Modern Wisdom - Psyop Expert: Secret Techniques For Psychological Power - Chase Hughes - #1103

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Chase Hughes is a former U.S. Navy Chief, behavior and influence expert, speaker, and author. Are you being brainwashed right now? What if the ideas you think are yours were carefully planted to make you believe you came up with them yourself? Maybe this pod is a psyop, maybe it isn’t, but listen, and maybe you’ll learn how to spot one. Expect to learn if we happen to live in the most psychologically manipulated era in history, what the most effective mass behavioural engineering campaign in history was, how mass persuasion and brainwashing work at scale, the behaviors that unconsciously trigger attraction, how to read anyone and spot their insecurities fast and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who are you? How do you describe what you do for work? It's so hard. But if I'm talking to somebody that's boring, I'll just tell them I teach psychology stuff. But if I want to get into it, I'll say, you know, I teach everything from brainwashing to interrogation applied on yourself and other people. And most of what I do is train sales teams nowadays. So sales has gotten really addicted to this stuff. But I've studied neuroscience for a long time. And I spent my life trying to figure out how the brain works. how to shift human behavior, not just like to get someone to confess to something in an interrogation, but how do we modify our own behavior? And what are the mechanics that make that possible?

Do you think we're living in the most psychologically manipulated era in human history? Yes. Hands down. But, I mean, you go to ancient Rome. Some shit would happen, and they would say, hey, do the lion fighting thing with the guy. Let's distract everybody. So I don't think it's new. I think it's a lot more pervasive, though. Is that because of it being facilitated through technology, or is that because of a requirement for control? What's the motivation for that? I think the just the digital media. If you think about what is the number one fear of human beings? Like every psychology class talks about it.

It's public speaking. But it's never public speaking. It's, I don't want to be judged. I don't want to be ostracized because in our brain that's 200,000 years old, getting kicked. out of a tribe means I'm dead. I'm not going to have sex. I 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, if I did something stupid in high school or even as an adult, I have to worry about 30 or 40 people judging me and maybe, you know, really kind of kicking me out of a social group. And now with social media, you've got to worry about

five or 10 million. So the consequences of doing something wrong are unbelievably exponentially increased, which has made us a whole different society, which we could get into. And this is the origin of this pandemic of loneliness that we're in right now, where everybody will agree that we're in a pandemic levels of loneliness and nobody, you don't hear anyone saying, I'm lonely, which is a deeper root of this exact problem. What's happening then? You ever said a French philosopher, this guy named Sartre? I've read a little bit of his stuff, but like just single quotes.

He had this play. It was called Sartre's Hell, where three people are locked in a room, basically, like this. And it's a play. But the room's not totally locked. Every couple hours the door opens and you can leave if you want to. But nobody leaves. and they're all desperate to be seen a certain way by someone else. This one guy, I'm paraphrasing, but he wants to be seen as a good person.

So he asked this woman, and they're, please tell me I'm a good person, please. And she says, yeah, you're a good person, but he knows. She doesn't mean it. So he stays. The door opens, nobody leaves, and they stay because they're waiting for this confirmation from other people who they are. And in this world today, with how performative and artificial everybody has become, I've got to show my best self, I've got to hide shame, I've got to conceal all this guilt and stuff that people carry around. The reason that somebody can feel lonely in a room full of people, and I'm not just talking about it on Facebook, I'm saying, like, in a real room full of people, is because no matter how many times your friends come over and pat you on the back and say,

oh, Chris, you did a great job. We love you. You're a great guy. Your spouse might say, oh, we love you and you're a great person. In the back of your mind, you know you're faking it, and you know that none of them really like the real you. And you get at the end of the day, and I'm not saying this is you, but at the end of the day, you're lonely in a room of 150, 200 people because you know that none of them know you. And you haven't ever really been seen by anybody. So increased fear of judgment because of social media equals increased performance equals I'm wearing a costume almost all the time. And nobody has ever seen me. Nobody really knows me. So even if they claim to like me in the back of my brain, there's this little reminder mechanism that says they don't like the real me. And nobody ever has. Nobody's ever seen me. So this is my opinion, but I think that's the root of our, of the pandemic that we're in right now of loneliness.

Like we're more connected than ever and more performative than ever at the same time. So we can't really connect. And our brains are wired for 120, 130 person tribe. And we start getting over that and we have massive issues. It's interesting that a lot of the time, the person, has been subsumed by the persona, the role that people are playing. But the persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise at best.

And it feels like a pat on the back. The same as people don't love Chris Hemsworth. They love Thor. They don't love Russell Crow. They love Gladiator. So how can you be surprised if you don't genuinely existentially feel the connection with your pursuits and your successes? and the people around you,

you know that they're just applauding the role that you play, as opposed to seeing who you are truly. Yeah. Have you seen the movie Pig with Nicholas Cage? No. You've got to watch it. Even if you watch this one scene, it's like five minutes long.

Nicholas Cage plays this guy who's just kind of had enough, and he stopped performing forever. Like, he doesn't care. He's not mean or anything, just doesn't perform. And he goes to this restaurant, he's a famous chef, and he's exiled and stuff. And this chef is just pretending to be a certain type of person so that his restaurant is more successful. And Nicholas Cage just basically says, none of this is real.

You're not real, which means they're not real. And none of this, everything's fake. Everything here is completely fake. And you're going to wake up every day, and there's going to be less of you and less of you until there's nothing left that you will ever recognize again. And it's this massive awakening scene for this guy. And it's beautiful. And I think when people watch it, they assume,

oh, I'm in the Nick Cage role here. And maybe sometimes in our life we are, but I think in other times we need to be kind of shaken awake and somebody grabs our little camera and changes our camera angle to look at a situation differently. I want to be woken up like that in every possible way. And I think that's what we all need. Is brainwashing real?

What's true and false about that? Brainwashing is absolutely real. There's a four-step process, and it spells out the word fear. It's focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition. So if we start with focus, this is me routinely breaking what you are predicting to be what's going to happen next,

over and over and over and a massive amount. One or two times, this is what triggers a mammal brain, our mammal brain, and a dog. You're walking down a pathway in the woods and a stick breaks behind a tree. You're like, what was that? You're not worried about anything else. So the fastest way to generate human focus or mammal focus is novelty. Some genuine thing happens that you didn't expect. So that's the first.

That's what we generate massive amount of focus. And then it's emotion. And with emotion, there's an old hypnosis technique that came, that became popular in the 50s. This guy named Dr. Milton Erickson popularized this thing called fractionation. So if you, and you'll be familiar with like Channel 4 and Darren Brown. I know a lot of Americans aren't, but he's kind of a, there's no American equivalent of Darren Brown. O's maybe the closest, Pelman? Yeah, I was probably, yeah.

So they figured out, like, if I pull somebody down in hypnosis and then take them gently out of it, when I put them right back down in, so this is in quick succession. I take you out of hypnosis, and then I put you back into hypnosis again. You'll go deeper every time. And there's no such thing as depth in hypnosis.

What they essentially mean is you'll have more GABA. You know, what GABA is. It's a neurotransmitter in your system, like the safety chemical. And you'll also have a higher degree of theta wave brain. state. And if I can just keep going up and the meck down and up and the make down, you're deeper and deeper and deeper and a hole every single time. So if you look at your feed, anybody out there, you open whatever feed you want on any, whatever app you're thinking of right now, you kind of scroll through your feed, you're going to see stuff that kind of brings you back up, but only for a

second or two. And then it's fear and scarcity. And it follows the thing of getting your focus, showing you an authority figure, telling you something threatening, making you fearful of judgment of a tribe, and then making you emotional, and then bringing you back up and then back down on that cycle. So it's focus, authority, tribe, and emotion.

You'll see it in your feed, guaranteed. And you don't even need to scroll for like five minutes. You'll see it right away. And then it'll be like one little thing to kind of bring you up, like one of those videos where the people are like,

oh, we just found this baby deer on our porch one day, and we decided to bottle feed him and raise him. And then, you know, it's like a fast cut to where like he's a giant deer, like sleeping in the kid's bed or something and he's like a family member now. It's like a heartwarming video that feels, and I love watching those. But it feels great. And then bam, they pull you back down again into the cycle. But what you'll notice after you see that fear video at the end of the Focus Authority Tribe and Emotion, right at the end of that, they're either going to A, bring you up or B, show you an ad. Now, I've never,

never heard anybody talk about this before, but you can absolutely see it. And I'm not immune. Like, I've bought stupid shit on Instagram like anybody else. Knowing about this stuff, like, doesn't get you vaccinated against manipulation. I bought the dumbest shit in the world on Instagram. It just means I'm a well-informed victim of this stuff. But that's the core of brainwashing is focus, emotion. That's the fractionation part of up and down, then agitation. So this is doing something to where the mammalian brain recognizes this is a different environment than I was expecting, not a thing that's happening. So now the landscape is changing. The oil prices are going up. This big thing is happening.

There's a shortage of some critical resource. And then repetition. So if it's in a detainee environment, the massive focus is then being woken up in the middle of the night over and over by strobe lights and loud sounds, cold water, that kind of stuff. Then the emotion, the entire time, sitting there in your prison cell or whatever, I've got every photo your family's ever posted on the internet playing on a slideshow using a projector on the wall. So focus, emotion, then agitation. Something is extremely disrupting to your ability to predict the future. That's agitation, and then repetition. The cycle begins again. And you can kind of do whatever you want. That process creates a blank slate in people, and that's like the baseline formula of, of

how brainwashing works. And that is exactly what social media is using. Yes, but I think a lot of people think, oh, there's some dark conference table, dudes smoking cigars, like, how can we, not can we really mess these people up? I don't think it's that at all. I think it's just an algorithm that's rewarding what's creating the most revenue. So, like, showing you an ad for shoes is way easier, after you watch the little baby deer video,

or after I make you think that the water supply is being destabilized. So I think it's just an algorithm. I think there's many other things where there's people involved and manipulating the public. I don't think that social media is doing that on purpose, that one piece of it.

The piece that I do absolutely think this is being done on purpose is if you're on the left and you open your feed, you're going to be shown the dumbest piece of shit, idiots on the other side that they could possibly find. And if you're on the right, you're going to be seeing the exact same thing about people on the left. And with the number one goal being,

in the deepest part of your mind, you cannot help but make a permanent judgment about reality of those people are effing crazy. All of them are crazy. I can't trust them. I can't listen to them. and this is a campaign that I think is called engineered division. And if I can get people fighting horizontally, they're not going to look up. If I can get somebody destabilized and kind of at ends at odds with each other, your ability to think critically is reduced by like 50%. This is massive, and they've shown this in many studies. And just getting someone destabilized in that way where they're kind of fighting each other,

they're distrustful of their neighbors, they're 10 times more easy to manipulate. So if you think of, like, how our brain works, if you're falling off a cliff, your arms and legs are going to flail all over the place, they're moving everywhere. The first solid object that touches your body, you're going to, like, instinctively grab onto it, even if it's a thornbush or barbed wire, you'll grab it. So when a population is destabilized and something clear and, like, logical is presented, something like a pre-packaged enemy, I'll just leave that there, is given to you, you're 10 times more likely to accept it because it's clear, it's prepackaged, and it's easy to follow.

