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

25:45Things are going to be fine. So if I can do that, you can fundamentally change someone's life. So the final point of that, which leads into discipline is, I need to get you to form a relationship with your future self. Because everything that goes on in our life has to do with our mammalian brain, the slower part of our brain here, and it doesn't speak English, there's no affirmation that's going to penetrate that barrier. There's no like, I'm going to read a quote on a wall or a PowerPoint slide that's going to fundamentally change behavior. You have to change the animal, the mammalian part of the brain.

26:25So the question I ask everybody that I'm training is, how would I teach it to a dog? How would I show my goals if I'm setting goals for next year? How would I show that to a dog? Because I have to get it down to a mammal. So the fastest way to do that is through visual means. So I have all of my clients download this app. I can't remember the name of it, but there's probably 100. But it makes you look like 95. And you're just covered in wrinkles. It makes a lot of your hair kind of go away. And I make them printed out and put it everywhere just for a couple of weeks. And now we start developing a mental mammalian relationship with our future self, which changes how I eat, changes how I spend money.

27:12It 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 in my life? And successful people, every single successful person that I've ever met has a good dopamine map. So they get dopamine from good sources instead of bad ones. And it's there a relationship between discipline and confidence, I think so very much.

27:54Because like if you and I were sitting in an airport together, let's say we're sitting in Atlanta airport, and I just asked you with, and you're not a behavior profiler, as far as I know. But I said, Stephen, look around and find somebody that's disciplined. It would take you five seconds because we don't need to profile people. That's a natural thing that you picked up on it on purpose, but we pick up on it unconsciously all the time. So having that level of discipline elevates our level of confidence automatically because we know that other people are going to pick up on it, but we also know I'm moving up, and I'm probably more in control of myself than the person that I'm talking to or the people that I'm dealing with regularly.

28:36So how we live off camera is coming through in our confidence. That's the exact thing that we were talking about, that environment, time, appearance. And if I can live off camera the same way that I want to be perceived by everybody in my life, my confidence already starts to grow. And you said enjoyment as well as one of the five. Yeah, why is enjoyment important? I added it on there. It took a while, but I walked through everybody I've ever trained. And if you look at everyone who is a natural leader and has that level of authority, they're not just partying in the moment, but just in calmly enjoying what is happening now.

29:22So maybe you could call it mindfulness, but I think in just the trait of enjoyment and being in enjoyment is the most magnetic human trait that there is. What do I need to know about observation, which is the second part of your triangle to success or failure? Observation, being able to read a room. Is it possible to be able to read a room? Yeah. How would I go about reading a room? Okay, so if you're reading like a public area, let's go back to the airport maybe. If I'm in a public area, I really want to pay attention to the slowest moving person in the room. I want to pay attention to who is more confident than the other person.

30:05And that's typically going back to speed. And if I'm reading other people well, I'm also making a lot of eye contact with them. So that's also one of the fastest ways to get a read on another human being is how often they're blinking. And if a person is blinking fast, it's a sign of high stress. If they're blinking really slow, it's a sign of focus. So it's not always relaxation. So if I talk to a psychopath in an interrogation room or in a business negotiation, and they're very focused on prey, so we call that a prey focus because they're going to manipulate somebody. They're a blink rate will almost be a zero.

30:49If I talk to somebody who's being deceptive, they're blink rate can go up to like a 75, 80 without us even knowing it. So one of the reasons that blink rate is so reliable is that it's unconscious. We don't realize the shifts in blink rate and we don't manually control it very well. And if all that I would ever need to teach somebody, you don't have to count or know how many times per minute it's going on is if I'm in a conversation, I'm going to start the conversation and say, is the blink rate normal? Is it look fast? Is it look slow? So what I'm really looking for in human behavior are changes.

31:27So if I'm on stage, let's say I'm doing a keynote and across the room, I'm making eye contact with all these people, and I start seeing an increase in audience blink rate, I know I need to change the subject or change the topic right away. So would you be looking at one particular person? No, 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? It's getting an average if that. Yeah, so as I'm looking around, how many blinks do I see? And I'm going to pretend as if that was one human eye. Okay. So when you get a lower blink rate, people are paying more attention.

32:04Yeah, you're doing a great job. And you can, 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. You do the same thing with jury selection. It's so reliable and you read these articles about like someone breathing into their chest. It takes a while to get good at that with your peripheral vision because I've taught it to people and they would have spent a conversation with someone staring at their chest.

32:40And especially if you're talking to a woman, it's a bad idea. So blink rate is incredibly reliable. So to recap that skill, I start a conversation. Does it look pretty normal? Is it pretty fast or kind of slow? The number of look for changes. And that's all I'm looking for in a room of people is what's changing. So 70 is deceptive and zero is psychopath. 70 is stress, not always deceptive. And zero is psychopath basically. Zero might be psychopath. And context is the second letter C. There's five Cs that we talk about in behavior profiling. So change, then context. So now it like somebody just crossed their arms and you read the internet.

33:26It says it's being defensive with holding closed off, see all that stuff. Well, what if it's freezing cold? Yeah. So now we have context. So interesting. That actually happened in my last conversation. I am, I try not to close off my body when I'm doing this because sometimes my natural reaction is to go like this. And then sometimes especially in here when it gets later and we didn't have the fan in the heater. I would go like this. And what I'm, if like the thinking, but this is rude to get rude to the guest, but I looked at my arms and I had these massive goosebumps. And I was like, that's the context.

33:55Yeah. The context is like freezing. Yeah. But to the guest, it would look like I'm going like this. Yeah. You know, so this is why body language is so delicate. I think it is delicate. And it's so hard for people to do peer reviewed research on it. Because there's a million variables. It's like saying, well, why should Roger Federer win a tennis match when he doesn't have any peer reviewed studies to back up what he's doing. Yeah. It's the same thing with body language because like they're doing interrogation research. So they're saying that a college kid who gets a lunch voucher and walks in and pretends to lie about a duck is exactly the same as someone who's been captured in combat.

34:43Sleep 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. It's so you cannot replicate human behavior that well. So and people treat it like it's a pharmaceutical like I can put a Tylenol in somebody and I can measure all these responses. And it doesn't really go into a spreadsheet like that. And there's a lot of great research out there. But I'd say it's just so incredibly hard to replicate everything and with perfection like that. So what was the first see.

35:18First see is change. I want to look for a change. And then you want to look at context. Is there a third see that would be clusters. Clusters. So then you read articles to say someone. Looks a certain way or does a certain thing that might be deceptive like the most common one I hear is someone touches their nose. So someone touching their nose might be being receptive. If you're just seeing one thing. I would say that never almost never means anything. You want to look for a cluster of behavior. So they started getting nervous, which is a change there. It's because I'm asking about where they were on Wednesday night.

35:51There's the context. And while they were getting nervous, they also started protecting their genitals with their hands. And looking their lips, which is a hygienic gesture that we do. So now I have a change within the context that's appropriate. And there's a cluster of behavior. After that, I screened through culture. Is there some part of this person's culture or background. That makes them do that. Like I was with a young person. We were watching a Pakistani person get interrogated. And you know how you commonly see that kind of head shake in that region of the world. They said, I was shaking his head while he's saying, yes.

36:31Like now we get down to that sea. This is culture, which rules out that behavior or gets rid of it. And finally, the most the least important thing on this is the checklist. And by checklist, I mean, there is a list of known behaviors that are likely to be deception. And if you're in body language, you deal in likelihood. That's all we deal in. Some people say they're 100 % sure on stuff. Skeptical. But we deal in likelihood. So we should always process in that. So someone looking their lips or moving a certain way. If it's in 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.

37:16Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, thinking about things I used to do when I was younger. And there was just a period of my life with some bizarre reason. I used to go like this. I used to do all the time. It was almost like a tick. Yeah, it's not really weird. I think this one's a really crazy thing to say. But.

