The Jordan Harbinger Show - 768: Chase Hughes | The Behavioral Table of Elements

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Chase Hughes (@thechasehughes) created The Behavioral Table of Elements for behavior analysis in interrogations, and is the author of The Ellipsis Manual: Analysis and Engineering of Human Behavior. [Note: This is a previously broadcast episode from the vault that we felt deserved a fresh pass through your earholes!] What We Discuss with Chase Hughes: What is The Behavioral Table of the Elements and how can we use it to determine the likelihood that someone is telling us the truth? Why Chase considers polygraph tests “just about as accurate as a coin toss” — and how they’re actually biased against people who tell the truth. What someone training to spot deception indicators and stress might learn from watching Conan O’Brien interviews. How training ourselves to be subconsciously aware of truth signals clues us in when someone who’s lying deviates from them. How to hack authority for influence and personal development. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/768 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss? Catch up with episode 165: Chris Voss | Negotiate as If Your Life Depended on It here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Once you start observing behavior and you start really seeing how insecure every single person is around you, it's a humbling experience. It's kind of addictive in that once you are able to see the weaknesses and the humanity of everybody, it kind of levels the playing field that humanizes everybody that would have otherwise been threatening or that seemed unapproachable. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional National Security Advisor, former cult member, or Cold Case Homicide Investigator. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter pack.

These are collections of our favorite episodes, organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Topics like abnormal psychology, persuasion and influence, disinformation, cyber warfare, negotiation, and communication, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, one from the vault with Chase Hughes, who spent 20 years in the military teaching interrogation and behavioral science on a tactical level. so applied in the field, not purely academic. We all know the power of nonverbal communication, the signals our body gives off, whether we want it to or not.

And today, we'll share a few dozen powerful tips that can't be found all over the internet in pop culture books, in YouTube videos. We did this episode several years ago, but the content was just too good not to keep it in the show feed here. We'll also learn some principles of influence and who couldn't use more of those

and how to use social authority to influence others. And we'll take a peek behind the curtain on how this all works in practice, which will help level the playing field for us, especially for those of us, who might find ourselves in a manipulative relationship at home or even at work. Last but not least, stress-free ways to start observing people without being creepy

and how to train your brain to see gestures and non-verbal signals without feeling overwhelmed. Lots of practical stuff in this one. Here we go with Chase Hughes. You being on active duty in the U.S. military for two decades, almost here. Give or take, yeah. You've been teaching interrogation and behavior science on a tactical level. And I assume what you mean by tactical level is, hey, by the way,

this stuff needs to actually work. Here's how you apply this stuff. Absolutely. I remember getting books that were like persuasion books and I got kind of tired of that same feeling. Like this is great information if I'm doing a PowerPoint somewhere and I want to look cool for a few minutes. And then I'd read through another book and I just got tired of getting a few paragraphs of information out of a book. I wanted a full-scale manual that was applicable in the field. And so you had to make it? I did, and that's what became the ellipsis manual. I've seen a lot of studies recently about nonverbal communication.

It's 67% or 87% or 97% or whatever of the equation and what spoke in the words, they don't even matter and all these studies that have been misinterpreted, frankly. But somehow a lot of nonverbal communication largely ignored in academics and largely ignored in every field other than more recently pop culture where people decided that they can watch one season of lie to me and then go back to their job and crush it. So I want to take a little bit of a look behind the curtain here. And I also like to take a peek on the dark side because I think a lot of manipulators use this stuff too. So if we have time, I'd love to get into that as well. What you were saying about this being ignored in academia is absolutely correct. I think the average

psychotherapist or social worker goes through years and years of training. And all of that, they get maybe a half hour on body language. And that's a psychotherapist with a graduate degree. And then these are the same guys who are going out there producing studies that say it's two-thirds or some odd number of communication. And then nothing changes in the academic perspective. The most common study that people are quoting and misquoting is the Moravian study, which says something like 67% of this is nonverbal, 30% of it is tonality and some singular digit percentage, something like 7% are the words you use.

And so whenever people quote that, I just kind of think, well, you obviously haven't really put that to the test and really read into it. Because if you think that that's the case, go watch an Italian movie if you don't speak Italian, and tell me exactly what's going on. You should be 93% accurate, right?

And you're not. So what the hell does that actually? mean. And then, of course, when you go to the people who worked on that study and used that study and other studies, they're like, oh, wait, yeah, that's not at all what that study means. It means that these are the signals that we're using and things like that, but you still need the whole picture in order to get an accurate perception and you can't take pieces of it, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't really translate. And yet there are entire fields, there are many a professional out there giving a TED talk or charging $1,000 an hour for

consulting in corporations whose foundation is that work. and they don't understand it. I completely agree. I think that's misinterpreted on a daily basis. And I think what's even worse is that people are using it to market products and saying the body language is the only thing you'll ever need to read.

Everything else is just crazy. Non-verbal communication might be somewhere around two-thirds of communication, but you're not going to understand the other third without hearing a person talk and understanding what they say without the syntax. Right, and if you're 33% off when somebody is trying to tell you,

you something important, you might as well just be entirely wrong because you are. Yeah, it's a coin toss. Right. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. It's an awkwardly shaped coin toss. How did you get into this? It sounds like when you were young, you were a terrible student. So we have that partially common. I was awful as a student. If I got like a C minus, it was a celebration. I'd failed out of high school miserably. Eventually, you know, I joined the Navy when I was 17 years old. Once I was in the Navy, I was probably 18 or 19 years old, and I started getting into Pickup. And this was 1999, maybe 2000. And nobody really existed back then as far as pickup went.

