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

When the CIA needed to understand the secrets of human communication, this was the man they contacted to help decode the arts of influence, deception and seduction. Chase Hughes is a former US Navy Chief and leading behaviour expert. He is the bestselling author of books such as, ‘The Behavior Operations Manual: Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence’ and ‘The Ellipsis Manual: Analysis And Engineering of Human Behaviour’. In this conversation, Chase and Steven discuss topics such as, how to master the art of persuasion, the best way to achieve success in life, how to extract sensitive information, and how to detect liars fast. 00:00 Intro 02:00 Who Is Chase Hughes and What Is His Mission? 03:28 The Factors for Success 04:17 Who Has Chase Worked With? 05:41 What Is the Behaviour Ops Manual? 06:42 The Most Common Reason People Come to Chase 14:45 The Elements That Give Someone Authority 17:18 Is There a Physical Appearance of Authority? 21:03 Building Confidence Within Your Own Mind 27:38 Is There a Relationship Between Discipline and Confidence? 29:23 Is It Possible to Read a Room? 39:46 What You Should Know About Communication 46:07 How Chase Would Sell a Pen 51:09 Listening: A Key Part of Communication 52:15 What Is Illicitation? 59:27 What Is the PCP Model? 1:10:33 How To and Should You Win an Argument? 1:16:34 How To Read Someone's Motivations in Life 1:25:11 What Is the Most Common Deficiency in Sales Pitches? 1:33:10 How Do I Change My Discipline? 1:38:32 Are There Any Tricks To Improve Discipline? 1:40:40 How To Form New Habits 1:48:06 If You See This With a Product, Be Terrified 1:53:05 What’s the Cost of This Social Media Rabbit Hole? 1:58:46 Guest's Last Question Follow Chase: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/WyJ70f6xqPb YouTube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DUk91t8xqPb NCI Training Page - https://g2ul0.app.link/dJtkPQUQqPb You can purchase Chase’s book, ‘The Behavior Operations Manual: Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/e1rvBDfyqPb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett ZOE - http://joinzoe.com with code BARTLETT10 for 10% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  So New Year's resolutions are around the corner. I think 9% of resolutions stick. So what advice have you got for me?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's say I wanted to lose weight. The first thing is realizing that all of our lives are about habits, not goals. The second aspect of this is one of the most effective strategies to brainwash yourself to form these new habits. And that is- Chase Hughes is a former military veteran turned world renowned expert in behavioral analysis and human influence.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  He has trained Secret Service agents, Navy SEAL leaders, CEOs and government officials to master communication, behavioral detection and persuasion.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  You can look at three factors every single time to determine why someone was successful or why they failed. The first is self mastery, where we look at confidence, body language, discipline and authority. And we know that people are hyper responsive to authority.

• 0:43Steven Bartlett?

  But how do we establish authority ourselves?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Authority is made up of five things, and that's- Number two is their level of observation. And there's five Cs that we talk about in behavior profiling, which we get into. But my favorite example, and one of the fastest ways to get a read on another human being, is how often they're blinking. If I start seeing an increase in someone's blink rate, I know I need to change the subject right away.

• 1:04Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  And the third, their level of communication. And if you want to learn how to start a conversation or continue one, this is for you. It comes down to understanding the type of person that you are in front of. Now segregate people into six groups, and that'll influence the best way to talk to those people, which we can get into if you want.

• 1:20Steven Bartlett?

  Please.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Okay, number one-

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:25Speaker 01

  So the big mistake most people make is, don't do that.

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you.

• 2:13Steven Bartlett?

  Chase Hughes, who are you and what is your mission?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I'm a behaviour guy, behaviour expert, and I think I've just set out to teach people that there is an entire world that other people can't really see, don't have access to. And I think for the last 10,000 years of recorded history, you can look at any event or any leader of any country, and everything that dictates the outcomes of situations comes down to human factors every time. No matter if there's economic turmoil, there's people getting pissed off about an economy, there's AI or technology innovations that are happening, everything comes down to human interactions. And whether or not you can manage yourself, you're a good leader, who the good leaders are, and who can persuade the people to feel a certain way.

• 3:03Steven Bartlett?

  And who do you do it for?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  I think I do it for people that have gone through a period in their life, realising that there's an invisible advantage that some other people have, the people that got successful, maybe have some kind of advantage that they're not able to tangibly see. And I think showing them that this is one of the biggest levers that you could ever pull in your life is the most rewarding and fascinating thing to see. Someone go through this transition to realise that this human behaviour stuff dictates outcomes in life.

• 3:39Steven Bartlett?

  When you say this, you're referring to human behaviour?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 3:42Steven Bartlett?

  And is human behaviour, is it like a set of tactics? Is it like a form of psychology? What is, what is this when you say the word this?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  When I say human behaviour, I mean that when a person becomes successful or they become a failure, you can look at three factors every single time to determine why someone was successful or why they failed. That is their level of self mastery, their level of observation, like can they read the room? Can they read the person that they're actually talking to? And their level of communication? Can they speak influentially? Can they talk about? Outcomes in a way that inspire people and motivate people and can they communicate in a persuasive way that moves people?

• 4:27Steven Bartlett?

  And who exactly have you worked with?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Lots of government agencies. Notably, I've worked with intelligence agencies. I've worked with the Psychological Operations Department, US Army, which is the Special Operations Command. I've trained a lot of the US Navy leaders nowadays and a lot of civilians are my main base of clients right now.

• 4:52Steven Bartlett?

  What do intelligence, what do you do for intelligence agents?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  So when we talk to intelligence agents, the number one thing that we train them in is recognizing human behavior. And we also teach interrogation and we tend to teach, like if I'm doing an interrogation, it's kind of the same as if I'm an intelligence officer somewhere trying to talk somebody into spying on their own country for us. Both of those things are about talking someone into doing something that's not really in their best interest. So when it comes down to that, that's really where we get to the point that rubber meets the road. Can you talk someone into doing something that they A, normally wouldn't do, which is maybe sales because they normally, they wouldn't have otherwise done that. Or B, in the interrogation world, can I talk you into something that you wouldn't want

• 5:41Speaker 01

  to do because it's not your best interest, like confessing to a crime or providing intelligence or something like that? And that's where we really do a lot of the training for police and government.

• 5:52Steven Bartlett?

  Next to me, there's this massive book called The Behavior Ops Manual. It's probably the biggest book I've ever seen. What is the wealth of experience that has fed into this body of work?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  That book right there is my entire life. So probably 30,000 to 40,000 hours of research on this stuff. Every technique that I've ever learned or taught, every method that we've ever used for interrogations or persuasion or influence, all that stuff is inside of the Behavior Ops Manual. And I wrote that book and we can get into that if you want to right now. I received a brain diagnosis where I thought I was going to lose my brain and I was desperate. I'm just wondering, how's my? Family gonna feed itself. So I wanted to put every single piece of knowledge that I've ever created or I've ever come up with for any government agent, everything, all on the

• 6:46Speaker 01

  table. And that's what this book was. It's just the culmination of everything.

• 6:50Steven Bartlett?

  And you served in the military yourself?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  I did for 20 years.

• 6:54Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most common thing that people come to your work for? Like if you were to encapsulate it into like a sentence, what they're searching for in their own personal lives?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  It would be a person that is lacking some degree of control in some aspect of their life. And it's typically, they think they need skills. Most of my clients come to me saying, I want the technique, I want the skill. Teach me the recipe to do X, Y, and Z. What do I say on the phone? Give me a new sales script. So I have this model called the ACSS model that I trained to my entire staff. And that ACSS model stands for authority, comfort, social skills, and then skills. Ninety percent of people say they need more skills, but what they need is authority or comfort. And they can't be comfortable in a conversation. So I could give you, like I would talk to these clients, and I would

• 7:48Speaker 01

  say, I could spend $10 million, write the best persuasion script for whatever your ideal outcome is, hand you this thing on a silver platter. And if you're not comfortable in that conversation, you're not going to be successful. So I could give it to somebody with social anxiety and have them go read this out loud. It's not Harry Potter. We're not reading spells. It's not a spell. So a lot of people's problems come from comfort, a lack of being able to be comfortable in, in a conversation, and the level of authority that they might have. And I don't mean hierarchical authority. I just mean personal authority. But they don't know it. They think it's, I need more social skills. I need to learn small talk, or I need this little technique. So every time, the one thing I tell every

• 8:33Speaker 01

  client is, If I give you a flight checklist right now for a, a small plane, a Cessna one seventy-two, are you a pilot? No, having this little checklist of what to do does not give you the skill. So a lot of that, so much of that comes from comfort. And the problem that a lot of people have is they're competing with other people on height, on looks, on social status, money, hierarchy, confidence, all this other stuff. The number one thing you need to compare yourself with other people on is comfort. That's it, is can I be more comfortable than the other person in, in this conversation? Cause our brains are naturally wired to compete. We can't turn competition off, but we can change what they're focused on.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  And if they're focused on comfort, we win a lot more conversations.

• 9:21Steven Bartlett?

  Comfort?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:22Steven Bartlett?

  How does that manifest? Is that just like being like physically comfortable? What is that?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be physical comfort. So one of the challenges I give to people is for your first week, all, the only thing I want you to focus on, I'm not going to give you this long list to go look into your phone and have to read it before every meeting. The one thing I want you to focus on this week is can you move slower? Than the other people in the room? That's it, just adjusting the speed limit on your body. So if you were standing in a swimming pool, how fast would your arms and legs move if you were underwater? And make that the speed limit for this entire week. That's all I want you to focus on. And that makes so many changes in people's mind because we change our bodies and we change how our emotions are feeling. And there's one thing that fear does, it speeds our body up.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  So if you see someone doing these rapid jerky movements, you're, you're seeing mostly fear or stress in their body.

• 10:22Steven Bartlett?

  So get more comfortable in an interaction conversation, even if it's on the phone or in person?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yes, on the phone, it would be speaking at a normal composed pace.