37:32One of my best friends had like curtains. Like have the hair cut curtains. Okay. And he used to flick it. And I almost like for carelessly picked up the like 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. Some form of behavior. Whereas it was just this weird thing that lasted for like 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. Yeah. If I if I was meeting you. Yeah.

38:06And you were on the dragonsden for a while. And people pitch you. Yeah. All kinds of ideas. That just having somebody on the show or just having those skills with you. You could see through a lot of those people. And whether or not they're being honest about what they're pitching. And you could look at a show like Shark Tank. And I can look at I can watch any episode of Shark Tank and look who's blinking the least. They're 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 there. They're it personally invested. So that's fascinating is that just you can just look at one or two things.

38:50And predict. Stress or focus. And. And just being able to do that. If you just took that one thing away from this. That would be a superpower. Because I sit here with guests, right? And they talk about their life stories and stuff. And I often see some patterns of behavior. Yeah. Specifically like closing up when you are someone something about their childhood or. A specific sensitive subject in their life. You tend to see like. Self. I call it like self soothing behavior to some degree. So it's difficult. And it's funny because we we're all like amateur body language experts now. Yeah. There's been a lot of stuff online saying spot this.

39:27Did they touch their nose, et cetera? So it can also be dangerous again. And it can give us these like, oh, I saw this one thing I'm never doing business with that guy. Yeah. And like he scratched his nose three times while he was talking about that. Well, he's. Look in his briefcase. He's got allergy medication in there. He's scratching his nose. The season just changed at 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. So now we we start to realize I'm not seeing a change. I'm seeing something that was repetitive. And communication is the third one in the triangle to success or failure.

40:01Communication. So what I've got so far is talking slow is high authority. Yeah. Is there anything else that if I want to be a master communicator, I should be thinking about. Absolutely. Oh. When it comes to communication, a man, a good storyteller is great. And there's a million podcasts out there that can teach somebody that. But it comes down to whether or not you can speak to the person that you are in front of. And understanding what kind of person that is. And there's a few ways that I identify. I segregate people into six groups. And that's through what do they need from other people? So what kind of things do I need socially?

40:45And these are significance. Acceptance. Approval. Intelligence. Pity. And strength or slash power. And in every conversation, if you ask somebody about themselves, they're going to come across. And reveal one of those things to you. So if I know that you are a significant 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. So the moment that I hear you talk about yourself, your accomplishments, what you like in life, what happened for you this week, what's a great memory that you have.

41:34Every conversation you're going to hear this stuff starting to get revealed. So you hear somebody within these are a conversation or things that you could hear in a conversation pretty quickly. You start talking to somebody and they said, yeah, I'm actually the CEO 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. So you hear that there's significance, right? Then you listen for approval is this is when you hear people say, well, I got to go up on stage tomorrow, but I suck at public speaking it. I'm going to I'm going to really bomb at it.

42:09I'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 kind of group and that'll come across in their communication. So you ask a significance person about a vacation and they say, yeah, I went down to Miami. It was fantastic. I had a great time. And I just got back last night asking acceptance person. They'll say, we went down there. All of us went to this thing and we did this.

42:47So 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, we actually got my MBA from this person. Oh, I did my master's thesis on that. Do you hear this intelligence stuff come out of people? And the pity is you can identify a pity person pretty well. And those are the hardest people to communicate to. And the pity person always like if I want to give you the ideal thing to say to each one of these people. The pity person wants to hear, I can't believe all the stuff that you've been through. And you've got to this point.

43:24I don't think many people would have. Pity wants recognition of suffering. And finally, we have the strength and power person. And this isn't always BIF from back to the future. So it can be somebody who's a leader in a company, they won't, but they want control. So significance is do I make a difference? Strength and power is do I have control over other people? These are the everybody from like the leader who kind of forces his way into the top to the guy with the ridiculous jacked up pickup truck that has like the plastic testicles hanging off of the back of them. And once you understand what categorization someone fits into, how would you show up in a way that's effective in communicating with them.

44:09Say for example, if I'm talking to a significance person. Yeah. Do I just, and I'm trying to close a deal with them or something. Do I hand it to their significance? Yeah. So there's a few other types that we teach intelligence people to identify. There's six ways we make decisions and then six ways that we have values, which is our end goal that we want. But I want to speak in a way that says this decision is going to increase your level of significance. And I want to compliment them on their level of significance right before I asked them for something. So I can say, Steven, this is a great podcast.

44:47You've got millions of subscribers and it's obviously you make a difference in so many people's lives. And you are a significance person. So that would be effective for you because I know that you want to make a biggest difference that you can. And I want to speak in a way that a speaks to their needs and lets them know that I am a source for that. But be that making this decision, whatever that whatever we're talking about selling a car, whatever is going to increase your ability to get that same need from other people. So I think if we did this together, I think the number one thing that's going to happen right away is you're going to be able to impact twice as many people.

45:27You're going to leave a much deeper footprint in the world. So I'm giving you, we're going to double your subscribers or your listeners, but not just that. You're going to make a bigger impact and legacy on the world. So every time I'm thinking about needs, always think in terms of neurotransmitters. So if I can compliment someone on their need, that's what we need from other people. So I'm giving them like 500 million neurotransmitters being released when they hear this. So it's not just that we're kind of suffering and insecure and all these things that we talked about a minute ago. We're also drug addicts, everybody.

46:07We just need to identify the drug that that person's addicted to. I was thinking about the pen. I was like, I was going to ask you to, if I'm an intelligence person and you had to sell me the pen. Yeah. How would you go about that? You know, I think there's a lot of people in the world out there. And I think most people just do what other people do. And I'm sure you would agree. There's so many idiots out there that just get with the basic thing. I'm going to do this basic thing and they don't really go outside the box very often. And every once in a while, there's you meet somebody who knows higher quality things.

46:47And you meet somebody who is able to see things at a level different than other people. And I would talk about that intelligence while subconsciously, I'm associating all of that with this. This is different. It's unique. It's a pencil. But it's not like other pencils. It's not the basic run of the mill thing. So I want to present that in a way. And I'm going to start with a negative comment. And this is one of the most effective persuasion strategies is to, I'm going to negatively associate something I don't want you to have. So let's say we're starting our podcast. And I'm afraid Steven's not going to connect with me.

47:26And 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. And there's so many people out there. And when any time I say something negative in a conversation, I never want to gesture in between you and me. I always want to gesture away. So this is, we're talking about other people. Because there's so many people out there who just don't really give back to the world. And they don't really have an interest in helping other people. And it's like every time you meet one of those people, you sit down with them.

48:01It's like all of them have the same thing in common. They can't just stop and connect when they sit down with somebody. So I'm demonizing a trait using your needs. That I don't want you to have like the inability to connect. Okay. Interesting. And you're consciously pointing off to just your, it's others not. Right. Until I said the word connect. And then I gesture between you and me back and forth between both of us. And that word stop is a very powerful word in the English language. So when I said it's like all of them have the same quality to them. They can't just stop and fully connect with somebody else.

48:43That's a very subtle thing. But I've used your neurotransmitters. I've used your needs. And I've, I've got you to agree. You're not at your head. Agree that those people don't really connect well with other people. So that's how powerful that stuff can be. And you can use the same thing in the in reverse. And I could, I could say a positive thing. And I could say, you know, Steven, what's fascinating to me is I've gone around the world. I've met several entrepreneurs. I met people who are on TV. And it's like you think that they are just dismissive offhand before you meet them. And it's incredible when you meet these people.

49:21It's like all of them have this ability to just tune everything out and just completely connect with somebody. And that would have the same effect. And what's going on there? People we want to be that person because it's positive we want to live up to that expectation set. Right. So what I've done is I've gotten you to say. Okay. As Chris Voss would put it, that's right. Okay. But I've got you to say that about who you are as a person. Okay. So now I'm not changing your ideas. I'm changing your identity. Changing my identity. Yeah, because you've made an agreement about who you are. You've not at your head.

50:03Okay. And if I wanted to take that further, I would, I would make an admission first. And I'd say, you know what? I've had social anxiety growing up. And I'm curious, what is it that? Have you always been able to just connect with everybody you talk to or is this something that you had to work on?

