The Behaviour Expert: Instantly Read Any Room & How To Hack Your Discipline! Chase Hughes

0:00 so New Year's resolutions around the corner I think 9% of resolutions stick what advice have you got for me okay so let's say I wanted to lose weight the first thing is realizing that all of our lives are about habits not goals the second aspect of this is one of the most effective strategies to brainwash yourself to form these new habits and that is Chase Hughes is a former military veteran turned world-renowned expert in behavioral analysis and human influence he has trained Secret Service agents Navy SEAL leaders CEOs and government officials to master communication behavioral detection and persuasion you can look at three factors every single time to determine why someone was successful or why they failed the first is self-mastery where we look at confidence body language discipline and authority and we know that people are hyper responsive to Authority but how do we establish Authority ourselves Authority is made up

0:46 of five things and that's number two is their level of observation and there's five C's that we talk about in Behavior profiling should 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 BL bling if I start seeing an increase in someone's blink rate I know I need to change the subject right away interesting and the third their level of communication and if you want to learn how to start a conversation or continue one this is for you it comes down to understanding the type of person that you are in front of now segregate people into six groups and that'll influence the best way to talk to those people so we can get into if you want please okay number one what about how to win an argument what are the things I should definitely not do so the big mistake most people make is don't do that

1:32 this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much Chase Hughes who are you and what is your mission I'm a behavior guy Behavior expert and I think I've just set out to teach people that there is an entire world

2:20 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 it everything comes down to human interactions and whether or not you can manage yourself you're a good leader who the good leaders are and who can persuade the people to feel a certain way and who'd you do it for I think I'd do it for people that have gone through a period in their life realizing that there's an invisible advantage that some other people have the people that got

3:05 successful maybe have some kind of advantage that they're not able to to tangibly see and I think showing them that this is one of the biggest lovers that you could ever pull in your life is the most rewarding and fascinating thing to see someone go through this transition to realize that this human behavior stuff dictates outcomes in life when you say this you're referring to human behavior and is human behavior 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 when I say human behavior I mean that when a person becomes successful or they become a failure you can look at three factors

3:52 every single time to determine why someone was successful or why they failed that is their level of self-mastery their level of observation like can they read the room can they read the person that they're actually talking to and their level of communication can they speak influentially can they talk about outcomes in a way that inspire people and motivate people and can they communicate in a persuasive way that moves people and who exactly have you worked with lots of government agencies uh notably I've worked with intelligence agencies I've worked with the psychological operations Department the US Army which is the Special Operations Command I've trained a lot of the US Navy leaders nowadays

4:38 and a lot of civilians are my main base of clients right now what do intelligence what do you do for intelligence agents so when we talk to intelligence agents the number one thing that we train them in is recognizing human behavior and we also teach interrogation and we tend to teach like if I'm doing an interrogation it's kind of the same as if I'm uh an intelligence officer somewhere trying to talk somebody into spying on their own country for us both of those things are about talking someone into doing something that's not really in their best interest so when it comes down to that that's really where we get to the point the rubber meets the road can you talk someone into doing something that they a normally wouldn't do which is maybe sales because they

5:24 normally they wouldn't have otherwise done that or B in the interrogation world can I talk you into something that you wouldn't want to do because it's not your best interest like confessing to a crime or providing intelligence or something like that and that's where we really do a lot of the training for police and government next to me there's this massive book called The behavior Ops manual it's probably the biggest book I've ever seen um what is the wealth of experience that have fed into this body of work that book right there is my entire life so probably 30 to 40,000 hours of 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

6:10 is inside of the behavior Ops manual and I wrote that book and we can get into that if you want to right now I received a brain diagnosis where I thought I was going to lose my brain and I was desperate I'm just wondering how's my family going to feed itself so I wanted to put every single piece of knowledge that I've ever created or I've ever come up with for any government agent everything all on the table and that's what this book was it's just the culmination of everything and you served in the military yourself I did for 20 years what is the most common thing that people come to your work for like if you were to encapsulate it into like a sentence what they're searching for in their own personal lives it would be a person

6:56 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 the recipe to do X Y and Z what do I say on the phone give me a new sales script so I have this model called the acss model that I trained to my entire staff and that acss model stands for Authority Comfort social skills and then skills 90% of people say they need more skills but what they need is Authority or comfort and they can't be comfortable in a conversation so I could give you like I would talk to these clients and I would say I could spend $10 million write the

7:43 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 client is if I give you a flight checklist right now for a a small plane Cessna

8:32 172 are you a pilot no having this little checklist of what to do does not give you the skill so a lot of that so much of that comes from comfort and the problem that a lot of people have is they're competing with other people on height on looks on social status money hierarchy confidence all this other stuff the number one thing you need to compare yourself with other people on is Comfort that's it is can I be more comfortable than the other person in in this conversation because our brains are naturally wired to compete we can't turn competition off but we can change what they're focused on and if they're focused on Comfort we win a lot more conversations Comfort yeah how does that manifest is that just like being like physically comfortable what is that yeah

9:20 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 the this long list to go look into your phone and have to read it before every meeting the one thing I want you to focus on this week is can you move slower than the other people in the room that's it just adjusting the speed limit on your body so if you were standing in a swimming pool how fast would your arms and legs move if you were underwater and make that the speed limit for this entire week that's all I want you to focus on and that makes so many changes in people's mind because we change our bodies and we change how our emotions are feeling and there's one thing that fear does it speeds our body up so if

10:05 you see someone doing these rapid jerky movements you're you're seeing mostly fear or stress in their body so get more comfortable in an interaction conversation even if it's on the phone or in person yeah so on the phone it would be speaking at a normal composed Pace okay and then so step two is composure can I get you into a place where you have some composure and the left and right side of composure we have collapse and we have posturing so we 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

10:51 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 uh and I said that's including travel and all that and the only thing he did he didn't say anything on the phone he just goes that's it he just made that noise and right away I said oh yeah but we could do a discount I could probably do like 5K we could even take some off 50% I could even take 75% since you're here here and I have to do this it just made up excuses and I almost got to the point where I was like let me pay you I'll give you some money if you come let me speak on stage for you and that's collapse so that's I'm in collapse in some areas of my life I might posture in some areas of my life

11:36 and our goal is to get out of that swing but the problem most people have if I'm living in collapse the solution looks like posturing and we see this in like guys that learn pickup like I'm going to learn how to posture because it's the opposite of what I'm doing it's not the center where I need to be and what is the center that's that's composure 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

12:23 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 um the way that we live our lives off camera I'm sure you would agree you just had Vanessa van Edwards on uh it 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

13:08 presentable but back home I've got a 8ot pile of laundry sitting in the bedroom my bed's nasty I've got dishes all piled up in the sink there's a part of our brain that's somehow dedicated to reminding us I'm faking it right now and that comes across so whether we're doing it consciously or uncons consciously 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 uh time appearance my social life and my

13:57 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 but afterwards we were like something was off I don't know what it was but something just didn't feel right about that guy and we've all had that little experience and getting a hold of your those five qualities that make up Authority are the fastest way to get success in your life and just drastically start changing your life so it's really that the controllable element it's our environment our time our appearance our social life and our finances that's the like controllable Foundation to all these other things um that we talked about yeah so that would be the the bottom Foundation of that little pyramid

14:44 and the far left side of that triangle would be confidence discipline leadership gratitude and enjoyment yeah and those elements alone produce feelings in other people that make them see an authority figure and you've heard of the milgrim experiment oh gosh it reminds me of something I read when I was 16 in Psychology class in a textbook probably did that was the one where they got people to shock each other yeah please explain all right let me give you a quick recap it's Yale University I think it's 1962 and Yale runs an ad in the paper says come help us with this study on learning and we'll give you 20 bucks or lunch voucher or something like that so all these volunteers come out and there's a tall guy in a lab coat and a official clipboard there and there's one

