So me, his resolution is around the corner. I think 9% of the solution 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. We know that people are hyper responsive to authority.

But how do we establish authority ourselves.

Authority is made up of five things, and that's number two. Number two is their level of observation. There's five Cs 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 linking. If I start seeing an increase in someone's blink rate, I know I need to change the subject right away. Interesting. The third, their level of communication. 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, so we can get into it if you want. Please. Okay, number one.

What about how to win an argument? What are the things I should definitely not do?

The big mistake most people make is, don't do 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.

I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make this 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, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever 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. 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. Whether or not you can manage yourself, you're a good leader, who the good who leaders are and who can persuade the people to feel a certain way.

Who'd you do it for?

I think I 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 advantage that they're not able to tangibly see. I think showing them that this is one of the biggest lovers 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. Is human behavior, is it like a Is it 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, 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?

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, US Army, which is the Special Operations Command. I've trained a lot of the US Navy leaders nowadays, and a lot of civilians are my main base of clients right now.

What do you do for intelligence agents?

When we talk to intelligence agents, the number one thing that we train them in is recognizing human behavior. We also teach interrogation. We tend to teach, if I'm doing an interrogation, it's 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. 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 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. 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 lose my brain, and I was desperate. I'm just wondering, how's my family going to feed itself? 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. That's what this book was. It's just the culmination of everything.

You served in the military yourself?

I did for 20 years.

What is the most common thing that people come to your work for? If you were to encapsulate it into 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. 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. I have this model called the ACSS model that I train to my entire staff. 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. 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 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. 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.

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 I need this little technique. 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. A lot of that, so much of that comes from comfort. 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. If they're focused on comfort, we win a lot more conversations.

Comfort? Yeah. How does that manifest? Is that just being physically comfortable?

What is that? Yeah, it would be physical Well, comfort. One of the challenges I give to people is for your first week, 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. If you were standing in a swimming pool, how fast would your arms and legs move if you were underwater? Make that the speed limit for this entire week. That's all I want you to focus on. 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. 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 On your phone, it would be speaking at a normal composed pace. 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. 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. We see that with every aspect of our lives. When I first started my business or when I first got out of the military, these people called me for a keynote. This guy calls me and he's like, What's your hourly rate? I said, 6K. I said, That's including travel and all that. The only thing he did He didn't say anything on the phone. He just goes, That's it. He just made that noise. Right away, I said, Oh, yeah, but we could do a discount. I could probably do 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 made up excuses. 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. I'm in collapse in some areas of my life. I might posture in some areas of in life. 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. We see this in guys that learn pickup. I'm going to learn how posture because it's the opposite of what I'm doing. It's not the center where I need to be.

What is the center? That's composure.

That would be composure. I would say composure is the combination of the things that make up authority. Authority is made up of five things, and that's confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. 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. 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. It it very quickly. 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. 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 a 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 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. 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. Do I take care of my environment? My time 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 right about that guy. We've all had that little experience. Getting a of those five qualities that make up authority are the fastest way to get success in your life and just drastically start changing your life.

It's really that the controllable element. It's our environment, our time, our appearance, our social life, and our finances. That's the controllable foundation to all these other things that we talked about.

Yeah. That would be the bottom foundation of that little pyramid. The far left side of that triangle would be confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. Those elements alone produce feelings in other people that make them see an authority figure. 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. Yale runs an ad in the paper. It says, Come help us with this study on learning, and we'll give you 20 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 You let him in this room, you watch this learner guy get strapped up. He's on this table getting strapped up to this electric shock machine. Every time he gets a question on this quiz wrong, you've got to shock him. You have to hit the button. And every Very 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 they keep going and going, and almost to the end, no more response. It's just silence. The guy didn'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. They keep going and going and going. You can watch some of these on video, and you just watch their faces toward the end. These psychiatrists I said at the beginning of this predicted less than 1% would go all the way. 67% of people go all the way. 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. I would say, I would argue, that's more difficult than selling someone a car.

That authority comes in that particular example, came from going to the university, the lab co, etc. But how do we establish authority ourselves? Is it going back to the things you said there about environment, appearance, etc, finances? Yeah. Are there physical expressions of that authority in a day on a day basis?