50:21Oh, is that question? Yeah. Okay. But I know it's not a question. But the moment that you ask the that you start to answer that question. You've made an agreement about who you are as a person. So if I wanted somebody to be less closed off. I might say, you know, I spent my whole life just worried about what other people think in it. It took, I was 25 before I got to a point where I was able to open up. Have you always been this open with people or did you have to work on that? So just any answer and no one's going to give you an answer of like, actually, I'm just closed off. I'm very close minded and that's maybe a point one percent of people.

51:00So 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 that 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 to flight checklist. Yeah. It's the thing with Julian Trezer 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, no, no, listen.

51:34He said everyone wanted to. He's one on speaking has got like 35 million views, but the one on listening just. No one's interested in that. But I'm guessing listening plays a pretty critical role to being a great speaker. Yeah, and listening means I can identify who you are and what the needs that are driving you and the social needs and the way that you make decisions. Is that part of the observation part? Yes, absolutely. Just listening to that means that now I have the right words to use for the communication and the right. The right understanding of what motivates you as a person. So if I'm a therapist, that makes me a better therapist.

52:10If I'm a hostage negotiator, that makes me a better hostage negotiator. And if I'm a suicide hotline operator, that makes me way better at my job. Because I'm understanding exactly who I'm talking to. And my goal is to talk someone into doing something that they normally would not do. You talk about this elicitation. Yeah, what is elicitation? It's a CIA tech hate, right? It is. It was originally came up with by this guy named John Nolan. And his book is no longer for sale. You have to get it on eBay. Like it's hard to find. But the book is called confidential. Why isn't it no longer for sale?

52:45I think that he just kind of pulled it off the shelf. I'm not sure. Okay. So elicitation is about using statements instead of questions. And I'll give you an example. Let's say you and I walk into Whole Foods, which is we're in New York. So it's probably a block away somewhere. We walk in there. And there's. Let's say there's a young lady stocking produce. And 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. And that's tough, right? It's it sounds really tough. So if you went over to her.

53:31And this is a generalization just to get you to understand what elicitation is. And said, hey, I'm trying to find the baby carrots. And she walks you over there. But while you're walking, you say, I just read this article online that says, all Whole Foods employees just got bumped up to $26 an hour. That's fantastic. And she turns around and goes, what? No, I make 17. So now she doesn't feel like she's been pressed or questioned about how much she makes. She's correcting you. Or if you, let's say you got into an Uber tonight and you said, I just read this article that Uber drivers were one of the top most highly satisfied.

54:14Employees in the country. You're going to get a correction. And you're going to be like, where did you read that? So triggering a need to correct the record is one of the easiest ways to use elicitation. But it's only one. Another one is just making a statement afterwards and saying, I bet you had some interesting experiences doing that. Or I can imagine that was challenging. Statements are always going to be better than asking pointed questions. Because a person feels like they're volunteering information. The third layer of that is disbelief. So let's say I wanted to ask if you just got back from vacation and I didn't want to use any questions.

54:57We, 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 the statement. And you're like, no, actually, I've been doing this, this, this, and this. So now you've, you've given me more than if I just asked if you're on vacation. And I said, wow, that had to be interesting. I can't imagine that it's got to be a lot of stuff going on there. And you start talking more and more and more and more. And then like, that sounds great. There was no challenges to that entire trip. I love when everything is 100 % flawless. And you're like, no, actually, and then you start going into that.

55:35And I'm like, no way. Now we have disbelief that comes in. And I have asked a single question yet. So that's one thing that I challenge everybody that I trained to get really good at is that elicitation piece. How many layers can I get into a person or a conversation just using these statements? And that's why I wrote, there's a whole chapter about it in, 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.

56:19They shipped would pull into Thailand or submarine to pull into Thailand or Singapore. And a Russian would go up and these sailors would be drinking at the bar. Russian would sit there. He's got a low -hot shirt on or something. And strike up a conversation and they say, I know that the German submarines get out running because their propellers are 22 and all of your submarine propellers are 18 feet in diameter. And the sailor slightly turns around and says, no, they're not. And starts giving up all this information just to correct the record. And that's all they did back then was just correcting the record.

56:55I'm triggering this need to offer some kind of correction to information that's inaccurate. And even with business intelligence. Let's say that a company's moving and they have to get business intelligence somebody at that company will get approached at a bar and somebody will say, yeah, I heard you guys are moving between March and April. And they'll get corrected. No, it's actually February, but we're not really supposed to talk about it. It's like there's no way you're going to move in February. It's too cold. And the interest rates are up to high. There's no possible way that the CEO would ever do that.

57:26It's like, yeah, and then you go to you're going to get more information out because of the disbelief. So that was correcting the record. A second technique called bracketing, where I'm giving you a series like between March and May. Or between 39 and 59. And the third is the disbelief that starts to getting this information out of people. So if you want to think about like, how do I start a conversation or continue one using elicitation. Think of the words so and then do a recap. So you've been doing this for three years or so. This is not the best job, but it's getting things done for you. Or I bet.

58:04So I bet that was interesting. I bet there were still some challenges there. I bet you overcame a whole lot to get to this point. So or I bet is the best way to do that. And when I, okay, so if I say, I bet you hate that coffee. Yeah. That that's a statement, but you're going to endeavor to correct the record either way. Yeah. And if you do hate the coffee, you'll say, yeah, like even you saying, yes, I do kind of hate it is offering up information. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And you could even go on with that. I mean, like, I bet you hate that coffee. And somebody says, yeah, well, I do kind of hate it.

58:40But I can imagine you're the kind of person who likes coffee a very specific way. Well, yeah, here's how I like it a lot. And say, that's extremely interesting. No creamer, no sugar. And I'm just recapping. So why is that better than me just going, how'd 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. Yeah. So they're trying to not get that got up. Yeah. So the rule of thumb is the more sensitive the information is that you need the less questions you need to be asking. And is that what I mean, that's does correlate to kind of like how I've information that the spies that have interviewed have given me like Andrew Bustamante and Mike Baker, they both said that much of the game was like hearing someone out and just letting them talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.

59:32Yeah, they're not being too pushy. Yeah. And that's that's the best way to not be pushy is to use the illustration stuff. Perception context permission, the PCP model. Is a way of understanding how to get someone to do something from turning a cult to buying an item. Yeah. So the PCP model looks like it's three steps, but it's what you to view it as kind of dominoes. So one step starts the progress of coming down the other and once that comes down the next domino starts going down. So if I change your perception about something, then I change the context that you're viewing that in, which changes the way that you feel permission to do it.

1:00:15So I'll give you an example. Would you want a weird example or a boring one? We'll go with, let's go with weird. Okay. So let's go with an attorney in Washington state was charged with assault of a woman using hypnosis. And he would have her get naked in his office, which is something she would not normally do. And the attorney was studying this hypnosis and stuff like that. He wasn't as far as I know he was not even good. But he would hypnotize her and then tell her. At the end of the day, you come home from work and this is just like that time. I want you to picture yourself. It's the end of the day.

1:01:05You'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. So he's changed her perception of where she is. He changed the context of neither one of you or me right now would like get naked on a podcast. But both of us are going to later tonight when we go to shower. So, 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 that I studied this and.

1:01:44It was fascinating is cult recruiters and 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 sales people. And these are hard hit in people man. That it's a hard job. Dorted or sales. But they. Talk people into doing things they probably wouldn't. Otherwise have done. Installing a 95 ,000 dollar solar system on their roof or buying a vacuum cleaner or joining a cult that's probably harmful. But all of them started off the conversation by changing the perception of what's going on. So instead of me saying, Hey, let me talk to you about this thing that's from a like a needy perspective.

