The Leading Body Language & Behaviour Expert: Manipulation Tricks The Military Use! 5 Signs Someone Is Lying To You! This Is Making You Less Likeable - Chase Hughes

So New Year's resolutions are around the corner. I think 9% of resolutions stick.
So what advice have you got for me? Okay, so let's say I wanted to lose weight. The first thing is realizing that all of our lives are about habits, not goals.
The second aspect of this is one of the most effective strategies to brainwash yourself to form these new habits. And that is...
Chase Hughes is a former military veteran turned world-renowned expert in behavioral analysis and human influence. He has trained secret service agents, Navy SEAL leaders, CEOs, and government officials to master communication, behavioral detection, and persuasion.
You can look at three factors every single time to determine why someone was successful or why they failed. The first is self-mastery, where we look at confidence, body language, discipline, and authority.
And we know that people are hyper-responsive to authority. But how do we establish authority ourselves ourselves authority is made up of five things and that's number two is their level of observation and there's five c's that we talk about in behavior profiling which we get into but my favorite example and one of the fastest ways to get a read on another human being is how often they're blinking if i start seeing an increase in someone's blink rate i I know I need to change the subject right away.
Interesting.

And the third, their level of communication.

And if you want to learn how to start a conversation or continue one, this is for you.

It comes down to understanding the type of person that you are in front of.

Now, segregate people into six groups, and that'll influence the best way to talk to those people, which we can get into if you want.

Please.

Okay, number one.

What about how to win an argument?

What are the things I should definitely not do? So the big mistake most people make is don't do that. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this.
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I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and

better I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button the show gets bigger

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doing this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
Chase Hughes, who are you and what is your mission? I'm a behavior guy, behavior expert. And I think I've just set out to teach people that there is an entire world that other people can't really see, don't have access to.
And I think for the last 10,000 years of recorded history, you can look at any event or any leader of any country and everything that dictates the outcomes of situations comes down to human factors every time. No matter if

there's economic turmoil, there's people getting pissed off about an economy, there's AI or technology innovations that are happening. Everything comes down to human interactions.
And whether or not you can manage yourself, you're a good leader, who the good leaders are, and who can persuade the people to feel a certain way. And who'd you do it for? I think I'd do it for people that have gone through a period in their life realizing that there's an invisible advantage that some other people have.
The people that got successful maybe have some kind of advantage that they're not able to tangibly see. And I think showing them that this is one of the biggest levers that you could ever pull in your life is the most rewarding and fascinating thing to see someone go through this transition to realize that this human behavior stuff dictates outcomes in life.
When you say this, you're referring to human behavior. And is human behavior, is it like a set of tactics? Is it like a form of psychology? What is this when you say the word this? When I say human behavior, I mean that when a person becomes successful or they become a failure, you can look at three factors every single time to determine why someone was successful or why they failed.

That is their level of self-mastery, their level of observation, like can they read the room? Can they read the person that they're actually talking to? And their level of communication. Can they speak influentially? Can they talk about outcomes in a way that inspire people and motivate people? and can they communicate in a persuasive way that moves people?

And who exactly have you worked with? Lots of government agencies. Notably, I've worked with intelligence agencies.
I've worked with the Psychological Operations Department, the U.S. Army, which is the Special Operations Command.
I've trained a lot of the U.S. Navy leaders nowadays, and a lot of civilians are my main base of clients right now.
What do you do for intelligence agents? So when we talk to intelligence agents, the number one thing that we train them in is recognizing human behavior. And we also teach interrogation.
And we tend to teach, like, if I'm doing an interrogation, it's kind of the same as if I'm an intelligence officer somewhere trying to talk somebody into spying on their own country for us. Both of those things are about talking someone into doing something that's not really in their best interest.
So when it comes down to that, that's really where we get to the point the rubber meets the road. Can you talk someone into doing something that they A, normally wouldn't do, which is maybe sales because they normally, they wouldn't have otherwise done that.
Or B, in the interrogation world, can I talk you into something that you wouldn't want to do because it's not your best interest, like confessing to a crime or providing intelligence or something like that. And that's where we really do a lot of the training for police and government.
Next to me, there's this massive book called the Behavior Ops Manual. It's probably the biggest book I've ever seen.
What is the wealth of experience that have fed into this body of work? That book right there is my entire life. So probably 30 to 40,000 hours of research on this stuff, every technique that I've ever learned or taught, every method that we've ever used for interrogations or persuasion or influence, all that stuff is inside of the behavior ops manual.
And I wrote that book, and we can get into that if you want to right now.

I received a brain diagnosis where I thought I was going to lose my brain. And I was desperate.

I'm just wondering, how's my family going to feed itself? So I wanted to put every single piece of

knowledge that I've ever created or I've ever come up with for any government agent, everything, all on the table. And that's what this book was.
It's just the culmination of everything. And you served in the military yourself? I did for 20 years.
What is the most common thing that people come to your work for? Like if you were to encapsulate it into like a sentence, what they're searching for in their own personal lives? it would be a person that is lacking some degree of control in some aspect of their life. And it's typically, they think they need skills.
Most of my clients come to me saying, I want the technique. I want the skill.
Teach me the recipe to do X, Y, and Z. What do I say on the phone? Give me a new sales script.
So I have this model called the ACSS model that I trained to my entire staff. And that ACSS model stands for authority, comfort, social skills, and then skills.
90% of people say they need more skills, but what they need is authority or comfort. And they can't be comfortable in a conversation.
So I could give you, like I would talk to these clients and I would say, I could spend $10 million, write the best persuasion script for whatever your ideal outcome is, hand you this thing on a silver platter, and if you're not comfortable in that conversation, you're not going to be successful. I could give it to somebody with social anxiety and have them go read this out loud.
It's not Harry Potter. We're not reading spells.
It's not a spell. So a lot of people's problems come from comfort, a lack of being able to be comfortable in a conversation, and the level of authority that they might have.
And I don't mean hierarchical authority. I just mean personal authority.
But they don't know it. They think it's, I need more social skills, I need to learn small talk, or I need this little technique.
So every time, the one thing I tell every client is, if I give you a flight checklist right now for a small plane, a Cessna 172, are you a pilot? No. Having this little checklist of what to do does not give you the skill.
So a lot of that, so much of that comes from comfort. And the problem that a lot of people have is they're competing with other people on height, on looks, on social status, money, hierarchy, confidence, all this other stuff.
The number one thing you need to compare yourself with other people on is comfort. That's it.
Is can I be more comfortable than the other person in this conversation? Because our brains are naturally wired to compete. We can't turn competition off, but we can change what they're focused on.
And if they're focused on comfort, we win a lot more conversations. Comfort? Yeah.
How does that manifest? Is that just like being like physically comfortable? What is that? Yeah, it would be physical comfort. So one of the challenges I give to people is for your first week, all the only thing I want you to focus on, I'm not going to give you this long list to go look into your phone and have to read it before every meeting.
The one thing I want you to focus on this week is,

can you move slower than the other people in the room?

That's it.

Just adjusting the speed limit on your body.

So if you were standing in a swimming pool,

how fast would your arms and legs move if you were underwater?

And make that the speed limit for this entire week.

That's all I want you to focus on.

And that makes so many changes in people's mind because we change our bodies and we change how our emotions are feeling. And there's one thing that fear does.
It speeds our body up. So if you see someone doing these rapid jerky movements, you're seeing mostly fear or stress in their body.
So get more comfortable in an interaction conversation, even if it's on the phone or in person. Yes.
On the phone, it would be speaking at a normal composed pace. Okay.
And then, so step two is composure. Can I get you into a place where you have some composure? In the left and right side of composure, we have collapse and we have posturing.
So I have a person that makes themselves small so other people can be comfortable, or I make myself big so other people can get away from me. And we see that with every aspect of our lives.
Like when I first started my business or when I first got out of the military, these people called me for a keynote. So this guy calls me and he's like, what's your hourly rate? And I said, 6K.
And I said, that's including travel and all that. And the only thing he did, he didn't say anything on the phone.
He just goes, that's it. He just made that noise.
And right away I said, oh yeah, but we could do a discount. I could probably do like 5K.
We could even take some off 50%. I could even take 75% since you're here, here, and I have to do this.
It just made up excuses. And I almost got to the point where I was like, let me pay you.
I'll give you some money if you come let me speak on stage for you. And that's collapse.
So I'm in collapse in some areas of my life. I might posture in some areas of my life.
And our goal is to get out of that swing. But the problem most people have, if I'm living in collapse, the solution looks like posturing.
And we see this in like guys that learn pickup. Like I'm going to learn how to posture because it's the opposite of what I'm doing.
It's not the center where I need to be. And what is the center? That's composure.
That would be composure. And I would say composure is the combination of the things that make up authority.
And authority is made up of five things. And that's confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment.
So I have an authority inventory. This is day one, the first thing that I give to intelligence people, or I've got a guy that owns a car dealership, whoever the client is.
And it's the authority assessment. It assesses you on those things.
And wherever your lowest point is, that's what's keeping you from being successful in most conversations when you need to persuade somebody. And it pinpoints it very quickly.
And if I could go into this a little further, the way that we live our lives off camera, I'm sure you would agree, you just had Vanessa Van Edwards on. It bleeds out in our body language.
It bleeds out in not just body language, but how we breathe, how we talk, how we come across. So even if I read that article on LinkedIn of 19 ways to look more confident, and it says, well, have better posture, sit up straighter, shake hands, make better eye contact.
I did all of that, and I look really presentable. But back home, I've got an eight-foot pile of laundry sitting in the bedroom.
My bed's nasty. I've got dishes all piled up in the sink.
There's a part of our brain that's somehow dedicated to reminding us, I'm faking it right now. And that comes across.
So whether we're doing it consciously or unconsciously, we're manufacturing gut feelings in other people. So our job is to manufacture better gut feelings.
And the five most common ways that those bleed out in our everyday life is how we manage five areas of our life. And that is our environment.
Like, do I take care of my environment, my time, appearance, my social life, and my financial life.

Because those are the five things we worry about in the back of our head that start bleeding out these gut feelings. Because we've all had a conversation where everything on the surface looked great.
But afterwards, we were like, something was off. I don't know what it was, but something just didn't feel feel right about that guy.
And we've all had that little experience and getting a hold of your, those five qualities that make up authority are the fastest way to get success in your life and just drastically start changing your life. So it's really that the controllable element.
It's our environment, our time, our appearance, our social life and our finances finances that's the like controllable foundation to all these other things um that we talked about yeah so that would be the the bottom foundation of that little pyramid and the far left side of that triangle would be confidence discipline leadership gratitude and enjoyment yeah and those elements alone produce feelings and other people that make them see an authority figure. And you've heard of the Milgram experiment.
Oh, gosh, it reminds me of something I read when I was 16 in psychology class in a textbook. Probably did.
That was the one where they got people to shock each other. Yeah.
Please explain. All right, let me give you a quick recap.
It's Yale University, and I think it's 1962. And Yale runs an ad in the paper that says, come help us with this study on learning and we'll give you 20 bucks or lunch voucher or something like that.
So all these volunteers come out and there's a tall guy in a lab coat, an official clipboard there. And there's one other volunteer and you draw straws.
One of you is the teacher. One of you is the learner.
So you're led into this room. You watch this learner guy get strapped up.
He's on this table getting strapped up to this electric shock machine. And every time he gets a question on this quiz wrong, you've got to shock him.
You have to hit the button. And every progressive question, you increase the voltage on this machine that goes all the way up on the far right to XXX danger, severe shock is what it says on there.
But the whole time you're shocking him, you can hear the guy screaming on the other side of the wall. He's screaming.
And midway through the process, the guy's banging on the wall. He's like, I have a heart condition.
I don't want to do this anymore. I'm out.
I quit. I don't want to do the experiment.
And 90% of these people will turn around to the guy in the lab coat, and the guy in the lab coat is like, please continue. It's important that you continue the experiment.
So I keep going and going, and almost to the end, no more response. It's just silence.
The guy doesn't even respond to questions. And the guy in the lab coat says, any non-answer has to be treated as if it were an incorrect answer.

