Manipulation Expert: How to Control Any Conversation and Read Their Mind Instantly!

Today's guest is a world-leading expert in the art of human behavior. So many people view the world as like Harry Potter, but they think there's some magic script out there. I'm just going to have this little spell, and it's going to make somebody's behavior change. But this is as close as it gets right here. Serving 20 years in the U.S. Navy, he's trained Secret Service and military leaders on behavior profiling, interrogation, and psychological warfare. Men will kind of do this behavior of covering their genitals during three key periods: feeling vulnerable, feeling threatened, or feeling

insecure. Women, instead of covering the crotch, will usually put an arm across their abdomen; they'll cover the uterus. Today, he's revealing his secrets, educating millions online, and working directly with CEOs and FBI agents to navigate the science of influence. "Could you hypnotize me to murder someone?" "Absolutely." "And how long would that take?" "40 minutes." In this episode, we'll dive into the strategy he uses to control any conversation, how government elites manipulate the masses, and the hidden cues that can reveal exactly what someone is thinking. Chase Hughes, welcome to the Jack Neil podcast. "Hey Jack! Yeah,

so since we just met each other and had a few minutes, I have a notepad here. And since you're a behavior expert, I was wondering if you could maybe write a few predictions about me just from interacting with me briefly in the past few minutes." "What if I write down three of your biggest insecurities?" "That's a good one." "And you don't have to read them on camera; you just got to say if they're accurate or not." "Okay, and we'll open it at the end. For the record, we have spoken for approximately 15 minutes. All right,

there's number one. Number two: give me a specific, and I'll give you—uh—give me a situation that you're in, and I'll give you an insecurity in that situation." "Um, core. For the third one, I'll write down the way that I know already that you use to escape from these first two." "Yeah, we go for that. No one's ever done this." "All right, and I'll sign it. I can just put that right there. Awesome." So yeah, Chase has just made three predictions about my insecurities, and one was how I deal with those insecurities. And you haven't really

asked me many questions to be able to know that, so I would be interested to see at the end of the podcast how that turns out. Just so you know, just us talking right now, there's a lot that you can see on human beings, and we can dig into that if you want to. I can tell you the methods that are apparent on most people. What can you tell about a person just by looking at their face? Quite a bit. So we spend most of our time in conversations looking at people's faces, right? So that's

where we always want to start teaching any kind of behavior reading or body language, behavior profiling. The first thing that you want to notice about a person's face is: what are the lines that are etched into their face? If you see somebody, and this happens by the age of like 18 or 19, so it's not like lines from aging; this is lines from expression. So if someone's smiling all the time, I guarantee you've met people before—you'll see these little crow's feet from a natural smile that are kind of etched because they live that life, and

they're kind of happy all the time. If somebody's angry all the time, you're going to see these two little muscles right here pulling together—this is called the glabella—you’re going to see kind of an etching right there. If somebody's really social, you're going to see more lines on the forehead develop because our forehead is our social billboard, and that's how we communicate emotion. So people are less likely to trust someone just instinctively if their forehead is covered up, like by your hair. But this is how we communicate: like I enjoy your presence, hello, good morning. If

you raise your eyebrows when you talk to a person—and you could try this as an experiment today; you're going in an airport here in a couple of hours—if you just raise your eyebrows when you say hello, 90% of people will reflect back the eyebrow raise without knowing that they even did it. So, instinctively programmed into human beings. So you can see people who are naturally more social from the forehead, more enjoyment and happiness driven from the crow's feet in the corners of the eyes. You could see anger right here, but one of the most profound

things that I ever discovered was if you make a skeptical facial expression, the first thing it does is raise your cheeks and compress your lower eyelid. Like, give it a shot really quick—like somebody's feeding you; it raises this up and kind of wrinkles the skin right here. So I thought if someone's spending a lifetime thinking they're getting lied to or they're really skeptical, that's going to etch onto the face. So I started experimenting with it, and I thought there's probably 20% effectiveness, but it’s more like 100%. Then I gave this information to two guys who

are comedy hypnotists, and maybe you've seen like a show or something. But you know, they go on stage and bring people up and make them do crazy things and all that. And they have tested it with like between 5,000 to 10,000 people, and they said it's 100%: the people who wind up staying on stage and being highly suggestible have really smooth lower eyelids. So, like, I'm extremely suggestible to hypnosis and all that. Stuff, look, see, my eyelids are totally smooth right there. You have somebody, um, your age; you still have like a lower level of

suggestibility. So that would be a factor too in the paper that we put together to write up on this, um, and that one we're still kind of figuring out. But so far, it's between 90 and 100% accurate. Like, the more suggestible someone is, the smoother the lower eyelids are going to be. And keep in mind, this is not some published science. I haven't done any scientific research on it, but it's anecdotal, and I've seen so much proof—thousands and thousands of repetitions. Is that something I have? You have what would be called an LEF (lower eyelid

factor), which means you're mildly suggestible, so you have slight wrinkling there from kind of that expression over time. Interesting! So the next thing is, and the most important thing that you can spot (and this is for anybody), if you're pitching, if you're negotiating, you can see it on a Zoom call: watching how often someone blinks. This is one of the most powerful superpowers that you could ever have. So we call this blink rate, and this is like how many times per minute a person is blinking. The average blink rate is between 15 and 17 in

a conversation for humans. If your blink rate starts going up, you're seeing stress in a person. So if we're in a conversation, let's say you're pitching a company or something, and somebody asks you about your financial projections, and your blink rate starts going through the roof as you're talking about all this money, that's a high-stress response, and that could be deceptive. But keep in mind, there's no behavior in human beings for deception—none. What we're looking for is a change or stress most of the time. So if I watch a person's blink rate go up, what

I really want to understand is what's the context? What was just mentioned or talked about that is making this change happen? So in a high-stress scenario, you can see blink rates above 80 per minute, and in a low blink rate scenario, that's where we have focus. So if someone's genuinely interested in a conversation, you'll see their blink rate drop almost to 3 to 4 per minute, which is a massive difference from 4 per minute to 80 per minute, and you can spot it from like 20 yards away. So it's so easy to see stress and

focus on a person. The last time you were really focused on like a movie that was really great, your blink rate was probably 3 or 4. And the last time you were maybe doing something stressful, like taking a math exam or doing something in school that stressed you out, your blink rate was probably 70 or 80. The cool thing is we're almost never aware of how often we're blinking. So it's so outside of our conscious awareness that we don't keep it under natural control all the time, and it's hard to control. So I can look

at any conversation; like, you look across an airport or a restaurant at two people talking, you can see who's more relaxed than the other person right away, and that's just looking at the eyes. So we're just looking at the face. This is not even the rest of the body. Now we can see not just if someone has a high blink rate or a low blink rate; what we're really wanting to look for, if I'm teaching you to do this as a trial consultant or you're about to help a lawyer select a jury, you want to

look for change. You don't want to look for, "Oh, it's high," or, "Oh, it's low." What I'm in the business of is spotting changes. So this person behaved this way a few minutes ago, and it just shifted to something else. If I'm doing public speaking, I'm speaking on stage a lot and stuff like that, I'm making eye contact with people who are out in the crowd— the people that are sitting out there in the audience. As I'm doing that, I'm looking at eyeballs, so I can average the entire room's blink rate. My job as a

public speaker is to keep the lowest blink rate possible. That means focus is happening. So I'm looking out around the crowd, and I see blink rates starting to go up; I'm seeing people blink more often. I know instantly that I'm losing attention; they're getting stressed out, they're thinking about lunch. So I'll raise my voice up higher, I'll walk to the other side of the stage, I'll clap my hands really loud, or change the subject, and automatically I start seeing blink rates go back down again because I've regenerated focus. You can spot that in any conversation.

Think about it like this: if you want to ask someone a question about something that should not cause them stress, but you're seeing that blink rate goes up, that's a big deal. You're seeing it change to this high blink rate. We teach this in jury selection and all that kind of stuff, but you don't have to count, and that's where that stresses a lot of people out—like I'm sitting here counting how often somebody's blinking. You practice just looking at how often someone's blinking and saying, “That looks pretty normal, that looks pretty slow, that looks pretty

fast.” So your job after that is, is it increasing or decreasing? And if you want to persuade someone, you want to influence someone, your goal is to get them to blink less and less often. That means that they're... Gener, you're generating more and more focus in them subconsciously. That makes sense, yeah? And the second thing is, uh, shutter speed. The shutter speed is the speed of the eyelid closing and then opening back up again. So, we see an increase in shutter speed with fear, and we see a decrease in shutter speed with comfort. But when

somebody is fully comfortable, let's say we start a conversation and all of a sudden I start talking about, uh, unpaid bills, and I see someone's shutter speed increase and their blink rate starts going up, I know that that is a really hot topic for that person. I can't read their mind, but I know that I'm seeing a reaction based on subject matter. Does that make sense? So, with the face, just a couple of the things that you need to be on the lookout for, especially if you're dealing in business negotiations, women going out on dates

with like manipulative dudes, and they need to spot it way sooner so they don't get like sucked into some horrible vortex, are lip compression. This one is really easy to spot, and it's a very universal thing across all cultures. Lip compression is when someone squeezes their lips together; you'll see it like that, and it usually means, almost all the time, withheld opinions. So, if we're talking and you're like, "Uh, Chase, how do you like the new thing that you just bought?" I'm like, "Oh, it's great." So, you're seeing somebody withhold some kind of opinion—not deception.

It's not lying per se; it's obviously based on the context. But it's really important to be able to say, "Oh, there's something being held back." It doesn't mean you need to dig it out or anything, but it's good as a data point to know that there's something here. If I'm in sales and I see lip compression, I know I'm just not going to talk about that topic anymore. If I'm in an interrogation, I know I may need to ask more questions about that thing. But it's very powerful to notice if you see when a topic

is being brought up and someone's listening, and they do this lip compression behavior. It's most often withheld opinions or something being withheld—emotion. And the other variation of this is lip retraction. This is when the lip goes past the barrier of the teeth. So, when you see the lip go into the mouth, or you see a finger go into the mouth—something passes the barrier of the teeth—it's a need for reassurance most of the time. So, you'll see that, like, um, I'll be calling someone up on stage or I'll do, uh, some kind of thing where I'm

talking to a person and you'll see them do some kind of thing where something's going into their mouth. Right away, I know that that person needs some kind of reassurance. It is so powerful; it could drastically change how you react to people and how you communicate with people. It can make you a much better communicator. As you start seeing blink rates go up, I know I'm going to change the conversation to something because I know you're being stressed out. If I bring something up and I see lip compression, I know that there may be something

there, or I need to move off of this topic. Or, if I'm in an interrogation, I need to dig into this topic. Those are just a few things that we can start looking for. What else do you suspect you can tell but might not be 100% certain? You'd mentioned the eye thing wasn't proven through data, but is there anything else? Like, I've heard a lot of people talk about physiognomy—yeah, like being able to tell based on jaw structure and nose structure, the tilt of eyes, that type of stuff. Is that all [ _ ]? I

think most of it's been discredited and is proven. And I think if it was even proven to be 20% reliable, I would be on board. I'd say, "Let's learn it and add that to my stack of data." Because when I'm looking at a person, I'm not looking for one thing; I'm looking for a cluster of different things that will tell me one piece of information. Does that make sense? Yeah, so physiognomy started back, um, in the late 1700s. They would make these models of the human head, and based on where the lumps are on the

skull, they would say, "Oh, this is high intelligence," and "This is low intelligence." Then they went into facial shapes and structures, and I think 99% of that stuff has been completely discredited. But I will say, as a caveat, if I want to, like, simulate or do research on high-stakes intelligence interrogations, where we have like a detainee and an interrogator, and I give a couple of college kids a lunch voucher to come up here and volunteer for an experiment, and then they pronounce, like, "Oh, we did research on interrogation," there is nothing—nothing—that a college can simulate