1:02:31They come out with a survey. And they say it's an anonymous survey, which automatically makes the people more open. So it's an anonymous survey. I've changed permission. So now the context has shifted slightly. And if I could change your perception again. Would you rather be in a group of people who feel like family or people who are related to you. So I start asking all these little questions about. How would you rather live your life in a way that's like just kind of nudging you down into this cult mindset of like, do you want to be around people that enjoy your company? Like those kind of questions.

1:03:10So 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 my context is way off, which shifts my permission. It's like, I have permission to do this because that's the kind of person I've just agreed to be. And that's who I've said that I am. I have to do this because that's cognitive dissonance like crazy. And one thing I teach you about any persuasion, whether you're doing a siop 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 I'm get the way that I've got you to see the world doesn't match up with what you're doing.

1:04:00So the fastest 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 both of those extremes. Once I get a person to make even one or two or three statements about their identity, I have drastically altered how they're going to behave in the future. Robert Chaldeini, 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.

1:04:48Two weeks before that, they go by door to door and say do support safe driving. Yes or no. Who's going to say no. It's like 91 % said, yeah, yeah, support safe driving. They said good. Will you put this tiny sticker in your front window, tiny little sticker. And just to let us know that you're supporting safe driving. That's all we always ask you to do. Two weeks later, they come back to the neighborhood like 89 % of people are sticking these signs in their yard. The other neighborhood they did the test on didn't have this little survey. Do you support safe driving first. And it was like 6 % stuck the sign in their yard.

1:05:28So making one agreement about who I am and then taking action on it. So if I can get you to take action on something, not in just between you and me. Now I got you to put a sticker on your window. I got you to do something that alters the way other people see you. So if I can get you to make something that I've got you to believe. Public and get you to make a Twitter post and get you to make a Facebook post. Now I've captured identity. So most persuasion and influence training in the world is about capturing ideas. Identity is where you truly get to change behavior. So I'm getting you to agree that you are a certain type of person before I want you to do anything.

1:06:09Interesting. It explains a lot about politics in fact. You know what we see go on in the election cycles and also just how a political party political group can slowly drift together to a position that objectively go. Bloody hell, that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because they kind of slowly they say I'm this party I signed up to this this particular political party. And then slowly just with like creep of beliefs, you end up over 10 years, all of you believing in thinking something is okay. Yeah. Interesting. Just because you made an agreement. I guess in part that explains some of the wars as well.

1:06:51Like there's an element here which can be can explain things like Nazi Germany. Yeah. And how civilization can go from being relatively normal to doing really horrific barbaric things to people. Yeah. And if you just going back to the milkroom experiment. Right away I got you to say do you fully volunteer to participate in this. Would you accept the role of teacher. Would you sit down on this chair? Would you shock him with this low voltage? I've got you to agree that I'm the kind of person that's willing to shock someone for an experiment within the first two minutes. And they don't talk about that.

1:07:29They kind of tend to say the whole experiments 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 the these recaps of the study. But if you volunteer for that experiment, you're driving on a campus. You've probably not been on going into a building you've never been to. Meeting a guy in a lab coat that you've never met. And another guy you've never met in a room that you've never met sat in front of a machine you've never seen. Reading a quiz that you've never read in your entire life. All of these things brand new. The number one thing that generates focus in the mammalian brain.

1:08:05This is dog. You name it. Is novelty. So our ancestors, they're walking past a bush every day of their life. And one day, sons about to set and a stick snaps behind that bush. That's novelty. That's an unexpected piece of information. New information. Or is it expected? Yeah, what's your definition of novelty? Novelty is my brain is expecting certain things to happen. I'm going to walk past this bush. Just like I've done before. I have kind of a script for running things. And something happens that breaks that script of what I am predicting about the world. Does that make sense? Any kind of novelty generates focus.

1:08:48So the four things that we can manipulate inside of a human brain spells out the word fate. So the four ways to manipulate or. Influence a mammal. And this is human dog. You name it is through focus authority. Tribe. And emotion. Those are the four things that a dog can feel. If you're looking at a dog training video, you're watching. Let's say you're binge watching three seasons of dog whisperer with Caesar Milan. You're seeing him a 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.

1:09:36It's also how an info. Marshall gets you to buy something. They grab your focus. They show you. Here's a. A million people who've already bought it so far. They all have these five star reviews. Everybody in your neighborhoods 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 like.

1:10:09Fizzy drink ads in the sun in the sunshine in the summer. And you see, you know, like the. You hear the sound. As they like break open. There's people there. I guess that's the tribe. Having a great time. And I was just struggling with the authority part. In that context. If those ads you see for like a fizzy drink brand. I think the authority would be the on screen presence or brand recognition. Okay. Or could be a celebrity or something. Yeah. And this is coming from a tribal leader. As if our ancestors didn't listen to a tribal leader. You don't live very long. And you actually talk about how to win an argument.

1:10:46And when I say win an argument, I don't really mean an argument. I mean more like, you know, me and my girlfriend having a conversation. Yeah. And I want to get to a good resolution. What are the things I should definitely not do? Calling out little points. That any kind of incorrect information. We wait until the end. We save it. Okay. So if I hear 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 that we want them to get that out first. But right away as soon as possible in any argument like this.

1:11:24I want to establish like. Do we have a similar common ground? Do we have what common ground do we share? And do we want a similar outcome? And I might even ask that question. Really quick. Do we both want the same thing from this discussion? I'll never call it an argument. So one, 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. And if I can be right, that means I was right. Not winning an argument doesn't mean you're right before or right after.

1:12:06But it's like, what is the ideal outcome for both of us? And I would stop in a business negotiation. Whatever. What's ideal for both of us? We both want this same thing. And the ideal outcome for you is this. The ideal outcome for me is this. And I think there's some middle ground here. And 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. So if my wife was saying. You don't even need to call me. You don't call me anyway when you're on these business trips. I never get phone calls.

1:12:42Do you think she is worried that her phone isn't ringing? Or she's worried that she's not being appreciated? And not feeling loved. So. Men, especially, we'll tend to say, well, let's, let's open these facts really quick. Pull your phone out. I'm going to show you some missed calls right now. It's not about the calls. I need to hear what's underneath the statements that someone is saying. You need to hear between the lines. Just like a behavior profiler. So what is the, 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.

1:13:29I just posted a video on YouTube three days ago of it was called the narcissist off switch. And it was how to disarm any narcissist. And there were these very specific methods. But the biggest method of all was to always think about what they are using to get out of you. So if I'm in an argument, is someone using fear? Obligation or guilt and that acronym spells fog. So am I going to get in trouble or can I recognize when somebody is using fear obligation and guilt? And if someone is doing any of those things, I want to call it out in a non -confrontational way. So let's say you give me some line about like if you don't do this, I'm going to have to work 19 hours next week.

1:14:20So it's never about the hours and it's now it's guilt, right? I can say, Steven, it. Maybe you didn't mean to, but it sounded like you wanted me to feel guilty about me working next week. And I know that you're a good person. I don't think you minute that way. So I will absolutely call out any fear obligation or guilt always. But I'll call it out in a way that says maybe you didn't mean this. But it sounded like this is what you were saying right here. And I always want to use that word where it's non -confrontational. And I want to give them an out. So in interrogation training, we always call this the golden bridge.

1:14:58In the art of war, they say give your opponent a golden bridge on which they can retreat. So they can retreat across this golden bridge and trap them in a corner. Yeah. So we give them an out. That's beautiful. So maybe you didn't mean this. And I always want to think about going back to that. What is the hidden feeling or fear that's behind what they're saying? They're scared of something. They're scared of losing a deal. They're scared of losing money. They're scared of looking a certain way. They're scared of what the people in the room are going to think. So where is the hidden fear in someone's argument?

1:15:34Anytime you're in an argument, there's a level of concealed fear. And just 30, 40 seconds, you can find that. And a lot of people teach this as a tactic, but just stopping and looking at a person. After they do that in an argument, it's so incredibly powerful. Just stopping and looking at them. Yeah. So like 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 were saying. And that helps people to do that because it feels less awkward as if I'm doing a tactic.

