Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Today on Super Normalize, we're unpacking something truly groundbreaking.
A revolutionary new lens on the understanding of human behavior called Septimics Hierarchies of Human Phenomena. This has been written by Jim Marshall and it's a study of the the underlying deep patterns of everything we do personally and socially, either as an individual or as a group. It allows you to actually predict outcomes and master your life and life path with clarity.
Jim Marshall, who is a polymathic, polymathic, poly polythmic polymathic scholar whose decades long journey through rigorous academia and hands on human development led him to invent this original methodology. Blending psychology, philosophy, history, science and even natural phenomena, Jim's work unpacks complex human motivations across 35 finely tuned scales designed not only for self betterment, but also to empower parents, raising resilient children, leaders managing organizations, counselors guiding their clients, and anyone who wants the keys to evolve faster. In this episode we'll explore Jim's story, how he crafted this monumental toolkit. Please plus practical applications that can transform how we relate to ourselves and others in the everyday. If you've ever felt puzzled why people act so differently or struggle to find predictable ways to improve yourself or your relationships, this conversation will open up fresh pathways.
So stay tuned as Jim shares powerful insights from his book Septemics that could change how you navigate life's complex game. On with the show.
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Welcome to Super Normalized Jim Marshall. Jim, you are the creator of Septemics, which is from my understanding, a helpful path to map reality in such a way to give yourself and maybe all the people around you, maybe even an unfair advantage.
It's so clear that I want to know more about it and I'm glad that we got in contact. So welcome to the show.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Thanks, C.J. glad to meet you.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah, good to meet you too, Jim. So you've dedicated over 50,000 hours to studying human potential and development. What initially sparked your passion for this field and how did it guide you to create success?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Okay, first of all, I should tell you that I have no memory whatsoever of a time when I was not intensely interested in learning everything taught in every university.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Of course that's impossible. But the drive was there and that's what's significant.
So I was impelled forward to learn from earliest childhood.
And I started school when I was three. And I've been engaged in education one way or another my entire life to this very day.
So eventually that led me to becoming a polymathic intellectual.
And that mindset positioned me to recognize Septemics when I stumbled across it.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Okay, so how, how did you stumble across it?
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Okay, well, the story really begins when I was accepted into engineering school at the age of 16.
Now of course, at the time, I thought, like all the other engineering students, that I was going to be engineering physical things like airfoils and motors and electrons. But by the time I had my bachelor's degree, it was clear to me that I wanted to engineer the human psyche.
Because it is the area of greatest unknown, of greatest mystery, and more importantly, it is the area in which we as a race are failing miserably.
Yeah, 95% of the problems in industrialized society are because people don't understand. People don't understand the husband, don't understand the wife, don't understand the son, don't understand the boss, etc. This is vast.
There's actually very little human understanding.
There's a tiny like 1%.
And this book solves that problem across 35 axes. So to make a long story short, I had a long career as a human development engineer, working one on one with hundreds of clients of every description for accumulatively many thousands of hours.
All of my clients improved as a result of our interaction, right? Brought to bear engineering approach, engineering tactics, engineering strategies, engineering devices, engineering theories, etc. Etc.
And the clients loved it. But I started to notice, incidentally, that I could predict the outcome of the session. Now, I never told that to anyone, but I made notes.
And as the years rolled by, it became obvious to me that the client was at a specific level on a specific scale that I had previously observed and recorded.
And as a result of our interaction, he would go up to the next level on that scale.
Now that happened thousands and thousands of times, I don't know how many thousands of times a 40 year period. Sometimes it happened 5, 6, 7 times in one session. And every time that occurred it verified my hypothesis. Because the clients knew absolutely nothing about how I was doing, what I was doing, what I was thinking, what I was recording, et cetera, et cetera. All they knew was they came to me with a problem, an unwanted condition or whatever, and I helped them resolve it. That's all they knew.
So the fact that there was this obvious repetitive pattern from people who knew nothing whatsoever about it is very strong scientific information.
Moreover, I would see it in the session, and then I would go outside the session to the supermarket or the bank and I would see people and they would manifest exactly the same phenomena.
People I didn't know, people I didn't speak to they would just manifest it. There it was, it's just like, you know, once you know what a chrysanthemum looks like, right, you walk by, oh, there's a chrysanthemum. That's what it was like.
So by 1995, I had about 32 scales that I had simply observed and recorded.
Nobody else was involved in this at all.
Also around that same time, I was pondering a difficult client and I was looking at this scale that I had that had six levels on it that I knew by then was correct. And somehow I couldn't get that client to resolve through that scale.
Then I realized, ah, this client is at a level on that scale that I had not previously observed.
In other words, it was actually a seven level scale. I just hadn't seen that phenomenon before. So as soon as I saw what it was, I knew instantly where to insert it. That was not a question. And as soon as I inserted it, that six level scale went to a seven level scale and went from being a line, which is what a scale is, to a plane, meaning a whole body of data with all of these intersecting, interlocking mathematical phenomena. Now, I should tell you, I took 26 semesters of math and loved every minute of it.
Math is a very real thing to me. It's not just something you do on paper with a pencil. I see it when it occurs, I see it. So I looked at this and I said, this thing is full of math.
Because you have to realize the whole point of math is that you start with a formula or an equation and you coax data out of it and you get down to the end and you get something new that is helpful to you. That is exactly how Einstein found E equals MC squared.
He used the laws of mathematics. He and he went down and at some point he got E equals MC squared. He said, wait a minute, this is big. So that's sort of what happened here. Because when you see data jump out at you that you're not looking for, that is a mathematical phenomenon. That is what happens in math.
So I then thought, huh, I wonder how many of these other scales that I have are actually seven level scales that had simply not been developed all the way.
Because you have to realize I wasn't developing anything, stumbled upon it. I was just helping with science and making notes. So then I, knowing what I was looking for, I inspected all of these scales and in a short period of time, each of them went to a seventh level and each of them manifested mathematically. So I now had, in a short period of time, 32, seven level scales, all about human phenomena that all had mathematics embedded in them.