• 10:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And then, so step two is composure. Can I get you into a place where you have some composure? In the left and right side of composure, we have collapse and we have posturing. So I have a person that makes themselves small so other people can be comfortable. Or I make myself big so other people can get away from me. And we have, we see that with every aspect of our lives. Like when I first started my business, or when I first got out of the military, these people called me for a keynote. So this guy calls me and he's like, what's your hourly rate? And I said, 6K.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And I said, that's including travel and all that. And the only thing he did, he didn't say anything on the phone. He just goes, hmm, that's it. He just made that noise. And right away, I said, oh yeah, but we could do a discount. I could probably do like 5K. We could even take some off 50%. I could even take 75% since you're here, here, and I have to do this. Just made up excuses. And I almost got to the point where I was like, let me pay you. I'll give you some money if you come let me speak on stage for you. And that's collapse. So that's, I'm in collapse in some areas of my life. I might posture in some areas of my life. And our goal is to get out of that swing. But the problem most people have, if I'm living in collapse, the solution looks like posturing.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  And we see this in like guys that learn pickup. Like I'm going to learn how to posture because it's the opposite of what I'm doing. It's not the center where I need to be.

• 12:05Steven Bartlett?

  And what is the center? That's, that's composure.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  That would be composure. And I would say composure is a combination of the things that make up authority. And authority is made up of five things. And that's confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. So I have an authority inventory. This is day one, the first thing that I give to intelligence people, or I've got a guy that owns a car dealership, whoever the client is. And it's the authority assessment. It assesses you on those things. And wherever your lowest point is, that's what's keeping you from being successful in most conversations when you need to persuade somebody. And it pinpoints it very quickly. And if I could go into this a little further,

• 12:50Speaker 01

  the way that we live our lives off camera, I'm sure you would agree, you just had Vanessa Van Edwards on. It bleeds out in our body language. It bleeds out in, not just body language, but how we breathe, how we talk, how we come across. So even if I read that article on LinkedIn of 19 ways to look more confident, and it says, well, have better posture, sit up straighter, shake hands, make better eye contact. I did all of that and I look really presentable. But back home, I've got an eight-foot pile of laundry sitting in the bedroom. My bed's nasty. I've got dishes all piled up in the sink. There's a part of our brain that's somehow dedicated to reminding us, I'm faking it right now. And that comes across.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  So whether we're doing it consciously or unconsciously, we're manufacturing gut feelings in other people. So our job is to manufacture better gut feelings. And the five most common ways that those bleed out in our everyday life is how we manage five areas of our life. And that is our environment. Like, do I take care of my environment? My time, appearance, my social life and my financial life. Because those are the, those are the five things we worry about in the back of our head that start bleeding out these gut feelings. Because we've all had a conversation where everything on the surface looked great.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  But afterwards, we were like, something was off. I don't know what it was, but something was, just didn't feel right about that guy. And we've all had that little experience. And getting a hold of your, those five qualities that make up authority are the fastest way to get success in your life and just drastically start changing your life.

• 14:39Steven Bartlett?

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

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that would be the, the bottom foundation of that little pyramid. And the far left side of that triangle would be confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude and enjoyment.

• 14:59Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And those elements alone produce feelings in other people that make them see an authority figure. And you've heard of the Milgram experiment.

• 15:09Steven Bartlett?

  Oh gosh, it reminds me of something I read when I was 16 in psychology class in the textbook.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Probably did.

• 15:15Steven Bartlett?

  That was the one where they got people to shock each other.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:18Steven Bartlett?

  Please explain.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  All right, let me give you a quick recap. It's Yale University, and I think it's 1962. And Yale runs an ad in the paper that says, "Come help us with this study on learning and we'll give you 20 bucks for lunch voucher," or something like that. So all these volunteers come out. And there's a tall guy in a lab coat, an official clipboard there. And there's one other volunteer, and you draw straws. One of you is the teacher, one of you is the learner. So you're led into this room. You watch this learner guy get strapped up. He's on this table getting strapped up to this electric shock machine. And every time he gets a question on this quiz wrong, you've got to shock him. You have to hit the button. And every progressive question, you increase the voltage on this machine that goes all

• 16:03Speaker 01

  the way up on the far right to XXX danger, severe shock is what it says on there. But the whole time you're shocking him, you can hear the guy screaming on the other side of the wall. He's screaming. And midway through the process, the guy's banging on the wall. He's like, "I have a heart condition. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm out. I quit. I don't want to do the experiment." And 90% of these people will turn around to the guy in the lab coat. And the guy in the lab coat's like, "Please continue. It's important that you continue the experiment." So they keep going and going. And almost to the end, no more response. It's just silence. The guy doesn't even respond to questions. And the guy in the lab coat says, "Any non-answer has to be treated as if it were an incorrect answer. Please continue."

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And they keep going and going and going. And you can watch some of these are on video. And you just watch their faces toward the end.

• 16:59Speaker 01

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

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Sixty seven percent of people go all the way.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  And two hundred and fifty volts is enough to kill you. A hundred percent went up to two fifty. The presence of novelty and authority did everything. It made a person commit murder. And that's, I would say, I would argue, that's more difficult than selling someone a car.

• 17:28Steven Bartlett?

  And that authority comes, in that particular example, came from going to the university, the lab coat, et cetera. But how do we establish authority ourselves? Is it going back to the things you said there about environment, appearance, et cetera, finances?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:42Steven Bartlett?

  Is there like, are there physical expressions of that authority in a day to day basis?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  There are. Slowness of movement is one of the most common. So we have slowness of movement. So the right side of that authority triangle has five letters on it. And that stands for movement, appearance, confidence, connection, and intent. Is our intent visible? That outward sign of authority is what a lot of people tend to look for. What does authority look like? But what we're really doing is I want to look up the symptoms of authority, not the cause. Because all these LinkedIn articles, YouTube videos that are saying how to have more confidence, how to do X, Y, and Z, are how to have the symptoms instead of the cause of authority.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  So people with authority tend to sit up straight. But they don't sit up straight because they read an article. They sit up straight because they see the world a certain way. And that's so much of a difference between changing my worldview versus changing my posture. It's very different outcomes, and we're still generating those gut feelings in people.

• 18:50Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Have you worked with many people that come to you and they've got a clear authority problem? Is there a particular example you can think of where you were able to help someone turn their life around?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Many, hundreds.

• 19:00Steven Bartlett?

  Give me your favorite example.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  My favorite example was a big CEO. He's in Los Angeles. And he asked me for skills. He starts off, I need the flight checklist. I don't need to learn to fly, I just need the checklist. But it takes me a while to kind of walk people back and say like, let's get to the root of this. Because you can't just openly say you have an authority and comfort problem. And His employees would like openly make fun of him in board meetings and stuff like that, and he didn't like it. And it, his company was going downhill so fast. And I took him through this process of gaining, let's, let's build up your confidence, discipline,

• 19:45Speaker 01

  leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment, all of those things. And let's find where your lowest point is of those five. If I could just find your lowest point on that five list, then I know the highest leverage thing that I can do. So if the highest leverage that he can do would be confidence, that's the number one thing I'm going to start working on. And the moment we took him through that process, it was only a couple of months, and we used a lot of hypnosis. We used a lot of, I literally used brainwashing techniques to help him. So it's the same techniques. And you know what cognitive behavioral therapy was also a form of brainwashing back in the day, and aversion therapy.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  But within just a few months, he went from around, I think, six to eight hundred K per month to like four million a month. All of his employees were on board. He, he did, he had this huge shift. The problem comes when you're, when you're a coach and you make someone's life change that fast, they have to have an excuse. They can't go back to the office and like, they're different, right? So they have to say some, this thing happened to me, I had this thing. So that's the first thing I work out with every client is like, you need, you're going to have to go back and tell them something happened that changed your life because you have to have a reason that you're going back different.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  So watching that transformation is so, so rewarding and incredible, but the confidence is usually what you have to change first with people.

• 21:14Steven Bartlett?

  How'd you do that?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  You change how, what's going on inside their head. So you've gone on stage before, probably a thousand or two thousand people. You were on TV for a while.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Even after you've been successful, have you ever even heard a tiny voice that said, why am I here? Or like, do I deserve to be here?

• 21:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, doing this is a prime example of that.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Or I'm faking it. People are gonna find out I'm faking it.

• 21:44Steven Bartlett?

  Well, you feel like that when you're a podcaster because you you didn't get any official qualifications. And then people started listening and then there's they think that you know what you're doing. Or you so I think I can tell by that as a podcaster.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so and they never go away. So the difference between a person who's confident and a person who doesn't have confidence is that they hear those voices as truth. And I hear them or somebody with confidence hears them as fiction. They're both listening to the same thing. So imagine like as a quick story, if I if you and I were going to lunch and I said, Stephen, I'm gonna come pick you up. I pull up in front of your house, you jump in the passenger side, we're heading off. And I'm listening to an audio book about a nuclear bomb going off. But it's inside the audio book, there's a fake news report about a nuclear bomb going off.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Let's say it's a pretend BBC broadcast or something that's going on that it's in the audio book. We start driving. I'm relaxed, I'm focused on the road, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Your heart rate's increased, you're fearful, your amygdala is firing off. You're in this horrible state of like, oh, my God, what's gonna happen to my family? We're both hearing the exact same broadcast. We're listening to the same speakers at the same time. But I know that I'm hearing fiction and you are worried that it's truth. I don't mean to use you as as that example, but it's that's the easiest way to describe it. And then just fundamentally changing how you hear that voice.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And nine times, I think 10 times out of 10. That voice was developed when you were eight or nine. What did that kid do? And this is what I would ask any of the clients. What did that kid do to make friends or keep them? So friends, to feel safe. Now, we're in the safety, like, how did I get to feel safe? And what did I do to earn rewards? And for some people, that might be recognition. For other kids who had a bad start in life, that might be water or food. Might have been a reward for those kids. So the way that we keep or earn friends, the way that we get rewards as a child, and the way that we feel, what we have to do to feel safe,