that would be even remotely close to an intelligence interrogation scenario where the person's sleep-deprived and they're facing the death penalty if they give out information. You can't replicate a lot of human behavior in some college basement somewhere doing an experiment. So, it's very hard to quantify, and I think a lot of people make a terrible mistake of thinking that human behavior is a science and not just an art form. Because every human being is a little bit different, everybody's got different backgrounds and different cultures and different experiences from their childhood, which kind of still runs

the little programs and stuff in the background. So treating it like it's geometry, where we can just accurately predict everything and relying solely on one psychology textbook as the source, the ground truth about every human being in the world, I think that is a mistake. But I do think it is a blend of art and science, and I think what I do when it comes to behavior profiling is a lot like being a meteorologist. I have all of these little data points, so this is likely what's going to happen. So we deal in likelihood instead

of pronouncing the actual thing. What's the easiest way to make someone feel comfortable around you? Man, that's fantastic! One of the fastest ways that a person gets to feel comfortable involves a few different factors. Number one is that they see you as predictable and reliable. This starts with the idea that this person A is not a threat. Not being a threat means I'm not facing the person head-on. The way you and I are facing right now is non-adversarial. Our brains are kind of wired to be a little bit more competitive when people are sitting directly

across from each other. This is why, in the bars back in the old West, they knew this, even if they didn't know why. They knew that to get a bunch of dudes at a bar who were getting drunk to talk to each other, they had to see each other, so they put up a huge mirror on the back of the bar where they could look at each other without facing each other. This lowered the likelihood of fights taking place. So that would be number one: Am I in some kind of nonverbal position that creates some

kind of adversarial thought process in their mammalian part of their brain? Is that specific to men, though? Oh no, no! Women have the exact same fight-or-flight response. So when another human, a woman or a man, comes up and is facing directly onto that person, it triggers our brains to say, “This might be a conflict or confrontation. This might be something I have to deal with physically.” Let me just explain: our brain has not changed in about 200,000 years, and we do not have a part of the brain dedicated to a hierarchical structure of the brain

for language. None. This is why it takes babies years to start talking and speaking. We have to learn that, but a baby can walk. A baby can learn sign language, like “milk” and “I want more,” and we can do all of that because we have hierarchical structures for those things, but we do not have them for language. Language is relatively new to our species, so we rely on a lot of non-verbal communication. We read other people at this gut level, or if it’s a woman, she would read people with some intuition—women's intuition is, in my

opinion, way better than men's. We read these micro movements first, and the mammalian brain is what's truly in charge of a human being. So if I'm thinking, “I need to make someone comfortable,” what most people would think is, “What are the words I need to say?” Language is always, above and beyond, the least important thing in persuasion and influence. It's the last part of our brain that evolved, so it’s the least important. If you think of any sales team in the world, and I'm sure you've dealt with a lot of dudes who do online sales,

they have a sales team. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen since I've retired from the military, and now I train a lot of sales teams around the country, is they want a better sales script. That's it! So I show up, and they're like, “Oh, we need different words.” I say, “If you paid me $10 million and I developed the best sales script on planet Earth, in the history of humankind, and gave it to one of your salespeople who has social anxiety, it would be the crappiest sales script in the world, and you're going to

blame it on the script.” I can give you every single word to say, but if you're not communicating the right signals non-verbally, those words are meaningless; they have no effect. So it's so important that we understand my ability to make another person comfortable is non-verbal—90% non-verbal. So it's how am I approaching that person. Making someone comfortable and making someone trust you are about the same thing. Then we get into authority—are you an authority figure? You can be dominant but not domineering; you can be in control but not controlling. But you do this all non-verbally. Are

you in charge of yourself? Do you have high self-confidence? Do you present non-threatening body language and demeanor? One of the best, most powerful ways to start communicating that is by using open palms. This is proven; there's even a TED Talk about it by a good friend of mine named Mark Barden, and he’s on the Behavior Panel YouTube channel with us. We cover a lot of true crime body language breakdowns and stuff. If you watch his TED Talk, it’s fascinating. But as a quick tip... Note: A summary of what this means is, while you're speaking, if

you're speaking with your arms and hands at naval height—so like even with your belly button and your palms open—when you're making these important points in what you're saying, people are like ten times more likely to believe you and trust you and trust in what you say, just by having these open palms. You can demonstrate it so quickly and so easily; like, even in a seated position, if I'm sitting here like this and I'm covering my genitals right now, which is a fear response when people lie or when they're scared or when they're really fearful about

what they're saying or what they're experiencing, right? And I say, "Jack, you can trust me." It feels weird. So if I cover my abdomen, because we don't have bones right here to protect organs, right? So one of the things we do when we're fearful is put bones where there aren't any bones. So we'll kind of cover this abdomen. Women are more likely to do it. But I say, "Jack, you can trust me," or, if we're talking like this and I say, "Jack, you can trust me," it feels different in your brain because we have this

hard wiring to see this openness—this open non-verbal communication. It feels completely different. Mark Bowden calls this the truth plane, where people are just way more likely to accept what you say or believe you. In reality, making someone comfortable is about having confidence; that's actually contagious. So when somebody has confidence that's artificial, it makes other people feel small. If your confidence is genuine and you're not faking confidence out of ego, that's what makes people small. But if I'm truly confident, it should make other people confident, even if they have social anxiety, even if they're stressed out.

I have a calm demeanor and enough composure that my confidence is sufficient to transfer to other people. If you're talking about persuasion and influence—whether you're a cult recruiter, an interrogator, or a parent trying to raise a kid—you want your confidence to be contagious. Your number one goal is to transfer my level of confidence to that other person so they can make a decision. I want to increase their confidence. So that's the number one thing: having confidence to the point where it's transferable to the other person. I wanted to touch on what you said a minute

ago about the crotch exposure just because there was this interview a few days ago with Trump and Zelensky, and people were commenting on the fact that Trump was kind of covering his genitals and Zelensky was sitting like this. So, like, what does that mean? Like, you're hiding something if you're covering your crotch, or what’s the kind of thing there? There are going to be a lot of body language experts out there. Somehow, I got voted the number one body language expert in the world on this Global Gurus thing, and they stopped that category. I think

maybe a lot of the votes were my mom going on there, but in reality, what a lot of these experts are going to say is, "He did this, so this might mean that," but what you won't hear them say is talking about changes—which we already talked about. When did that happen? How long did it stay that way? And when did it open back up again? So, what was the moment that happened when the movement took place of that genital protection behavior? There are probably a few still frames you could get where Zelensky is covering his

abdomen, covering his crotch. You can get still shots to mean anything that you want them to mean, but what we really need to pay attention to is the change. I actually haven't watched it; it's just stressful, and I choose not to watch anything negative or weird, so I just don't expose my brain to it. But in any situation, you can cherry-pick little pieces of data until you turn on the job of looking for changes in behavior, and that's the number one thing. I would say that there are some people out there who will say, "Oh,

Zelensky was confident; Trump was not." Maybe the whole interview didn't look like that; I don't know if the whole interview was like that and if his hands were covering his crotch the whole time. I would say there’s some insecurity; men will kind of do this behavior of covering their genitals, while women, during three key periods—feeling vulnerable, feeling threatened, or feeling insecure—will usually put an arm across their abdomen to cover the uterus. You'll see this; I can't remember where this research was done, but young girls going to college for the first time—so they're in this new

environment—during the first eight to nine days, I think, of school, they would carry their books and stuff in front of their abdomen. The more socially comfortable they got with everybody, the books would be carried lower and lower until they were down at their side. Men are likely to do the same thing; we kind of pull our arms in when we're feeling those moments. But always think about the change: when is it happening? There are so many body language experts out there who speak about body language like it's a still image, and I've never understood that.

Because when I first started learning, I thought, "Oh, this is a..." I learned by looking at pictures. A book I'm like still image, still image, and I know what that means. If I see it, I don't—I need to look for the change to that behavior when someone moves to that behavior. So if you see Trump covering his genitals the whole time, I would say there's a pretty good bet he's vulnerable, threatened, or insecure. It's one of those three things. I mean, you've been on a lot of podcasts and in a lot of high-stakes negotiations. How

do you get what you want out of an interaction? Okay, so, number one, I need to figure out what my desired outcome is, so I need to go in there with an outcome in mind. A lot of people don't. Every conversation should have an outcome. "I want this person to feel great" could be an acceptable outcome, but right off the bat, you want to get them to start making identity agreements. And this is just kind of a little micro class of things that you can do. Identity agreements mean that you get them to either verbally

or in their own head say, "I am the type of person who __." So what I've taught in sales and even in interrogations is if we start a conversation, and I say, "You know, Jack, there are so many podcasters out there who just have this rigorous structure that they have to follow, and it's kind of nauseating to be on the podcast." Okay, so I'm glad I'm in here with you today. I didn't say anything about you, but I got you to mentally agree that you are not that one type of person. Do you see how

quickly that can start compounding? So if I walked in here like that, I might be able to get you to not pull out your iPad, to not do anything. Does that make sense so far? So I've just said there are so many people who do X, Y, Z behavior. I'm glad that it's you and me here today. I'm glad that you and I are talking. I'm getting you to agree that you are not that type of person. And imagine if I'd come in here—and I'll just use you and me as an example, if that's all

right with you? Yeah, for sure. Imagine if I—like, when I came into the studio today, I was down in this little parking lot area. You were up the stairs, and as I was walking up the stairs, I said, "Dude, I was just watching your podcast. It is so refreshing to see somebody who is a podcaster and can still do whatever." I say I can make sure that you'll probably do that or act that way on the show because I didn't get you to agree to an idea. I got you to agree to an identity, and

identity is the strongest way to influence a human being—to get them to agree to who they are as a person. So let's say I wanted you to be more open and vulnerable about yourself. So I'm walking up these stairs, and I'm like, "Dude, I just finished watching your podcast, and like so many podcasters are so closed off. They push these barriers up, and they try to fake their way through podcasts, so it's really rare to see somebody who is just genuinely open and authentic." So I really appreciate it. I didn't say that that was you,

but your head said it was you. But if I say, "You are this kind of person," and I give you these direct compliments, your brain feels like it's being influenced. Your brain feels like there's some manipulation going on, but if I take that out, I'm taking away your ability to really scrutinize what I'm saying, because I'm just making a generalized statement, even though I'm getting you to say, "Yes, that is me." Does that make sense? Yeah. And another way—and this is just like the first beginning of a conversation. And let's say I said, "You know,

Jack, I just watched your podcast. I got to tell you, man, as a behavior guy, I'm wondering—how did you get this open and just completely raw and able to share all your feelings at your age? I think I was like 30 until I got that open with other people." And the moment that you start answering that question, you're agreeing to an identity verbally. Now I've got you to verbally agree to an identity, and most of the time, if you just memorize that one phrase—if you want a quick one-liner, which I hate—these little scripts and stuff.

But ask somebody, "How did you get this open with other people? Have you always been this way, or is this something you had to work on?" I know I had social anxiety; I had to work on it, so I'm curious about something. And then I make an admission, and it makes the admission look more honest if I touch my chest, and you probably notice the feeling of like, "This looks a lot more genuine." My eyebrows going up, I'm kind of touching my chest, making an admission, and the moment that you start answering that, I'm nailing

down what you're allowed to do with me in the future. So I'm removing the possibility that you're going to be more holding back. I'm not completely eliminating it, but I'm lessening that likelihood. So every moment in a conversation is about crafting the likelihood of the behaviors that are going to follow. Yeah, I'm really interested in the identity thing. I will say, like, researching you... In the past couple of weeks, that's been my biggest takeaway by far. It seems to be the root of most conflicts between people. Essentially, if you have an opinion that I disagree

with, it's more so that I don't want to have the identity of the person who would agree with that opinion. That's where we see this bifurcation of politics between liberals and conservatives; it's more so that people want to identify with that side of the aisle, rather than actually live out what that opinion looks like. I guess what I want to ask you about utilizing the identity—or just in terms of getting what you want out of a conversation, say this podcast for instance—is that I might have to cut it a bit short in a couple of

hours because I have a flight to make. How would you kind of go about it if you really wanted to be on here for like five hours with me? How would you steer the conversation in a way, without any sort of bribe or anything, to make that happen? Yeah, so let's start from me being in the parking lot like I was this morning. For reference, we're on the second floor of a building; there's an outdoor staircase. I'm standing out there, and you kind of came out and said "Hey," and that was like...let's start with that.