Having gone to school for 28 years, I said to myself, I never saw anything like this before. This looks like a new subject to me, one that could really help people. So then I thought, wait a minute, I could go from helping people by the hundreds, which is what I had been doing as a human development engineer, to helping people by the millions if I put this in a book and get it out so everybody can have it.
So I'm going to have to write a book.
So the first draft was finished in December of 95, and I sent it out immediately in a transcript form to colleagues of mine, all of whom had graduate degrees in a variety of subjects.
And they all responded very positively.
They had different responses, but distinctly positive responses. And that told me, this is exactly what I think it is, a new subject that people will get.
This is not obscure. So I then spent the next 25 years of my life writing the book.
Because you have to realize first I had to discover the phenomena. And I pretty much already told you how that occurred, although I did find three more scales while I was writing the book.
Then I had to take this data and I had to use it to craft a workable philosophic system. Now, as an engineer, like all engineers, I'm only interested in results and facts, to engineering, opinions and beliefs are utterly irrelevant. You can't say whoops in engineering. It's not allowed.
Right? You can't have the plane fall out of the sky and you say whoops.
It's got to be right. It's got to work the first time, every time for everybody.
And we have all of these practices embedded in engineering for many decades to make sure that occurs. So it took 20 years for me to craft a workable philosophic system that would work for everybody all the time.
But the most time consuming aspect of this was expressing it in a way that would make sense to the average reader.
Because from the beginning, my intent was to give this to the people of Earth so they could lead better lives.
And that takes a lot of work. This is an 86,000 word book.
So I literally had to go word by word.
How are people going to get this? Is this the right word?
Should I use red? Should I use scarlet? Should I use crimson? You know, that type of thing for years and years and years.
So then I told you the first draft was released in 95.
So after I got that feedback from these brilliant colleagues of mine, I started working on the book. I rewrote the whole book and then I released it to colleagues and associates and students and clients and such. And I got feedback. And then I took that feedback and rewrote it again.
So there were at least a half a dozen rewrites of this book.
And the whole point was for me to make it clear to people so that they could understand this.
And I know I succeeded at that because some version of this book has now existed for almost 30 years. And I have been watching people get this. They get it. You don't need a college degree to understand this because of the way I crafted it.
So some guy opens the book, never saw it before, never spoke to me. He looks at, he says, ah, this makes sense. Yeah, I see it is scale of control or whatever. People get this, and the reason they get it is it's natural law.
So these scales are true in the same way that Newton's three laws of motion are true in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem is true.
Now, this is coming from a person who comes from a hard science background. So several people have said to me, what book is your book like? That's a reasonable question, right? They don't know anything about it. And I have to tell them in all candor, I don't think there's ever been a book like this before, at least on Earth.
But every One of these 35 scales is expressed in what you could call a table or a spreadsheet that is comparable to the periodic table of elements.
But instead of the table being for matter, it's for these 35 subjects of human affairs. So each of these 35 subjects has its own periodic table.
So, you know, I'm sure you can recall when you saw the periodic table in your youth, right? You looked at it and you said, oh, this makes sense.
Hydrogen is one, helium is two, lithium is three, and it goes down horizontally and vertically. You know, makes a lot of sense.
And it's because it's natural law.
So when Mendeleev constructed, I think there were 79 known elements. Well, now we have something like 125. And we just keep adding them in because it works, the paradigm works.
Okay, so what I should do now is I should tell you the names or tell you a listeners, because you may already have heard this, the names of the 35 scales, because then you will know exactly what subject matter is addressed in the book. May I do that?
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I've got one question though, before we jump into that.
How did you come up with seven.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: I didn't come up with it.
I just found it.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: You just found it. Okay. Because I'm just curious as to why it would be seven.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: And I told you I had this six level scale that I knew was correct. Right. But I couldn't get it to work on this one client. And then I was, ah, there's another level here. And when I inserted was a 7 and it manifested mathematically, then I knew I was into something big. Because when mathematics comes in, you're into scientific truth. So I didn't come up with seven. Seven came up with me.
Okay.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: No, I just thought I'd ask because I was like.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: The largest section of the book is called Introduction to Subtemics. And in there there's a section called why 7?
It's on my website.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: And if you read that, I explain it's a mathematical explanation. You probably read it already, why seven? It tells you exactly in mathematical and scientific terms, why seven?
So that kind of answers your question, although it depersonalizes it from me.
So it's embedded in nature. So now let me tell you the names of these scales because this really tells you a lot. Okay? So of the 35 scales, 24 of them are individual scales and 11 of them are group scales. These are the individual scales.
The Scale of Basic Purposes, the Scale of Personal Influence, the Scale of Choice, the Scale of Permeation, the Scale of Thought, the Scale of Identity, the Scale of Evaluation, the Scale of Motivation, the Scale of Control, the Scale of Stopping, the Scale of Scholarship, the Scale of Literacy, the Scale of Mental Ability, the Scale of Memory, the Scale of Spiritual Identity, the Scale of Mental Deletion, the Scale of Aberration, the Scale of Physical Fitness, the Scale of Justification, the Scale of Belief, the Scale of Equanimity, the Scale of Attack, the Scale of Conflict, and the Scale of Reaction. And these are the group scales. The Scale of Relationships, the Scale of Life Spheres, the Scale of Government, the Scale of Civilization, the Scale of Survival, the Scale of Management, the Scale of Exchange, the Scale of Communication, the Scale of Allegiance, the Scale of Sexuality, and the Scale of Politics.
Any one of these scales by itself could dramatically improve the life of the reader. And let me give you a simple example of how that might work.
I mentioned the scale of motivation.
One of the most important things to know about anybody is the person's motivation. Why is this person doing this? Right? This goes on all the time, right?