1:16:17I'm doing that thing. But I'm just pausing because I'm going to actually reflect on what you just said. And I'm going to use that time for just a minute. I might look away. I might as soon as you're done talking, I might say.

1:16:31And I might just take a moment and say, Steven, it's maybe I heard this wrong. And go right into that. So that long pause is so effective in conversation, especially when it's meaningful. And it's not a tactic. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have? Especially as it relates to what most people ask you about and they're most interested in. Well, what is one thing that no one's ever asked you on a podcast? What is one thing no one's ever asked me? People don't really ask me stuff. Well, who are you? And what is your mission? Oh, you're doing something on me.

1:17:06I'm not doing something unless you were doing something on me. I would love to know. And why don't you answer that? And I'll break down the hidden statements that you're going to reveal about your personality. Hey, who am I?

1:17:24I'm a podcaster. I'm an entrepreneur, an investor. I'm a boyfriend. And what's my mission? It's to pursue my potential and to follow my curiosity and to see what happens. All right. Yeah. So that's a great answer. But you went deeply into who you are as a person. So the first thing you did is look up into your right. Yeah. Then you looked up into your left. They up into the center. So that when your eyes are moving in multiple directions is called a trans derivational search. So I'm looking in different file cabinets that are inside my head. Yeah. And then you talked about some of the labels that you wore.

1:18:06Yeah. 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 what an important to you. Yeah, it's not important to me. Right. So you could hear what's important to people. Just then. And then the mission was not about other people. It was about like how can I make myself better? You may be doing that to enrich other people's lives. But you didn't say I have a podcast. So I can benefit 10 million. Are you about to hit 10 million? Yeah. It's interesting because I actually my brain like.

1:18:45It was right there to say that. And then I thought it's just not the nature of. The truth like the truth is I started this in my bedroom. And I always think about the fact that when I did it for three years, no one was listening. So my mission when I was doing it was genuinely because I really loved it. Yeah. It wasn't like I'm going to change the world. And it's so tempting sometimes to like add that on like I want to change the world. And I just don't believe that's why most people start things and continue when no one's listening. Yeah. I think it's it's usually something more selfish. That means sense.

1:19:17Yeah. You started something and you were passionate about the thing itself. I enjoyed the thing. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That was a dissertation. Okay. That what you just did then. Well, three. I think I did three layers. Okay. But it's very, very genuine. And a lot of people get to the subscriber thing. I'm I think I'll hit a million in a week or two, which is a huge milestone for me. I never thought I would have a million. But. It was never important on your main channel. On the behavior panel. It's me and three other behavior profilers. Yes. That's incredible. Yeah. It's amazing. And we. That was a station.

1:20:02Good job. So. We just record zooms. Don't edit them at all. I just see now. I was just trying to listen. It's a little sloppy. So you were sorry. You're doing like a read of me. You said, I said, podcast. I said, I don't know. I said, I'm going to be a professional. I said, I said, I said, I do it. I think I said. So your goals. Feuriosity. And then I wasn't the other one. It was like, it was about my potential. Yeah. That's what I think about a lot. Like pushing my potential in following my curiosity. Yeah. That's what happens. So potential curiosity. What would I see there? So I'm a podcaster.

1:20:39I did this for passion. I want, I want to fulfill my potential. Am I saying, I'm not seeing acceptance. I'm not saying that you need approval from me. I'm not saying that you need to do anything. So it's about your personal level of significance. Like, do I make a difference? But not to other people. But you still want people to acknowledge that you are reaching your potential. You are doing what you say you're going to do. You're relying on your girlfriend. So we're talking about a little bit of a group. But all of what you're saying is about significance. So when I say, like, you make a tremendous difference in people's lives.

1:21:12And 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 like the center of attention in room. Yeah, see that little. A grimace. Yeah. But other people who are like the more approval group focused people. When I say, like, I can tell like you're the center of all your groups of friends. And everybody comes to you for advice. You seem like one of those people, which is an elicitation statement by itself. And it's not like you're supposed to do it by yourself as well.

1:21:48So you can tell that if I used anything that didn't fit your psychology, it feels weird. And if a salesperson is doing that. They do it by accident. And they say, Oh, this is a numbers game, because I don't. I use this script that I have. I kind of follow the script pretty loosely. And I close a 41 % or whatever it is. In reality, if you changed how you communicate based on the sub parts of that person's psychology, which are on public display, their 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 the sale, how you get somebody to do something.

1:22:35Everything changes the moment you're able to profile a human being and understand who they are a little bit deeper. And if you know the needs, if I know your need is significance, I automatically know one of your fears and some of your biggest fears are feeling insignificant, feeling like you could have made a difference, but you didn't make any difference, like you didn't leave any footprint in the world, like you didn't fulfill what you meant what you wanted to. And any need that I can identify automatically reveals some fears. And if I understand fears, I can also lead behavior that way as well.

1:23:13I was thinking through the context of being like a CEO or manager of Teams. This is, I guess this is why it's so important to know the different types of people you have in your teams. And also I used to work on phones doing tele cells. And you did? Yes, for many years. I, when I was 16, I worked at Everest in Plymouth, which was Windows and Doors and Conservatories in artificial grass. And then when I went to Manchester when I was a little bit older for university before dropping out, I worked at Swinton Car Insurance. I worked at a bunch of places. I worked at Fusion Studios selling like photography vouchers.

1:23:51I did Facebook ad sales on the phone back in the day. Lots of, lots of tele cells experience. And I was just wondering, because in those moments you call someone out of the blue, or they call you asking for car insurance. And you don't have a big window of time necessarily to figure out what kind of person they are. Not at all. So how'd 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 the 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.

1:24:30Right is that person answers the phone and 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. A person doesn't even know who they are yet. But they're 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.

1:25:02And then if they're on the phone a little bit longer, you can get to know them a little bit better and I said, what kind of person they are and better adjust to make sense. And then when you're saying, I'm so sorry, this is really embarrassing. Other person, most people aren't going to be like, no, it's fine. It's fine. I don't even know who you are. We haven't even got to know each other yet. Is there something that you see most frequent that's deficient in cells pitches when you're training cells people? Is that like one particular thing that's typically most deficient that they're not doing?

1:25:32There's a few. Okay. But slowness is a big one. Authority is lacking in confidence in what that person is selling and going off of a script. And this is the biggest one. Any kind of script automatically tells our brain. So like when's the last time you got you get telemarker or calls to your phone every once in a while. I'll say a while. I do too. And I'll answer it. And the moment that it sounds like somebody going, oh, hi, Mr. Hughes, this is Blink from Blink Company. My brain knows what a sales call sounds like and instantly checks out of the conversation. Instantaneously, even if I didn't want to do it, my brain's already starting to shut this guy out of my life because it sounds like everything else I've ever heard.

1:26:24So since our brain is so good at making apps, I know because of just knowing neuroscience, if I'm calling and I sound like a salesperson or I sound like something you've heard before, you're done. You're going to get off the phone as fast as possible. If something happens that makes you think, whoa, this is different, your brain is going to pay more attention. And I don't mean knocking a Starbucks over across your laptop. I mean, how can I make my sales calls not sound like every other call that exists? I was victim of a phone call that was clearly listening to your work because the guy called me and said, hi, this is a sales call and you can hang up now if you're not interested.

1:27:08But if you are willing to hear me out, I just want any seconds. And the fact that they offered me the opportunities to hang up for some reason appreciated it. And I gave them the time. And I remember I was like, really busy. I was on my way to a podcast recording and just the fact that you can hang up now, this is just going to be honest, this is a sales call. Yeah, he gave you autonomy. So I was like, okay, what are you selling? That 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.

1:27:39Yeah. And we, I guess we can do the same in our emails. In fact, the CEO and CEO of my media company that I hired sent me an email. And the first line of the email, they didn't even, she's listening now, Cristiana and Georgie, they didn't even like introduce themselves. They said, um, like straight to the point, no habituation filter. And it's interesting. It's an interesting open aligned because the word habituation filter, it's something I talk about my book. So they're kind of like tickled my ego a little bit as well, I think, because it says I've read your book. Yeah. And they went straight to the point it took me off guard and got even focus.