There were a few sleazy books and stuff out there. And I remember one of my friends asking me, like, oh, why don't you get that girl's number? And I was like, I don't think she likes me. And he's like, oh, yeah, she was doing this and this, listed all these nonverbal characteristics. So I went home that night and typed in on the internet. how to tell if a girl likes you. I got all these body language articles and it just, it seemed like I was seeing there's something that's been there all in my life. All of this nonverbal communication has been hidden and nobody talked about it. I never knew that it was important. And once I got good

at it and I started getting good at it, I realized you really can kind of see behind people's masks just by reading body language. I'm talking about once you've studied it for quite some time and you've gotten good at it. And I think a lot of products nowadays, and a lot of people seriously underestimate the amount of effort it would take to be good at it. There's so many things that say seven quick tricks to do this or easy ways to get something done. And in reality, if you consider just playing the piano and learning to play the piano at maybe a concert level, that would take you years and years of study, and a human being is just about infinitely more complex than a piano, and they change every time you talk to them. They're always different. That's the equivalent of like seeing

an ad online that says learn to play concert level piano in three weeks. Right. Pianists hate him. This guy figured out how to play concert piano overnight. Yeah. Right. That kind of thing. It also is vastly different because of the way the brain is constructed. We already know from brain science, modern brain science and up-to-date brain science that our individual brains are wired differently. So not only is it become a concert pianist in three weeks, it's also on a piano that has 180,000 keys or something like that instead of the usual number of keys. You have that. And then also, and they're not arranged in the same way as the piano that you learned on a few years ago. And it's not the same as the one you have at home. And it's not the same one as I have here at

school, you're going to have to figure out where the keys are in the moment while you're trying to play. Yes. And that's what we're looking at when we're looking at verbal and nonverbal communication taken in concert with the different variety of factors that have environments and personality all roped in there together. So if that's the case, how am I so sure and how are you so sure that what we've got here, what you've got here, is accurate and useful? The behavioral table of elements is, I think it's the most well-researched work. And I think it's being used in the field now. And the way that we use it is a cumulative read. So it doesn't automatically mean X, Y, and Z happened. It produces a certain amount of numbers associated with each gesture so that seven interrogators can read a situation

different ways, but there's a common interpretation. And you can gauge the amount of deception that's likely taking place in an interrogation. And that's unique to interrogation. And that's unique to or are you using this in conversations of all kinds? It's absolutely applicable to anything. The day I came up with the idea for this, I was reluctantly watching an episode of The Bachelor with my mother. And she was talking about how she liked this girl and what her favorite girl was and how she hated the other one.

And I said, well, the one you liked was just lying to them when they were in the hot tub. And she was like, well, I just, I wish I could use your eyes for just, an hour so I could see this stuff. What a great use of modern cutting edge science to look at the bachelor. Right. Is Tina going to make it to the end? Right. Who's going to get eliminated? Who gets voted off the island? How do we start to even look at this behavior? Because if I look at a piano and I decide I'm going to learn how to play this, there's got to be a place to start without getting overwhelmed. I think it's just now that we've accepted the idea that maybe we can learn this stuff, how do we look at that without going, all right, well, since we can't simplify it like we can in the book,

you and I were just talking about that we decided wasn't useful, the useful stuff seems very complicated. Where do we even begin without freaking out that we're never going to get it? I would say a lot of people get overwhelmed in the beginning because they realize that it's a big undertaking. You've got to treat that journey kind of like an experiment. And once you start observing behavior and you start really seeing how insecure every single person is around you. It's a humbling experience. It's kind of addictive in that once you are able to see the weaknesses and the humanity of everybody, it kind of levels the playing field that humanizes everybody that would have otherwise been threatening or that seemed unapproachable. And you can kind of see through the

social masks that everybody wears. And it's a humbling thing. thing, and I would say at the beginning, once you're starting out, just see behavior for behaviors sake. Don't try to make an interpretation. Don't try to go flip through a book and figure out what everything means. Spend a week watching people's pupil dilation and seeing whether they're blinking fast or slow. Spend a week watching whether or not somebody's breathing into their chest or their stomach. Just make those small plans. Take it week by week and just make small observations without trying to interpret stuff. And I think that is absolutely the best way to go about it. I wish that had that advice when I started. Right. So instead of thinking, all right, I got to figure out if this

person is lying or if this person's under stress, just watch people talk and think, all right, well, they're breathing in through their stomach, meaning they're more relaxed or in their chest, meaning they're possibly, they're less relaxed, they're speaking with their arms crossed. Well, it is cold. Okay, cool. Instead of trying to interpret what that means, just look at the behavior so that we can start to develop an eye for looking at smaller behaviors instead of trying to look for them and interpret them in context in real time. Absolutely. Once you start making a habit of seeing behavior, it gets pushed from consciousness to kind of unconscious behavior, just like driving or learning how to ride a motorcycle. That takes a ton of your focus in the beginning until that stuff

eventually, then operating the clutch or the brake or the gas, that stuff just naturally pushes itself back into your unconscious to where you can focus on other things. And is this going to look creepy? I mean, are we going to end up making too strong eye contact or staring at somebody a bit too much while they're talking? Or has this been something that your students have been able to do easily without being observed in a way that generates questions? I don't think anybody would look creepy doing it. You're just making natural eye contact is enough to observe most of this behavior. All right. So we look for breathing. We look for pupil dilation. How do we train our brain then to see just,

without feeling overwhelmed because of course that's separate. Or are we just, again, we're having regular conversations and we're just noticing what they're doing with their hands, arms. Are we watching their feet? What else are we looking for? I would say just watch the different parts of the body and how they interact with their environment. Spend a few weeks on that without trying to interpret it

