen. Most people now start up with great goals and in two or three days they all get depressed because they don’t know “how”. You don’t have to know how, you going to know what. And most people don’t start with a “what”. This one of the keys on seminars of showing people “how do you find out what your what is”. We already know that 87 percent of people in anywhere in any job don’t like their job. They’d rather be in some place else. Seven to eight out of twenty people anywhere here in Kyiv, just outside your window, Yaroslav, don’t like their job, they’d rather be somewhere else. They don’t know where somewhere else is or don’t know how to find it. So if you know how to program that part of the brain to find your “what”, it will send you there. So as a result of these seminars people do quit their jobs or do get rid of their marriages. Which is, in a good way.

– Ladies and Gentlemen that was Allan Pease. Thank you very much for coming and have a good time in Kyiv.

– Spasibo!

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