1:28:18Of course, yeah, they have the job now they work here. So, and even the subject line was like, oh, that was their introduction email to you. Yeah, that was the first ever email. Yeah, that's brilliant. Because it's, I don't think people will realize this unless you've been in a situation where you're like working in recruitment, looking at thousands of emails. But we, when I used to really run the recruitment inbox, because I'm just obsessed with the recruitment, we had, we have 35 ,000 email emails in there. And I'm going through there at speed. And I'm looking for what I would call exclusionary factors and inclusionary factors.

1:28:53What I mean by that is factors to immediately exclude this email. Yeah. And factors to immediately include this email within three seconds to read later. To read later, to like start into read later or just to give it another 10 seconds. And the exclusionary factors are, they're all to surface things that you typically get from people who typically do a certain thing. And that's mean that's also why I think about marketing newsletters. If the newsletter looks designed, the study 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.

1:29:28The emails you get every day that are important are not designed. Yeah. And so we, with our newsletter, we again, the email newsletter provider was saying, oh, you can use all these templates. But then we're like, no, no, if we use a template, no one reads the thing, which is again counterintuitive, but it's the same psychology, right? It is. And like I've increased our, our open rate with emails by not capitalizing the first word of the subject line because it looks like it's overly edited. And we've switched from here's a list of 13 ways that we might have failed in 2013 with this ad campaign or whatever, or this marketing campaign.

1:30:11And I'll just change the subject line to this sucked. And it just, it did so much better because it looks like something a friend would send you. It looks like something you'd get from a relative or something. And that's that habituation filter at play, just trying to phase out things that are, I like that word, not novel. I think I read it, I read it was reading studies about habituation and how we just habituate to things. And I was looking into how that happens in both what we see, but also what we hear. So the studies were talking about, if you say a word like, father, father, father, father, father, father, father, father, eventually it just becomes a sound in your head.

1:30:51Yeah. Because your brain is taken away cognitive resource. It's no longer thinking about the meaning and it's just hearing this sound. But then there's other words that habituate slower like warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, because those words are like emotional. And anyway, I think a lot about it in the context of content creation. Mr. Beast is the great master of beating your habituation filter, like with how he starts his videos, 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.

1:31:27Because I see any video that looks like that I'm off within the first second. I'm done because they all look the same now. Yeah. That's an interesting observation. So I think the type of viewers, very important. Because like during this video, when people are watching this conversation, you're not going to have 10 seconds of B roll of people walking in slow motion through an airport. There's not going to be, you're not over designing stuff. And the people who listen to this show are way different than the people who are watching Mr. Beast drop a Ferrari onto a mattress and blow it up. They're very, very different.

1:32:06So 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 sort of quick prejudices about everything. So shortcuts. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to develop as many shortcuts as I can to save cognitive load, brain power. At my company Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company Flight Group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences, whether that's a new show, a product or a project. It's why I launched the conversation cards. I've relied on Shopify before. Who's a sponsor of today's podcast.

1:32:42And I'll be using them again for the next big launch, which we'll hear about soon. And I use them because how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world, we 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 slash Bartlett.

1:33:15That's Shopify .com slash Bartlett 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? And getting to a point where they're modifying their discipline changes their confidence, because I always talk about discipline as kind of the gateway drug to everything else in authority. And it's the gateway to composure for sure, but getting your discipline modified is one of the fastest ways to make everything else change.

1:34:04And how do I fix my discipline if I'm an ill -disciplined person? Understanding what discipline is is the most critical element. And I define this differently, the most people. So I define discipline as your ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own, present self. And that's it. That's all the discipline is. I'm prioritizing the needs of future me. You're trying to think of a... No, I was thinking of two scenarios. The scenario one is I go home tonight, right? Because I go to sleep, I get to bed early. And there's this other thing I'm thinking about doing after this, which is going to the gym.

1:34:47Yeah. And I'm like, I was just as you're saying that, I was thinking, both help future me. Yeah. I was brought to us. I was like, which one is disciplined? I think they both be disciplined. Okay. So the moment that we start understanding that if I could just make decisions that are prioritizing future me, then we go back to where am I getting my dopamine from. And I want past tense me to be a source of dopamine for present tense me. Because most of us look back with regret. I shouldn't have drank that much. I shouldn't have mouthed off at the family reunion. You know, whatever it is, I shouldn't have overslept.

1:35:27If I can start looking backwards with gratitude, that's the fastest way to make discipline dopamine generating. So the tricks are to start small. So like when I go to bed at night, I will pop open the little curig. Coffee thing and stick the thing in there, put a cup under there, everything's like ready to go. So when I wake up in the morning, I just go, bam, and everything's ready. I'll get my clothes out. Everything kind of lined up ready to put on for the next day. So I'm lowering the threshold of how much attention I'm spending. So I'm going to set my life up in every single way that I possibly can.

1:36:04As if I were a butler for future me. So when I wake up in the morning, all this stuff set out, my laundry's laid out, my checklist for what I need to do to the for the day. All the stuff I'm 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 dollar bill or maybe a few hundred dollar bills. Every spring or summer, and I'll stick them in the jacket pocket that I'm not going to use until the winter.

1:36:40And 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 like printing that old me photo and putting it all over the house. But everything that I can possibly do to make myself look backwards with gratitude is what I'm going to start doing. But you have to start small. It's like just going overboard is going to be crazy. And even writing a little post at note to yourself and sticking it in a jacket or a maybe a dress shoe that you're not going to wear for a few months.

1:37:20It means so much to find that and it's from you. It's not from a loved one. You did it. So you're looking backwards with like, wow, that's amazing. So you're now getting in love and sending gratitude backwards, which automatically means that what's going forwards is concern and care. The moment I'm always looking back with gratitude, the concern is always going forward in the future. And the concern for present goes away. And I'm going to push that concern to the right out in the future. People struggle with even with the small things, right? Like getting because it's funny because I watched a video last night about a lady that went to YouTube and started her like journey of weight loss and whatever.

1:38:05And she was very, I think she was 400 pounds or something and she was trying to get down. And in the video, you watched some people all know him referring to over the space of a year or two years. She actually just gains weight. She gets to I think five, five hundred pounds or something. And as I was watching it, you're watching someone who's saying, I want to change my life. But then it's coming on every day and say, I've just gained three pounds, I've just gained another three pounds. And there's almost this, this like visible dissonance that you're observing between this person saying they want to change their life.

1:38:37But clearly the actions that they're then taking are like different to that. And many people can relate to that feeling of, I want to be this person. I mean, we're coming up to like, we're at for anyone that doesn't know we're recording this in December. So news resolutions around the corner. Everyone's going to say to themselves who they want to become. But it's easier said than done. I think one seven, eight, eight percent, nine percent of news 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.

1:39:12But what are the habits that make my goal a byproduct? Everything is about byproducts in your whole life, whether you know it or not. So instead of setting goals, set like the byproduct, what are the byproducts I want to have for this year? And then what are the habits that make that up? So what the big mistake most people make is they see somebody like you, you go to the gym very often, you probably eat really clean. I know you don't drink alcohol because I brought you a flask and gave it to your team. But, uh, boss, they took it. They did. So somebody who doesn't live a very disciplined life would look at you and say, God, I want to be like Steven, he's got all this discipline going to the gym, but they don't understand that you go into the gym isn't discipline.

1:39:58It's a habit. So you're not like forcing yourself to go do something. You're doing something that's a habit for you. The discipline only is necessary. You only need like a teaspoon of it at the very beginning to get this habit started. So start micro habits first and then bigger habits. So the discipline is not something that you should be seeing if you're seeing someone eat healthy and go to the gym. Do all the stuff you want to do. Those are habits. And that person, you're, you're not seeing a discipline at work right there. You're seeing a habit. The discipline was just at the beginning. And I think if more people knew that, that you're just exercising a little discipline at the very beginning.

