By Don Keenan
Not as frequently as in the past we still see people guessing at the code. On the list serves it takes on a frenzied pace that has 15 to 20 people guessing in rapid fire. If it wasn’t heart-attack serious the phenomenon of guessing would be funny.
You’ve heard me say from the very beginning DO NOT GUESS ON THE CODES because you have a far greater than 50 percent chance that your guess will send you careening over the cliff to certain case death.
EARLY DAYS
Please recall the story of the numbnuts that said the code for tractor/trailer driver was “dangerous bully on the highway.” This was spoken by a fool who had just read the Reptile© book, and that was it, and he was giving a non-authorized presentation about the Reptile© at a national trial lawyer organization seminar before David and I shut it down by threatening injunctions for violation of copyright, patent and trademark. Contrary to the code espoused by the numbnuts, we had done well over a dozen focus groups dealing with tractor/trailer codes and cases and found the exact opposite in the code. A truck driver was looked upon as a safe professional driver. The justifications during our research from Bubba was that they have a specialized license to drive, they’re under tremendous scrutiny from the federal and state government to be safe, if driving is their livelihood, it puts food on their table. Why would they take a risk with their safety let alone the safety of others?
THE REPTILE© REASON
We learn through the evolution that to try a case off code is often more powerful than if the defendant is on code. If Bubba expects and believes he has the right to be on the highway with safe professional tractor/trailer drivers then Lord help the tractor/trailer driver that does not conform to this code. Bubba cannot live in a world with even one off-code tractor/trailer driver. Remember the Reptile© books admonition: the Reptile© is often not smart.
Now my fellow Woodpeckers, imagine trying the case where you thought the code for truck driver was “dangerous bully on the highway” and swinging your dead cat castigating every single driver on the road and how the entire industry must be punished. That dog wouldn’t hunt. In fact you would have Bubba pull him back taking the side of the tractor/trailer driver, his friend.
THE PROCESS
Now let’s give you a peek at how codes were discovered. As with tractor/trailer drivers it began with a series of attitude surveys which were located by our researchers. It seems that the insurance industry in their underwriting process wanted to find out the attitudes of normal Americans towards truck drivers. In so doing they posed a simple question on a questionnaire sent to many hundreds of people. The simple question was;
“If you learn there has been a catastrophic collision on the Interstate and it involves a tractor/trailer and a single motorist, who do you assume is at fault?”
Now if you ask that survey of trial lawyers you’d probably get 90 percent of the people blaming the tractor/trailer driver, however, not so with Bubba. The opinion is flipped and more than 85 percent of the time, Bubba feels it’s the single motorist who is responsible for the catastrophic wreck.
Now for those of you new to the Reptile©, that might come as a surprise, however, to those Reptile© disciples, it’s a perfectly consistent Reptilian© response. Bubba would never get on the highway where he knew tractor/trailer trucks frequented if he felt that 90 percent of the time they’re the ones that cause the catastrophic wreck. To do so would be suicide at worst and simply Russian roulette at best. Bubba can’t live in that type of dangerous world so he will create a Reptilian© façade that will protect him so that every time he goes on the Interstate he feels totally at ease and protected.
We see this Reptilian© façade created by Bubba in many, many, many situations all arising to the level of a code. One of the 10,000 reasons why you can’t guess a code: You don’t live in Bubba’s world. (See blog “Bubba the Juror’s World and Our World”)
Once we were seized with the attitudinal information about truck drivers, we then proceeded through the seven steps of getting a code, none of which is anything close to what you’re taught at the Reptile© focus group seminar nor at the Keenan Ball College, however, it’s the template that the other professions such as marketing, advertising, journalism, divinity, politics all use, similar but not the same.
The first step is taken right out of the page of Freud some 200 years ago – quick word association. You say the word truck driver and don’t give Bubba any time to think but simply to utter the first thing that comes to his mind. Truck driver of course would be buried in a sea of other words also asked rapid fire.
CODE IS EMOTIONAL
Understand that at the end of the day the code is not logical, you know full well the Reptile© is not logical, but the code is pure emotion. Thus, in the seven‑part template to get the code, we employ every device possible to remove from Bubba the opportunity to logically answer the question or do the task. Instead, we go through a series of steps that will slowly remove logic from the response matrix.