And humans do not ever follow like the best leader in a situation. They follow the most followable. And there's a big difference between those things. So destabilization, that would be step number one. and two Chinese intelligence officers wrote a paper on this. It's called, I think it's called unrestricted warfare. It's been translated into English. And they use a hypothetical country that really looks like the United States in this paper. But they talk about this asymmetric warfare and how we have to get them fighting each other. We have to make them distrustful of each other.

And we destabilize the government from the inside because we can't win a terrestrial war with these people. And all of this is just written out there. You could buy this probably on Amazon for like three or four bucks. This translated book is probably online too. But it's very open. It's not just like the normal bad guys that you hear about. These are foreign state actors that are doing some of this stuff. We just had a former mayor of a city in California, I believe,

that was proven to be an operative. for China, a mayor. And so I think people are thinking like there's some ancient, rich family, you know, in the depths of some cave somewhere plotting the destruction of the world. I think it's just countries that hate each other and greedy, selfish companies. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but if you're watching the news and you don't hear nuance, you are being manipulated. Because they're giving you a message.

Here's the enemy. Here's how to feel about what you're watching on the news. And here's exactly what's happening. And they'll tell you that this, this and this, all these three things happen. They'll never tell you how they're connected. They'll act like everything's a separate story. So I think there's an agenda. I won't pretend.

I'd be a fool to say, like, I can understand or know the end game of any of this stuff. That's a long-ass answer to your question. What makes a leader followable? Yeah. there are authority first, the perception of authority. And we trust in order. There are five things that make us trust another human being. First is confidence.

So the person doesn't have any reservations. They're talking clearly. They're speaking in a way that I can clearly understand. They're not using academic language, which is why most presidents, the president who speaks at a lower grade level is, I think, like, 35% more likely to win a debate. So that makes them followable, right? Confidence and literacy.

Like, it's clear to understand them. They're very confident. Next is discipline. And I don't mean that this, the person is, like, making videos of themselves waking up and, like, hey, here's my morning routine. But I mean, like, we can see discipline on people. we can see somebody that has self-control and discipline, and that starts coming through. We can pick up on that.

And then leadership, and for good or bad, there's cult leaders that have all these problems, or all these qualities too. Gratitude and enjoyment. The gratitude just being like, I'm thankful for what's happening right now in the moment. I'm emotionally stable. I'm easy to follow.

But we're not really going into all that. Our brain's shortcut is that we follow someone who is probably loudest, clearest and has no hesitation in their behavior. So our brains are trained to look for micro hesitations and automatically give us a little gut feeling of, oh, I shouldn't trust that person. So micro hesitations are the fastest way to destroy authority. In both of those scenarios that you just described,

the world being chaotic and difficult and confusing and something being offered up as order in one example, it's an enemy that's pre-packaged, there's order, why is this going bad, it could be a million reasons, or it could be that group over there, and the same thing for leaders, I don't understand what's going to happen, we've got all of these different directions that we could go down, don't worry, all of that chaos doesn't need to be worried about, because I have the order, and I can wrangle this system to bring it to bear. Yeah, for better or worse, and that's what has.

happens. And if you just, the way that I describe this very simply is the process is to close down a machine or close, close everything down, build pressure inside of it, and then decide where the pressure is going to release. So it's a, it's a controlled release of pressure that's been being built up on purpose. And sometimes that is like the pressure is some relief. Like we have this national thing that's happening and the pressure release is chosen at a certain point. And there's a lot of people that say, like, track the money. If you track pressure, like financial pressure, economic pressure, shipping and trade pressure, oil shipping around the world, tracking the pressure is always more revealing from an intelligence perspective than

tracking the money. This pressure is going to show you, like, it has to have a release valve somewhere. And nine times out of ten, there is a person or group of people that are choosing how and where the release valve is going to be. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 next gen, the same one scoop ritual, but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was

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and that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Are heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What's the outcome you think that those people want? Like the they? Yeah, the they. If there is, part of this is social media algorithms have reverse engineered the way that humans' brains work, because it's a very simple algorithm. Super simple.

And the fact that it's simple is why it's so effective, because if you started to put constraints on it, you would be trying to predict the best way to get the outcome that you want. The best way to get the outcome that is to just let it optimize for that outcome and reverse engineer however it got that. Yeah. That's why we can complain all we want about the algorithms, but even the engineers, you open up the black box of YouTube, but you open up the black box. but you open up the black box of TikTok, they don't know what's happening inside of there. There is no knowing about what's happening inside of there. This is just recursive algorithms training itself.

Yeah. Interesting. The coolest thing I learned about this is from Stuart Russell, guy that wrote the textbook on AI. So up until probably 2020 when the transformer technology and LLMs came along, it may still be the case. I know he's still talking about this a lot.

I think his textbook had been translated into 100 languages. So it was used around the world. It was the canonical textbook for AI. Stuart Russell. He wrote this book called Human Compatible. He's talking about computers, humans, some psychology, a lot of AI and computer science. You said that there's two ways that algorithms can become better at predicting what it is that you're going to click on. The first one is serving you content, which is more akin to something that you want to press. Right. Like, all that you're trying to optimize is CTR and watchtime, basically,

which is kind of every algorithm now, I can just better predict what it is that you want and give you that. But the other side is I can nudge your preferences to make them easier to predict. So it's a bidirectional relationship. And it's not like anybody told the black box algorithm to go and do this, but over time it knows, hey, if I walk people down, the sequence of steps. And this is where I think the truth about pipelines and radicalization comes along.

But it's not necessarily radicalization to an extreme of one particular worldview. It's an extreme of predictability. Yeah. And this bidirectional relationship between becoming better at working out what you want to click and becoming better at making you more predictable to work out your preferences, that is really, I mean, it's when you told me about it, it blew my mind. It's one of the most mind-blowing things that I've ever heard. Dude, I've got to read this because...

It's fucking spectacular, eh? When I teach, like, persuasion and influence, I'm actually here in town today teaching. I've been on stage all morning doing a, like, a seminar. You need a new time, that's what you need. Yeah. So when I teach, what I'm telling people is your first goal is being able to engineer and build the perfect client. So I make the person the perfect recipient for what I need to give them. So if I know the outcome is I need you to click on Baby Deer videos,

I'm going to engineer the shit out of that to where I'm not going to like just start showing them to you. I'm going to make you the perfect recipient before I start shifting your behavior. So the way that I typically describe this is if you learn persuasive, interrogation, sales, whatever it is. They're going to teach you how to engineer outcomes because people are obsessed with the outcome. But I argue that if you're good, what you engineer are conditions. And if I can engineer the right conditions, I can get you to do anything, anything. And just as an example, just of how powerful conditions and context are, I think it was in the 1940s.

this stage hypnotist guy is doing like a comedy club thing we're like oh the guy next to you farted and it smells really bad you're on a roller coaster now and it's like all of this stuff but there's like 10 or 15 people up on stage and then part of the show is all right

all of your cops you got called to a party everybody in the audience is a party right now and the more the audience laughs the more you're going to get upset So they get up and they're not allowed to leave the stage, so they're all kind of yelling, pretending like these kids are like a house party or something. Then he's like, oh, one of them's got a gun, he's going to take you down.

And one of these guys on the stage is an off-duty police officer carrying a weapon, starts firing into the crowd, a real gun. And I think one person was in, I don't know if he died, but it shot a real gun into a crowd. Their cop was a good person, well, all meaning, just wanted to go out with his wife, you know, for an evening. But context can dictate your behavior no matter what. Like, we're going to probably both you and I, not together, but we will get naked by the end of the day, both of us.

We're going to get into a shower. The day is young. The day is young. We're going to get into a shower, get into a bath, whatever. But we're not like, as we're standing in front of the shower, we're not like, oh, I don't know if I should. We just get naked, right? So context, context tells us what's allowed. So if I can modify context, I can get you to do anything.

All I have to do is it's a PCP formula. I change your perception about the situation that's going on. Then I say, yeah, since you're viewing this differently, it's actually this situation where people are trying to do X. or I reframe this as someone is a complete threat. But I've changed your perception of what's possible to do. Then the context is some person is a threat. And they're a mortal.

Now I say the word mortal. They're a mortal threat. So I've changed the category. And if I shift category and context, that changes what you think you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. Does that make sense? So like if I'm in a perfect world, the only question, like if you're really good at this stuff, like a lot of these systems are, what is the context where the behavior I want you to do is automatic?

What is the context? So if I can make you believe that you're in a shooting range and you're actually standing in a bar, your behavior is going to be very different. So what you're really seeing over time is a drift of perception. and then context. So with this PCP, perception, context, and permission. Permission is that final thing that says, oh, in this context, I'm completely allowed to do this, and it makes perfect sense. So a lot of what we're seeing is context engineering.

So if you look at the Milgram experiment, which I think a lot of people are familiar with, essentially they prove that people will shock strangers what they think is to death in about 47 minutes. at a 70% success rate or failure rate, whatever you want to call that. But they didn't have a script. There wasn't some magic sales script where they brought them in and they had the right words to say in the magic hypnosis guy that comes in there.

It's just a dude in a lab coat. And all they did in the Milgram experiment is engineer the conditions that make it okay. The context made that shocking behavior. missable. You mentioned there about people or technologies that are unbelievably good at manipulating behavior. When it comes to seeing operators, people, who's the most effective behavioral manipulator that you've ever seen operate in front of you? I can't say names. The guys, I think he's still active, but he could get pretty much anybody to do anything, but he shifted the context. So the task that I gave him is go into this social, very social environment.

There's like a band playing. It's like a bar, like a pub. This is a real thing. Yeah. And I said, I want you to have someone, let's say, laid out on the floor thinking that They're just completely unconscious in like seven minutes. And I couldn't hear anything that was being said. And he did it.

He did it within like three, four minutes. And I asked him, I said, what did you do? And he's like, oh, I just told her I was a hypnotherapist. And I asked what she wanted to, how she wanted to change her life. And she was really, really excited that she wanted more discipline. And I just told her I would give her more discipline. And it's really easy. So he shifted the context to her being helped instead of controlled.

and made it okay for her to be laying on the floor and made everything okay just because he shifted the context. It's the same in interrogation rooms to where the context shifts and there's like a five-step protocol that people use to make someone confess to a crime. And if you really examine what the protocol is, it's just a massive shift in context and perception.

What's the protocol? You ready? Yes. So it's socialize, minimize, rationalize and project. Is that not four? Yeah, it's four steps, and then there's an alternative question at the end. Okay.

Is it this or this? So just like name a crime that's not gross that we can actually talk about, anything you want. Like stolen money. Texting while driving. Okay, texting while, well, they're not going to be an interrogation room. Okay, yeah, cool. Smuggling arms. Okay, smuggling arms.

Great. All right. So the first step would be. Social. Fucking interrogation room for texting while driving. It's just armies of interrogators up and down the United States highways. Okay. It might solve the problem.

Okay. So smuggling arms. So you're talking to this person and you decided that it's time to shift into interrogation. The beginning of an interrogation is called the interview process and the shift is called the confrontation. So the confrontation is basically just where you tell them like they're lying. but you don't do it in a way that hurts their ego.