Like a girl says, why is this guy talking to me? See, does he want to get money out of me? Does he want to date from me, Is he just a lonely person? See, what's the motive?
That's how the police solve crimes. So you could ask yourself, look, using this scale, remember, there's only seven levels, so it's not hard to figure out, what is my wife's motivation toward me? What is my brother's motivation toward me? What is my uncle's motivation toward me? What is my pastor's motivation toward me? And you could do this for every person you know or have ever known.
Now, every time you get a correct answer, meaning you spot it accurately, you'll have a realization. You'll say, ah, that's my mother's motivation. No wonder she acts like that.
See, it's an insight.
Then you could reverse the vector and say, what is my motivation toward Fred? What is my motivation toward Joe? What is my motivation toward Mary? What is my motivation toward Eloise, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and use it another 200, 300, 400, 500 times that way.
So by the time you finish this exercise, you will have had something like 500 or 600 insights and the whole subject of motivation for you will have been resolved because you'll know everyone's motivation toward you and your motivation toward them. That is a big step forward in understanding people.
But realize there are 35 scales.
So this is 1 35th of what you can do with just a simple approach.
I'm not saying that's the best way to use this. That's just a way to understand how this works.
Now let me give you a simple analogy, okay? So people understand why this works and how this is valuable.
I've been into gardening since I was a boy, so maybe you are too. Maybe you say, oh, you like garden? Why don't you come to my house and look at my garden?
So I show up at CJ's house, right? And I don't even know if you have a garden. But if you do, you take me into your garden and I say, oh, CJ has hydrangeas, tulips, forget me nots, roses, bougainvillea, begonias, irises.
Now the reason I can analyze it that way is because I know a lot about flowers. But if you bring some three year old kid into your garden, that little kid is going to see and smell exactly what I saw and smelled. But all the kid can say is, these are pretty and they smell nice. That's all he knows.
He doesn't know what a chrysanthemum is.
Now, most adults are like that little kid regarding people.
They don't know what they're looking at because they don't have this data.
So that is why more than 50% of the people who get married in the United States get divorced.
Clearly they did not understand the person or that wouldn't have happened.
They either wouldn't have married them at all or they would have married them and lived happily ever after.
Okay? And that's why all over the world throughout history, people elect morons and criminals to run the governments, because they don't understand them.
Okay? So this book solves that across 35 axes, meaning you have 35 ways of slicing it. So if you can't slice it with this knife, you slice it with this knife. So this is really useful to people. And let me give you an example. Let's say you've been dating some girl for three years and you're talking about getting married, right? That's a big step. Wouldn't it make sense to ask, why does this girl want to marry me? I mean, isn't that a reasonable question?
I'm not saying to ask the woman. I'm saying, look in the book. Open it up to the book scale of motivation.
There are only seven levels, so it's not a big menu.
Well, you know her because you've been hanging out with her for three years. Once you study the chapter, you're going to spot it.
And so maybe you say, oh, I know why she wants to arm me. She loves me. That's level one. The highest level, the highest motivation of all is you do things out of love.
But maybe that doesn't happen.
Maybe what happens is you say, you know, now that I think about this, I think this woman wants to marry me because I drive a Lamborghini, I have a 60 foot yacht, I fly my own Learjet, I live in a $15 million condo and I have $10 million in the bank.
See, that's a different motivation. That's level four money.
I'm not saying it's good or it's bad. It's just what it is.
Now, what you do with that is entirely up to you.
You might look at it and say, okay, well, this is not the first woman who wanted to marry me for my money. But this one is pretty smart, funny, congenial, gracious, easy to get along with. So I'm going to marry her anyway. And you may live happily ever after, knowing what our motivation is, but maybe that doesn't happen. Maybe you're not that type of a person. Maybe you're the type of person who says, you know, I want somebody who loves me for myself, not for my Lamborghini.
And you break up with her because you're looking for a wife.
Now, in that latter category, you might make the mistake of thinking that you would be upset about that and you would be wrong. You will not. You'll be relieved.
You'll say, thank goodness I figured this out now before I wound up owing her $15,000 a month in alimony. Now, when you go forward looking for a mate elsewhere, you're a little smarter, you're a little wiser, maybe you don't even mention that you have a Lamborghini.
See, so that's just a simple example of how this works.
And so that could have saved you a fantastic amount of money, time, anxiety, heartache, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just by you are able to make these calculations and know what you're dealing with.
That's what this is about.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: It's an all encompassing method to understanding your life, by the sound of it.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: Well, life, I would say, is too big a word, because life includes things like medical science and automobile mechanisms and things. And it doesn't apply to those, it applies to people. It's definitely a broad way of understanding people, all people.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: So it's more about personal dynamics and psychometrics and how we interrelate.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: Yeah, and you have to realize that you have individual skills and group skills. So when you get into group subtemics, you're talking on a big scale.
You know, where is this government on this scale?
That's a big issue.
You know, there's a single paragraph in my book where I talk about the scale of government, where I go through the entire history of the United States in one paragraph and tell what level of government it was at at the time, and when it changed to the next one until it deteriorated into what it is today. That's how precise this is. This is not vague. This is useful because it's accurate, it's precise, and it's specific.
Well, that's what you get from an engineer. This is human phenomena filtered through the mind of an engineer.
Now, Isaac Newton famously shined a beam of white light through a prism, and what emerged on the other side was the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Now, that rainbow is always red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. It never varies. That is what these scales are like. So I took something like basic purposes, I put it through the prism, I got the seven phenomena, and I wrote them down.
So this is a spectrum. So for each one of these 35 axes we have the full spectrum of possibility, from the highest to the lowest.
So you have the lowest possible human debris up to the highest saint. So, for example, the scale of basic purposes, the highest basic purpose is transcendence.
That's what you find in people like Jesus, Gautama, Yogananda.
That's their basic purpose, to transcend. They're not interested in all this other stuff. And at the bottom, you find Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.
10 in between is the rest of us. And that's true for every scale.
Every person is somewhere on every scale.