1:40:39And then it's just, that's just what you do. It's like somebody who sees someone brushing their teeth every day, like, wow, that's so much discipline. It's just what we do. It's a habit. There's an interesting part of this, like habit equation, you could say, or like discipline equation, which is the why part, which is like, why does this matter to you? And is it important to get really clear on why this thing matters to you, whether it's the gym or like, because the one I, I was playing around with this discipline equation idea for my last book. And the kind of conclusion I landed at was that to be disciplined, you have to understand the reason why something matters to you.

1:41:21You can say that in other words. Yeah. Plus the psychological reinforcement you get from the pursuit of the thing, minus the, you could say the psychological or perceived cost of the pursuit of the thing. So in the context of brushing your teeth, I think I know where it matters, right? Because if I don't then I have to get to the dentist, my teeth fall out. I look, I believe whatever it might be. The is it rewarding and fun to do now, 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.

1:41:59So the behavior happens. Yeah. But the key part of this equation here is the why part. Like it's not the key part, but it's a central part is the why part. Why does the thing matter to you? Yeah. And how much why? Like how big is the why? Yeah. Because if if the why is I need enjoyment in the present moment, then no other why will be bigger. No discipline, why will 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 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.

1:42:53Does that equation stack up for you? I'm saying this, but I like it a lot because I've been trying to be saying it. I wrote about this in my book. The whole idea is why plus like you can say reinforcement, minus you can say cost, just to simplify it. Yeah. But is there anything missing from this equation? Do you think is there anything? I said it to Simon Sinek and he went, let's try it out. And he talked to me about taking his bin out in the morning, like taking the bin out for like the bin men. And it kind of holds up because he's saying the why is if I don't take the bin out, then I'm going to get fined and my bin is going to overflow pretty strong motivator.

1:43:28The reinforcement, there's no reinforcement getting out of bed at 70 and Seki bin out. It's not nice. Yeah. The cost is also significant getting out of bed. But the why is still so it's why plus you can say like why plus the psychological reinforcement from the pursuit of doing it. So DJing really fun for me. I would say there's, it would be divided by the cost of inaction. The cost of inaction would, 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 use, can I leverage my focus, the mammalian brains focus?

1:44:09Can I leverage authority over myself in some way over that mammalian part of my brain force myself out of bed, force these habits to start developing? And then tribe are my friends involved? Have I made a public agreement about something? And then the emotion, which I think would be the why. Yeah. And like that's the emotional driver that animal can understand. You visualizing yourself better, like looking with a six pack or whatever it is, but printing it on a vision board. This is why I think vision boards are so important. Not because we're manifesting something out of the universe. Maybe it is, but we're definitely showing something that a dog can understand.

1:44:53It's imagery and dog, dog can understand images. So we're routinely exposing ourselves to these vision boards on a very regular basis. And if you follow the brainwashing formula, which is focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition, it spells fear. And that is the best way to brainwash yourself to form these new habits and goals. So how can I get myself to focus? How can I build the emotion, which is the why? Recurring emotion, not just one at the very beginning. How can I continue to make it emotional? Or maybe I can make the cost of an action emotional. They're making by the app that makes me look fat or one of those things.

1:45:35And then agitation is, if I'm waking up habituation, what you just talked about, if I'm waking up at the same house every day that I've been fat in, let's say I wanted to lose weight or whatever, the same house every day that I've lived x way in, I'm seeing the same hallway, same rug, same couch, everything looks the same. My brain says, oh, I'm here. I'm going to follow that script because our brain writes scripts for us to save us time. So agitation means I'm going to disrupt my environment so much. And so often that my brain has no chance to default to an older script. South clients that repaint their house, they rearrange their furniture, they change up their wardrobe a whole lot, they get a completely new haircut.

1:46:19So they're not even looking at the same person in the mirror anymore. They do everything you can to disrupt that rhythm. It's exactly what we would do with a detainee if we were trying to brainwash someone who is in an intelligence interrogation. So I'm disrupting environment like crazy. And what 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.

1:46:54So like if even just coming to the vision board, a last client, I had them go to Best Buy and get a 70 inch TV and then get one of those cheap tablets, those $300, $200 tablets and just duct tape it to the back of the TV and put his vision point 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.

1:47:35So 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? Just. So I should keep a vision board. I think always think with your goals, like, how would I show these goals to my dog?

1:48:08How 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 move his bed. Is there anything else that we haven't covered here in terms of your work here? That is important for us tonight. I will give anybody listening one big piece of advice that I've passed down to my kids and maybe just make this a final piece of advice. Is if you are exposed to a product that can't tell you the problem that they're solving, you need to be terrified, absolutely terrified. So like if I look at DoorDash or UberEats, they get food to me faster.

1:48:54I 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 in a MacBook solves. This is camera does all this does all these things. It helps you get this fact done faster. And you look at Facebook meta. These AR goggles, none of them will ever tell you the problems that they're trying to solve because it's loneliness and people needing to anesthetize themselves from being in their own life.

1:49:42And we are in a loneliness epidemic right now. In the midst of all this, we've never been more connected, but we've never had more loneliness than is in the world right now. And there's so many products that are out there that are that seem great, but they can't articulate what they're really solving. And it's usually loneliness, boredom, or a need to anesthetize myself. So I don't have to think about my life after being my life. And that should be one thing. If I could just program into everyone's head, be so, I did this to my kids, just be so, so scared and so cautious when I see a product or an app or anything that's not openly advertising the problem that they're solving.

1:50:34I mean, there's a lot of entertainment apps, right, at the moment for young kids. Yep. And social works. Fine for boredom. Is boredom a problem? It might be. But because I'm trying to distinguish between like is TikTok solving a problem for a young kid. Right. So that might be solving loneliness instead of boredoms. And I think TikTok does not talk about solving any problem. It's like a casino, isn't it? For the dope for me. Yeah, it's so bad. And they use some, they use a hypnosis technique, not just TikTok. This is everybody called fractionation, which is where you bring somebody up. And like, so like you'll see one of those videos of a grandpa holding his grandbaby, you know, like that, that makes you almost cry.

1:51:18Have you ever cried just watching like a 60 second Instagram reel? Yeah, I have to. And I feel stupid. I'm by myself watching a 60 second video. But like they'll pull you down into that. Then they'll punch you back up like two videos later. And you'll start to notice this. Two videos later, it'll be a riot. Someone robbing a store, fist fight, a car going way too fast, flipping off the road and airplane almost crashing. So they get you up and down and up and down. And the more I can do that, this is proven that that ramps up suggestibility. Dr. Milton Erickson did studies on this in the 1960s.

1:52:01And that increases your level of suggestibility, like 10 fold. The more I can get you up and down, up and down. And what happens after you get like four or five cycles of up and down, you get an ad.

1:52:18And it's so reliable. And I didn't realize it was happening until my wife said, why are you buying shit off Instagram ads like once a week? And I was working on me. So I was buying stupid shit that was on Instagram ads. And then I finally set time limits on those apps. Set time limits on those apps. Yes. Yes. My wife has the passcode to unlock the, whatever it's called screen time, the iPhone screen time. But I'm a, I'm a brainwashing expert. And I am personally terrified of short form social media like that. And I'm not immune. And I'm one of the best in the world. And I am not immune to it. And I think that should be a stark warning for a lot of people.

1:53:17What's the cost though? What's the cost of the life in your view of living this kind of life where, you know, we go home and we just like burn our brains out with these social media apps and fry our dopamine receptors. Is there like a cost? Yeah, I think the cost is increased loneliness. And the, these apps, any app that sells ads has two main goals. Number one, and all advertising shares these two main goals. Number one, make you compare yourself to other people in unhealthy ways. Number two, make you think I am not enough. And we see that everywhere. I'm not enough. I'm comparing myself to other people.