and just seeing the behavior for its own sake. So when we start noticing these behaviors, what do we do with them? Are we just mentally cataloging them? Do you encourage people to try to interpret them later after the conversation? what do we do with these once we start to notice the hands, the breathing, and the eyes? What took me a few years to figure out is something you were doing as a kid, you know,

keeping a behavior journal. And I would say writing this stuff down, write down what you're seeing every time you have a chance to do it. Write down the gestures that you're seeing more common in one person that you work with or this Starbucks barista every time she's there. She touches her chest when she says, thank you. And then once you start learning the interpretation of behaviors, you can go back and look through all of these things and see the natural tendencies of the people that you interact with. And those tendencies will lead some of their personality traits. And how do we know that those tendencies lead to personality traits? How do we start to map these things together? Seeing the correlation between somebody who is displaying insecure

body language when they talk to you all up until the point when you ask them about a vacation they just went on. You can see these little insecurities. You can see. You can see. these little weaknesses in people just because of these small behaviors that you're able to see. Where does the behavioral table of elements come into this, right? You've got this big, periodic table. I'd love to learn, first of all, how you develop this and how we start using this in a practical way. We develop the behavioral table. Obviously, we watch the Bachelor. First step to anything productive is watching reality TV, right? Absolutely. So how to apply it in regular everyday life can be a little bit tricky, and I think you will need to carry it around.

We had a wallet card that we give to our students, the government clients and some law enforcement students who carry that around and use it in the field, one, as a training tool, and two, as an analysis tool. So a partner standing back watching his partner do a field interrogation or just interviewing somebody on the side of the road after an accident happened or something like that. So I would say using this as a training tool and using it as a reference are equally important. And the one that we have for download on the site, you can just hover over any of the elements on the table. And it has a huge description that pops up then. The four different types of ways you can put your hands in your pockets or the different types of shoulder shrugs or breathing speed.

So it'll give you all the information right there. And then we have to memorize this thing? I still haven't memorized the whole thing. We use it as a reference tool. So after an interaction has taken place, you can go back there and look at the behavior. Because the behavioral table is laid out with the top of the heads on the top. The feet are on the bottom and the stuff that happens outside of our body is on the bottom two rows. So that would be like a post-interview analysis or an after-the-game wrap-up.

That's super useful. First of all, it makes way more sense why you organize the table in the way that you did. At first I thought, why is this not an alphabetical order? You're driving me crazy. But now that it's sort of geographically located for the body, the arms are on the outside and things like that, I guess, and then outside the chart where the radioactive elements go on a regular periodic table or things that happen outside the body.

Perfect. Okay. This is good news because if we don't have to memorize this, because we're using it as a post-game wrap-up type of thing, that means we never actually have to worry about this. The skill that we're actually training is observing eyes, feet, hands, breathing, and a couple of other things, shoulders and things like that, once we have that down and we can journal that stuff,

even make mental notes of it, and then write them down after, we can decode an interaction a month later if we really need to. Absolutely, yes. That makes this entire endeavor a lot easier because I think a lot of folks think I've got to read this body language in real time, come to an interpretation in the moment, use that in combination with environmental context, and then have some sort of accurate conclusion at the end

by the time they're done talking, and that's not really what we're doing here. And the more you do these wrap-ups, like the post-game wrap-up, the better you will get over time at reading it in the moment. And you have to continually do this to force that awareness, force the unconscious competence on yourself. So how do we test ourselves and see if we're doing this right? Because that's the problem, right? We can always, we can observe tons of behavior, we could take a thousand pages of journal entries. How do we check and see whether or not we're even close to being accurate? You can use the behavioral table as a test as well. You can ask whether or not you saw these gestures,

click on it, see the description of it, make sure you saw that, and you interpreted it correctly. So this is a grading tool as well. So we wanted it to be a one-page document of everything that could possibly happen with body language. Can you explain how that checking, that testing works? Because I'm a little unclear on that. How would I use the table to decide whether or not things I'm observing are correct? So let's say you saw a conversation, or even if you're watching YouTube, and say you watched Conan O'Brien interview somebody, and you saw someone cross their legs and you made an estimation about it, they crossed their arms, they touched their face, like say they scratched their nose, and they were picking lint off of their shirt towards the end of the interview. So as long as you identified all of those, and if you want to test yourself on the knowledge of them, that's where you would check up on the behavioral table. watch it again and see if you missed anything. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Chase Hughes.

We'll be right back back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. The course does all of that in a super easy, non-cringe, down-to-earth way, no awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics, just practical exercises that are going to make you a better

connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer. Six minutes a day, not even that. That's all it takes. And by the way, many of the guests on the show, already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. Once again, you can find it at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Chase Hughes. Okay, so once we get those behaviors together, we might see something like, well, how do we know, okay, this person is nervous, or this person has a certain set of emotions, or is that not what the periodic table is about? Yes, the periodic table will measure uncertainty and nervousness and tension. So the further you go to the right of that behavioral table, the more likely it is to be stress or deception. So it's top

of the body to the bottom on the geographic location on the table. And left to right is least stressed to most stressed or most deceptive. Right, and just for those of you following along at home, you can listen to this interview. You don't have to worry about memorizing where these are on the table because when you play this show again, and the table is in front of you, they're color-coded, and like you said, it is left to right.

It works in many ways like an actual periodic table of elements works in that the higher stress elements are towards the right and shaded in orange slash red, correct? Yes, absolutely. Very convenient. Cool. So we can watch YouTube. We can get these behaviors down. So we can't really tell if somebody then is lying to us directly, right, or lying to Conan in this case. I would say that if you use the behavioral table to try to detect deception, that your odds will be much better than a polygraph.