So I might say something like, Chris, I appreciate you, and I just want you to know, I've been doing this a really long time. I've talked to a lot of people. And if there's one thing I know for sure, it's when I'm not getting the full story. And I don't think I'm getting the full story here. And then I go right into the socialized part of this thing. And when I say socialize, it's basically people will understand.

So the line is, I think at the end of the day, you did this because you're a good person. And I'm going to explain why. And I've talked to a lot of bad people, and I know you're not a bad person. And I think when people see all the steps that led up to you getting wrapped up in this that they're going to understand, then minimize.

And like I said, I don't think you're a bad guy. And to be honest, I deal with bad people all the time, and people that do way worse stuff than this. I've seen people that have done way worse than this, get completely over it. So it's not that big of a deal. I'm not, nobody's accusing you of being some mass murder or something like that. This is not the same thing.

Then it's rationalized. I know you came from a poor village. I know that you had a really tough background, and I know that you're a good person. And I'm not saying whether or not you were doing this to pay for it, but I know that your aunt has several hundred thousand dollars of medical bills that she's needed to pay. Now I project. So now the project is basically it's not your fault. And I think anybody that was handed your conditions and your life would have probably made the same choices that you did. And I know a lot of times these arms smuggling rings will use threats and pressure to get someone into the unit.

So if that happened to you, I just want you to know. That's something that I want to know about. So I know that you didn't like deliberately decide to do this. And then we move into the alternative question. And I'll say, so Chris, what I'm really trying to find out here is, were you doing this just to make a bunch of money and then go buy a bunch of drugs and live in some other country?

Were you really like trying to help one of your family members? Because I know these guys have been talking to you and I've looked into you as well and it doesn't look like you're a bad person. So now it's an alternative question of, are you a piece of crap or did you try to do something good for your family? Both of them are admissions of guilt though? Yeah, yeah.

I'm just trying to find out the reason that this happened. You're not. You're trying to find out an admission of guilt. Yes. Yes. But in the conversation, we're trying to find the reason it happened. So we're going for the admission of guilt because the first part of the interrogation, there's like a long series of questions we ask. And based on those responses, if they respond a certain way to each question, then we move towards the confession methodology.

And they're basic questions. Like if there was a robbery in some neighborhood here, can I say, the city that we're in? Of course. Okay. So let's say like two blocks away or maybe, yeah, two blocks from here, there's a neighborhood in Austin. And there's a, there's a neighborhood there, and let's say you robbed a house. One of those questions to determine how guilty you are is one of my favorite questions in the world. It's called the bait question. And it basically says, let's imagine you did this. I want to put you in the mindset so you can understand the question. Let's say you stole a bike out of this person's garage a couple days ago. I called you up and was like, hey, I think you might have seen something that's going to help us in the case.

Could you please come in here and talk to us about the case? You come in and say, Chris, dude, thank you for coming in. This is important to us. We've got officers out there that they've been working all through the night collecting evidence and stuff. I just want to ask you one question. And you seem like a really good guy. So I want you to think really carefully before you answer this. Is there any reason whatsoever that one of the neighbors would have a ring doorball camera

that shows your vehicle in that area? So now you're confronted with a dilemma of if I say no and he whoops out a video, now I'm a liar and they probably know that I did this. If I say, yes, I'm placing myself at the scene of the crime, right? And the cool thing is that someone who's innocent would be like, nope. And it would be instantly, they would have no hesitation. They'd have tons of confidence. Nope, there's absolutely no reason.

So that's one of those kind of set up questions. And another one of- Regardless of whether you've got the ring doorbell footage or not. Yes, and I don't say that I have it. Is there any reason why? Yes. Is there any reason that one of the officers would have received some ring doorbell or some doorbell video camera footage

that shows your vehicle in that area. Not you do anything bad. And another one is, another great question, I can't reveal all these, but another great question is called the punishment question. And this works on kids. It works on adults.

It doesn't matter. And it's just a few words long. I would say, what do you think should happen to the person that did this? And you'll always get amazing answers. I'll give you my kids example. And this is from they were seven and eight, give or take.

I came home from work. I'm in like my camo uniform. And we had a white living room rug, and there's like a little cardboard thing of chocolate milk, just like sitting on its side, and there's like a little pool of chocolate milk on the carpet. And they were both playing the Xbox. The milk's like right there.

A few feet away, I was like, what the hell? Guys? Like, oh, I don't know. And I was like, did you guys do this? And they're like, nope. And I said, all right, William, kitchen, Charlotte dining room. Fucking prisoner. Prisoners dilemmaed them.

Yeah. And I went over to Charlotte. Yeah, it was Charlotte. And I said, Charlotte, what do you think should happen to the person that did this? And she goes, spankins, grounded, no more Xbox. can't play with the friends, no more sleepovers, can't eat in the living room anymore. It just goes on and on.

I was like, okay, all right. It's a kid's equivalent of capital punishment. Yeah, and I was like, damn. So I went to William and I said, Will, what do you think should happen to the person that did this? He goes, uh, maybe no more chocolate milk in the living room. And there we go. I had my guy really quick.

Have you ever seen those videos of when there's three dogs in the house and one of them's ripped the shit out of a, a couch or something and two of them are just sort of looking like this and the other one's got his face up against the wall. That is so good. I want to see dog interrogation

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Revealing something. Yeah. Just being something that's honest and true. So it resonates. What would be an example? it would depend on the situation. But I might say something like, you know. Bike stole. Let's stay with that. The stolen bike or the arms, whichever you want.

Well, yeah. So you're talking about interrogation room rapport? Yeah. Oh, okay, that's different. Oh, actually, stick with the normal rapport and then we'll go back to interrogation. Yeah. So normal rapport, the admission might be, you know, I was so like in my own head. I was so afraid to be open around other people.

And I kind of like wore a mask for like 10, 15 years of my life until. I realize, like, it's not a big deal as I think it is. I'm not a big deal as I thought I was. And just saying something that other people really wouldn't and being honest about it is one of the, one of the fastest ways to make trust start happening in a conversation because just people are so fake that that is somehow rare now. And that's why I think podcasts where there's a genuine dude on there get more views than CNN. I think Rogan's got more views than CNN. But at the end of the day, that's one of the fastest ways to do it. Another one of the fastest ways to do it in this world is to have ignorance and fascination about something that you pride yourself in knowing a lot about. So like if you're an electrical engineer or something, or, you know, maybe you wire podcast studios for a living.

I'd be like, God, that's always fascinated me with all that stuff. I don't think I could do that if I, if I try. tried for a year. I'm just not inclined to do that, but it's still fascinating. That's one of the fastest ways to absolutely do that. And I do think rapport is a little bit overrated. I think at the end of the day, having contagious confidence to where your confidence is high enough, where the other person feels confident, is so much more effective. And rapport is a byproduct of that. So I always try to think like, what is upstream of the thing that I want? So if I want this as my desired in-state, what are all the things that needed to happen to make this just an automatic byproduct of what I want

at the end of the day? And one of the things that we found out over these years is in an interrogation room or in some business setting, it doesn't actually matter. Is this level of confidence without any hierarchy or status? And the biggest mistake that most people make is like, If I say the word confidence, you're going to think more than who or higher than or less confidence than. And that hierarchy thinking is the fastest way to collapse any kind of skill in human beings because it pushes your awareness back behind your eyes. And I think if your awareness is in front of your eyes, people can really, really feel that. And one metaphor I used to talk about this a lot is if I could go on a slight. rant here. If you went into like, we're in Austin, so there's probably a piano store somewhere.

Let's say you and I went into like a big ass piano store. And they got this big grand piano there. And I go up to the piano and I smash down the middle key really hard, which is a C. It's going to send out this frequency through the entire store. And the C string on every other piano is going to start resonating like crazy. But it's going to send out this frequency through the entire store. And the C string on every other piano is going to start resonating like crazy. But it's only that string is going to vibrate. It's because it's tuned to that frequency, right? It's not going to vibrate any other strings except proceed. The same thing works for tuning forks. So when I teach this stuff, it's that humans work almost exactly the same way. And one of the phrases that I teach is, wherever you're speaking from is where you're going to

speak to and other people. Where you speak from, you will speak to. So, If we're in a conversation and I'm worried about hierarchy and status, I'm plucking that same chord in the person I'm speaking to. Because that comes through. If I'm very confident and not insecure confidence, posturing kind of stuff, that's going to trigger confidence in the other person. So true confidence is really contagious. And the other confidence, like where you can tell somebody's like read 15 of those LinkedIn articles,

of like, oh, how to display CEO level confidence. Make solid eye contact, firm handshake, pat somebody on the arm, use their name, that kind of shit. Genuine confidence makes other people confident. Absolutely. And having enough confidence to share without ever viewing it in the lens of hierarchy and status is the fastest way to like this, whatever people call charisma. I think it's the fastest route. How do you think about appearing confident in a room?

Can you rephrase that? What are the component parts of appearing confident to somebody? Well, what we're really doing, like if you read one of those articles about like how confident people command a room and all like, there's YouTube videos all day long for that stuff. What I think they're made of is they're studying the symptoms of. of confidence. So if I wrap you in a heating blanket and squirt water in your nose, it does not give you COVID,

but it gives you a couple of symptoms, right? It doesn't work in reverse all the time. So what I think a lot of those people that train online is they see somebody who's genuinely confident and like, oh, what are they doing with their body? They're standing up straight. They're speaking from their diaphragm.

They're doing all. of these things, they use hand gestures like this. And then they're like, okay, let's make an Excel spreadsheet out of this. We're going to figure the shit out. Like, all right, how wide was the hand gesture? Like, let me check. It's 36 inches. Yeah, it was 36. So then we train somebody to do this with their hands at 36 inches and they've got social anxiety. They're going to look like an idiot. It's not going to look congruent. It's going to feel like, whoa, what's going on with this guy? So I think our culture is just obsessed with symptoms in general. Like I want the Ferrari and the yacht, and I don't want the bank account.

I mean, I want the symptoms of being wealthy. I want to show people that I have symptoms of wealth. But if you look at the cause of confidence, and I think my definition of confidence is way different than what you read online, but I think confidence is two elements. Number one, it is a willingness to receive social injury. I'm willing to be socially injured. Number two, it is a generalized or kind of a fuzzy belief that things are going to work out okay.

Things are going to be okay. So that social injury is typically why people can't feel confident. So it's social injury or permission. I don't have permission to be like that here. If I make 50K a year, I'm not going to be confident walking into that Hermes, Irme's, whatever, Louis Vuitton. luggage place. Fucking Gucci. Yeah, whatever.

And the confidence comes from like permission. I don't have permission to be here. They can tell that I'm not from here. So that's a role-based permission. But if you're willing to receive social injury, you're totally fine with it. You have a generalized expectation that things are going to be okay. That is the first step to like really feeling confident and completely eliminating hierarchy and status from your mental thoughts forever for the rest of your life, I think is the best way.

Because it's not related to how you and somebody else interact. It's within you. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like this is going to go okay. And if social rejection does come my way, I'm fine with it. Yeah, it's a social injury. That's okay. It might hurt. I'm not saying I'm immune to any of it. It might hurt, but I'm okay. I'm happy to receive it. What do you make of Trump's behavior? How do you analyze him as a communicator? It's a fabulous communicator. I think he speaks at a, I think, a seventh grade level. A lot of good leaders speak at a low level.

I think Obama was seventh or eighth grade level as well. But why do they do that? They will become more followable, like exactly what we're talking about with authority and while we follow authority figures in times of distress. and I think he's a communicator that is obviously self-serving, self-fulfilling, and people call him a narcissist, which is a diagnostic term for insurance companies, which is why that was invented.

But say whatever you want. But I think he's a great communicator. I think he gets the point across. And he's just very idiosyncratic. He's weird. He does stuff that other people don't do. he breaks from a lot of the norms. But the communication is effective.

Why is it effective, though? Like, how does he get so much attention? Well, one, he's kind of loud. But number two, it's novelty. We talk to, like, novelty massively generates focus in human beings. And he's like a novelty master. He's a magician of novelty. So he's the dude when it comes to that.

And he is not the clearest communicator when it comes to, like, long vision and plans, stuff like that, but he says things that are followable. He has ideas that are very easy to follow. Man, Shane Gillis did a bit about him talking about Baghdadi when Baghdadi, have you seen? It's one of the best videos on YouTube. But it was just hilarious, how simply, it was absolutely simple, how he communicated everything, and it painted a picture in your head. And he did it in a way that didn't have to use literary, flowery poetry language and

and all of that, but it put a very clear picture in your head when he said that stuff. It's interesting to think about how distinctive someone's voice is, and it's typical that a lot of people that have massive cultural influence have a distinctive, if you can do an impression of someone, probably a good indication they've got quite a distinctive voice. Yeah. You can do an impression of Jordan Peterson, right easily, very distinctive voice.

can do an impression of Andrew Tate quite easily. Very distinctive voice, distinctive speaking cadence, repetition, this Russell Brand and necessarily verbose and articulate,

sort of meandering sentences, listical style. With Trump, sort of punchy thing, a superfluous restatement of the past point with embellishment and a little bit of bravado

Obama staccato very sharp this well it's this and then it's this like tap up pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop up I think that there's something to be said about a signature style

sometimes much of the time maybe most of the time the impressions that someone does about another person typically not that flattering most impressions aren't done to pay a compliment to someone

Yeah. But if someone can do an impression of you easily, you kind of own an area of verbal real estate. I have this. If you do that, is that fucking Kermit the Frog or Jordan Peterson? I can't work it out. But it's one of them. I know it's one of them in there. And if you do a Trump, even a bad Trump impression, I know that's Trump.

Actually, that's a good judge of how effective someone is as a rhetoritician. and of having a distinctive and signature style of speaking. Yeah. How easily can someone do an impression of you? How far away from the way that you speak can I do an impression and the person I'm saying it to still understand the person that I'm doing it about? Yeah. You know what I mean?

That's a cool rule of thumb. Yeah. And it's like the novelty aspect and the uniqueness of the voice. Distinctiveness is a huge part, I think. It's like the facial features are to a caricature artist. You know, like all these individual, weird, unique things about the face, and I'm going to exaggerate them for a caricature. I think it's the same kind of thing.

And that voice is like a good trademark. If you have that unique voice, it's fantastic for a trademark. This is why I need to get 11 labs to give me my voice back. I'm on a campaign, I'm on a crusade against 11 labs. They stole my voice. They stole my voice and now everyone's using it in ads. Oh, I've got, I have at least two AI channels of me popping up every day on YouTube. It's unbelievable with my name.

Okay, that's different. That's slightly different. Oh, they're using your voice likeness. Yeah, so they have a go-to British voice called Archer, and this has been around for a while now. It's just trained on me. It's been trained on me. It's got the same verbal tics that I have from the specific. area in the northeast of the UK that I'm from. It's got glottal stops in certain words.

It's got the you sound words, yours. Bizarre little idiosyncrasies and phonetic idiisms that I've got. And it's motherfucking me. And at some point in future, I'm going to shout at someone. The CEO was in Qatar while I was there giving a speech. One of the, one of the C-suite was there in Qatar and I got stopped talking to the dude, the new CEO of Qatar Airways, and I had this thing in front of me and it was connect with the guy that might be able to give me a discount on flights on Qatar Airways or go and shout at the dude from 11 labs. I'm like, I'll take the flights. It was like, deal or no deal. Oh, that's good. Can we play it? Oh, yeah, yeah, fuck, play it. Watch this thing. You're an expert in communication. Oh, yeah. There's massive searches.

More than $200 million spent, and on March 8, 26, Ocean Infinity officially called off their last search. Their CEO, Oliver Plunkett, essentially admitted what no one in the official investigation wanted to say. Maybe the plane simply isn't where we've been looking. But one man wasn't surprised. A journalist named Jeff Wise had been saying exactly... Your THs. When you say the TH, it's very unique. And it's got your THs.

I've also got a slight Lisp that I worked against, and it's got that too. So whoever the AI is, they fucking inherited my Lisp. Maybe it's good. We were talking about, if I can get rid of that. If it starts speaking better than me,

that's when I've got an issue. It's a race between the AI to refine itself and me and my speech coach, Miles, to see who can win first? Who's going to get rid of the Lisp first? The real version of me or the copy. So most people don't realize how much being dehydrated

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Yeah. What are the behaviors that reveal insecurity? So when it comes to insecurity, let's go mammalian and then human. So the mammalian fear response or insecurity response is a reduced arm swing, incomplete movements. So like, I'm going to reach for this. I'm going to stop. and then kind of continue doing it, and then the movements aren't completed. You'll see a lot of that kind of stuff.

And you'll see reduced eye contact in a downward motion. And biggest of all, you're going to see the body moving or staying in areas that protect arteries. This means you'll see a lot less of this. You'll see the humorous kind of sit in a little bit closer to the body while they're talking, so the brachio artery is protected. You'll see the shoulders a little bit up in social situations. It'll stay a little higher, their head coming down a little bit, protecting the carotid arteries.

You'll see the arms in front of their body like this. Sometimes this is called a fig leaf gesture named by Alan Peas. Because it's covering the genitals? Yeah. Oh, interesting. But it's also protecting the femoral arteries at the same time. And men are more likely to do that. women are more likely to wrap a single arm around the abdomen like this while they're talking during, like if they're insecure.

And this is protecting the uterus area. And there are studies on this. I have no idea who did the studies. But this was originally written about by a guy named Desmond Morris, who just, I think, died in the last month or two. He was in his 90s. But it's like the first researcher who wrote a book about really observing humans as if they were animals. how did their body move? And so the book was called Naked Ape. They're like us, like the hairless monkey.

And he studied, he was like this savant at human behavior. But anyway, like when you're looking at the insecure behaviors, and if you're looking at two people, what you really want to look at, especially if there's two people, is which person needs something more from the other person and which person is reacting to the other person. The one thing, man, I'm hesitant to reveal this. The one thing that I teach a lot of these venture capital people,

they'll get pitched a lot. I've never been to one of the pitches. I've been on the pitching side quite a bit over the last six months, so I know what this feels like. The one thing that I teach them to look for is what's called lip compression. And we tend to do this at times when we are withholding a little bit of information or we're withholding an emotion. So like, you imagine like if your friend started a new job and you're like, hey, dude, how's the new job? And he goes, oh, it's great.

So that lip compression is withholding. So what I teach them to do is watch for the compression. the moment you see it, just rewind. What were they just talking about right before you see it? How's the financials in the business? Yeah. He says, oh, all the financials are great. We've projected out a good thing for the next couple of quarters.

And you'll see that, just that little lip compression is... Is that lip compression? I'm always interested in why that particular expression or feature is associated with that particular motive or leak. What is it? Is it? It's our first way of withholding. It's our first way to hold in milk. Like a tongue jut, like after someone tells a lie,

like there's something called a tongue jut that's very common like this. This is our first no. It's a way to force a nipple out of the mouth. And these are theories of Desmond Morris's as well. Like this is our first wave withholding and keeping milk in the mouth, and our first no is pushing our tongue out or pursing our lips. little bit. What? That's sick. Is that not cool?

Yeah. Is that not cool? It's amazing. Sorry, I'm enthralled in the conversation. Is this not? Are people more bored usually? Because this is brilliant. Okay, good. Yeah. Maybe I expect you to be bored. It's boring to because I've been looking at it for like 10.50. I'm British. You have to remember. You have to filter it through the British, whatever this is. Yeah. Yeah. So that's our first no. So tongue out of the mouth that tongue jut is our first no. there's a difference though between a tongue sticking out really quick and then a tongue licking the lips.

So a tongue licking the lips is called a hygienic gesture. So it's made to make somebody more attractive. So a hygienic gesture might be me sitting up a little straight and like pulling my shirt down, like rubbing and lint off, licking my lips. All those gestures that are made to look us more attractive. Those you want to look for before someone starts talking. So if they know a topic's coming up, like, all right, next we're going to get into financials. And then you see hygienic gestures before they start talking. So typically you'll see hygienic gestures.

So they're improving their appearance before the delivery of something that might be questionable. You're trying to stack the deck in their favor. Yeah. There's no behavior for deception. None. There's no behavior for deception. What does that mean? There's no behavior that's like this is deception.

None. Zero. What we're measuring with behavior is A, stress, and B, changes. Like somebody says, oh, someone tapping their finger all the time, or tapping their finger means that they're stressed and that means they're lying. That's total bullshit. Absolute bullshit. So if I just tap my finger all day long, what you need to look for is when I stop.

I was going to say, you're just a finger tap-up. Yes, yes. So your first thing that you need to do, like, and people study body language a lot, And I could save you 15 years of studying body language. The only thing that you need to get good at is detecting change. And then learn a few little facial things or a few little tricks, but you get really good at detecting a change. This is the same as doing a polygraph, right?

They have to get a baseline first. Yeah, yeah. And what you're doing is a visual equivalent? Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, visual and verbal equivalent of all that. What's the cadence that this person speaks out? What's the volume that this person speaks at? Or if they've been talking about their kid that's missing on the news,

like, he's great, he's great, he's great. And then all of a sudden they say, how do you think he's doing? And they start using past tense words all of a sudden to describe their childhood they think, or they're trying to say is currently alive. And they're using past, they shift from present tense to past tense. He is a good kid. He was a good kid. Like those shifts in tense and language use are really important.

And when it comes to behavior, there's none for deception. You've got to look for change context. So like somebody says, oh, well, his arms went into his torso. Like, well, did it get colder? Did someone open a door and it's 50 degrees in the room? So context is really important. Was he hungry? Yeah.

And then clusters. So like one behavior is not that much to like, if you're in something that's high stakes, you want to look for a mountain. of behaviors. It's like his breathing rate increased. We had pupil dilation. He licked his lips and he was tabbing his finger that he hadn't done before and his language shifted. He started becoming more, he lost his verbal fluency. So he's more hesitant in his language and stuff. We were like, we typically want to see a stack of many different things. And in body language, I don't know why, I got obsessed with it for a while. I'm really not. I'm kind of over it, but

in body language you deal in likelihood it's like a meteorologist that's not like yes it's definitely going to rain at 3 15 p.m. today and we're looking at here's historical stuff that's happened there's something that's happening now here's a likelihood that something will happen is there a reliable way that stress changes your behavior yes and what do you mean by that you begin to get stressed about something yeah while we're communicating Yeah. Some are idiosyncratic. There's a baseline, and then there's deviations from the baseline.