1:53:58And it gets us into an us versus them. Then it traps you into a corner of confirmation bias. Whatever you think, I'm going to show you this group of 150 people that agree with you, no matter how stupid, how radical, how absolutely bizarre your ideas are. Let me show you all of these people. And then you start thinking the whole world's like that. So really quickly, what happens when we conglomerate people together? Like, I'm, I've only been in New York once in my life, but we're in New York right now looking at my hotel. I've like struggling to find a piece of nature. Like I think I have more trees on my property than they're in the whole city here.

1:54:42So on the whole, when you squeeze people together, you heard of the bystander effect. I have heard of it, but please. So they, they was a very good experiment that was led by Dr. Phillips and Bartol. They did at Liverpool Street station in London, in London. Yeah. So right at Liverpool Street, there's just, there's a video on YouTube. And it's fair use. If you want to overlay like an image of what this looks like, but at Liverpool Street station, there's three or four steps to get up to the main. So from the street, there's a curb and there's three or four steps. I had this woman laid out on the ground, wearing like a normal skirt and top.

1:55:20And I think three hundred and ninety five people either walked by her or stepped over her. And then they did it with a guy and they did it with a guy. He's holding a beer and he's asking for help. And they made change to all these variables. But it's happened in New York City before. There's a woman named Kitty Genovace in the 60s. I think just two blocks from here who was stabbed to death in front of like 55 witnesses. Don't quote me on that number. And no one called the police until much, much later. Mostly because everyone thought somebody else would act. But if I described to you saying I watched a person get stabbed and three people just watched and they watched it happen, would you say that that's psychopathy?

1:56:07That's a psychopath. So these large cities and stuff. And the apps that are messing with the social part of our brain that makes us think the tribe is way bigger than our brains are made to handle causes this almost psychopathic behavior. Which the bystander effect has been proven hundreds of times as an experiment. Is that because if I'm logging on to social media, I'm becoming desensitized to this kind of thing. But also if you live in London, you get quite accustomed to seeing someone that is homeless. And so in that case of seeing someone rolling on the float Liverpool street station, you might have seen it before and it might have just been someone who was homeless or struggling with something.

1:56:49Yeah, some kind of addiction or something. Yeah. So you you've become somewhat desensitized to it. Is that so you are getting dispensitized to it. But your brain is made to hold small tribes of a couple hundred people. And the moment that tribe expands into something your brain can't imagine, you are no longer relying on reputation from anyone. You don't care what other people are thinking about you. And the moment that stops, your brain says, I don't have the capacity to worry about everyone that I see. So empathy disappears. But you walk down these streets here in New York. Their empathy is zero for you.

1:57:30No matter what's happening, you walk through a country town. It's like 1500 people out in the population of the town I live in is 2 ,200. And if you get cut on the arm or like you stumbled four cars will stop. People get out of their cars to figure out what's going on. Because our brains can handle smaller tribes. The moment we get flooded with all of these things, all of these people that we can't possibly care about everybody, empathy disappears. The second aspect of this is, if we're surrounded by environments that our ancestors would be absolutely scared of and confused by, we start developing problems in our brain, depression, loneliness, suicide, through the roof in large cities every time.

1:58:16There's no exception. And I think the same thing happens when we put stuff ourselves. Our ancestors cells don't recognize. You had the glucose queen on here recently talking about some of this. We're putting unnatural stuff into our bodies. You had a toxicologist on here, I think, talking about this too. It goes into our bodies. Our ancestors don't know what that is. And our bodies can't process it. It turns into disease. It turns into mental disease when our bodies can't process everything that's going on around us. So in my theory, and this is just my theory, the further we're separated from nature, we find disease, mental and physical.

1:58:57Amen. 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 few is, how can we consistently feel and appreciate the blessings in our lives? And this is interesting because you talked about gratitude early on. Yeah. I think if mindfulness has become a trope, now it's just kind of become overused on the internet. And it's one of the, I think it's a superpower, just learning present tense mindfulness of just being in this moment. And I think if you one of the fastest ways to get good at just enjoying the moment is to be so self forgiving that it's almost delusional.

1:59:49It's the best advice that I could give somebody. Be delusional self forgiving about everything. What does that mean in reality? Give me an example. And most people look back with regret and shame. I shouldn't have done that or I should have done that. I can't believe I embarrassed myself. I can't believe I did that thing in front of those people. Get so forgiving of everything that you've ever done of yourself that it is like delusional to the point where it's just crazy. And you're thinking I shouldn't forgive myself for that. You get to a point where everything is fine and it's just hilarious.

2:00:29If 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 delusionaly self forgiving. How does that keep you out of thinking about the future though? Because thinking about the future is great. Especially once we follow that discipline practice. And we're putting concern forward in gratitude backwards. You wrote a book called phrase seven, which is I hear is being turned into a TV series. Which you're going to feature in. As a bartender. As a bartender. And this is being released next year. Or 25 seconds. All right. Okay.

2:01:09Better than nothing. And this is being released next year. We're hopeful. Yeah. What's your what is the book about phrase seven? It is a fictional book about mind control hypnosis, brainwashing, and how those things are being used on our population. But also about how you can recognize it. And even how you can use some of those techniques in your everyday life. But it's kind of like a mix between 24 and suits. Okay. Yeah. People in their seats. And if I if I want to learn more about your work and I want to get I want to go further into everything that you do. Where's the best place for me to go?

2:01:51Just our homepage, which is NCI, which is our neurocognitive intelligence, NCI .University. NCI .University. Yeah. And right at the very bottom of that page, I'll put a link that says CEO that has anything that I talked about here as well that people can download. And this book here is not available on the website. The paperback version of that is yes. Okay. The paperback version. The same but it's the same stuff, right? Yes. Exactly. Cool. Chase, thank you. It's so unbelievably fascinating. I get the impression that I could talk to you probably for 20 hours maybe. I feel like this conversation could have been 20 hours long because I feel like we're just scratching the surface.

2:02:30Because I guess at the end of the day, everything is about humans. This. You know, every every goal dream problem I have in my life, it could actually be just distilled down to some kind of human challenge with my girlfriend with, you know, businesses, ironic, etc. Even with like being a host of a podcast, it's all human beings. So that's why I'm so hungry to learn more because it's clearly like the singular skill that's going to unlock all of the things that I care about. And that's why as well, like when you talk about some of these studies, the Milgram study and a bunch of them in school, I was obsessed with these things.

2:03:03I still remember the studies that, like the Milgram study that they just changed my life and my thinking in so many ways. And as I grew up and I became, you know, I did like a call center stuff and then like 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, you know, running businesses now, the Milgram study or the, when I was in the call center, the Milgram study was still pertinent or as a podcast host, Milgram study is still pertinent because it's once again just dealing with humans. And that's what you're helping people to unlock.

2:03:33So thank you for doing what you do. Absolutely. And for the many, you know, you've got a lot of raving funds 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, many times breaking down moments in society and culture and looking at those moments through the lens of behavioral factors and body language and things like that to help you interpret what was going on in that moment. It's incredibly illuminating and it's incredible. It's entertainment at the end of the day.

2:04:00It's fantastic. Thank you so much, Chase. Thanks, Stephen. 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. All the nutritionists I've spoken to have highlighted just how misleading information is out there when it comes to food. Take healthy halos. The claims you see on packaging that say things like low sugar and nothing artificial are often a sign of foods to avoid. Have you ever noticed a health claim on fresh fruit? You probably get my point. Understandably, there's loads of distrust out there. Who should you turn to for accurate information?

2:04:31I, you Zoe, which is backed by one of the world's largest microbiome databases and most scientifically advanced at -home gut health tests. Zoe gives you proven science whenever you need it. As a Zoe member, you'll get an at -home test kit and personalized nutrition program to help you make smarter food choices that support your gut. To sign up, visit Zoe .com and use my code Bartlett10 for 10 % off your membership. That's Zoe .com. Code Bartlett10. Trust your gut. Trust Zoe.

2:05:25Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform you'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio, as over the last year we've moved out of startup mode and to scale up mode.

2:06:00We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's Guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett.