Psyop Expert: “Brainwashing Is Real And It’s Happening Now” - Chase Hughes

English

CChris Williamson

Mental HealthAdvertising/MarketingInternet Technology

Transcript

00:00:00Who are you? How do you describe what you do for work?

00:00:02It's so hard. But if I'm talking to somebody that's boring, I'll just tell them I teach psychology stuff.

00:00:08But if I want to get into it, I'll say, you know, I teach everything from brainwashing to interrogation,

00:00:14applied on yourself and other people. And most of what I do is train sales teams nowadays.

00:00:20So sales has gotten really addicted to this stuff. But I've studied neuroscience for a long time.

00:00:26And I've spent my life trying to figure out how the brain works and how to shift human behavior,

00:00:31not just like to get someone to confess to something in an interrogation, but how do we

00:00:36modify our own behavior? And what are the mechanics that make that possible?

00:00:41Do you think we're living in the most psychologically manipulated era in human history?

00:00:45Yes. Hands down. But I mean, you go to ancient Rome, some shit would happen and they would say,

00:00:52hey, do the lion fighting thing with the guy. Let's distract everybody. So I don't think it's new.

00:00:58I think it's a lot more pervasive though.

00:01:00Is that because of it being facilitated through technology? Or is that because of a requirement

00:01:05for control? What's the motivation for that?

00:01:08I think the, just the digital media. If you think about what is the number one fear of human

00:01:16beings, like every psychology class talks about it, it's the public speaking, but it's never public

00:01:21speaking. It's, I don't want to be judged. I don't want to be ostracized because in our brain,

00:01:26that's 200,000 years old. Getting kicked out of a tribe means I'm dead. I'm not going to have sex.

00:01:33I won't have babies and I'm going to die. It's a mortal fear of dying. But if you go back to the 1980s,

00:01:41if I did something stupid in high school, or even as an adult, I have to worry about 30 or 40 people

00:01:49judging me and maybe, you know, really kind of kicking me out of a social group. And now with social

00:01:56media, you've got to worry about five or 10 million. So the consequences of doing something wrong are

00:02:04unbelievably exponentially increased, which has made us a whole different society, which we could get

00:02:11into. And this is the origin of this pandemic of loneliness that we're in right now, where everybody

00:02:17will agree that we're in pandemic levels of loneliness and nobody, you don't hear anyone saying,

00:02:23I'm lonely, which is a deeper root of this exact problem.

00:02:29What's happening then?

00:02:30You ever study French philosopher, this guy named Sartre?

00:02:34I've read a little bit of his stuff, but just single quotes.

00:02:38He had this play, it was called Sartre's Hell, where three people are locked in a room,

00:02:43basically like this, and it's a play. But the room's not totally locked. Every couple hours,

00:02:49the door opens and you can leave if you want to. But nobody leaves. And they're all desperate to be

00:02:55seen a certain way by someone else. This one guy, he, I'm paraphrasing, but he wants to be seen as a

00:03:02good person. So he asked this woman in there, please tell me I'm a good person, please. And she says,

00:03:08yeah, you're a good person. But he knows she doesn't mean it. So he stays. The door opens,

00:03:14nobody leaves and they stay because they're waiting for this confirmation from other people who they

00:03:19are. And in this world today, with how performative and artificial everybody has become, so I've got to

00:03:28show my best self. I've got to hide shame. I've got to conceal all this guilt and stuff that people carry

00:03:34around. The reason that somebody can feel lonely in a room full of people, and I'm not just talking

00:03:43about on Facebook, I'm saying like in a real room full of people, is because no matter how many times

00:03:49your friends come over and pat you on the back and say, oh, Chris, you did a great job. We love you.

00:03:53You're a great guy. Your spouse might say, oh, we love you. And you're a great person. In the back of

00:04:00your mind, you know you're faking it. And you know that none of them really like the real you.

00:04:06And you get at the end of the day, and I'm not saying this is you, but at the end of the day,

00:04:10you're lonely in a room of 150, 200 people because you know that none of them know you and you haven't

00:04:18ever really been seen by anybody. So increased fear of judgment because of social media equals increased

00:04:28performance equals I'm wearing a costume almost all the time, and nobody has ever seen me. Nobody

00:04:36really knows me. So even if they claim to like me, in the back of my brain, there's this little reminder

00:04:41mechanism that says they don't like the real me. And nobody ever has. Nobody's ever seen me.

00:04:49So this is my opinion. But I think that's the root of the pandemic that we're in right now of loneliness.

00:04:57Like we're more connected than ever and more performative than ever at the same time. So we can't

00:05:03really connect. And our brains are wired for 120, 130 person tribe. And we start getting over that,

00:05:09and we have massive issues. It's interesting that a lot of the time, the person has been subsumed by

00:05:19the persona, the role that people are playing. Yeah. But the persona is incapable of receiving love.

00:05:24It can only receive praise at best. And it feels like a pat on the back. The same as people don't

00:05:32love Chris Hemsworth. They love Thor. They don't love Russell Crowe. They love gladiator. So how can you

00:05:39be surprised if you don't genuinely existentially feel the connection with your pursuits and your

00:05:46successes and the people around you? You know that they're just applauding the role that you play,

00:05:55as opposed to seeing who you are truly. Yeah. Have you seen the movie Pig

00:06:01with Nicolas Cage? No.

00:06:03You got to watch it. Even if you watch this one scene, it's like five minutes long. Nicolas Cage

00:06:08plays this guy who's just kind of had enough and he stopped performing forever. Like he doesn't care.

00:06:15He's not mean or anything, just doesn't perform. And he goes to this restaurant. He's a famous chef

00:06:20and he's exiled and stuff. And this chef is just pretending to be a certain type of person so that his

00:06:26restaurant is more successful. And Nicolas Cage just basically says, none of this is real. You're not

00:06:33real, which means they're not real. And none of this, everything's fake. Everything here is completely

00:06:38fake. And you're going to wake up every day and there's going to be less of you and less of you

00:06:43until there's nothing left that you will ever recognize again. And it's this massive awakening scene

00:06:49for this guy and it's beautiful. And I think when people watch it, they assume, oh, I'm in the Nick

00:06:55Cage role here. And maybe sometimes in our life we are, but I think in other times we need to be

00:07:02kind of shaken awake and somebody grabs our little camera and changes our camera angle to look at a

00:07:07situation differently. I want to be woken up like that in every possible way. Um, and I think that's,

00:07:14that's what we all need. Is brainwashing real? What's true and false about that?

00:07:23Brainwashing is absolutely real. There's a four-step process and it spells out the word fear.

00:07:30Um, it's focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition.

00:07:37So if we start with focus, this is me routinely breaking what you are predicting to be what's

00:07:44going to happen next over and over and over in a massive amount. One or two times, this is what

00:07:50triggers a mammal brain, our mammal brain and a dog. You're walking down a pathway in the woods and a

00:07:57stick breaks behind a tree. You're like, what was that? You're not worried about anything else.

00:08:02So the fastest way to generate human focus or mammal focus is novelty. Some genuine thing happens that

00:08:10you didn't expect. So that's the first. That's what we generate massive amount of focus. And then it's

00:08:15emotion. And with emotion, there's some, there's an old hypnosis technique, uh, that came, that became

00:08:21popular in the fifties. This guy named Dr. Milton Erickson popularized this thing called fractionation.

00:08:29So if you, and you'll be familiar with like channel four and Darren Brown, I know a lot of

00:08:37Americans aren't, but he, he's kind of a, there's no American equivalent of Darren Brown.

00:08:42O's maybe the closest to Pellman.

00:08:44Yeah. O's Pellman. Yeah. So they figured out like if I pull somebody down in hypnosis and then

00:08:51take them gently out of it, when I put them right back down in, so this is in quick succession, I take

00:08:56you out of hypnosis and then I put you back into hypnosis again. You'll go deeper every time.

00:09:01And there's no such thing as depth in hypnosis. What they essentially mean is you'll have more GABA,

00:09:06you know what GABA is. It's a neurotransmitter in your system, like the safety chemical.

00:09:11And you'll also have a higher degree of theta wave brain state. And if I could just keep going up and

00:09:18then make down and up and then make down, you're deeper and deeper and deeper in a hole every single

00:09:23time. So if you look at your feed, anybody out there, you open whatever feed you want on any,

00:09:29whatever app you're thinking of right now, you kind of scroll through your feed. You're going to see

00:09:33stuff that kind of brings you back up, but only for a second or two. And then it's fear and scarcity.

00:09:41And it follows the thing of getting your focus, showing you an authority figure, telling you

00:09:46something threatening, making you fearful of judgment of a tribe, and then making you emotional and then

00:09:52bringing you back up and then back down in that cycle. So it's focus, authority, tribe, and emotion.

00:09:56You'll see it in your feed, guaranteed. And you don't even need to scroll for like five minutes,

00:10:01you'll see it right away. And then it'll be like one little thing to kind of bring you up. Like

00:10:07one of those videos where the people are like, oh, we just found this baby deer on our porch one day

00:10:12and we decided to bottle feed him and raise him. And then, you know, it's like a fast cut to where

00:10:17like he's a giant deer, like sleeping in the kid's bed or something. And he's like a family member now.

00:10:22It's like a heartwarming video that feels, and I love watching those, but it feels great. And then bam,

00:10:29they pull you back down again into the cycle. But what you'll notice after you see that fear video

00:10:35at the end of the focus, authority, tribe, and emotion, right at the end of that, they're either

00:10:39going to A, bring you up, or B, show you an ad. I've never heard anybody talk about this before,

00:10:46but you can absolutely see it. And I'm not immune. Like I've bought stupid shit on Instagram,

00:10:52like anybody else. Knowing about this stuff like doesn't get you vaccinated against manipulation. I bought

00:10:58the dumbest shit in the world on Instagram. It just means I'm a well-informed victim

00:11:04of this stuff. But that's the core of brainwashing is focus, emotion. That's that fractionation part of

00:11:11up and down. Then agitation. So this is doing something to where the mammalian brain recognizes

00:11:17this is a different environment than I was expecting, not a thing that's happening. So now the landscape is

00:11:22changing. The oil prices are going up. This big thing is happening. There's a shortage of some critical resource

00:11:29and then repetition. So if it's in a detainee environment, the massive focus is them being woken up

00:11:38in the middle of the night over and over by strobe lights and loud sounds, cold water, that kind of stuff.

00:11:42Then the emotion. The entire time you're sitting there in your prison cell or whatever.

00:11:48I've got every photo your family's ever posted on the internet playing on a slideshow using a projector on the wall.

00:11:54So focus, emotion, then agitation. Something is extremely disrupting to your ability to predict the future.

00:12:02That's agitation. And then repetition. The cycle begins again. And you can kind of do whatever you want.

00:12:08That process creates a blank slate in people and that's like the baseline formula of how brainwashing works.

00:12:18And that is exactly what social media is using?

00:12:20Yes. But I think a lot of people think, oh, there's some dark conference table, dudes smoking cigars.

00:12:28Like, how can we, how can we really mess these people up? I don't think it's that at all. I think it's just

00:12:34an algorithm that's rewarding what's creating the most revenue. So like showing you an ad for

00:12:42shoes is way easier after you watch the little baby deer video or after I make you think that the water

00:12:49supply is being destabilized. So I think it's just an algorithm. I think there's many other things where

00:12:57there's people involved in manipulating the public. I don't think that social media is doing that on

00:13:02purpose. That, that one piece of it, the piece that I do absolutely think this being done on purpose

00:13:09is if you're on the left and you open your feed, you're going to be shown the dumbest piece of

00:13:15shit idiots on the other side that they could possibly find. And if you're on the right, you're going to be

00:13:21saying the exact same thing about people on the left. And with the number one goal being you in, in the

00:13:28deepest part of your mind, you cannot help, but make a permanent judgment about reality of those people are

00:13:36effing crazy. All of them are crazy. I can't trust them. I can't listen to them.

00:13:43And this is a campaign that I think is called engineer division.

00:13:48And if I can get people fighting horizontally, they're not going to look up. If I can get somebody

00:13:53destabilized and kind of at ends at odds with each other, you're not, your ability to think critically is

00:14:01reduced by like 50%. This is massive. And they've shown this in many studies and just getting someone

00:14:09destabilized in that way where they're kind of fighting each other. They're distrustful of their

00:14:13neighbors. They're 10 times more easy to manipulate. So if you think of like how our brain works, if you're

00:14:20falling off a cliff, your arms and legs are going to flail all over the place. You're moving everywhere.

00:14:26The first solid object that touches your body, you're going to like instinctively grab onto it. Even if

00:14:33it's a thorn bush or barbed wire, you'll, you'll grab it. So when it, when a population is destabilized

00:14:40and something clear and logical is presented, something like a pre-packaged enemy, I'll just leave that

00:14:47there, is given to you. You're 10 times more likely to accept it because it's clear, it's pre-packaged,

00:14:55and it's easy to follow. And humans do not ever follow like the best leader in a situation. They

00:15:02follow the most followable. And there's a big difference between those things. So destabilization,

00:15:09that would be step number one. And two Chinese intelligence officers wrote a paper on this.

00:15:15It's called, I think it's called unrestricted warfare. It's been translated into English and they

00:15:18use a hypothetical country that really looks like the United States in this paper. But they talk about this

00:15:26asymmetric warfare and how we have to get them fighting each other. We have to make them distrustful of each

00:15:32other. And we destabilize the government from the inside because we can't, we can't win a terrestrial

00:15:37war with these people. And they, they, all of this is just written out there. You could buy this probably on Amazon

00:15:44for like three or four bucks, this translated book. It's probably online too. But it's very, it's very

00:15:51open that it's not just like, it's not like the normal bad guys that you hear about. These are foreign

00:15:58state actors that are doing some of this stuff. We just had a former mayor of a city in California, I believe,

00:16:05that that was proven to be a operative for China, a mayor. And so I think people are thinking like,

00:16:15there's some ancient rich family, uh, you know, in the depths of some cave somewhere plotting the

00:16:22destruction of the world. I think it's just countries that hate each other and greedy, selfish companies.

00:16:27Um, and maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but if you're watching the news and you don't hear nuance,

00:16:35you are being manipulated because you're, they're giving you a message. There's, here's the enemy.

00:16:39Here's how to feel about what you're watching on the news. And here's exactly what's happening.