There's no question as to whether or not it applies. The question is, what level is this person at?
So it's like a blood pressure. You have a blood pressure. I don't know what it is.
But, you know, every time you go to a doctor, it doesn't matter what's wrong with you. You have a rash, your nose is running, your knees hurt. They always take their blood pressure, right? Every time you know why, they know you have it and they don't know what it is.
So they take three minutes and they write it down. That's what this is like.
You are somewhere on every one of these scales.
And if you take the time to study, you will find where you are. And every time you do, you'll have a realization. Oh, that explains why I couldn't get along with Gertrude 20 years ago when we were dating.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: So to put it another way, it sounds like your scales are exactly the frequency of change between people. So when people raise in frequency, they attract, obviously, people of that frequency, and the wash of being at that frequency goes down into their lives and the lives of others.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: Okay, that's a good way to look at it.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Some of your readers have said that they've noted fascinating connections that you draw between natural phenomena and at play in your framework. Can you highlight that in relation to human behavior?
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
Human behavior occurs according to natural phenomena.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: This is just like.
Just like the Fibonacci sequence.
And for those of you who might not know, there are many organisms that arrange themselves according to specific numbers, which we now call Fibonacci numbers, named after the mathematician Fibonacci. So if you take a sunflower and you count the seeds one way, you get one Fibonacci number. And if you count them the other way, you get another Fibonacci number. Well, how does that work? These creatures don't know anything about math.
And this is true in many cases. Pine cones are the same way.
Well, Fibonacci looked at this, and he Said, there's something here. There must be some phenomenon, something that makes sense with this. And he reverse engineered what we now call the Fibonacci Sequence out of those numbers. In other words, he asked the question, what formula, if I had it, would explain all these numbers?
And he gave us the Fibonacci Sequence, which enables us to calculate these numbers to infinity if we want.
So this is a perfect example of how mathematics is embedded in nature.
Humans are a part of nature, these natural phenomena. That is why this works, and that is why this is not hard to learn.
It's not counterintuitive because it's natural phenomena. So, like, the first time you saw the Pythagorean Theorem, you were maybe, what? 12, 13, 14, right. And you looked at it in geometry. Oh, this makes sense. I see. You know, it doesn't take too much to see A squared plus B squared equals C squared or whatever form you want to put it in. And now you've got it. You know, the Pythagorean Theorem was true before Pythagoras discovered it and will still be true even after humans are extinct because it's embedded in the fabric of the universe. That is what these scales are. I just stumbled across them because of the nature of my work and because of my polymathic skills. I was able to see this for what it was.
I don't think someone who is not a polymath could have discovered this. It's too broad, it's too deep, it goes too far afield.
So you would have to have a hard science background to figure this out, and you would also have to be a polymath.
Now, in case you don't know, there are very few polymaths now because our education system militates against them. Our whole education system, especially graduate school, is about specialization.
So I have a friend who has a master's degree in engineering from mit.
He knows more engineering than I do, but I know more about everything else.
I have another friend who has a PhD in biochemistry. He knows more about biochemistry than I do, but I know more about everything else, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of this goes into being a polymath and having that state of mind where all the subjects merge together. In my mind, they're not separate anymore. When I studied them, they were separate. But as the years rolled by, they combined themselves in my mind.
So there's no separation for me between law and mathematics and engineering and military science and music.
It's all one thing. And that's Why I was able to spot this.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: Fascinating.
Curious.
For people who are entrepreneurs or business leaders out there who are tuning in today, what practical tools from septemics would you like to highlight that assists with managing teams or navigates.
Helps to navigate organizational change?
[00:33:44] Speaker B: Okay, so you didn't really state it this way, but what you're asking is all about people, right? You're dealing with people.
Not only the people in your organization, your competitors, your suppliers, the people who write rules for you in Washington. They're people, right?
And as I said, the main problem is not understanding people. So you have a guy, he's got a doctorate in computer science, and he's the CEO of this corporation, right? He knows computers, but he doesn't understand why his partner is suddenly not doing his work, showing up late, becoming argumentative, giving him a hard time. This is a problem for this guy, right? So he gets out the septemics book and he analyzes him.
And then he can say to him, alex, come over here. Let me show you this. See? And he picks out the one that he knows is relevant to this guy. He says, look at this.
And the guy will look at it. Let's say it's the scale of relationships because the guy's having trouble with his wife and it's bleeding over into his work life, right? So he looks at it and says, you mean there's a scale of relationships?
He says, yeah. This relationship that you're having all this trouble with, where is it on the scale?
Guaranteed, Alex is going to want to know that because this is opening a door for him.
So he's going to look at it.
Now, what's going to happen is in a matter of seconds, he will find a bracket. He will say something like, well, I can see right away we're definitely not at level one, two, or three, because that's the top of the scale. We're having a lot of trouble.
I says, okay, so you got it down to 4, 5, 6, 7. Go ahead and read it, and then you can get it. Exactly. So he reads it and he says, well, now that I read it, I can see we're at level five. No wonder we're having a lot of trouble. And that explains why when I do this, she does that.
See, he's having an insight. He's already starting to unravel this.
And then the guy says to him, well, you know, you could improve this relationship by moving it from level five up to level four. The guy says, you can?
Yeah. It tells you in the book how to do that. He says, let's do it. Wait a minute. Now, before you do that, let me show you something else. And he turns to the scale of sexuality. Well, that's relevant because it's the guy's wife. So he says, take a look at this. He says, you mean there's a scale of sexuality?
He says, yeah, you don't have to tell me if you don't want. But for your own illumination, where are you on the scale?
Guaranteed, he's going to want to know that.
So he's going to look at it and he's going to find a bracket. Maybe 25 seconds, he'll say, you know what? I can see level 6 and 7 have nothing to do with me, so it's got to be one through five. Okay, fine, go ahead and read it and you can get it. Exactly. So he reads it. He oh, well, I can see him at level four. And I'll have a realization that explains why this, this, this, this and that. That, that, that.