Yeah. But presumably there are also some relatively common patterns that happen across everybody, regardless of whether they're a finger tapper or a foot tapper or a neck scratcher. Yeah. So the most common thing that you want to look for is what stress does, we have a little cortisol that comes up. But if it's real stress, the person's also going to have a little dump of epinephrine, which is adrenaline. and when the body says, whoa, you know, there's a little too much adrenaline here. I need to burn some of the shit off.

It's going to move like the, you'll see their foot. You'll see their body move because their foot's tapping a lot. Or you'll see like some part of their body. They'll think, oh, yeah, it's just tapping my foot because it's convenient. What their body is doing is burning off excess adrenaline because of the stress. So right when you see like someone start burning off stress, the stress started like 10, 15 seconds before that. That's interesting. this thing has occurred, epinephrine's increased,

I need to burn this off, movement. Yeah. Frequent, quick moving movement. Yeah. And a lot of people will do it through stiffness too. So you see someone go from rigid and I can burn it off like this. Like I'm going to, my body gets more rigid, my posture and everything. The stress.

You're actually actively tensing as opposed to just being still. Yeah. Right, from stillness to stiffness maybe. That's interesting. Just go back to, can you recap? the behaviors that display insecurity again? Yes, so protecting arteries is number one. And this is brachial, carotid femoral,

and this arm wrap that you'll see more likely in women of wrapping like a single arm like this, protecting the uterus, and incomplete gestures. So someone makes a gesture, they don't complete it, and then they kind of stop, or it's interrupted, interrupted gestures. What's going on there?

It's self-doubt. Like, am I allowed to do this? Do I have permission to do this? Is this going to make me look weird? How am I being perceived? So it's a lot of, like, people that are insecure, it's experiencing insecurity. It's about self-perception. Like, how is Chris perceiving me?

Does he like me? Is there something going on? Am I being judged right now? So, and maybe I need. move in a hesitant manner. Maybe this was too fast. Maybe I did this thing weirdly. Maybe I need to slow down.

Can I grab this thing right now? It's not open. Can I open it on a podcast? It's got a loud-ass thing next to a microphone. All of that kind of stuff. Yes. Answer is always yes. Yeah, I've been wondering this all time.

Good, good, good. And that is the same, presumably, as the micro pauses when it comes to words, communication. Am I okay to say this thing? I'm unsure. I've got more processing power. I guess there's more going on than just that. Uncertainty about what I'm saying, how I'm going to say it, where am I going next? What did I just say?

How is this couched in the broader context of what I've been saying throughout this entire conversation? Yeah, it's a lot more self-management. And if you're wanting to spot insecurity changes, watch for someone in a conversation that their lips have been parted the whole time. And all of a sudden they're like, oh, yeah. And they close their lips and they stay closed a little bit. So that's another one. So if you're seeing a little bit, tiny bit of stress behavior,

and then their lips close, when they're normally just, if we're really interested in something, our lips part, just a little bit. And then when we experience a little bit of stress, we'll have lip closure again. I remember seeing a image

of someone doing the holding gesture, that thing. And it was described, it's a very British thing to do. I don't know that you're aware of this. So there's something, in the UK called Chabs. Chavs are a little bit like Hicks or Rednecks, sort of antisocial behavior. That's not to dismiss Hicks and Rednecks, many of them, but there's some of them in this room.

But, yeah, I've been to Stoke-on-Trent. Okay, that city, that city, if that city was a person, that person would be a chav. Yeah, yeah. that anti-social behavior thing was a meme in the UK probably until the early 2010s and then it kind of stopped and it doesn't really exist anymore

and it was a meme of someone saying the face that I make when I walk past a grandmother walking her small dog in the street to show her that I'm not a chav or a threat and I've noticed I bet there's a German word to describe exactly that entire phrase

Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Chardonfreude equivalent of whatever it is. There's one of my favorite, it's a Zagrubner, which is the frustration that migratory birds feel when they are prevented from migrating. Of course there's a word for this. The fucking German's so good, dude. It must be a nightmare to learn. But, yeah, that's, actually, that would be a good example. What are some of the reliable body language signals behaviors that people put across when they're not a threat? Oh, you'll see more open poems. Okay.

And typically at naval height. Naval height. And this comes from a friend of mine, Mark Bowden, body language expert. We have a show called The Behavior Panel. Have you heard of this on YouTube? It's four of us. Four body language dudes, nerds. That's what it is.

And all of us just nerd out on body language, but we'll take every week, we'll take video and break it down. Police body cam video, celebrity video, parents saying their kid's missing. And most be like, their kid might not be missing. I love this shit, dude. And we'll break down everything. I'm going to be watching this for the next few weeks. This is my sort of stuff. Yeah, it was like we were just doing it during COVID for fun.

And then we, like, had a million subscribers in short order. And then it was fun for all of us. So we just kept doing it. What was your question of you? Non-threatening behavior. Because grandma walking down the street doing the thing. And this, you know, they did research on that in New York. And they called it, like, right after 9-11, these researchers noticed that you, New Yorkers would greet each other like this.

And they called it a share. grief expression. New Yorkers don't talk to each other anyway, so they're like, like that. It was the first time that thing really had a good name. That's basically like two New Yorkers kissing.

Yeah. That's about as intimate as New Yorkers can get. Super intimate. Yeah, yeah. But Mark Bowden has this thing called the truth plane, where when we make these gestures that are open-palmed

and we're speaking to somebody, and it's kind of at naval belly button height. Something Trump does quite a lot, I think. And it makes somebody more likely to trust what we're saying. And so, like, when I'm saying, like, exposing palms means that somebody's a little bit more trustworthy. I don't mean, like, hey, what's up? Like, they've got their hands.

Yeah, super cult leader. He calls this the ecstatic plane, and this is the truth plane down here. And he's got some great names for a lot of these. There's a rare number of occasions where your hands should be above your shoulders. Very rare. And he's probably, Mark's, I bet Mark has a list. I don't know what it is. But the other ones are just smoothness of movement.

And is the person performing or just being? And that doesn't mean they're bad or they're deceptive or anything. But one of the first things I look at when I meet a person is, are they in front of their eyes or kind of just jammed back here wondering what's going on, wondering how they're being perceived? Like, are they present in what's going on? So when I train people, it's one of the big things is like just pulling their awareness out in front of their eyes. so they're a lot more present. They're here. Yeah.

What about early warning signs that somebody is a threat or may have aggression? It's so hard to predict, especially if somebody's trying to hide it. I train law enforcement in some of these, and it's still very hard to predict. We talked about four different types. There's COPE. It's concealment, oxygenation, preparation, and expenditure. Like they're trying to burn off. energy. And in the concealment aspect, you really want someone who is concealing their intention.

So right before some kind of violent action takes place, they'll break eye contact but keep you in peripheral vision for a prolonged period of time. And the second piece of that is you'll see a dominant foot withdrawal, even if they're not going to punch you. You're going to see broken eye contact and dominant shoulder either start moving away or dominant foot going back. And it's kind of blading the body but getting kind of prepared for an attack. And in America, what we teach the police is that like no one can draw a weapon from concealment without making a 90 degree angle with your body. It's like if you're not seeing 90 degree angles, they're not going to, they can't get a weapon. Show me what you mean. So like if I have a show me where I've got a weapon anywhere you

like. Well, right in the front. So I'm hit 90 degrees just reaching for the, for the weapon, right? So if I'm talking to somebody who's standing there and I'm a police officer and I see, someone quickly move to a 90 degree position, I need to be very focused on what's going on. It doesn't mean they're drawing a weapon. But you cannot draw a weapon from concealment without this 90 degree phenomenon. One of my favorite insights about blading is from Robin Dunbar, and he has this book called Friends. A cool thing that you can do the next time that you're a party is look at the angle of the feet of men talking to each other and of women talking to each other.

And women talk perpendicular. They talk 180 degrees, feet to feet straight on. Men talk at about 120 degrees. They blade. It's more shoulder to shoulder. And if you're a guy, just try the next time that you're talking to someone. Ideally, someone that you don't know super well, maybe someone that you've just met. Rotate yourself around to 180 degrees and go straight on.

And you'll begin to feel this strange spider crawling, tickling up. because typically the only time that men would have squared up to each other is if they were about to fight. Especially if you're close. Like if your distance is like two or three feet and then you have like head on stuff, this is one they put bars or mirrors up in bars in the old west. Men could talk to each other and they were side by side, but you could still see them in the mirror. That's interesting. And it reduced the bar fights and stuff. Because you wouldn't misconstrue something that someone had just said.

Yeah. So they're not facing each other at all. but you and I could be sitting here side by side and look at each other's faces in the mirror and have a full-blown conversation. There's no threatening. So we're both aligned facing the same direction. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength App is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies.

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and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. Interesting, the levels of intimacy that are opened up through not being straight on. There are certain styles of therapy that are done lying down with a therapist to your side. Therapist isn't sat at the foot of the bed, staring at you like a doctor coming in, flipping out a clipboard.

and there's a men's sheds initiative that happened in Australia. It's pretty interesting. So they were trying to get Australian men to talk about the mental health. Australians, probably not great at talking about their mental health. Men, and they got a two times multiplier for putting those two things together. So instead of, they tried, we're going to have the coming. Also, if you think about AA, also largely shoulder to shoulder, although you can go across, but the across is further away than the shoulder.

So you have intimacy plus directness. but with the mensheds thing, they realized that if they got guys together to do something with the front of their brain, because John's broken his lawnmower, but Chris has got the good wrench, and Chase has got the hammer and the welding material. After a while, all of these guys would bring the thing in, they'd be working together, and I'd be using the wrench, and you'd be using the hammer or whatever. And before long, we'd be talking about the fact that John's marriage is breaking down or that he doesn't have a good relationship with his kid, whatever it might be. But it was, the synopsis was men relate shoulder to shoulder, women relate face to face. And it's interesting. That's a good one. What other sex differences are there in communication? What are the biggest ones? You mentioned that women cover up like this. Certainly the

face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder thing seems pretty massive. Yeah. What are some of the other interesting ones? There's two big ones. You know, men will most often like reach for the stomach during times of uncertainty. So just kind of scratching or adjusting. You've seen the guys on the beach that are like, like how, you know, somebody looking at me, they'll kind of lean back and like scratching right here like this. Like this is all like the, like a pacifier for us,

a little pacifying behavior. And women during the same like period of stress, since stress builds up heat and most women have this long hair over their neck, it builds up a heat back here. So you'll see women reach back and lift the hair. hair over their neck for just a second to ventilate that area and they'll do it unconsciously. So those are two big ones. What do you think the men's stomach thing is? What's going on there?

I have no idea. Soothing behavior. I have no, yeah, it's a self-soothing behavior. But I don't know the origin of it or some evolutionary thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you seen footage of Wade Wilson on the stand? This is the Deadpool killer? No. Okay, I'm going to, this is cool. You haven't seen this one, maybe. Bring it up.

Yeah. Jerry, can you just pull up, Deadpool killer sentencing? Is this from the movie Deadpool? No. So this guy's called Wade Wilson. And there's a great,

you would love this. You guys should actually do, if you're still doing the reaction thing, it would be cool for you guys to do a reaction to the Netflix series that's just come out. It's called Worst X ever. And a lot of it,

at least the two episodes that I saw last week, Wade Wilson's the first one, and the character, Deadpool, Ronald's character. His real name is Wade Wilson. Yeah, here we go.