00:16:44And they'll tell you that this, this, and this, all these three things happen. They'll never tell

00:16:48you how they're connected. They'll act like everything's a separate story. So, uh, I think there's

00:16:53an agenda. I won't pretend I'd be a fool to say, like, I can understand or know the end game of any

00:17:00of this stuff. That was a long ass answer to your question. What makes a leader followable?

00:17:06Yeah. There are authority first, the perception of authority. And we trust in order. There are five

00:17:16things that make us trust another human being. Uh, first is confidence. So the person is, doesn't

00:17:22have any reservations. They're talking clearly. They're speaking in a way that I can clearly

00:17:27understand. They're not using academic language, which is why most presidents, the president who has

00:17:34speaks at a lower grade level is, I think like 35% more likely to win a debate.

00:17:41So that makes them followable, right? Confidence and literacy. Like it's clear,

00:17:46clear to understand them. They're very confident. Next is discipline. And I don't mean,

00:17:52that this, the person is like making videos of themselves waking up and like, Hey, here's my

00:17:58morning routine. But I mean, like we can see discipline on people. We can see somebody that

00:18:03has self-control and discipline and that starts coming through. We get, we can pick up on that.

00:18:07And then leadership and for good, for good or bad, there's cult leaders that have all these

00:18:12problems or all these qualities too. Gratitude and enjoyment. The gratitude, just being like,

00:18:18I'm thankful for what's happening right now in the moment. I'm emotionally stable. I'm easy to follow,

00:18:24but we're not really going into all that. Our brain's shortcut is that we follow someone who is

00:18:30probably loudest, clearest, and has no hesitation in their behavior. So our brains are trained to look

00:18:37for micro hesitations and automatically give us a little gut feeling of, Oh, I shouldn't trust that

00:18:43person. So micro hesitations are the fastest way to destroy authority.

00:18:47In both of those scenarios that you just described, the world being chaotic and difficult and confusing

00:18:58and something being offered up as order. In one example, it's an enemy that's prepackaged.

00:19:06There's order. Why is this going bad? It could be a million reasons, or it could be that group over

00:19:12there. And the same thing for leaders. I don't understand what's going to happen. We've got all

00:19:17of these different directions that we could go down. Don't worry. All of that chaos doesn't need to be

00:19:22worried about because I have the order and I can wrangle this system to bring it to bear.

00:19:27Yeah. For better or worse. And that's what happens. And if you just, the way that I described this very

00:19:34simply is the process is to close down a machine or close, close everything down, build pressure inside

00:19:43of it, and then decide where the pressure is going to release. So it's a, it's a controlled release of

00:19:49pressure that's been being built up on purpose. And sometimes that is like the pressure is some relief.

00:19:55Like we have this national thing that's happening and the pressure release is chosen at a certain point.

00:20:01And there's a lot of people that say, like track the money. If you track pressure, like financial pressure,

00:20:08economic pressure, shipping and trade pressure, oil shipping around the world, tracking the pressure

00:20:15is always more revealing from an intelligence perspective than tracking the money. Because

00:20:21pressure is going to show you like it has to have a release valve somewhere. And nine times out of 10,

00:20:25there's a person or group of people that are choosing how and where the release valve is going to be.

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00:21:51What's the outcome you think that those people want?

00:21:54Like, like the they?

00:21:57Yeah, the they. If there is, part of this is social media algorithms have reverse engineered the way

00:22:02that humans brains work because it's a very simple algorithm.

00:22:05Super simple.

00:22:06And the fact that it's simple is why it's so effective because if you started to put constraints

00:22:10on it, you would be trying to predict the best way to get the outcome that you want. The best way to

00:22:15get the outcome that you want is to just let it optimize for that outcome and reverse engineer

00:22:19however it got there. Yeah.

00:22:20That's why we can complain all we want about the algorithms, but even the engineers,

00:22:24you open up the black box of YouTube, but you open up the black box of TikTok.

00:22:29They don't know what's happening inside of that. There is no knowing about what's happening inside of

00:22:33there. This is just recursive algorithms training itself.

00:22:35Yeah.

00:22:35Interesting. The coolest thing I learned about this is from Stuart Russell,

00:22:39guy that wrote the textbook on AI. So up until probably 2020, when the transformer technology

00:22:45and LLMs came along, it may still be the case. I know he's still talking about this a lot.

00:22:49I think his textbook had been translated into a hundred languages. So it was used around the world.

00:22:54It was the canonical textbook for AI, Stuart Russell. He wrote this book called Human Compatible.

00:22:59And he's talking about computers, humans, some psychology, a lot of AI and computer science.

00:23:06And he said that there's two ways that algorithms can become better at predicting what it is that you're

00:23:13going to click on. The first one is serving you content, which is more akin to something that you

00:23:21want to press, right? Like if all that you're trying to optimize is CTR and watch time, basically,

00:23:27which is kind of every algorithm now, I can just better predict what it is that you want and give

00:23:34you that. But the other side is I can nudge your preferences to make them easier to predict.

00:23:42So it's a bi-directional relationship. And it's not like anybody told the black box algorithm to go and

00:23:49do this, but over time it knows, Hey, if I walk people down the sequence of steps, and this is

00:23:55where I think the truth about pipelines and radicalization comes along, but it's not necessarily

00:24:00radicalization to an extreme of one particular worldview. It's an extreme of predictability.

00:24:05Yeah.

00:24:06And this bi-directional relationship between becoming better at working out what you want to click and

00:24:13becoming better at making you more predictable to work out your preferences.

00:24:19Yeah.

00:24:19That is really, I mean, when he told me about it, it blew my mind. It's one of the most mind-blowing

00:24:25things that I've ever heard.

00:24:26Dude, I've got to read this because-

00:24:29It's fucking spectacular, eh?

00:24:30When I teach persuasion and influence, I'm actually here in town today teaching. I've been on stage all

00:24:38morning, uh, doing a, like a seminar training, training, new time. That's what you need. Yeah.

00:24:44So when I teach, I, what I'm telling people is your first goal is being able to engineer and build the

00:24:51perfect client. So I'm, I'm make the person the perfect recipient for what I need to give them.

00:24:59So if I know the outcome is I need you to click on baby deer videos, I'm going to engineer the

00:25:05shit out of that to where I'm not going to like just start showing them to you. I'm going to make

00:25:10you the perfect recipient before I start shifting your behavior. So the, the way that I typically

00:25:20describe this is if you learn persuasion, interrogation, sales, whatever it is, they're going to teach you

00:25:25how to engineer outcomes because people are obsessed with the outcome. But I argue that if you're good,

00:25:34what you engineer are conditions. And if I can engineer the right conditions, I can get you to do

00:25:40anything, anything. And just as an example, just of how powerful conditions in context are,

00:25:48I think it was in the 1940s, this, uh, like stage hypnotist guy is doing like a comedy club thing.

00:25:57You know, we're like, oh, the guy next to you farted and it smells really bad. You're on a roller

00:26:00coaster now. And there's like all of this stuff for, there's like 10 or 15 people up on stage.

00:26:06And then a part of the show is, all right, all of your cops, you got called to a party. Everybody

00:26:11in the audience is a party right now. And the more the audience laughs, the more you're going to get

00:26:16upset. So they get up and they're not allowed to leave the stage. So they're all kind of yelling,

00:26:23pretending like these kids are like a house party or something. Then he's like, oh, one of them's got a

00:26:28gun. He's going to take you down. And one of these guys on the stage is an off-duty police officer,

00:26:32uh, carrying a weapon starts firing in into the crowd, a real gun. Um, and I think one person was,

00:26:38I don't know, I don't know if he died, but it shot a real gun into a crowd. The cop was a good person,

00:26:46well-meaning, just wanted to go out with his wife, uh, you know, for an evening.

00:26:52But context can dictate your behavior, no matter what. Like we're going to probably both you and I,

00:27:00not together, but we will get naked by the end of the day. Both of us.

00:27:04We're going to get into a shower. The day is young.

00:27:06The day is young. We're going to get into a shower, get into a bath or whatever.

00:27:11Um, but we're not like, as we're standing in front of the shower, we're not like, oh,

00:27:15I don't know if I should. We're just, we just get naked. Right. So context,

00:27:21context tells us what's allowed. So if I can modify context, I can get you to do

00:27:29anything. All I have to do is it's a PCP formula. I change your perception about the situation that's

00:27:37going on. Then I say, yeah, since you're viewing this differently, it's actually this situation where

00:27:43people are trying to do X or I reframe this as someone is a complete threat, but I've changed

00:27:49your perception of what's possible to do. Then the cons, uh, the context is some person is a threat

00:27:58and they're, they're a mortal. Now I say the word mortal. They're a mortal threat.

00:28:02So I've changed the category. And if I shift category and context, that changes what you think

00:28:08you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. Does that make sense? So like, if I, if I'm

00:28:14in a perfect world, the only question, like, if you're really good at this stuff, like a lot of these

00:28:19systems are, what is the context where the behavior I want you to do is automatic?

00:28:29What is the context? So if I can make you believe that you're in a shooting range

00:28:33and you're actually standing in a bar, you're going to, your behavior is going to be very different.

00:28:38So what you're, what you're really seeing over time is, is a drift of perception and then context.

00:28:45So with this PCP perception, context, and permission, permission is that final thing that says, oh,

00:28:51in this context, I'm, I'm completely allowed to do this. And it makes perfect sense.

00:28:56So a lot of what we're seeing is context engineering. So if, if you look at the Milgram experiment,

00:29:03which I think a lot of people are familiar with, essentially some, they prove that you,

00:29:07you people will shock strangers, what they think is to death in about 47 minutes at a 70% success rate

00:29:15or failure rate, whatever you want to call that. But they didn't have a script. There wasn't some

00:29:22magic sales script where they, where they brought them in and they had the right words to say in the,

00:29:27in the magic hypnosis guy that comes in there. It's just a dude in a lab coat.

00:29:33And all they did in the Milgram experiment is engineer the conditions that make it okay. The

00:29:39context made, made that shocking behavior permissible.

00:29:43You mentioned there about people or technologies that are unbelievably good at manipulating behavior.

00:29:54When it comes to seeing operators, people, who's the most effective behavioral

00:30:00manipulator that you've ever seen operate in front of you?

00:30:04I can't say names. The guy's a, I think he's still active, but he could get pretty much anybody to do

00:30:15anything, but he shifted the context. So what the, the task that I gave him is go into this social,

00:30:24very social environment. There's like a band playing. It's like a bar, like a pub.

00:30:28This is a real thing. Yeah. And I said, I want you to have someone

00:30:36let's say laid out on the floor, thinking that they're just completely unconscious in like seven

00:30:42minutes. And I couldn't hear anything that was being said. And he did it. He did it within like three,

00:30:49four minutes. And I asked him, I said, what did you do? And he's like, oh, I just told her I was a

00:30:56hypnotherapist. And I asked what she wanted to, how she wanted to change her life. And she was really,

00:31:00really excited that she wanted more discipline. And I just told her I would give her more discipline

00:31:04and it's really easy. So he shifted the context to her being helped instead of controlled, um, and,

00:31:12and made it okay for her to be laying on the floor and made everything okay, just because he shifted the

00:31:17context. Um, it's the same in interrogation rooms to where the context shifts and there's like a

00:31:25five step protocol that people use to make someone confess to a crime. And if you really examine what

00:31:31the protocol is, it's just a massive shift in context and perception. What's the protocol?

00:31:35You ready? Yes. So it's, uh, socialize, minimize, rationalize, and project.

00:31:45Is that not four? Yeah. It's four steps. And then there's

00:31:48an alternative question at the end. Okay. Is it this or this?

00:31:53So just like name, uh, name a crime. That's not gross that we can actually talk about anything you

00:31:58want, like stolen. Texting while driving. Okay. Texting while, well, they're not going

00:32:03to be an interrogation room. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Uh, uh, um, smuggling arms.

00:32:07Okay. Smuggling arms. Great. All right. So the first step would be social.

00:32:11Fucking interrogation room for texting while driving.

00:32:14There's just armies of interrogators up and down the United States highways. Okay.

00:32:19It was, it might solve the problem. Okay. So smuggling arms.

00:32:24So you're talking to this person and you decided

00:32:27that it's time to shift into interrogation. The beginning of an interrogation is called the interview

00:32:32process. And the shift is called the confrontation. So the confrontation, uh, is basically just where

00:32:38you tell them like that they're lying, but you don't do it in a way that hurts their ego. So I might say

00:32:44something like, Chris, I appreciate you. And I just want you to know, I've been doing this a really long

00:32:48time. I've, I've talked to a lot of people. And if there's, if there's one thing I know for sure,

00:32:53it's when I'm not getting the full story. And I don't think I'm getting the full story here. And

00:32:58then I go right into the socialized part of this thing. And when I say socialize, it's basically people

00:33:04will understand. So the line is, I think at the end of the day, um, you did this because you're a good

00:33:11person. And I'm gonna explain why. And I've talked to a lot of bad people and I know you're not a bad

00:33:15person. And I think when people see all of the steps that led up to you getting wrapped up in this,

00:33:20that they're going to understand, then minimize. And like I said, I don't think you're a bad guy.

00:33:27And, and to be honest, I deal with bad people all the time and people that do way worse stuff than

00:33:32this. I've seen people that have done way worse than this, get completely over it. So it's not that

00:33:37big of a deal. I'm not, nobody's accusing you of being some mass murder or something like that.

00:33:42This is not the same thing. Then it's rationalized. I know you came from a poor village. I know that you

00:33:50had a really tough background and I know that you're a good person. And I'm not saying whether or not

00:33:55you were doing this to pay for it, but I know that your aunt has several hundred thousand dollars

00:33:59of medical bills that she's needed to pay. Now I project. So now project is basically it's not your

00:34:09fault. And I think anybody that was handed your conditions and your life would have probably made

00:34:15the same choices that you did. And there's, I know a lot of times these arms smuggling rings will use

00:34:21threats and pressure to get someone into the unit. So if that happened to you, I just want you to know,

00:34:26that's something that I want to know about. So I know that you didn't like deliberately decide to

00:34:31do this. And then we move into the alternative question. And I'll say, so Chris, what I'm really

00:34:38trying to find out here is, were you doing this just to make a bunch of money and then go buy a bunch

00:34:44of drugs and live in some other country? Were you really like trying to help one of your family members?

00:34:49Because I know these guys have been talking to you and I've looked into you as well,

00:34:52and it doesn't look like you're a bad person. So now it's an alternative question of,

00:34:57are you a piece of crap or did you try to do something good for your family?

00:35:01So that's- Both of them are admissions of guilt though.

00:35:04Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to find out the reason that this happened.

00:35:07Yeah. You're not, you're trying to find out an admission of guilt.

00:35:09Yes. Yes. But in the, in the conversation, we're trying to find out the reason it happened.

00:35:15So we're going for the admission of guilt because the, the first part of the interrogation,

00:35:19we, there's like a long series of questions we ask. And based on those responses, if they respond a

00:35:25certain way to each question, then we move towards the confession methodology. So there,

00:35:31and they're basic questions. Like if, if I, if there was a robbery or in some neighborhood here,

00:35:39can I say the city that we're in? Of course.

00:35:41Okay. So let's say like two blocks away or maybe, yeah, two blocks from here, there's a neighborhood

00:35:47in Austin and there's a, there's a neighborhood there. And let's say you robbed a house. But one

00:35:52of those questions to determine how guilty you are is one of my favorite questions in the world. It's

00:35:56called the bait question. And it basically says, um, let's, let's imagine you did this. I want to put

00:36:03you in the mindset so you can understand the question. Let's say you, you stole a bike out

00:36:09of this person's garage a couple of days ago. I called you up and like, Hey, I think, uh, you,

00:36:14you might've seen something that's going to help us in the case. Could you please come in here and

00:36:18talk to us about the, about the case? You come in and I say, Chris, dude, thank you for, for coming

00:36:24in. Uh, this is important to us. We've got officers out there that they've been working all through the

00:36:29night, uh, collecting evidence and stuff. I just want to ask you one question and you seem like a

00:36:34really good guy. So I want you to think really carefully before you answer this. Is there any

00:36:38reason whatsoever that one of the neighbors would have a ring doorbell camera that shows your vehicle

00:36:46in that area? So now you're confronted with a dilemma of if I say no and he whoops out a video,

00:36:57now I'm a liar. And they probably know that I did this. If I say, yes, I'm at,

00:37:01I'm placing myself at the scene of the crime. Right. And the cool thing is that someone who's

00:37:06innocent would be like, nope. And it would be instantly, they would have no hesitation.

00:37:11They'd have tons of confidence of, nope, there's absolutely no reason.

00:37:16So that's one of those, those kinds of setup questions. And I know that's regardless of

00:37:20whether you've got the ring doorbell footage or not. Yes. And I don't say that I have it.

00:37:25Is there any reason why? Yes. Is there any reason that one of the officers would have received some

00:37:30ring doorbell or some doorbell video camera footage that shows your vehicle in that area?

00:37:38Not you do anything bad. And another one is another great question. I can't reveal all of these, but

00:37:45another great question is called the punishment question. And this works on kids. It works on

00:37:53adults. It doesn't matter. And it's just a few words long. I would say, what do you think should

00:38:00happen to the person that did this? And you always get amazing answers. I'll give you my kids example.

00:38:12And this is from when they were seven and eight, give or take. I came home from work. I'm in the,

00:38:18like my camo, uh, uniform and we had a white living room rug and there's like a little cardboard thing

00:38:24of chocolate milk, just like sitting on its side. And there's like a little pool of chocolate milk on

00:38:30the carpet. And they were both playing the Xbox. The milk's like right there, a few feet away. I was like,

00:38:36what the hell guys? They're like, oh, I don't know. And I was like, did you guys do this? And they're

00:38:42like, nope. And I said, all right, William, kitchen, Charlotte, dining room.

00:38:48Fucking prisoner, prisoners dilemmaed them. Yeah. And I went over to, um,

00:38:56Charlotte. Yeah, it was Charlotte. And I said, Charlotte, what do you think should happen to the

00:39:00person that did this? And she goes, spankings, grounded, no more Xbox, can't play with the

00:39:07friends, no more sleepovers, can't eat in the living room anymore. It just goes on and on.

00:39:13And I was like, okay, all right. It's a kid's equivalent of capital punishment.

00:39:16Yeah. And I was like, damn. So I went to William and I said, well, what do you think should happen

00:39:21to the person that did this? He goes, uh, maybe no more chocolate milk in the living room.

00:39:27And there we go. I had, I had my guy really quick. Have you ever seen those videos of when there's

00:39:32three dogs in the house and one of them's ripped the shit out of a, uh, couch or something. And

00:39:39two of them are just sort of looking like this and the other one's got his face up against the wall.

00:39:44That is so good. I want to see dog interrogation videos, dude. Before we continue,

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00:41:05All right. So, uh, when it comes to building rapport,

00:41:12what are the techniques that elite negotiators use to create rapport quickly?

00:41:18Uh, number one is making an admission that other people might be embarrassed about

00:41:24of some, of having a fault of some kind or being insecure about something.

00:41:29Revealing something.

00:41:30Yeah. Uh, just being something that's honest and true. So it's, it resonates.

00:41:35What would be an example?

00:41:37Um, it, it would depend on the situation, but I might say something like, you know,

00:41:43Bike stolen. Let's stay with that.

00:41:45The stolen bike or the arms, whichever you want.

00:41:48Well, yeah. So you're talking about interrogation room rapport?

00:41:51Yeah.

00:41:51Oh, okay. That's different.

00:41:52Oh, actually stick with the normal rapport and then we'll go back to interrogation.

00:41:55Yeah. So normal rapport, the, the admission might be, um, you know, I was, I was so like

00:42:01in my own head, I was so afraid to be open around other people. And I kind of like wore a mask for

00:42:06like 10, 15 years of my life until I realized like, it's, it's not a big deal as I think it is.

00:42:12I'm not a big deal as I, I thought I was. And just saying something that other people really

00:42:17wouldn't and being honest about it is one of the, one of the fastest ways to make trust start

00:42:24happening in a conversation because just people are so fake that that is somehow rare now.

00:42:30And that's, that's why I think podcasts where there's a genuine dude on there get more views

00:42:35than CNN. I think Rogan's got more views than CNN. Um, but at the end of the day,

00:42:42that's one of the fastest ways to do it. Uh, another, one of the fastest ways to do it in,

00:42:47in this world is to have ignorance and fascination about something that you pride yourself in knowing

00:42:53a lot about. So like if you're an electrical engineer or something, or, you know, some,

00:43:00you're maybe you wire podcast studios for a living and I'd be like, God, that's, that's always

00:43:04fascinated me with all that stuff. I don't think I could do that. If I, if I tried for a year,

00:43:09I'm just not inclined to do that, but it's still fascinating. That's one of the fastest ways to

00:43:14absolutely do that. And I think, I do think rapport is a little bit overrated.

00:43:22I think at the end of the day, having contagious confidence to where the, your confidence is high

00:43:29enough where the other person feels confident is so much more effective and rapport is a byproduct of

00:43:35that. So I always try to think like, what is upstream of the thing that I want? So if I want

00:43:41this as my desired end state, what are all the things that needed to happen to make this just an

00:43:47automatic byproduct of what I want at, at the end of the day? And one of the things that we found out

00:43:53over these years is in an interrogation room or in some business setting, it doesn't actually matter,

00:43:58is this level of confidence without any hierarchy or status. And the, the biggest mistake that most

00:44:06people make is like, if I say the word confidence, you're going to think more than who, or higher than,

00:44:13or less, less confidence than. And that hierarchy thinking is the fastest way to collapse any kind of

00:44:21skill in human beings because it pushes your awareness back behind your eyes.

00:44:27And I think when you're, if your awareness is in front of your eyes, people can really,

00:44:31really feel that. And one metaphor I use to talk about this a lot is, if I could go on a

00:44:37slight rant here, if you went into like, we're in Austin, so there's probably a piano store somewhere.

00:44:43Like let's say you and I went into like a big ass piano store and they got this big grand piano there.

00:44:51And I go up to the piano and I smashed down the middle key really hard, which is a C.

00:44:57It's going to send out this frequency through the entire store. And the C string on every other

00:45:03piano is going to start resonating like crazy, but it's only that string is going to vibrate.

00:45:09It's because it's tuned to that frequency, right? It's not going to vibrate any other

00:45:13strings except for C. The same thing works for tuning forks.

00:45:17So when I teach this stuff, it's that humans work almost exactly the same way.

00:45:25And one of the phrases that I teach is wherever you're speaking from is where you're going to

00:45:30speak to and other people, where you speak from, you will speak to. So if we're in a conversation and

00:45:36I'm worried about hierarchy and status, I'm plucking that same cord in the person I'm speaking to.

00:45:43Because that comes through. If I'm very confident and not insecure confidence, posturing kind of stuff,

00:45:52that's going to trigger confidence in the other person. So true confidence is really contagious.

00:45:57And the other confidence, like where you can tell somebody's like read 15 of those LinkedIn articles

00:46:04of like, oh, how to display CEO level confidence. Make solid eye contact, firm handshake,

00:46:10pat somebody on the arm, use their name, that kind of shit.

00:46:15Genuine confidence makes other people confident. Absolutely. And having enough confidence to share

00:46:21without ever viewing it in the lens of hierarchy and status is the fastest way to like this,

00:46:29whatever people call charisma. I think it's the fastest route.

00:46:34How do you think about appearing confident in a room?

00:46:39Can you rephrase that?

00:46:40What are the component parts of appearing confident to somebody?

00:46:46What we're really doing, like if you read one of those articles about like how confident people

00:46:50command a room and all that, there's YouTube videos all day long for that stuff.

00:46:57What I think they're made of is they're studying the symptoms of confidence.

00:47:06So if I wrap you in a heating blanket and squirt water in your nose, it does not give you COVID,

00:47:13but it gives you a couple of symptoms, right? It doesn't work in reverse all the time.

00:47:19So what I think a lot of those people that train online is they see somebody who's genuinely

00:47:26confident and like, oh, what are they doing with their body? They're standing up straight.

00:47:30They're speaking from their diaphragm. They're doing all of these things. They use hand gestures like this.

00:47:36And then they're like, okay, let's make an Excel spreadsheet out of this. We're going to figure

00:47:40this shit out. Like, all right, how wide was the hand gesture? Like, let me check. It's 36 inches.

00:47:45Yeah, it was 36. So then we train somebody to do this with their hands at 36 inches and they've

00:47:50got social anxiety. They're going to look like an idiot. It's not going to look congruent. It's

00:47:54going to feel like, whoa, what's going on with this guy? So I think our culture is just obsessed

00:48:00with symptoms in general. Like I want the Ferrari and the yacht and I don't want the bank account.

00:48:05I mean, I want the symptoms of being wealthy. I want to show people that I have symptoms of wealth.

00:48:11But if you look at the cause of confidence, and I think my definition of confidence is way different

00:48:18than what you read online, but I think confidence is two elements. Number one, it is a willingness to

00:48:25receive social injury. I'm willing to be socially injured. Number two, it is a generalized or kind of

00:48:37a fuzzy belief that things are going to work out okay. Things are going to be okay. So that social

00:48:44injury is typically why people can't feel confident. So it's social injury or permission. I don't have

00:48:50permission to be like that here. If I make 50k a year, I'm not going to be confident walking into that

00:48:56Hermes, Hermes, whatever, Louis Vuitton luggage place.

00:49:01Fucking Gucci.

00:49:04Yeah, whatever. And the confidence comes from like permission. I don't have permission

00:49:10to be here. They can tell that I'm not from here. So that's a role-based permission.

00:49:16But if you're willing to receive social injury, you're totally fine with it. You have a generalized

00:49:21expectation that things are going to be okay. That is the first step to like really feeling confident

00:49:26and completely eliminating hierarchy and status from your mental thoughts forever for the rest of

00:49:32your life, I think is the best way. Because it's not related to how you and somebody else

00:49:39interact. It's within you. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like this is going to go okay. And if social

00:49:45rejection does come my way, I'm fine with it. Yeah. It's a social injury and that's okay.

00:49:50It might hurt. I'm not saying I'm immune to any of it. It might hurt,

00:49:54but I'm okay. I'm happy to receive it. What do you make of Trump's behavior?

00:49:58How do you analyze him as a communicator? He's a fabulous communicator. I think he speaks

00:50:04at a seventh grade level. A lot of good leaders speak at a low level. I think Obama was seventh or eighth

00:50:12grade level as well. But why do they do that? Because they will become more followable. Like

00:50:19exactly what we're talking about with authority. And while we follow authority figures in times of

00:50:24distress. And I think he's a communicator that is obviously self-serving, self-fulfilling,

00:50:33and people call him a narcissist, which is a diagnostic term for insurance companies,

00:50:38which is why that was invented. Say whatever you want. But I think he's a great communicator. I think

00:50:45he gets the point across. And he's just, he's very idiosyncratic. He's weird. He does stuff that other

00:50:53people don't do. He breaks from a lot of the norms. But the communication is effective. Why is it

00:50:59effective though? Like, how does he get so much attention? Well, one, he's kind of loud. But number

00:51:03two, it's novelty. We talk like novelty massively generates focus on human beings. And he's like a

00:51:10novelty master. He's a magician of novelty. So, he's the dude when it comes to that. And he

00:51:21is not the clearest communicator when it comes to like long vision and plans and stuff like that.

00:51:26But he says things that are followable. He has ideas that are very easy to follow.

00:51:32Man, Shane Gillis did a bit about him talking about Baghdadi, when Baghdadi, have you seen?

00:51:37Mm-hmm. It's one of the best videos on YouTube. But it was just hilarious how simply,

00:51:43it was absolutely simple how he communicated everything. And it painted a picture in your head.

00:51:48Yeah. And he did it in a way that didn't

00:51:50have to use literary, flowery, poetry language and all of that. But it put a very clear picture

00:51:56in your head when he said that stuff. It's interesting to think about how

00:52:03distinctive someone's voices. And it's typical that a lot of people that have massive cultural influence

00:52:12have a distinctive, if you can do an impression of someone, probably a good indication they've

00:52:17got quite a distinctive voice. Yeah.

00:52:19You can do an impression of Jordan Peterson. Yeah.

00:52:21Quite easily. Very distinctive voice. Can do an impression of Andrew Tate.