And a polygraph is only about a coin toss away from being right or wrong either way. And the behavioral table uses likelihood of deception indicators and groups them together. So if you have a score that's above a certain number, you can pretty much reasonably guess that somebody is being deceptive. We're looking at lie detection here. It's really, really hard to do a lot of people watch shows like lie to me and think they can do it, which is ridiculous. We have people getting certified in micro expressions who then think they can do this. We have Harvard studies that are being misquoted where people think, oh, maybe if I learn this, I can do this. Are we, able to use the behavioral table and have a better chance of deciding whether or not someone is

telling the truth? Because as you mentioned in your work and as every accurate truth teller will tell us, that you can never decide with certainty based on nonverbal communication whether or not someone's telling the truth. But what are we doing here? What are the odds then look like when we get good at this type of behavior observation and use the table to decode it? Since the deception indicators are on the far right side of the table. Those are rated as a deception likelihood of 4.0. So when you reach a 12 or higher for a cluster of gestures, so during the time that someone is answering a question, basically, you can reasonably assume that the person is being deceptive or if you're an interior that you need to dig a little deeper. Okay. And it's more accurate than a

polygraph, which is just about as accurate as a coin toss. That's a little scary, because I think People normally assume that polygraph tests are, well, this is how you tell if someone's lying, you hook them up to an EKG meter, and if they're lying, that little pencil thing goes out of control, the end. I'm still flabbergasted that the government still uses those to vet employees. And they're actually, if you read some of the research on them, they're biased against people who are telling the truth. And most people fail polygraphs because they say too much, not because the machine measured deception.

And that's bad news because people, of course, who want to cooperate oftentimes are the ones that are doing most of the talking. And the KG ones, the ones that have something to hide are the ones that pass. Right. And then the most dangerous time and during a polygraph examination is when they're taking the machine off and the guy tells you the interview's over. And you think the polygraph is the lie detector. And then the guy keeps asking you a few more questions as he's unstrapping the machine from you and the machine's turned off. That's where a lot of people fail. Because that's where the actual polygrapher, if that's the proper term, is still running the test himself. It's just that he's done using the machine. Yes. So the interview's continuing. And he'll ask you a few follow-up questions. Like, yeah, well, we talked about your trip to the liquor store last Thursday.

The machine had something funny on there. I can't go back and look at it right now. But what was up with that? And then those are the follow-up, post-interview follow-up questions that'll really nail you. Well, that's strange and seems to prove the assertion that the machine's not really doing the heavy lifting there, which is bad news. You mentioned pre-show that watching Conan's a great way to see actual stress signals without having to interrogate someone, because in around 50% of his guests, he manages to get around 15 to 22 stress signals. Why is that the case? I think Conan has the ability to elicit those responses out of the people that come on the people that come on.

the show. The way he interviews people and the way he speaks to people produces some of that anxiety behavior on the right side of the behavioral table. Why do you think that is? Because he's super tall, possibly, or is there something else going on here? He has a strong, authoritative style of speaking, and he is comfortable making prolonged eye contact and asking strange questions that other talk show host would probably feel might be inappropriate. So he tends to place people in those situations to really throw them off guard. And when he does try to throw his guests off guard, they usually exhibit some of those behaviors on the far right side of the behavior table. And those aren't necessarily deception indicators. That's just stress. There's no behavior

for deception. There's no micro expression for deception. So all of those things are absolutely just stress. You're measuring clusters of stress. And that's how people get closer to deception. But for people training to spot deception indicators and stress, Conan is one of the best places to start. He's got a knack for producing those anxiety behaviors in celebrities. And that's obviously an excellent way to work this because if a celebrity, somebody who's maybe won a nice golden globe for acting cool under fire can't do it on live TV, they're not going to edit that out. They're not going to do another take. These are in many ways going to be as close as you can get to perfect video of real people

in a stressful situation that you can repeat and replay as many times as you want, and in every, well, virtually every case, this person is not a criminal. They're just under stress because of the environment and the person that they're interacting with. Absolutely, very well said. You mentioned that there's no signal for deception itself, only signals for stress.

Why is it that looking for truth signals is the best way to spot deception? First of all, what are truth signals and how do we use this to spot deception if all we can really do is spot stress? Good question. I think looking for truth signals and training your brain to see truth signals, which are someone who is open, who is relaxed and comfortable, basically just vulnerable body language. So spotting somebody who's just communicating really authentically is a good example of truth signals. And training your brain to look for those truth signals means that when you see deception, it's going to stand out much more.

So you're training your unconscious to see truth signals and you're looking for truth signals and spending lots of time on that. When you actually experience deception, which is going to be often, it will stand out. And once you start seeing deception, once you study what deception really is and how to read it on the table, you'll notice that almost everybody you know will lie to you. Can you narrate and paint us a picture of an example of this happening in conversation?

Doesn't have to be a real example. I realize a lot of the military and intelligence stuff you do is on lockdown. But can you narrate a hypothetical in which you're looking for a truth signal, you find it, and then you see something different happen that indicates deception? When you are looking for a truth signal, let's give an example here. If you are asking someone a question where they were on such and such, night and you would expect someone to open their palms, which is a display of sincerity, but they touch their face as soon as they start talking again. So usually, almost all the time,

facial touching is a sign of nervousness. And you looking for truth signals, which would be open palms, hands down on the table, just natural body movements, seeing the person touch their face is automatically going to set off an alarm. We're looking for something that we're expecting versus thinking, okay, whatever happens now, it's got a match. Because if we're looking for deception, that could be any behavior that isn't the one or two that should naturally follow an authentic answer. Is that what you're telling me right now? Absolutely.

So if we're thinking, oh, where were you last night? And they start talking and their palms are open and they're narrating a story about how they went to Jack in the box and then they came home and went to sleep. It looks normal. It looks authentic. They've got a couple of readily readable behaviors, palms up, their arms are uncrunked. they've got a little bit of a head tilt or something like that.