Please continue.

And they keep going and going and going.

And you can watch some of these around video, and you just watch their faces toward the end.

These psychiatrists at the beginning of this predicted less than 1% would go all the way.

67% of people go all the way. And 250 volts is enough to kill you.
100% went up to 250. The presence of novelty and authority did everything.
It made a person commit murder. And that's, I would say, I would argue, that's more difficult than selling someone a car.

And that authority comes, in that particular example,

came from going to the university, the lab coat, et cetera.

But how do we establish authority ourselves?

Is it going back to the things you said there about environment, appearance, et cetera, finances?

Yeah.

Are there physical expressions of that authority

in a day-to-day basis? There are. slowness of movement is one of the most common so we have slowness of movement so the right side of that authority triangle has five letters on it and that stands for movement appearance confidence connection and intent is our intent visible that outward sign of authority is what a lot of people tend to look for.
What does authority look like? But what we're really doing is I want to look up the symptoms of authority, not the cause. Because all these LinkedIn articles, YouTube videos that are saying how to have more confidence, how to do X, Y, and Z, are how to have the symptoms instead of the cause of authority.
So people with authority tend to sit up straight, but they don't sit up straight because they read an article. They sit up straight because they see the world a certain way.
And that's so much of a difference between changing my worldview versus changing my posture. It's very different outcomes.
And we're still generating those gut feelings in people. Interesting.
Have you worked with many people that come to you and they've got a clear authority problem? Is there a particular example you can think of where you were able to help someone turn their life around? Many, hundreds. Give me your favorite example.
My favorite example was a big CEO. He's in Los

Angeles. And he asked me for skills.
He starts off, I need the flight checklist. I don't need to learn to fly.
I just need the checklist. But it takes me a while to kind of walk people back and say, like, let's get to the root of this.
Because you can't just openly say you have an authority and comfort problem. And his employees would openly make fun of him in board meetings and stuff like that, and he didn't like it.
And his company was going downhill so fast. And I took him through this process of gaining, let's build up your confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment, all of those things.
And let's find where your lowest point is of those five. If I could just find your lowest point on that five list, then I know the highest leverage thing that I can do.
So if the highest leverage that he can do would be confidence, that's the number one thing I'm going to start working on. And the moment we took him through that process, it was only a couple of months and we used a lot of hypnosis.
We used a lot of, I literally used brainwashing techniques to help him. So it's the same techniques.
And you know what? Cognitive behavioral therapy was also a form of brainwashing back in the day and aversion therapy. But within just a few months, he went from around, I think, $600,000 to $800,000 per month to like $4 million a month.
All of his employees were on board. He had this huge shift.
The problem comes when you're a coach and you make someone's life change that fast,

they have to have an excuse.

They can't go back to the office and they're different.

So they have to say, this thing happened to me.

I had this thing.

So that's the first thing I work out with every client.

You're going to have to go back and tell them something happened that changed your life

because you have to have a reason that you're going back different.

So watching that transformation is so, so rewarding and incredible. But the confidence is usually what you have to change first with people.
How'd you do that? You change how, what's going on inside their head. So you've gone on stage before, probably a thousand or 2000 people.
You were on TV for a while. Even after you've been successful, have you ever even heard a tiny voice that said, why am I here? Or like, do I deserve to be here? Yeah.
I mean, doing this is a prime example of that. Yeah.
Or I'm faking it. People are going to find out I'm faking it.
Well, you feel like that when you're a podcaster because you didn't get any official qualifications and then people started listening and then they think that you know what you're doing. So I think I can temper that as a podcaster.
Yeah. And they never go away.
So the difference between a person who's confident and a person who doesn't have confidence is that they hear those voices as truth. And I hear them or somebody with confidence hears them as fiction.
They're both listening to the same thing. So imagine like as a quick story, if you and I were going to lunch and I said, Stephen, I'm going to come pick you up.
I pull up in front of your house. You jump in the passenger side.
We're heading off. And I'm listening to an audio book about a nuclear bomb going off.
But it's inside the audio book. There's a fake news report about a nuclear bomb going off.
Let's say it's a pretend BBC broadcast or something that's going off. And it's in the audio book.
We start driving. I'm relaxed.
I'm focused on the road. I'm enjoying what I'm doing.
Your heart rate's increased. You're fearful.
Your amygdala's firing off. You're in this horrible state of like, oh, my God, what's going to happen to my family? We're both hearing the exact same broadcast.
We're listening to the same speakers at the same time. But I know that I'm hearing fiction, and you are worried that it's truth.
I don't mean to use you as that example, but that's the easiest way to describe it. And then just fundamentally changing how you hear that voice.
And nine times, I think 10 times out of 10,

that voice was developed when you were eight or nine.

What did that kid do?

And this is what I would ask any of the clients.

What did that kid do to make friends or keep them?

So friends, to feel safe.

Now we're in the safety.

Like, how did I get to feel safe? And what did I do to earn rewards? And for some people, that might be recognition. For other kids who had a bad start in life, that might be water or food, might have been a reward for those kids.
So the way that we keep or earn friends, the way that we get rewards as a child, and the way that we feel what we have to do to feel safe, those develop as little apps in our brain that run in the background of our adult lives all the time. And we typically, as a kid, they're great.
They might have kept us safe. They might have kept us alive.
They might have held us inside of these social circles. But I'm going to be a dick to people so that they don't get close to me.
Or I'm going to kiss up to authority figures like mom and dad, so I'll get some recognition and praise. And that becomes an app that we carry into adulthood without knowing it, without our consent, without our awareness.
That little kid brings these things into adulthood, and they just modify.

So I go from having to kiss up to a narcissistic mother to I'm going to kiss the boss's ass every single day, and everybody knows me as the office kiss ass. So they just translate from child to adult behavior.
And if I can start understanding that, then I can start getting that person to understand the fundamental way to change their life. And I make them put those phrases out in the open to where it's so, I want them to be pissed off.
So I will make them get a desktop wallpaper that says, I don't deserve money. Money is for other people.
Just to make their brain see how stupid it is on a regular basis and put it on a motivational poster. And the second part of that is anybody who's confident has a generalized expectation of positive outcomes.
Not specific, but things are going to be fine. Things are going to be fine.
So if I can do that, you can fundamentally change someone's life. So the final point of that, which leads into discipline, is I need to get you to form a relationship with your future self.
Because everything that goes on in our life has to do with our mammalian brain, the lower part of our brain here, and it doesn't speak English. There's no affirmation that's going to penetrate that barrier.
There's no, like, I'm going to read a quote on a wall or a PowerPoint slide that's going to fundamentally change behavior. You have to change the animal, the mammalian part of the brain.
So the question I ask everybody that I'm training is, how would I teach it to a dog? How would I show my goals if I'm setting goals for next year? How would I show that to a dog? Because I have to get it down to a mammal. So the fastest way to do that is through visual means.
So I have all of my clients download this app. I can't remember the name of it.
There's probably a hundred, but it makes you look like 95. And you're just covered in wrinkles.
It makes a lot of your hair kind of go away. And I make them print it out and put it everywhere just for a couple of weeks.
And now we start developing a mental mammalian relationship with our future self, which changes how I eat, changes how I spend money. It changes maybe what time I go to bed, how much alcohol I drink, and mostly where I'm getting my dopamine from.
If I draw a map of everywhere I'm getting my dopamine from, and more than 50% of it is on alcohol or porn or, you know, all of these things that I don't want, that's, you have to be very, very honest with yourself at that point of where do I need to get dopamine in front of them in my life? And successful people, every single successful person that I've ever met has a good dopamine map. So they get dopamine from good sources instead of bad ones.
And is there a relationship between discipline and confidence? I think so very much. It's like if you and I were sitting in an airport together, let's say we're sitting in Atlanta airport.
And I just asked you, and you're not a behavior profiler as far as I know, but I said, Stephen, look around and find somebody that's disciplined. It would take you five seconds because we don't need to profile people.
That's a natural thing that you picked up on it on purpose, but we pick up on it unconsciously all the time. So having that level of discipline elevates our level of confidence automatically because we know that other people are going to pick up on it.
But we also know I'm moving up and I'm probably more in control of myself than the person that I'm talking to or the people that I'm dealing with regularly. So how we live off camera is coming through in our confidence.
That's the exact thing that we were talking about, that environment, time, appearance. And if I can live off camera the same way that I want to be perceived by everybody in my life, my confidence already starts to grow.
And you said enjoyment as well was one of the five. Yeah.
Why is enjoyment important? I added it on there. It took a while, but I walked through everybody I've ever trained.
And if you look at everyone who is a natural leader and has that level of authority, they're not just partying in the moment, but just calmly enjoying what is happening now. So maybe you could call it mindfulness.
but I think in just the trait of enjoyment and being in enjoyment is the most magnetic human trait that there is. What do I need to know about observation, which is the second part of your triangle to success or failure? Observation, being able to read a room.
Is it possible to be able to read a room? Yeah. How would I go about reading a room? Okay, so if you're reading like a public area, let's go back to the airport maybe.
If I'm in a public area, I really want to pay attention to the slowest moving person in the room. I want to pay attention to who is more confident than the other person.
And that's typically going back to speed. And if I'm reading other people well, I'm also making a lot of eye contact with them.
So that's also one of the fastest ways to get a read on another human being is how often they're blinking. And if a person is blinking fast, it's a sign of high stress.

If they're blinking really slow, it's a sign of focus.

So it's not always relaxation.