Here we go. And it would be only further broken if it took Wade's last breath. That broken system owes Christine and it owes Diane and it owes their families. So it's not real. So one thing that you'll see, especially in men, when you'll see this in women too sometimes, but you'll see it in men is we talked about like arteries. When we want to show defiance and that I'm not scared of you, like if we're about to get in a fight and I'll be like, what?

You show your neck? Yeah. So we'll, like, expose the arteries. Look, you'll see the arms come out like this. I'm no scared of you. Yeah. So, like, I'm exposing arteries. And we see that in.

Like the pot, neck open. Yeah. Leaning back. So this is almost like a display of absolute lack of fear. Dismissiveness. Like a challenge. Dismissiveness. All right, let's keep going.

Steve Wilson. Thank you. We would rest. All right. The dog just asks that you colloquy the defendant to ensure that he doesn't want to speak. get this hearing? Well, Mr. Wilson, you have an opportunity just like during any other phases of, well, let me just finish real quick. Any other phases during the case, if you want to address the court, I would permit you to do that. Obviously, you know, everything's recorded. But you would

have that opportunity if you wish. No one can prevent you from addressing the court if you wish to. And no one can make you address the court if you don't want to. So it is an decision that's solely left up to you if you want to address the court or not. Not today. Later, when I come back, I will today. All right, pause that. Okay. So what you saw, like right before he was talking, you saw the lip-licking.

That's the hygienic gesture to improve his appearance there. You didn't see him lean forward or anything. He's trying to maintain some kind of control in the situation. He probably thrives on a lot of autonomy and just knowing that he's kind of self-governing a little bit. You didn't see him blinking at all during that process. One of the interesting things about blinking is, and I don't talk about body language anymore on podcasts. I usually talk about DMT and all that kind of stuff. That's episode two.

Episode two. So blinking is one of the most reliable body language indicators ever studied. And it's cool because we spend our time looking at people's eyes throughout our conversation. Let me show you this one, like just a badass trick. I think it's badass. the average blinks per minute of human beings in conversation is around 15, give or take. 15 blinks a minute. If we are in a situation that is stressful, without even noticing it, our blink rate can go up to like 85, 90.

And we don't even notice that our blinking has changed. It's insane. Like when I took like the math portion of my SATs, I suck at math, so I was probably like a 90. But what happens when our body gets focused in on something that's important, or we're watching a movie that's super interesting, our blink rate without noticing can go down to like a two. So stress increases how often we blink, and it's not relaxation that lowers it, it's focus.

So if you see these psychopaths that are doing these interviews like Manson and 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, that's focus, not relaxation. Those are very different things. Like when I watch the movie Interstellar, one of my favorite movies, I probably... My favorite movie of all time. Mine too.

I probably blink three or four times. It's a long movie, too. It is. I think three and a half hour movie. I own the Tesirac from that movie that was built by Kip Thorne. What do you mean? I'll have to send you a photo of it. Like the model that they use for the Tesirac.

of the movie. Bookcase. No, no, like the entire Tesseract isn't, like you can use binoculars and look down into this thing for like 30 miles. I'll see near a picture of it. Unreal. Well, so interesting.

Let me, you weren't expecting this. Love Island reference. Interstellar came out just before I went on this reality TV show. And while I was on there, I was desperately trying to hold on to anyone that wanted to talk about nerdy shit with me. And I managed to grab one of the other cast members

and go and have a conversation with him. And I remember I was talking about the real science of interstellar because Kipthorn released that book. He was the consultant physicist on it. And then Brian Cox did his live show. And the background of Brian Cox's live show was made by the same people that modeled Gargantua, that was the black hole.

So that's a real, fully appropriately modeled using physics of the world and the universe, black hole. And I went to go and see him after I got back in Leeds. And it was the coolest thing. I just remember that. That really sticks with me

the fact that I was trying to have this conversation from memory about the physics of Interstellar as a non-physics person that's only seen Interstellar once. I remember whoever's listening on this. There's someone listening to your mic 24 hours a day when you do these reality TV shows. And I remember thinking,

whoever, do you ever poor bastard has been cursed with listening to me, try and like cod memory my way through this physics lesson is destined for challenges. So you're miced up all day? 24 hours, yeah. And if you get up and go to the bathroom

in the middle of the night, they want to put your mic on. So you have a little necklace kind of like this, but it's made of elastic, and then a battery pack in your pocket. There's a little wire that runs up and over. You ever fart into them on purpose? Because you know,

they guys did all sorts. Yeah, it's fine. You'll just whisper stuff because you know that you're being listened to 24 hours a day. There's one person on each audio channel. So these guys are on... Oh, you have a... One human dedicated to your mic.

Exactly. Yeah, on eight hour shifts. One, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three. Rotating. And I came out three weeks in, and that was the end of my time. Was this like a survivor? I'm sorry, I didn't know.

Imagine Survivor, but for fuckboys. That's basically what it is. Navy SEAL Hell Weeks for people who you don't want your daughter to get married to. Okay. And I came out and had these two guys come up to me. me and they said, Chris, you don't know us, you don't know who we are, but we've been listening to you eight hours a day for the last three weeks. And I just wanted to ask, what was the name of that book about the physics thing to do with the, to do with the movie that you were listening

to? It's like, fuck, like that was, I wasn't on camera. I mean, you're always on camera, but there was just some wanky conversation between me and Jordan, one of the other guys. And I'm like, oh shit, you really were listening throughout the whole thing. Because for the rest of I'm talking about, you know, bullshit. But the one time I had an interesting conversation. I was like, what the book? The name of the boat? Was it Kip Thorne?

It's the other guy that did the thing. Wow. So, yeah, pretty cool. The fact that we have this insight into how other people behave through their eyes, especially given that that's where we're typically looking is, I suppose the problem is, in order to be a good detector of body language, eye movement, you need to not only be doing your part of the communication and thinking about what you're projecting, but you also need to be doing the detecting thing at the same time. It's twice as hard. For the most part,

I think you, I don't know whether an untrained person would pay that much attention, conscious attention, to how their interlocutor is behaving, unless they were to do something out of the ordinary. Like, if I do this, you're like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah. But if my brain, breath rate increases on my blink rate changes or whatever, beyond the subperceptible instinctive just something is going on sense that I might have, training that in requires double the RAM. I'm not just projecting, I'm now detecting too. It does for a minute. So that's how I teach people to just do one or two things at a time.

And if you're just an everyday guy and you're not in hostage negotiations all the time, You only need about three or four things to look for. And you only need to learn them one at a time. And when I'm like watching somebody's blink rate, I'm not, I'm not sitting there like, oh, Chris's blink rate's now a 33 noted. It's just every once in a while, I'll check in on that. And if you're a good conversationalist, your goal should be, can I lower our blink rate? If we start our conversation and I'm interesting to you, my goal should be like, oh,

I'm watching your blink rate go down over time. But if you're talking to somebody, let's say you're in sales and you see all of a sudden you mention the terms of the agreement. You mentioned the APR interest or something and you see blink rate go up. Now it's a beneficial item. If you're watching somebody pitch you and you're in some private capital firm, whatever they call that, and you're seeing blink rate at the moment of discussion of finances or the moment they're discussing how many prospective customers they're going to have. have or something like that. Those are important data points. But if you're on a date, change the subject. They were engaged. Now they're a little bit more uncomfortable.

Yeah. And then something's stressing them out. Maybe you talked about one thing and some unrelated thing popped up in their head, which happens to all of us. Just change the time. They got distracted. Yeah. Yeah. But also that means that you're maybe not being as engaging as you could do. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You're either, I don't like what you're talking about or I don't care what you're talking about, but either way, it would be good to bring them back in. What are the biggest misconceptions that we have about reading others? Some of the falsehoods lies about human behavior? I think number one is that there's one behavior that means one thing all the time. There's a few exceptions, like blink rate is a difference. But then somebody's like,

oh, what if I have asthma? Well, like, then it won't be a change. It'll be your baseline. What does asthma have to do with your blink right? Like allergies and stuff. Oh, okay. So, like, if they're blinking fast the whole time, then who cares? That's your baseline.

So there's a few, very, very few exceptions. But when you hear, like, this means that somebody's being deceptive because they scratch their nose or something like that, I think it's one of the biggest misconceptions. I think another is, is sort of. certainty. People, like, you'll hear body language experts all the time, like, absolutely, this person's lying. You can tell because he did this and this at the same time. Like, I feel irresponsible ever saying that, like, my eyeballs are more accurate than a, like, a polygraph. That seems silly to me. So I think it's a likelihood game. And I think we should be honest that it's a likelihood game. No matter how good you are, I don't think any behavior. expert in the world can still spot a psychopath. Even though there's all this training out there on how to do that kind of stuff. Why?

The signals are hidden. They've spent a lifetime honing composure and deception. And decepting, being deceptive with their face and their expressions and their breathing and all that kind of stuff. Most of the time doing it unconsciously. And presumably, yeah, exactly. Presumably that would be so idiosyncratic. for that one person as well, where did their psychopathy come from? What are their patterns?

What are they trying to hide? What have been their experiences in the past? And what have been their tells? And then what have been their compensations for their tells that now result in this behavior? Yeah. And you know what? I want to bring up, Jared, can you search on YouTube?

Danny Treo, T-R-E-J-O, Charles Manson. So this is a clip from the pod, and this is interesting for you, given that you talked about drugs. This is interesting around hypnosis. So Danny Treo, the Hollywood actor with the massive chest tattoo, big sort of cholo dude. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Machete, that guy. He... He did he like a really nice guy in real life.

Sickest dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a great conversation with him a few years ago. So you met Charles Manson in prison, didn't you? What was that story? Can you tell us that? How did jail? in the county jail.

But let me tell Charlie wasn't the guy that you saw on the TV specials. All right? He was a, God, he was like five foot four, five foot five. A little scrawny.

He was poor, kind of like a bum, really. He had a, a string for a belt. He tied his pants with a string because he couldn't afford a belt. You know, and everybody else, we dressed, you know, cool ironed our pen. And so some of the prisoners were going to take advantage of them

because they'd take advantage of anybody in small. And we found out that he could hypnotize you. So we let him sleep in front of our cell to, you know, to make sure that nobody had hurt him. And he got us loaded on weed and three of the guys in the cell. Everybody else had like six guys in their cell. We only had three because we were special. I had two killers with me. So, so, so, and then, and then he got us loaded on weed.

And I said, well, get us loaded on heroin. So the three of us tried to get loaded. He got two of us loaded on heroin. One guy just woke up. And afterwards, I asked him, how come, why come he couldn't do him? And he said, never did it before? Did you ever get loaded on heroin? know. But your mind doesn't know how to work.

You understand? Your mind doesn't know how to react. So if I tell you to do something while you're hypnotized and you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it, you'll just wake up. And that's what we kept having. So, yeah, he hypnotized Danny's fucking Trejo and his two cellmates. but one of the dudes hadn't done heroin before. And Danny goes on to say that when you do heroin, apparently you throw up,

it's quite likely that you're going to throw up at some point. And Danny and the other guy that had done it threw up and the dude that hadn't, didn't. Yeah, this is a thing. This is a real thing. For some things, like, I absolutely, and I'm a hypnotist, and that was just part of learning all of this brain stuff.