There are. Slowness of movement is one of the most common. We have slowness of movement. The right side of that authority triangle has five letters on it. 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 these 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. That's so much of a difference between changing my worldview versus changing my posture that'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 walk people back and say, let's get to the root of this. Because you can't just openly say you have an authority and comfort problem. His employees would open I didn't really make fun of him in board meetings and stuff like that, and he didn't like it. His company was going downhill so fast. I took him through this process of gaining, let's build up your confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude and enjoyment, all of those things. 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. If the The biggest leverage that he can do would be confidence, that's the number one thing I'm going to start working on. The moment we took him through that process, it was only a couple of months, and we used a lot of hypnosis. I literally used brainwashing techniques to help him.

It's the same techniques. You know what? Cognitive behavioral therapy was also a form of brainwashing back in the day, an aversion therapy. But within just a few months, he went from around I think 6,000 to 800K per month to four 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. They have to say, This thing happened to me. I had this thing. That's the first thing I work out with every client is 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. Watching that transformation is so rewarding and incredible. But the confidence is usually what you have to change first with people.

How did you do that?

You change what's going on inside their head. You've gone on stage before, probably a thousand or 2,000 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. I think I can term it as a podcaster.

Yeah, and they never go away. The difference between a person who's confident in a person who doesn't have confidence is that they hear those voices as truth. I hear them or somebody with confidence hears them as fiction. They're both listening to the same thing. Imagine as a quick story, if you and I were going to lunch, and I said, Steven, 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 audiobook about a nuclear bomb going off. But it's inside the audiobook, 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 on, that it's in the audiobook. 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 is 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 it's That's the easiest way to describe it. Then just fundamentally changing how you hear that voice. I think 10 times out of 10, that voice was developed when you were eight or What did that kid do? This is what I would ask any of the clients, what did that kid do to make friends or keep them? Friends, to feel safe. Now we're in the safety. How did I get to feel safe? And what did I do to earn rewards? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. They just translate from child to adult behavior. 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. 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.

If I can do that, you can fundamentally change someone's life. 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 mamalian brain, this 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 mamalian part of the brain. 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. The fastest way to do that is through visual means. I have all of my clients download this app. I can't remember the name of it. There's probably 100, but it makes you look like 95. You're just covered in wrinkles. It makes a lot of your hair go away.

I make them print it out and put it everywhere just for a couple of weeks. Now we start developing a mental, mamalian 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 all of these things that I don't want, you have to be very, very honest with yourself at that point of, where do I need to get dopamine from in my life? And successful people, every single successful person that I've ever met has a good dopamine maps. 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. 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, Steven, 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 in calmly enjoying what is happening now. 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 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. That's typically going back to speed. If I'm reading other people well, I'm also making a lot of eye contact with them. That's also one of the fastest ways to get a read on another human being is how often they're blinking. 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. It's not always relaxation. If I talk to a psychopath in a 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. 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.

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? What I'm really looking for in human behavior are changes. 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.

Would you be looking at one particular person?

No.

So 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 the- 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. 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 thing with jury selection. It's so reliable. You read these articles about 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 spend a conversation with someone staring at their chest, and especially if you're talking to a woman, it's a bad idea. Blinking The think rate is incredibly reliable. To recap that skill, I start a conversation. Does it look pretty normal? Is it pretty fast or slow? Then I'm going to look for changes. That's all I'm looking for in a room of people is what's It's changing.

So 70 is deceptive and zero is psychopath.

Seventy is stress, not always deception. Okay.

And zero is psychopath, basically.

Zero might be psychopath. Context is the second letter C. There's five Cs that we talk about in behavior profiling. Change then context. Now, somebody just crossed their arms and you read the internet, it says it's being defensive, withholding, closed off, see all that stuff. Well, what if it's freezing cold? 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. Then sometimes, especially in here when it gets later and we didn't have the fan in the heater, I would go like this. I was thinking, but this is rude. It gets rude to the guest. But I looked at my arms and I had these massive goosebumps and I was like, that's the context. The context is like, I'm freezing. But to the guest, it would look like I'm going this. This is why body language is so delicate, I think. It is delicate.

It's so hard 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? It's the same thing with body language because they're doing interrogation research 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. They're saying those behaviors are identical. Then there's the peer-reviewed research on lying and not lying. You cannot replicate human behavior that well. People treat it like it's a pharmaceutical. I can put a Tylenol in somebody and I can measure all these responses. It doesn't really go into a spreadsheet like that. 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.