So the moment I'm walking up the stairs, I say the exact same intro: "Hey Jack, I just watched a couple of your podcasts yesterday to get ready for this. And I was just on the way over here, I was watching this one with this other guy, and I got to say, man, there are so many podcast hosts out there who just rush and rush to get something over with. It's kind of disgusting because it's like this mechanistic process where people just want to churn out content; they've got [ __ ] to do, so they end

the podcast early and do all these things—they don’t really prioritize their guest. And you do! It's amazing that I go on so many podcasts, and there's nobody that really prioritizes getting everything they can from a guest. I really appreciate that you do that." So it was framed as a compliment, but you've agreed that you are a certain type of person at this moment that would have at least got you 15 more minutes, and that's just the beginning. So right away, I didn't get you to agree to an idea; I got you to agree that you're

a certain type of person. This is in the first 30 seconds. Influencing someone long-term is not just about "Hey, let me just keep hacking away at this identity." There are ideas that come in there too. What I did there is called a negative dissociation, and this is part of the NCI system that I teach in government and to people all over the world. It’s called NCI: Neurocognitive Intelligence. One of the methods in there is called negative dissociation. I don’t want you to have a certain trait, so all I’ll do is talk negatively about a certain

group of people and how they have this trait. Let’s say now we're inside. I've already said that first thing to you, and then I say, "You know, you've been doing podcasts for a while; you've got a million subscribers now on YouTube, and I'm just amazed at how many douchebags there are out there hosting podcasts nowadays. I’m really excited to come here because every time I've sat with one of these people—I’ve been on a lot of podcasts—every time I sit down with one of these people, it’s like they have a clock ticking down, and they have

to just pay attention to the clock. It’s almost like I’m sitting with a doctor who doesn’t give a [ __ ] about me." Now, I've given you a scenario that your brain has automatically related to, right? So I’ve put a picture in your head—a negative one. It’s just really mechanistic. I’ve seen so many of your shows, and it’s good to be with someone who is willing to stick around and get the full story when they need to do that. Now that’s identity again. You could keep going down a hill, and if you keep doing it

over and over using the same technique, it’s going to be very obvious. It’s going to be like, "Oh, why does he keep saying this [ __ ]?" From identity, I want to go to expectancy. If you have confidence and authority, you can create expectancy. Priming is another component of identity. Then there's priming—setting the stage every moment of a conversation; we’re getting the person's brain ready for the next thing that's going to happen. A lot of people think, "I'm just going to read the script, and then the sale is going to happen." The sale starts in

the first 5 seconds. So the next concept is priming. I’m going to start putting in small seeds of thought in your head. To understand the concept of priming, they did a study—and I’m no expert on this study or anything; I’m probably going to butcher it. They did a study where people were taking a word search puzzle, and in the group, they put these words in the puzzle that were loosely related to old age—Florida, wrinkle, pain. Retirement. All of this—like, there's probably 10 or 15 words in there; I can't remember them all. But just after taking,

just after being exposed to those words for a few minutes, the speed at which they exited the testing room and walked down the hallway was reduced by somewhere near 30 to 40%. So, they started walking slower just because they were exposed to these words. And if you have an outcome in mind, the number one thing you need to do is prime that person to think of that outcome. Does that make sense? Yeah, so none of these techniques work very well unless you have authority and you have confidence. So, when we're talking about these techniques, these

are language techniques. Like we talked about, it's the least important thing. And so, right after that, I would ask if you're on the clock and then how flexible you are. I would talk about time and how time can be flexible. I would mention how I changed my flight just a few days ago, and it was really easy and didn’t impact my trip very much. Just bringing these subjects up on a very regular basis—there's a ton of techniques we could talk about if we have a specific scenario, anything, or interrogation if you want to. But there

are so many things that go back to non-verbal behavior and authority that I feel like just talking about the linguistics—which we could do all day long—would take us deep into linguistics and how to use confusion to deliberately confuse somebody's brain and all of that kind of stuff. But the base of that pyramid, the base of whether or not I accomplish what I want to do, is going to be a result of whether I have authority, whether I have enough confidence, and presence to get that thing done. And if you want to, we can break down

the linguistics or the authority; I'll let you choose where you want to go. Linguistics? Okay, let's talk about how linguistics work in the brain. We don’t have an evolutionary part of our brain for language; we have these two areas in our brain called Broca's area and Wernicke's area where we process language. When it comes to linguistics, the first thing that you want to be aware of is how we're directing that person's attention. So, can I capture a person's focus, and can I lead a person's focus? If I'm speaking in a way that is not direct

and doesn't capture focus, then I'm already losing persuasion. You could read all these cool scripts, all these great books, but if you don't have the social skills to speak well and really captivate somebody's attention, you're not going to do it. One of the most common things that people learn when it comes to linguistics are these statements called Milton statements or salad statements (or whatever). They’re kind of presumptive, so "a person can" is the beginning of one of those. I can insert anything I want after that and help your brain to start picturing it and imagining

it. If I'm communicating in a way that is vivid, then I'm painting pictures in your head, which means that the mammalian part of your brain can understand it. If my words are not creating pictures in your head, and I'm not interesting enough or generating enough focus, then I don't translate what I'm saying into the mammalian brain. So, let’s say I want you to forget about the time. I can just put that into a sentence. I want to start injecting these thoughts into your head earlier on without you knowing that it's happening. I would say some

kind of phrase where I could inject that into a sentence. So, if I were to say, "It's amazing how fast a person can completely lose track of time," or, "It's amazing how it’s so easy to just completely forget about the time for a few hours." What I did here was I inserted a small pause before I told you what I wanted you to do. You can ask me anything. So, let’s say I wanted you to extend the podcast a few hours or cancel your flight or whatever, which we can’t do because I've got an appointment

a little bit later. But I want to insert those phrases. If I say “completely forget about the time,” let’s say that’s what I want you to do. As I'm talking, I can say, “Just name any random subject, and I'll show you exactly how you can weave it into any conversation.” Any subject you want? Technology? Alright, and I was in Best Buy the other day looking at these laptops. They’re making so many advances, and there are so many things that you can look at. It’s amazing how easy it is to completely lose track of time. Make

sense so far? Mhm, okay. And now, to get you to want to have the podcast with me longer, we’ll cover another technique. This is called embedded commands; a lot of you can look it up anywhere on the internet. So, before we move to this next technique, the rules of this embedded command technique—where you're hiding language inside of language—are that I'm going to pause before and after and the command itself. Injecting or hiding into my language has to be able to stand alone as a sentence. So, for example, I can't say, "Let's say I want you

to—I want to get you to relax," that's it. A lot of people would say, "Yeah, it was a really completely relaxing journey." "Completely relaxing" is not a sentence; "completely relax" is a sentence. It's a statement of telling someone to do something. So that's the difference. The biggest mistake most people make is that they don't pause, and they're using -ing words when they should be using direct commands. Ideally, if you get more advanced at this, you should be able to clip the soundbite of someone saying the hidden part, and it should sound like they're speaking an

independent sentence. Does that make sense? So, it should be a command hidden within it. Then, we get into ambiguities. So, let's dive into ambiguities and then gestures and how they can play into this. Give me something you would want someone to feel; like, let's go into connection. Okay, so give me any random scenario, and I will show you how we can inject language into that scenario using the phrase of feeling connected. You go to Starbucks and order with your barista? Yeah, okay. And what are we talking about? Give me any topic, and I'll show you

how easy it is to weave into anything just on the fly. Like, what new coffee do they have at Starbucks? Okay, yeah. So, the first thing—I'm my time is limited with this barista—so the first thing is I want to establish her focus. I'm going to do one small thing, and I'm going to say something like, "You know, it's absolutely fascinating." And very covertly, I'm pointing at myself as I'm saying the word "fascinating" to start off the sentence to try to associate myself with the word fascinating, so I can just buy myself a tiny bit more

focus, so that she'll bite onto the next sentence. So when time is super limited, it's a lot more difficult. But we're at Starbucks; we're talking about all the—are you talking about all the coffees that you said? All the coffees? Yeah. So there are so many coffees here to choose from, and I remember watching this documentary about these coffee makers. It is incredible how much they take care of each other. It’s a rare moment when somebody can feel completely connected to another person. Did you hear that piece? "Feel completely connected," and if you cut the audio

out of what I just said, it sounds like I'm saying an independent sentence. On top of that, my hand, as I was saying the words "feel completely connected," was going back and forth between you and I. Does this make sense so far? Yeah, I just—I want to comment that it feels very hypnotic, and I've noticed that about your speech the whole time. I know you're trained in hypnotism, but spending time with Marcel, it's just—I’m picking up on it like I'm getting into a trance just listening to you speak. Have people commented about that? Yeah, yes.

But most of the time, it's people who have listened to these MP3s that I have. They're for free to make your confidence better, to increase your mental well-being, and all of that kind of stuff. So they're like going to sleep every night listening to my voice doing very overt hypnosis to get them to sleep. And then I've noticed they come to like a training session or something with me in person. I've got a little mic on; there are speakers in the room, and I'll say just the word "sleep." Yeah, I almost felt it on that!

I was hoping that you wouldn't do it. My first time I ever did it, there was a guy who'd been listening to me for like nine months straight every time he went to bed, and I said that word, and he just fell out of his chair. So, I had to be really careful. So, let's add on to this technique a little bit. Whatever we're talking about, we can talk about picking out carpet and how someone can feel completely connected. And I could be talking about an electrician coming to my house and fixing wires, and it’s

amazing when that connection finally happens when he’s putting these wires together. But I'm saying the words independently, and I'm saying them with this back-and-forth gesture as I’m talking about connection. But now I want to hide the sentence, "feel completely connected now with me," and I'm going to disguise that in speech. Have you ever heard this before? It's pretty bizarre, but I'm going to be ambiguous about where the period is and where the comma is in these sentences. So, in essence, I'm going to say the sentence like, "feel completely connected period now with me" when I

start exploring things. But I'm going to tie those together. So, give me another topic, and I'll roll with it. Random toothbrush? Okay, I always use my toothbrush because I remember this dentist I had when I was a kid. He was the only guy that really genuinely cared about me. He was the most kind person that I ever met, and it's so rare when you can feel completely connected now with me. The way I see it is we develop relationships differently, especially as kids. And then I'll just roll off on another sentence. But if you clipped

out what I said, "feel completely connected now with me," and I isolated that in my speech, it makes... Sense so far? Um, there was a thing back in the '90s where these guys would kind of come up with a lot of these ambiguities and stuff, and they are powerful. But they become powerful not because someone uses them in isolation. You're not going to just say, "Uh, you're not going to sneak the phrase 'buy this Bugatti' into a paragraph, and somebody's magically going to go spend a bazillion dollars on a car." They have to be paired

with confidence, authority, leadership, and a true belief in what you're saying, and self-esteem, and all of that. If you use all these language techniques and you have crippling self-doubt and all of this stuff, you have to work on that other stuff first. A lot of people get wrapped around these little language techniques because it gives you a placebo. It's like, "Oh, I know a trick now." But they're not that effective unless you're using them in a really, I would say, a really confident way. So, to expand on the language aspect of this, confidence is probably