Many of you know that back in 2004, 2005, when we were crisscrossing the country trying to prove the Reptile© wrong, we employed what we thought was the template used by Rapaille, the one that he set forth in several of his writings. Talk about our bus going over the cliff, we got nowhere for what appeared to be a long period of time until we had the good sense of locating former employees of Rapaille to find out how he really did it. Both of them (who had worked at different times for Rapaille) recounted that Rapaille had no desire to lay out his template so that his competitors could simply duplicate and either kill his business or drastically reduce it. So Rapaille’s blueprint was not correct, that’s as kind as I can say it.
But what we did find from his former employees is that his true template was, as I said, above a deliberate intent to remove logic and structured decision-making from Bubba’s response. Instead the target was the emotional imprint.
QUICK WORD ASSOCIATIONS
We also learned that Rapaille always incorporated a traditional focus group (the ones we do every day) as the first step in the process. But then he told his assistants to ignore any of the findings. So we asked why do it? Rapaille explained that every person that they recruit for research expects that there’s going to be a focus group so why not give it to them. Because we tried to get the code in a day’s session, rarely did we incorporate the initial focus group, however, maybe we should, because our focus group people were always a bit confused with what we were doing beginning with the quick word association.
Hopefully you can see that the quick word association provides no time for Bubba to think. The utterance is pure instinct without thought i.e. cat, dog, black, white, east, west.
MAN FROM MARS
The next phase was usually what we call “the man from Mars.” That is when one of us would tell the folk that we were from Mars just landed on Earth and we were here to get information but we didn’t know a thing about how things work on Earth. Thereafter, we would ask questions such as “What is a hospital?” “Why is there a need for a hospital?” “Who works at a hospital?” “What do they do?” The man from Mars removed the logical decision-making and instead the focus group people responded by imprints, emotion, what they felt. Between the word association and man from Mars, we are now starting to move well away from the cortex frontal lobe logical thinking and more into emotion the imprint.
THE VISUAL CHALLENGE
The next level, and the last one I’ll talk about, is the collage and this one removed any verbal exchange description from the process. We brought people into a big room, sat them on the floor, told them to take off their shoes, belts, et cetera and get comfortable. Then we stacked up magazines amongst the folk, gave them rounded scissors and horse paste, like we had in grade school, and construction paper. Everybody then was back in the second, third grade. In fact, most of the time during this step we had milk and cookies served. However, remember there’s no talking because at the beginning of the process we simply tell the participants we’re going to give you one or two words and then you’re going to go through the magazines and cut out any visual images which describe your interpretation of the word and create a collage pasted on the construction paper. Now you may think this is a bizarre even a non‑starter, however, when you have the term tractor/trailer driver and you give folk an hour or more to do their collage and you see the results of their collage, you’ll understand the power of the emotional imprint.
When we had the participants complete their collage and pass them up to us, we would then move on to the next step, but then later after they were gone we would take the 60 or 80 collages, pass them amongst our team and see if it made any sense. Well, my fellow Woodpeckers if 99 percent of the images are happy faces, starched denim shirts and even husbands and wives joined arm-in-arm to represent a tractor/trailer driver, you know instantly that that code is not quite “dangerous bully on the highway.” In fact, several times we used the collage with tractor/trailer drivers. We had jurors cut out images of Santa Claus and put them on the collage. I just couldn’t help myself. I really had to know what the Santa Claus was all about and the focus group member looked at me like why don’t you understand that Santa Claus is in essence a tractor/trailer driver in the sky delivering presents to little children around the world.
AGE REGRESSION
I skipped over some of the steps. They’re just too difficult to explain, so let me just give you the last and final step – age regression. At the end of the day, we dim the lights, give everyone a little pillow, they lay on their back with distance between each other in the hotel, we actually play spa music, let it run for 10 or 15 minutes and then we begin the age regression. We take them back to their childhood and then move forward to present time, getting them to visualize and re-experience the events that imprinted the code; whether it’s the code for justice, tractor/trailer driver, hospital, no matter what. There are two factors important – the first childhood imprint and the last significant imprint. That is true because the imprint can change.
The most frequent one is ethnic and racial prejudice. Often as children we have no prejudice. Kids are kids and we play with everybody. In fact our fascination draws us to some kid different than us and it’s fun. So the imprint we have when we’re young is not bad, but as we’ve seen over and over again, the later imprint, the significant event, is bad. The Hispanic stole my job, the African-American arm-robbed my daughter, et cetera. Now the most recent event can sure enough change the imprint.
NO WAY FOR YOU TO DISCOVER TRUE CODE
As I’ve said many, many, many, many times, the bad news is there is no possible way for you to get the code and as I said above. Again, if you guess at it, then your bus is halfway over the cliff already. But the good news is we have well over 180 codes that all you have to do is ask and you’ll get it.