00:52:27Quite easily. Very distinctive voice, distinctive speaking cadence, repetition.

00:52:33This Russell Brand, unnecessarily verbose and articulate, sort of meandering sentences,

00:52:41listicle style. With Trump, sort of punchy thing. Superfluous restatement of the past point,

00:52:50with embellishment and a little bit of bravado. Obama, staccato. Very sharp.

00:52:58This. Well, it's this. And then it's this. And then it's this.

00:53:01I think that there's something to be said about a signature style. Sometimes, much of the time,

00:53:12maybe most of the time, the impressions that someone does about another person,

00:53:16typically not that flattering. Most impressions aren't done to pay a compliment to someone.

00:53:22Yeah.

00:53:22But if someone can do an impression of you easily,

00:53:27you kind of own an area of verbal real estate. I have this. If you do that,

00:53:33is that fucking Kermit the Frog or Jordan Peterson? I can't work it out. But it's one of them.

00:53:38I know it's one of them in there. And if you do a Trump, even a bad Trump impression,

00:53:42I know that's Trump. Actually, that's a good judge of how effective someone is as a

00:53:50rhetorician and of having a distinctive and signature style of speaking.

00:53:54Yeah.

00:53:55How easily can someone do an impression of you?

00:53:59How far away from the way that you speak can I do an impression and the person I'm saying it to

00:54:05still understand the person that I'm doing it about?

00:54:08Yeah.

00:54:08You know what I mean? That's a cool rule of thumb.

00:54:10Yeah. And it's like the novelty aspect and the uniqueness of the voice.

00:54:15Distinctiveness is a huge part, I think.

00:54:16It's like the facial features are to a caricature artist.

00:54:20You know, like all these individual, weird, unique things about the face,

00:54:24and I'm going to exaggerate them for a caricature. I think it's the same kind of thing. And that voice

00:54:30is like a good trademark. If you have that unique voice, it's fantastic for a trademark.

00:54:37This is why I need to get 11 labs to give me my voice back.

00:54:41Yeah.

00:54:43I'm on a campaign. I'm on a crusade against 11 labs. They stole my voice. They stole my voice,

00:54:48and now everyone's using in ads.

00:54:50Oh, I have at least two AI channels of me popping up every day on YouTube. It's unbelievable. With my name.

00:54:57Okay, that's different. That's slightly different.

00:55:01Oh, they're using your voice likeness.

00:55:04Yeah. So, they have a go-to British voice called Archer, and this has been around for a while now.

00:55:13It's just trained on me. It's been trained on me. It's got the same verbal tics that I have

00:55:19from the specific area in the northeast of the UK that I'm from. It's got glottal stops in certain words.

00:55:26It's got the you sound words, yus, bizarre little idiosyncrasies and phonetic idiisms that I've got,

00:55:36and it's motherfucking me. At some point in future, I'm going to shout at someone.

00:55:42The CEO was in Qatar while I was there giving a speech. One of the C-suite was there in Qatar,

00:55:47and I got stopped talking to the new CEO of Qatar Airways, and I had this thing in front of me,

00:55:53and it was connected with the guy that might be able to give me a

00:55:55discount on flights on Qatar Airways. I'll go and shout at the dude from Eleven Labs.

00:55:59I'm like, "I'll take the flights." It was like deal or no deal.

00:56:05Oh, that's good.

00:56:06Can we play it?

00:56:08Can we play it?

00:56:09Oh, yeah, yeah. Fuck, play it. Watch this thing. You're an expert in communication.

00:56:14Oh, yeah.

00:56:14Listen to this.

00:56:15Massive searches. More than $200 million spent. And on March 8th, 2026, Ocean Infinity officially

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00:56:36wasn't surprised. A journalist named Jeff Wise had been saying exactly that.

00:56:41Your THs. When you say the TH, it's very unique. And it's got your THs.

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00:56:52they fucking inherited my lisp.

00:56:55Maybe it's good.

00:56:56We were talking about, if I can get rid of that. If it starts speaking better than me,

00:57:00that's when I've got an issue. It's a race between the AI to refine itself and me and my

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00:58:03That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. You're talking there about building confidence,

00:58:11but I'm interested in what behaviors instantly reveal insecurity. You mentioned micropauses as one that,

00:58:19maybe not insecurity, but authority and trustworthiness perhaps. What are the behaviors that reveal insecurity?

00:58:27So when it comes to insecurity, let's go mammalian and then human. So the mammalian fear response or

00:58:35insecurity response is a reduced arm swing, incomplete movements. So like, I'm going to reach for this,

00:58:44I'm going to stop and then kind of continue doing it. And then the movements aren't completed.

00:58:48You'll see a lot of that kind of stuff. And you'll see reduced eye contact in a downward motion.

00:58:55And biggest of all, you're going to see the body moving or staying in areas that protect arteries.

00:59:04This means you'll see a lot less of this. You'll see the humerus kind of sit in a little bit closer

00:59:09to the body while they're talking. So the brachial artery is protected. You'll see the shoulders a

00:59:15little bit up in social situations that'll stay a little higher, their head coming down a little bit,

00:59:21protecting the carotid arteries. You'll see the arms in front of their body like this.

00:59:25Sometimes this is called a fig leaf gesture named by Alan Pease.

00:59:30Because it's covering the genitals? Yeah.

00:59:32Oh, interesting.

00:59:33But it's also protecting the femoral arteries at the same time. And men are more likely to do that.

00:59:39Women are more likely to wrap a single arm around the abdomen like this while they're talking during,

00:59:45like if they're insecure. And this is protecting the uterus area. And there are studies on this. I have

00:59:52no idea who did the studies. But this was originally written about by a guy named Desmond Morris who just,

01:00:00I think, died in the last month or two. He was in his 90s. But he's like the first researcher who wrote

01:00:05a book about really observing humans as if they were animals. Like how did their body move? And so the

01:00:13book was called Naked Ape. They're like us, like the hairless monkey. And he studied, he was like this

01:00:21savant at human behavior. But anyway, like when you're looking at the insecure behaviors

01:00:29and if you're looking at two people, what you really want to look at, especially if there's two people,

01:00:34is which person needs something more from the other person and which person is reacting to the other

01:00:41person. Man, I'm hesitant to reveal this. The one thing that I teach a lot of these venture capital

01:00:54people, they'll get pitched a lot. I've never been to one of the pitches.

01:00:59I've been on the pitching side quite a bit over the last six months, so I know what this feels like.

01:01:04But the one thing that I teach them to look for is what's called lip compression.

01:01:11And we tend to do this at times when we are withholding a little bit of information

01:01:18or we're withholding an emotion. So like you imagine like if your friend started a new job

01:01:25and you're like, "Hey dude, how's the new job?" And he goes, "Oh, it's great."

01:01:33So that lip compression is withholding. So what I teach them to do is watch for the compression.

01:01:40The moment you see it, just rewind. What were they just talking about right before you see it?

01:01:44How's the financials in the business?

01:01:45Yeah. He says, "Oh, all the financials are great. We've projected out a good

01:01:50thing for the next couple of quarters."

01:01:53And you'll see that just that little lip compression is...

01:01:56Is that lip compression... I'm always interested in why that particular expression or feature

01:02:04is associated with that particular motive or leak. What is it? Is it...?

01:02:11It's our first way of withholding. It's our first way to hold in milk.

01:02:15Like a tongue jut, like after someone tells a lie, like there's something called a tongue jut that's

01:02:20very common, like this. This is our first no. It's a way to force a nipple out of the mouth.

01:02:27And these are theories of Desmond Morris' as well. Like this is our first way of withholding

01:02:33and keeping milk in the mouth. And our first no is pushing our tongue out or pursing our lips a little

01:02:39bit. What?

01:02:41That's sick. Is that not cool?

01:02:42Okay. Yeah.

01:02:43Is that not cool?

01:02:44You're amazing.

01:02:45Sorry. I'm enthralled in the conversation. Are people more bored usually? Because this is brilliant.

01:02:50Okay. Good. Yeah. Maybe I expect you to be bored. It's boring to me because I've been looking at it

01:02:53for like 10, 15 years. I'm British. You have to remember, you have to filter it through the British,

01:02:58whatever this is.

01:02:58Yeah. Yeah.

01:02:59So that's our first no. So tongue out of the mouth, that tongue jut is our first no. There's a difference

01:03:07though between a tongue sticking out really quick and then a tongue licking the lips. So a tongue licking

01:03:13the lips is called a hygienic gesture. So it's made to make somebody more attractive. So a hygienic

01:03:20gesture might be me sitting up a little straight and like pulling my shirt down, like rubbing lint off,

01:03:26licking my lips. All those gestures that are made to look as more attractive. Those you want to look for

01:03:32before someone starts talking. So if they know a topic's coming up, like, all right, next we're

01:03:37going to get into financials. And then you see hygienic gestures before they start talking. So typically

01:03:43you'll see hygienic gestures. So they're improving their appearance before the delivery of something that

01:03:48might be questionable.

01:03:49Mm. You're trying to stack the deck in their favor.

01:03:52Yeah. There's no behavior for deception. None.

01:03:56There's no behavior for deception. What does that mean?

01:03:58There's no behavior that's like, this is deception. None. Zero. What we're measuring with behavior

01:04:05is, A, stress, and B, changes. Like somebody says, oh, someone tapping their finger all the time,

01:04:13or tapping their finger means that they're stressed and that means they're lying. That's

01:04:16that's total bullshit. Absolute bullshit.

01:04:20So if I just tap my finger all day long, what you need to look for is when I stop.

01:04:24I was going to say, you're just a finger tapper. Yes. Yes. So your first thing that you need to do,

01:04:29like, and people study body language a lot, and I could save you 15 years of studying body language.

01:04:34The only thing that you need to get good at is detecting change. And then learn a few little

01:04:40facial things or a few little tricks, but you get really good at detecting a change.

01:04:46This is the same as doing a polygraph, right? They have to get a baseline first.

01:04:50Yeah. Yeah.

01:04:51And what you're doing is a visual equivalent? Is that a fair assessment?

01:04:54Yeah. Visual and verbal equivalent of all that.

01:04:56What's the cadence that this person speaks at? What's the volume that this person speaks at?

01:05:00Yeah. Or if they've been talking about their kid that's missing on the news, like,

01:05:05he's great, he's great, he's great. And then all of a sudden they say, how do you think he's doing?

01:05:09And they start using past tense words all of a sudden to describe their child who they think,

01:05:14or they're trying to say is currently alive. And they're using past tense. They shift from present

01:05:20tense to past tense. He is a good kid. He was a good kid. Like, those shifts in tense and language

01:05:27use are really important. And when it comes to behavior, there's none for deception. You've got to

01:05:33look for change context. So, like, somebody says, oh, well, his arms went into his torso. Like, well,

01:05:41did it get colder? Did someone open a door and it's 50 degrees in the room?

01:05:45So, context is really important.

01:05:46Was he hungry?

01:05:47Yeah. And then clusters. So, like, one behavior is not that much to, like, if you're in something

01:05:56that's high stakes, you want to look for a mountain of behaviors. So, like, his breathing rate increased,

01:06:01we had pupil dilation, he licked his lips, and he was tapping his finger that he hadn't done before,

01:06:06and his language shifted. He started becoming more, he lost his verbal fluency. So, he's more hesitant

01:06:12in his language and stuff. We're like, we typically want to see a stack of many different things. And

01:06:18in body language, I don't know why, I got obsessed with it for a while. I'm really not. I'm kind of

01:06:25over it. But in body language, you deal in likelihood. It's like a meteorologist. It's not like, yes,

01:06:32it's definitely going to rain at 3:15 PM today. And we're looking at, here's historical stuff that's

01:06:39happened. There's something that's happening now. Here's a likelihood that something will happen.

01:06:43Is there a reliable way that stress changes your behavior?

01:06:47Yes. And what do you mean by that?

01:06:50You begin to get stressed about something while we're communicating.

01:06:56Yeah.

01:06:56Some are idiosyncratic, there's a baseline, and then there's deviations from the baseline.

01:07:01Yeah.

01:07:01But presumably, there are also some relatively common patterns that happen across everybody,

01:07:07regardless of whether they're a finger tapper or a foot tapper or an egg scratcher.

01:07:11Yeah. So the most common thing that you want to look for is what stress does it. We have a little

01:07:17cortisol that comes up, but if it's real stress, the person's also going to have a little dump of

01:07:21epinephrine, which is adrenaline. And when the body says, whoa, you know, there's a little too much

01:07:27adrenaline here. I need to burn some of this off. It's going to move. You'll see their foot,

01:07:31you'll see their body move because their foot's tapping a lot. Or you'll see some part of their

01:07:36body, they'll think, oh yeah, I was just tapping my foot because it's convenient. What their body is

01:07:41doing is burning off excess adrenaline because of the stress. So right when you see someone start

01:07:47burning off stress, the stress started like 10, 15 seconds before that.

01:07:50That's interesting. This thing has occurred. Epinephrine's increased.

01:07:59I need to burn this off movement. Yeah. Frequent quick moving movement.

01:08:04Yeah. And a lot of people do it through stiffness too. So you see someone go from rigid

01:08:09and I can burn it off like this. Like I'm going to, my body gets more rigid, my posture and everything,

01:08:15the stress. Actually actively tensing as opposed to just being still. Yeah. Right. From stillness to

01:08:21stiffness maybe. Yeah. That's interesting. Just go back to, can you recap the behaviors that

01:08:28display insecurity again? Yes. So protecting arteries is number one. And this is brachial,

01:08:36carotid, femoral, and this arm wrap that you'll see more likely in women of wrapping like a single arm like

01:08:44this. Uh, protecting the uterus and incomplete gestures. So someone makes a gesture, they don't

01:08:51complete it. And then they kind of stop or it's, it's interrupted, interrupted gestures. What's going

01:08:57on there? It's self doubt. Like, am I allowed to do this? Do I have permission to do this? Is this going

01:09:04to make me look weird? How am I being perceived? It's so it's a lot of like people that are insecure. It's

01:09:10experiencing insecurity. It's about self perception. Like how and how is Chris perceiving me? Does he

01:09:17like me? Is there something going on? Am I being judged right now? So, and maybe I move in a hesitant

01:09:23manner. Maybe this was too fast. Maybe I did this thing weirdly. Maybe I need to slow down. Can I grab

01:09:28this thing right now? It's not open. Can I open it on a podcast? It's got a loud ass thing next to a

01:09:33microphone. Answers yes. Answers always yes. I've been wondering this all time. Good, good, good. Um,

01:09:39and that is the same presumably as the micro pauses when it comes to words communication.