one of those things that’s such a critical element. If we could dip into confidence really quick, the number one mistake in my lifetime training the CEOs, the intelligence folks, all these people to develop confidence is that it has nothing to do with your standing over anyone else. It has nothing to do with other people. The moment that you make it about how it deals with other people, it's not confidence anymore; it’s hierarchy. And those are two different things. So people think about confidence, and it’s like, “Oh, I have to be more than other people.” The

biggest mistake is comparing me to other people, and that’s what I call hierarchical thinking. People make these mistakes because they view themselves as, “Well, if I’m confident, I need to be above this person,” or they’re scanning the room to see who’s in charge, who’s subordinate. What’s truly powerful about this—and this sounds like it’s a hippie bumper sticker—but are you willing to get to a point where you treat everybody the same? You meet a business billionaire for a sales pitch, or you’re talking to your Uber driver, and you have the exact same level of confidence because

you’re never thinking in hierarchy and status. As Americans, especially living in the West, we are programmed to see hierarchy and status. The two main goals of advertising are, number one, to make you compare yourself to other people; and number two, to make you think, “I am not enough.” So get that statement into your head—the identity statement of "I am not enough." We get programmed from such a young age with these commercials and advertisements, and now social media is just insane. If you kind of back your way out of that hierarchical thinking and comparing yourself to

other people, you have the most transformative experience when it comes to confidence because confidence has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s not about anybody else; it’s about me. It’s about whether I have confidence in this situation. The fastest way that I’ve ever seen to develop confidence—and I have a free hypnosis on our website you can download and listen to every night—has changed people’s lives. But the fastest way to develop confidence is to develop a comfort with the possibility of social injury. That’s just: am I willing to be embarrassed? Am I willing to say something

that’s on my mind that might cause some judgment? Someone’s going to judge me. That fear of judgment is also kind of hierarchical thinking, like they are going to judge me, which will put me down. So if your confidence is coming from how your environment is, then you’re going to always need something, which is not confidence at all. So when we’re talking about confidence, it’s self-confidence—not environment confidence, not Jack confidence. Jack doesn’t help me feel confident. But we become no longer dependent on the environment or who we’re around or what happened; we just become comfortable with

that injury. The second element is that I develop this mindset, this worldview of things generally going to work out fine. Things are probably going to be okay, and if my genuine belief is—not just the thought that I have, not like a Post-It note I put on my bathroom mirror and read as an affirmation every day—but I develop this hardcore internal belief that things will work out pretty much okay. Number two is this fundamental worldview shift: I'm okay with receiving social injury, and I’m never using hierarchy and status to look at the world ever again. It

is such a drastic change. It’s exhausting living in the other reality where I’m deeply concerned with the environment, and I need things to be perfect for me to feel confident or to feel okay with talking or saying something that’s on my mind or being vulnerable around another person. So does confidence come from competence? I don’t think so at all. If you watch, um, what is that movie? "Catch Me If You Can." Have you seen it? I think so. I think I know what you’re talking about. It’s Leonardo DiCaprio playing a guy—Frank Abagnale is his real

name. It’s a true story where he puts on this pilot outfit and starts flying free around the entire country. It’s a fabulous movie, and I don’t know if... You do like overlays when people are talking about stuff, but a couple of these scenes—like he's walking with all these, uh, flight attendants; uh, then he pretends to be a doctor, like a surgeon; then he pretends to be a lawyer—so he kind of assumes all these identities. He has zero competence, zero, uh, but everyone believes him because he is so self-assured. He's not looking to other people for

his confidence; it's an internal thing. And that's where the term "con man" came from. It's "confidence." So their confidence was so high that it became contagious. You believe it so much that you start to believe it. Um, and that's kind of a bad way to compare these things and say that's where you need to be in life, but you need to have the confidence where, like, this is not a big deal. No matter what's happening, it's not a big deal because your worldview is that things are going to be fine; everything's going to work out.

I'm open to being socially injured; that's just part of living as a human being on this planet. Define social injury. Social injury is judgment, most of the time. Okay? Judgment, and the judgment—if I'm reliant on the outside world—causes shame. Let me give you the third pathway of confidence here, since we're just throwing random [ __ ] around. Um, getting so forgiving of yourself and your own past that for anyone else looking at it, you would be delusional or crazy—like unlimited self-forgiveness. And this sounds like some self-help [ __ ], but it's just, like, I don't

care what anyone thinks about anything that I've ever done. I am so self-forgiving that everything is forgiven that I've done, and I don't accept any judgment from anybody else. I'm radically, delusionally forgiving about everything that I've ever done, which kind of just helps to delete what keeps most people back—and that's shame. So I'm hiding shame, I'm hiding guilt, and I'm also concealing this fear of, "I might get judged by somebody." Opening that up, it just sounds crazy, but like we're training, like, Jason Bourne-type of dudes. And the best way that we can train them is

like getting them to live with, like, an open heart, just wide open, where I'm open to getting that social injury. So if I can—if I have that much confidence, then these little language techniques and stuff that we're talking about are ten times more powerful. So, a couple more techniques, if you want to go back to them, um, are these gestures that I was talking about. Yeah, so if I want something between you and I, like, I say the word "connection," or I say the word, um, if I'm talking to somebody that I want to date,

I might say the word "attraction," and go like this back and forth between us two. I don't know if my hands are in the camera or not, but I want to use my gestures on purpose instead of on accident. Is that maybe they have a 5% effect on how someone perceives something, but it's an effect; there's some kind of effect going on. And if I say something and I want it to be associated with me, and I'm really trying to generate a lot of your focus, I would say, like, you know, it's just, I'm seeing

so many of these things. It's just really fascinating when you get to the point where you discover something new, and I'm just pointing at myself, saying "fascinating." So think of the words that you would want to say if you wanted to kind of control another human being or, like, get to an outcome. Yeah, um, so let's go back to your example of me wanting you to—what was it?—like, extend the podcast out for five hours, right? Um, let's say we're standing out there in the Green Room and we're getting ready to kind of come in here

and record. And I said, "Jack, you know, it's fascinating. Um, it's amazing—like, so many people I was working with. I was at this doctor's office the other day getting this brain scan done here while I'm in LA, and it is just awesome that he was willing to just stop and spend extra time with me doing these brain scans." And I would say that, so I'm saying "spend extra time with me," and I'm pausing—before and I'm pausing afterwards—to the point where if you clipped it out of audio, that would be its own statement. It's fascinating; it's

kind of a cool placebo. But it's only a placebo of skill unless the confidence is there, and you can back all that stuff up. And there's so much you can do with language, but it's only as good as how you're influencing the mammalian brain. So if I have zero—like, imagine if a third grader came up to you and said that, or you; it would have no impact on you. If a third grader came up to you and insulted you, it would have no impact. So there needs to be authority present. And authority—not over others, but

authority over self. Like, I'm in control; I'm not controlling. And, you know, you've probably seen me go through the five factors of authority and what makes authority possible, but we've proven in so many experiments that authority matters more than any possible word that you will ever say in your lifetime—like the Milgram experiment, which is, uh, famous. People got talked into killing another person—or they thought they did—in under an hour. And more and more we're discovering is I need to be more Caesar Milan and less Tony Robbins. I need... To think about controlling that mammalian brain,

and because that's what really makes the decisions. If somebody thinks, "Oh, well, the human cortex is more advanced, so it makes more decisions," no, it's not like that. You can't hold your breath until you die; your mammalian brain is going to take over and knock your ass out or make you just open your mouth and breathe again. So, that is the brain that makes a lot of our decisions from an emotional perspective, and that's where you establish someone's focus. You have authority, and you say something that triggers this tribal response and emotion. Those are the

four things that influence mammals: focus, authority, tri, and emotion—those four things. Um, what are some habits that make people dislike you from a mammalian perspective, or human, I guess human? Yeah, I think not being interested. So, most people focus too much on being interesting instead of being interested, and that is the number one recipe. The second way that people get to a point of not being liked by others is, "I need to be on top." So, you'll say, "Oh, I went on this great vacation to Disney World," and someone might respond, "Oh, great! Yeah, we

just went to Rome, actually, and toured the entire Vatican. I got this backstage pass to the Vatican," which I never have. I'm not saying that you should one-up people; obviously, everyone should know that. But what I'm saying is, if I'm doing this subconsciously every time this person wants to be seen as important or significant, or to gain some kind of social acceptance, I'm shutting them down. The three biggest social needs that people have are significance. I need to feel significant; I need to feel accepted; and I need some kind of approval. Like, I need to

be told I'm doing a good job or to receive some kind of recognition. The moment that we see somebody exhibiting, like if I see this person and they say, "I'm a CEO; I've got four employees; we've made $10 million last month," and all of that, I know for a fact that they thrive on significance. So, the moment that I say, "Oh, I just made $15 million last month and I did all this," I'm taking away the exact thing that they need from other people in social interactions. It makes us feel good, but we're not really

doing that for the other person. When you get to understand if you are dealing with a person that is significance-driven, acceptance-driven, or approval-driven, the moment you start taking that away, you're taking away not just how they feel; you're taking away neuropeptides because they get dopamine and other neuropeptides from that feeling. It's like a person knocking on a drug dealer's door, and the drug dealer is like, "No, go somewhere else." That's kind of what it is, because we are chemicals, and we're dealing at a chemical level. This person needs to be validated and made to feel

significant, made to feel like they're a part of a group, made to feel like they have permission to do something, complemented on, and told that they did a great job. And just as a quick example, acceptance-driven people are always going to be talking about groups and tribes. They'll use pronouns like "we" way more often in their speech and their language. Approval-driven people are always going to be saying things to get you to kind of tell them that they're okay, to tell them they're doing a good job. They might say, "I'm going on this podcast tomorrow,

and I always suck every time I go on a podcast. I always suck, and people just don't like it." Is that what you—oh no, Jack, it's okay; you did a great job last time that last podcast you did got 55,000 likes on the video, and most of the comments were really positive. So, that would be like on the approval side. The biggest mistake that people make is not getting to a place where they understand what this person's social needs are, and now they understand how to give them those social needs. So, if I want to

persuade a person and I know they're driven by significance, I say, "You know what, Jack, you make a tremendous difference around here, and I've met your team. Everyone I've met that works with you really looks up to you and respects you." That would work wonders for a person that has that social need because I just say a few words. Keep in mind that so many people view the world as like Harry Potter, where they think there's some magic script out there, where I'm just going to have this little spell, and it's going to make somebody's

behavior change. But this is as close as it gets right here: understanding precise human needs and what they seek out in social interactions. It's going to be different for everybody, and there are six needs that I typically teach. It's not just significance, approval, and acceptance; we also teach pity, that some people are seeking pity, a need to be seen as intelligent, and a need to be seen as powerful or strong. You'll see these people that are more posturing and all that kind of stuff, and if you understand how to complement those needs and how to

give them the neuro— they're not looking for you to say words; they're looking for neuropeptides. Words are just the avenue to get the chemicals they need from social interaction. All we're... Doing by understanding what needs this person has is understanding how to trigger those chemical pathways in a person's brain. How do you deal with people that just have these super high egos that speak about all their great accomplishments? Uh, but when you compliment them, they almost reject it and kind of, uh, like, don't want to hear compliments. But they also don't want you to, like,

add on to their compliment. It seems to be like a fairly common thing I've noticed with hyper-successful guys. Uh, I think there's a lot of people that have egos around all of their accomplishments; they want to appear humble, uh, but they may not be humble. I think the best way to deal with that is to ask them that exact piece of advice. So, give me an example of a person that, uh, says something like, "I went to Oxford," or something like that. So, I guess, like, "I have an IQ of 180." Wow! So, you having

an IQ this high, do you mind if I just want to ask you a question really quick? Because I've been struggling with this for a while. You kind of probably see conversations in different levels than most people do and notice that I'm not looking at you while I'm asking this question, so I'm not putting social pressure on you—looking away. Do you probably see a lot of these conversations in, like, different levels than most people? I've been struggling with it, and then you just ask exactly what you asked me. And when they give you advice, they're

agreeing not to be that person. I get it. So, it goes back to the original thing of you're giving them the identity of not that person. Yes, okay. But you're asking their advice, so the moment that they start, uh, telling you something that they're proud of—these little accomplishments—ego is what I call that accomplishment-driven ego. You take exactly what they say, and you want to do this as early as possible in that interaction. So, the moment—give me another one that you might hear from somebody: "I just slept with seven women this week." Okay, that's a lot!