• 24:08Speaker 01

  those develop as little apps in our brain that run in the background of our adult lives all the time. And we typically, as a kid, they're great. They might have kept us safe. They might have kept us alive. They might have held us inside of these social circles. But I'm going to be a dick to people so that they don't get close to me. Or I'm going to kiss up to authority figures like mom and dad so I'll get some recognition and praise. And that becomes an app that we carry into adulthood without knowing it, without our consent, without our awareness. That little kid brings these things into adulthood, and they just modify. So I go from having to kiss up to a narcissistic mother

• 24:50Speaker 01

  to I'm going to kiss the boss's ass every single day. And everybody knows me as the office kiss ass. So they just translate from child to adult behavior. And if I can start understanding that, then I can start getting that person to understand the fundamental way to change their life. And I make them put those phrases out in the open to where it's so, I want them to be pissed off. So I will make them get a desktop wallpaper that says, "I don't deserve money. Money is for other people." Just to make their brains see how stupid it is on a regular basis and put it on a motivational poster.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  And the second part of that is,

• 25:37Speaker 01

  anybody who's confident has a generalized expectation of positive outcomes, not specific, but things are gonna be fine. Things are gonna 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.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Because everything that goes on in our life has to do with our mammalian brain, this lower part of our brain here.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And it doesn't speak English. There's no affirmation that's gonna penetrate that barrier. There's no like, I'm gonna read a quote on a wall or a PowerPoint slide that's gonna fundamentally change behavior. You have to change the animal, the mammalian part of the brain. So the question I ask everybody that I'm training is, how would I teach it to a dog? How would I, how would I show my goals if I'm setting goals for next year? How would I show that to a dog? Because I have to get it down to a mammal. So the fastest way to do that is through visual means. So I have all of my clients download this app. I can't remember the name of it, there's probably a hundred. But it makes you look like 95.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And you're just covered in wrinkles, it makes a lot of your hair kind of go away. And I make them print it out and put it everywhere, just for a couple of weeks. And now we start developing a mental mammalian relationship with our future self, which changes how I eat, changes how I spend money. It changes maybe what time I go to bed, how much alcohol I drink, and mostly where I'm getting my dopamine from. If I draw a map of everywhere I'm getting my dopamine from, and more than 50% of it is on alcohol or porn or, you know, all of these things that I don't want. That's, you have to be very, very honest with yourself at that point of, where do I need to get dopamine from in my life?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And successful people, every single successful person that I've ever met has a good dopamine map, so they, they get dopamine from good sources instead of bad ones.

• 27:49Steven Bartlett?

  And is there a relationship between discipline and confidence?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I think so very much. It's like if, 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.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  So how we live off camera is coming through in our confidence. That's the exact thing that we were talking about, that environment, time, appearance. And if I can live off camera the same way

• 28:51Speaker 01

  that I want to be perceived by everybody in my life, my confidence already starts to grow.

• 28:57Steven Bartlett?

  And you said enjoyment as well was one of the five.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:59Steven Bartlett?

  Why is enjoyment important?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I added it on there. It took a while, but I walked through everybody I've ever trained. And if you look at everyone who is a natural leader and has that level of authority, they're not just partying in the moment, but just calmly enjoying what is happening now. So maybe you could call it mindfulness, but I think in just the trait of enjoyment and being in enjoyment is the most magnetic human trait that there is.

• 29:34Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:47Steven Bartlett?

  How would I go about reading a room?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you're reading like a public area.

• 29:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Let's go back to the airport, maybe. If I'm in a public area, I really wanna pay attention to the slowest moving person in the room. I wanna pay attention to who is more confident than the other person. And that's typically going back to speed. And if I'm, 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.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  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 gonna manipulate somebody, their blink rate will almost be a zero. If I talk to somebody who's being deceptive, their blink rate can go up to like a 75, 80, without us even knowing it. So one of the reasons that blink rate is so reliable is that it's unconscious. We don't realize the shifts in blink rate, and we don't manually control it very well. And if all that I would ever need to teach somebody, you don't have to count or know how many times per minute it's going on, is if I'm in a conversation,

• 31:16Speaker 01

  I'm gonna start the conversation and say, is the blink rate normal? Does it look fast? Does it look slow? So what I'm really looking for in human behavior are changes, changes. So if I'm on stage, and if I'm, 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.

• 31:41Steven Bartlett?

  So would you be looking at one particular person?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  No, so

• 31:45Steven Bartlett?

  Generally?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I would look at all of these eyes and pretend like I'm looking at one human.

• 31:51Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 31:52Steven Bartlett?

  Getting an average of the.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so when you get a lower blink rate, people are paying more attention.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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's the most interested person in the room. We 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, spend a conversation with someone staring at their chest. And especially if you're talking to a woman, it's a bad idea. So blink rate is incredibly reliable. So to recap that skill.

• 32:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  I start a conversation, does it look pretty normal? Is it pretty fast or kind of slow? Then I'm going to look for changes. And that's all I'm looking for in a room of people is what's changing.

• 33:01Steven Bartlett?

  So 70 is deceptive and zero is psychopath.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  70 is stress, not always deception.

• 33:09Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, and zero is psychopath, basically.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Zero might be psychopath. Context is the second letter C. There's five Cs that we talk about in behavior profiling. So change, then context. So now, like, somebody just crossed their arms and you read the internet, it says it's being defensive, withholding, closed off, see all that stuff. Well, what if it's freezing cold?

• 33:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  So now we have context.

• 33:33Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:48Steven Bartlett?

  And what I'm, if like the, I was thinking, but this is rude to get rude to the guest. But I looked at my arms and I had these like massive goosebumps and I was like, that's the context.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:56Steven Bartlett?

  The context is I'm fucking freezing.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Steven Bartlett?

  But to the guest, it would look like I'm going like this.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:02Steven Bartlett?

  You know, so this is why body language is so delicate, I think.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It is delicate. And it's so hard to, for people to do peer reviewed research on it. Because there's a million variables. It's like saying, well, why should Roger Federer win a tennis match? When he doesn't have any peer reviewed studies to back up what he's doing?

• 34:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  It's the same thing with body language. Because like they're doing interrogation research. So they're saying that a college kid who gets a lunch voucher and walks in and pretends to lie about a duck is exactly the same as someone who's been captured in combat, sleep deprived for a few days, has a black hood over their head and they're drug into an interrogation room. And they're saying those behaviors are identical. Then there's the peer reviewed research on lying and not lying. It's so, you cannot replicate human behavior that well. So, and people treat it like it's a pharmaceutical. Like I can put a Tylenol on 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.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  But I'd say it's just so incredibly hard to replicate everything in, with perfection like that.

• 35:16Steven Bartlett?

  So what was the first C?

• 35:18Speaker 01

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

• 35:20Steven Bartlett?

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

• 35:23Speaker 01

  That would be clusters.

• 35:24Steven Bartlett?

  Clusters.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  So then you read articles that say someone looks a certain way or does a certain thing that might be deceptive. Like the most common one I hear is someone touches their nose. So someone touching their nose might be being deceptive. If you're just seeing one thing, I would say that never, almost never means anything. You want to look for a cluster of behavior. So they started getting nervous, which is a change. There, it's because I'm asking about where they were on Wednesday night. There's the context. And while they were getting nervous, they also started protecting their genitals with their hands and licking their lips, which is a hygienic gesture that we do. So now I have a change within the context that's appropriate. And there's a cluster of behavior.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  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?

• 36:26Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  In that region of the world. And he said, oh, shaking his head while he's saying yes. I'm like, now we get down to that C. This is culture, which rules out that behavior or gets rid of it. And finally, the most, the least important thing on that list is the checklist. And by checklist, I mean, there is a list of known behaviors that are likely to be deception. And if you're in body language, you deal in likelihood. That's all we deal in. Some people say they're 100% sure on stuff. I'm skeptical, but we deal in likelihood. So we should always process in that. So someone licking their lips or moving a certain way, if it's in, on a checklist, does not mean that it's deceptive.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Because what if they do it all the time? Then we don't have a change. Does that make sense?

• 37:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about things I used to do when I was younger. And there was just a period of my life where, for some bizarre reason, I used to go like this. And I used to do it all the time.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Like a tick?

• 37:25Steven Bartlett?

  It was almost like a tick, yeah. Do you know what's really weird? I think this sounds like a really crazy thing to say, but one of my best friends had like curtains, like had the haircut curtains.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:39Steven Bartlett?

  And he used to flick it. And I almost like vicariously 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.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but did you do it all the time?

• 37:58Steven Bartlett?

  I just did it, I, oh, I don't know. I felt like I just did it randomly.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  But that, that wouldn't be a change.

• 38:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  If I, if I was meeting you.

• 38:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And you were on the Dragon's Den for a while.

• 38:09Steven Bartlett?

  St. Louis, yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  And people pitch you.

• 38:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  All kinds of ideas. That just having somebody on the show or just having those skills with you, you could see through a lot of those people. And whether or not they're being honest about what they're pitching, they're confident about what they're pitching. And you could look at a show like Shark Tank. And I can look at, I can watch any episode of Shark Tank and look who's blinking the least. They're, they're going to be the first to make an offer. Ninety nine percent of the time because they're the most focused on what's going on. They're, they're personally invested. So that's fascinating is that just, you could just look at one or two things and predict stress or focus.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  And just being able to do that, if you just took that one thing away from this, that would be a superpower.

• 39:01Steven Bartlett?

  Cause I sit here with guests, right? And they talk about their life stories and stuff. And I often see some patterns of behavior.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:07Steven Bartlett?

  Specifically like closing up when you ask someone something about their childhood or a specific sensitive subject in their life. You tend to see like self, I call it like self-soothing behavior to some degree. So it's difficult and it's funny because we, we're all like amateur body language experts now. Yeah. There's been a lot of stuff online saying, spot this, did they touch their nose, et cetera? So it can also be dangerous.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  It can. And it can give us these like, oh, I saw this one thing. I'm never doing business with that guy.