01:09:47Am I okay to say this thing? I'm unsure. I've got more processing power. I guess there's more going

01:09:51on than just that. Um, uncertainty about what I'm saying, how I'm going to say it, where am I going next?

01:09:59What did I just say? How is this couched in the broader context of what I've been saying throughout

01:10:03this entire conversation? Yeah. It's a lot more self management. And if you're wanting to spot

01:10:08insecurity changes, watch for someone in a conversation that their lips have been parted

01:10:13the whole time. And all of a sudden they're like, oh yeah. And they close their lips and they stay

01:10:18closed a little bit. So that's another one. So if you're seeing a little bit, a tiny bit of stress

01:10:22behavior, and then their lips close when they're normally just, if we're really interested in

01:10:27something, our lips part just a little bit. Uh, and then when we experience a little bit of stress,

01:10:33we'll have lip closure again. I remember seeing a image of someone doing the

01:10:41holding gesture, that thing. And it was described, it's a very British thing to do. I don't know if you're

01:10:48aware of this. So there's something in the UK called chavs and chavs are a little bit like

01:10:53hicks or rednecks, sort of, um, anti-social behavior. That's not to dismiss hicks and rednecks.

01:10:59Many of them, there's some of them in this room, but, uh, yeah, I've been to Stoke on Trent.

01:11:04Yeah. Okay. That city, that city, if that city was a person, that person would be a chav. Yeah. Yeah.

01:11:14Um, that, uh, anti-social behavior thing is, was, was a meme in the UK probably until the early 2010s.

01:11:22And then it kind of stopped and it doesn't really exist anymore. And it was a meme of someone saying,

01:11:27"The face that I make when I walk past a grandmother walking her small dog in the street

01:11:32to show her that I'm not a chav or a threat." And I've noticed-

01:11:39I bet there's a German word to describe exactly that entire phrase.

01:11:42Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Schadenfreude equivalent of,

01:11:45of whatever it is. Yeah.

01:11:46There's one of my favorite, it's a, which is

01:11:52the frustration that migratory birds feel when they are prevented from migrating.

01:11:57Of course there's a word for this.

01:11:58The fucking German's so good, dude. It must be a nightmare to learn. Um, but yeah, is that,

01:12:07actually that would be a good example. What are some of the reliable body language signals,

01:12:12behaviors that people put across when they're not a threat?

01:12:15Oh, you'll see more open palms. Okay. Uh, and typically at navel height.

01:12:25Navel height. And this comes from a friend of mine, Mark Bowden, a body language expert.

01:12:30Uh, we have a show called The Behavior Panel. Have you heard of this on YouTube?

01:12:35Uh, it's four of us. Four, uh, body language dudes. Nerds, yeah. Call it what it is.

01:12:39Um, and all of us just nerd out on body language, but we'll take every week,

01:12:46we'll take video and break it down. Police body cam video, celebrity video,

01:12:53parents saying their kid's missing and we'll also be like, oh, their kid might not be missing. And like,

01:12:58well, I love this shit, dude. And we'll break down.

01:13:00I live with it. This is, this is, I'm going to be watching this for the next few weeks. This is my

01:13:03sort of stuff. Yeah. It was like, we were just doing it during COVID for fun. And then we like

01:13:09had a million subscribers, uh, in short order. And then it was fun for all of us. So we just kept

01:13:14doing it. What was your question? Non-threatening behavior because grandma walking down the street

01:13:20doing the thing. Yeah. And this, you know, they, they did research on that in New York.

01:13:26Uh, and they call it like right after 9/11, these researchers noticed that you New Yorkers would greet

01:13:32each other like this, like, and they called it a shared grief expression because New Yorkers don't

01:13:40talk to each other anyway. So they're like, like that. Uh, it was the first time that thing really

01:13:45had a good name. That's basically like two New Yorkers kissing.

01:13:47Yeah. That's about as intimate as New Yorkers can get.

01:13:50Super intimate. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:51But Mark Bowden has this thing called the truth plane where when we make these gestures that are

01:13:57open palmed and we're speaking to somebody and it's kind of at navel belly button height.

01:14:02Mm-hmm. Something Trump does quite a lot, I think.

01:14:04Yeah. And it, it makes somebody more likely to trust what we're saying.

01:14:09Um, and so like when, when I'm saying like exposing palms means that somebody is a little bit more

01:14:14trustworthy, I don't mean like, Hey, what's up? Like that, like they've got their hands up.

01:14:19Yeah. Super cult leader. This, he calls this the ecstatic plane. And this is the truth plane down

01:14:24here. And he's got some great names for a lot of these. There's a, there's a rare

01:14:30number of occasions where your hands should be above your shoulders. Very rare.

01:14:34Yeah. And he's probably Mark's, I bet Mark has a list. I don't know what it is, but the other ones

01:14:39are just smoothness of movement. And is the person performing or just being, and that doesn't mean

01:14:46they're bad or they're deceptive or anything. But one of the first things I look at when I meet a

01:14:49person is, are they, are they in front of their eyes or kind of just jammed back here, wondering

01:14:55what's going on, wondering how they're being perceived? Like, are they present in what's going on?

01:15:01So when I train people, that's one of the big things is like just pulling their awareness out

01:15:05in front of their eyes. So they could, they're a lot more present. They're here. Yeah.

01:15:11What about early warning signs that somebody is a threat or may have aggression?

01:15:19It's so hard to predict, especially if somebody is trying to hide it.

01:15:22The, I train law enforcement in some of these, and it's still very hard to predict that we, that we

01:15:28talked about four different types. There's C O P E. It's concealment, oxygenation, preparation,

01:15:33and expenditure. Like they're trying to burn off energy. And in the concealment aspect,

01:15:40you really want someone who is concealing their intention. So right before some kind of violent

01:15:45action takes place, they'll break eye contact, but keep you in peripheral vision for a prolonged period

01:15:50of time. And the second piece of that is you'll see a dominant foot withdrawal. Even if they're not

01:15:57going to punch you, you're going to see broken eye contact and dominant shoulder either start moving

01:16:02away or dominant foot going back. Um, and that is kind of blading the body, but getting kind of

01:16:07prepared for an attack. And in America, what we teach the police is that like, no one can draw a weapon

01:16:14from concealment without making a 90 degree angle with your body. It's like, if you're not seeing 90

01:16:20degree angles, they're not gonna, they can't get a weapon. Show me what you mean. So like, if I have a,

01:16:24show me where I've got a weapon, anywhere you like. Right in the front. So I'm hitting 90 degrees,

01:16:29just reaching for the, for the weapon. Right. So if I'm, if I'm talking to somebody who's standing

01:16:33there and I'm a police officer and I see someone quickly move to a 90 degree position, I need to be

01:16:40very focused on what's going on. It doesn't mean they're drawing a weapon, but you cannot draw a

01:16:44weapon from concealment without this 90 degree phenomenon. One of my favorite insights about

01:16:51blading is from, uh, Robin Dunbar. And he has this book called friends. Cool thing that you can do the

01:16:58next time that you're a party is look at the angle of the feet of men talking to each other and of women

01:17:04talking to each other and women talk perpendicular. They talk 180 degrees feet to feet straight on men

01:17:11talk at about 120 degrees. They blade is more shoulder to shoulder. And if you're a guy, just

01:17:18try the next time that you're talking to someone, ideally someone that you don't know super well,

01:17:22maybe someone that you've just met, rotate yourself around to 180 degrees and go straight on. And you'll

01:17:29begin to feel this strange spider crawling, tickling up because typically the only time that men would

01:17:36have squared up to each other is if they were about to fight. Especially if you're close. Like if your

01:17:40distance is like two or three feet and then you have like head on stuff. This is when they put bars

01:17:46or mirrors up in bars in the, in the old west. So men could talk to each other and they were

01:17:52side by side, but you could still see them in the mirror. That's interesting. And it reduced the bar

01:17:56fights and stuff. Why? Because you wouldn't misconstrue something that someone had just said.

01:18:02Yeah. So they're not facing each other at all, but you and I could be sitting here side to side by

01:18:07side and look at each other's faces in the mirror and have a full blown conversation. There's no,

01:18:11no threatening. So we're both aligned facing the same direction. If you're trying to go from Joey

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01:19:11slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Interesting, the levels of intimacy that are opened

01:19:18up through not being straight on. There are certain styles of therapy that are done lying down with a

01:19:26therapist to your side. A therapist isn't sat at the foot of the bed staring at you like a doctor coming in,

01:19:31flipping out a clipboard. And there's a men's sheds initiative that happened in Australia. It's

01:19:37pretty interesting. So they were trying to get Australian men to talk about their mental health.

01:19:41Australians, probably not great at talking about their mental health. Men, not to, and they got a

01:19:46two times multiplier for putting those two things together. So instead of, they tried, we were going

01:19:51to have the, also if you think about AA, also largely shoulder to shoulder, although you can go across,

01:19:57but the across is further away than the shoulder. So you have intimacy plus directness. But with the

01:20:02men's sheds thing, they realized that if they got guys together to do something with the front of

01:20:09their brain, because John's broken his lawnmower, but Chris has got the good wrench and Chase has got the

01:20:17hammer and the welding material. After a while, all of these guys would bring the thing in and they'd be

01:20:22working together and I'd be using the wrench and you'd be using the hammer or whatever. And before long,

01:20:26we'd be talking about the fact that John's marriage is breaking down or that he doesn't have a good

01:20:30relationship with his kid or whatever it might be. But it was, the synopsis was men relate shoulder

01:20:35to shoulder, women relate face to face. And it's interesting. It's interesting. That's a good one.

01:20:42What other sex differences are there in communication? What are the biggest ones? You mentioned that women

01:20:48cover up like this, certainly the face to face versus shoulder to shoulder thing seems pretty massive.

01:20:53Yeah. What are some of the other interesting ones?

01:20:57There's two big ones. Men will most often reach for the stomach during times of uncertainty.

01:21:04So just kind of scratching or adjusting. You've seen the guys on the beach that are like,

01:21:08like how, you know, somebody looking at me, they'll kind of lean back and like scratching right here,

01:21:12like this, like this is all like the, uh, like a pacifier for us, a little pacifying behavior.

01:21:18And women during the same like period of stress, since stress builds up heat and most women have

01:21:25this long hair over their neck, it builds up a heat back here. So you'll see women reach back and lift

01:21:31the hair over their neck for just a second to ventilate that area and they'll do it unconsciously.

01:21:36Uh, so those are two big ones. What do you think the men's stomach thing is? What's going on there?

01:21:42I have no idea.

01:21:42Soothing behavior.

01:21:43I have no, well, yeah, it's a self-soothing behavior, but I don't know the origin of it or

01:21:48some evolutionary thing.

01:21:50What it's trying to achieve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh,

01:21:52have you seen footage of Wade Wilson in on the stand? This is the Deadpool killer.

01:21:58No.

01:21:58Okay. I'm gonna, this is cool. You haven't seen this one.

01:22:01Maybe bring it up.

01:22:01Yeah. Jared, can you just pull up, um, Deadpool killer sentencing?

01:22:05Is this from the movie Deadpool?

01:22:07No. So this guy's called Wade Wilson and there's a great, you would love this. You,

01:22:12you guys should actually do, if you're still doing the reaction thing,

01:22:15it would be cool for you guys to do a reaction to the Netflix series that's just come out. It's

01:22:19called a worst X ever. And a lot of it, uh, at least the two episodes that I saw last week,

01:22:25Wade Wilson's the first one. And the character Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds character,

01:22:28his real name is Wade Wilson. Yeah. Here we go. Here we go.

01:22:31And it would be only further broken if it took Wade's last breath.

01:22:36That broken system owes Christine and it owes Diane and it owes their families.

01:22:42So one thing that you'll see, especially in men, when you'll see this in women too, sometimes,

01:22:49but you'll see it in men is we, we talked about like arteries. When we want to show defiance,

01:22:54and, and, and that I'm, I'm not scared of you. Like if we're about to get in a fight and I'll be like,

01:23:00what? And show your neck. Yeah. So we'll like expose the arteries. Look,

01:23:04you'll see the arms come out like this. I'm not scared of you.

01:23:07Yeah. So like I'm exposing arteries and we see that. Like the pot, neck open.

01:23:12Yeah. Leaning back. So this is almost like a display of absolute lack of fear.

01:23:19Dismissiveness. Like a challenge. Dismissiveness.

01:23:21All right, let's keep going. Steve Wilson. Thank you.

01:23:25We would rest. All right.

01:23:27Did I just ask that you call with the defendant to ensure that he doesn't want to speak at this

01:23:31hearing? Well, Mr. Wilson, you have an opportunity just like during any of the other phases of,

01:23:35well, let me just finish real quick. Any other phases during the case,

01:23:39if you want to address the court, I would permit you to do that. Obviously,

01:23:43you know, everything's recorded. But you would have that opportunity if you wish. No one can

01:23:49prevent you from addressing the court if you wish to. Hasn't blinked yet.

01:23:52And no one can make you address the court if you don't want to. So it is a decision that's

01:23:58solely left up to you if you want to address the court or not. Not today. Later, when I come back,

01:24:04I will today. All right. Pause that. Okay.

01:24:09So what you saw like right before he was talking, you saw the lip licking. That's the hygienic gesture

01:24:14to improve his appearance there. You didn't see him lean forward or anything. He's trying to

01:24:20maintain some kind of control in the situation. He probably thrives on a lot of autonomy and just

01:24:25knowing that he's kind of self-governing a little bit. You didn't see him blinking at all during that

01:24:30process. One of the interesting things about blinking is, and I don't talk about body language

01:24:35anymore on podcasts. I usually talk about DMT and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. That's episode two.

01:24:41Episode two. So blinking is one of the most reliable body language indicators

01:24:48ever studied. And it's cool because we spend our time looking at people's eyes throughout our

01:24:52conversation. Let me show you this one, like just a bad-ass trick. I think it's bad-ass.