15:31 other volunteer and you draw straws one of you is the teacher one of you is the learner so you're led into this room you watch this learner guy get strapped up he's on this table getting strapped up to this electric shock machine and every time he gets a question on this quiz wrong you've got to shock him you have to hit the button and every Progressive question you increase the voltage on this machine that goes all the way up on the far right to xXx danger severe shock is what it says on there but the whole time you're shocking him the 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

16:16 these people will turn around to the guy in the lab coat and the guy in the lab coat is like please continue it's important that you continue the experiment so they keep going and going and almost to the end no more response it's just silence the guy doesn't even respond to questions and the guy in the lab coat says any non-answer has to be treated as if it were an incorrect answer please continue and they keep going and going and going and you you can watch some some of these are on video and you just watch this their faces toward the end these psychiatrists at the beginning of this predicted less than 1% would go all the way 67% of people will go all the way and 250 volts is enough to kill you 100%

17:04 went up to 250 the presence of novelty and Authority did everything it made a person commit murder and that's I would say I would argue that's more difficult than selling someone a car and that Authority comes in that particular example came from going to the university the lab coat Etc but how do we establish Authority ourselves is it going back to the things you said there about environment appearance Etc finances yeah is there like are are there physical expressions of that Authority in a day-to-day basis there are slowness of movement is one of the most common so we have slowness of movement so the right side of that Authority triangle has five letters on it and that stands for movement appearance confidence connection and

17:51 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 we all these LinkedIn articles YouTube videos that are saying how to have more confidence how to do x y and z are how to have the symptoms instead of the cause of authority so people with authority tend to sit up straight but they don't sit up straight because they read an article they sit up straight because they see the world a certain way and that's so much of a difference between changing my world view versus changing my posture that's very

18:37 different outcomes and we're still generating those gut feelings in people interesting have you worked with many people that come to you and they've got a clear Authority problem is there a particular example you can think of where you were able to help someone turn their life around many hundreds give me your favorite example my favorite example was a big CEO he's in Los Angeles and he ask me for skills he starts off I need I need the flight checklist I don't need to learn to fly I just need the checklist uh 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 and comfort problem and his employees would like openly make fun of him in board meetings and stuff like that and

19:23 he didn't like it and it 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 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 say it was only a couple of months and we used a lot of hypnosis we used a lot of um I literally used brainwashing techniques to help him so it's the same techniques and you know

20:08 what uh cognitive behavioral therapy was also a a form of brainwashing back in the day and aversion therapy um but within just a few months he went from around I think 6 to 800k per month to like 4 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

20:54 different so watching that transformation is so so so rewarding and incredible but the confidence is usually what you have to change first with people how'd you do that you change how what's going on inside their head so you've gone on stage before probably a thousand or 2,000 people you were on TV for a while even after you've been successful have you ever even heard a tiny voice that said why am I here or like do I deserve to be here yeah I mean this is a prime example of that yeah yeah or I'm faking it people are going to find out I'm I'm faking it well you feel like that when you're a podcaster because you you didn't get any official qualifications and then people started

21:39 listening and then there's they think that you know what you're doing or you so I think I can tell that as a podcaster 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 I said Stephen I'm going to come pick you up I pull up in front of your house you jump in the passenger side we're heading off and I'm listening to an audio book about a nuclear bomb going off but it's inside the audiobook

22:26 there's a fake news report about a nuclear bomb going off let's say it's a pretend BBC broadcast or something that's going off that it's in the audiobook we start driving I'm relaxed I'm focused on the road I'm enjoying what I'm doing your heart rate's increased you're fearful you're a migdala is firing off you're in this horrible state of like oh my God what H what's going to happen to my family we're both hearing the exact same broadcast we're listening to the same speakers at the same time but I know that I'm hearing fiction and you are worried that it's truth I don't mean to use you as as that example but it's that's the easiest way to to describe it and then just fundamentally changing how you hear that voice and