So if I talk to a psychopath in an interrogation room or in a business negotiation, and they're very focused on prey,

so we call that a prey focus,

because they're going to manipulate somebody, Their blink rate will almost be a zero. If I talk to somebody who's being deceptive, their blink rate can go up to like a 75, 80 without us even knowing it.
So one of the reasons that blink rate is so reliable is that it's unconscious. We don't realize the shifts in blink rate and we don't manually control it very well.
And if all that I would ever need to teach somebody, you don't have to count or know how many times per minute it's going on, is if I'm in a conversation, I'm going to start the conversation and say, is the blink rate normal? Does it look fast? Does it look slow? So what I'm really looking for in human behavior are changes. Changes.
So if I'm on stage, let's say I'm doing a keynote, and across the room I'm making eye contact with all these people, and I start seeing an increase in audience blink rate, I know I need to change the subject or change the topic right away. So would you be looking at one particular person? No.
Generally? Yeah. So I would look at all of these eyes and pretend like I'm looking at one human.
Okay. Does that make sense? Getting an average of that.
Yeah. So as I'm looking around, how many blinks do I see? And I'm going to pretend as if that was one human eye.
Okay. So when you get a lower blink rate, people are paying more attention.
Yeah. You're doing a great job.
And I go to these pitch meetings where these entrepreneurs will go up and pitch these angel investors and stuff like that up in Washington. And you can measure who will pitch based on blink rate.
You see a blink rate drop, that is the most interested person in the room. We do the same with jury selection it's so reliable and you read these articles about like someone breathing into their chest it takes a while to get good at that with your peripheral vision because i've taught it to people and they would have spend a conversation with someone staring at their chest and especially if you're talking to a woman it's's a bad idea.
So blink rate is incredibly reliable.

So to recap that skill, I start a conversation.

Does it look pretty normal?

Is it pretty fast or kind of slow?

Then I'm going to look for changes.

And that's all I'm looking for in a room of people is what's changing.

So 70 is deceptive and zero is psychopath 70 is stress not always deception okay and zero is psychopath basically zero might be psychopath context is the second letter c there's five c's that we talk about in behavior profiling so change then context so now like somebody just crossed their arms and you you read the internet, it says it's being defensive, withholding, closed off, see all that stuff. Well, what if it's freezing cold? So now we have context.
So interesting. That actually happened in my last conversation.
I try not to close off my body when I'm doing this, because sometimes my natural reaction is to go like this. And then sometimes, especially in here when it gets later, and we didn't have the fan in the heater i would go like this yeah and what i'm if like the i was thinking but this is rude it gets rude to the guest but i looked at my arms and i had these like massive goosebumps and i was like that's the context yeah the context is i'm freaking freezing yeah but to the guest it would look like i'm going like this yeah you know so this is why body language is so delicate i think it is delicate and it's so hard to for people to do peer-reviewed research on it because there's a million variables it's like saying well why should roger federer win a tennis match when he doesn't have any peer-reviewed studies to back up what he's doing.
Yeah. It's the same thing with body language.

Because, like, they're doing interrogation research.

So they're saying that a college kid who gets a lunch voucher and walks in and pretends to lie about a duck

is exactly the same as someone who's been captured in combat,

sleep-deprived for a few days, has a black hood over their head, and they're drug into an interrogation room. And they're saying those behaviors are identical.
Then there's the peer-reviewed research on lying and not lying. It's so, you cannot replicate human behavior that well.
And people treat it like it's a pharmaceutical. Like I can put a Tylenol in somebody and I can measure all these responses.
And it doesn't really go into a spreadsheet like that. And there's a lot of great research out there.
But I'd say it's just so incredibly hard to replicate everything with perfection like that. So what was the first C? First C is change.
I want to look for a change. And then you want to look at context.
Is there a third C? That would be clusters. Clusters.
So then you read articles that say someone looks a certain way or does a certain thing that might be deceptive. Like the most common one I hear is someone touches their nose.
So someone touching their nose might be being deceptive. If you're just seeing one thing, I would say that never, almost never means anything.
You want to look for a cluster of behavior. So they started getting nervous, which is a change.
It's because I'm asking about where they were on Wednesday night. There's the context.
And while they were getting nervous, they also started protecting their genitals with their hands and licking their lips, which is a hygienic gesture that we do. So now I have a change within the context that's appropriate, and there's a cluster of behavior.
After that, I screen through culture. Is there some part of this person's culture or background that makes them do that? Like I was with a young person, we were watching a Pakistani person get interrogated.
And you know how you commonly see that kind of head shake in that region of the world. And he said, oh, he's shaking his head while he's saying yes.
I'm like, now we get down to that sea. This is culture, which rules out that behavior or gets rid of it.
And finally, the least important thing on that list is the checklist. And by checklist, I mean, there is a

list of known behaviors that are likely to be deception. And if you're in body language, you deal in likelihood.
That's all we deal in. Some people say they're 100% sure on stuff, and I'm skeptical.
But we deal in likelihood. So we should always process in that.
So someone licking their lips or moving a certain way, if it's on a checklist, does not mean that it's deceptive. Because what if they do it all the time? Then we don't have a change.
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking about things I used to do when I was younger.
And there was just a period of my life where for some bizarre reason, I used to go like this. And I used to do it all the time.
Like a tick like a tick. Yeah.
It's not really weird. I think this sounds like a really crazy thing to say, but one of my best friends had like curtains, like the haircut curtains.
Okay. And he used to flick it.
And I almost like vicariously picked up the like flicking from him. I'd go like that the time but I was just thinking if someone saw me doing that they would perceive that as some some form of behavior whereas it was just this weird thing that lasted for like two years when I was younger and then it went away yeah but did you do it all the time I just did it I don't know I felt like I just did it randomly but that that wouldn't be a change okay yeah if i if i was meeting you yeah and you were on the dragon's den for a while still am yeah and people pitch you yeah all kinds of ideas that just having somebody on the show or just having those skills with you you could see through a lot of those people and whether or not they're being honest about what they're pitching.

They're confident about what they're pitching. And you could look at a show like Shark Tank.
And I can look at, I can watch any episode of Shark Tank and look who's blinking the least. They're going to be the first to make an offer 99% of the time because they're the most focused on what's going on.
They're personally invested invested so that's fascinating is that just you could just look at one or two things and predict stress or focus and just being able to do that if you just took that one thing away from this that would be a superpower because i sit here with guests right and they talk about their life stories and stuff. And I often see some patterns of behavior.
Yeah. Specifically like closing up when you ask someone something about their childhood or a specific sensitive subject in their life, you tend to see like self, I call it like self-soothing behavior to some degree.
So it's difficult. And it's funny because we're all like amateur body language experts now.
Yeah. There's been a lot of stuff online saying, spot this, did they touch their nose, etc.
So it can also be dangerous. It can.
And it can give us these like, oh, I saw this one thing. I'm never doing business with that guy.
Yeah. And like he scratched his nose three times while he was talking about that.
Well, he's looking his briefcase. He's got allergy medication in there.
He's scratching his nose. The season just changed at springtime.
His nose is red when he came in. So he's been scratching it for 30 minutes before he walked in the door.
So now we start to realize I'm not seeing a change. I'm seeing something that was repetitive.
And communication is the third one in the triangle to success or failure. Communication.
So what I've got so far is talking slow is higher authority. Yeah.
Is there anything else that if I want to be a master communicator, I should be thinking about? Absolutely. Nope.
When it comes to communication, A, being a good storyteller is great. And there's a million podcasts out there that can teach somebody that.
But it comes down to whether or not you can speak to the person that you are in front of and understanding what kind of person that is. And there's a few ways that I identify.
I segregate people into six groups, and that's through what do they need from other people. So what kind of things do I need socially?

And these are significance, acceptance, approval,

intelligence, pity, and strength slash power.