And I've got to ask you one question because, I mean, to sleep with that many women, you've got to have some social skills that most people don't have. Could I borrow your advice for, like, 30 seconds? And then right away, I'm going to say, "All right, so, every once in a while, I'll have these people, and I—I don't know how to say it, but they have this..." And then I'll go right into that exact same question. They have this ego; they want to—they won't take compliments, and all of this stuff. How do I deal with

those people? You act—you identify that person. They start doing these things; you use what they say about themselves to say, "This is why you're perfect to answer this question." And the moment—because they're going to give you advice, it might be shitty, it’s going to be horrible advice, but they're making that subconscious agreement that I am not that person. The moment they give you advice, they're saying, "Here's how to deal with those people," and there it becomes not them. You're not permanently changing their identity; once they go to another party or something the same night, they're

going to go back to being ego-driven. But you're changing the results you're going to get in that situation, and maybe over time, you're changing the results they're going to get with you. They'll be a different person with you. It's fascinating. Um, on the habits of people—um, making people dislike you, is there anything, like, instantaneous, like, body language-wise, that you think of? Um, direct facing. So, like, facing someone head-on, like, a 180 direct facing someone. And this other thing that we call proxemic is, like, within the first five minutes of interaction, you're not supposed to invade,

like, the 26-inch mark. But if you and I were 26, let's say we're 26 inches away from each other, um, and we’re both facing that wall of the podcast studio, it’s fine. But at 26 inches, and we both turn into each other and, like, face each other, now it's weird. So, proximity and what's called ventral orientation—which is how we're facing our bodies—um, those are the two fastest ways because you're setting off all of those mammalian brain alarms and saying something is off here; I need to protect myself. The fastest other way to do this is

to automatically start using a tone of voice that’s different from that person, inappropriate for the social setting—so way too loud or way too soft—and that makes people automatically think something is different about this person, so they're not part of this tribe. Because, even if we're in a bar, the people that are drinking, that we don’t even know, are part of our tribe 'cause we're all acting the same, we're all drinking the same, we all have all of these things in common. So, they become like a little micro tribe in the human brain. Then, somebody starts

acting differently from that tribe, and I interact with them—let's say it's you; you come up to a table and, like, you're acting funny or doing something different than the rest of the tribe is doing. The moment that I start interacting with you, I become another outcast. I'm associating with someone who's not conforming to the tribe's agreed-upon behavior. When is the right time to mirror someone's body language? Let's talk about this. Um, so when the mirroring stuff came out, it was a bunch of, like, behavior nerd virgins who would take A legal pad out with them

to a bar, and they would watch people interact in a bar. So, over time, they started making all these notes, and they saw, “Oh, when people like each other, they're going to start mirroring each other's behaviors.” So, what that means is mirroring is a symptom of people liking each other, right? And this started our national obsession—this one thing, especially in psychology. It started this national obsession with symptoms. Because if you like, if you go on LinkedIn or YouTube or Google right now and type in “how to be confident,” what are you going to see? You're

going to see all these articles like “17 ways to command respect like a CEO,” “25 ways to have confident body language for your next sales pitch,” and what do the articles say? You click on it, open it up—uh, really good posture, yeah; large gestures; speaking with certainty; making solid eye contact with someone; using their name really often; a firm handshake; touching them on the shoulder every once in a while. Those are symptoms of confidence. So, our country gets—I don't know why—if you look at our healthcare system, we're obsessed with symptoms and not causes. If you

look at, like, how to be more mindful during the day, they give you a bunch of symptoms of mindful people but not the cause of mindfulness. There are so many things out there that are—and this only occurred to me like five years ago after I retired from the military—they're all symptom-focused and what I call cause-blind. So, back to this question that you asked me. I thought it was a huge tangent, but these dudes are sitting in this bar writing all this stuff down. Me mirroring your behavior won’t make you like me; it’s a symptom of

us liking each other. So, mirroring happens after the liking. What are some other things people do when they start to develop trust with each other? They get close; they get closer to each other; they're more comfortable with physical contact. Uh, what else? What can you think of? They face more in their feet, point toward each other. So, let’s say you walk up, and within the first couple of minutes of an interaction, you face someone directly, you get really close to them, and you start touching their arm and hand. They're just symptoms. We like somebody based

on this little grocery list that's in our mammalian brain. Mirroring can be good in some situations, but it’s not just a universal thing. The best thing to mirror is like if a person’s relaxed, I’ll be relaxed. If they’re attentive and focused, I’ll be attentive and focused. I want to mirror the mammal, not just the body—like, where are they mentally? And like, you and I aren’t mirroring each other really exactly at all, but we have very similar emotional body language. Like, we’re relaxed; we’re having a conversation. That is far more important than, like, am I going

to cross my ankle over like that so Jack will like me? It doesn’t really—like, even if I did this right now, that’s not making a difference in your psychology. You can’t feel any difference listening to me now versus when I had my legs crossed the other way. But it is more of a difference if I’m, um, kind of matching you emotionally, and we kind of have that going on. So, if we’re mismatched emotionally and cognitively, that’s where you want to do the work. We need to get that out to a match first. So, like, matching

a person's body language is not going to give you, I don’t think, hardly any advantage whatsoever. Like, if you've got all your [___] figured out, you're a persuasion expert, you have unlimited, unstoppable confidence, you’ve learned all these linguistics, then mirroring might give you a little bit of an edge—maybe like a one to two percent edge. Interesting. That’s so fun! People often refer to that as, like, the main thing to—uh, I’ll tell you what part of seduction. Yeah, it’s because I can teach you a technique that gives you a placebo of having developed some kind of

skill, and it’s something you can go out and do easily, but it’s hard to get any results from it because you need so much other stuff to get results from other people. The mirroring was never a huge part of that, in my opinion, and I’ve studied this for 30, 40,000 hours. I’ve crossed the 10,000-hour mark a long time ago. I’ll give you another example of one of these things, like the linguistics I talked about— that’s kind of a light level. It’s not doing heavy lifting. Like, no, it sounds cool though: like I learned this thing

on a podcast where, like, you point at yourself and you say the word “fascinating.” That is not a heavy-lifting technique, but it makes you feel like, “Oh, you know, I’ve got this! I’ve got this little thing that I can take out and use.” Me telling you to like be more mindful and fix your [___], be radically self-forgiving, get to a point of confidence—go do a psychedelic journey or something. Obviously, after you talk to a doctor—I’m not a doctor; I’m not giving anybody advice—but like step out of all of these things that are holding you back,

and you will live; you will enjoy a planet that most people don’t really live on. They’re in a different reality. Most people, they're living way behind their eyes in conversations, and that has its profoundness. Like, if you just look at what... What we've been talking about this whole time—getting yourself to a point of composure and confidence—is 99% of the heavy lifting, maybe 95%, and the other 5% is cool tricks that we can throw on top of it. Um, but the one thing that I teach is this thing called the failure triangle. You can look at

any situation that involves human beings and see that there's one of three reasons it fails: 1. I failed to observe—like I didn't read the room, I didn't read the person, or I didn't understand that person's needs well enough. 2. I failed to communicate—this is where I failed to say the right words, I failed to pitch it correctly, I didn't trigger that person's social needs, I didn't understand who I was talking to, and I couldn't say the right words or communicate the right way. Or maybe I just talked in a freaking boring way; I was just

boring. 3. The third one is self-mastery. So, it's observation, communication, and self-mastery. Let's say my observation was great, my communication was great, but I have no mastery over myself. I put a suit on, I put a sharp tie on, went out, and got a manicure and a haircut and all this other stuff, but back home I've got a 15-t pile of laundry that I haven't done, my sink's full of [__], and my bathroom counter's covered in crap, all over the place. But I'm pretending, in this sales pitch, that I have my [__] together. There's a

part of our brain that reads those gut feelings, like we talked about, and the other person might say, "You know what? Everything sounded great, but something was off. Something didn't feel right about this situation." The heaviest lifting thing is the self-mastery part, where we kind of get—and it's true, people don't want to hear it. They say, "No, no, no! Give me the little cool technique! Give me the script!" But it's like, I can give you the best script in the world, you have to be the right person who can read it. That's what it comes

down to. I can give you a flight checklist for an airplane; it does not make you a pilot. I guess, just spending a bit of time with me—how could I? The original question was: how could I use mirroring to get better responses from guests? But given that it's a bit irrelevant, what could I do? What kinds of questions, what kinds of behaviors would give me the most useful personal information from people? Statements, not questions. So what I mean by that is, if somebody says, “XXX is the answer to all these things,” you pretty much sum

it up, saying, “So, basically, XXX,” and you kind of deliver the summary. Then, they're going to start adding on. Then you throw another statement out there after they add on to be like, “Wait, I don't know if I believe that. Is that really possible for someone to do that much?” Then you're going to get a long statement out there because that's disbelief, right? And you're not saying you don't believe the person. You can say something like, “Oh my God, that's hard to believe that that's even real! That's amazing!” I didn't ask any questions, and they're

going to start responding, saying, “Yeah,” and actually, they'll keep going down on the data. Then you do another provocative statement that maybe triggers a need to correct the record. So let's say, give me a topic we're talking about. Look, pretend you're a guest for one second; I'll be Jack. Yeah, uh, chocolate ice cream is worse than vanilla ice cream. Wow! So, and you're the expert in ice cream, is that right? I mean, I studied ice cream for 45 years. Okay, so I'm not sure where I read it, but I've heard that 90% of people like

vanilla over chocolate. Where did you read that? I can't remember where I read it, but I thought, like in my life, I would have sworn that more people like vanilla. Okay, and then it would be something along the lines of, "Well, research shows this and this and this." And I just feel the need to correct it automatically. Yeah, so then you say, "Oh, research shows this and this and this." And I might say, "That is absolutely fascinating." Then they say, "Yeah, because it goes back this, this, this," and there's more elicitation statements. You want to

prove that something is more fascinating, perhaps, and then you prove that it's more fascinating. Then I say, "So, essentially, these guys all came together just to do this one study on chocolate versus vanilla ice cream," and they're going, "Yeah!" And even in 1973, you're adding some more data in there. So the more sensitive the information you want to get from a person, the more statements you should be using instead of questions. And that's where these provocative statements come in, triggering a need to correct the record, and this other thing called bracketing. So if I want

to get some kind of information from you, I'll just say a statement that says a bracket of numbers or whatever. But let's say we're doing the ice cream. I would imagine that to get these results, they must have studied thousands of people—probably between a thousand and 5,000 people were involved in this study. They're likely to say, "Well, actually..." That's me showing a range of numbers. And it doesn't matter, like, if the range is off; in fact, if the range is off, they'll be like, "No, no, no, it's way more than that." Then they, so it's

bracketing and triggering a need to correct the record at the exact same time. This is a technique the Soviets used throughout the Cold War to obtain secrets from the United States Navy, and it was invented—well, invented, discovered, I guess—by this guy named John Nolan. He wrote a book called *Confidential* that you can't even get anymore, even on eBay, I don't think. It talks about this called elicitation, so it makes your brain feel like you're not being really questioned over and over and over again. So no matter what I say—like, I'm talking right now about elicitation,