See, he's having a cognition or an epiphany or whatever you want to describe it as about his own sexuality.
So then he might also say, and you know, my wife is at level five. And that's our problem, because if you look at that scale, some of these levels are distinctly incompatible.
If you have one person at five and one person at four, you cannot possibly have a sexual relationship.
So then he might say, well, I'm going to show her this and see if I can get her to move from five up to four. Or he might say, you know what?
I'm not going to waste any more time in this woman going to get somebody new. That's up to him. That's not for us to say. The point is he's out of that mess and now his work goes back to normal because he's not getting drunk because his wife is driving him crazy.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: See, more awareness changes everything, right?
[00:37:47] Speaker B: But also, you have to realize there is a scale of management which goes through the seven necessary steps to managing anything of any size, all the way from a hot dog stand up to Walmart. And it's very specific.
So anybody in business is going to eat that right up.
So there's probably millions of guys who will look at that and say, now I see why I went out of business with that, why we didn't have this level. It was absent. See, so septemic thinking is very specific.
There's no generality. There's no scale that works best for everybody. There's no one size fits all. The whole point of it is that one size does not fit all.
You have seven sizes in 35AXI.
So you find the subject or the scale that you think is relevant and then you assess to find the level, whether it's yourself or another. So let's say you have trouble with your mother in law, right?
Common problem. You say she's always trying to control us, you know, we're grown people, she's telling us what we should eat, what we should rent, blah blah. So you look at the scale of control, right?
That's a no brainer. And when you look at, you'll see it's got seven levels and you'll spot her because you know her, because she's been driving you crazy for five years.
Ah, she's at level six.
That's what most people call a control freak.
No wonder she does X, Y and Z. Now I understand now there's probably nothing you can do about to change that.
You could give her a copy of the book and say look at this. But not too many mother in laws are going to be open to that.
But if she is, that's fine. She could figure it out herself, you know, and maybe she could move up from level five, level six to level five and then she wouldn't behave that way.
She still wouldn't be excellent on control, but she would be up one level.
So, but you understand her better now. So most people are high in some scales and low in other scales. That is the norm.
Fewer than 1% is at or near the top of all the scales and something like 4% is at or near the bottom of all the scales. Most of us are high in some and low on others.
And I can give you examples if you want. But the way this works is let's say you meet somebody, say oh, this is a terrific person, she's high in this scale and this scale and this scale and. But she's probably not going to be high in every scale.
She's going to have a few clinkers in there.
So you can assess this. When this person gets a little weird, you can say what's going on? Ah, scale of attack.
She's low on the scale of attack.
That explains why. Ba ba da ba ba ba ba da ba.
So you deal with it. In other words, you can tiptoe around it.
I had a girlfriend once, gorgeous, smart, rich.
We had a ball together, right?
Well she was one of these people who, if she got a spider in her house, she would not kill that spider. She had to catch it and put it in the garden, right?
So One day she got. She lived in this wooded area, this expense wooded area.
So she got a mouse in her house.
She said, would you help me? I don't know what to do.
So I killed the mouse and I got rid of it.
But that made me realize that she was low on the scale of attack.
You see, when you are low on the scale of attack, there are seven different versions of it, but you're not going to attack. You're not going to be willing to attack. You're not going to be able to attack, depending on what level it is.
So she was clearly low on the scale of attack.
I wasn't.
Okay. I was high on the scale of attack.
So anybody who's not at level two, at least on the scale of attack, cannot be a policeman or in the military, especially anything like the marines or special Forces.
They can't do it because they're not willing to attack.
Okay?
It doesn't mean you're going to. It doesn't mean you want to. It means you're willing to. So some guy pulls a gun on a cop, the cop shoots him. That's his job.
See?
So that tells you a lot. If you are recruiting people for the police or the military, you need to find out where they are in that scale.
Now, it's true. It's true. There are some places in the Navy or the Air Force where you could have sort of a desk job. You're typing, you know, or you're cleaning the galley. You know, there are a few little jobs like that where somebody who's low in the skill of attack actually could do it.
But the truth is, when push comes to shove and you're attacked, what's the guy gonna do?
You know, they're gonna expect him to get a gun and get on the wall and start shooting, and he's not gonna be able to do that. So that's just a little. Little tiny vignette. How this works.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: I'm curious how the mouse killing went in her mind.
Was she offended by it because she had a low scale of attack and you could do it?
[00:43:45] Speaker B: Oh, well, she was happy.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: I was happy. Oh, good.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: Okay. You know.
[00:43:49] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm just wondering if it worked. Direction. So she.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Muscular, macho, masculine guy, you know, and she was. She knew that in. In many ways. And so she sort of knew that I would take care of it, and I did.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: Can you break down?
[00:44:08] Speaker B: I could. I could imagine. I could imagine if she was with some nerdy guy, it'd say, oh, no, I don't want to do It. I'm afraid it's a mouse, you know.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: Oh, that's the end of it.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: I actually had a girlfriend, another girlfriend who was absolutely gorgeous and we never really got together with. And I don't know why, it was one of those weird things. But she had a couple of boyfriends before me and after me who were like really dorky skinny guys with glasses, you know, And I just couldn't figure out this. This woman, like looked like she stepped out of a magazine. Why is she with these skinny, dorky guys?
Well, I never figured it out. Maybe it has something to do with her father or something. Who knows what it is, you know, and whereas, you know, I kind of expected her to really have a relationship with me and it never really happened. So. So, you know, if those guys had to deal with this mouse, I don't know, you know, how that would have worked out.
You know, maybe they. Maybe they would have said, let's call animal control.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: Oh, God.
Can you break down some common misunderstandings about human behavior that your system clarifies?
[00:45:26] Speaker B: Well, I think the biggest misunderstanding is that it's a sort of vague, touchy feely, intuitive thing that nobody really can figure out that is completely wrong.