I can't remember the exact behaviors you listed in the table here. Versus, they cross their arms and then they touch their chin and they're stroking their chin like they can't remember and then they're scratching their nose and then they tell you that they went to Starbucks

and had a late night coffee and stayed up all night because of the caffeine. You're thinking, that's weird. What a weird set of behaviors that normally wouldn't follow an obvious, nonchalant story about what they ate for dinner. So it's easier to spot those

since there are fewer truth signals that would match that behavior? Yes. When you're talking about Conan, you mentioned the authoritative voice. We talked before the show, and you'd mentioned that a demonstration or proof of authority, that matters more than influence skills every time. What does that mean? That seems like a huge takeaway, potentially. I think it is.

When we were writing the ellipsis manual, we wrote that book to be the most dangerous. I wanted to have, like, a surgical manual. of persuasion. And we went from just talking somebody into doing something for you to actual word-for-word script on how to create a Manchurian candidate. And doing all of this like black ops type of persuasion stuff, we discovered that the authority a person has, the social or perceived authority a person has is more important than the skill level they have. And this was proven in a study done by, Stanley Milgram, who's a professor at Yale. Are you familiar with it? I am not. I'm curious, though, before we get into that, what do you mean that skills don't trump authority? Are we talking about the

ability to persuade someone using little techniques and tactics is dwarfed by the results when somebody just has a higher level of authority? Yes. Okay. So the Milgram study was done at Yale, and it's been repeated, I think, hundreds of times. And they have a volunteer who volunteers for this experiment on learning. And he goes in there and he has this machine that's hooked up to a guy in the other room and it's got electrodes on it. They walk this guy in there and they say, this guy's going to be learning.

He's another volunteer. He's got this electrodes all over him that's going to shock him. You're going to be delivering shocks every time he gets the answer wrong. They walk the volunteer back to the other room. sit him down at this machine. It's got all these switches from left to right on it. It goes from like zero volts all the way to XXX. So there's like 50 switches on this machine. And every time this guy keeps getting these words wrong, this guy who is running the experiment, standing behind them in a lab coat and a clipboard, says you need to shock him, deliver 120 volts, deliver 200 volts. So it keeps

just ramping it up. And the guy in the other room getting shocked is screaming for his life, saying, I want to quit, I'm done, let me out of here. I don't want to participate anymore. I have a heart problem. All of this just nonstop protesting going on from the other room. And these volunteers sitting there at a rate of 80% would shock the other person to the point of death. Yikes. To where the banging on the wall, the yelling, the begging for help completely stop. and they're shocking him over and over again, continuing to shock him, all because a guy in a lab coat with no name tag used phrases like, it's important that you continue. The experiment requires that you continue. Just phrases like that, 80% of people shocked another human being to death because a guy in a

lab coat told him to. And the guy in the other room wasn't getting shocked. Right, of course. He's an actor in the study. Yes. So the only person that was a volunteer for the experiment was the person delivering the shocks. That must have been pretty traumatizing for the people in that study after the fact, knowing that they essentially would, had that been real, they would have murdered that person. Absolutely. After the experiment was over, there were several people that filed official complaints against Dr. Milgram saying that he caused post-traumatic stress disorder, what we would call that today anyway. And the experiment was repeated in urban areas outside of a college environment because some of the people that were detractors said these people knew that they were safe.

They were in a lab environment. It was taking place on a campus so they knew nobody could really get hurt. So they repeated the study in several different settings to eliminate all of these negative feedback that they got from the experiment. And several other studies have been done on authority, like the crosswalk study, a guy wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt who breaks the crosswalk illegally and starts rocking across the street, a couple of people will follow him. but a guy wearing a suit and tie, the same guy wearing a suit and tie breaking a crosswalk and going across the street increases the likelihood by 66% of the people will break the crosswalk with him and go across the street. Because of the perceived authority of somebody wearing a suit versus jeans and in the

Milgram study, because of the perceived authority of the person wearing a lab coat slash plastic badge, correct? Yes. So are there different types of authority? I mean, clearly this one is, in the Milgram study, it sounds like some of that was probably contextual. They're in a lab in a university. That was the negative feedback and part of it. And some of it has to do with the appearance of the person who's in authority. Are there other types of factors involved that we can look at? There are. They chose the guys with the lab coats. They chose guys that were really hygienic. They were good

looking guys. They looked like they were professional doctors. They didn't wear name tags that said doctor was just a gray lab coat is what they used. The takeaway from that, I think, I think was lost on a lot of people is that a man wearing a lab coat can convince a stranger to commit murder in less than 30 minutes without any skills, no hypnosis, no persuasion training, nothing, just authority. Okay. So the obvious follow-on question is, how do we hack this? Do I need to carry a lab coat in my backpack?

Do I have to have one steamed and hanging in my car? where do we go with this that we can use that for good? And then, of course, after that, I want to know what you're afraid of people using this to do. Well, when we were writing the book, the authority chapter was originally just going to be something small that we added in there. And we discovered how powerful it was. And some of the people that were reading it said that it changed them. So we distilled authority down into five qualities. And this kind of goes back to pick up in that when I first started learning pick-up tricks and tactics, it was all ways to fake or pretend like you were an actual man, like you had your stuff together. We distilled these down into five qualities,

which are dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and fun. And by dominance, I don't mean domineering. I mean someone who's just got their stuff together. And it's amazing how many people, when we talk about discipline, email me and say, oh, I want to learn some of these psychological manipulation tactics or whatever. And just interviewing this guy over Skype or over the phone, I can tell, like, he doesn't even make his bed in the morning. He's probably way behind on bills. He's got probably got a pile of dishes in his sink. Just the guy's kind of a slob, can't take care of himself, but he wants to take control of another human being. And that goes back to just if you can't manage.

yourself, it will leak out. Your persuasion skills can be perfect. Your confidence can be perfect. But if you have issues with any of those five qualities, it will leak out somehow in your body language. The example of that is when a woman is talking to somebody and everything looks like it's going right and she says something just doesn't feel right. Something feels off. So that is our nonverbal leakage of not mastering some of one of those qualities or lacking in one of those. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Chase Hughes. We'll be right back back.