• 39:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  And like, he scratched his nose three times while he was talking about that. Well, he's looking in his briefcase. He's got allergy medication in there. He's scratching his nose. The season just changed at springtime. His nose is red when he came in, so he's been scratching it for 30 minutes before he walked in the door. So now we, we start to realize I'm not seeing a change. I'm seeing something that was repetitive.

• 39:57Steven Bartlett?

  And communication is the third one in the triangle to success or failure. Communication. So what I've got so far is talking slow is higher authority.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else that if I want to be a master communicator, I should be thinking about?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Nope. When it comes to communication, A, being a good storyteller is great. And there's a million podcasts out there that can teach somebody that. But it comes down to whether or not you can speak to the person that you are in front of. And understanding what kind of person that is. And there's a few ways that I identify. I segregate people into six groups. And that's through what do they need from other people? So what kind of things do I need socially? And these are significance, acceptance, approval,

• 40:54Speaker 01

  intelligence, pity, and strength or slash power.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  And in every conversation, if you ask somebody about themselves, they're going to come across and reveal one of those things to you. So if I know that you are a significance-driven person, and I'm selling you on how smart of an idea this is, and how intelligent you are for making this choice, I'm communicating the way opposite in what you need to hear. So the moment that I hear you talk about yourself, your accomplishments, what you like in life, what happened for you this week, what's a great memory that you have, every conversation, you're going to hear this stuff starting to get revealed. So you hear somebody within, these are conversations, or things that you could hear in a conversation pretty quickly.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  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, then you listen for approval. And this is when you hear people say, "Well, I gotta go up on stage tomorrow, but I suck at public speaking. I'm gonna, I'm gonna really bomb at it. I'm just really nervous." Trying to get you to say, "No, you don't suck. You're great. You did great last time. You're gonna rock this. You got this." Then you have the acceptance people. They'll always use the terms like "we," "us," "our." And just team. So acceptance people are all about like, I'm a member of some kind of group

• 42:30Speaker 01

  and that'll come across in their communication. So you ask a significance person about a vacation and they say, yeah, I went down to Miami. It was fantastic. I had a great time and I just got back last night. Ask an acceptance person, they'll say, we went down there, all of us went to this thing and we did this. So you hear a lot of this language that talks about groups and membership. You get into the intelligence side, how often do you hear people go, yeah, I actually got my MBA from this person. Oh, I did my master's thesis on that. Do you hear this intelligence stuff come out of people? And the pity is you can identify a pity person pretty well. And those are the hardest people to communicate to. And the pity person always like, if I want

• 43:12Speaker 01

  to give you the ideal thing to say to each one of these people, the pity person wants to hear, I can't believe all the stuff that you've been through and you've got to this point. Because I don't think many people would have. Pity wants recognition of suffering. And finally, we have the strength and power person. And this isn't always Biff from Back to the Future. So it's can be somebody who's a leader in a company, they want, 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

• 43:52Speaker 01

  forces his way into the top to the guy with the ridiculous jacked up pickup truck that has like the plastic testicles hanging off of the back of it.

• 44:02Steven Bartlett?

  And once you understand what categorization someone fits into, how would you show up in a way that's effective in communicating with them? Say, for example, if I'm talking to a significance person.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:13Steven Bartlett?

  Do I just?

• 44:15Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm trying to close a deal with them or something. Do I pander to their significance? Is that?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a few other types that we teach intelligence people to identify. There's the six ways we make decisions and then six ways that we have values, which is our end goal that we want. But I want to speak in a way that says this decision is going to increase your level of significance. And I want to compliment them on their level of significance right before I ask them for something. So I could say, Stephen, this is a great podcast. You'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 the biggest difference that you can. And I want

• 45:02Speaker 01

  to speak in a way that A speaks to their needs and lets them know that I am a source for that. But B, that making this decision, whatever the, whatever we're talking about, selling a car, whatever, is going to increase your ability to get that same need from other people. So I think if we did this together, I think the number one thing that's going to happen right away is you're going to be able to impact twice as many people. You're going to leave a much deeper footprint on the world. So I'm giving you, we're going to double your subscribers or your listeners, but not just that, you're going to make a bigger impact and legacy on the world. So every time I'm thinking about needs, always

• 45:44Speaker 01

  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 are kind of suffering and insecure and all these things that we talked about a minute ago. We're also drug addicts, everybody. We just need to identify the drug that that person's addicted to.

• 46:13Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about the pen. I was like, I was gonna ask you to, if I may, if I'm an intelligence person and you had to sell me the pen.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:23Steven Bartlett?

  How would you go about that?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  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 gonna do this basic thing, and they don't really go outside the box very often. And every once in a while, there's, you meet somebody who knows higher quality things. And you meet somebody who is able to see things at a level different than other people. And I would talk about that intelligence while, subconsciously, I'm associating all of that with this. This is different, it's unique, it's a pencil. But it's, it's not like other pencils. It's not the basic, run-of-the-mill thing.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  So I want to present that in a way, and I want to start with a negative comment. And this is one of the most effective persuasion strategies is to, I'm gonna negatively associate something I don't want you to have.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So let's say, we're starting our podcast, and I'm afraid Stephen's not gonna connect with me. And I know that you're significance-driven. As we started out, imagine if I said something at the very beginning of this podcast, and I said, Stephen,

• 47:36Speaker 01

  thanks for having me, man. And there's so many people out there. And when, anytime 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. There's so many people out there who just don't really give back to the world. And they don't really have an interest in helping other people. And it's like, every time you meet one of those people, you sit down with them. It's like, all of them have the same thing in common. They can't just stop and connect when they sit down with somebody. So I'm demonizing a trait, using your needs.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  That I don't want you to have, like the inability to connect.

• 48:18Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay, interesting. And you're consciously pointing off to gesture to its others not.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Right, until I said the word connect, and then I gestured between you and me back and forth between both of us. And that word stop is a very powerful word in the English language. So when I said, it's like all of them have the same quality to them. They can't just stop and fully connect with somebody else. That's a very subtle thing, but I've used your neurotransmitters, I've used your needs, and I've I've got you to agree, you nodded your head, if 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, Stephen, what's fascinating to me

• 49:08Speaker 01

  is I've gone around the world, I've met several entrepreneurs, I've met people who are on TV. And it's like, you think that they are just dismissive offhand before you meet them. And it's incredible when you meet these people, it's like all of them have this ability to just tune everything out and just completely connect with somebody.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  And that would have the same effect.

• 49:31Steven Bartlett?

  And what's going on there? People, we wanna be that person because it's positive, we wanna live up to that expectation set?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Right. So what I've done is I've got you to say, as Chris Voss would put it, that's right.

• 49:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  But I've got you to say that about who you are as a person.

• 49:52Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  So now I'm not changing your ideas, I'm changing your identity.

• 49:57Steven Bartlett?

  Changing my identity or?

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you've made an agreement about who you are. You've nodded your head.

• 50:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  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?

• 50:21Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, is that a question?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:22Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, but I know it's not a question.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a good question.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  The moment that you ask the, that you start to answer that question,

• 50:30Steven Bartlett?

  You've stepped.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  You've made an agreement about who you are as a person. So if I wanted somebody to be less closed off, I might say, you know, I've spent my whole life just worried about what other people think. And it, I was 25 before I got to a point where I was able to open up. Have you always been this open with people? Or did you have to work on that? So just any answer, and no one's going to give you an answer of like, actually, I'm just closed off, I'm very closed minded. And that's maybe a point one percent of people. So small agreements and none of these are designed for people to take word for word. I guess they can. But it's about the idea of getting someone to comment on their own identity, who they are as a person.

• 51:13Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  They want the flight checklist.

• 51:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's thing with Julian Treasure, who did the TED Talk on how to be a great speaker. He told me he also did a TED Talk on how to be a great listener. No, no one listened. He said everyone wanted to, his one on speaking has got like 35 million views. But the one on listening, just no one's interested in that. But I'm guessing listening plays a pretty critical role to being a great speaker.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and listening means I can identify who you are and what the needs that are driving you and the social needs and the, the way that you make decisions.

• 51:56Steven Bartlett?

  Is that part of the observation part?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  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. If I'm a hostage negotiator, that makes me a better hostage negotiator. And if I'm a suicide hotline operator, that makes me way better at my job because I'm understanding exactly who I'm talking to. And my goal is to talk someone into doing something that they normally would not do.

• 52:26Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about this elicitation.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:29Steven Bartlett?

  What is elicitation? It's a CIA technique, right?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:43Steven Bartlett?

  Why isn't it no longer for sale?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  I think that he just kind of pulled it off the shelf. I'm not sure.

• 52:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  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, uh, let's say there's a young lady stocking produce. And you get in there and I say, all right, Stephen, your goal is to go figure out how much she makes in 60 seconds, and you're not allowed to ask any questions. Or be awkward.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  And that's tough, right? It's, it sounds really tough. So if you went over to her, and, and this is a, 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, 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

• 54:08Speaker 01

  that Uber drivers were one of the top, most highly satisfied employees in the country. You're going to get a correction. And you're going to be like, where did you read that? So triggering a need to correct the record is one of the easiest ways to use elicitation, but it's only one. Another one is just making a statement afterwards and saying, I bet you had some interesting experiences doing that. Or I can imagine that was challenging. Statements are always going to be better than asking pointed questions because a person feels like they're volunteering information.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  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. We, let's say we meet up for dinner or something and I said, see, you look like you just got back from a vacation. That's a statement and you're like, no, actually, I've been doing this, this, this, and this. So now you've, you've given me more than if I just asked if you were on vacation. And I said, wow, that had to be interesting. I can't imagine that. There's gotta be a lot of stuff going on there. And you start talking more and more and more. And then, like, that sounds great. There was no challenges to that entire trip.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  I love when everything is 100% flawless. And you're like, no, actually. And then you start going into that. And I'm like, no way. Then now we have disbelief that comes in. And I haven't asked a single question yet. So that's one thing that I challenge everybody that I train to get really good at is that elicitation piece. How many layers can I get into a person or a conversation just using these statements? And that's why I wrote, there's a whole chapter about it in, 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

• 56:11Speaker 01

  would get information from a 19-year-old US Navy sailor in the early days of the Cold War. They ship would pull into Thailand, or submarine would pull into Thailand or Singapore. Then a Russian would go up and these sailors would be drinking at the bar. Russian would sit there, he's got a aloha shirt on or something, and strike up a conversation. They say, I know that the, the German submarines could outrun you because their propellers are 22, and all of your submarine propellers are 18 feet in diameter. And the sailor, slightly drunk, turns around and says, no, they're not. And starts giving up all this information just to correct the record. And that's all they did back then was just correcting the record.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  I'm triggering this need to offer some kind of correction to information that's inaccurate. And even with business intelligence,

• 57:04Speaker 01

  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. They'll say, no, it's actually February, but we're not really supposed to talk about it. It's like, there's no way you're going to move in February. It's too cold and the interest rates are up too high. There's no possible way that the CEO would ever do that. It's like, yeah. And then you're going to, you're going to get more information out because of the disbelief. So that was correcting the record. A second technique called bracketing, where I'm giving you a series like between March and May. Or between 39 and 59. And the third is the disbelief that starts getting this information out of people.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  So if you want to think about like, how do I start a conversation or continue one using elicitation? Think of the words so, and then do a recap. So you've been doing this for three years or so. This is not the best job, but it's getting things done for you. Or I bet. So I bet that was interesting. I bet there were still some challenges there. I bet you overcame a whole lot to get to this point. So or I bet is the best way to do that.

• 58:13Steven Bartlett?

  And when, okay, so if I say, I bet you hate that coffee.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:17Steven Bartlett?

  That, that's a statement, but you're going to endeavor to correct the record either way.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:23Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:33Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, interesting.

• 58:34Speaker 01

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

• 58:55Steven Bartlett?

  So why is that better than me just going? How do you prefer your coffee?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Well, if we're just talking about coffee, it's not sensitive information. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that was better.

• 59:05Steven Bartlett?

  It's for sensitive information.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:07Steven Bartlett?

  When you're trying to not get their guard up.

• 59:08Speaker 01

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

• 59:15Steven Bartlett?

  And is that, I mean, that's, does correlate to kind of like how I've, the information that the spies I've interviewed have given me. Like Andrew Bustamante and Mike Baker, they've both said that much of the game was like hearing someone out and just letting them talk and talk and talk and talk.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:32Steven Bartlett?

  But not being too pushy.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, that's the best way to not be pushy is to use the elicitation stuff.

• 59:39Steven Bartlett?

  Perception, context, permission, the PCP model is a way of understanding how to get someone to do something. From joining a cult to buying an item.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the PCP model looks like it's three steps, but it's, I want you to view it as kind of dominoes. So one step starts the progress of coming down the other. And once that comes down, the next domino starts going down.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  So if I change your perception about something, then I change the context that you're viewing that in, which changes the way that you feel permission to do it. So I'll give you an example. Would you want a weird example or a boring one? We'll, we'll go with, let's go with weird.

• 1:00:22Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  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, I don'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.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  You're coming home from work, you drop your keys in the bowl. You make your way to the bathroom, you turn on a hot shower. And now you're here getting ready to get into that shower. So he's changed her perception of where she is. He changed the context of neither one of you or me right now would 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 I studied this and it was fascinating is cult recruiters.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  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 salespeople. And these are hard hitting people, man. That it's a hard job, door to door sales. But they talk people into doing things they probably wouldn't otherwise have done. Uh, installing a $95,000 solar system on their roof or buying a vacuum cleaner or joining a cult. That's probably harmful. But all of them started off the conversation by changing the perception of what's going on. So instead of me saying, hey, let me talk to you about this thing. That's from a, like a needy perspective.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Now the context shifts to where I've just made 25 agreements about who I am as a human being.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  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 psy-op 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.

• 1:03:52Steven Bartlett?

  Which is?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  I'm getting you to be uncomfortable because I'm getting, the way that I've got you to see the world, doesn't match up with what you're doing. So 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, 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. Uh, Robert Cialdini, who wrote Influence and Pre-Suasion, a wonderful human being,

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  wrote about this where a few weeks before they go ask somebody to put a giant ugly sign in their yard that says, "Drive safe," huge ugly sign. Two weeks before that, they go by door to door and say, "Do you support safe driving? Yes or no?" Who's gonna say no? It's like 91% said, "Yeah, yeah, I support safe driving." And 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, all we ask you to do. Two weeks later. They come back to the neighborhood, like eighty-nine percent of people are sticking these signs in their yard. The other neighborhood they did the test on didn't have this little

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  survey, do you support safe driving first? And it was like six percent stuck the sign in their yard. So making one agreement about who I am and then taking action on it. So if I can get you to take action on something, not just between you and me, now I got you to put a sticker on your window. I got you to do something that alters the way other people see you. So if I can get you to make something that I've got you to believe, public, I get you to make a Twitter post, I get you to make a Facebook post, now I've captured identity. So most persuasion and influence training in the world is about capturing ideas. Identity is where you truly get to change behavior. So I'm getting you to agree

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  that you are a certain type of person before I want you to do anything.

• 1:06:09Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. It explains a lot about politics, in fact, you know, what we see go on in the election cycles, and also just how a political party, political group can slowly drift together to a position that objectively go, bloody hell, that's crazy.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Steven Bartlett?

  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 ten years, all of you believing and thinking something is okay.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Just because you made an agreement.

• 1:06:48Steven Bartlett?

  I guess in part that explains some of the wars as well. Like, there's an element here which can be, can explain things like Nazi Germany.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Steven Bartlett?

  And how a civilization can go from being relatively normal to doing really horrific, barbaric things to people.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you, just going back to the Milgram experiment, right away, I got you to say, do you fully volunteer to participate in this? Would you accept the role of teacher? Would you sit down in this chair? Would you shock them with this low voltage?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  I've got you to agree that I'm the kind of person that's willing to shock someone for an experiment within the first two minutes. And they don't talk about that. They kind of tend to say the whole experiment's about authority. But I don't think it's all authority. I think a lot of it is novelty. And they don't talk about that ever in these recaps of the study. But if you volunteer for that experiment, you're driving on a campus you've probably not been on, going into a building you've never been to, meeting a guy in a lab coat that you've never met, and another guy you've never met, in a room that you've never met, sat in front of a machine you've never seen, reading a quiz that you've never read in your entire life. All of these things, brand new.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  The number one thing that generates focus in the mammalian brain, and this is dog, you name it, is novelty. So our ancestors, they're walking past a bush every day of their life. And one day, sun's about to set, and a stick snaps behind that bush. That's novelty. That's an unexpected piece of information.

• 1:08:24Steven Bartlett?

  New information, or is it unexpected?

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Steven Bartlett?

  What's your definition of novelty here?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Novelty is my brain is expecting certain things to happen. I'm gonna 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?

• 1:08:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Any kind of novelty generates focus. So the four things that we can manipulate inside of a human brain spells out the word fate. So the four ways to manipulate or influence a mammal, and this is human, dog, you name it, is through focus, authority, tribe, and emotion.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Those are the four things that a dog can feel. If you're looking at a dog training video, you're watching,

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  say you're binge watching three seasons of Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, you're seeing him redirect focus, establish authority, show contact with the tribe and praise the dog when the dog's doing well. Focus, authority, tribe and emotion. That's how we train animals. It's also how an infomercial gets you to buy something. They grab your focus. They show you, here's a a million people who've already bought it so far. They all have these five star reviews. Everybody in your neighborhood is doing it. Or all these people across the United States are doing it. They're getting success and all of their friends love them because of that success. Now we get emotion. And they show it visually. They don't just say it. They're showing this visual images to show the mammal brain,

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  the focus, authority, tribe and emotion. It spells fate.

• 1:10:07Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about a lot of like fizzy drink ads in the sunshine in the summer. And you see, you know, like the, you hear the sound like 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.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:32Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Or it could be a celebrity or something.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:44Steven Bartlett?

  In your life, you talk about how to win an argument. And when I say win an argument, I don't really mean an argument. I mean more like, you know, me and my girlfriend having a conversation.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Steven Bartlett?

  And I wanna get to a good resolution. What are the things I should definitely not do?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Calling out little points that any kind of incorrect information, we wait until the end. We save it.

• 1:11:08Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  So if I hear, 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.

• 1:11:15Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Because they get diffused. Now that we want them to get that out first.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Do we have a similar common ground? Do we have? What common ground do we share? And do we want a similar outcome? And I might even ask that question, be like, really quick, do we both want the same thing from this discussion? I would never call it an argument. So one, the moment that we redirect on, this is the outcome I want, instead of I need to win an argument. Because when we're in a fight, we tend to think, I intellectually need to conquer this conversation. And I need to be right. And if I can be right, that means I was right. Not winning an argument doesn't mean you were right before or right after. But it's like, what is the ideal outcome for both of us? And I would stop in a business negotiation, whatever.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  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. Do you think she is worried that her phone isn't ringing? Or she's worried that she's not being appreciated? And not feeling loved? So men especially will tend to say,

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  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. I 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.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  And there were these very specific methods. But the biggest method of all was to always think about what they're 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.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  So, am I gonna 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 gonna have to work nineteen hours next week. So, it's never about the hours, and it's now it's guilt, right? I could say, Stephen, maybe you didn't mean to, but it sounded like you wanted me to feel guilty about me working next week. And I know that you're a good person. I don't think you meant it that way. So, I will absolutely call out any fear, obligation, or guilt.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  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 wanna use that word where it's non-confrontational, and I wanna give them an out. So, in interrogation training, we always call this the golden bridge. In the art of war, they say, give your opponent a golden bridge on which they can retreat. So, they can retreat across this golden bridge.

• 1:15:08Steven Bartlett?

  And trap them in a corner.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, we give them an out that's beautiful. So, maybe you didn't mean this. And I always wanna 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 gonna think. So, where is the hidden fear in someone's argument? Anytime you're in an argument, there's a level of concealed fear, and just thirty, forty seconds, you can find that. And a lot of people teach this as a tactic, but just stopping and looking at a person after they do that in an argument is so incredibly powerful.

• 1:15:52Steven Bartlett?

  Just stopping and looking at them?

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, like, say you made that statement to me about, I'm gonna have to work nineteen hours next week.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  The moment that I stop, it lessens the power of that statement because I'm not stopping as a tactic. I'm choosing to stop because I want to process what you were saying. And that helps people to do that because it feels less awkward as if I'm doing a tactic. I'm doing that thing, but I'm just pausing because I'm going to actually reflect on what you just said. And I'm going to use that time for just a minute. I might look away. I might, as soon as you're done talking, I might say,

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  and I might just take a moment and say, Stephen, 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.

• 1:16:46Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:57Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Steven Bartlett?

  People don't really ask me stuff.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Well, who are you and what is your mission?

• 1:17:04Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, you're doing something on me.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  I'm not doing something unless you were doing something to me. I would love to know. And why don't you answer that and I'll break down the hidden statements that you're going to reveal about your personality.

• 1:17:19Steven Bartlett?

  Uh, who am I?

• 1:17:25Steven Bartlett?

  I'm a podcaster. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an investor. I'm a boyfriend. And what's my mission?

• 1:17:34Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm. It's to pursue my potential and to follow my curiosity and to see what happens.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:17:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  So that's a great answer, but you went deeply into who you are as a person. So the first thing you did is look up and to your right.

• 1:17:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Then you looked up and to your left, then up into the center. So that, when your eyes are moving in multiple directions, is called a transderivational search. So looking in different file cabinets that are inside of my head.

• 1:18:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  And then you talked about some of the labels that you wore.

• 1:18:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  And podcaster was first, but you mentioned boyfriend. So I know what's important to you. So like the podcast, you don't say I'm a TV star. But most people would identify you as a TV star, but it wasn't important to you.

• 1:18:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's not important to me.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Right. So you could hear what's important to people.

• 1:18:24Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:18:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting because I actually, my brain like, it was right there to say that. And then I thought, it's just not the nature of the truth. Like the truth is, I started this in my bedroom. And I always think about the fact that when I did it for three years, no one was listening. So my mission when I was doing it was genuinely because I really loved it.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Steven Bartlett?

  It wasn't like, I'm going to change the world. And it's so tempting sometimes to like, add that on, like, I want to change the world. And I just don't, I don't believe that's why most people start things and continue when no one's listening.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Steven Bartlett?

  I think it's, it's usually something more selfish. Does that make sense?

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you started something and you were passionate about the thing itself.

• 1:19:22Steven Bartlett?

  Enjoyed the thing. Yeah.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  I love that. That was elicitation.

• 1:19:29Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay. That what you just did then?

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Well, three, I think I did three layers.

• 1:19:33Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  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

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  that was never important.

• 1:19:50Steven Bartlett?

  On your main channel?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  On the behavior panel. It's me and three other behavior profilers.

• 1:19:56Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, yes. That's incredible.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:19:59Steven Bartlett?

  And we that was elicitation.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Good job.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  So we just record zooms, don't edit them at all.

• 1:20:09Steven Bartlett?

  I've seen it. I know. I was just trying to elicit.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  It's a little sloppy.

• 1:20:15Steven Bartlett?

  So you were sorry, you were doing like a read of me. You said, I said podcaster, I said entrepreneur, I said investor. And then I said, I do it to like, I think I said.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  So your goals.

• 1:20:25Steven Bartlett?

  Curiosity. And then I, what was the other one? It was like, it was about my potential. That's what I think about a lot, like pushing my potential and follow my curiosity.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Steven Bartlett?

  I see what happens.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  So potential curiosity, what would I see there? So I'm a podcaster. I did this for passion. I want my, I want to fulfill my potential. Am I seeing, I'm not seeing acceptance. I'm not seeing that you need approval from me to do anything. So it's about your personal level of significance. Like, do I make a difference, but not to other people? But you still want people to acknowledge that you are reaching your potential. You are doing what you say you're going to do. You relying on your girlfriend. So 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 and you're really enriching other people. You're doing exactly what you're born to do.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:31Steven Bartlett?

  Grimace.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. But other people who are like the more approval group focused people, when I say like, I can tell like you're the center of all your groups of friends. And everybody comes to you for advice. You seem like one of those people, which is an elicitation statement by itself as well. So you can tell that if I used anything that didn't fit your psychology, it feels weird.

• 1:21:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  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, I use this script that I have, I kind of follow this script pretty loosely and I close a 41% or whatever it is.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  In reality, if you changed how you communicate based on the subparts of that person's psychology, which are on public display, they're private thoughts, but they're very public. If you know how to listen to what people are saying and understand what people are saying, you can put that out and it changes how you speak, it changes how you communicate, how you close a sale, how you get somebody to do something. Everything changes the moment you're able to profile a human being and understand who they are a little bit deeper. And if you know the needs, if I know your need is significance, I automatically know what one of your fears and some of your biggest fears are. Feeling insignificant, feeling like you could have made a difference, but you didn't make any

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  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, any need that I can identify automatically reveals some fears. And if I understand fears, I can also lead behavior that way as well.

• 1:23:13Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking through the context of being like a CEO or manager of teams. This is, I guess this is why it's so important to know the different types of people you have in your teams. And also, I used to work on phones doing telesales.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  You did?

• 1:23:30Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, for many years. I, when I was 16, I worked at Everest in Plymouth, which was windows and doors and conservatories and artificial grass. And then when I went to Manchester, when I was a little bit older for university before dropping out, I worked at Swinton Car Insurance. I worked at a bunch of places. I worked at Fusion Studios selling like photography vouchers. I did Facebook ad sales on the phone back in the day. Lots of, lots of telesales 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.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 1:24:11Steven Bartlett?

  So how'd you go about?

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Then you go back to the FATE model. So one of the sales teams I recently trained.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  And I'm not on a confidentiality agreement. But one of the things when they call people up out of the blue is they pretend like their dog just knocked a drink over on their computer right as that person answers the phone. 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. Person doesn't even know who they are yet. But that's so novel and interesting that they stay on the phone 70% longer just because of the spilled coffee and the person saying, I'm so sorry. This is embarrassing. Making this admission of I'm a little bit embarrassed on the phone. They stay on the phone longer because novelty captured that mammalian focus.

• 1:25:01Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. And then if they're on the phone a little bit longer, you can get to know them a little bit better and understand what kind of person they are and better adjust to.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Steven Bartlett?

  Makes sense.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  And then when you're saying, I'm so sorry, this is really embarrassing, the other person, most people are going to be like, no, it's fine. It's fine. I don't even know who you are.

• 1:25:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  We haven't even got to know each other yet.

• 1:25:22Steven Bartlett?

  Is there something that you see most frequent that's deficient in sales pitches when you're training salespeople? Is there like one particular thing that's typically most deficient that they're not doing?

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  There's a few.

• 1:25:33Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  But slowness is a big one. Authority is lacking in confidence in what that person is selling. And going off of a script, and this is the biggest one, any kind of script automatically tells our brain. So like, when's the last time you got, you get telemarketer calls to your phone every once in a while?

• 1:25:57Steven Bartlett?

  Once in a while, yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do too, and I'll answer it. And the moment that it sounds like somebody going, oh, hi, Mr. Hughes, this is blank from blank company.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  My brain knows what a sales call sounds like and instantly checks out of the conversation, instantaneously, even if I didn't want to do it. My brain's already starting to shut this guy out of my life because it sounds like everything else I've ever heard. So since our brain is so good at making apps, I know because of just knowing neuroscience, if I'm calling and I sound like a salesperson or I sound like something you've heard before, you're done. You're going to get off the phone as fast as possible. If something happens that makes you think, whoa, this is different, your brain is going to pay more attention. And I don't mean knocking a Starbucks over across your laptop.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  I mean, how can I make my sales calls not sound like every other call that exists?

• 1:26:56Steven Bartlett?

  I was victim of a phone call that was clearly listening to your work because the guy called me and said, hi, this is a sales call and you can hang up now if you're not interested. But if you are willing to hear me out, I just want thirty seconds. And the fact that they offered me the opportunity to hang up, I for some reason appreciated it and I gave them the time. And I remember I was like really busy. I was on my way to a podcast recording and just the fact that he'd gone, you can hang up now, this, just gonna be honest, this is a sales call.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, he gave you autonomy.

• 1:27:27Steven Bartlett?

  So I was like, okay, what are you selling? Then he told me about some social media software or whatever. But I just thought it was really smart because you're right, within seconds, I'm trying to figure out if this is like all the others.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Steven Bartlett?

  And I guess we can do the same in our emails. In fact, the CEO and COO of my media company that I hired sent me an email. And the first line of the email, they didn't even, she's listening now, Christiana and Georgie, they didn't even like introduce themselves. They said, like, straight to the point, no habituation filter.

• 1:28:03Steven Bartlett?

  And it's interesting, it's an interesting opener line because the word habituation filter is something I talk about in my book. So they kind of like tickled my ego a little bit as well, I think.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Steven Bartlett?

  Because it says, I've read your book.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Steven Bartlett?

  And they went straight to the point, it took, caught me off guard. And

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  It got more focus.

• 1:28:19Steven Bartlett?

  Of course, yeah, they have the job now, they work here. So, and even the subject line was like.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that was their introduction email to you.

• 1:28:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that was the first ever email.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's brilliant.

• 1:28:29Steven Bartlett?