It is scientific and precise. And I have figured it out. And I have been watching people use this for 30 years. People continually tell me, thank you, this, takes this, this, this and this. And they give me a whole story about how problem they have with their kids and how it fixed it up. You know, I'm continually barraged by this without asking. I don't go around asking people, but, oh, you're the septemic guy. I'm so glad I got to speak to you because it straightened out my marriage, you know, so it's because it's precise. Let me explain something.
I already know for a fact that this book, this material, undercuts depression and anxiety. And I'll tell you how. When I was working as human development engineer, one of the data that I developed was that a person never knows why he's upset.
Never.
He sometimes thinks he knows why he's upset and he's always wrong.
So all I would do is come in and use my biofeedback and et cetera and get him to realize what really why he was upset. And he would have a big realization and this upset would stop.
The condition didn't change, but he would stop being upset just like that, in a millisecond.
Oh, now I see he's not upset anymore.
So that's going from a generality to A specific, isn't it? Before it was a miasma.
Now it's this one little thing.
It's a very similar thing with anxiety. Anxiety comes from a problem.
A person cannot have a problem if he knows all about it.
When a person has a problem, it's because there are unknowns in it. So let's say a guy is an American, he's being audited by the irs.
Boy, is that a reason to worry, right? You talk to anybody who's been ordered by the irs, they get ulcers, they can't sleep, they're worried. You know why there are all these unknowns? What are they going to ask me? Do I have all the receipts? Are they going to accept the receipts I have? Did they know about that bank account? You see? Which guy are they going to sign to me? See, it's full of unknowns.
If there were no unknowns, he would be fine about it. And that's one of the reasons why I almost never get upset about anything.
I almost never worry about anything, because for me, it's about knowledge. I get the data, I know what I'm talking about.
And so I'm not going to get upset, which leads eventually to depression, and I'm not going to worry, which leads eventually to anxiety. I don't have those things.
When I was young, I did.
And furthermore, I should say, in my youth, this data did not exist. So of course I didn't have it. And I made the same stupid mistakes that everybody else makes.
But now that I have this data, that absolutely does not happen, cannot happen, will not happen. And I'll give you a real life example. I'm a single guy.
So about eight months ago, I met this gorgeous blonde. She looked like a movie star, perfectly dressed, her hair was beautiful. Everything, you know.
So we were very attracted to one another. And so now we're going through the usual getting to know you routine.
What kind of movies do you like? What kind of books do you read? What do you like to do in your spare time? You know, there's a lot of that stuff right early in the relationship.
So we had at least a half a dozen conversations along those lines. Oh, really?
You don't fish? Oh, that's interesting. I don't fish either. You know, stuff like that.
So we're having this conversation and I noticed, oh, she's low on this scale. So then I said, okay. So we had another conversation, Ah, she's low on this other scale.
And then we had another conversation, ah, she's low on this other scale. Wait a Minute, this is a downscale person.
You know, there are downscale persons.
These are the people who cause all the trouble.
And I said to myself, wait a minute.
Do I really want to get involved with this? No.
And I just said to her, pass.
No, thanks.
She was shocked, shocked, visibly shocked because she was so beautiful and glamorous then I'm sure that's the first time that ever happened to her, because most guys would have jumped right in, they don't know about this stuff, and then they would have wound up having a train wreck three months or six months later.
I wound up saying, boy, am I glad I'm out of that relationship. Well, for me, I saved myself a lot of time, a lot of trouble, a lot of aggravation, a lot of money, etc. Etc. By figuring this out ahead of time. Because I know this material just by talking to her.
So that's pretty much how my life goes.
You know, some people, most people are high on some skills and low on other skills. So I mentioned that before. So, like, I have a friend who's a wonderful person, smart, successful, funny, you know, you name it. Great guy.
But there's one thing about him. He's a political extremist.
As I explain in that chapter, those are the people who cause all the trouble. Political extremists are ones who attempt assassinations, are the ones who fix elections, are the ones who bribe government officials, are the ones who become terrorists, etc. Etc. They're extremists. Right.
So when he gets on his rant, whatever it is, Donald Trump doesn't matter what it is, I say, how's your son?
Oh, he's great. He's living in Washington now. Really? Did he buy a house? Yeah. Tell me about her. Often. And that's how you preserve the relationship.
So, like, you know, I have three sisters. Two of them are conservatives and one's a liberal. There is no overlap between the 1 and the 2.
Their beliefs are mutually exclusive. I get along great with all of them. You know why? I just don't let it become an issue. I tiptoe around it, you know, Like, I had a sister say, oh, I'm so sad that Hillary Clinton wasn't elected. I cried, you know.
Really? Okay, well, how's your son? What's he doing? Oh, well, he's okay. He's got a new girlfriend.
That's it. We're out of it.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: Ground the conversation in something that's relatable.
[00:52:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So this preserves the relationship.
The other thing is, you have to realize this is very specific.
So I gave you the example before about a woman who wants to marry you for your money.
Well, let's say you own an automobile dealership and you're looking for a new salesman.
Well, this salesman is going to get a cut of every car he sells, right? He gets a percentage.
So you interview this guy and it comes out in the conversation, especially if you know what you're looking for, that he's a money motivated person.
That's what you want.
Hire him.
You see?
Same level, same scale, different application.
You don't want your wife that way, but you want your salesman that way.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Of course, you see, so this makes sense.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: This is really useful stuff.
You just have to understand it.
And you find the scale that you think applies and you use it. I had a client recently and you know, he was having a lot of trouble with a lot of things. And so I sort of started asking. Turns out this is a guy who never gets enough sleep, is like chronically sleep deprived. Well, that's going to sabotage everything. No wonder he can't remember anything, you see?
So I said, look, you need to handle this. You need. That's the scale of, of physical fitness, okay? He's at level 5 on the scale of physical fitness. I was able to isolate that and point that out and tell him, you have to fix that.
No, whether he does or doesn't, that's up to him. You know, I'm not. I don't have a magic wand.