01:24:59The average blinks per minute of human beings in conversation is around 15, give or take 15 blinks

01:25:05a minute. If we are in a situation that is stressful without even noticing it, our blink rate can go up to

01:25:13like 85, 90. And we don't even notice that our blinking has changed. It's insane. Like when I took

01:25:21like the math portion of my SATs, I suck at math, so I was probably at like a 90. But what happens when

01:25:29our body gets focused in on something that's important, or we're watching a movie that's super interesting,

01:25:36our blink rate without noticing can go down to like a two. So stress increases how often we blink. And it's not

01:25:45relaxation that lowers it, it's focus. So if you see these psychopaths that are doing these interviews, like

01:25:51Manson, and then he's just doing this to the interviewer and his eyes are open the whole time and he doesn't blink at all the whole time.

01:25:56That's focus, not relaxation. Those are very different things. Like when I watched the movie

01:26:04Interstellar, one of my favorite movies, I probably- My favorite movie of all time.

01:26:09Mine too. I probably blinked three or four times.

01:26:13It's a long movie too. It is.

01:26:14I think three and a half hour movie.

01:26:16I own the Tesseract from that movie that was built by Kip Thorne.

01:26:22What do you mean?

01:26:22I'll have to send you a photo of it. Like the model that they use for the Tesseract of the movie.

01:26:27Bookcase.

01:26:29No, no, no. Like the entire Tesseract. Like you can use binoculars and look down into this thing for like 30 miles.

01:26:35I'll send you a picture of it.

01:26:36Unreal. So interesting. You weren't expecting this. Love Island reference.

01:26:43Interstellar came out just before I went on this reality TV show. And while I was on there,

01:26:49I was desperately trying to hold on to anyone that wanted to talk about nerdy shit with me.

01:26:54And I managed to grab one of the other cast members and go and have a conversation with him.

01:26:57And I remember I was talking about the real science of Interstellar because Kip Thorne released that book.

01:27:01He was a consultant physicist on it.

01:27:03Yeah.

01:27:03And then Brian Cox did his live show.

01:27:08And the background of Brian Cox's live show was made by the same people that modeled Gargantua.

01:27:14That was the black hole. So that's a real, fully, appropriately modeled using physics of the

01:27:21world and the universe black hole. And I went to go and see him after I got back in Leeds. And it was

01:27:28the coolest thing. And I just remember that that really sticks with me. The fact that I was trying

01:27:31to have this conversation from memory about the physics of Interstellar as a non-physics person

01:27:36that's only seen Interstellar once. And I remember whoever's listening on this,

01:27:39there's someone listening to your mic 24 hours a day when you do these reality TV shows.

01:27:43And I remember thinking, whoever, do you have a poor bastard has been cursed with listening to me,

01:27:48try and cod memory my way through this physics lesson is destined for challenges.

01:27:58So you're mic'd up all day?

01:27:5924 hours. Yeah. And if you get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night,

01:28:03they want you to put your mic on. So you have a little necklace kind of like this, but it's made of

01:28:10elastic and then a battery pack in your pocket. There's a little wire that runs up and over.

01:28:14You ever fart into them on purpose?

01:28:15Because you know- The guys did all sorts. Yeah. It's fine. You just whisper stuff

01:28:19because you know that you're being listened to 24 hours a day and there's one person on each audio

01:28:22channel. So these guys are on- Oh, you have one human dedicated to your mic.

01:28:26Exactly. Yeah. On eight hour shifts, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three,

01:28:29rotating. And I came out three weeks in and that was the end of my time there.

01:28:35Is this like a survivor? I'm sorry, I didn't know.

01:28:37I don't- Imagine survivor, but for fuck boys.

01:28:44That's basically what it is. It's Navy seal hell weeks for people who you don't want your

01:28:49daughter to get married to. And I came out and had these two guys come up to me and they said,

01:28:57Chris, you don't know us. You don't know who we are, but we've been listening to you eight hours a day

01:29:03for the last three weeks. And I just wanted to ask, what was the name of that book about the physics

01:29:08thing to do with the, to do, to do with the movie that you were listening to? It's like,

01:29:12fuck, like that was, I wasn't on camera. I mean, you're always on camera, but there was just some

01:29:17wanky conversation between me and Jordan, one of the other guys. And I'm like, oh,

01:29:21shit, you really were listening throughout the whole thing. Cause for the rest of it,

01:29:25I'm talking about, you know, bullshit. But, uh, the one time I had an interesting conversation,

01:29:29guys, like what's the name of the book? Was it Kip Thorne? Is that the guy that did the thing?

01:29:32Wow. So yeah, pretty cool. The fact that we have this insight into how other people behave through

01:29:41their eyes, especially given that that's where we're typically looking is, I suppose the problem is

01:29:47in order to be a good detector of body language, eye movement, you need to not only be doing your part of

01:29:58the communication and thinking about what you're projecting, but you also need to be doing the

01:30:04detecting thing at the same time. So it's twice as hard. Now for the most part, I think you, I don't

01:30:11know whether an untrained person would pay that much attention, conscious attention to how the

01:30:17interlocutor is behaving, unless they were to do something out of the ordinary. Like if I do this,

01:30:23you're like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah.

01:30:24But if my breath rate increases or my blink rate changes or whatever, beyond the sub perceptible

01:30:29instinctive, just something is going on sense that I might have training that in requires double the

01:30:38RAM. I'm not just projecting, I'm now detecting too. It does for a minute. So that's why I teach

01:30:44people to just do one or two things at a time. And if you're just an everyday guy and you're not in

01:30:50hostage negotiations all the time, you only need about three or four things to look for.

01:30:55And you only need to learn them one at a time. And when I'm like watching somebody's blink rate,

01:31:00I'm not, I'm not sitting there like, Oh, Chris's blink rates now a 33 noted.

01:31:06It's just every once in a while, I'll check in on that. And if you're a good conversationalist,

01:31:11your goal should be, can I lower our blink rate? If we start our conversation and I'm interesting to you,

01:31:19my goal should be like, Oh, I'm watching your blink rate go down over time. But if you're talking to

01:31:23somebody, let's say you're in sales and you see all of a sudden you mention the terms of the agreement,

01:31:29you mentioned the, the APR interest or something and you see blink rate go up now, now it's a beneficial

01:31:36item. If you're watching somebody pitch you and you're in some private capital firm, whatever they

01:31:42call that. And you're seeing blink rate at the moment of discussion of finances or the moment they're,

01:31:48they're discussing how many prospective customers they're going to have or something like that.

01:31:53Those are important data points, but if you're on a date, change the subject.

01:32:00They were engaged. Now they're a little bit more uncomfortable.

01:32:03Yeah. And then something's stressing them out. Maybe you talked about one thing and some unrelated

01:32:08thing popped up in their head, which happens to all of us. Just change the topic.

01:32:12They got distracted. But also that means that you're maybe not being as engaging as you could do.

01:32:17Exactly. Yeah.

01:32:19Either I don't like what you're talking about or I don't care what you're talking about,

01:32:21but either way they'd be good to bring them back in. What are the biggest misconceptions

01:32:29that we have about reading others? Some of the falsehoods or lies about human behavior?

01:32:38I think number one is,

01:32:42is that there's one behavior that means one thing all the time. There's a few exceptions like blink rate

01:32:49is a difference. But then somebody's like, "Oh, what if I have asthma?" Well, then it won't be a change.

01:32:54It'll be your baseline.

01:32:55What does asthma have to do with your blink rate?

01:32:58Like allergies and stuff.

01:32:59Oh, okay.

01:33:00Right, yeah.

01:33:01So like if they're blinking fast the whole time, then who cares? That's your baseline.

01:33:06Okay.

01:33:06So there's a few, very, very few exceptions. But when you hear like this means that somebody's

01:33:12being deceptive because they scratch their nose or something like that, I think it's one of the

01:33:16biggest misconceptions. I think another is certainty. People, like you'll hear body language experts all

01:33:24the time, like absolutely this person's lying. You can tell because he did this and this at the same time.

01:33:30Like I feel irresponsible ever saying that like my eyeballs are more accurate than like a polygraph.

01:33:39That seems silly to me. So I think it's a likelihood game. And I think we should be honest

01:33:45that it's a likelihood game. No matter how good you are, I don't think any behavior expert in the world

01:33:52can still spot a psychopath, even though there's all this training out there on how to do that kind

01:33:58of stuff.

01:33:58Why?

01:33:59The signals are hidden. They've spent a lifetime honing composure and-

01:34:08Deception.

01:34:08And decepting, just being deceptive with their face and their expressions and their breathing and

01:34:14all that kind of stuff. Most of the time doing it unconsciously.

01:34:16And presumably, yeah, exactly. Presumably that would be so idiosyncratic for that one person as

01:34:22well. Where did their psychopathy come from? What are their patterns? What are they trying to hide?

01:34:27What have been their experiences in the past and what have been their tells? And then what have

01:34:32been their compensations for their tells that now result in this behavior?

01:34:36Yeah.

01:34:37And you know what I want to bring up, Jared, can you search on YouTube

01:34:43Danny Trejo, T-R-E-J-O, Charles Manson. So this is a clip from the pod, and this is interesting for

01:34:53you, given that you talked about drugs. This is interesting around hypnosis. So Danny Trejo,

01:34:59the Hollywood actor with the massive chest tattoo, big sort of cholo dude.

01:35:03Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Machete, that guy. He-

01:35:07Isn't he like a really nice guy in real life?

01:35:09Sickest dude. Sickest dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a great conversation with him a few years ago.

01:35:14So you met Charles Manson in prison, didn't you? What was that story? Can you tell us that?

01:35:18In the county jail, in the county jail. But let me tell you, Charlie wasn't the guy that you saw on the TV

01:35:27specials, all right? He was a, God, he was like five foot four, five foot five, a little scrawny. He was

01:35:36poor, kind of like a bum, really. He had a string for a belt. He tied his pants with a string because he

01:35:48couldn't afford a belt, you know? And everybody else, we dressed, you know, cool, ironed our pants. And,

01:35:54uh, and so the, some of the prisoners were going to take advantage of them because they take advantage

01:36:00of anybody that's small. And, uh, we found out that he could hypnotize you. So we, we let him sleep in

01:36:06front of our cell to, to, you know, to make sure that nobody had heard him. And, and, uh, he got us

01:36:13loaded on weed and, and three other guys in the cell. Everybody else had like six guys in their cell.

01:36:20We only had three because we were special.

01:36:26I had two killers with me. So, so, so, uh, and then, uh,

01:36:33and then he got us loaded on weed. And I said, well, get us loaded on heroin.

01:36:37So the three of us tried to get loaded. He got two of us loaded on heroin. One guy just woke up.

01:36:43And afterwards I asked him, how come, welcome. He couldn't do him. And he said,

01:36:47never did it before. Did you ever get loaded on heroin?

01:36:50No, but your mind doesn't know how to work. You understand your mind doesn't know how to react.

01:36:56So if I tell you to do something while you're hypnotized and you haven't done it before,

01:37:04or you don't know how to do it, uh, you'll just wake up. And that's what kept happening.

01:37:13So yeah, he hypnotized Danny fucking Trejo and his two cellmates,

01:37:18but one of the dudes hadn't done heroin before. And Danny goes on to say that when you do heroin,

01:37:24apparently throw up, it's quite likely that you're going to throw up at some point.

01:37:28And Danny and the other guy that had done it throw up and the dude that hadn't didn't.

01:37:33Yeah. This is the thing. This is a real thing. Uh, for some things like I absolutely, and I,

01:37:42I'm a hypnotist, uh, and that was just part of learning all of this brain stuff. I went to many

01:37:48different hypnosis schools and trainings and stuff. I don't, I don't think that you could do it with like

01:37:55mushrooms or LSD or anything like that, because it's a such a brain connective and massively immersive

01:38:04experience. It's too complex to replicate. Yeah. Like if alcohol, you can get someone drunk

01:38:10very easily, uh, on hypnosis heroin, maybe like you're kind of creating some of that euphoria. Um,

01:38:18but initially you want to create the, the negative conditions of the thing first. Uh, so your body

01:38:27believes that it's possible and your brain's easier at connecting or at making bad shit happen.

01:38:31Like vomiting. Yeah. It's way easier for your brain to default to negative. This is why

01:38:36your ancestors would always, uh, confuse a, a bear for a rock and not a rock for a bar, a bear.

01:38:43Maybe the other way around. But so you get the negative thing first and then your brain's like,

01:38:47wow, this is really easy. Then once you do that, you're like, this time, you're not going to have

01:38:51this negative thing, but you have all the other positive benefits of this. There's a guy in the

01:38:561980s. I can't remember his name. And maybe I think it was Marshall Silver, but I think it was him.

01:39:02Uh, but there was this program called drug of choice, uh, where you could order a audio tape

01:39:08and you can, you can order like the marijuana audio tape. And if you've ever done it before,

01:39:13like it will kind of recreate that experience of that drug. I've never tried it or anything,

01:39:17but it absolutely is possible.

01:39:20Going back to the deception detecting stuff,

01:39:23what's the best way to get the truth out of someone quickly?

01:39:28In what situation?

01:39:29Normal conversation between you and someone that you think is being deceptive. It's cordial.

01:39:33You're not going to do anything too nefarious. How do you get the truth out of someone?

01:39:38It's socialize, minimize, rationalize, and project.

01:39:42Let me say, Chris, look, I know that I think everybody's going to understand if, if something

01:39:47happened, I think everybody's going to understand. And I promise you, it's not a big deal to me.

01:39:51That's minimized. And it makes perfect sense. Everything lined up the way it did and

01:39:55shit happened the way it did. That's not a big deal. And frankly, it wasn't your fault. These

01:39:58people kind of put this in front of you or this thing happened, or you downloaded that app and you

01:40:02didn't know what it was. And I think everything's completely fine. But the one thing that's always

01:40:07been important to you and me is our friendship. And I don't want to lose that. And then hopefully you

01:40:14ask them, ask them the question again at the end of that.

01:40:17Hmm. I wonder what it is.

01:40:23At each stage, I'm trying to think about if, if it was me, what I'm trying to hold on to,

01:40:29what it is that I'm grasping for. And I think part of it is, it feels like treading water and someone

01:40:38throwing you a lifeline so that you're less alone in the discomfort and the loss, the confusion of

01:40:52trying to hold this thing together. Someone sees, someone sees why I did this thing.

01:40:57Yeah.