You are probably thinking, “Well if it takes a day or more to get the code, did it really take 180 days to get these 180 codes?” No, after doing so many codes you get to know when you’re going to get into the repeating zone and you simply do not need to repeat what you’ve done many times. For example, the known phenomenon of code façade. If you’re not looking for it you might not see that Bubba’s emotional imprint is simply a way to protect himself.
Now along the way, I have to tell you, that not all of our code attempts have been successful. A very common obstetrical medical negligence case is the shoulder dystocia case where the allegation is that the physician pulled too hard on the baby’s head during delivery and caused injury to the neck and shoulder, often a lifetime disability. Because there’s so many of these cases, we set out to do the code. After two full days of trying to get the code we had not succeeded, and that was after Rick Friedman joined our team bringing a fresh eye towards our techniques and methods. So we let it alone and decided to take another stab at it 6 months later and failed again. There were just too many variables to make any common core sufficient to get an imprint/code.
OFTEN DIFFICULT TO INTERPRET
Finally, I want to say that examining all of the results we get from the seven steps is not easy. There have been several times when I have consulted my psychiatrist with “What does this mean?” However, before we go, I want to tell you about one of our earliest but most difficult codes to secure and that is the code for justice. We sat around the night before and we’re certain that it would be something along the lines of “making a wrong right,” “holding someone responsible or accountable.” Well see that’s the problem with pre‑destined thinking, that’s what you’re looking for and you don’t need to be looking for anything during a traditional focus group or a Reptile© code focus group. You’ve simply got to keep an open mind to whatever they’re saying and not have to divorce any pre‑destined thought.
So running through the word association, the man from Mars, the collage and the age regression, we had anything but what we were looking for. It appeared that every person had, at some point in their life, an experience with something bad happening and then there was an attempt to resolve it which fell painfully short. We had stories of the bicycle being stolen when the person was young but never recovered, the classmate accused you of lying and the teacher did not resolve it, the other kids were cheating, you were not and they got ahead and then, the really big one that I guess shouldn’t surprise us, is the story after story about my best friend got killed by a drunk driver and they got probation, or my father was killed by a drunk driver and they served 30 days. So after a whole day, we got nothing but negative outcomes so we decided to run it again a month or so later in a different venue to see if we got anything different. After a full day we got the same outcome, but we listened to it a little closer, and then it was revealed to us through an interpretation that the real imprint code for justice was closure; the matter was at an end. Now, initially we were disappointed, until David actually found the silver lining and said we need to imbed closure into our cases and let the jury know about the lack of closure in the case and the extreme power of closure.
So if any of you have seen my closing argument DVD Vignettes, you know full well that I’ve got five or six of them that talk about how to use closure in closing argument and, believe me when I say, it’s powerful. It also has the potential of taking you completely off code when you stand behind the defendant in closing argument and say to the jury that “Yes your client needs closure, the community needs closure, but this defendant also needs closure.” That’s not something an on-code lawyer would do, but having done it in virtually every case, it is very powerful.
I hope this blog doesn’t start a stampede of everyone trying to get their own codes, believe me, it’s a non‑starter. The purpose of the above was just to tell you how damn difficult it is to get the code and how dangerous it is to guess about it.
WHY NOT DISTRIBUTE ALL CODES?
Now before you ask that all the 180 codes get sent to you, let me tell you why we won’t send any except the one you ask for. Over the 10 years we’ve been doing codes, the code has changed in several instances. The code for doctor in the beginning was “hero,” as stated by Rapaille and his research, but because of the concentration of HMO care, that code has changed, the code for law enforcement has changed in many venues in light of Ferguson and other events.
Bottom line: Codes are a slippery slope, and don’t attempt them yourself, and understand that the code itself gets you nowhere unless you know the elements within the code.
AFTER THOUGHT
Now the concept of codes has no history in the law. I’m sure you didn’t take a course in law school on codes, and in fact, with the Reptile©, the codes are frequently discussed in the seminars and college courses, but there is no course in codes. (We are exploring in 2016 a separate college course on codes.) So I expected a lot of misfiring regarding codes, and often it occurs when a lawyer will call me up and say, “Papa Don, I need the code for X.” Then I give it to him and without waiting for me to say what the elements of the code are, their excitement causes them to say goodbye and off they go. This causes me to go to my cigar room and ponder just what the hell are they going to do with just the code. If you just know the code for tractor/trailer driver without knowing what elements make that code, true as I described above, then you’re not going to be able to use the code. In fact, the elements of the code are often more important than the code itself.