and all you do is kind of nod and be like, "That's fascinating. I bet a lot of different countries use this." So that's a provocative statement that starts with "I bet," right? And then I start talking about all, like, "Yeah, the Russians used this in the Cold War to get secrets about our submarines." And then you just do a word repetition, so "submarines." And then I go, "Yeah, the size of these propellers, how fast they could go, how deep they could go, how covert they would go." Then you'd say another provocative statement: "These submarines go

really deep. I would imagine the Russians probably got a lot of secrets from us." There's no questions yet. I'm like, "Oh my God, yeah, they got the size of our propeller; they could figure out how close we could be to launch these nuclear missiles." Then you say, "Which is amazing because they needed that data for X, Y, and Z." So it's just a lot of statement responses, and I'm not saying 100% of your podcast needs to be statement-based, but in this case, the words are more effective than the actual confidence and emotions behind them. Yes,

and what you just did was a provocative statement. Fast learner! I need to implement it more, but I guess just, what's the effective time to use questions? Like, does it make people feel more comfortable to ask a question, or does it actually have some sort of discomfort if you're leading into something that might be sensitive or that person might not usually give to everybody? That's where you want to pepper in, like, 90% statements and 10% questions. If you want a person's mammalian brain to get an idea, you have to paint a picture vivid enough with

sensory-rich information that allows their mammalian brain to get it. So the mammalian brain does not speak English in any way; it doesn't understand language. But once the human brain understands something where it can form a bunch of pictures and images, that translates down to the mammalian side of the brain. Does that make sense? So let's say I wanted to get you to kind of mentally get an imagery in your mammalian brain of, like, letting go. I might talk about something that vividly paints that picture, so I might say something like, "Jack, when I'm a little

stressed, when I got off the plane and I booked this—my assistant actually booked me with this massage therapist who's, like, famous around the country—came to the hotel room, and I've never felt that degree of relaxation before. Like, all the tension in your body just being completely erased, like your shoulders just drop, everything falls; even the skin on your face starts to relax. You didn't know that you carried tension in your skin and your scalp, and you didn't even realize how easy it was to just kind of fully let go into an experience that was very

hypnotic. Your breathing rate slowed by about three breaths per minute; you'll have that on camera if you want to look at it." And all I'm doing is painting a picture first and then describing sensory experiences about something else. But if I sat here and I said, "Jack, I want you to picture your skin relaxing," that's weird, right? Like, we're in a conversation; that's weird. But if I'm talking about me, I can say the same words to get your brain to associate all of those feelings, and you cannot mentally pay attention to a story like the

one I just said without kind of going into what that feels like and what that might feel like. And if it's novel and unique, and a person hasn't really thought about it before, you'll get them to bite on a lot more. So, like, you have never probably pictured the sensation of the skin on your scalp relaxing until just when I said it a second ago. You're like, "Wow, you can kind of relax that skin a little bit." So if it's novel—it's a new piece of information that they kind of haven't pictured before; it's interesting, it's

sensory-rich, and it paints a picture—then I'm translating that into the mammalian brain. So whatever I want somebody to mentally experience, if I speak it in that way, I can translate that into the mammalian brain, which means I'm getting the body to adopt, or I'm getting the brain to develop the image that I want it to see. And this sensory experience is effective with emotions you want to experience, or is it effective with any kind of emotion, like a stressor? Say yeah, so like if you wanted to stress someone out, you could explain in detail the

process of feeling like the stress in the pit of your stomach, your shoulders tightening up. You could go in any direction that you wanted to go. Sure, what would that, uh, sound like for the stress? Yeah, um, you describe, uh, some scenario where you became stressed out and you didn't realize it. Like, I didn't realize how stressed I was about, let's say, coming on your podcast, right? And let's say I get really nervous on podcasts. I said, you know, Jack, I was just sitting in my hotel room last night and I just didn't even realize

that I was stressed until I paid a little bit of attention to my body. I realized, like, my shoulders were getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and my breathing was getting into this really shallow spot. I was clenching my jaw. I'm sure you've had that feeling before, like your stress is just kind of overtaking your body. So now I've changed it from me talking about me to you, and that's me talking about you directly, which allows you to kind of resist it and say, "I know, I don't think I've had that." But if I translate

it to the general "you," then I can say the word "you" without talking about you directly. And I'll give you an example of that. I'd rather do it about something positive, but, um, it was, you know, it was in my hotel room last night, just thinking about this, and I just noticed all this tension. And you know when, like, your body starts tightening up and your jaw's clenching, and you don't really know why all of this is happening and everything just gets tighter and more resistant? It's like your muscles and your skin just turn into

this armor. So I'm saying "you" all of this time, but I'm not directly talking about you; it's the general "you." But I started with "I," so I did this, I did this, and you know when you have that feeling of blank? So, I'm changing my language to shift from "I" to talking about "you," and that's called an "I-you shift," or the fancy name for that is a "shift of referential index." This is useful in, uh, just day-to-day conversations, and I'm guessing it would be particularly useful in interrogations. Yeah, and if you could imagine, like, if

the number one currency in persuasion, influence, human behavior, leadership—fill in the blank—whatever you're doing with other humans, your number one currency is focus. So, if I wanted to develop focus in you really quick, uh, I would talk about how fascinating watching a podcast was or reading a book was or whatever, and I would vividly talk about the process of the volume getting turned down on everything around you and how much all of your focus can just zoom in on one thing when you know that something's important to you. So, I narrowed in your focus with

my hands, and then I said, "When something is important to you," and I casually kind of pointed to myself, vividly describing the process of focus happening; getting absorbed in something and everything else kind of fading away to where it's just one thing that has all of your attention and all of your awareness, and that's the most important thing for you. It's really fascinating that every time you say "focus," I would imagine, uh, that the viewers probably watch the podcast a bit longer. Um, so see the drop-off. How does this apply in interrogations? And, uh, I

guess generally when you're interrogating someone, torture is more effective than kindness, right? It's the opposite, really. Yes, proven time and time again. This started in World War II with a Nazi interrogator, a German interrogator; his name was Hans Scharf. Every interrogation system that's taught that I'm aware of in the world is a derivative of the work of Hans Scharf. He was the first guy that said, "Hey, what if we're not total dicks to these people? What if we're not just P.A.S.S. to these guys all the time? What if we take them out of their cell,

take them on a walk around the park, give them a little better food, give them Advil when they need it, you know, blah blah blah?" And it turned out that he got better results than so many other guys combined. He was getting intelligence from these people, and he had a few basic tenets: being kind, pretending like you know everything. So, every single thing they say, every piece of intelligence they provide, "Yeah, we knew that already; that's not a big deal," and a few other methods that we can get into. But the kindness part is so

much more effective because, if you think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs—and I'm imagining that popping up on the YouTube screen for you at home right now—if I'm a dick to you and I'm torturing you, I'm injecting you with stuff all the time, I'm pushing you down to that lower level of survival and safety. Once you're there, you're only worried about you, which means that if you're providing intelligence and all this stuff, you're just going to make stuff up to survive. So, when people are getting tortured, they're at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid, and they will

just do everything possible, even giving massive amounts of false information, just to keep themselves alive and prevent the pain from happening. Does that make sense? In reality, when we're talking about, like, criminal interrogation, there are five big things that you want to hit for an interrogation: you want to socialize, minimize, rationalize, project, and ask an alternative question. So, give me a crime, and you can make up whatever you want, and I will make up a monologue. What we call that, and that's when you're in an interrogation. I ask you a couple of questions; there's like

two or three questions that are absolutely brilliant at uncovering whether somebody is likely guilty or likely innocent. If you want to go through those first, sure, yeah. Uh, so number one, let's say, or I guess we could say the crime first. So if I stole $5,000 from a 7-Eleven, okay? So number one, and this is called the bait question. Um, so let's say I'm the police officer coming in here. The first thing I'm going to do is separate myself from the authority figures, so I'm not going to come in with a uniform; I'm going to

come in in civilian clothes. I'm going to try not to have a gun on me unless my department requires the gun to be on my belt in the interrogation room, which is a horrible, horrible policy. You should never allow firearms into an interrogation room. So when I walk in, I'm going to separate myself from the police outside. I say, "Hey, I came in here; these guys are, you know, running this investigation and stuff, and we're just going to get started. I'm actually just waiting on some paperwork. If you wouldn't mind, it probably won't be very

long." So during this little period—and I learned this from Scott Rouse, who's an interrogator also on the Behavior Panel—this little pretend period of waiting for papers is all fake. It's made so we are mandated to sit here together, and I can start doing whatever I want. I can ask where you're from; I can ask these kind of basic questions and stuff. Then they're going to bring these papers in, and we'll start doing some little conversation. But then I'll drop in this question, and I'll say, and I'll just say this to you as if I were

in the interrogation room so you can hear the tone of my voice and all this: I'd say, "Jack, today's my day off, and I think the same reason I came in here is because I think you're a good person. So I just want to say this to you, which I don't really say to many people, but I'm just going to ask you a question. I want you to think very, very hard before you answer. I want you to really consider the question before you give me an answer. Is there any reason whatsoever that a video

camera in that 7-Eleven would have you at that store?" Yes? Okay, so I'll place you at the scene, right? But at the beginning, if I go, "Were you at that 7-Eleven?" you'd be like, "No." Does it imply something else? Yeah, it's like, "Were you there that day at this time?" Yeah, and you can deny that. And I also didn't say that there's a video, so it's not—I'm not lying to you. I'm not saying there is a video. And if you just kind of go to the—let's go to the O.J. Simpson case. If you asked O.J.,

like, "Were you at Nicole's house last night?" he would be like, "No." So he drove his Bronco to that house, right? Mhm. So in the O.J. case, you would say, "O.J., is there any reason—any reason at all? And please keep in mind those guys are out there investigating this stuff, and they are pounding the ground. There's like 400 officers we have working on this case right now, and I want you to think carefully before you answer: Is there any reason at all that one of the neighbors or a couple of the neighbors would say that

they saw your vehicle outside of Nicole's house last night?" Now I've nailed you. As you know, if you say no, then there's potentially multiple eyewitnesses who saw you, and now you're, from the very beginning, lying. And you're only lying if you're guilty, right? So that question is so powerful, and it just is: Is there any reason XYZ would exist? Your fingerprints would show up there; there would be DNA there. Sometimes there's DNA that travels around all the time, so is there any reason we might find some DNA on that thing? So the second piece of

this is called the punishment question, and the punishment question is great because it really differentiates between guilty and innocent people pretty fast. The punishment question is, let's say that you're kind of denying taking the 10 grand from the 7-Eleven. I would say like, "Well, we know that 10 grand was stolen. What do you think should happen to the person that steals 10 grand from a store?" And that makes you consider it, 'cause now you're going to have to tell me, the person who might be locking you up, what you're going to get as a sentence,

right? So people are going to be a lot more lenient. And even in interviews with predators of people under the age of 18—I don't know what YouTube blocks, but I'll just say it that way—you ask them, "What do you think should happen to the person who did this?" and you'll get legitimate answers from these people that say like, "Well, the person's sick; they have a mental problem and they definitely need some kind of counseling, some kind of therapy and help, but they're sick. Probably not jail time, but they should definitely offer, yeah, like a written

apology to the family. They should definitely do that, but they're sick. The person's sick, and they definitely need some kind of help." Nobody would say that about... A person who hurts a kid like that deserves the death penalty or something—nobody would say otherwise. No rational person would. I mean, I've done this with my kids when they were like six or seven. I went home; you've probably heard me say this if you've watched a podcast or two of mine, but there was a thing of milk spilled on the living room floor, and I asked them who

did it. They were both like, "I don't know! It just appeared there!" So, I asked my daughter, "What do you think should happen to the person who did this?" And she goes right away, "Spankin', grounded, no Xbox, can't play outside, can't join my friends, have to stay in the room and read." "Okay, okay." Then I went to my son and said, "Well, what should happen to the person who spilled that milk?" He goes, "Uh, no more chocolate milk in the living room." So, it works equally on adults and kids. Then we move into asking all