23:15 nine times I think 10 times out of 10 that voice was developed when you were eight or nine what did that kid do and this is what I would ask any of the clients what did that kid do to make friends or keep them so friends to feel safe now we're in the safety like how did I get to feel safe and what did I do to earn rewards and for some people that might be recognition for other kids who had a bad start in life that might be water or food might have been a reward for those kids so the way that we keep or earn friends the way that we get rewards as a child and the way that we feel what we have to do to feel safe those develop as little apps in our

24:01 brain that run in the background of our adult lives all the time and we typically as a kid they're great they might have kept us safe they might have kept us alive they might have held us inside of these Social Circles but I'm going to be a dick to people so that they don't get close to me or I'm going to kiss up to authority figures like Mom and Dad so I'll get some recognition and praise and that becomes an app that we carry into adulthood without knowing it without our consent without our awareness that little kid brings these things into adulthood and they just modify so I go from having to kiss up to a narcissistic mother to I'm going to I'm going to kiss the boss's ass every single day and everybody knows me as the

24:46 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 just to make their brains see how stupid it is on a regular basis and put it on a motivational poster and the second part of that is I any anybody who's confident has a generalized expectation of positive

25:32 outcomes not specific but things are going to be fine things are going to be fine so if I can do that you can fundamentally change someone's life so the final point of that which leads into discipline is I need to get you to form a relationship with your future self because everything that goes into on in our life has to do with our mamalian brain this lower part of our brain here and it doesn't speak English there's no affirmation that's going to penetrate that barrier there's no like I'm going to read a quote on a wall or a PowerPoint slide that's going to fundamentally change Behavior you have to change the animal the Mamon part of the brain so the question I ask

26:17 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 cuz 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 yeah 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 mamalian in relationship with our future self which changes how I eat changes how I spend money it changes maybe what time I go to

27:05 bed how much alcohol I drink and mostly uh 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 front of in my life 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 and is there a relationship between discipline and confidence 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

27:52 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 5 seconds because we don't need to 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 I'm dealing with regularly so 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

28:39 camera the same way that I want to be perceived by everybody in my life my confidence already starts to grow and you said enjoyment as well was one of the five yeah why is enjoyment important I added it on there it it took a while but I walked through every body I've ever trained and if you look at everyone who is a natural leader and has that level of authority they are not just partying in the moment but just in calmly enjoying what is happening now so maybe you could call it mindfulness but I think in just the trait of enjoyment and being in enjoyment is the most magnetic human trait that there is what do I need to know about

29:26 observation which is the second part of your triangle to success or failure observation being able to read a room is it possible to be able to read a room yeah how would I go about reading a room okay so if if you're reading like a public area yeah let's go back to the airport maybe yeah if I'm in a public area I really want to pay attention to the slowest moving person in the room I want to pay attention to who is more confident than the other person and that's typically going back to speed and if I'm 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

30:12 blinking and if a person is blinking fast it's a sign of high stress if they're blinking really slow it's a sign of focus so it's not always relaxation so if I talk to a psychopath and a interrogation room or in a business negotiation and they're very focused on prey so we call that a prey Focus because they're going to manipulate somebody their blink rate will almost be at 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

30:58 and if all that I would ever need to teach somebody you don't have to count or know how many times per minute it's going on is if I'm in a conversation I'm going to start the conversation and say is the blink rate normal does it look fast does it look slow so what I'm really looking for in human behavior are changes changes so if I'm on stage 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 I know I need to change the subject or change the topic right away so would you be looking at one particular person no so generally yeah so I would look at all of these eyes and pretend like I'm looking at one human okay does that make sense getting

31:43 an average of the yeah so as I'm looking around how many blinks do I see and I'm going to pretend as if that was one human eye okay so when you get a lower blink rate people are paying more attention yeah you're doing a great job and you can I go to these pitch meetings where these uh entrepreneurs will go up and Pitch these Angel Investors and stuff like that up in Washington and you can measure who will pitch based on blink rate you see a blink rate drop that is the most interested person in the room we do the same thing with jury selection it's so reliable and you 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