And in every conversation, if you ask somebody about themselves,

they're going to come across and reveal one of those things to you. So if I know that you are a significance-driven person, and I'm selling you on how smart of an idea this is and how intelligent you are for making this choice, I'm communicating in the way opposite in what you need to hear.
So the moment that I hear you talk about yourself, your accomplishments, what you like in life, what happened for you this week, what's a great memory that you have, every conversation you're going to hear this stuff starting to get revealed. So you hear somebody within, these are a conversation or things that you could hear in a conversation pretty quickly.
You start talking to somebody and they said, yeah, I'm actually the CEO at that company. I've got 490 people that work for me and I'm probably going to be making an exit sometime next year.
So you hear that. There's significance, right? Then you listen for approval.
This is when you hear people say, well, I've got to go up on stage tomorrow, but I suck at public speaking. I'm going to really bomb at it.
I'm just really nervous. Trying to get you to say, no, you don't suck.
You're great. You did great last time.
You're going to rock this. You got this.
Then you have the acceptance people. They'll always use the terms like we, us, our, and just team.
So acceptance people are all about like, I'm a member of some kind of group, and that'll come across in their communication. So you ask a significance person about a vacation, and they say, yeah, I went down to Miami.
It was fantastic. I had a great time.
And I just got back last night. Ask an acceptance person, they'll say, we went down there.
All of us went to this thing, and we did this. So you hear a lot of this language that talks about groups and membership.
You get into the intelligence side, how often do you hear people go, yeah, I actually got my MBA from this person. Oh, I did my master's thesis on that.
Do you hear this intelligence stuff come out of people? And the pity is you can identify a pity person pretty well and those are the hardest people to communicate to and the pity person always like if i want to give you the ideal thing to say to each one of these people the pity person wants to hear i can't believe all the stuff that you've been through and you've got to this point because Because I don't think many people would have. Pity wants recognition of suffering.
And finally, we have the strength and power person. And this isn't always BIF from Back to the Future.
So it can be somebody who's a leader in a company, but they want control. So significance is, do I make a difference? Strength and power is, do I have control over other people? These are the, everybody from like the leader who kind of forces his way into the top to the guy with the ridiculous jacked up pickup truck that has like the plastic testicles hanging off of the back of it.
And once you understand what categorization someone fits into, how would you show up in a way that's effective in communicating with them? Say, for example, if I'm talking to a significance person, do I just, and I'm trying to close a deal with them or something, do I pander to their significance? Is that? Yeah. So there's a few other types that we teach intelligence people to identify.
There's six ways we make decisions and then six ways that we have values, which is our end goal that we want. But I want to speak in a way that says this decision is going to increase your level of significance.
And I want to compliment them on their level of significance right before I ask them for something. So I can say, Stephen, this is a great podcast.
You've got millions of subscribers, and it's obvious you make a difference in so many people's lives. And you are a significance person.
So that would be effective for you because I know that you want to make the biggest difference that you can. And I want to speak in a way that A, speaks to their needs and lets them know that I am a source for that but b that making this decision whatever that whatever we're talking about selling a car whatever is going to increase your ability to get that same need from other people so I think if we did this together I think the number one thing that's going to happen right away is you're going to be able to impact twice as many people.
You're going to leave a much deeper footprint on the world. So I'm giving you, we're going to double your subscribers or your listeners, but not just that.
You're going to make a bigger impact and legacy on the world. So every time I'm thinking about needs, always think in terms of neurotransmitters.
So if I can compliment someone on their need, that's what we need from other people. So I'm giving them like 500 million neurotransmitters being released when they hear this.
So it's not just that we're kind of suffering and insecure and all these things that we talked about a minute ago. We're also drug addicts, everybody.
We just need to identify the drug that that person's addicted to. I was thinking about the pen.
I was like, I was going to ask you to, if I'm a, if I'm an intelligence person and you had to sell me the pen. Yeah.
How would you go about that? You know, I think there's a lot of people in the world out there. And I think most people just do what other people do.
And I'm sure you would agree. There's so many idiots out there that just get with the basic thing.
I'm going to do this basic thing. And they don't really go outside the box very often.
And every once in a while, there's, you meet somebody who knows higher quality things, and you meet somebody who is able to see things at a level different than other people. And I would talk about that intelligence while subconsciously I'm associating all of that with this.
This is different. It's unique.
It's a pencil. But it's not like other pencils.
It's not the basic run-of-the-mill thing. So I'm going to present that in a way, and I'm going to start with a negative comment.
And this is one of the most effective persuasion strategies is to, I'm going to negatively associate something I don't want you to have. So let's say we're starting our podcast, and I'm afraid Stephen's not going to connect with me.
And I know that you're significance-driven. As we started out, imagine if I said something at the very beginning of this podcast, and I said, Stephen, thanks for having me, man.
And there's so many people out there. And any time I say something negative in a conversation, I never want to gesture in between you and me.
I always want to gesture away. So this is, we're talking about other people.
You know, there's so many people out there who just don't really give back to the world and they don't really have an interest in helping other people. And it's like every time you meet one of those people, you sit down with them.
It's like all of them have the same thing in common. They can't just stop and connect when they sit down with somebody.
So I'm demonizing a trait using your needs that I don't want you to have. Like the inability to connect.
Okay. Interesting.
And you're consciously pointing off to gesture to others. Right.
Until I said the word connect. And then I gestured between you and me back and forth between both of us.
And that word stop is a very powerful word in the English language. So when I said it's like all of them have the same quality to them, they can't just stop and fully connect with somebody else.
That's a very subtle thing. But I've used your neurotransmitters.
I've used your needs. And I've got you to agree.
You nodded your head. Agree that those people don't really connect well with other people.
So that's how powerful that stuff can be. And you can use the same thing in reverse.
And I could say a positive thing. I could say, you know, Stephen, what's fascinating to me is I've gone around the world.
I've met several entrepreneurs. I've met people who are on TV.
And it's like, you think that they are just dismissive offhand before you meet them. And it's incredible when you meet these people, it's like all of them have this ability to just tune everything out and just completely connect with somebody.
And that would have the same effect. And what's going on there? People, we want to be that person because it's positive.
We want to live up to that expectation set. Right.
So what I've done is I've got you to say, as Chris Voss would put it, that's right. Okay.
But I've got you to say that about who you are as a person. Okay.
So now I'm not changing your ideas. I'm changing your identity.
Changing my identity? Yeah, because you've made an agreement about who you are. You've nodded your head.
Okay. And if I wanted to take that further i would i would make an admission first and i'd say you know what i've had social anxiety growing up and i'm curious what is it that have you always been able to just connect with everybody you talk to or is this something that you had to work on oh is that a question yeah okay but i know it's not a question yeah but the moment the moment that you ask the that you start to answer that question you've stepped you've made an agreement about who you are as a person so if i wanted somebody to be less closed off i might say you know i've spent my whole life just worried about what other people think and it i was 25 before i got to a point where i was able to open up.
Have you always been this open with people or did you have to work on that? So just any answer, and no one's going to give you an answer of like, actually, I'm just closed off. I'm very closed-minded.
And that's maybe a 0.1% of people. So small agreements.
And none of these are designed for people to take word for word. I guess they can.
But it's about the idea of getting someone to comment on their own identity, who they are as a person. Is there anything else as it relates to communication that's especially important? It's funny that so many people are interested in the communication part more so than the listening part.
They want the flight yeah it's thing with julian treasure who did the ted talk on how to be a great speaker he told me he also did a ted talk on how to be a great listener no one listened he said everyone wanted to his one on speaking has got like 35 million views but the one on listening just no one's interested in that but i'm guessing listening plays a pretty critical role to being a great speaker. Yeah.
And listening means I can identify who you are and what the needs that are driving you and the social needs and the way that you make decisions. Is that part of the observation part? Yes, absolutely.
Just listening to that means that now I have the right words to use for the communication and the right understanding of what motivates you as a person. So if I'm a therapist, that makes me a better therapist.
If I'm a hostage negotiator, that makes me a better hostage negotiator. And if I'm a suicide hotline operator, that makes me way better at my job because I'm understanding exactly who I'm talking to.
And my goal is to talk someone into doing something that they normally would not do. You talk about this elicitation.
Yeah. What is elicitation? It's a CIA technique, right? It is.
It was originally came up with by this guy named John Nolan, and his book is no longer for sale. You have to get it on eBay.
It's hard to find. But the book is called Confidential.
Why isn't it no longer for sale?

I think that he just kind of pulled it off the shelf.

I'm not sure.

Okay.

So, elicitation is about using statements instead of questions.

And I'll give you an example.

Let's say you and I walk into Whole Foods, which is, we're in New York, so it's probably a block away somewhere. And we walk in there walk in there, and let's say there's a young lady stocking produce.
And you get in there, and I say, all right, Stephen, your goal is to go figure out how much she makes in 60 seconds, and you're not allowed to ask any questions or be awkward. And that's tough, right? It sounds really tough.
So if you went over to her, and this is a generalization just to get you to understand what elicitation is, and said, hey, I'm trying to find the baby carrots. And she walks you over there, but while you're walking, you say, I just read this article online that says all Whole Foods employees just got bumped up to $26 an hour.

That's fantastic.

And she turns around and goes, what? No, I make $17. So now she doesn't feel like she's been pressed or questioned about how much she makes.
She's correcting you. or if you let's say you got into an uber tonight and you said i just read this article that uber drivers

you how much she makes. She's correcting you.
Or let's say you got into an Uber tonight and you said, I just read this article that Uber drivers were one of the top, most highly satisfied employees in the country. You're going to get a correction.
And you're going to be like, where did you read that? So triggering a need to correct the record is one of the easiest ways to use elicitation,

but it's only one.

Another one is just making a statement afterwards and saying, I bet you had some interesting

experiences doing that, or I can imagine that was challenging.

Statements are always going to be better than asking pointed questions because a person

feels like they're volunteering information. The third layer of that is disbelief.
So let's say I wanted to ask if you just got back from vacation and I didn't want to use any questions. Let's say we meet up for dinner or something and I said, Seamon, you look like you just got back from a vacation.
That's a statement. And you're like, no, actually, I've been doing this, this, this, and this.
So now you've given me more than if I just asked if you were on vacation. And I said, wow, that had to be interesting.
I can't imagine that there's got to be a lot of stuff going on there. And you start talking more and more and more.
And then, like, that sounds great. There was no challenges to that entire trip.
I love when everything is 100% flawless. And you're like, no, actually.
And then you start going into that. And I'm like, no way.
Now we have disbelief that comes in. And I haven't asked a single question yet.
So that's one thing that I challenge everybody that I train to get really good at is that elicitation piece. How many layers can I get into a person or a conversation just using these statements? And that's why I wrote, there's a whole chapter about it in this book here.
But that elicitation is powerful because we're not being asked questions. so our brain doesn't set off little security alarms.
And this is how Soviet spies would get information from a 19-year-old U.S. Navy sailor in the early days of the Cold War.
A ship would pull into Thailand or a submarine would pull into Thailand or Singapore. And a Russian would go up and these sailors would be drinking at the bar.
Russian would sit there. He's got a Aloha shirt on or something.
And strike up a conversation. They say, I know that the German submarines could outrun you because their propellers are 22 and all of your submarine propellers are 18 feet in diameter.
And the sailor, slightly drunk, turns around and says, no, they're not, and starts giving up all this information just to correct the record. And that's all they did back then was just correcting the record.
I'm triggering this need to offer some kind of correction to information that's inaccurate. And even with business intelligence, let's say a company is moving and they have to get business intelligence.
Somebody at that company will get approached at a bar. And somebody will say, yeah, I heard you guys are moving between March and April.
And they'll get corrected. They'll say, no, it's actually February, but we're not really supposed to talk about it.
It's like there's no way you're going to move in February. It's too cold.
And the interest rates are up too high. There's no possible way that the CEO would ever do that.
It's like, yeah. And then you're going to get more information out because of the disbelief.
So that was correcting the record. A second technique called bracketing, where I'm giving you a series, like between March and May, or between 39 and 59.
And the third is the disbelief that starts getting this information out of people.

So if you want to think about, like, how do I start a conversation or continue one using elicitation, think of the words so and then do a recap.

So you've been doing this for three years or so.

This is not the best job, but it's getting things done for you.

Or I bet.

So I bet that was interesting. I bet there were still some challenges there.
I bet you overcame a whole lot to get to this point. So, or I bet is the best way to do that.
And when, okay, so if I say, I bet you hate that coffee. Yeah.
That's a statement, but you're going to endeavor to correct the record either way. Yeah.
And if you do hate the coffee, you'll you'll say yeah like even you saying yes i do kind of hate it is offering up information yeah okay interesting and you could even go on with that like i bet you hate that coffee and somebody says yeah well i do kind of hate it but i can imagine you're the kind of person who likes coffee a very specific way. Well, yeah, here's how I like it a lot.
And say, that's extremely interesting. No creamer, no sugar.
And I'm just recapping. So why is that better than me just going, how do you prefer your coffee? Well, if we're just talking about coffee, it's not sensitive information.
So I wouldn't say that that was better. It's for sensitive information.
Yeah. When you're trying to not get their guard up.
Yeah. So the rule of thumb is the more sensitive the information is that you need, the less questions you need to be asking.
And is that what, I mean, that does correlate to kind of like how I've, the information that the spies I've interviewed have given me, like Andrew Bustamante and Mike Baker, they've both said that much of the game was like hearing someone out and just letting them talk and talk and talk and talk, but not being too pushy. Yeah.
And that's the best way to not be pushy is to use the elicitation stuff. Perception, context, permission, the PCP model, is a way of understanding how to get someone to do something from joining a cult to buying an item.
Yeah. So the PCP model looks like it's three steps, but I want you to view it as kind of dominoes.
So one step starts the progress of coming down the other. And once that comes down, the next domino starts going down so if i change your perception about something then i change the context that you're viewing that in which changes the way that you feel permission to do it so i'll give you an example would you want a weird example or a boring one we'll go with let's go with weird.
So let's go with an attorney in Washington state was charged with assault of a woman using hypnosis. And he would have her get naked in his office, which is something she would not normally do.
And the attorney was studying this hypnosis and stuff like that. He wasn't, as far as I know, he was not even good, but he would hypnotize her and then tell her at the end of the day, you come home from work.
And this is just like that time. I want you to picture yourself.
It's the end of the day. You're coming home from work.
You drop your keys in the bowl. You make your way to the bathroom.
You turn on a hot shower, and now you're here getting ready to get into that shower. So he's changed her perception of where she is.
He changed the context of neither one of you or me right now would get naked on a podcast, but both of us are going to later tonight when we go to shower because that's a different context. So he modified the context, which gave her permission to remove clothing or do something that we otherwise wouldn't do in a social setting.
One of the ways I studied this, and it was fascinating, is cult recruiters. I spent a long time, well, six weeks, working with these cult recruiters.
And I was back and forth between cult recruiters and door-to-door salespeople. And these are hard-hitting people, man.
It's a hard job, door-to-door sales. But they talk people into doing things they probably wouldn't otherwise have done.
Installing a $95,000 solar system on their roof or buying a vacuum cleaner or joining a cult that's probably harmful. But all of them started off the conversation by changing the perception of what's going on.
So instead of me saying, hey, let me talk to you about this thing that's from a needy perspective, they come out with a survey. And they say it's an anonymous survey, which automatically makes the people more open.
So it's an anonymous survey. I've changed permission.
So now the context has shifted slightly. And if I could change your perception again, would you rather be in a group of people who feel like family or people who are related to you? So I start asking all these little questions about how would you rather live your life in a way that's like just kind of nudging you down into this cult mindset of like, do you want to be around people that enjoy your company? Like those kind of questions.
So more perception changes. Now the context shifts to where I've just made 25 agreements about who I am as a human being.
So now my context is way off, which shifts my permission.