If you like this episode of the show, I'd love it if you take the same tack as other smart and considerate listeners, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. To learn more, all those discount codes, all those URLs, they're all in one very clickable place, very searchable place, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Alternatively, you can search for any sponsor using the search box on the website over at Jordan Harbinger.com as well. anything you can do is support those who support us is greatly appreciated. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Chase Hughes.

Your mindsets dictate your behaviors which dictate your results. And what that essentially means is, look, you can try to fake it till you make it, and you can have all this cool dominant guy body language, and you can have all the clever lines that people like to teach on the Internet, but it doesn't really matter. Because if you don't have your internal state together, that whole blink concept, that Malcolm Gladwell concept, is going to bite you in the butt

because people who are evolved to see this, in other words, humans, in general, who are evolved to see this, especially the fairer sex, are going to sense that something is not quite right. And we don't even have to identify what that particular nonverbal communication is and why it's coming through.

There's always going to be some leakage. Our bodies are terrible liars. And so it really does pay instead to have the mindset together instead. And so when you're looking at authority and things like that, a lot of guys who are trying to pick up women are just hacking authority. And so it doesn't work for relationships, and it doesn't work if people are really paying attention to the signals that are coming out. Even when somebody is highly skilled at doing this,

somebody who's paying attention and not just being willfully blind, they're going to pick up some leakage, and that's going to be the red flag that spoils the batch. Brilliant. And that's it. Like, if you have everything memorized, all these techniques memorized, and you can't make your bed, you can't pay your bills on time, it's not going to happen for you. You've really got to take control over yourself first and be, live a life of self-discipline. And that's one of the things that just shines through all of your nonverbal communication, especially in a one-on-one situation. When you're in a one-on-one conversation and you have that maturity and groundedness and self-discipline, it really shows through automatically. Without

talking about it, without discussing it, it's a feeling. that the other person gets. So if we can hack authority for getting people to murder someone else in a lab and men everywhere are trying to hack authority for getting women into bed, how do we hack this for something good, for the good of humanity? So when you do hack authority, this is managing your life and planning your life and living a life of self-discipline. Hacking authority means that you are mastering your environment and hacking it for good means that you are leaving every person, better than you found them. And that when you do the authority hacking, whether it's through what you wear or increasing your level of hygiene, your level of physical fitness, all of these

are methods to start hacking authority. And developing your sense of working up these five qualities, the dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and fun, working up those five qualities is the number one way to hack authority. So with the authority hacking, one of the biggest things that Milgram discovered was called an agentic shift, that when a person is in the presence of somebody in authority or somebody with perceived authority, social authority, we make a shift to become an agent doing the work of another person. So those people who were shocking the person in the other room underwent an agentic shift in the presence of that authority figure, the guy in the lab code. So when this agentic shift happens, we expose the person we're speaking to or the person who's

experiencing it is basically writes off whatever they do as in being an agency for the person that they're speaking with. Right. I was just following orders, right, is how that sounds in practice. Yes. And that just following orders thing was one of the reasons they ran the experiment. Stanley Milgram's parents were in a prison camp. And once this agentic shift is made, the psychological loopholes start to open up as wide as they can possibly be. So in the presence of a person that has this authority, we will obey and we will consider it to be either their idea or it's our idea, but we're doing it for the good of the other person. That's incredibly powerful. Of course, we can use this for habit change and things like that. And I was going to dive down that rabbit

whole, but how are people using authority or potentially going to use authority to create negative outcomes for us here in the United States, for example, or the Western world, and how can we defend against that type of thing? For example, if I find myself talking with somebody in a lab coat turning up the electrical shocks on some poor person, is there anything I can do to defend myself against that, or in the moment, am I already too late? I think in the moment, if you find yourself facing any type of authority that's making you do that. The only thing that can really get you out of that is that mindfulness and self-awareness of what you're doing at all times. And I think that is the less than 5% of the population who has the ability to do that. A hundred percent of us would say,

I would never shock another person to death, but 80% of us would. And I think that's the scary part that we think we have a firewall. We think we have some virus protection in our own mind, and we don't realize how easy it is for us to be hacked, our behavior to be hacked, our actions. So is there nothing we can do? And all we can do is hope we're part of the 5% of the population that is mindful enough to do this, or are there things we can do to inoculate ourselves against that type of influence? To inoculate yourself, you have to really learn what's going on. you'll be able to spot some of these methods if they're being used on you. There's going to be a point where you make a decision like a point of no return and you feel

that agentic state starting to shift over, but you have to be aware of that. So the time to counteract this theoretically is going to be when we start to feel the agentic shift kick in and that we're doing things not because we want to, but because somebody else has power over us. The earliest moment we recognize this, that's the time that we would what, try to get away from that particular person? Because it seems like, I guess we could look at our own behavior and try to decipher whether or not it's something we actually want to do. But if authority really does have that power over us, then it seems like what we should do is get a way physically from that authority. That would be one of the best ways to do it. It's very

hard for us to resist as just all human beings, especially when that authority starts taking place or taking hold. Leaving is definitely the best way to do it. We've spoken a lot about nonverbal communication, sort of how we started the show. I definitely want to get a practical from you. The posture exercise sounds great because it does prove not only that body language shows what's going on inside, it actually can create what is going on inside as well. Absolutely. And I think the reason we study body language is the reverse of that.