these questions—there are like ten we ask to see if someone's probably guilty or probably innocent. That's an interview. The moment we get through those ten questions and I think, "Okay, Jack probably did this," we transition into interrogation. So, that's the difference: an interview is to find out what happened; an interrogation is when this person might be the one I'm looking for. At this phase of the interrogation, there's a whole lot that we're not covering, but we get to this part called the monologue. The monologue is designed to offload. If anybody's in sales or is in

any kind of persuasion job, this can be repurposed for anything, and it is massively powerful. Minimize, rationalize, project, alternative question. Okay, so let's break it down one thing at a time. I want you just to imagine hearing this all as one long monologue, but I'm going to give you paragraph headers for everything I'm going to say. You want to go with the "71 10 10, grand is missing," so the first step is socialize. I want to say, "Jack, I got to be honest with you. I think once people see what happened and they see all

these circumstances, everybody is going to understand why this happened. I think it’s going to make sense for anybody who hears your story; it's going to make perfect sense." Now, to minimize: "And this is $10,000. I deal with murderers, rapists, and horrible human beings day in and day out. When I heard this story, I knew that you're most likely a really good person, and this is not a big deal. People walk out of this; you're going to walk out of here in a little bit. This we can absolutely get through. I see bad stuff all the

time; this is not a bad thing." That's minimizing. Now, rationalize: "If you just look at your life, I think people are going to understand because anybody in your shoes would have done the same thing. It makes perfect sense because they left the safe open, or they didn't pay you enough, or your boss is just a jerk and kind of begged you to do this; they left the safe unlocked or they left the keys with you overnight." Now, project: "I personally believe that you're a good person. I don't think this is your fault. I think anybody

in the same circumstances... we get circumstances in our life, and when those circumstances line up, it's easy for us to make an error, make a mistake. I think that you did make a mistake, and I have to be honest with you. In this folder right here, we're tracking three different groups involved with human trafficking, and they are making people steal money. I know your aunt is going through chemotherapy right now, and I know she's suffering a great deal, and that's very expensive. What I need to know, Jack, is if you're involved with this human trafficking

scheme. This is a big deal, and we need to talk about that. But if you've made a mistake and you're a good person, I think you were trying to help your aunt pay for those chemotherapy bills, and I think you did the right thing. But if you're involved with this, this is a whole other story. If you just made a mistake, and this is a one-time thing, that’s all different, and we can get over that." I'm not here to arrest you; I'm not here to get you in trouble in any way. I'm not here to

prosecute you. So, that's the alternative question at the end: was it this big nasty horrible thing, or did you just make a mistake? Then, you'll see a little bit of hesitation in most people, and some people, you'll hear them say, "What happens if I say that I did it?" And you say, "I can't make you any promises, but I can promise you that people are going to understand." Then you kind of just start the monologue over again and go back. "But I really need to understand if this is going into human trafficking or if you

were maybe trying to help one of your family members. And if it is, all I need from you is one thing: you don't have to say anything, but what I really need from you is a written statement that says you understand that this was wrong, and you make a solemn promise to me right now that you won't do it again." In a guilty person's mind, that sounds like, "Wow, I can go if..." I do this, but that's a confession that I've just got you to write down. That's one of the most common tricks in police

interrogation: I just want you to say that you understand that it's wrong and you promise that you will not ever do it again. You promise that you'll never do it again in front of a judge. You say, "Okay, that's it." When I say I'm not going to arrest you, I'm not going to prosecute you—I'm not; that's the guy standing outside the room; he's going to do that. I'm just the interrogator, so it is honest and it is, uh, forthcoming, and it alleviates all of the pressures and all of the reasons that somebody might have against

a confession. What are people going to think? This is a huge deal; it's all my fault. This is going to go over really badly, and this is something I had control over, and I shouldn’t have done. So you're taking all of that off of their plate by saying, "Someone else's fault, not a big deal. People are going to understand, and it makes it so that anybody in your shoes would have done the exact same thing that you did." You're kind of smashing that all in one big paragraph. It's fascinating how effective that could be. The

whole priming feels a bit similar to sales—like how ticket sales calls have gone in my experience. But I guess the part I'm curious about is: it's only effective if the person is guilty. Or have you ever seen or heard of cases where people utilize those types of methods to get a false confession? You can totally get a false confession using that. It's when you misuse those techniques or the moment that an interrogator is more concerned with a confession than the truth—you're in dangerous, dangerous territory, and that is not an ethical person. Every interrogator should be

truth first, confession from the truth absolutely. But if they're convinced that this person did it and they're saying things like, "You're not going to leave this room until we get the full story. You're not going to leave this room until I hear why you did this. I just want to know why," you’ll hear so much of that kind of over and over and over again—depriving them of food for a prolonged period, maybe getting them sleep deprived. There are studies published that sleep deprivation drastically increases suggestibility, and you can implant memories and thoughts into people's heads,

and that's been proven. So at the end of the day, the false confession is not about technique; it's about the person using it. A scalpel can hurt someone or save someone's life, and it's all about the intent of the person using it. If you have somebody that's low integrity or low education—like they haven't been taught how to avoid a false confession—and a lot of cops out there do not get training in interrogation or anything advanced in interrogation. I train police departments in interrogation, and I'm not going to say any department names, but I would say

50 to 70% of cops have no interrogation training. So the way that they know how to do an interrogation is from what they saw on TV, from Law and Order and shows like that. When training these people, the instructions you would give theoretically to get the truth would be the same instructions you would give to get a false confession. No, very different. There's a whole list of things that make false confessions happen. When I say false confession, I just want to clarify that I mean like you are trying to, I guess, get another scapegoat or

a crime committed—like some conspiracy stuff. You want someone to be innocent, and you want some random person to be guilty. Yeah, you could use similar techniques, but you're going to need to do some unethical things. You cannot accidentally get a false confession if you're going for the truth. If your priority is getting the truth, I don't think you could be led into a false confession because they'd start saying stuff about the crime. I've seen false confessions where the person says they used a .22 caliber gun, and it was a 9mm that killed somebody. The police

coerced them into saying, "No, no, no, go back in your memory again. Do you remember that 9mm? Do you remember those 9mm shell casings? Do you remember pushing those down into that magazine?" So the moment a person remembers something inaccurate about the crime, that's a massive red flag that they've been manipulated. The problem is that the person spotting the red flag is the person that created the red flag most of the time. I guess you can't speak of specific instances, but in your studies, what's the CIA's most disturbing experiment to you? They had an experiment

that they did in Canada, and I am never—so, so many times people are like, "Oh, well, you must know all about this MKUltra project and names and dates and locations." I'm not a historian; I don't give a [expletive] about 99% of MKUltra. I care about the techniques and the methods and the protocols and stuff that were a result of MKUltra. I'm not like, "Let me go fact-check and get everybody's names right and dates." I don't have any of that because it was never important to me. But they did this thing in Canada, and... Uh, I

can't remember the guy's name, but they took people coming in for just normal appointments, like "I have postpartum depression" or "I have anxiety," and they would, against their will, do this thing called psychic driving. It had nothing to do with being psychic; it just meant psychic of the mind. They would give them massive, prolonged doses of LSD, and in some cases, tape their eyes open like in *A Clockwork Orange*, and play these videos in front of their faces all the time. They thought it was going to reprogram their brain somehow, but what happened was that

a lot of the people had to learn how to walk again. They couldn't control their bladder; they had to learn how to control their urine and stuff like that again. Some of them lost 30 to 40 years of memories from their lives, and these were people who checked into a clinic for anxiety. This was funded by MK Ultra, and it was in Canada. It's so well-known and so open that even the Canadian government paid the people's families who were wrecked because of this thing. The other thing they did—there’s so much mind warfare stuff we could

go into—but they did this thing called Project Midnight Climax in a brothel. These Johns would come in, and they'd say, "Well, I want to spend the night with this hooker." They would take them up, the hooker would take them up to a hotel room, and they would drug these dudes with high doses of LSD. There were mirrors in these hotel rooms, with scientists watching what took place behind a mirror. That is the most bizarre and weird thing I've ever even heard of. They could experiment with LSD on a lot of people. Then they did it

with soldiers; the British Royal Air Force did this with LSD. LSD was just like the rave of the time because the CIA thought it might be this miracle mind control drug. They were getting videos back from the Korean War of these Americans getting brainwashed and stuff, so they thought, "There is something happening to these Americans that we don't have the technology to do." It was a psychological arms race—or so we thought. It was just basic stuff; it was very basic brainwashing methods. What were the results of that Midnight Climax? Nobody knows. No, nobody knows. Yeah,

I think it was just studying the effects of LSD and the effects of what they call interrogative suggestibility—can I make you confess to stuff, can I get intelligence out of you if you're a captured asset of some kind? I don’t think they published anything afterward, like some after-action report or anything. It was an interesting time period. I won't go into this too much, but did you know they were testing LSD on dolphins in the '70s? Do you know why they had to stop doing that? No, why? It was because, remember Robbie? Yeah, it was one

of the female scientists who was having sex with a dolphin named Peter. The dolphin ended up getting depressed because she was taken off the project, and then he took his own life. That's why they stopped running LSD on dolphins. Holy smokes. Yeah, we covered this a while back; it just made me think of that. But, wow, on hypnosis, would you say you're one of the best hypnotherapists you've come across? No idea, I don't do therapy. I don't know a lot about other hypnotists, and I haven't tested their skill levels. I have the number one bestselling

book in hypnosis for five years straight, I think on and off. What can you not hypnotize someone to do? There's no limit. Can you hypnotize me right now? Yeah, okay, but anyone listening, we have to do these legal disclaimers: if you're driving a car, if you're operating machinery, you have to pause or turn the tape off—or whatnot, tape—but stop the video. They would have to do it. Let's go into the science of it first, if you want to. Yeah. The first seven or eight years of our lives, our brains spend most of their time in

this brainwave state called Theta. Theta is kind of like a deep meditation and relaxation state, and it makes us way more ready to absorb data and absorb information. That's how we learn language so fast; we learn to walk so fast, and all these amazing insights come to us as little kids because we're in Theta state so much. Hypnosis is a way that gets our brain back into that Theta brainwave state, and it does it in a few ways: by relaxing the physiology of the body, which is not always necessary but definitely helps. When your body

relaxes and your brain is relaxed, it releases this neurotransmitter called gamma, which is gamma-aminobutyric acid. It is the brain's calming mechanism; it's called an inhibitory neurotransmitter, so it tells everybody, "Hey, let's calm it down; you don't need to worry about things." It's essentially the safety chemical. So, if you're with a hypnotist, there is a way that they speak in a certain way that relaxes the body and relaxes the mind. A whole lot of focus, and that's kind of what hypnosis is: Theta wave brain state plus focus plus a desire or some expectation that something positive

is going to happen. Most hypnotists will tell you you can't be made to do something that you normally wouldn't do; you can't be made to do something against your will. That's not true. That is absolutely not true. You can be made to do a lot. So, I think it's important. There was just a case in Washington state where a hypnotist was—or no, he was an attorney. Have you heard about this? He was a lawyer, and he had this female client who was going through, I think, a divorce. He would hypnotize her in his office to

say, "Oh, I'm going to help you relax. I'm going to help you, you know, get rid of some of these negative beliefs," and he was sexually assaulting her under hypnosis in his office. She was taking her clothes off and all this stuff. Um, and I've heard a few hypnotists say, "Well, she must have done that in her normal everyday life, or she wouldn't have done that." But I want you to understand that if I can change context, I can get you to do anything. It's like you're not thinking about killing me; it's not something that