I went to many different hypnosis schools and trainings and stuff. I don't think that you could do it with like mushrooms or LSD or anything like that because it's such a brain connective and massively immersive experience. It's too complex to replicate. Yeah, like if alcohol, you can get someone drunk very easily on hypnosis. Heroin maybe, like you're kind of creating some of that euphoria. but initially you want to create the negative conditions of the thing first so your body believes that it's possible and your brain's easier at connecting or at making bad shit happen.

Like vomiting. Yeah. It's way easier for your brain to default to negative. This is why your ancestors would always confuse a bear for a rock and not a rock for a bear. Maybe the other way around. But so you get the negative thing first, and then your brain's like, wow, this is really easy. Then once you do that, you're like, this time you're not going to have this negative thing, but you have all the other positive benefits of this.

There's a guy in the 1980s. I can't remember his name. Maybe I think it was Marshall Silver, but I think it was him. But there was this program called Drug of Choice where you could order an audio tape. And you could order like the marijuana audio tape. And if you've ever done it before, like it will kind of recreate that experience of that drug. I've never tried or anything. But it absolutely is possible.

Going back to the deception detecting stuff, what's the best way to get the truth out of someone quickly? In what situation? Normal conversation between you and someone that you think is being deceptive. It's cordial. You're not going to do anything too nefarious. How do you get the truth out of someone? It's socialize, minimize, rationalize, and project. You say, Chris, look, I know that I think everybody's going to understand.

If something happened, I think everybody's going to understand it. And I promise you, it's not a big deal to me that's minimized. And it makes perfect sense. Everything lined up the way it did and shit happened the way it did. That's not a big deal. And frankly, it wasn't your fault. These people kind of put this in front of you or this thing happened or you downloaded that app and you didn't know what it was.

And I think everything's completely fine. But the one thing that's always been important to you and me is our friendship. And I don't want to lose that. And then hopefully you ask him the question again at the end of that. I wonder what it is. At each stage, I'm trying to think about if it was me, what I'm trying to hold on to, what it is that I'm grasping for. And I think part of it is, it feels like treading water and someone throwing you a lifeline

so that you're less alone in the discreeting. comfort and the loss, the confusion of trying to hold this thing together. Someone sees, someone sees why I did this thing. Yeah. And it's not that big of a deal anyway, if I am to admit it, but they're there with me. I think a lot of it is around, I'm not going to have to bear this burden alone anymore. Yeah. Trying to sort of feel what comes up as your, role playing this bike stealing. Yeah, those are the big, those are the four reasons that your brain will kind of resist telling the truth. People won't understand.

This is a huge deal. It doesn't make sense why I did this and it's all my fault. So I just want to alleviate those four things. Yes, yes, yes, as fast as possible. Yes, the alleviation. Why can't people relax? What's the truth about emotional debt? I've heard you talk about this.

Dude, this is a big one. I think this goes back to what we talked about at the very beginning, was people carrying around shame. And everybody thinks that they're the only one. If we're really, really honest with ourselves, like, we walk around every day. We have this, we conceal shame because there are a lot of institutions that are around today that have made shame into an institution. like social enforcement and shame.

And everyone thinks it's just me. I'm the only one hiding the shit from everybody else. If I start becoming real, everyone, everyone's going to leave me. I'm going to be abandoned by my friends. I'm going to get outcasts and judged. I have to keep hiding this. And everyone thinks it's just them. The cool thing is that it's literally 100% of people.

It's every single human being is out there carrying the exact same shit as you. And they all think it's just them. That's the, it's saddening, but I think it's beautiful at the same time. We really do share a lot more in common, especially with the things that we hide from each other. Then a lot of us would be willing to admit. So when we encounter like emotional debt, this is typically when I'm a little kid, what are the patterns I had to develop to earn friends and keep friends to feel safe or to attain some kind of social reward like appreciation or love or something like that? So if something in my

childhood made one of those three things happen, friends, safety, and rewards, then that, the brain says, oh, this worked, I'm going to make an app out of this shit. So your brain makes an app and says, I know exactly how to produce this thing. So I'm going to make an app. And I'm going to run that app all the time. So for the first couple of years, it's an app that you're consciously clicking on in social situations. By the time you're like probably 12 or 13, that's solidified in your behavior. And then fast forward, you've got a 34-year-old woman working in an office who had to kiss some bully's ass in middle school.

And that's all she does as an adult. So we carry all these little childhood things without knowing it, like this loaded childhood backpack. It's gone from being an app to being source code. Yeah, beautifully said, yes. And we carried into adulthood without knowing. And you can look at just about any adult in the world and say, you know, if we went back in time,

what is you going to do, friends, safety, and rewards back in childhood? and then you say, oh, you came to me for help with this XYZ thing. Look at your eight-year-old self. Let's go back in time 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. And that is emotional debt.

And every time we're not dealing with a lot of that stuff directly, every time we hide it from someone else, we're withdrawing from account. And we're kind of overdraft. everything in our life. So concealment is is one of the most exhausting, cognitively exhausting things that there is when it comes to human behavior. Concealment is more mentally taxing than doing calculus. Like just trying to act like you've got your shit together in a social situation, like faking it hard, is harder than calculus to our brains. So, I mean, fuck.

That's, it sucks. I mean, a lot of us are paying this emotional debt. And I think that's it. It's like the costume is heavy. The costumes that we're wearing just get heavier and heavier because we keep adding stuff on it. And a lot of us, by the time we hit 18, 19 years old, we're like a decorator crab. You know, I've kind of, you know what a decorator crab is?

Can we bring up a picture of a decorator crab? So these crabs will go around their whole life and find shit on the beach and like stick it and like glue it onto their shells somehow. Protection? Ornaments? Maybe distraction, maybe like a mating ornament. I don't know why they do it. Yeah, and they'll decorate their bodies with all kinds of crazy stuff. Okay.

And they do that by hand. And it's not part of their body at all. So that looks like it's picked up sea urchin spikes, maybe. and stuck it on somehow. If you go back, you take the search and go one to the right of that image, right there. That guy found some fruit loops or something down there on the ocean. So they just stick little barnacles and stuff all over their bodies. And we're kind of like this.

We go through life and we're like, you know what? That guy did this one thing to protect himself. I'm going to stick that on. So we're walking around with all of this stuff on us that's not us at all. It's not me. And then we go back to that thing like we originally talked about. It's like I have to go my whole life knowing that no one's ever known me. And that sucks.

And that's emotional debt. How do you advise people to process emotions so that it doesn't get deposited into the bank account or used to withdraw from the bank account? I think physicality is the best. There's a guy, his name is Dr. David Berseli. and he invented this thing called trauma release exercise. It's been known that we go into these things called neurogenic tremors all the time, where our body looks kind of like a little seizure, where there's little tremors going through your body.

But if you watch like a polar bear get tranquilized by some researcher, and it's a paralytic tranquilizer, polar bear is laid out on the ground, but he's conscious. Like, can you imagine how terrifying? It's like worse than an alien abduction. That's like an alien and abduction for us. So this polar bear goes through trauma. And what is the first thing that happens?

The anesthesia thing starts wearing off. And his body goes into these convulsions and shaking movements and big breaths. And it's all completely autonomic. He's not really consciously controlling any of it. He's just letting his body do what it does. Squirrels do the same thing. After an Impala gets big. bit by a tiger.

I've seen zebras do the same thing. Yeah, zebras. And Robert Sapolsky wrote a book about a lot of this stuff, about how nature knows what to do. It doesn't suppress healing mechanisms. It's called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And, but they figured out that humans suppress this, this tremor mechanism.

Why do you think that is to avoid being seen as strange by the people around us? This is an indication of weakness. Absolutely. I was bothered. Yeah, I think you hit the nail perfectly on the head there. Like there's some weird, if I jiggle around on the floor in front of the tribe, they're going to think I'm sick. What if they throw me over the cliff like old Jimmy last year when he was sick, you know? Well, if nothing else, even if they correctly identify it, they don't think that you've got leprosy or you've gone insane.

What they do know is that your capacity has been breached. Yeah. Your nervous system's ability to withstand this was taken over the edge. Yeah. You overclock yourself. You were overclocked by somebody else, which is a, you know, you're overclocked by somebody else, which is an indication of weakness. Yeah, it's so true.

But he basically, he's not teaching you a technique. He's just helping you to find the switch in your body that you've been suppressing your entire life. And we had to do it after a deployment that I was, I did 20 years in the military. So I did a bunch of deployments. But one of these appointments, we came back, it was rough, but we had to go through this trauma-releasing exercise.

It's a different, under a different brand name. like than this, Dr. Burselli. But it was maybe the most profound emotional transformation I've ever made in my life other than psychedelics. It's unbelievable. And your body knows how to do it. Every mammal on earth does this automatically, and it is life-changing.

And it's free. It's totally free. You go on YouTube and learn how to do it, and it's unbelievable. And every mammal does it. And during this lady's presentation to us, when we got back from a deployment, she says, raise your hand if you ever seen a depressed squirrel. Or a zebra. Like a zebra doesn't get bit by a crocodile and go back to his tribe.

We're like, guys, that had a shit day. And I need to curl up under that tree for like nine days. And people need to bring me food. That doesn't happen. Like somehow they're over stuff a lot quicker than we get over stuff, even though we make more meaning about the situation than the zebras do. How do you come to think about the role of shame in people's? lives. I think shame has been institutionalized on purpose by many different places. And we learn as we're little kids, like, if I feel shame about something, I need to conceal it. And I've learned a

new part of me that I can wall off and I don't need to show anybody. So if I'm ashamed about anything, it doesn't make, shame doesn't make you a good person. And I think a lot of people think that if I feel ashamed about something that makes me moral, that makes me good as a human being. It doesn't. It just ruins your life. It doesn't make you a good person. Learned an interesting thing from Rob Henderson where a book that he was reading taught somebody's guilt seems to be proportional to their perceived likelihood of being caught. Wait. Someone's guilt, the amount of guilt that you feel,

tends to be proportional to how likely you perceive it that you're going to be caught for whatever you're guilty about. Wow, that's really good. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. That our level of guilt for something that we know we can't be caught for is so much less. Now, obviously, the scales have a bunch of different things going on here.

So on one side, there might be the severity of what you did. You know, you could kill something. somebody and immediately get them, watch them be eaten by an alligator hole or a python or something and you go, well, there's no chance. But it's such a huge transgression of what your typical behavior would be that that's something that you would take very badly. Or you can have something that's much smaller, but has a much high likelihood of getting

caught. You know, you threw chewing gum down, but you threw it down right at the teacher's feet and you don't know if he saw or not. And that would be a big deal. And then there's sort of everything in between that. Those are the two, that's the spectrum of crime, by the way. there's chewing gum and killing someone. That's those are the two ends, the Overton window of crime.