But I did him a favor by pointing that out and telling him, you need to fix this thing and then all these other things will go away.
I actually had a client many years ago, A woman who owned her own business, was very wealthy, dynamic person, right?
This person had not had what I would call a good night's sleep in 30 years. So she brings me in as human development engineer to straighten her out.
When I found that out, I got very busy with rehabilitating her physically and I got her sleeping.
I said, look, if you want to do this work for me, you have to be playing with a full deck. You can't do this on four hours of sleep.
Well, I got. She was sleeping long periods of time. I got her taking supplements, which she had never done. I got her working out, which. And she blossomed.
And then we went into all of this other esoteric work. She was able to handle it. So again, using the right scale, you know, bringing to bear the thing that's relevant.
[00:55:58] Speaker A: I'm curious. When you work with people, do you ask a series of questions to Find out which scale to be looking at. Or is it just something that comes to you intuitively straight away?
[00:56:06] Speaker B: Well, six, one, half a dozen or the other. I mean, it depends on how well I know the person.
If I have a client, the first thing I do is conduct a long interview and ask questions. How to get along with your wife, how to get along with your mother, you know, how is your work life? A lot of questions, right? And this person is attached to my biofeedback device as this is going on. So I'm seeing the responses.
See, you say husband, nothing. You say father, nothing. You say boyfriend, bing get a big response. Or biofeedback. Okay, now we know where to look. So we get in a session. I say, tell me about your boyfriend, Bing, same reaction on the biofeedback, and we're off to the races.
I'm not wasting any time on these other things because they're inert.
Now, they might not remain inert. They might come alive later on, but that gets into a whole technical substance about how the mind works in layers.
But the point is, by the time I finish the interview, I know a lot about this person.
Not merely what he says to me, but how it reacts on the biofeedback.
Or it might be somebody who I've been hanging out with for years, like my acupuncturist.
I. I see her like two or three times a week for like two years.
So I really know this person. Now, I don't need to ask any questions. I know she's at this level, on this scale. She's at this level. And I'm not telling her that you should never tell anybody their level on any scale. It's counterproductive and unethical.
Because, number one, remember I said when you find the level, you have a realization. And if you tell them, you're taking that away from them. The other thing is, people don't like to be evaluated.
You know how the wife goes to the husband and says, you know, what's wrong with you? You're not ambitious enough. You need to get a second job, make more money. That's not helping him. That's making him think about get a divorce. What she should do is, Fred, take a look at this septemics book. What? What's this? I never heard of this. Take a look at this. This will help you. Right? He reads the book. Ah, now I see. I'm low on this scale. That's why I'm not getting an advance in my work, you see? And he will resolve it himself.
So same thing with yourself. Don't tell people your levels.
It's too intimate.
It's more intimate than sleeping with them because you're telling them what's going on in your mind.
And in, in a very scientific way, don't do that. If somebody wants to figure out C.J. he can get the book and do his own analysis.
People ask me all the time, oh, where am I on the scalp? I never tell anyone. That's not my job.
I am not the guru or the oracle from deli. You know, I'm just a guy who wrote a book. It's in the book. Use the book.
If you actually read the book, you'll see it is not hard to figure out.
It's very user friendly because I intentionally crafted these scales to be, to wrap around the reader. So here's what this is like, right? When you go into this septemics book, let's say you go to buy a suit, right? You go to a men's clothing store, right? They have 10,000 suits.
How the hell are you going to pick that out?
Well, first of all, you talk to, talk to the salesman and you have a conversation.
What application is this for? What type of fabric do you want? What are your measurements?
You know, and you sort of are narrowing it down. He says, okay, you like gabardine? Okay, I have something here. Oh, we don't like dark colors. Okay, here's a Greg Aberdeen suit and it's in your size. Okay, I'll try that.
So it's like this winnowing process, right? By the time you, after two hours, you are $500 cheap, poorer, but you go out with a suit you like.
That's why you went, that's what this is like. You go into this book and you come out with a suit that you like.
[01:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I can see that even from the sparse information that I've read in it. I, I endeavored to read the whole lot, but I had a lot of things going wrong with my computer during this week. I was like, ah.
But what I read of it really did reflect that as well. So I appreciate that.
Now, looking forward, do you see any potential applications of septemic expanding into new fields or technologies such as AI education reform or global leadership models? Because I'd imagine, like from say, an ongoing feedback AI like device trained on your understanding. It would be actually an amazing tool for making sense of life and personal growth and even company growth.
[01:01:13] Speaker B: Yes, this book is universally applicable. Applicable for humans.
If you can read English reasonably well and you want to improve yourself or others. Now, many people who wear rose colored glasses make the mistake of thinking that everyone wants to improve himself. And that's not true.
I've actually calculated that about half of the human race wants to improve oneself or others.
And this book is for them, if they can read English.
So in a sense, you articulated, I think, three different major areas.
This is globally relevant. It doesn't matter if you're into banking, if you're on Wall street, if you're into AI, if you are a painter, if you are a farmer, if you're. This is relevant because everyone deals with people. And that is the problem we have now, dealing with people.
So I'll come across some guy and I'll say, oh, this guy is at the bottom of the scale. We're done.
Done. Thank you very much, have a nice day. Goodbye. That's it.
[01:02:26] Speaker A: You've actually done that, obviously.
[01:02:28] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: That waste time with people that are on the bottom scale.
[01:02:34] Speaker B: The other way happens too. I see people who are like really upscale people. Wow, this person is high on this scale. High on that scale. That's somebody I want around me. And you know, when I find somebody like that, it doesn't matter what the application is, I want that person. In other words, if I find somebody who's a very upscale psychologist, I want to have that psychologist around me. If he's a very upscale financier, I want to have that financier around me. Because an upscale person is a benefit, he's a boon to you.