It's like, I have permission to do this because that's the kind of person I've just agreed to be. And that's who I've said that I am.
I have to do this because that's cognitive dissonance, like crazy. And one thing I teach you about any persuasion, whether you're doing a psyop on an entire country or you're just manipulating one person or doing therapy on one person.
Your main weapon as a person who is persuasive or influential is cognitive dissonance. Which is? I'm getting you

to be uncomfortable because the way that I've got you to see the world doesn't match up with what

you're doing. So the easiest thing for you to change is what you're doing.
Instead of changing

your mind about something or calling yourself dumb, I just get you to do something different. And that's weaponized cognitive dissonance.
We're seeing a lot of that with the extreme left, extreme right politics on both of those extremes. Once I get a person to make even one or two or three statements about their identity, I have drastically altered how

they're going to behave in the future. Robert Cialdini, who wrote Influence and Persuasion,

a wonderful human being, wrote about this where a few weeks before they go ask somebody to put a

giant ugly sign in their yard that says, drive safe, huge ugly sign. Two weeks before that, they go back door to door and say, do you support safe driving? Yes or no? Who's going to say no? It's like 91% said, yeah, yeah, support safe driving.
They said, good. Will you put this tiny sticker in your front window, tiny little sticker, and just to let us know that you're supporting safe driving.
That's all we ask you to do. Two weeks later, they come back to the neighborhood.
Like 89% of people are sticking these signs in their yard. The other neighborhood they did the test on didn't have this little survey, do you support safe driving first? And it was like 6% stuck the sign in their yard.
So making one agreement about who I am and then taking action on it. So if I can get you to take action on something, not in just between you and me, now I got you to put a sticker on your window.
I got you to do something that alters the way other people see you. So if I can get you to make something that I've got you to believe public,

I get you to make a Twitter post, I get you to make a Facebook post,

now I've captured identity.

So most persuasion and influence training in the world is about capturing ideas.

Identity is where you truly get to change behavior.

Because I'm getting you to agree that you are a certain type of person before I want you to do anything.

Interesting.

It explains a lot about politics, in fact.

You know, what we see go on in the election cycles.

And also just how a political party, political group, can slowly drift together to a position that objectively you go bloody hell that's crazy yeah you know because they kind of slowly they say i'm this party i signed up to this this particular political party and then slowly just with like creep of beliefs you end up over 10 years all of you believing and thinking something is okay yeah it interesting. Just because you made an agreement.
I guess in part that explains some of the wars as well. Like there's an element here which can explain things like Nazi Germany.
Yeah. And how a civilization can go from being relatively normal to doing really horrific, barbaric things to people.
Yeah. Just if you just going back to the Milgram experiment, right away, I got you to say, do you fully volunteer to participate in this? Would you accept the role of teacher? Would you sit down in this chair? Would you shock him with this low voltage? I've got you to agree that I'm the kind of person that's willing to shock someone for an experiment within the first two minutes.
And they don't talk about that. They kind of tend to say the whole experiment's about authority.
But I don't think it's all authority. I think a lot of it is novelty.
And they don't talk about that ever in these recaps of the study. But if you volunteer for that experiment, you're driving on a campus you've probably not been on, going into a building you've never been to, meeting a guy in a lab coat that you've never met, and another guy you've never met, in a room that you've never met, sat in front of a machine you've never seen, reading a quiz that you've never read in your entire life.
All of these things, brand new. The number one thing that generates focus in the mammalian brain, this is dog, you name it, is novelty.
So our ancestors, they're walking past a bush every day of their life. And one day, sun's about to set and a stick snaps behind that bush.
That's novelty. That's an unexpected piece of information.
New information, or is it unexpected?

Yeah. What's your definition of novelty here? Novelty is my brain is expecting certain things to happen.
I'm going to walk past this bush, just like I've done before. I have kind of a script for running things.
And something happens that breaks that script of what I am predicting about the world. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Any kind of novelty generates focus. So the four things that we can manipulate inside of a human brain spells out the word fate.
So the four ways to manipulate or influence a mammal, and this is human, dog, you name it, is through focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. Those are the four things that a dog can feel.
If you're looking at a dog training video, you're watching, let's say you're binge watching three seasons of Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, you're seeing him redirect focus, establish authority, show contact with the tribe, and praise the dog when the dog's doing well. Focus, authority, tribe, and emotion.
That's how we train animals. It's also how an infomercial gets you to buy something.
They grab your focus. They show you here's a million people who've already bought it so far.
They all have these five-star reviews. Everybody in your neighborhood is doing it, or all these people across the United States are doing it.
They're getting success. And all of their friends love them because of that success.
Now we get emotion. And they show it visually.
They don't just say it. They're showing those visual images to show the mammal brain, the focus, authority emotion that spells fate i was thinking about a lot of like um fizzy drink ads in the sun in the sunshine in the summer and you see you know like the you hear the sound like as they're like breaking open there's people there i guess that's the tribe having a great time and i was just struggling with the authority part in that context.

So those ads you see for like a fizzy drink brand.

I think the authority would be the on-screen presence or brand recognition.

Okay. Or it could be a celebrity or something.

Yeah. And this is coming from a tribal leader.
Because if our ancestors didn't listen to a

tribal leader, you don't live very long. In your work, you talk about how to win an argument.
And when I say win an argument, I don't really mean an argument. I mean more like, you know, me and my girlfriend having a conversation.
Yeah. And I want to get to a good resolution.
What are the things I should definitely not do? Calling out little points. That any kind of incorrect information, we wait until the end.

We save it.

Okay.

So if I'm in an argument with someone and they're calling me out for doing something

I clearly didn't do, I'll wait.

I want to wait.

Why?

Because they get diffused.

Now, we want them to get that out first.

But right away, as soon as possible, in any argument like this, I want to establish, like,

do we have a similar common ground?

Do you want to go, like, do we have a similar common ground? Do we have, what common ground do we share, and do we want a similar outcome? And I might even ask that question, be like, really quick, do we both want the same thing from this discussion? I would never call it an argument. so one the moment that we redirect on on this is the outcome I want instead of I need to win an argument, because when we're in a fight, we tend to think I intellectually need to conquer this conversation, and I need to be right.
And if I can be right, that means I was right. Not winning an argument doesn't mean you were right before or right after, But it's like, what is the ideal outcome for both of us? And I would stop in a business negotiation or whatever.
What's ideal for both of us? We both want this same thing. And the ideal outcome for you is this.
The ideal outcome for me is this. And I think there's some middle ground here.
And it would be the same thing in a relationship. If anything started spinning out of control, the first thing I'm going to think is, I'm going to hear what's not being said.
So if my wife was saying, you don't even need to call me. You don't call me anyway when you're on these business trips.
I never get phone calls. Do you think she is worried that her phone isn't ringing or she's worried that she's not being appreciated and not feeling loved? So men especially will tend to say, well, let's open these facts really quick.
Pull your phone out. I'm going to show you some missed calls right now.
It's not about the calls. I need to hear what's underneath the statements that someone is saying.
You need to hear between the lines, just like a behavior profiler. So what's the emotion that's starting here? Is it anger? Is it loneliness? Is it feeling unappreciated? I need to understand what the emotion is behind what someone's saying and address that and never address exactly what people are saying to try to win an argument.

I just posted a video on YouTube three days ago. It was called the narcissist off switch.
And it was how to disarm any narcissist. And there were these very specific methods.
But the biggest method of all was to always think about what they are using to get out of you. So if I'm in an argument, is someone using fear, obligation, or guilt? And that acronym spells FOG.
So am I going to get in trouble? Or can I recognize when somebody is using fear, obligation, and guilt?

And if someone is doing any of those things, I want to call it out in a non-confrontational way. So let's say you give me some line about like, if you don't do this, I'm going to have to work 19 hours next week.
So it's never about the hours and it's now it's guilt, right? I could say, Stephen, maybe you didn't mean to, but it sounded like you wanted me to feel guilty about me working next week. And I know that you're a good person.
I don't think you meant it that way. So I will absolutely call out any fear, obligation, or guilt, always.
But I'll call it out in a way that says, maybe you didn't mean this, but it sounded like this is what you were saying right here.

And I always want to use that word where it's non-confrontational, and I want to give them an out.

So in interrogation training, we always call this the golden bridge.

In the art of war, they say, give your opponent a golden bridge on which they can retreat. So they can retreat across this golden bridge.
And trap them in a corner. Yeah.
So we give them an out that's beautiful. So maybe you didn't mean this.
And I always want to think about going back to that. What is the hidden feeling or fear that's behind what they're saying? They're scared of something.
They're scared of losing a deal. They're scared of losing money.
They're scared of looking a certain way. They're scared of what the people in the room are going to think.
So where is the hidden fear in someone's argument? Anytime you're in an argument, there's a level of concealed fear. In just 30, 40 seconds, you can find that.
And a lot of people teach this as a tactic, but just stopping and looking at a person after they do that in an argument is so incredibly powerful just stopping and looking at them yeah so like say you made that statement to me about i'm gonna have to work 19 hours next week the moment that i stop it lessens the power of that statement because I'm not stopping as a tactic. I'm choosing to stop because I want to process what you were saying.
And that helps people to do that because it feels less awkward as if I'm doing a tactic. I'm doing that thing.
But I'm just pausing because I'm going to actually reflect on what you just said. And I'm going to use that time for just a minute.
I might look away. As soon as you're done talking, I might say.
And I might just take a moment and say, Stephen, maybe I heard this wrong and go right into that. So that long pause is so effective in conversation, especially when it's meaningful and it's not a tactic.

What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have,

especially as it relates to what most people ask you about

and they're most interested in?

Well, what is one thing that no one's ever asked you on a podcast?

What is one thing no one's ever asked me?

Yeah.

People don't really ask me stuff.

Well, who are you and what is your mission?

Oh, you're doing something on me.

I'm not doing something unless you were doing something to me.

I would love to know.

And why don't you answer that and I'll break down the hidden statements that you're going to reveal about your personality.

Who am I?