So if you do move your body, it can create an emotion on the inside, just like we displayed on the outside when we're feeling an emotion. All right, so a great exercise to prove this to yourself is to slouch your posture down as much as you can. So like try to exhibit the physical characteristics of a person who's just downtrodden. He has no friends. People are talking crap about them and social media. Just like the worst, most poor body language you can possibly exhibit. And while you're holding that without moving a muscle, try to feel confident at the same time.

It's almost impossible to do. So moving you physically will create an internal emotion. The other part of the posture exercise is to prove to you that if you can talk someone into doing something, you can control their emotions based on their body. So if I can talk to you, I say, Jordan, I've read this interesting article about how successful people tend to breathe into their stomachs more than their chest. I'm forcing the body language of comfort on you and forcing you to be more comfortable. Can you clarify that?

I'm not sure I follow that. Sure. So if I can get you to start exhibiting different body language, I can get you to experience a different emotional state. So if I get you to match and mirror me and I start sitting up or I start slowing my breathing down, I can force your body, and I say a force with big quotes around it, I can get you to start coalescing with mine. Let me just clarify this. So it sounds like what you're saying is the reason you're telling somebody that the body language of success or that successful people breathe through their stomach and not through their chest is because you know that everybody else wants to be successful. So that statement will then convince me or suggest to me

that I should breathe through my stomach instead of through my chest, which makes me more relaxed, which is the actual outcome that you're going for. So you're subtly suggesting to me, instead of saying, breathe through your stomach and relax, you're saying, hey, by the way, this quality that I know you want involves you taking this action physically. But then by taking that action physically, you're getting me to do something else that you want that you haven't stated. Yes. Got it. That makes sense. So you're doing this subtly during interrogations, during conversations to get people to take on a certain physicality so that you can get them to do other things and become more compliant, correct?

Yes. So you start processing them into going into comfort or getting more relaxed and you get more compliance. Right. Okay. This makes perfect sense. So one of the things I used to do is, for example, if someone's arms are crossed and we're talking, say we're in a negotiating situation as attorneys or in business, if they've got

their arms crossed, I may do something. where I hand them a drink, and I slide that across the table. Usually people will not just sit there with a drink in front of them and their arms crossed, they'll reach out and get it. And when you have somebody who reaches out to get it, they oftentimes will keep their hand there.

And if you're in a dating situation, you can have a glass, like a martini glass, which looks unstable, and you can slide it across from them or you can keep it sliding away from them as well so that they have to uncross their arms to bring it back into the proximity that they would need for something like their drink. people don't want their drink to be too far outside their psychological space. So to make that a little

bit more clear, if you're, say, out with friends at night and you're talking with somebody and they close off, you may slide their drink further away from them, causing them to uncross their arms and hold on to their drink, which uncrosses their arms. That's sort of the similar situation where you tell somebody, hey, successful people do this, and then they start to emulate that behavior, only I'm doing it a little bit more brute force method, it sounds like. That's terrific. And just mentioning something like when you're complaining about somebody saying they never look at people when they speak, or he always has his shoulders up and he's so rigid, complaining about another person would force the same kind of body language behaviors. Right. So if you want to get your kids to

stop slouching or a friend or a significant other to stop slouching, you might say something like, yeah, you know what? One of my pet peeves I just realize is when people just cannot stand up straight. You don't have to be looking at them to do that. It might be a little too on the nose. You could even say this to them over the phone and you can almost hear them straighten up on the other and say, yeah, that drives me crazy as well. And you could absolutely influence someone's physicality based on that. Now, whether or not that sticks is irrelevant, of course, because we're not trying to change their habit.

We're just trying to change their physicality in the moment so that we can elicit a certain mindset, right? Yes. Perfect. Man, there's so much here that I want to wrap with the X-ray vision for a day exercise. Can you guide us through that? Sure. The X-ray question is just a simple question that we teach to the students.

students as they're going through the first part of their training phase. And it's basically designed to expose the people around you. And the question you asked is, what do their friends say to them that makes them feel good or cool? What makes them feel significant in the world? And finally, where are they on the needs map? And the human needs map is something that we use for profiling other people. And the basic human needs we have on there are appreciation, approval, acceptance, power, admiration, pity, and intelligence. So how do we do this exactly, right? We're looking at where people need attention from others, when they do things to gain appreciation. Can you give us an example of this inaction so that people know exactly what they're looking for? Whenever you hear a conversation, you can hear

this almost at any point if you were to inject yourself in someone else's conversation. When you're listening to someone talk, they will start revealing these needs. if they talk about, hey, I just got this, this, and this for my birthday. Or I just graduated from this MMA fighting school. Or, hey, I came down and I folded laundry for you. So what do they need to be appreciated for? Or what do they need to feel acceptance to? So these will reveal themselves.