32:28 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 yeah I start a conversation does it look pretty normal is it pretty fast or kind of slow then I'm going to look for changes and that's all I'm looking for in a room of people is what's changing so 70 is deceptive and zero is psychopath 70 is stress not always decep okay and zero is psychopath basically zero might be psychopath context is the second letter C there's five C's that we talk about in Behavior profiling so change then context MH so now it like

33:14 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 yeah so now we have Contex so interesting that actually happened in my last conversation I um I try not to close off my body when I'm doing this cuz some sometimes my natural reaction is to go like this and then sometimes especially in here when it gets later and we didn't have the fan in the heater I would go like this yeah and what I'm if like the I was thinking but this is rude the rude to the guest but I looked at my arms and I had these like massive Goosebumps and I was like that's the context yeah the context is I'm freezing yeah but to the guest it would look like I'm going like this yeah you know so this is why body language is so delicate I think is delicate and it's so hard to for people to do peer-reviewed

34:01 research on it because there's a million variables it's like saying well why should Roger Federer win a tennis match when he doesn't have any peer-reviewed studies to back up what he's doing yeah it's the same thing with body language because like they're doing interrogation research so they're saying that a college kid who gets a lunch voucher and walks in and pretends to 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 drugg 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

34:47 replicate human behavior that well so and people treat it like it's a pharmaceutical like I can put a Tylenol in somebody and I can measure all these responses and it doesn't really go into aad spr sheet like that and there's a lot of great research out there but I'd say it's just so incredibly hard to replicate everything in with perfection like that so what was the first C first C is change I want to look for a change and then you want to look at context is there a third C that would be clusters clusters so then you read articles that say someone looks a certain way or does a certain thing that might be deceptive like the most common one I hear is someone touches their nose so someone touching their nose might be being de cve if you're just seeing one thing I would say that never almost

35:33 never means anything you want to look for a cluster of behavior so they started getting nervous which is a change they're it's because I'm asking about where they were on Wednesday night there's the context and while they were getting nervous they also started protecting their genitals with their hands and licking their lips which is a hygienic gesture that we do so now I have a change within the context that's appropriate and there's a cluster of Behavior after that I screen through culture is there some part of this person's culture or background uh that makes them do that like I was with a young person we were watching a Pakistani person get inter interrogated and you know how you you commonly see that kind of headshake oh yeah in that

36:18 region of the world they said I was shaking his head while he's saying yes like now we get down to that sea this is culture which rules out uh 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 and I'm skeptical but we deal in likelihood so we should always process in that so someone licking their lips or moving a certain way if it's in on a checklist does not mean that it's deceptive MH cuz what if they do it all the time then we

37:05 don't have a change does that make sense 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 a tick it was almost like a tick yeah 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 the haircut curtains okay and he used to flick it and I almost like vicariously picked up the like flicking from him I'd go like that all the time but I was just thinking if someone saw me doing that they would perceive that as some some form of behavior whereas it was just this weird thing that lasted for like two years when I was younger and then went away yeah but did you do it all the time I just did it I oh I

37:50 don't know I felt like I just did it randomly but that that wouldn't be a change okay yeah if I if I was meting you yeah and you were on the Dragon's Den for a while still yeah and people pitch you yeah all kinds of ideas that just having somebody on the show or just having those skills with you you could see through a lot of those people and whether or not they're being honest about what they're pitching they're confident about what they're pitching and you could look at a show like Shark Tank and I can look at I can watch any episode of Shark Tank and look who's blinking the least MH they're they're going to be the first to make an offer 99% of the time because they're the most focused on what's going on they're they're personally