I'm a podcaster. I'm an entrepreneur.
I'm an investor. I'm a boyfriend.
And what's my mission? It's to pursue my potential and to follow my curiosity and to see what happens. all right yeah so that's a great answer but you went deeply into who you are as a person

so the first thing you did is look up and to your right. Yeah.
Then you looked up and to your left. Then up and to the center.
So that, when your eyes are moving in multiple directions, is called a transderivational search. So looking in different file cabinets that are inside my head.
Yeah. And then you talked about some of the labels that you wore.
Yeah. And podcaster was first, but you mentioned boyfriend.
So I know what's important to you. So like the podcast, you don't say I'm a TV star, but most people would identify you as a TV star, but it wasn't important to you.
Yeah, it's not important to me. Right.
So you could hear what's important to people. Interesting.
And then the mission was not about other people. It was about like, how can I make myself better? You may be doing that to enrich other people's lives.
But you didn't say, I have a podcast so I can benefit 10 million. Are you about to hit 10 million? Yeah, it's interesting because I actually, my brain, like, it was right there to say that.
And then I thought it's just not the nature of the truth. Like the truth is, I started this in my bedroom.
And I always think about the fact that when I did it for three years, no one was listening. So my mission when I was doing it was genuinely because I really loved it.
It wasn't like, I'm going to change the world. And it's so tempting sometimes to like add that on like i want to change the world and i just don't i don't believe that's why most people start things and continue when no one's listening yeah i think it's it's usually something more selfish does that make sense yeah you started something and you were passionate about the thing itself i enjoyed the thing yeah yeah yeah i love that that was elicitation okay that what you just did then three i think i did three layers okay but it's very very genuine and a lot of people get to the subscriber thing i'm i think i'll hit a million in a week or two which is a huge for me.
I never thought I would have a million. But it was never important.
On your main channel? On the behavior panel. That's me and three other behavior profilers.
Ah, yes. That's incredible.
Yeah, it's amazing. Elicitation.
That was elicitation. Good job.
So we just record Zooms. Don't edit them at all.
I've seen it. I was just trying to elicit.
Slow sloppy. So you were, sorry, you were doing like a read of me.
You said, I said podcaster. I said entrepreneur.
I said investor. And then I said, I do it to like, I think I said.
So your goals.

Curiosity.

And then I was the other one.

It was like, it was about my potential.

That's what I think about a lot.

Like pushing my potential and follow my curiosity.

Yeah.

I see what happens.

So potential curiosity.

What would I see there?

So I'm a podcaster.

I did this for passion.

I want my, I want to fulfill my potential.

Am I seeing, I'm not seeing acceptance. I'm not saying that you need approval from me to do anything so it's about your personal level of significance like do i make a difference but not to other people but you still want people to acknowledge that you are reaching your potential you are doing what you say you're going to do you relying on your girlfriend so're talking about a little bit of a group, but all of what you're saying is about significance.
So when I say you make a tremendous difference in people's lives and you're really enriching other people, you're doing exactly what you were born to do, it hits harder than if I said lots of people appreciate you and you're in so many great social circles, and you're like the center of attention. Yeah, see that little? A grimace.
Yeah. But other people who are like the more approval group-focused people, when I say like, I can tell like you're the center of all your groups of friends and everybody comes to you for advice.
You seem like one of those people, which is an elicitation statement by itself as well. So you can tell that if I used anything that didn't fit your psychology, it feels weird.
And if a salesperson's doing that, they do it by accident and they say, oh, this is a numbers game because I don't, I use this script that I have. I kind of follow this script pretty loosely, and I close at 41% or whatever it is.
In reality, if you changed how you communicate based on the sub parts of that person's psychology, which are on public display, they're private thoughts, but they're very public. If you know how to listen to what people are saying and understand what people are saying, you can put that out and it changes how you speak.
It changes how you communicate, how you close a sale, how you get somebody to do something. Everything changes the moment you're able to profile a human being and understand who they are a little bit deeper.
And if you know the needs, if I know your need is significance, I automatically know what one of your fears and some of your biggest fears are, feeling insignificant, feeling like you could have made a difference, but you didn't make any difference, like you didn't leave any footprint in the world, like you didn't fulfill what you meant, what you wanted to. And any need that I can identify automatically reveals some fears.
And if I understand fears, I can also lead behavior that way as well. I was thinking through the context of being like a CEO or manager of teams.
This is, I guess this is why it's so important to know the different types of people you have and your teams. And also, I used to work on phones doing telesales.
You did? Yes, for many years. When I was 16, I worked at Everest in Plymouth, which was windows and doors and conservatories and artificial grass.
And then when I went to Manchester, when I was a little bit older for university before dropping out, I worked at Swinton Car Insurance. I worked at a bunch of places.
I worked at Fusion Studios selling like photography vouchers. I did Facebook ad sales on the phone back in the day.
Lots of tele-sales experience. And I was just wondering, because in those moments you call someone out of the blue, or they call you asking for car insurance,

and you don't have a big window of time necessarily to figure out what kind of person they are.

Not at all.

So how do you go about?

Then you go back to the fate model.

So one of the sales teams I recently trained, and I'm not on a confidentiality agreement,

but one of the things when they call people up out of the blue

is they pretend like their dog just knocked a drink over on their computer right as that person answers the phone. They're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.
Hold on one second. And they're cleaning this up and they're explaining like, we just got this new dog and she knocked this coffee over.
I'm really sorry. Person doesn't even know who they are yet.
But it's so novel and interesting that they stay on the phone 70% longer just because of the spilled coffee and the person saying, I'm so sorry, this is embarrassing, making this admission of I'm a little bit embarrassed on the phone.

They stay on the phone longer because novelty captured that mammalian focus.

Interesting.

And then if they're on the phone a little bit longer, you can get to know them a little bit better and understand what kind of person they are and better adjust. Yeah.
Makes sense. And then when you're saying, I'm so sorry, this is really embarrassing that other person, most people are going to be like, no, it's fine.
It's fine. I don't even know who you are.
We haven't even got to know each other yet. Is there something that you see most frequent that's deficient in sales pitches when you're training salespeople? Is there like one particular thing that's typically most deficient that they're not doing? There's a few, but slowness is a big one.
Authority is lacking in confidence in what that person is selling and going off of a script. And this is the biggest one.
Any kind of script automatically tells our brain. So like, when's the last time you got, you get telemarketer calls to your phone every once in a while? Once in a while, yeah.
Yeah. I do too.
And I'll answer it. And the moment that it sounds like somebody going, oh, hi, Mr.
Hughes, this is blank from blank company. My brain knows what a sales call sounds like and instantly checks out of the conversation instantaneously.
Even if I didn't want to do it, my brain's already starting to shut this guy out of my life because it sounds like everything else I've ever heard. So since our brain is so good at making apps, I know because of just knowing neuroscience, if I'm calling and I sound like a salesperson or I sound like something you've heard before, you're done.
You're going to get off the phone as fast as possible. If something happens that makes you think, whoa, this is different, your brain is going to pay more attention.
And I don't mean knocking a Starbucks over across your laptop. I mean, how can I make my sales calls not sound like every other call that exists? I was victim of a phone call that was clearly listening to your work because the guy called me and said, hi, this is a sales call and you can

hang up now if you're not interested. But if you are willing to hear me out, I just want 30 seconds.

And the fact that they offered me the opportunity to hang up, I just for some reason appreciated it

and I gave them the time. And I remember I was like really busy.
I was on my way to a podcast

recording and just the fact that he'd gone, you can hang up now. This just going to be honest,

this is a sales call. Yeah, he gave you autonomy.
So I was like, okay, what are you selling? But he told me about some social media software or whatever. But I just thought it was really smart because you're right.
Within seconds, I'm trying to figure out if this is like all the others. And I guess we can do the same in our emails.
In fact, the CEO and COO of my media company that I hired sent me an email. And the first line of the email, they didn't even, she's listening now, Christiana and Georgie, they didn't even like introduce themselves.
They said, like straight to the point, no habituation filter. And it's interesting.
It's an interesting opener line because the word habituation filter is something i talk about my book so they kind of like tickled my ego a little bit as well i think because it says i've read your book yeah and they went straight to the point it took caught me off guard and got even more focus of course yeah they have the job now they work here so and even the subject line was like oh that was their introduction email to you yeah that was the first ever email yeah that's brilliant because it's i don't think people realize this unless you've been in a situation where you're like working in recruitment looking at thousands of emails but we when i used to really run the recruitment inbox because i'm just obsessed with the recruitment we have we have 35 000 email emails in there and I'm going through there at speed. And I'm looking for what I would call exclusionary factors and inclusionary factors.
What I mean by that is factors to immediately exclude this email and factors to immediately include this email within three seconds. To read later.
To read later. To like star it and to read later, or just to give it another 10 seconds and the exclusionary factors are they all just surface things that you typically get from people who typically do a certain thing and that's mean that's also why i think about marketing newsletters if the newsletter looks designed the studies show the open rate the retention rate the click-through rate is significantly worse if it's a beautifully designed email because people see it as a sales email.
The emails you get every day that are important are not designed. And so with our newsletter, we again, the email newsletter provider was saying, oh, you can use all these templates.
But then we're like, no, no, if we use a template, no one reads the thing, which is, again, counterintuitive. But it's the same psychology, right?

It is.

Like, I've increased our open rate with emails by not capitalizing the first word of the subject line. Because it looks like it's overly edited.
And we've switched from, here's a list of 13 ways that we might have failed in 2013

with this ad campaign or whatever, or this marketing campaign.

And I'll just change the subject line to this sucked.

And it just, it did so much better

because it looks like something a friend would send you.

It looks like something you'd get from a relative or something.

And that's the habituation filter at play, just trying to...

Thank you. would send you it looks like something you'd get from a relative or something and that's that habituation filter at play just trying to phase out things that are not novel i think i read it i was reading studies about habituation and how we just habituate to things and i was looking into um how that happens in both what we see but also in what we hear so the studies were talking about If you say a word like father, father, father, father, father, father, father, father, father, eventually it just becomes a sound in your head.
Yeah. Because your brain is taking away cognitive resource.
It's no longer thinking about the meaning and it's just hearing this sound. But then there's other words that habituate slower, like warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, because those words are like emotional.
And anyway, I think a lot about it in the context of content creation. Mr.
Beast is the great master of beating your habituation filter, like with how he starts his videos. Yeah.
Screaming in your face, like 500 people in that circle, million pounds. But I think he defeats the habituation filter for a certain type of viewer because i i see any video that looks like that i'm off within the first second i'm done because they all look the same now yeah that's an interesting observation so i think the type of viewer is very important because like during this video when people are watching this conversation you're not going to have 10 seconds of b-roll of people walking in slow motion through an airport there's not going to be you're not over designing stuff and the people who listen to this show are way different than the people who are watching mr beast drop a ferrari onto a mattress and blow it they're very different.
So I think that habituation filters change based on what we consume and what we appreciate. Interesting.
Because we're all making, we're all doing sort of quick prejudices about everything. So shortcuts.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm going to develop as many shortcuts as I can to save cognitive load, brain power. At my company Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company flight group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences.
Whether that's a new show, a product or a project, it's why I launched the conversation cards. I've relied on Shopify before, who's a sponsor of today's podcast, and I'll be using them again for the next big launch, which we'll hear about soon.
And I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world. With Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely.
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What is the most popular thing people come to you and talk to you about and ask you that we haven't talked about today? I think one of the most common in there is how can I change my discipline? That's the number one thing that I get from people. How do I level up discipline on this authority checklist? And getting to a point where they're modifying

their discipline changes their confidence. Because I always talk about discipline as kind of the

gateway drug to everything else in authority. And it's the gateway to composure, for sure.

But getting your discipline modified is one of the fastest ways to make everything else change.

And how do I fix my discipline if I'm an ill-disciplined person? Understanding what discipline is, is the most critical element. And I define this differently than most people.
So I define discipline as your ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own present self and that's it that's all the discipline is i'm prioritizing the needs of future me you're trying to think of a exception no i was thinking of two scenarios the scenario one is i go home tonight right because i go to sleep i get to bed early and there's this other thing i'm thinking about after this, which is going to the gym. Yeah.
And I'm like, I was just, as you're saying that, I was thinking both help future me. Yeah.
I was like, which one is discipline? I think they would both be discipline. Okay.
So the moment that we start understanding that, if I could just make decisions that are prioritizing future me. Then we go back to, where am I getting my dopamine from? And I want past tense me to be a source of dopamine for present tense me.
Because most of us look back with regret. I shouldn't have drank that much.
I shouldn't have mouthed off at the family reunion. You know, whatever it is.
I shouldn't have overslept. If I can start looking backwards with gratitude, that's the fastest way to make discipline dopamine generating.
So the tricks are to start small. So like when I go to bed at night, I will pop open the little Keurig coffee thing and stick the thing in there, put a cup under there.
Everything's like ready to go. So when I wake up in the morning, I just go, bam, and everything's ready.
I'll get my clothes out, everything kind of lined up, ready to put on for the next day. So I'm lowering the threshold of how much attention I'm spending.
So I'm going to set my life up in every single way that I possibly can as if I were a butler for future me. So when I wake up in the morning, all this stuff set out, my laundries laid out, my checklist for what I need to do for the day, all the stuff I've got to get on a plane is all laid out by the back door.
I can grab it and jump in the car. Everything that I could possibly do to make my future self go, oh man, that's awesome, and look backwards with gratitude, I'm going to do it.
I'll take a $100 bill or maybe a few $100 bills every spring or summer, and I'll stick them in a jacket pocket that I'm not going to use until the winter, and I'll forget about it. And in the winter, I'm looking, and now I become a source of dopamine.
Past tense me is becoming a source of dopamine for present tense me. That forces me to look in the future, along with printing that old me photo and putting it all over the house.
But everything that I can possibly do to make myself look backwards with gratitude is what I'm going to start doing. But you have to start small.
It's like just going overboard is going to be crazy. And even writing a little post-it note to yourself and sticking it in a jacket or maybe a dress shoe that you're not going to wear for a few months, it means so much to find that.
And it's from you. It's not from a loved one.
You did it. So you're looking backwards with like, wow, that's amazing.
So you're now getting in love and sending gratitude backwards, which automatically means that what's going forwards is concern and care. The moment I'm always looking back with gratitude, the concern is always going forward in the future.
And the concern for present goes away. And I'm going to push that concern to the right out in the future.
People struggle even with the small things, right? It's funny because I watched a video last night about a lady that went to YouTube and started her journey of weight loss and whatever. and she was very i think she was 400 pounds or something and she was trying to get down and in the video you watch some people will know who i'm referring to over the space of a year or two years she actually just gains weight so she gets to i think five five hundred pounds or something and as i was watching it you're watching someone who's saying i want to change my life but then is coming on every day and saying i've just gained three pounds i've just gained another three pounds and there's almost this this like visible dissonance that you're observing between this person saying they want to change their life but clearly the actions that they're then taking are like are different to that and many people can relate to that feeling of, I want to be this person.

I mean, we're coming up to like,

for anyone that doesn't know,

we're recording this in December.

So New Year's resolutions are around the corner.

Everyone's going to say to themselves

who they want to become.

But it's easier said than done.

I think what, seven, eight, 8%,

9% of New Year's resolutions will stick.

So is it just a case of starting small

or is there any other tricks to discipline

that you can offer?

It's starting small and realizing that

Thank you. Yeah.
So is it just a case of starting small or is there any other tricks to discipline that you can offer? It's starting small and realizing that all of our lives are about habits, not goals. But what are the habits that make my goal a byproduct? Everything is about byproducts in your whole life, whether you know it or not.
So instead of setting goals, set like the byproduct. What are the byproducts I want to have for this year? And then what are the habits that make that up? So what the big mistake most people make is they see somebody like you.
You go to the gym very often. You probably eat really clean.
I know you don't drink alcohol because I brought you a flask and gave it to your team. but uh b it.
They did. So somebody who doesn't live a very disciplined life would look at you and say, God, I want to be like Steven.
He's got all this discipline. He's going to the gym.
But they don't understand that you going to the gym isn't discipline. It's a habit.
So you're not like forcing yourself to go do something. You're doing something that's a habit for you.

The discipline only is necessary.

You only need like a teaspoon of it at the very beginning to get this habit started.

So start micro habits first and then bigger habits.

So the discipline is not something that you should be seeing if you're seeing someone eat healthy and go to the gym, do all the stuff you want to do.

Those are habits.

And that person, you're not seeing a discipline at work right there. You're seeing a habit.
The discipline was just at the beginning. And I think if more people knew that, that you're just exercising a little discipline at the very beginning, and then it's just, that's just what you do.
It's like somebody who sees someone brushing their teeth every day. Like, wow, that's so much discipline.
It's just what we do. It's a habit.
There's an interesting part of this, like, habit equation, you could say, or like discipline equation, which is the why part. Which is like, why does this matter to you? And is it important to get really clear on why this thing matters to you, whether it's the gym or like, because when I was playing around with this discipline equation idea for my last book and the kind of conclusion I landed at was that to be disciplined, you have to understand the reason why something matters to you.
You can say that in other words. Yeah.
Plus the psychological reinforcement you get from the pursuit of the thing minus the, you could say, the psychological or perceived cost of the pursuit of the thing. So in the context of brushing your teeth, I think I know why it matters, right? Because if I don't, then I have to go to the dentist, my teeth fall out, I look ugly, whatever it might be.
The, is it rewarding and fun to do? No, not really. And minus the cost of the pursuit, it takes two minutes, it's not that bad.
But when that nets out, the why is stronger, thankfully, on net than the cost. So the behavior happens.
But the key part of this equation here is the why part. Like, it's not the key it's a central part is the why part why does this thing matter to you yeah and and how much why like how big is the why yeah because if if the why is i need enjoyment in the present moment then no other why will be bigger no discipline why will larger.
The only why will be, why am I eating these Cheetos right now? Or why am I drinking 20 beers every night? Because that's the only why. So I think once the why starts edging its way into the future, that's the moment where you break the discipline spiral and you get out of that because your whys are extending into time that hasn't happened yet.

Does that equation stack up for you?

I'm saying this.

I like it a lot.

Because I've been saying it.

I wrote about this in my book.

The whole idea is Y plus like you could say reinforcement minus you could say cost cost, just to simplify it. But is there anything missing from this equation? Do you think? Is there anything? I said it to Simon Sinek, and he went, let's try it out.
And he talked to me about taking his bin out in the morning, like taking the bin out for, like, the bin men. And it kind of holds up because he's, so the why is, if I don't take the bin out, then I'm going to to get fined and my bin isn't going to overflow.
Pretty strong motivator. The reinforcement, there's no reinforcement.
Getting out of bed at 7 a.m. to take your bin out, it's not nice.
The cost is also significant, getting out of bed. But the why still...
So it's why plus... You could say like why plus the psychological reinforcement from the pursuit of doing it.
So DJing, really fun for me. I would say it would be divided by the cost of inaction.
The cost of inaction would either add to it, but it's always going to be your perception of the why, your perception of the cost, and your perception of the cost of inaction. And all of that is going to be about, can I use, can I leverage my focus, the mammalian brain's focus? Can I leverage authority over myself in some way over that mammalian part of my brain, force myself out of bed, force these habits to start developing? And then tribe, are my friends involved? Have I made a public agreement about something? And then the emotion, which I think would be the why.
Yeah. And that's the emotional driver.
That animal can understand you visualizing yourself better, like looking with a six-pack or whatever it is, but printing it on a vision board. This is why I think vision boards are so important, not because we're manifesting something out of the universe.
Maybe it is. But we're definitely showing something that a dog can understand.
It's imagery. And dog can understand images.
So we're routinely exposing ourselves to these vision boards on a very regular basis. And if you follow the brainwashing formula, which is focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition, it spells fear.
And that is the best way to brainwash yourself to form these new habits and goals. So how can I get myself to focus? How can I build the emotion, which is the why? Recurring emotion, not just one at the very beginning.
How can I continue to make it emotional? Or maybe I can make the cost of inaction emotional. Maybe I can buy the app that makes me look fat or one of those things.
And then agitation is if I'm waking up habituation, which you just talked about, if I'm waking up in the same house every day that I've been fat in, let's say I wanted to lose weight or whatever, the same house every day that I've lived X way in, I'm seeing the same hallway, same rug, same couch, everything looks the same. My brain says, oh, I'm here.
I'm going to follow that script because our brain writes scripts for us to save us time. So agitation means I'm going to disrupt my environment so much and so often that my brain has no chance to default to an older script.
So I have clients that repaint their house, they rearrange their furniture, they change up their wardrobe a whole lot, they get a completely new haircut so they're not even looking at the same person in the mirror anymore. They do everything you can to disrupt that rhythm.
It's exactly what we would do with a detainee

if we were trying to brainwash someone who is in an intelligence interrogation. So I'm disrupting environment like crazy.
And what would we do with a dog? Are we going to let it do everything it's always done? Are we going to change that environment? Are we going to change the behavior, change the lease, change the collar?

So it's not everything exactly the same.

And then repetition.

Repetition, which is just repeating the same thing.

Over and over.

So like if even just coming to the vision board, the last client I had, I had them go to Best Buy and get a 70-inch TV and then get one of those cheap tablets, those $300, $200 tablets, and just duct tape it to the back of the TV and put his vision board on that thing. It's like 900 slides of just nonstop photos, but it runs 24 hours a day in his office, even if he's not there.
He walks in the morning, it's on, nonstop repetition. Because him having to turn it off at night means he's got another point of discipline.
I've got to turn that TV on, start that little PowerPoint thing. But that's nonstop, and it's just nonstop exposure.
So can I generate focus? That's a lot of focus on the goals. Then there's emotion.
You're seeing all of that. Agitation, which is disrupting my life patterns, and repetition, which is just over and over and over.
How can I re-expose you to the same stimuli, re-expose myself to the same stimuli? Interesting. So I should keep a vision board.
I think, always think with your goals, how would I show these goals to my dog? How would I show these goals to my dog? And how would I let my dog know shit's going to change around here? I'm going to move stuff around. I'm going to make everything different.
I'd move his bed. Is there anything else that we haven't covered yet in terms of your work here that is important for us to know?

I will give anybody listening one big piece of advice

that I've passed down to my kids,

and maybe just make this a final piece of advice,

is if you are exposed to a product

that can't tell you the problem that they're solving,

you need to be terrified, absolutely terrified. So like if I look at DoorDash or Uber Eats, they get food to me faster.
I don't have to leave my house. I don't have to do anything.
I can continue writing my book or doing something on my computer and the food just shows up. They tell you the problem that they're solving, right? Look at Amazon.
They can tell you all the problems they're solving. But you look at something like Apple Vision Pro.
They can't tell you. You will never see it.
You see all the problems that a MacBook solves. This camera does all this, does all these things.
It helps you get this done faster. And you look at Facebook meta, these AR goggles, none of them will ever tell you the problems that they're trying to solve because it's loneliness and people needing to anesthetize themselves from being in their own life.
And we are in a loneliness epidemic right now. In the midst of all this, we've never been more connected, but we've never had more loneliness than is in the world right now.
And there's so many products that are out there that seem great, but they can't articulate what they're really solving. And it's usually loneliness, boredom, or a need to anesthetize myself so I don't have to think about my life.
I don't have to be in my life. And that should be one thing, if I could just program into everyone's head, be so, I did this to my kids, just be so, so scared and so cautious when I see a product or an app or anything that's not openly advertising the problem that they're solving.
I mean, there's a lot of entertainment apps, right? At the moment for young kids and social networks. Which is fine for boredom.
Is boredom a problem? It might be. Because I'm trying to distinguish between like like, is TikTok solving a problem for a young kid? Right.
So that might be solving loneliness instead of boredom. And I think TikTok does not talk about solving any problem.
It's like a casino, isn't it? For the dopamine. Yeah, it's so bad.
And they use a hypnosis technique not just tiktok this is everybody

called fractionation which is where you bring somebody up and like so like you'll see one of those videos of a grandpa holding his grandbaby you know like that that makes you almost cry have you ever cried just watching like a 60 second instagram reel yeah i have too man and i stupid. I'm by myself watching a 60-second video.
But they'll pull you down into that. Then they'll punch you back up like two videos later, and you'll start to notice this.
Two videos later, it'll be a riot, someone robbing a store, fist fight, a car going way too fast, flipping off the road, an airplane almost crashing. So they get you up and down and up and down.
And the more I can do that, this is proven that that ramps up suggestibility. Dr.
Milton Erickson did studies on this in the 1960s. And that increases your level of suggestibility like tenfold.
The more I can get you up and down, up and down. And what happens after you get like four or five cycles of up and down? You get an ad.
And it's so reliable. And I didn't realize it was happening until my wife said, why are you buying shit off

Instagram ads like once a week now? And I was working on me. So I was buying stupid shit that

was on Instagram ads. And then I finally set time limits on those apps.
You set time limits on those

apps? Yes. Yes.
My wife has the passcode to unlock the, whatever it's called, screen time.

Thank you. on those apps.
You set time limits on those apps. Yes, yes.
My wife has the passcode to unlock the, whatever it's called, screen time, the iPhone screen time. But I'm a brainwashing expert, and I am personally terrified of short-form social media like that.
And I'm not immune. And I'm one of the best in the world.
And I am not immune to it. And I think that should be a stark warning for a lot of people.
What's the cost, though? What's the cost of the life, in your view, of living this kind of life where, you know, we go home and we just like burn our brains out with these social media apps and fry our dopamine receptors. Is there like a cost? Yeah, I think the cost is increased loneliness.
And these apps, any app that sells ads has two main goals. Number one, and all advertising shares these two main goals.
Number one, make you compare yourself to other people in unhealthy ways. Number two, make you think, I am not enough.
And we see that everywhere. I'm not enough.
I'm comparing myself to other people. And it gets us into an us versus them.
Then it traps you into a corner of confirmation bias. Whatever you think, I'm going to show you this group of 150 people that agree with you, no matter how stupid, how radical, how absolutely bizarre your ideas are.
Let me show you all of these people. And then you start thinking the whole world's like that.
So really quickly, what happens when we conglomerate people together?

I've only been in New York once in my life, but we're in New York right now looking at my hotel.

I was struggling to find a piece of nature.

I think I have more trees on my property than they're in the whole city here.

So on the whole, when you squeeze people together, have you heard of the bystander effect?

I have heard of it, but please.

So they... city here.
So on the whole, when you squeeze people together, have you heard of the bystander effect? I have heard of it, but please. So there is a very good experiment that was led by Dr.
Philip Zimbardo that they did at Liverpool Street Station. Oh, in London? In London, yeah.
Okay. So right at Liverpool Street, there's a video on YouTube, and it's fair use if you want to overlay like an image of what this looks like.
But at Liverpool Street Station, there's three or four steps to get up to the main. So from the street, there's a curb, and then there's three or four steps.
They had this woman laid out on the ground wearing like a normal skirt and top, and I think 395 people either walked by her or stepped over her.

And then they did it with a guy.

Then they did it with a guy.

He's holding a beer, and he's asking for help.

And it changed all these variables.

But it's happened in New York City before.

There's a woman named Kitty Genovese in the 60s,

I think just two blocks from here,

who was stabbed to death in front of like 55 witnesses.

Don't quote me on that number. And no one called the police until much, much later, mostly because everyone thought somebody else would act.
But if I described to you saying, I watched a person get stabbed, and three people just watched, and they watched it happen,

would you say that that's psychopathy?

That's a psychopath.

So these large cities and stuff,

and the apps that are messing with the social part of our brain that makes us think the tribe is way bigger than our brains are made to handle,

causes this almost psychopathic behavior,

which the bystander effect has been proven hundreds of times as an experiment.

Is that because if I'm logging onto social media, I'm becoming desensitized to this kind of thing. But also, if you live in London, you get quite accustomed to seeing someone that is homeless.
And so in that case of seeing someone rolling on the Flo Floyd Liverpool Street Station, you might have seen it before.

And it might have just been someone who was homeless or struggling with something, some kind of addiction or something. Yeah.
So you've become somewhat desensitized to it, is that? So you are getting desensitized to it, but your brain is made to hold small tribes of a couple hundred people. And the moment that tribe expands into something your brain can't imagine, you are no longer relying on reputation from anyone.
You don't care what other people are thinking about you. And the moment that stops, your brain says, I don't have the capacity to worry about everyone that I see.
So empathy disappears. Like you walk down these streets here in New York, their empathy is zero for you.
No matter what's happening, you walk through a country town, it's like 1,500 people. The population of the town I live in is 2,200.
And if you get cut on the arm or like you stumbled, four cars will stop. People get out of their cars to figure out what's going on because our brains can handle smaller tribes.

The moment we get flooded with all of these things, all of these people that we can't possibly care about everybody, empathy disappears. The second aspect of this is, if we're surrounded by environments that our ancestors would be absolutely scared of and confused by, we start developing problems in our brain.
Depression, loneliness, suicide, through the roof in large cities every time. There's no exception.
And I think the same thing happens when we put stuff our cells, our ancestor cells don't recognize. You had the glucose queen on here recently talking about some of this.
We're putting unnatural stuff into our bodies. You had a toxicologist on here, I think, talking about this too.
It goes into our bodies. Our ancestors don't know what that is, and our bodies can't process it.
It turns into disease. It turns into mental disease when our bodies can't process everything that's going on around us.
So in my theory, and this is just my theory, the further we're separated from nature, we find disease, mental and physical. Amen.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. The question left for you is how can we consistently feel and appreciate the blessings in our lives? And this is interesting because you talked about gratitude earlier on.
Yeah. I think if mindfulness has become a trope now, it's just kind of become overused on the internet.

And it's one of the, I think it's a superpower,

just learning present tense mindfulness of just being in this moment. And I think if you,

one of the fastest ways to get good at just enjoying the moment is to be so self-forgiving that it's almost delusional. That's the best advice that I could give somebody.
Be delusionally self-forgiving about everything. What does that mean in reality? Give me an example.
Most people look back with regret and shame. I shouldn't have done that or I should have done that.
I can't believe I embarrassed myself. I can't believe I did that thing in front of those people.
Get so forgiving of everything that you've ever done of yourself that it is like delusional to the point where it's just crazy. And you're thinking, I shouldn't forgive myself for that.
you get to a point where everything is fine and it's just hilarious if you get to that point your ability to stay in the present and not stuck in the past will 10x overnight just the ability to be delusionally self-forgiving how does that keep you out of thinking about the future though because i think about the future is great especially once we follow that discipline practice and we're putting concern forward and gratitude backwards you wrote a book called phrase seven which which is i hear is being turned into a tv series yeah which you're going to feature in as a a bartender. As a bartender.
And this is being

released next year? For 25 seconds. All right.
Okay. Better than nothing.
And this is being released next year? We're hopeful. Yeah.
What's your, what is the book about, Phrase 7? It is a fictional book about mind control, hypnosis, brainwashing, and how those things are being used on our population,

but also about how you can recognize it and even how you can use some of those techniques in your everyday life. But it's kind of like a mix between 24 and suits.
Okay, yeah, people know suits. And if I want to learn more about your work and I want to go further into everything that you do, where's the best place for me to go? Just our homepage, which is NCI, which is our Neurocognitive Intelligence, nci.university.
nci.university. Yeah.
And right at the very bottom of that page, I'll put a link that says CEO that has anything that I talked about here as well that people can download. And this book here, is that available on the website? The paperback version of that is yes.
Okay. The paperback version.
But it's the same stuff, right? Yes, exactly. Cool.
Chase, thank you. It's so unbelievably fascinating.
I get the impression that I could talk to you probably for 20 hours, maybe. i feel like this conversation could have been 20 hours long because i feel like we're just scratching the surface because i guess at the end of the day everything is about humans it is you know every every gold dream problem i have in my life it could actually be just distilled down to some kind of human challenge with my girlfriend with you know the businesses i run etc even with like being a host of a podcast it's all human beings so that's why I'm so hungry to learn more because it's clearly like the singular skill that's going to unlock all of the things that I care about and that's why as well like when you talk about some of these studies the Milgram study and a bunch of them in school I was obsessed with these things I still remember the studies that like thegram study, that they just changed my life and my thinking in so many ways.
And as I grew up and I became, you know, I did like call center stuff and then like business and leadership in our podcast. It's all there.
It's all been human. It's all there every step of the way.
It's been about the same things. Even, you know, running businesses now, the Milgram study or the, when I was in the call center, the milgram study was still pertinent or as a podcast host the milgram study is still pertinent because it's once again just dealing with humans and that's what you're helping people to unlock so thank you for doing what you do absolutely and for the many you know you've got a lot of raving fans online i thank you on behalf of all of them as well and if anyone wants to go check out the youtube channel which is really fascinating because i've watched, many, many times breaking down moments in society and culture and looking at those moments through the lens of behavioral factors and body language and things like that to help you interpret what was going on in that moment.
It's incredibly illuminating and it's incredible. It's entertainment at the end of the day.
It's fantastic. Thank you so much, Chase.
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