What was the first C?

First C is change. I want to look for a change.

Then you want to look at context. Is there a third C?

That would be clusters. Clusters. Then you read articles that say someone looks a certain way or a certain thing that might be deceptive. The most common one I hear is someone touches their nose. Someone touching their nose might be being deceptive. If you're just seeing one thing, I would say that almost never means anything. You want to look for a cluster of behavior. 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. While they were getting nervous, they also started protecting their genitals with their hands and looking their lips, which is a hygienic It's a dynamic gesture that we do. 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. I was with a young person, we were watching a Pakistani person get interrogated. You commonly see that head shake in that region of the world. They said, Oh, he's shaking 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.

Finally, the least important thing on that list is the checklist. By checklist, I mean There is a list of known behaviors that are likely to be deception. 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. I'm skeptical. But we deal in likelihood. We should always process in that. 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. Which does that make sense?

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. I used to do it all the time. Like a tick? It was almost like a tick, yeah. It was really weird. I think this sounds like a really crazy thing to say, but One of my best friends had curtains, have the haircut curtains, and he used to flick it. I almost vicariously picked up the flicking from him. I'd go like that all the time. But I was just thinking if someone saw me doing that, they would perceive that as some form of behavior, whereas it was just this weird thing that lasted for two years when I was younger and then 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 wouldn't be a change.

Okay.

If I was meeting you. Yeah. You were on the Dragon's Den for a while.

Still am, yeah.

People pitch you all kinds of ideas. 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. You could look at a like Shark Tank, and 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. That's fascinating is that you could just look at one or two things and predict stress or focus. 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, and they talk about their life stories and stuff, and I often see some patterns of behavior, specifically closing up when you ask someone something about their childhood or a specific sensitive subject in their life. You tend to see, I call it self-soothing behavior to some degree. It's difficult. It's funny because we're all amateur body language experts now. There's been a lot of stuff online saying, spot this, did they touch their nose, etc. It can also be dangerous.

It Again, and it can give us these like, Oh, I saw this one thing. I'm never doing business with that guy. He scratched his nose three times while he was talking about that. While he's looking in his briefcase, he's got allergy medication in there. He's scratching his nose. The season just changed. It's spring time. His nose is red when he came in, so he's been scratching it for 30 minutes before he walked in the door. Now we start to realize I'm not seeing a change. I'm seeing something that was repetitive.

Communication is the third one in the triangle to or failure. Communication. What I've got so far is talking slow is higher authority. Is there anything else that if I want to be a master communicator, I should be thinking about? Absolutely.

When it comes to communicating A, being a good storyteller is great. 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 person that is. 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. What things do I need socially These are significance, acceptance, approval, intelligence, pity, and strength/power. In every conversation, if you ask somebody about themselves, they're going to come across and reveal one of those things to you. 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 the way opposite in what you need to hear. 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. You hear somebody within... These are things you could hear in a conversation pretty quickly.

You start talking to somebody and they said, Yeah, I'm actually the CEO of that company. I've got 490 people that work for me, and I'm probably going to be making an exit sometime next year. You hear that. There's significance, right? Then you listen for approval. This is when you hear people say, Well, I 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 the acceptance people are all about like, I'm a member of some group, and that'll come across in their communication. 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. 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. 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. To How did this intelligence stuff come out of people? The pity is you can identify a pity person pretty well. Those are the hardest people to communicate to. The pity person always... 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 I don't think many people would have. Pity wants recognition of suffering. Finally, we have the strength and power person. This isn't always BIF from back to the future. It can be somebody who's a leader in a company, but they want control. Significance is, do I make a difference? Strength and power is to have control over other people? Everybody from the leader who forces his way into the top to the guy with the ridiculous jacked up pickup truck that has the plastic testicles hanging off of the back of it.

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 hand it to their significance? Is that?

Yeah. There's a few other types that we teach intelligence people to identify. There's the 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. I want to complement them on their level of significance right before I ask them for something. I could say, Steven, 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 significant person. That would be effective for you because I know that you want to make a biggest difference that you can. 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 we're talking about, selling a car, whatever, is going to increase your ability to get that same need from other people. 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. 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. Every time I'm thinking about needs, always think in terms of neurotransmitters. If I can complement someone on their need, that's what we need from other people. I'm giving them 500 million neurotransmitters being released when they hear this. It's not just that we're 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 is addicted to.