you would think about doing. But if you genuinely believed I was coming at you with a knife and you had a gun, I've modified the context, and now it's okay. So, your permission in your brain of, "I can't kill this person. I'm not thinking about it," radically changes, right? If I can—if this lawyer— I don't know how he did it, but this lawyer who's doing the sexual assault modifies the context and says, "Well, you're probably going to get naked today, but not here in the studio, but probably when you take a shower." You're going to

get naked. So, if I change, I hypnotize you and then change the context to you just getting home from work, putting your keys on the entry table, putting your wallet down there, walking into the bathroom, turning on that nice hot shower, feeling that steam, then it's time to strip down and get in the shower. I didn't modify anything about what you normally do; what you're doing is against your will. All I did was change the context. So, if a person can change and manipulate context—which we're seeing in politics right now; if you look very closely,

everything that's going on with manipulation is about three things, and it's PCP: I modify your perception, which allows me to shift the context, which changes permission. Perception, context, and permission—everything is about that. So, always be on the lookout for how your perception is being modified because the next thing that they will change is the context. The context enables you to do things that you would have never otherwise done, like throwing a Molotov cocktail through a Target store window here in L.A. So, it's always perception, context, and then permission. But the thing is, when something is

extremely good and capable of helping people, we might be able to use that same technology to do something bad and hurt people. So, it's kind of a double-edged sword. Could you hypnotize me to murder someone? Absolutely. And how long would that take? Forty minutes. And that's like—you think anyone could do that, or is it just because I'm slightly more susceptible? So, there would be time. Um, let's talk about that, unpack that a little bit. Some of that is about suggestibility. Suggestibility is, by so many psychologists and scientists, referred to as this thing that's like a

solid state: this person's highly suggestible, this person's medium suggestible, this person's low. It is very much context-dependent. So, your suggestibility is also a measure of my level of authority, my confidence, and what you think about me. So, we could take a suggestible person, and you say, "Oh, I'm prone to go into hypnosis," so I go into it easily. Well, what if a third grader did it? It's context, right? So, your suggestibility is based on context—again, context. So if I have a lower suggestible person, I need to modify that person's level of suggestibility, like their level

of trust, their level of openness, their level of focus on the conversation, and their level of expectancy. Do I expect something generally positive to come from this? I'm going to make myself more suggestible because I'm getting more excited about the outcome that is going to come from the hypnosis. That make sense? Yeah? Okay, so those are the six factors that determine success with hypnosis: focus, openness, connection, suggestibility, compliance, and expectancy—those six things. And you only need three of those to make a murderer. Just three. If you look at the Milgram experiment, there was no openness,

there was no connection, and there was no expectancy. They had no idea what was happening next, what was going to come next. They just had focus, suggestibility, and compliance, and they made murderers in less than an hour, and they did it with no hypnosis—zero hypnosis, no techniques, no linguistics. It was just authority and novelty—something new. I'm in a building I've never been in, in front of this machine I've never seen, with this dude in a lab coat that I've never met before. Everything was novel, and we know novelty generates a tremendous amount of focus inside

of our brain. So, when you're hypnotizing somebody to do something like that, you can modify two different types of contexts. The first context is... it's a life... Or death scenario where you need to shoot somebody. The second context is you see that gun that you're holding as a water gun or something that's absolutely harmless. So those are the two ways we can modify context. And there's a guy named George Esterbrook who I think was kind of the pioneer in doing this hypnosis for things that may not be in your best interest. George Esterbrook was a

professor at Colgate University, and he had these documents called "Super Spy," where it talked about how to split a personality and how to program spies to carry secrets in these, like, partitioned, so to speak, parts of their brain that even if they were interrogated and captured they couldn't access—until they received some kind of code word across the enemy lines. These are MK Ultra documents that were inside of George Esterbrook's attic and never got destroyed. The CIA told him to destroy them; they're not even on the internet. I will put them for you if you want

to throw them in the show notes. These are brand new. This is not like something you type in MK Ultra and you get access to these documents. So it goes to this little formula to make this super soldier and then super spy, and he was one of these pioneers. These are letters between him and J. Edgar Hoover and him and a lot of these famous hypnotists, hypnotherapists, and psychiatrists back then. He was a psychiatrist as well. So Esterbrook had these systems developed, and overall, they developed an entire plan to hypnotize this German submarine captain and

send him back to his harbor in Germany and have him torpedo the entire German fleet with a split personality. As I know, that plan never went through; it never came to fruition, but all of the steps of this plan were there, and it's all about those six things that I talked about: expectancy, focus, openness, connection, compliance, and suggestibility. If I can level up all six of those, I can do anything I want. If you just look at the Milgram experiment, it was only three—if you have all six, you can literally do whatever you want. These

are like cult leader things. If I have you captive and I'm making you do stuff all the time, you're conforming to the tribe, and there's tons of authority, and your emotions are being messed with, so I have your mammalian brain captured. Around there, we have all of those six things, which is what influences the human brain. If I have those six, I can do whatever I want—anything. I can get you to do anything I want. I don't need hypnosis; I don't need anything else. I just need those six things. And if you look at what

Manson did, who was obviously trained by the CIA, I mean, it's kind of obvious now, this guy named Jolly West was, I think, heavily involved in this stuff. Manson told a librarian to go kill a pregnant person, which is bizarre. Especially a woman killing a woman who's pregnant is almost unheard of. It's like all of us, every human being, has this innate desire to protect pregnant people. It's innate; I think it's built into everybody. To override that, you would have to have all four of that mammalian brain control and then all six of the human

brain control. With all six of those elements, can you hypnotize someone to do something they can't normally do? To physically lift more weight than they can, jump higher than they can—that kind of thing? Absolutely. But what you're really doing—you're not modifying ability; you're modifying perception of limitation. So I've done this with many different UFC fighters and boxers, where we hypnotize them not to get gas out and to not really feel a lot of pain during the fight. And it has worked absolutely. You can watch it on YouTube; you can watch the fights, the guys that

I've worked with. It's like you're looking at a human Terminator. They don't make facial expressions; you're not seeing them heaving in the corner during these breaks in between rounds. But you can absolutely do that. What's, I guess, something you're surprised you can do or people on stage are surprised that you can do? I don't know; I've never used hypnosis as a demo in my life—not even once. Oh, well, maybe like in a bar or something. What do you do in the bar? Mostly like, I could teach you to do this in five minutes, but it

looks dramatic, so no one cares about any degree that I have or anything like that or any books I've written. But you could do this one thing in a bar that looks dramatic, where you just have someone lay on the ground, and it looks dramatic. So like you tell them to go down, and you kind of guide them down on the ground and just kind of leave them there, and people are like, "Oh my God, this is like a magical power." Like, I could teach you how to do that in five minutes; it's not hard.

How fast could you make me—or could you try to make me—like, fall asleep in this chair? Just like all the way? Is that possible? Easily, yeah. You want to go through it? Any special thing that you would like as an outcome of this? More confidence? More discipline? What would you prefer? More focus? A lot? More focus. All right, so I have an innate desire to explain everything I'm doing as I'm doing it, but I'm just going to go ahead and do it without any explanation. Beautiful! All right, so go ahead and put both of your

feet flat on the ground and just let your legs relax. Now, I want you to imagine that with every breath you're taking, your lungs almost go all the way to the bottom of your feet, like you're trying to fill up your legs with the air that you're breathing in. That's great! Just continue those deep, deep breaths. All I want you to do is imagine every one of those tiny muscles around your eyes finally getting your permission to just let go. Picture what it would feel like if the skin on the back of your neck could

finally just release and unwind, letting every piece of that tension go. Know that the deeper you allow yourself to go now, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you're going to accept this suggestion for increased focus in your life. It's going to get even better. The more those breaths continue to just breathe themselves, the more the skin around your entire body can completely let go, even feeling those muscles running alongside the left and right sides of your spine finally getting your permission to just let go and let everything go. When you're ready,

allow your eyes to close—only when you're ready to go completely down—letting your head relax and go into a natural state of absolute letting go, with all those muscles completely unraveling. Let your mind wander wherever it wants to go, just allowing my voice to be right there, at the center of your mind, as you sink deeper than ever before. Letting that neck completely relax all the way back, noticing that as you continue those breaths, the deeper you go, the more your body continues to go deeper and deeper than ever before. Every muscle relaxing, releasing, and completely

letting go. Allow that part of your mind that doesn't need to be here to drift wherever it needs to go. Know that every time you touch any doorknob or any handle to open a door, you'll be reminded of the following suggestion: that every single day of your life, your level of focus on what's important will continue to increase. Your level of absolute drive and focus on the most important things will be unshakeable—more focus than any time in your life. Every time you touch a doorknob or any device to open a door, your brain will automatically

recall and make even more powerful the suggestion that you're receiving right now, in the center of your mind. Allow all of that part of your brain to absorb everything right where I am, right here in the center of your mind. Letting all those muscles completely relax, release, and let go. Now, in a moment, I'm going to count from one to five to bring you right back here to the room. With each number, let that suggestion sink deeper and deeper and become more permanent. Only allow your eyes to open as that suggestion becomes absolutely permanent in

your mind. One... getting more aware of just the sounds in the room again. Two... a little more aware of that chair underneath your legs and the weight of your feet on the floor. Three... back to hearing my voice off to the left side of your head right now. Four... feeling more and more awake. Five... letting everything become more and more permanent as you come right back to this room. Oh man, I will say, guys, that's very impressive considering he didn't have much time with me to even start on it. Gosh, I know the words that

you need to hear, though. Yeah, I've spent two hours with you now; I know every word that causes your blink rate to go down. That's impressive. Well, we only have a few minutes left. Let's take a look at the notepad to see what the predictions were originally. You don't have to read them out loud; read them to yourself first. Can you explain the second one to me? Or maybe I remember what it says—getting the writing wrong. Read it; you can read it; that's fine. Uh, frequently ruminating on what could have been said or communicating differently

or wishing you had communicated differently. Yeah, I would say you nailed it on those. I mean, I'll say them to the audience for fun. The first one was deeply worried about how you're being perceived to the point it interferes with your life. The last one was using constant exposure to sound, voice, or video when alone to avoid more deep, penetrating thoughts that interfere with self-concept, self-confidence, and certainty about the world. Yeah, these are really good! One other guest who had interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people said that to me on one of my first podcasts:

"You are so particular in your movements." I'm like, "I'm worried about perception." That's fascinating! Just from... I'm just—like, it makes sense that you would realize that by now, but I'm pretty impressed, in hindsight, that that was brief after knowing each other. I want to ask you about that, but guys, we do not have much time, unfortunately. Um, a question I ask... Every guest, and you take your time on this—uh, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? This is going to be Cory, uh, but I think it's the most powerful thing in the world.

If you read every ancient text—uh, whatever religion: the Nag Hammadi, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, uh, whatever you read, the most common phrase, including the Bible, the New Testament, the Old Testament, even the forbidden books of the Bible, like um, the book of Timothy, uh, or Thomas, and uh, Judas—um, the most common phrase ever repeated in all of those texts, you know what it is? Do not fear! In every single ancient religious text, it's "Fear not" or "Do not fear" or some variation of that. Funny enough, the King James Version of the Bible says "Do

not fear" 365 times, and I think that's our biggest problem in life: fear is the opposite of love, and every spiritual teaching—you know that. So, almost all spiritual teachings teach that we only really have two basic emotions as humans: we have love and we have fear. I think having a good life is getting out of that fear area and getting into, like, how can I just be openhearted all the time and just love what's going on and be more in the love part? So, the best advice I ever got was from ancient religious texts—every religion

ever. Yeah, that's a good one. Well, everyone, this has been the uh, Jack Neil Podcast. This is your guest, Chase Hughes. Thanks for coming on, man. Uh, where can people find you? You can just go to my system, you can go to my YouTube channel—it’s just under Chase Hughes—or our website for all the training and stuff is called NCI University. Awesome! Thank you, guys. Nice to meet you, man.