01:40:57And it's not that big of a deal anyway, if I am to admit it, but they're there with me. I think

01:41:05a lot of it is around, I'm not going to have to bear this burden alone anymore.

01:41:12Yeah.

01:41:13Trying to sort of feel what comes up as you're role-playing this bike stealing.

01:41:18Yeah. Those are the big, those are the four reasons that your brain will kind of resist telling

01:41:23the truth. People won't understand. This is a huge deal. It doesn't make sense why I did this

01:41:30and it's all my fault. So I just want to alleviate those four things.

01:41:35Yes. Yes.

01:41:36As fast as possible.

01:41:37Yes. The alleviation.

01:41:41Why can't people relax? What's the truth about emotional debt? I've heard you talk about this.

01:41:46Dude, this is a big one. I think this goes back to what we talked about at the very beginning with

01:41:55people carrying around shame and everybody thinks that they're the only one.

01:42:02If we're really, really honest with ourselves, like we walk around every day, we have this,

01:42:08we conceal shame because there are a lot of institutions that are around today that have

01:42:13made shame into an institution, like social enforcement and shame.

01:42:21And everyone thinks it's just me. I'm the only one hiding the shit from everybody else. If I,

01:42:29if I start becoming real, everyone, everyone's going to leave me. I'm going to be abandoned by my

01:42:33friends. I'm going to get outcast and judged. I have to keep hiding this. And everyone thinks it's just

01:42:40them. The cool thing is that it's literally 100% of people. It's every single human being is out there

01:42:48carrying the exact same shit as you, and they all think it's just them. Uh, that's the, it's saddening,

01:42:56but I think it's beautiful at the same time that we all, we, we really do share a lot more in common,

01:43:00especially with the things that we hide from each other. Uh, then we're, then a lot of us would be willing to admit.

01:43:06So when we encounter like emotional debt, this is typically when I'm a little kid,

01:43:14what are the patterns I had to develop to earn friends and keep friends to feel safe

01:43:22or to attain some kind of social rewards, like appreciation or love or something like that.

01:43:28So if something in my childhood made one of those three things happen, friends, safety and rewards,

01:43:34then that, that the brain says, Oh, this worked. I'm going to make an app out of this shit.

01:43:40So your brain makes an app and says, I know exactly how to produce this thing. So I'm going to make an

01:43:45app and I'm going to run that app all the time. So for the first couple of years, it's an app that

01:43:49you're consciously clicking on in social situations. By the time you're like probably 12 or 13,

01:43:56that's solidified in your behavior. And then fast forward, you've got a 34 year old woman working

01:44:03in an office who had to kiss some bully's ass in middle school. And that's all she does as an adult.

01:44:10So we carry all these little childhood things without knowing it, like which this loaded

01:44:17childhood backpack. It's gone from being an app to being source code.

01:44:21Yeah. Beautifully said. Yes. And we carried an adult without knowing.

01:44:28And we don't, you can look at just about any adult in the world and say, you know, if we went back in

01:44:34time, what did you do to do friends, safety and rewards back in childhood? And then you say,

01:44:41oh, you came to me for help with this XYZ thing. Look at your eight year old self. Let's go back in

01:44:47time and take a look at them. And then you're like, oh wow, that's it. I mean, that's all I was trying to do.

01:44:55And that is emotional debt. And every time we're not dealing with a lot of that stuff directly,

01:45:02every time we hide it from someone else, we're withdrawing from account and we're,

01:45:06we're kind of overdrafting everything in our life. So concealment is, is one of the most exhausting,

01:45:16cognitively exhausting things that there is when it comes to human behavior. Concealment is more

01:45:22mentally taxing than doing calculus. Like just trying to act like you've got your shit together

01:45:28in a social situation, like faking it hard is harder than calculus to our brains. So I mean,

01:45:37fuck that's, it sucks. That, I mean, a lot of us are paying this emotional debt and

01:45:48I think that's it. It's like the costume is heavy. The, the costumes that we're wearing

01:45:53just get heavier and heavier because we keep adding stuff on it. And a lot of us, by the time we hit

01:45:5918, 19 years old, uh, we're like a decorator crab, you know, I've kind of, you know what a decorator

01:46:05crab is? Can we bring up a picture of a decorator crab? So these crabs will go around their whole life

01:46:11and find shit on the beach and like stick it and like glue it onto the, their shells somehow.

01:46:17It's protection, ornaments? Maybe distraction, maybe like a mating ornament. I don't know why they do it.

01:46:25Yeah. And they'll decorate their bodies with all kinds of crazy stuff.

01:46:34They do that by hand and it's not part of their body at all.

01:46:37So that looks like it's picked up sea urchin spikes, maybe.

01:46:41And stuck it on somehow. If you go back to the search and go one to the right of that image,

01:46:46right there, that guy found some fruit loops or something down there on the, on the ocean.

01:46:53So they just stick little barnacles and stuff all over their bodies. And we're kind of like this,

01:46:57we go through life and we're like, you know what, I'm gonna, that guy did this one thing to protect

01:47:02himself. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick that on. So we're walking around with all of this stuff on us.

01:47:07That's not us at all. It's not me. Uh, and then we go back to that thing like we originally talked

01:47:13about. It was like, I have to go my whole life knowing that no one's ever known me and that sucks.

01:47:21And that's emotional debt. How do you advise people to process emotions

01:47:26so that it doesn't get deposited into the bank account or used to withdraw from the bank account?

01:47:31I think physicality is the best. There's a guy, his name is Dr. David Berceli. And he invented this

01:47:38thing called trauma, well discovered this thing called trauma release exercise.

01:47:44It's been known that we go into these things called neurogenic tremors all the time,

01:47:49where our body looks like kind of like a little seizure where there's little tremors going through

01:47:53your body. But if you watch like a polar bear get tranquilized by some researcher and they, and they,

01:47:59it's like a paralytic, a tranquilizer. The polar bear is like laid out on the ground and, but he's

01:48:05conscious. Like can you imagine now how terrifying it's like worse than an alien abduction. That's like

01:48:11an alien and abduction for us. So this polar bear goes through trauma. And what is the first thing that

01:48:17happens is that the, the anesthesia thing starts wearing off and his body goes into these convulsions

01:48:23and shaking movements and big breaths. And it's all completely autonomic. He's not really consciously

01:48:30controlling any of it. He's just letting his body do what it does. Squirrels do the same thing.

01:48:35After an Impala gets bit by a tiger.

01:48:37I've seen zebras do the same thing.

01:48:38Yeah. Zebras. Um, and Robert Sapolsky wrote a book about a lot of this stuff,

01:48:43about how nature knows what to do. It doesn't suppress healing mechanisms. It's called, uh,

01:48:48why zebras don't get ulcers. And, but they figured out that humans suppress this, this tremor mechanism.

01:48:55Why do you think that is to avoid being seen as strange by the people around us? This is a

01:49:01indication of weakness. I was bothered.

01:49:03Yeah. I think you hit the nail perfectly on the head there. Like there's some weird,

01:49:07if I jiggle around on the floor in front of the tribe, they're going to think I'm sick. What

01:49:11if they throw me over the cliff, like old Jimmy last year when he was sick, you know?

01:49:15Well, if nothing else, even if they correctly identify it, they don't think that you've

01:49:18got leprosy or you've gone insane. What they do know is that your capacity has been breached.

01:49:24Yeah.

01:49:24Your nervous system's ability to withstand this was taken over the edge.

01:49:31Yeah.

01:49:32You overclocked yourself. You were overclocked by somebody else, which is an indication of weakness.

01:49:36Yeah. It's so true.

01:49:39But he basically, he's not teaching you a technique. He's just helping you to find the

01:49:43switch in your body that you've been suppressing your entire life. And we had to do it after a

01:49:49deployment, uh, that I was, I did 20 years in the military. So I did a bunch of deployments,

01:49:56but one of these deployments, we came back, it was rough, but we had to go through this trauma

01:50:00releasing exercise. It's a different, under a different brand name, like, um, than this, uh,

01:50:06Dr. Borselli. But it was maybe the most profound emotional transformation I've ever made in my life,

01:50:13other than psychedelics. It's unbelievable. And it's, your body knows how to do it. Every mammal on earth,

01:50:20uh, does this automatically and it is life changing and it's free. It's totally free. You go on YouTube

01:50:27and learn how to do it. And it's, it's unbelievable. And it's, every mammal does it. And during this

01:50:32lady's presentation to us, when we got back from deployment, she says, raise your hand if you've

01:50:36ever seen a depressed squirrel or a zebra, like a zebra doesn't get bit by a crocodile and go back to his

01:50:46tribe and be like, guys, I had a shit day and I need to curl up under that tree for like nine days

01:50:51and people need to bring me food. That doesn't happen. Like they're somehow they're over stuff,

01:50:57uh, a lot quicker than we get over stuff. Even though we make more meaning about the situation

01:51:01than that, than the zebras do. How do you come to think about the role of shame in people's lives?

01:51:07I think shame has been institutionalized on purpose by many different, uh, places. And we

01:51:14learn as we're little kids, like if I feel shame about something, I need to conceal it. And I've

01:51:21learned a new part of me that I can wall off and I don't need to show anybody. So if I'm ashamed about

01:51:28anything, it doesn't make shame, doesn't make you a good person. And I think a lot of people think

01:51:33that if I feel ashamed about something that makes me moral, that makes me good as a human being,

01:51:39it doesn't, it just ruins your life. It doesn't make you a good person.

01:51:42I learned an interesting thing

01:51:46from Rob Henderson, where a book that he was reading taught

01:51:53somebody's guilt seems to be proportional to their perceived likelihood of being caught.

01:52:00Wait, someone's guilt, the amount of guilt that you feel tends to be proportional to how likely you

01:52:09perceive it, that you're going to be caught for whatever you're guilty about.

01:52:12Wow. That's really good.

01:52:14Isn't that fascinating?

01:52:15That our level of guilt for something that we know we can't be caught for is so much less.

01:52:21Now, obviously the scales have a bunch of different things going on here. So on one side,

01:52:26there might be the severity of what you did. You could kill somebody and immediately watch them be

01:52:33eaten by an alligator hole or a python or something. And you go, well, there's no chance, but it's such a

01:52:37huge transgression of what your typical behavior would be, that that's something that you would take

01:52:42very badly. Or you'd have something that's much smaller, but has a much higher likelihood of getting

01:52:47caught. You know, you threw chewing gum down, but you threw it down right at the teacher's feet and

01:52:52you don't know if he saw or not. And that would be a big deal. And then there's sort of everything

01:52:56in between that. Those are the two, that's the spectrum of crime, by the way, there's chewing gum

01:52:59and killing someone. Those are the two ends, the Overton window of crime. And I just love that idea

01:53:08that the level of guilt that we feel about anything that we've done. You, it's not just the severity

01:53:16of whatever it is. It's not just your conscious coming, consciousness coming in saying like that

01:53:20was not your best self speaking or acting or whatever. How likely is it that I think that I'm

01:53:26going to be caught? And as that gets closer and closer and closer, your level of guilt increases.

01:53:32- Yeah. - You know, thinking about with the Epstein files, the day that the Epstein files came out.

01:53:39- Yeah. - What?

01:53:43- We saw a lot of people get real quiet while they were waiting to see what was released.

01:53:50- Well, if you think about

01:53:54what that day must have been like for those people, horrible. You're certainly not going to chalk it up.

01:54:00If you're a zebra, you're going home and telling your family, I had a shit day today. I got the

01:54:05equivalent of bit on the ass by an alligator, but it happened in the court of public opinion. However,

01:54:12in some ways, the concealment tax that was being paid, you know, your name's in them.

01:54:19You know, your name's in them. You know that there are being investigations and releases are happening.

01:54:26And yeah, I mean, you could hope. This is something else. I was having this conversation last night.

01:54:32You don't need karma to deliver spiritual justice, right? All that karma is, is someone repeating their

01:54:37patterns and behaviors enough times until reality finally gives them what they deserve. So imagine that

01:54:43you're a bad person. You treat most people that you interact with poorly. You screw them over in one

01:54:49form or another, maybe the same way, maybe in different ways. The only way that you make it to

01:54:54the end of your life without that coming to the surface is by basically beating the odds,

01:55:02right? You've stacked the deck against yourself. And what you're hoping is that you can somehow sort of,

01:55:07you know, tiptoe Captain Sparrow dance your way through this minefield and avoid all of the

01:55:14different tripwires and get to the other side and, oh, I did it. And then you die or whatever. Um,

01:55:25that sense that a lot of people have of that person fucking that just desserts like how the, how the,

01:55:32how the, like, how has nobody cottoned on to this thing that I think that I see about this person.

01:55:38And maybe you're right. Let's assume that you're right about your character assessment about this

01:55:42person, that they're a bad person and that this stuff should have gotten to them. What someone is

01:55:46doing is basically stacking against the deck against themselves, but presuming that you've got a

01:55:51relatively functioning conscience, that concealment burden is going to start to stack up and stack up

01:56:01and stack up. And especially if you know that there's an investigation coming and that people

01:56:04are getting closer and maybe the guilt. So yeah, some people, sure, they are bad people who make it to

01:56:13the end of their life without having been rumbled. But the only way that they did that was basically

01:56:19through luck. They fluked their way through this lop to make it to the end of, which is rare.

01:56:29Most people end up getting what they deserve. My, my mentor used to call that their,

01:56:33that person's safe is full. Like they've locked up a whole lot of stuff. You know, it's just,

01:56:39it's ready to bust open and they're easier to get to confess. They're easier to do all kinds of stuff

01:56:44because their safe is so full. That's concealment burden is high level of emotional stress, ambient

01:56:51emotional stress, also high. And the need to release that pressure.

01:56:56The release valve thing. Yeah. And that's, that's not even the economic

01:56:59pressure around the world. That's the emotional pressure inside. So, and we get to choose the

01:57:03release valve form. How's what we've spoken about to do with shame and childhood patterns related to

01:57:09the trauma triangle? Is that all wrapped up inside of that? I think, I think it might be. I don't know.

01:57:16I don't think we know shit about consciousness and all. There's so many people who have so much

01:57:21certainty that I would be embarrassed showing that level of certainty about, oh, this is exactly how

01:57:27the brain works. I've studied neuroscience for nine years. We have zero clue how the brain works. We don't

01:57:34know where memories are stored. We don't even know what they're made of. And like they're doing all

01:57:39these experiments now that are showing that consciousness might be non-local. I think you've

01:57:43had a few people on. Panpsychists. Yeah. Yeah.