38:35 invested so that's fascinating is that just you could just look at one or two things and predict stress or focus and just being able to do that if you just took that one thing away from this that would be a superpower because I sit here with guests right and they talk about their life stories and stuff and I often see some patterns of Behavior yeah specifically like closing up when you ask someone something about their childhood or a specific sensitive subject in their life you tend to see like self I call it like self- soothing Behavior to some degree so it's difficult and it's funny because we we're all like amateur body language experts now yeah because there's been a lot of stuff online saying spot this did they touch their nose Etc so it can also be dangerous it can and it can give us

39:22 these like oh I saw this one thing I'm never doing business with that guy yeah and like he scratched his nose three times while he was talking about that well he's look in his briefcase he's got allergy medication in there he's scratching his nose the season just changed it 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 and communication is the third one in the Triangle to success or failure communication so what I've got so far is talking slow is higher authority yeah is there anything else that if I want to be a master Communicator I should be thinking about absolutely oh when it comes to communication a being a good Storyteller is great and

40:08 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 MH and understanding what kind of person that is and there's a few ways that I identify I I segregate people into six groups and that's through what do they need from other people so what kind of things do I need socially and these are significance acceptance approval intelligence pity and strength or SL power and in every conversation if you

40:54 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 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 conversation or things that you could hear in a conversation pretty quickly you start talking to somebody and they said yeah I'm actually the CEO of that

41:40 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 uh then you then you listen for approval is this is when you hear people say well I got to go up on stage tomorrow Tom but I suck at public speaking I'm going to I'm going to really bomb at it I'm just really nervous trying to get you to say no no you don't suck you're great you did great last time you're going to rock this you got this then you have the acceptance people they'll always use the terms like we us our and just team so acceptance people are all about like I'm a member of some kind of group and that'll come across in their communication so you ask a significance person about a vacation and they say I

42:27 went down to Miami it was fantastic I had a great time and I just got back last night you ask an acceptance person they'll say we went down there all of us went to this thing and we did this so you hear a lot of this language that talks about groups and membership you get into the intelligence side how often do you hear people go yeah I actually got my MBA from this person oh I did my Master's thesis on that do you hear this intelligence stuff come out of people and the pity is you can identify a Pity person pretty well and those are the hardest people to communicate to and the pity person always like if I want to give you the ideal thing to say to each one of these people the pity person wants to hear I can't believe all the stuff that you've been through and

43:13 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 forces his way into the top to the guy with the ridiculous jacked up pickup truck that has like the plastic testicles hanging off of the back of it and once you understand what categorization someone fits into how would you show up in a way that's

43:59 effective in communicating with them say for example if I'm talking to a significance person yeah do I just and and I'm trying to close a deal with them or something do I Pander to their significance is that yeah so there's a few other types that we teach intelligence people to identify there's 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 You Stephen um this is a great podcast you've got millions of subscribers and it's obvious you make a difference in so many people's lives and

44:44 you are a significance person so that would be effective uh for you because I know that you want to make the biggest difference that you can and I want to speak in a way that a speaks to their needs and lets them know that I'm 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

45:30 world so every time I'm thinking about needs always think in terms of neurotransmitters so if I can compliment someone on their need that's what we need from other people so I'm giving them like 500 million neurotransmitters being released when they hear this so it's not just that we 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 I was thinking about the pen I was like I was going to ask you to if I'm a if I'm an INT intelligence person and you had to sell me the pen yeah how would you go about that you know I think

46:17 there's a lot of people in the world out there and I think most people just do what other people do and I'm sure you would agree there's so many idiots out there that just get with the basic thing I'm going to do this basic thing and they don't really go outside the box very often and every once in a while there's you meet somebody who knows higher quality things you 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 um but it's it's not like other pencil it's not the basic run-of-the-mill thing so I want to present that in a way and I want to start with a negative comment and this

47:03 is one of the most effective persuasion strategies is to I'm going to negatively associate something I don't want you to have so let's say uh we're starting our podcast and I'm I'm afraid Stephen's not going to connect with me and I know that you're significance driven as we started out imagine if I said something at the very beginning of this podcast and I said Stephen thanks for having me man and there's so many people out there and 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 you know there's so many people out there who just don't really give back to the world and they don't really have an interest in helping other people and it's like every time you meet one of those people

47:50 you sit down with them it's like all of them have the same thing in common they can't just stop and connect when they sit down with somebody so I'm demonizing a trait using your needs that I don't want you to have like the inability to connect ah okay interesting and you're consciously pointing off to adjust it to it's others not right until I said the word connect and then I gestured between you and me back and forth between both of us and that word stop is a very powerful word in the English language so when I that 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

48:36 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 I could say you know Stephen what's fascinating to me is I've gone around the world I've met several entrepreneurs I've met people who are on TV and it's like you think that they are just dismissive offand before you meet them and it's incredible when you meet these people it's like all of them have this ability to just tune everything out and just completely connect with somebody and that would have the same

49:21 effect and what what's going on there people we want to be that person because it's positive we want to live up to that expectation set right so what I've done is I've gotten you to say um as Chris Voss would put it that's right okay but I've got you to say that about who you are as a person okay so now I'm not changing your ideas I'm changing your identity changing my Identity or yeah because you've made an agreement about who you are you've nodded your head okay and if I wanted to take that further I would I would make an admission first and I'd say you know what I've had social anxiety growing up and I'm curious what is it that have you always been able to just connect with everybody

50:07 you talked to or is this something that you had to work on oh was that a question yeah okay but I know it's not a question Yeah Yeah question the moment that you ask that that you start to answer that question you stepped you've made an agreement about who you are as a person so if I wanted somebody to be less close off I might say you know I've spent my whole life just worried about what other people think and it it to 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 like actually I'm just closed off I'm very close-minded and that's maybe a 0.1% of people so small agreements and none of

50:53 these are designed for people to take word for word word I guess they can but it's about the idea of getting someone to comment on their own identity who they are as a person is there anything else as it relates to communication that's especially important it's funny that so many people are interested in the communication part more so than the listening part they want the flight checklist yeah I was think of 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 I'm guessing listening plays a pretty critical role to being a great speaker yeah and

51:38 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 is that part of the observation part yes absolutely just listening to that means that now I have the right words to use for the communication and the right the right understanding of what motivates you as a person so if I'm a therapist that makes me a better therapist if I'm a hostage negotiator that makes me a better hostage negotiator and if I'm a suicide hotline operator that makes me way better at my job because I'm understanding exactly who I'm talking to and my goal is to talk someone into doing something that they normally would not do you talk about this elicitation yeah what is elicitation it's a CIA technique right it is it was originally came up with by this guy

52:25 named John Nolan and his book is no longer for sale you have to get it on eBay like it's hard to find but the book is called confidential why isn't it no longer for sale I think that he just kind of pulled it off the shelf I'm not sure okay so elicitation is about using statements instead of questions and I'll give you an example let's say you and I walk into Whole Foods which is we're in New York so it's probably a block away somewhere 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

53:10 any questions or be awkward 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 heyy 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 it says all Whole Foods employees just got bumped up to $26 an hour that's fantastic and she turns around 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 mhm or if you let's say you got into an Uber

53:56 tonight and you said I just read this article that Uber drivers were one of the top most highly satisfied employees in the country you're going to get a correction and you're going to be like what 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 exper experiences doing that or I can imagine that was challenging statements are always going to be better than asking pointed questions because a person feels like they're volunteering information the third layer of that is disbelief so let's say I wanted to ask

54:43 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 MH and I said wow that had to be interesting I I can't imagine that there's got to be a lot of stuff going on there and you start talking more and more and more and then like that sounds great there was no challenges to that entire trip I love when everything is 100% Flawless and you're like no actually and then you start going into that and I'm like no way then now we have disbelief that comes in and I

55:30 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 a there's a whole chapter about it in in this book here but that elicitation is powerful because we're not being asked questions so our brain doesn't set off little security alarms and this is how Soviet spies would get information from a 19-year-old US Navy sailor uh in the early days of the Cold War they s ship would pull into Thailand or submarine would pull into Thailand or Singapore and a Russian would go up and

56:16 these Sailors would be drinking at the bar Russian would sit there he's got a a loha 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 fet in diameter and the Sailor slightly drunk turns around and say no they're not and starts giving up all this information just to correct the record and that's all they did back then was just correcting the record I'm triggering this need to offer some kind of Correction to information that's inaccurate and even with business intelligence let's say the 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

57:03 are moving between March and April and they'll get corrected in they 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 you're going to get more information out because of the disbelief so that was correcting the record a second technique called bracketing where I'm giving you a series like between March and may or between 39 and 59 and the third is the disbelief that starts getting this information out of people so if you want to think about like how do I start a conversation or continue one using elicitation think of the words so and then do a recap so you've been

57:48 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 I bet there were still some challenges there I bet you overcame a whole lot to get to this point so or I bet is the best way to do that and when okay so if I say I bet you hate that coffee yeah that that's a statement but you're gonna Endeavor to correct the record either way yeah and if you do hate the coffee you'll say yeah like even you saying yes I do kind of hate it is offering up information yeah okay interesting and you could even go go on with that like I bet you hate that coffee and somebody says yeah well I do kind of hate it like I can imagine you're the kind of person who likes coffee a very specific way

58:35 well yeah here's how I like it a lot and say that's extremely interesting no creamer no sugar and I'm just recapping so why is that better than me just going how' you prefer your coffee well if we're just talking about coffee it's not sensitive information so I wouldn't I wouldn't say that was better it's for sensitive information when you're trying to not get their guard up yeah so the rule of thumb is the more sensitive the information is that you need the less questions you need to be asking and is that what I mean that's does correlate to kind of like how I've uh 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

59:20 them talk and talk and talk and talk yeah but not being too pushy yeah and that's that's the best way to not be pushy is to use the elicitation stuff perception context permission the PCP model is a way of understanding how to get someone to do something from joining a cult to buying an item yeah so the PCP model looks like it's three steps but it's I 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 m 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

1:00:06 I'll give you an example would you want a weird example or a boring one we we'll go with let's go with weird Okay so let's go with uh 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 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

1:00:52 time I want you to picture yourself it's the end of the day you're coming home from work you drop your keys in the bowl you make your way to the bathroom you turn on a hot shower and now you're here getting ready to get into that shower so he's changed her perception of where she is he changed the context of neither one of you or me right now would 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

1:01:37 recruiters I spent a 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-hit 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 M 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 they come out with a

1:02:24 survey and they say it's 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 lived your life in a way that's like just kind of nudging you down into this cult mindset of like do you want to be around people that enjoy your company like those kind of questions so more perception changes now the context shifts to where I've just made 25 agreements about who I am as a

1:03:09 human being so now my my context is way off which shifts my permission it's like I have permission to do this because that's the kind of person I've just agreed to be and that's who I've said that I am I have to do this because that's cognitive dissonance like crazy and one thing I teach you about any persuasion whether you're doing a scop on an entire country or you're just manipulating one person or doing therapy on one person your main weapon as a person who is persuasive or influential is cognitive dissonance which is I'm getting you to be uncomfortable because I'm get the way that I've got you to see the world doesn't match up with what you're doing so the fast easiest thing for you to change is what you're doing

1:03:54 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 chalini who wrote influence and persuasion wonderful human being wrote about this where a few weeks before they go ask somebody to put a giant ugly sign in their yard that says drive safe huge ugly sign two weeks

1:04:40 before that they go back door to door and say do you support safe driving yes or no who's going to say no it's like 91% said yeah yeah I support safe driving they said good will you put this tiny sticker in your front window tiny little sticker and just to let us know that you're supporting safe driving that's all we all we ask you to do two weeks

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