And if you just read the book, it's very clear, I tell you how these people behave. What is the product of the, of these different levels. If you're dealing with somebody who's at level two on the scale of basic purposes, that has a very specific outcome, you're going to understand that person and you're going to know what's going on with that person.
And just first of all, anybody who's at level two on that scale is an extraordinary person. We're talking about Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, Alexander the Great and Winston Churchill. They're all at level two. I mention their names because they're dead. So these are extraordinary people.
And I don't know if you noticed, but it recently came out in an interview that when Donald Trump was a kid and they took him for aptitude testing, the aptitude test said, your son will be a great musician, but his father was a builder. He didn't want to hear that, okay?
So he didn't push him that way. He didn't let him go. That Way, he let him go into construction. So, you know, things like that happen. This happens all the time. You know, I'll tell you an interesting story. You know who Walter Matthau is?
[01:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:33] Speaker B: Okay. Great, great actor, dramatic and comedic actor. So in 1968, he was in a film called the Odd Couple, which was a huge success.
Right.
Smash movie.
Well, after the movie came out, and that really made him a huge star, even bigger than he had been before, he went home to visit his mother and she said to him, how much money did you make from this movie? He said, about a million dollars. That was a lot of money in 1968. And she said to him, you know, you could have been a doctor.
[01:05:14] Speaker A: Love it.
[01:05:16] Speaker B: That's very common.
She probably was very upset, frustrated.
You know, she wanted his son to be my son, the doctor, you know, so. And he didn't want that. He wanted to be an actor.
So, you know, as great an actor as he was, he obviously picked the right thing.
But that goes on all the time.
So this is really important in understanding people. You know, like, I have A son, he's 33 years old now, and I knew when he was 3 years old that he wasn't going to be an engineer because I went to a top engineering school. There were 2,000 of us and we were all very much the same. He was nothing like that. He just wasn't an engineer.
It's not that he isn't smart, he's brilliant.
He scored in the top 1% on two of the three SAT sections. So we're talking about brilliant guy, but I could just see he's not an engineer.
So, you know, I never raised the issue. There was never a discussion.
You know, a lot of engineer dads would have tried to say, why don't you go into engineering? You know, I didn't do that because I understood him, so I sort of let him figure things out himself.
And because he was smart, he was able to do that.
There's really no substitute for intelligence. I have to tell you, if a person has it, it makes a big difference. And if a person doesn't have it, lots of luck.
[01:06:47] Speaker A: So, Jim, we're coming to the end of the podcast. How can people find you and your work and your book?
[01:06:56] Speaker B: Well, I want to invite your listeners to my website, which is septemics.com S E P T M I C S, where you can see what many readers have said, what many journalists have written, what the reviews are. You can read sections of the book itself, and there's even a pre recorded Introduction to Septemics that you can listen to that explains it to a new person in 15 minutes.
[01:07:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I listened to that this morning. It was really good.
[01:07:23] Speaker B: By the time you do all of that, you're gonna want to buy the book for sure.
[01:07:29] Speaker A: I urge people to buy the book, too.
[01:07:32] Speaker B: Then you have to realize that this is a textbook on an entirely new subject.
So you have to study it like a textbook. You have to go to line one of page one and read the first sentence and say, does this make sense to me?
Yes. Okay. And then you go to line two, just the way you would study a physics book or a chemistry book. You can't skip around. You won't get it.
And then you go through the book, the whole book, that way. And then when you're done, you go back to the beginning and read it again and find your level on every scale. And by the time you finish the second reading, you will be a new person, because you will have had at least 35 insights about yourself.
[01:08:16] Speaker A: Jim, this is a wonderful gift to the world, and thank you for your time today for explaining septimics in a way that people will understand it for sure. And I urge people to pick up your book as well, because I'm looking forward to finishing reading it myself.
[01:08:30] Speaker B: Right.
So in closing, I just want to say one thing.
The data in this book are vital for every person and can help you to achieve your goals faster and easier by explaining what might otherwise seem to be inexplicable or random. So there have been parts of your life about people you couldn't explain, or you thought it just didn't make any sense at all, and you were wrong. It was explicable, and it's not random. And when you get this steady, you'll say, now I see why I couldn't get along with Mary and why we broke our relationship up. And then when that happens, you're free of it. You're not carrying it around as a mystery anymore. Gee, what happened between us? You know, there's lots of people going around saying, why did I get fired from that job?
You know, it's like a burden to the guy. Well, he figures it out and he lets it go. Okay, that's the end of that.
So it frees you up to go into the future unburdened by these things.
And so the more you use this, the more you benefit from it. And the more you benefit from it, the more you want to use it.
So it's a virtuous cycle, and the sky is the limit. There's no limit to how much you can use this.
[01:09:56] Speaker A: Awesome. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom and understanding of septimics.
[01:10:03] Speaker B: Thanks, C.J. it was a pleasure talking to you.
[01:10:06] Speaker A: Excellent. All right, I'll just say goodbye to listeners.
That was another amazing talk with another really amazing guest, Jim Marshall, on septemics. Now, look, if you've enjoyed today's show, please reach out to Jim and I would urge you to get his book from. You know, to be honest, I didn't read the whole book. I didn't have time, actually had a problem with my computer. I had to work out over the weekend.
But from what I've read of the book and the other understanding that I've been given by looking at all of Jim's information in his bio, this book is groundbreaking. I'm actually looking forward to finishing this book now because I want to get through all of the understanding of it and embed it into myself.
And Jim has offered me some slides that I will be looking at to maybe interviewing him about all of the different levels that are actually highlighted in the book. And I look forward to that. I think that's going to be a huge thing. So if you've enjoyed today's show, please remember to like and subscribe.
And if you're on a podcast app, remember to give us five stars. Say something really nice. And if you think somebody else would enjoy the show, please share this to a friend. So thank you so much for listening. Until next episode, it's been bye for now.
[01:11:23] Speaker B: Well, I'd like to ask you all to like and subscribe.
And if you want to find out about my book, there's a link below.
SA.