All you have to do is change the way that you start listening to how people speak. And you will start to hear all kinds of human needs in there. And those needs are tremendous lever points that you can use in interaction. That's what we detailed in the ellipsis manual, how to do all this and how to identify the fears and weaknesses based on what needs a person has. And this is by no means an academic text on human needs. These are just the ones that are most easily to spot and the easiest to use in a conversation. Can you give us an example of using this in our daily lives that we can apply right after we hear this? Absolutely. If you hear a person tell you four or five things where

they're seeking appreciation from you. So they did a favor for you. They are offering to do a favor for you or something to that effect. So anytime a person is seeking appreciation, you can use that appreciation factor to give them appreciation or approval or acceptance, whatever you're hearing from them. Use the appreciation and give them appreciation the next time right before you ask them to do something for you. So in practice, that would look like what? In practice, that would look like, hey, you have really been there for me like seven times in a row. I really appreciate everything you've been doing. I have a favorite ask if you wouldn't mind. So that would be for a person that is appreciation motivated. Right. It's not just for everybody because somebody might be like,

yeah, you're right, I do way too much for you. But if they're appreciation motivated, then that's really what they're going for, right? So they'll do something in order to get more of it. Yes. And the approval people would operate a little bit different. Sure. Can you give an example of the approval people. How do we detect an approval seeking person and how do we use that, for example, to go a little dark side here at the end of the show? Approval seeking people tend to brag a little bit and they will look at you anytime they say something positive about themselves. So right after they say something positive, they'll look at you to make sure there's an effect, like a nonverbal effect.

With people that seek approval, you can hear that immediately when they start doing that. and the thing that will tell you that they are the approval-seeking people is that look. You'll get the look right after they say it. And anytime you want to use this on the person who seeks approval, obviously the thing that they fear the most is being rejected. Can you give us an actual example of this in practice, the actual phrasing that we might be hearing, the actual phrasing we might give in return?

For approval-seeking people, the way that you might want to ask for a favor is, hey, Jordan, I was talking to Stephen and Lindsay, and they are extremely excited to have you on the team. They said you're one of the best people ever out here. And I wanted to ask you a favor if that's all right with you. So you're validating that socially they are being approved by a group of people. How do we know that their approval seeking in the first place? That would be based on any time you have a conversation with them

and you hear them talking about themselves and making that eye contact right after they say something positive about themselves. So can you give us an example of them saying something positive about themselves and then looking at us and then us using that to our advantage? So somebody says, hey, Jordan, you know, I just graduated from the MMA school, just right down the road,

and then he makes a little bit of eye contact right after he says it. That is, bar none, absolutely an approval-seeking person. And the way to do that, you could, especially if that's it, you could validate them by talking about their accomplishments right before you ask them for a favor. So we can constantly be on the lookout

for people's motivators by listening to the way that they talk both about themselves or especially about themselves, what other sort of examples can we use to examine what people's motivators are? If we know that that's approval seeking, what are the other modes of behavior and what are the phrases these people might be using? Well, there's several. There's acceptance, and these people who drive through acceptance have a need to be accepted by a group or just one person. And especially if you have the authority, you will create acceptance seeking people just by your own behavior. So that's not the person's regular MO. The rest of the needs, and like the intelligence,

power, admiration, those are people who need to be seen as intelligent. They don't need to be intelligent. And that's one of the biggest mistakes that I think leaders make now is that all of this business about identifying the strengths of your employees is about identifying what they do well, how well the mechanism performs a task. And instead of trying to figure out what a person's good at, try to figure out what they want to be seen as being good at. And you will get 10 times the results. All right. Well, Chase, thank you so much.

There's so much here. Each little area that we've touched on today is a whole show, right? The approval seeking behavior, finding out people's motivators, using motivators to get results, examining nonverbal communication, figuring out which nonverbal communication is true and what it means in concert with the environment. There's just so much here. And I think that if people are wondering, oh my gosh, what do I do with this now? Examining people's behavior, figuring out how to make yourself more observant,

worry about utilizing these concepts later on. But for now, the big takeaway is learn what you can absorb just from paying attention to the right channels. And I think that will make people much more effective than they were before they hit play on this episode. So, Chase, thank you very much for your time. Now, I've got some thoughts in this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Chase Manhattan bank robbery. I'm a second negotiator on the phone.

Hugh McGowan is a commander of the NYPD team. He puts me on the phone and he takes this guy off. He says, you're up, you're next. This is what I want you to do. You're just going to take over the phone and say, you're talking to me now. And we're going to do it really abruptly. My point is to get a hostage out, which is what a hostage negotiator is supposed to do. And somebody hands me a note and says, ask him if he wants to come out.

That was somebody that was listening. My friend, Jamie, Jamie Sedano. Jamie's sitting there and something in Jamie's instincts is telling him that this guy wants to come out more than anything else. He just hears it. And he writes, ask him if he wants to come out. I see a note pop in front of my face. So I go, do you want to come out? And there's a long silence on the other end of the line.

And the guy says, I don't know how I do that. Which is a great big giant, yes. Yeah. Everybody goes like, holy cow, okay. Get him out of there. I'm talking, I'm talking, I'm talking. Again, probably about, I don't know, maybe half an hour later. Another note comes in my hand.

I don't know where it's from. As it turns out, it's from Jamie again. And the note says, tell him you meet him outside. And I say, tell him. How about this? I'm not if I meet you out front of the bank. And he goes, yeah, I'm ready to do in the shit. I get out there, I get on the PA, I start talking to him.

So I say, hi, it's Chris. I'm out here. Standard operating procedure is to barricade the exit from the outside. So a bad guy suddenly doesn't run away. So SWAT has barricaded the bank from the outside, which everyone has forgotten. So I'm trying to talk this guy out the door. We don't know how many bad guys are inside. We don't know how they're going to react.

We don't know what the hell's going to happen. He comes to the door and can't get out. Oh, God. That would be, as he rattles the door. rattles the door. Everybody's like, ah! He's nervous, right?

I mean, no crap. I'm trapped in here now. Yeah, on the outset, we go, nah, what do we do? We forgot to unlock the door. And our bad guy is kind of like, oh, I'm going to play games with me, huh? For more from FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss,

including negotiation and persuasion tips, along with a few crazy stories, check out episode 165 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Big thank you to Chase Hughes. All things Chase will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I've said it once, but I'll say it again, please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both

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