01:57:46Yeah. It, it just looks like it starts, that's starting to explain a whole lot of stuff that we were

01:57:53calling anomalies that just might not be an anomaly. And Rupert Sheldrake is, is one of these guys.

01:57:59Friend of the show. Yeah. Dude. I love that guy so much.

01:58:04Morphic resonance is such a fucking cool idea, man. Like it's what's interesting to me, stuff like

01:58:09the Danny Trejo thing is a good example of that, but that's story based, right? Stories stick with

01:58:14you for a good while. If you hear about a dude that was a famous cult leader and a guy that's a famous

01:58:17movie actor being in jail together, wearing a rope around his waist, getting loaded on heroin

01:58:22through hypnosis. I'll forget my children's names before I forget that, right? On my deathbed.

01:58:29Yeah.

01:58:29Um, but the Sheldrake thing with the morphic resonance that dogs are able to detect when

01:58:37their owners are coming home, even when they alter the vehicle and the time and the mode of transport

01:58:43and the person, and they go to the window, the, did you see the one about, um, is it starlings dunking

01:58:51their heads into glass milk bottles? Did you ever learn this one? No.

01:58:55This is fucking crazy. Let me hear it.

01:58:57So, um, there was a type of bird that existed.

01:59:04I want to say in, in the UK during world war two, uh, before world war two and the glass

01:59:14milk bottles that would be put out by the milkman on everyone's front doorstep. Did that ever happen

01:59:19in the U S? Yeah. I think before we used to have a milkman. Yeah. Okay. That exists.

01:59:25Okay. I don't know about this country. It's like three seconds old. I want, I want a millennia

01:59:31old country like mine. Anyway, I like this place. I spent too much time in a Costco this morning

01:59:36and there was a glass bottle that you would leave out and it would have a foil

01:59:39lid and the foil coloring on the lid would be, uh, semi-skimmed, full fat, gold top, whatever.

01:59:45And, um, birds had realized that they could pierce the foil because it's only thin and they could stick

01:59:53their beaks in and they could drink the top filtering of this thing. Uh, and you would often,

01:59:58apparently because if you've ever put your finger into a Corona to shove a lime down the weird sort of

02:00:04fuck, I'm stuck. Like you really need to wiggle it to get it out. And a lot of the time people would

02:00:08arrive at the front doorstep and just see an upended bird. It's like a Molotov cocktail, but it's got a

02:00:15sparrow sticking out the top of, I can like this. Um, and then during world war two, all of that stopped

02:00:24because of the battle of Britain and the blackout, there were no milk deliveries. So that meant that

02:00:31all of the birds had stopped to learn this thing for generations of birds had stopped to learn this

02:00:39thing. And then when it came back, it had taken a long time for this to be developed and they'd done

02:00:44a statistical analysis of this Rupert's guys had done a statistical analysis of this. And, uh, as soon

02:00:52as the milkman began doing it again, immediately a generation of birds that had never seen a milkman

02:01:00and never seen milk bottles started doing it straight away. And you've seen this stuff where

02:01:04they teach, uh, mice to solve a maze in LA and mice that are in New York are able to solve the maze more

02:01:10quickly. Yeah. Which is insane. And there's a 10 year old boy in Japan, 10 years old, that was the

02:01:17first in the world just recently, maybe this year proved that a butterfly retains the memory of its

02:01:25ancestors and a butterfly memory also survives caterpillar metamorphosis. Because it's fully liquidized.

02:01:33Right. Yeah. Caterpillar going to a butterfly is completely liquidized.

02:01:37Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the memory goes through not just generations,

02:01:40but goes through the entire chrysalis phase of butterfly, whatever that's called transformation.

02:01:45How did the 10 year old boy prove it? Lavender.

02:01:50So when they're caterpillars, he gives them a tiny little shock. Uh, but the boy was so kind that he

02:01:58shocked them on his own arm so he could feel it too, like with the caterpillars, cause he didn't want to

02:02:03give them too much shocking, but he exposed them to lavender and a shock at the same time over and

02:02:11over and over and over, you know, three times a day, maybe per caterpillar. A little electric shock.

02:02:16Yeah. But it's like a large, like a tens unit pad, but it's like that big. I saw it and he put it on his

02:02:22arm and he gently folded over it because he didn't want to hurt the caterpillar. You know, he considered

02:02:27them his friends. It's not like this modern scientists who were just, yeah, let's torture his ass.

02:02:32So this is Pavlovian stuff. Yeah. And then when they become butterflies,

02:02:36he built this tube that's a Y shape. So they fly down this thing and they've got this fork in the road

02:02:42with sugar water at the end of both. And one of them has a little cotton ball that has lavender on it.

02:02:48And he proved that these butterflies that he had trained, the caterpillar, went straight off to the

02:02:55right away from the lavender because they had it associated with negative memory and their children

02:03:02did the same thing or their offspring did the exact same thing. And have you read Irreducible by

02:03:11Federico Fagin? What's that? It's just, it's kind of an argument against materialist reductionism.

02:03:18Okay. And you're familiar with the concept of, it's basically like if there's a, let's say like,

02:03:24Chris, let's go understand music. We're going to go understand music. We have 500 years to figure this

02:03:28out. So we go to the Philharmonic and all the instruments are out there. We're like,

02:03:32you know what we're going to do first? Let's chop this cello over there into 6,000 pieces

02:03:38and study it for 10 years under a microscope. And we understand music, zero. But we've broken

02:03:45everything down into its tiny little parts. And then finally, somebody says, we've had a massive

02:03:50breakthrough. We found the sheet music in the front of the orchestra. And then the lead scientist is

02:03:57like, good, cut it up, put it under the microscope. And then we were like the sheet music makes the

02:04:04music. So of course we can just put it under the microscope. And I don't know why, but this music

02:04:09looks like paper. It doesn't look like music. So the argument is like, if we keep just breaking

02:04:16things down into elements, we're missing the substance of what's really there.

02:04:22You familiar with Daniel Schmachtenberger? Do you know who that is?

02:04:25No.

02:04:25It's a surname that you don't forget. He's been on the show twice now, and he's got great talk on

02:04:32emergence. I'm going to send it to you. It's a little bit, it's very dense, actually. I fell in

02:04:38love with this guy's thinking. He's been a good friend ever since. But he's got this idea basically,

02:04:44which is kind of basic, right? That there can be combinations of things that allow properties to

02:04:48emerge that individually do not. You know this if you put sodium in water or whatever, and you get

02:04:55a particular, like an interesting reaction. But the same thing is true with regards to what you're

02:05:02saying here, that analyzing things in isolation don't explain what happens when they come together.

02:05:09And the inverse of this, which I first heard from him, but then Naval reused,

02:05:17was human beings locally reverse entropy.

02:05:22Locally reverse entropy, the entire universe aiming toward entropy, and we locally reverse it for

02:05:30a brief time. Ultimately, the universe is going to win, right? The battle is ours, but the war is

02:05:35always going to be theirs. But I just love that. I love that idea. I love the idea that we locally

02:05:41reverse entropy. It's really cool. It is beautiful. I mean, it's like somebody

02:05:46studying DMT and saying, "Oh yeah, it activates a receptor on your 5-HT2A serotonin receptor." Like,

02:05:54yeah. Yeah, that's what's made our ancestors see the exact same thing for 4,500 years. And that's

02:06:00what creates the entities. It's silly to think that we can really comprehend everything. We can't even define

02:06:07or understand consciousness. And we're like, "Oh yeah, it's a receptor activator. It's a receptor agonist."

02:06:15And I just think that there's way too much certainty about this stuff. We need more scientists just

02:06:23finishing a few sentences with, "As far as we know." If we just had that, a little bit more of

02:06:30of "As far as we know." I think science would advance a lot faster because it's dogmatic at this point.

02:06:37I want to talk about the DMT stuff. I feel like there's a million things to get into that we

02:06:42haven't. But let's bring this one into land here because this has been really, really fascinating.

02:06:47What's this new show where you told your team, "If we don't get death threats within the first six

02:06:52months, we're not doing our job?" The origin of this is I took an Adderall one morning.

02:07:02Great start to a day. Go on.

02:07:05I got distracted doing some work and I was like, "Shit, I didn't take an Adderall." And I took

02:07:08another one, which I've never done. My brain was not prepared for this. And I also do a little daily

02:07:18microdose action. And all that mixed together. And I was just sitting there at my desk typing or going

02:07:25through emails or something. I was like, "You know what?" Randomly, I was like, "I need to start a TV

02:07:30station." And I did. That does sound like the sort of thing someone who's taken two tabs of Adderall and

02:07:36some mushrooms would come up with. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, "You know what? I could beat Fox.

02:07:41I could beat mainstream news." So we built and own a television studio now. And we have a daily news

02:07:51show that's about to start coming out. Maybe by the time this is released, we'll have a video out.

02:07:56It's called "Station One" on YouTube. We have one or two videos out, but we're going to start daily news.

02:08:02And we're also going to, every day you'll get the news, but you'll also get how everything that

02:08:08you're being shown is different stories are actually connected. All of the psyops layers with actual

02:08:15registers and receipts for every single thing of how the news is being used to frame a narrative,

02:08:22all of that will be made public. And then every single day on the news, we'll tell you in the next

02:08:2872 hours, here's what to look out for. If you see these three words in a bill that Congress passes at

02:08:33like 2 a.m., you need to watch out for this thing. If this oil company invests in this one thing in the

02:08:39next four days, you need to watch out for this. This is probably going to happen. So every single day,

02:08:43it should feel, and we follow the format of the president's daily brief from the director of the

02:08:49CIA. And that's the daily news. It's like the president's daily brief exact format. And I think

02:08:56it's going to be good. I think people are going to like it. And there's no narrative. There's no

02:09:00left and right politics, which doesn't really exist. And I think it's, I think it's going to be pretty

02:09:07cool. Heck yeah. Chase Hughes, ladies and gentlemen. Chase, you're awesome, man. I'm looking forward to

02:09:11speaking to you next time. Me too. Thanks, Bruce. All right. See you next time, everyone. Dude,

02:09:16fucking crushed it. So good. Yeah, man. Appreciate it, Bill. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you

02:09:22enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one even more.

02:09:30Go on, press it.

Key Takeaway

Modern social media exploits the brain's 200,000-year-old fear of tribal ostracization by using FEAR-based cycles to keep users performative, lonely, and vulnerable to manipulation through context engineering.

Highlights

Human brains are evolved for tribal groups of 120-130 individuals, making modern social media environments, where people face judgment from millions, a primary driver of the current loneliness pandemic.
Brainwashing follows a four-step formula represented by the acronym FEAR: focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition.
Social media algorithms use 'fractionation'—rapidly cycling users between content that makes them feel good and content that triggers fear or scarcity—to keep them engaged and extract more revenue.
Individuals are 10 times more likely to accept a pre-packaged enemy or logical solution when they are destabilized by horizontal conflict with peers.
The most followable leaders, regardless of their actual competence, speak at a lower grade level and display high confidence without hesitation in their behavior.
Confidence is defined by a willingness to receive social injury and a generalized belief that situations will resolve positively, rather than adopting external behavioral 'symptoms' of power.

Timeline

Social Media and the Loneliness Pandemic

Social media has exponentially increased the consequences of being judged from a local tribe of 30-40 people to a global audience of millions.
Constant performative behavior on digital platforms prevents genuine connection, leading to a pandemic of loneliness even in crowded rooms.
The persona adopted to gain social approval is incapable of receiving genuine love, only praise.

The current era is characterized by an unprecedented level of psychological manipulation facilitated by digital media. Because human brains are wired for small, 120-person tribes, the fear of public ostracization remains a mortal threat. Social media forces individuals to maintain a performative 'costume' to avoid judgment, leaving the real person unseen and unable to establish deep connections.

The Mechanics of Brainwashing

Brainwashing utilizes a four-step cycle: focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition.
Algorithms perform 'fractionation' by rapidly alternating between positive content and fear-based, scarcity-driven narratives to deepen user susceptibility.
Destabilized populations fighting horizontally are 10 times more likely to accept pre-packaged, logical-sounding enemies.

Brainwashing is an actionable process. Algorithms generate massive focus through novelty, build emotional state changes via fractionation—similar to hypnosis techniques popularized in the 1950s—and induce agitation by disrupting future predictability. This process creates a blank slate in the user, making them highly susceptible to advertising or political messaging.

Authority, Influence, and Context Engineering

Followable leaders utilize confidence, clarity, and discipline while avoiding micro-hesitations.
Persuasion is the process of engineering conditions rather than just outcomes.
Context dictates behavior: if the environment is shifted enough, people will perform actions they would otherwise find unacceptable.

Leadership is less about the quality of the leader and more about the degree to which they are 'followable' during times of chaos. Elite influencers do not just focus on outcomes; they engineer the conditions and contexts that make desired behaviors feel like the only logical choice for the participant.

Interrogation Protocols and Deception Detection

The four steps to gain a confession are: socialize, minimize, rationalize, and project.
There is no single 'deception' behavior; one must establish a baseline and detect deviations or clusters of stress.
Insecurity is physically revealed through artery protection, interrupted gestures, and increased blink rates under stress.

Interrogation is simply a massive shift in context and perception. By alleviating the burden of guilt through rationalization and projection, interrogators make it psychologically safer for a subject to admit guilt. Reliable cues for stress and insecurity include rapid blink rate changes, lip compression, and defensive posturing, but these must be interpreted as clusters rather than individual signs.

Trauma Release and Emotional Debt

Emotional debt is formed when childhood behaviors developed for safety become rigid, adult 'source code'.
Concealment of shame is cognitively more taxing than complex analytical tasks.
Physical movement, such as neurogenic tremors, is an essential, autonomic healing mechanism for trauma that humans suppress to avoid appearing weak.

Processing trauma effectively requires bypassing the cognitive mind and engaging the autonomic nervous system. Humans suppress natural healing tremors that other mammals use to process adrenaline after threats. The constant effort to conceal one's true self behind a 'decorator crab' exterior of artificial ornaments causes chronic emotional exhaustion and overdrafts one's psychological health.

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