And I just love that idea that the level of guilt that we feel about anything that we've done, it's not just the severity of whatever it is. It's not just your consciousness coming in saying like that was not your best self speaking or acting or whatever. How likely is it that I think that I'm going to be caught? and as that gets closer and closer and closer, your level of guilt increases. Yeah. You know, I was thinking about with the Epstein files,

the day that the Epstein files came out. Yeah. What? We saw a lot of people get real quiet while they were waiting to see what was released. Well, if you think about what that day must have been like for those people, horrible. Certainly not going to chalk it up.

If you're a zebra, you're going home and telling you, you found, I had a shit day today. I got the equivalent of bid on the ass by an alligator, but it happened in the court of public opinion. However, in some ways, the concealment tax that was being paid, you know your name's in them. You know your names in them. You know that there are being investigations and releases are happening. And, yeah, I mean, you could hope, this is something else, I'm having this conversation last night. you don't need calmer to deliver spiritual justice, right? All that karma is is someone repeating their patterns and behaviors enough times until reality finally gives them what they deserve.

So imagine that you're a bad person. You treat most people that you interact with poorly. You screw them over in one form or another, maybe the same way, maybe in different ways. The only way that you make it to the end of your life without that coming to the surface is by basically beating the odds. You've stacked the deck against yourself. And what you're hoping is that you can somehow sort of, you know, tip to Captain Sparrow to dance your way through this minefield. Yeah. And avoid all of the different trip-wise and get to the other side and fuck, I did it. Yeah.

And then you die or whatever. That sense that a lot of people have of that person fucking, they're just desserts. It's like how does nobody cottoned on to this thing that I think that I see about this person? And maybe you're right. Let's assume that you're right about your character assessment about this person, that they're a bad person and that stuff should have gotten to them. What someone is doing is basically stacking the deck against themselves, but presuming that you've got a relatively functioning conscience,

that concealment burden is going to start to stack up and stack up and stack up. And especially if you know that there's an investigation coming and that people are getting closer and maybe the guilt. Da-da-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. So, yeah, some people, sure, they are bad people who make it to the end of their life without having been rumbled. But the only way that they did that was basically through luck. They fluked their way through this lop to make it to the end of... Which is rare. Most people end up getting what they deserve.

My mentor used to call that that person's safe as full. Like they've locked up a whole lot of stuff. You know, it's just, it's ready to bust open. And they're easier to get to confess. They're easier to do all kinds of stuff because they're safe is so full. That's concealment burden is high. Yeah. Level of emotional stress, ambient emotional stress also high.

And the need to release that pressure. The release valve thing. Yeah. And that's not even the economic pressure around the world. That's the emotional pressure inside. And we get to choose the release valve form. Has what we've spoken about to do with shame and childhood patterns related to the trauma triangle? Is that all wrapped up inside of that?

I think it might be. I don't know. I don't think we know shit about consciousness. There's so many people who have so much certainty that I would be embarrassed showing that level of certainty about, oh, this is exactly how the brain works. I've studied neuroscience for nine years. We have zero clue how the brain works. We don't know where memories are stored. We don't even know what they're made of.

And like they're doing all these experiments now that's showing that consciousness might be non-local. I think you've had a few people on. Pan-psychists. Yeah. It just looks like it starts, that's starting to explain a whole lot of stuff that we were calling anomalies that just might not be an anomaly. And Rupert Sheldrake is one of these guys. the show. Yeah. Dude, I love that guy so much.

Morphic resonance is such a fucking cool idea, man. Like, it's, what's interesting to me, stuff like the Danny Treo thing is a good example of that, but that's story-based, right? Stories stick with you for a good while. If you hear about a dude that was a famous cult leader and a guy that's a famous movie actor, being in jail

together, wearing a rope around his waist, getting loaded on heroin through hypnosis, are you just, I'll forget my children's names before I forget that, right, on my deathbed. Yeah. But the Sheldrake thing with the morphic resonance, the dogs are able to detect when their owners are coming home, even when they alter the vehicle and the time and the mode of transport and the person and they go to the window. Did you see the one about, is it Starlings dunking their heads into glass milk bottles? Did you ever learn this one?

No. This is fucking crazy. Let me hear it. So there was a type of bird that existed, I want to say, in the UK during World War II, before World War II and the glass milk bottles that would be put out by the milkman on everyone's front doorstep. Did that ever happen in the US? Yeah, before my time. You used to have a milkman? Yeah.

Okay, that exists. Okay. I don't know about this country. It's like three seconds old. I mean, I want a millennia old country like mine. Anyway, I like this place. I spent too much time in a Costco this morning. And there was a glass bottle that you would leave out and it would have a foil lid and the foil coloring on the lid would be semi-skimmed, full fat, gold top, whatever. And birds had realized that they could pierce the foil because it's only thin and they could

stick their beaks in and they could drink the top filtering of this thing. And you would often apparently because if you've ever put your finger into a corona to shove a lime down, we had sort of fucking stuck. Like you really need to wiggle it to get it out. And a lot of the time people would arrive at their front doorstep and just see an upended bird. It's like a Molotov cocktail, but it's got a sparrow sticking out the top of fucking light. And then during World War II, all of that stopped because of the Battle of Britain and the blackout. there were no milk deliveries.

So that meant that all of the birds had stopped to learn this thing. For generations of birds, had stopped to learn this thing. And then when it came back, it had taken a long time for this to be developed, and they'd done a statistical analysis of this. Rupert's guys had done a statistical analysis of this. And as soon as the milkman began doing it again, immediately a generation of birds that had never seen a milkman and never seen milk bottles started doing it straight away. And you've seen this stuff where they teach mice to solve a maze in

L.A. and mice that are in New York are able to solve the maze more quickly. Yeah. Which is insane. There's a 10-year-old boy in Japan, 10 years old that was the first in the world, just recently, maybe this year, proved that a butterfly retains the memory of its ancestors. And a butterfly memory also survives caterpillar metamorphosis. Because it's fully liquidized. Yeah. Caterpillar going to a butterfly is completely liquidized. Yeah.

And the memory goes through, not just generations, but goes through the entire Chrysalis phase of butterfly, whatever that's called, transformation. How did the 10-year-old boy prove it? Lavender. So when they're caterpillars, he gives them a tiny little shock. But the boy was so kind that he shocked them on his own arm so he could feel it too, like with the caterpillars because he didn't want to give them too much shocking.

But he exposes him to lavender and a shock at the same time over and over and over, you know, three times a day maybe per caterpillar. A little electric shock. Yeah, 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 arm and he gently folded over it because he didn't want to hurt the caterpillar. he considered them as friends. It's not like this modern scientist who would just, yeah, let's torture his ass. So this is Pavlovian stuff. And then when they become butterflies, he built this tube that's a Y shape.

So they fly down this thing and they've got this fork in the road with sugar water at the end of both. And one of them has a little cotton ball that has lavender on it. And he proved that these butterflies that he had trained, the caterpillar, went straight off to the right. away from the lavender because they had it associated with negative memory and their children did the same thing or their offspring did the exact same thing and have you read irreducible by federico fagin what's that uh it's just it's kind of an argument against materialist reductionism okay and you're familiar with the concept of it's basically like if there's a let's say like Chris let's go understand music we're going to go understand music we have 500 years to figure this out

so we go to the Philharmonic and all the instruments are out there we're like you know what we're going to do first let's chop this cello over there into 6,000 pieces and study it for 10 years under a microscope and we understand music zero but we've broken everything down into its tiny little parts and then finally somebody says we've had a massive breakthrough we found this sheet music in the front of the orchestra. And then the lead scientist is like, good, cut it up. Put it under the microscope. And then we're like, this sheet music makes the music. So of course we can just put it under the microscope. And I don't know why, but this music looks like paper.

It doesn't look like music. So the argument is like if we keep just breaking things down into elements, we're missing the substance of what's really there. You're familiar with Daniel Schmachtenberger? Do you know who that is? No. To a surname that you don't forget. He's been on the show twice now, and he's got great talk on emergence.

I'm going to send it to you. It's a little bit, it's very dense, actually. I fell in love with this guy's thinking. He's been a good friend ever since. But he's got this idea, basically, which is kind of basic, right? That there can be combinations of things that allow properties to emerge that individually do not. right you know this if you put sodium in water or whatever

and you get a particular like an interesting reaction but the same thing is true with regards to what you're saying here that analyzing things in isolation don't explain what happens when they come together and the inverse of this which I first heard from him but then Naval reused

was human beings locally reverse entropy locally reverse entropy, the entire universe aiming toward entropy, and we locally reverse it for a brief time. Yeah.

Ultimately, the universe is going to win, right? The battle is ours, but the war is always going to be theirs. Yeah. It's, but I just love that, I love that idea. I love the idea that we locally reverse entropy.

It's really cool. That is beautiful. And it's, I mean, it's like somebody studying DMT and saying, oh, yeah, it activates a receptor on your 5HT2, a serotonome receptor.

Like, yeah, yeah, that's what's made our ancestors see the exact same thing for 4,500 years. And that's what creates the entities, you know. It's silly to think that we can really comprehend everything. We can't even define or understand consciousness. And we're like, oh, yeah, it's a receptor activator. It's a receptor agonist. And I just think there's way too much certainty about this stuff.

we need more scientists just finishing a few sentences with as far as we know. If we just had that a little bit more of as far as we know, I think science would advance a lot faster because it's dogmatic at this point. I want to talk about the DNT stuff. I feel like there's a million things to get into that we haven't. But let's bring this one into land here because this has been really, really fascinating. What's this new show where you told your team if we don't, get death threats within the first six months

we're not doing our job. So I, uh, the origin of this is I took an adderol one morning. Great start to a day. And, uh, go on. I got distracted doing some work and I was like, shit, I didn't take an adoril.

And I took another one. Which I've never done. Is that my brain was not prepared for this. And I also, uh, do a little daily microdose action. and all that mixed together and I was just sitting there at my desk typing or going through emails or something

and I was like you know what? Randomly I was like I need to start a TV station and I did That does sound like the sort of thing someone who's taken two tabs of Adderall and some mushrooms would come up with Yeah yeah and I was like you know what I could beat Fox I could beat I could beat mainstream news

so we built and own a television studio now and we have a daily news show that's about to start coming out. Maybe by the time this is released, we'll have a video out. It's called Station One on YouTube. We have one or two videos out, but we're going to start daily news. And we're also going to, every day you'll get the news, but you'll also get how everything that you're being shown as different stories are actually connected.

All of the Psiops layers with actual registers and receipts for every single thing of how the news is being used to frame a narrative. All of that will be made public. And then every single day on the news, we'll tell you in the next 72 hours, here's what to look out for. If you see these three words in a bill that Congress passes at like 2 a.m.,

you need to watch out for this thing. If this oil company invests in this one thing in the next four days, you need to watch out for this. This is probably going to happen. So every single day, it should feel, and we follow the format of the president's Daily Beach, brief from the director of the CIA. And that's the daily news.

It's like the president's daily brief exact format. And I think it's going to be good. I think people are going to like it. And there's no narrative. There's no left and right politics, which doesn't really exist. And I think it's going to be pretty cool. Heck yeah.

Chase Hughes, ladies and gentlemen, Chase, you're awesome, man. I'm looking forward to speaking to you next time. Me too. Thanks for us. All right. See you next time, everyone. Dude. Fucking crushed it. So good. Yeah, man.

Appreciate it, Bill.