  Cause it's, I don't think people realize this unless you've been in a situation where you're like working in recruitment, looking at thousands of emails. But we, when I used to really run the recruitment inbox, because I'm just obsessed with the recruitment, we have, we have thirty five thousand emails in there. And I'm going through there at speed. And I'm looking for

• 1:28:49Steven Bartlett?

  what I would call exclusionary factors and inclusionary factors. What I mean by that is factors to immediately exclude this email.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Steven Bartlett?

  And factors to immediately include this email within three seconds.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  To read later.

• 1:29:02Steven Bartlett?

  To read later, to like start it and to read later, or just to give it another ten seconds. And the exclusionary factors, they're all just surface things that you typically get from people who typically do a certain thing. And that's, I mean, that's also why I think about marketing newsletters. If the newsletter looks designed, the studies show the open rate, the retention rate, the click through rate is significantly worse. If it's a beautifully designed email, because people see it as a sales email.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  The emails you get every day that are important are not designed.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  It is. Like I've increased our, our open rate with emails by not capitalizing the first word of the subject line. Cause it looks like it's overly edited. And we've switched from here's a list of thirteen ways that we might have failed in twenty thirteen with this ad campaign or whatever, this marketing campaign. And I've just changed 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.

• 1:30:25Steven Bartlett?

  And that's the habituation filter at play, just trying to. Phase out things that are

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  I like that word.

• 1:30:33Steven Bartlett?

  Not novel. I think I read it. I was reading studies about habituation and how we just habituate to things. And I was looking into how that happens in both what we see, but also in what we hear. So the studies were talking about if you say a word like father, father, father, father, father, father, father, father, eventually it just becomes a sound in your head.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:51Steven Bartlett?

  Because your brain is taking away cognitive resources. 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, 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.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Steven Bartlett?

  Screaming in your face, like

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:19Steven Bartlett?

  500 people in that circle, million pounds.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  But I think he defeats the habituation filter for a certain type of viewer. Because I see any video that looks like that, I'm off within the first second. I'm done.

• 1:31:33Steven Bartlett?

  Because they all look the same now.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:36Steven Bartlett?

  That's an interesting observation.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  So I think the type of viewer is very important because like during this video, when people are watching this conversation, you're not going to have 10 seconds of B-roll of people walking in slow motion through an airport. There's not going to be, you're not over designing stuff. And the people who listen to this show are way different than the people who are watching Mr. Beast drop a Ferrari onto a mattress and blow it up. They're very, very different. So I think that habituation filters change based on what we consume and what we appreciate.

• 1:32:12Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Because we're all making, we're all doing sort of quick prejudices about everything. So

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Shortcuts. Yeah.

• 1:32:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  I'm going to develop as many shortcuts as I can to save cognitive load, brain power.

• 1:32:27Steven Bartlett?

  At my company Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company Flight Group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences. Whether that's a new show, a product, or a project, it's why I launched the Conversation Cards. I've relied on Shopify before, who's a sponsor of today's podcast, and I'll be using them again for the next big launch, which we'll hear about soon. And I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world. With Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely. 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.

• 1:33:11Steven Bartlett?

  You can sign up by going to Shopify.com/Bartlett. That's Shopify.com/Bartlett, or find the link in the description below.

• 1:33:22Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  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 is 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.

• 1:34:04Steven Bartlett?

  And how do I fix my discipline if I'm an ill-disciplined person?

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:36Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm like, I was just, as you're saying that, I was thinking both help future me.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52Steven Bartlett?

  I was probably, I was like, which one is discipline?

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  I think they would both be discipline.

• 1:34:57Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  So the moment that we start understanding that, if I could just make decisions that are prioritizing future me, then we go back to where am I getting my dopamine from? And I want past tense me to be a source of dopamine for present tense me. Because most of us look back with regret. I shouldn't have drank that much. I shouldn't have mouthed off at the family reunion, you know, whatever it is. I shouldn't have overslept. If I can start looking backwards with gratitude, that's the fastest way to make discipline dopamine generating. So the tricks are to start small.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  So like when I go to bed at night, I will pop open the little Keurig coffee thing and stick the thing in there, put a cup under there. Everything's like ready to go. So when I wake up in the morning, I just go bam, and everything's ready. I'll get my clothes out, everything kind of lined up, ready to put on for the next day. So I'm, I'm lowering the threshold of how much attention I'm spending. So I'm going to set my life up in every single way that I possibly can, as if I were a butler for future me. So when I wake up in the morning, all this stuff set out, my 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.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  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, and I'll forget about it. And in the winter, I'm looking, and now I become a source of dopamine. Past tense me is becoming a source of dopamine for present tense me. That forces me to look in the future, along with 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.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  But you have to start small. It's like just going overboard is going to be crazy. And even writing a little post-it note to yourself and sticking it in a jacket or maybe a dress shoe that you're not going to wear for a few months. It means so much to find that and it's 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.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  And I'm going to I'm going to push that concern to the right, out into the future.

• 1:37:54Steven Bartlett?

  People struggle 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. And she was very, I think she was 400 pounds or something and she was trying to get down. And in the video, you watch, some people will know who I'm referring to. Over the space of a year or two years, she actually just gains weight. So she gets to, I think, five, 500 pounds or something. And as I was watching it, you're watching someone who's saying, I want to change my life. But then is coming on every day and saying, I've just gained three pounds. I've just gained another three pounds. And there's almost this, this like visible dissonance that you're observing between this person saying they want to change their life.

• 1:38:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Steven Bartlett?

  Is it just a case of starting small? Or is there any other tricks to discipline that you can offer?

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  It's starting small and realizing that all of our lives are about habits, not goals. But what are the habits that make my goal a byproduct? Everything is about byproducts in your whole life, whether you know it or not. So instead of setting goals, set like the byproduct. What are the byproducts I want to have for this year? And then what are the habits that make that up? So what the big mistake most people make is they see somebody like you. You go to the gym very often. You probably eat really clean. I know you don't drink alcohol because I brought you a flask and gave it to your team. But

• 1:39:43Steven Bartlett?

  Boss, they took it.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  They did. So somebody who doesn't live a very disciplined life would look at you and say, God, I want to be like Stephen. He's got all this discipline going to the gym. But they don't understand that you going to the gym isn't discipline. It's a habit. So you're not like forcing yourself to go do something. You're doing something that's a habit for you. The discipline only is necessary. You only need like a teaspoon of it at the very beginning to get this habit started. So start micro habits first and then bigger habits. So the discipline is not something that you should be seeing if you're seeing someone eat healthy and go to the gym. Do all the stuff you want to do. Those are habits and that person you're you're not seeing a discipline at work right there.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  You're seeing a habit. The discipline was just at the beginning. And I think if more people knew that, that you're just exercising a little discipline at the very beginning. And then it's just, that's just what you do. It's like somebody who sees someone brushing their teeth every day. Like, wow, that's so much discipline. It's just what we do. It's a habit.

• 1:40:51Steven Bartlett?

  There's an interesting part of this, like habit equation, you could say, or like discipline equation, which is the why part.

• 1:41:01Steven Bartlett?

  Which is like, why does this matter to you? And is it important to get really clear on why this thing matters to you? Whether it's the gym or like, because when I was playing around with this discipline equation idea for my last book. And the kind of conclusion I landed at was that to be disciplined, you have to understand the reason why something matters to you. You can say that in other words.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Steven Bartlett?

  Plus, the psychological reinforcement you get from the pursuit of the thing. Minus the, you could say, the psychological or perceived cost of the pursuit of the thing. So in the context of brushing your teeth, I think, I know why it matters. Right? Because if I don't, then I have to go to the dentist, my teeth fall out, I look ugly, whatever it might be.

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Steven Bartlett?

  The, is it rewarding and fun to do? No, not really. And minus the cost of the pursuit, it takes two minutes, it's not that bad. But when that nets out, the why is stronger, thankfully, unneted than the cost. So the behavior happens.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Steven Bartlett?

  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 this thing matter to you?

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and how much why? Like, how big is the why?

• 1:42:14Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:42:53Steven Bartlett?

  Does that equation stack up for you, saying this?

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  I like it a lot.

• 1:42:57Steven Bartlett?

  Because I've been trying, I've been saying it, I wrote about this in my book, the whole idea is why? Plus, like, you could say reinforcement, minus, you could say, cost, just to simplify it.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:07Steven Bartlett?

  But is there anything missing from this equation? Do you think, is there anything, I said it to Simon Sinek and he went, let's try it out. And he talked to me about taking his bin out in the morning, like taking the bin out for like the bin men. And it kind of holds up because he's, so the why is if I don't take the bin out, then I'm going to get fined and my bin isn't going to overflow. Pretty strong motivator.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:28Steven Bartlett?

  The reinforcement, there's no reinforcement. Getting out of bed at seven AM to take your bin out, it's not nice.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32Steven Bartlett?

  The cost is also significant getting out of bed, but the why still.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  So it's why plus.

• 1:43:38Steven Bartlett?

  You could say like, why plus the psychological reinforcement from the pursuit of doing it. So DJing, really fun for me.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  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 inaction. And all of that is going to be about, can I use, can I leverage my focus, the mammalian brain's focus? Can I leverage authority over myself in some way, over that mammalian part of my brain? Force myself out of bed, force these habits to start developing. And then tribe, are my friends involved? Have I made a public agreement about something? And then the emotion, which I think would be the why.

• 1:44:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  And, 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. It'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.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  And that is the best way to brainwash yourself to form these new habits and goals. So how can I get myself to focus? How can I build the emotion, which is the why? Recurring emotion, not just one at the very beginning. How can I continue to make it emotional? Or maybe I can make the cost of inaction emotional. Maybe I can buy the app that makes me look fat or one of those things. And then agitation is if I'm waking up a habituation, which 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.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  I'm going to follow that script because our brain writes scripts for us to save us time. So agitation means I'm going to disrupt my environment so much and so often that my brain has no chance to default to an older script. So I have clients that repaint their house. They rearrange their furniture. They change up their wardrobe a whole lot. They get a completely new haircut. So they're not even looking at the same person in the mirror anymore. They do everything you can to disrupt that rhythm. It's exactly what we would do with a detainee. If we were trying to brainwash someone who is in an intelligence interrogation. So I'm disrupting environment like crazy. And what will we do with a dog?

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  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, not everything exactly the same. And then repetition.

• 1:46:51Steven Bartlett?

  Repetition, which is just repeating the same thing.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Over and over. So like if even just coming to the vision board. The last client I had, I had him 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. Cause 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. Um, but that's nonstop and it's just nonstop exposure. So can I generate focus?

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  And that's a lot of focus on, on the goals. Then there's emotion, you're, 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?

• 1:47:56Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. So I should keep a vision board.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  I, I think, always think with your goals, like, how would I show these goals to my dog?

• 1:48:08Steven Bartlett?

  How would I show these goals to my dog?

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  And how would I let my dog know shit's gonna change around here? I'm gonna move stuff around, I'm gonna make everything different.

• 1:48:18Steven Bartlett?

  I'd move his bed.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:21Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else that we haven't covered yet in terms of your work here? That is important for us to know.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  I will give anybody listening, one big piece of advice that I've passed down to my kids. And maybe just make this a final piece of advice is if you are exposed to a product that can't tell you the problem that they're solving, you need to be terrified, absolutely terrified. So like, if I look at DoorDash or Uber Eats, they get food to me faster. I don't have to leave my house, I don't have to do anything. I can continue writing my book or doing something on my computer and the food just shows up. They tell you the problem that they're solving, right? Look at Amazon, they can tell you all the problems they're solving. But you look at something like Apple Vision Pro.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  They can't tell you. You will never see it. You see all the problems that a MacBook solves. This, this camera does all this, does all these things. It helps you get this done faster. When you look at Facebook Meta, these AR goggles, none of them will ever tell you the problems that they're trying to solve because it's loneliness. And people needing to anesthetize themselves from being in their own life. And we are in a loneliness epidemic right now. In the midst of all this, we've never been more connected, but we've never had more loneliness than is in the world right now. So then there's so many products

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  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. I don't have to be in my life. And that should be one thing, if I could just program into everyone's head, be so, I did this to my kids, just be so, so scared and so cautious. When I see a product or an app or anything that's not openly advertising the problem that they're solving.

• 1:50:34Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, there's a lot of entertainment apps, right? At the moment for young kids and social networks.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Fine for boredom.

• 1:50:40Steven Bartlett?

  Is boredom a problem?

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  It might be.

• 1:50:43Steven Bartlett?

  But Because I'm trying to distinguish between like, is TikTok solving a problem for a young kid?

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  Right. So that might be solving loneliness instead of boredom. And I think TikTok does not talk about solving any problem.

• 1:50:57Steven Bartlett?

  It's like a casino, isn't it? For the dopamine.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so bad. And they use some, they use a hypnosis technique. Not just TikTok, this is everybody. Uh, called fractionation, which is where you bring somebody up. And like, so like, you'll see one of those videos of a grandpa holding his grandbaby, you know, like that. That makes you almost cry. Have you ever cried just watching like a 60 second Instagram reel?

• 1:51:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  I have too, man. And I feel stupid. I'm by myself, watching a 60 second video. Uh, but like, they'll pull you down into that. Then they'll, they'll punch you back up like two videos later and, and you'll start to notice this. Two videos later, it'll be a riot. Someone robbing a store, fistfight, a car going way too fast, flipping off the road, an airplane almost crashing. So they get you up and down and up and down. And the more I can do that, this is proven, that that ramps up suggestibility. Uh, Dr. Milton Erickson, uh, did studies on this in the 1960s. And that increases your level of suggestibility like tenfold.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  And it's so reliable.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  And I didn't realize it was happening until my wife said, "Why are you buying shit off Instagram ads like once a week now?" And I was working on me. So I was buying stupid shit that was on Instagram ads. And then I finally set time limits on those apps.

• 1:52:41Steven Bartlett?

  You set time limits on those apps?

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. My wife has the passcode to unlock the, uh, whatever it's called. Screen time, the iPhone's 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.

• 1:53:17Steven Bartlett?

  What, what's the cost, though? What's the cost of the life, in your view, of the, 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?

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the cost is increased loneliness. And the, these apps, any app that sells ads has two main goals. Number one, uh, 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, and I'm comparing myself to other people. And it gets us into an us versus them. Then it traps you into a corner of confirmation bias. Whatever you think, I'm gonna 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.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  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 to New York once in my life, but we're in New York right now. Looking at my hotel, I was like, struggling to find a piece of nature. Like, I think I have more trees on my property than there are in the whole city here. So, on the whole, when you squeeze people together, have you heard of the bystander effect?

• 1:54:47Steven Bartlett?

  I have heard of it, but please.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  So they, there is a very good experiment that was led by Dr. Phillips and Barto that they did at Liverpool Street Station.

• 1:54:56Steven Bartlett?

  In London?

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  In London, yeah. So right at Liverpool Street, there's this, there's a video on YouTube. And it's fair use if you want to overlay like an image of what this looks like. But at Liverpool Street Station, there's three or four steps to get up to the main. So from the street, there's a curb, and then there's three or four steps. They had this woman laid out on the ground, wearing like a normal skirt and top. And I think 395 people either walked by her or stepped over her. And then they did it with a guy. Then they did it with a guy, he's holding a beer and he's asking for help. And they, it may have changed all these variables, but it's happened in New York City before. There's a woman named Kitty Genovese in the 60s, I think just two blocks from here,

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Saying, "I watched a person get stabbed, and three people just watched, and they watched it happen." Would you say that that's psychopathy? That's a psychopath? Yeah. 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.

• 1:56:29Steven Bartlett?

  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,

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Steven Bartlett?

  Some kind of addiction or something.

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:51Steven Bartlett?

  So, you've become somewhat desensitized to it? Is that?

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  So, you are getting desensitized to it, but your brain is made to hold small tribes of a couple hundred people. And the moment that tribe expands into something your brain can't imagine, you are no longer relying on reputation from anyone. You don't care what other people are thinking about you. And the moment that stops, your brain says, "I don't have the capacity to worry about everyone that I see." So, empathy disappears. Like, you walk down these streets here in New York, their empathy is zero for you. No matter what's happening. You walk through a country town, it's like 1,500 people. The population of the town I live in is 2,200.

• 1:57:40Speaker 01

  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. And the moment we get flooded with all of these things, all of these people that we can't possibly care about everybody, empathy disappears. And the second aspect of this is... If we're surrounded by environments that our ancestors would be absolutely scared of and confused by, we start developing problems in our brain. Depression, loneliness, suicide, through the roof, in large cities. Every time. There's no exception. And I think the same thing happens when we put stuff our cells, our ancestors' cells don't recognize.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  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. That 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.

• 1:58:56Steven Bartlett?

  Amen. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. The question left for you is, how can we consistently feel and appreciate the blessings in our lives? And this is interesting because you talked about gratitude earlier on.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think if mindfulness has become a trope, now it's just kind of become overused on the internet, and it's one of the, I think it's a superpower, just learning present tense mindfulness of just being in this moment. And I think if you, one of the fastest ways to get good at just enjoying the moment is to be so self forgiving that it's almost delusional. That's the best advice that I could give somebody. Be delusionally self forgiving about everything.

• 1:59:57Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean in reality? Give me an example.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 of that. You get to a point where everything is fine, and it's just hilarious. If you get to that point, your ability to stay in the present and not stuck in the past will 10x overnight. Just the ability to be delusionally self forgiving.

• 2:00:41Steven Bartlett?

  How does that keep you out of thinking about the future, though?

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Thinking about the future is great, especially once we follow that discipline practice. And we're putting concern forward and gratitude backwards.

• 2:00:55Steven Bartlett?

  You wrote a book called Phrase Seven, which, which is, I hear, is being turned into a TV series. Which you're gonna feature in.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  As a bartender.

• 2:01:04Steven Bartlett?

  As a bartender. And this is being released next year?

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  For 25 seconds.

• 2:01:07Steven Bartlett?

  All right, okay. Better than nothing. And this is being released next year?

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  We're hopeful, yeah.

• 2:01:13Steven Bartlett?

  What's your, what is the book about, Phrase Seven?

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:01:41Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, yeah, people know Suits. And if I, if I wanna learn more about your work, and I wanna get, I wanna go further into everything that you do, where's the best place for me to go?

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Just our homepage, which is NCI, which is our neurocognitive intelligence, nci.university.

• 2:01:58Steven Bartlett?

  NCI.university.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:02:08Steven Bartlett?

  And this book here, is that available on the website?

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  The paperback version of that is, yes.

• 2:02:13Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, the paperback version. But it's the same stuff, right?

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:02:18Steven Bartlett?

  Cool. Chase, thank you. It's so unbelievably fascinating. I get the impression that I could talk to you probably for Twenty hours, maybe. I feel like this conversation could have been twenty hours long because I feel like we're just scratching the surface. Because I guess at the end of the day, everything is about humans. It is. You know, every, every gold dream problem I have in my life, it could actually be just distilled down to some kind of human challenge. Yeah. With my girlfriend, with, you know, businesses I run, et cetera, 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

• 2:02:58Steven Bartlett?

  study and a bunch of them in school, I was obsessed with these things. And I 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, the Milgram study is still pertinent because it's, once again, just dealing with humans. And that's what you're helping people to unlock. So thank you for doing what you do. Absolutely. And for the many, you know, you've got a lot of raving fans online. I thank you on behalf of all of them as well. And if anyone wants to go check out the YouTube

• 2:03:41Steven Bartlett?

  channel, which is really fascinating because I've watched you 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. It'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?

• 2:04:25Steven Bartlett?

  You probably get my point. Understandably, there's loads of distrust out there. Who should you turn to for accurate information? I use 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 personalised nutrition programme 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.