I was thinking about the pen. I was going to ask you to, if I'm an intelligence person and you had to sell me the pen, how would you go about that?

I think there's a lot of people in the world out there, and I think most people just do what other people do. 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. Every once in a while, 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. 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. I want to present that in a way, and I'm going to start with a negative comment. 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. Let's say we're starting our podcast, and I'm afraid Steven is not going to connect with me. 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, Steven, thanks for having me, man.

There's so many people out there. Anytime I say something negative in a conversation, I never want to gesture in between you and me. I always want to gesture away. We're talking about other people. 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. 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. I'm demonizing a trait using your needs that I don't want you to have, the inability to connect.

Okay, interesting. You're consciously pointing off to it's others not.

Right. Until I said the word connect, and then I gestured between you and me back and forth between both of That word stop is a very powerful word in the English language. 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. That's how powerful that stuff can be. You can use It's the same thing in reverse. I could say a positive thing. I could say, Steven, 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. 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. That would have the effect.

What's going on there? We want to be that person because it's positive. We want to live up to that expectation set.

Right. What I've done is I've got you to say, as Chris Voss would put it, that's right. But I've got you to say that about who you are as a person. 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. If I wanted to take that further, I would make an admission first, and I'd say, You know what? I 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, it's a good question. The moment that you ask, that you start to answer that question, you've made an agreement about who you are as a person. If I wanted somebody to be less closed off, I might say, I've spent my whole life just worried about what other people think. 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? Just any answer, and no one's going to give you an answer. 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 checklist.

Yeah. It's the thing with Julian Treasurer, 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, 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. If I'm a therapist, that makes me a better therapist. If I'm a hostage negotiator, that makes me a better hostage negotiator. 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. 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 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 pulled it off the shelf. I'm not sure. So elicitation is about using statements instead of questions. 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. We walk in there, and let's say there's a young lady stocking produce. You get in there and I say, All right, Steven, 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. That's tough, right? It sounds really tough. If you went over I went 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. 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. She turns around and goes, What? No, I make 17. Now she doesn't feel like she's been pressed or questioned about 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. 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. 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, See, 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 I love when everything is 100% flawless. You're like, no, actually. Then you start going into that and I'm like, no way. Then we have disbelief that comes in. I haven't asked a single question yet. 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? That's where 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 US 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 the sailors would be drinking at the bar. Russian would sit there. He's got a 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. That's all they did back then. It was just correcting the record. I'm triggering this need to offer some correction to information that's inaccurate. 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 correct in this. No, it's actually February, but we're not really supposed to talk about it. 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. Then you're going to get more this information out because of the disbelief. That was correcting the record. A second technique called Bracketing, where I'm giving you a series between March and May or between 39 and 59. And the third is the disbelief that starts getting this information out of people. If you want to think about, how do I start a conversation or continue one using elicitation, think of the words so, and then do a recap.

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. I bet that was interesting. I bet there were still some challenges there, or I bet you overcame a whole lot to get to this point, or I bet is the best way to do that.

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.

If you do hate the coffee, you'll say, Yeah. Even you saying, Yes, I do hate is offering up information. Yeah.

Okay, interesting. You could even go on with that. I bet you hate that coffee, and somebody says, Yeah, well, I do hate it. But I can imagine you're the person who likes coffee a very specific way. Well, yeah, here's how I like it a lot. You'd say, That's extremely interesting. No creamer, no sugar. I'm just recapping.

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 was better.

It's for sensitive information when you're trying to not get their guard up.

Yeah. The rule of thumb is the more sensitive the information is that you need, the less questions you need to be asking.

That does correlate to how 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 hearing someone out and just letting them talk and talk and talk and talk, but not being too pushy.

Yeah. 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. The PCP model looks like it's three steps, but I want you to view it as dominoes. One step starts the progress of coming down the other, and once that comes down, the next dominoes starts going down. 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? Let's go with weird.

Okay.

Let's go with an attorney in Washington State was charged with assault of a woman using hypnosis. He would have her get naked in his office, which is something she would not normally do. The attorney was studying this hypnosis and stuff like that. 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 dropped 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. 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. But 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. These are hard-hidden 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. Instead of me saying, Hey, let me talk to you about this thing, that's from a a needy perspective, they come out with a survey, and they say it's an anonymous survey, which automatically makes the people more open. It's an anonymous survey. I've changed permission. Now the context has shifted slightly. 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? I start asking all these little questions about, how would you rather live your life in a way that's just nudging you down into this cult mindset of like, do you want to be around people that enjoy your company?

Those 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 person I've just agreed to be, and that's who I've I am. I have to do this because that's cognitive dissonance like crazy. 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. But 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 Chaldey Nini, 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 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, I 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. It was like 6% stuck the sign in their yard. Making one agreement about who I am and then taking action on it. If I can get you to take action on something, not just between you and me, now I got you to put a sticker on your window. I got you to do something that altars the way other people see you. 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. 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. What what we see going 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. Because they slowly... They say, I'm this party. I signed up to this particular political party. And then slowly, just with creep of beliefs, you end up over 10 years, all of you believing and thinking something is okay. Yeah.

It's interesting. Just because you made an agreement.

I guess in part, that explains some of the wars as well. There's an element here which can explain things like Nazi Germany and how a civilization can go from being relatively normal to doing really horrific, barbaric things to people.

Yeah. Just going back to the Milgram experiment, right away, I got you to say, do you fully volunteer to participate in this? Do 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 person that's willing to shock someone for an experiment within the first two minutes. They don't talk about that. They I tend to say the whole experiment is 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, 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.

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.

A new information, or is it unexpected? 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 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 novelty generates focus. The four things that we can manipulate inside of a human brain spells out the word fate. The four ways to manipulate or influence a mammal 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 Caesar Milan, you're seeing him redirect focus, establish authority, show contact with the tribe, and praise the dog when the dog is 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 this visual images to show the mammal brain, the focus, authority, tribe, and emotion that spells fate.

I was thinking about a lot of fizzy drink ads in the sunshine in the summer, and you see You hear the sound as they break it open. There's people there, I guess that's the tribe, having a great time. I was just struggling with the authority part in that context. If there's ads you see for 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. 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 Can you actually talk about how to win an argument. When I say win an argument, I don't really mean an argument. I mean more like me and my girlfriend having a conversation, and I want to get to a good resolution. What are the things I should definitely not do?

Calling We're getting out little points that any incorrect information, we wait until the end. We save it. 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, do we have a similar common ground? What common ground do we share? And do we want a similar outcome? I might even ask that question. Really quick, do we both want the same thing from this discussion? I would never call it an argument. The moment that we redirect 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. 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? 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. I think there's some middle ground here. That 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. 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? 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. 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 I did a video on YouTube three days ago. It was called The Narcissist Off Switch. It was how to disarm any narcissist. 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. If I'm in an argument, is someone using fear, obligation, or guilt? That acronym spells Fogg. Am am I going to get in trouble or can I recognize when somebody is using fear, obligation, and guilt? If someone is doing any of those things, I want to call it out in a non-confrontational way. Let's say you give me some line about, If you don't do this, I'm going to have to work 19 hours next week. It's never about the hours, and now it's guilt, right? I could say, Steven, maybe you didn't need to, but it sounded like you wanted me to feel guilty about me working next week. I know that you're a good person. I don't think you meant it that way. 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.

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

Don't trap them in a corner. Yeah.

So we give them an out that's beautiful. 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. Where is the hidden fear in someone's argument? Anytime you're in an argument, there's a level of concealed fear. Just 30, 40 seconds, you can find that. 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. Say you made that statement to me about, I'm going to 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 are saying. 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. 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, I might just take a moment and say, Steven, maybe I heard this wrong, and go right into that. 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. 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. What's my mission? It's to pursue my potential and to follow my curiosity and to see what happens.

All right. That's a great answer. But you went deeply into who you are as a person. The first thing you did is look up and to your right. Then you looked up and to your left, then up and to the center. When your eyes are moving in multiple directions, it's called a transderivational search. Looking in different file cabinets that are inside of my head. Yeah. 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.

You could hear what's important to people. Interesting. Then the mission was not about other people. It was about how 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 my brain It was right there to say that. Then I thought, it's just not the nature of the truth. 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. My mission when I was doing it was Genuine, because I really loved it. It wasn't like, I'm going to change the world. It's so tempting sometimes to add that on, I want to change the world. I don't believe that's why most people start things and continue when no one's listening. I think 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.

I love that.

That was elicitation.

Okay, 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 think I'll hit a million in a week or two, which is a huge milestone 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. Yes, that's incredible. Yeah, it's amazing.

That was I'm in a visitation. Good job.

We just record Zooms, don't edit them at all. I've seen it.

I was just trying to elicit. It's a little sloppy. Sorry, you were doing a read of me. I said podcaster, I said entrepreneur, I said investor, and then I said I do it to I think I said...

So your goals?

Curiosity, and then I was the other one. It was about my potential. That's what I think about a lot, pushing my potential and following my curiosity. I see what happens.

So potential curiosity, what would I see there? So I'm a podcaster. I did this for passion. I want to fulfill my potential. I'm not seeing acceptance. I'm not seeing that you need approval from me to do anything. It's about your personal level of significance. 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're relying on your girlfriend. We're talking about a little bit of a group, but all of what you're saying is about significance. 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're 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 the center of attention in Yeah, see that little-Grimisk.

Yeah.

But other people who are the more approval group-focused people, when I say, I can tell 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 isn't solicitation statement by itself as well. You can tell that if I used anything that didn't fit your psychology, it feels weird. If a salesperson is doing that, they do it by accident, and they I say, Oh, this is a numbers game, because I use this script that I have. I 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 subparts 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.

If you know the needs, if I know you're need a 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. Any need that I can identify automatically reveals some fears. If I understand fears, I can also lead behavior that way as well.

I was thinking through the context of being a CEO or manager of teams. I guess this is why it's so important to know the different types of people you have in your teams. Also, I used to work on phones doing tele-sales. 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. 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 Studio selling photography vouchers. I did Facebook ad sales on the phone back in the day. Lots of tele-sales experience. 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 person they are.

Not at all. How did 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. She knocked this coffee over. I'm really sorry. The 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. Then if they're on the phone a little bit longer, you can get to know them a little bit better and understand what person they are and better adjust to make sense.

Then when you're saying, I'm so sorry, this is really embarrassing. Other person, most people are going to be like, No, 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 sales people? Is there 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. Going off of a script, and this is the biggest one, any script, automatically tells our brain. When's the last time you get telemarketer calls to your phone every once in a while? Every once in a while, yeah. Yeah. I do, too, and I'll answer it. 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 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. 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, Well, this is different, your brain is going to pay more attention. 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 a 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, for some reason appreciated it, and I gave them the time. I remember I was really busy. I was on my way to a podcast recording. Just the fact that you can hang up now, just going to be honest, this is a sales call.

Yeah, he gave you autonomy.

So I was like, Okay, what are you selling? Then 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. 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. In the first line of the email, they didn't even... She's listening now, Christiana and Georgie. They didn't even introduce themselves. They said, straight to the 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. They've tickled my ego a little bit as well, I think, because it says, I've read your book. They went straight to the point, it caught me off guard. You got more focus. Of course. They have the job now. They work here. 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 will realize this unless you've been in a situation where you're working in recruitment, looking at thousands of emails. When I used to really run the recruitment inbox because I'm just obsessed with the recruitment, we have 35,000 emails in there. 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 this email within three seconds.

To read later.

To read later. To star it and to read later, or just to give it another 10 seconds. The exclusionary fact is they're all just surface things that you typically get from people who typically do a certain thing. 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. With our newsletter, we, again, the email newsletter provider was saying, Oh, you can use all these templates. But then we're like, No, if we use a template, no one reads the thing, which is, again, counterintuitive. But it's the same psychology, right? It is.

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. We've switched from Here's a list of 13 ways that we might have failed in 2013 with this ad campaign or whatever, this marketing campaign. I just changed the subject line to this sucked. 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.

That's the 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. I was looking into how that happens in both what we see, but also in what we hear. The studies were talking about if you say a word like father, father, father, father, father, Like with how he starts his videos, 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 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.

I think the type of viewer is very important because 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. You're not over designing stuff. 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 up. They're very, very different. So I think the habituation filters change based on what we consume and what we appreciate.

Interesting. Because we're all making We're all doing quick prejudices about everything.

Shortcuts, 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. 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. No matter the size of your business, Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better connect with your customers all over the world. To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show, we're giving you a trial, which is just $1 a month. You can sign up by going to Shopify. Com/barz Bartlet. That's Shopify. Com/bartlet, or find the link in the description below. 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? Getting to a point where they're modifying their discipline changes their confidence because I always talk about discipline is the gateway drug to everything else in authority. It's the gateway to composure, for sure. But getting your discipline modified is one of the fastest ways to make everything else change.

How do I fix my discipline if I'm an ill-discipline person?

Understanding what discipline is is the most critical element. I define this differently than most people. I define discipline as your ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own present self. That's it. That's all a discipline is. I'm prioritizing the needs of future me. You're trying to think of an exception.

No, I was thinking of two scenarios. The scenario one is I go home tonight because I go to sleep, I get to bed early. There's this other thing I'm thinking about doing after this, which is going to the gym. As you're saying that, I was thinking both help future me. I was like, Which one is disciplined?

I think they would both be disciplined. 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? I want past tense me to be a source of dopamine for present since 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, 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 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 ready to go. When I wake up in the morning, I just go, Bam, and everything's ready. I'll get my clothes out, everything lined up, ready to put on for the next day. So I'm lowering the threshold of how much attention I'm spending. 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.

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 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 hundred bill or maybe a few hundred dollar 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.

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. You're looking backwards with like, wow, that's amazing. You're now getting in love and sending gratitude backwards, which automatically means that what's going forward is concern and care. The moment I'm always looking back with gratitude, the concern is always going forward in the future. The concern for present goes away. 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 I was in a video last night about a lady that went to YouTube and started her journey of weight loss and whatever. I think she was 400 pounds or something, and she was trying to get down. In the video, some people will know who I'm referring to. Over this place of a year or two years, she actually just gains weight. She gets to, I think, 500 pounds or something. 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 I've just gained another £3. There's almost this 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 different to that. Many people can relate to that feeling of I want to be this person. I mean, we're coming up to, 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, 7, 8%, 9% of New Year's resolutions will stick?

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 the byproduct. What are the byproducts I want to have for this year? And then what are the habits that make that up? The big mistake most people will 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 they took it. They did. Somebody who doesn't live a very disciplined life would look at you and say, 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 forcing yourself to go do something. You're doing something that's a habit for you. The discipline only is necessary. You only need a teaspoon of it at the very beginning to get this habit started.

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. I think if more people knew that, that you're just exercising a little discipline at the very beginning, and then 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 habit equation, you could say, or 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? Because I was playing around with this discipline equation idea for my last book, and the 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. 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. In the context of brushing your teeth, I think I know why it matters, because if I don't, then I have to go to the dentist, my teeth fall out, I look ugly, whatever it might be. 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 It happens.

But the key part of this equation here is the why part. It's not the key part, but it's the central part is the why part. Why does the thing matter to you?

Yeah. How much why? How big is the why? Because if the why is I need enjoyment in the present moment, then no other why will be bigger. No discipline why will ever be 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 Look, the whole idea is Y plus, you could say, reinforcement, minus, you could say 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, taking the bin out for the bin men. It holds up because the why is, if I don't take the bin out, then I'm going 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 7:00 AM 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 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 an action. And all of that is going to be about, 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. Then tribe, are my friends involved? Have I made a public agreement about something? Then the emotion, which I think would be the why. 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 Are you testing something out of the universe? Maybe it is. But we're definitely showing something that a dog can understand. It's imagery. A dog can understand images. We're routinely We're exposing ourselves to these vision boards on a very regular basis. If you follow the brainwashing formula, which is focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition, it spells fear.

That is the best way to brainwash yourself to form these new habits and goals. 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 Maybe I can buy the app that makes me look fat or one of those things. 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 this 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 I'm going to brainwash someone who is in an intelligence interrogation. I'm disrupting environment like crazy. What will we do with the dog? Are we going to let it do everything it's always done? Are we going to change that environment? We're 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.

Even just coming to the vision board, the last client I had, I had him go a 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. 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.

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 For 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. 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 is this camera, does all this, does all these things. It helps you get this done faster. You look at Facebook meta, these AR struggles, 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.

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. There's so many products that are out there that seem great, but they can't articulate what they're really solving. 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. That should be one thing if I could just program into everyone's head. I did this to my kids. Just be 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.

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 Is TikTok solving a problem for a young kid?

Right. So that might be solving loneliness instead of boredom. 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. They use a hypnosis technique, not just TikTok, this is everybody, called fractionation, which is where you bring somebody up. You'll see one of those videos of a grandpa holding his grandbaby like that, that makes you almost cry. Have you ever cried just watching a 60-second Instagram reel?

Yeah.

I have, too, man. I feel stupid. I'm by myself watching a 60-second video. But they'll pull you down to 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. They get you up and down and up and down. The more I can do that, this is proven that that ramps up suggestibility. Dr. Milton Erickson did studies on this in the And that increases your level of suggestibility tenfold. The more I can get you up and down, up and down. What happens after you get 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 as It was like once a week now. I was working on me. I was buying stupid shit that was on Instagram ads. Then I finally set time limits on those apps.

You set time limits on those apps?

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. I'm not immune. I'm one of the best in the world, and I am not immune to it. 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 life where we go home and we just burn our brains out with these social media apps and fry dopamine receptors? Is there a cost?

Yeah, I think the cost is increased loneliness. These apps, any app that sells ads, has two main goals. Number one, and all advertising share There's 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. 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. Then you start thinking the whole world's like that. Really quickly, what happens when we conglomerate people together? I've only been in New York once in my life. 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. On the whole, when you squeeze people together, have you heard of the bystander effect?

I have heard of it, but please.

There is a very good experiment that was led by Dr. Philip Zimbardo that they did at Liverpool Street Station.In London?In London, yeah. Okay. Right at Liverpool Street, there's a video on YouTube, and it's fair use if you want to overlay an image of what this looks like. At Liverpool Street Station, there's three or four steps to get up to the main. From the street, there's a curb, then there's three or four steps. They had this woman laid out on the ground wearing a normal skirt and top, and I think 395 people either walked by her or stepped over her. Then they did it with a guy. Then they did it with a guy. He's He's holding a beer and he's asking for help. It may have changed all these variables. But it's happened in New York City before. There's a woman named Katie Genovace in the '60s, I think just two blocks from here, who was stabbed to death in front of 55 witnesses. Don't quote me on that number. No one called the police until much, much later, mostly because everyone thought somebody else would act. But if I describe 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. 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 When I'm logging on to social media, I'm becoming desensitized to this thing. But also, if you live in London, you get quite accustomed to seeing someone that is homeless. In that case of seeing someone rolling on the floor at Liverpool Street Station, you might have It's been a long time. I've never seen it before, and it might have just been someone who was homeless or struggling with something, some addiction or something. You've become somewhat desensitized to it, is that?

You are getting desensitized to it, but your brain is made to hold small tribes of a couple of hundred people. 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. The moment that stops, your brain says, I don't have the capacity to worry about everyone that I see. So empathy disappears. 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. If you get cut on the arm or 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 The 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. I think the same thing happens when we put stuff our cells, our ancestors' cells, don't recognize. You had the glucose queen on here recently talking about some of this. We were 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. 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? This is interesting because you talked about gratitude earlier on.

I think if mindfulness has become a trope, now it's just become overused on the internet. It's one of the I think it's a superpower, just learning present tense mindfulness of just being in this moment. I think 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 delusional to the point where it's just crazy. You're thinking, I shouldn't forgive myself of that. You get to a point where everything is fine and it's just hilarious. If 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?

Thinking 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 7, which I hear is being turned into a series, which you're going to feature in?

As 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 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 like a mix between 24 and suits.

Okay, people know suits. 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. To.

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 surface. Because I guess at the end of the day, everything is about humans.

It is.

Every goal, dream, problem I have in my life, it could actually be just distilled down to some human challenge with my girlfriend, with the businesses I run, et cetera, even with 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 the singular skill that's going to unlock all of the things that I care about. And that's why as well, 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, the Milgram study, that they just changed my life and my thinking in so many ways. As I grew up and I did call center stuff and then business, 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 running businesses now, the Milgram study, or 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'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 you many, many, many, many times of 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 the day. It's fantastic. Thank you so much, Chase. Thanks, Steven. When it comes to food, I trust my gut and I trust Zoe, a business I'm an investor in and today's sponsor of this podcast.

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