The Military Influence Training that Maps Out Human Weakness, Harnesses Confusion, and Triggers Obedience in Others With Chase Hughes

In this episode we discuss the darker side of how the US military influences human behavior - we touch on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating Manchurian candidates, how this one psychological bias can convince strangers to murder someone more than 80% of the time, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses, and much more with Chase Hughes.

Chase Hughes is the founder of Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and the amazon bestselling author of The Ellipsis Manual. Chase previously served in the US Navy as part of the correctional and prisoner management departments. Chase speaks on a variety of topics including brainwashing and attraction and frequently develops new programs for the US Government and members of anti human-trafficking teams around the world.

We discuss:

How seeing "how weak and vulnerable everyone was" transformed Chase’s worldview
Is it possible to create real world Manchurian candidates?
Why you’re grossly underestimating the work necessary to read human body language and understand human behavior
Why the typical strategies of influence won’t work unless you can profile and understand the individual - and tailor what you’re saying and doing to meet that individuals weaknesses and needs
One of the best things you can start doing every single day
Simple questions you can use to “disengage someone from autopilot” and break the pattern they are stuck in
How you can develop “FIC" to hack human behavior
Focus
1. Interest
2. Curiosity
The “RAS” - reticular activation system - constantly looking for things that are threats and things that are socially valuable
Social authority and perceived authority are more important than influence in shaping human behavior
How the Milgrim experiment fundamentally demonstrates the incredible power of the authority bias
The one strategy that can be effective influencing strangers to commit murder more than 80% of the time
The 5 key factors you can use to hack authority and trigger an “obedient” response
Dominance / ambition
1. Discipline
2. Leadership
3. Gratitude
4. Fun / sense of adventure
When we interact with authority we go through an “agentic” shift - our brain shifts responsibility for our own actions onto the person who instructed us to do it - you can make people take extreme behaviors if you get them to give YOU responsibility for their actions
Master yourself first before you can influence others
Master environment first
1. Master your time - keeping a plan and sticking to it
2. Master the mechanics of your habits
3. Master your attention span
Tactics for mastering authority today
Express genuine interest in other people and make them feel INTERESTING not interested
1. Remember the phrase - LEADERSHIP through SUPPORT
The people who think they are alpha males are usually NOT the alpha male - big dogs don’t feel the need to bark
The Columbo method - make deliberate social errors, be vulnerable, start with an insecurity - that helps open people up to influence
Chase offers a challenge to you - Talk to a stranger every single day. And once that gets easy, you have to push out your comfort zone even further.
The Texas crosswalk study - why wearing a suit makes you more likely to get people to follow you than wearing jeans
Why you should ask unique questions and do unique things
The 3 tools you can use to develop a profile of anyone
Social Weakness Chart
1. Human Needs Map
2. Behavioral Table of Elements
There’s no vaccination to being socially vulnerable - if you become socially invulnerable it makes you a nasty person - it diminishes your ability to connect with others and takes away your ability to feel empathy and anxiety for others.
Be completely real with your self, and with others, as it can help build more genuine connections
Trying to manage your own behavior and body language really starts to suck up alot of your own “CPU power” and Chase doesn't recommend it
How you can watch a video of an interview or interrogation - using this special tool - and decode the behavior and determine
Why a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is typically biased against people telling the truth
How Conan Obrien can help you become a better human lie detector
Simple exercises you can use to start RIGHT NOW to develop an understanding of human body language and behavior
The concept of embedded commands and how you can use them to make a person have a thought without it being conscious of it
Confusion statements and embedded commands - they will go straight to the subconscious
Why you should ask yourself "What does this person like to be complimented on, what makes them feel significant”
And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] The Ellipsis Manual: analysis and engineering of human behavior by Chase Hughes
[Website] Ellipsis Behavior
[Image] Behavioral Table of Elements
[Blog] THE NEW HUMAN NEEDS MAP - Ellipsis Behavior
[Article] THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT by Saul McLeod
[SoS Episode] Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash
[SoS Episode] Weapons of Influence Series

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with now more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss the darker side of how the U.S. Military influences human behavior. We touch on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating Manchurian candidates. How this one psychological bias can convince strangers to murder someone more than 80% of the time, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses and much more with Chase Hughes. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our popular guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another sweet surprise bonus guide by joining our email list today.

Next; if you join your email list, you’re going to get an email from us every single Monday, called Mindset Monday. It’s a short list of articles, videos TED Talks and ideas that have us fascinated and excited about evidence-based growth. Lastly, by being on the email list you get a chance to shape the show. Vote on guests, questions and even changing things like our intro music. When we launched our new intro music a few weeks ago, listeners like you on who are on the email list voted on it and that’s what we picked. 

Remember, you can sign up for the email list now by going to successpodcast.com and signing up, or if you're on your phone and you can’t get to it right now, just text the words “smarter” to number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Don’t make me use some of these influence tactics to get you to sign up. 

In a previous episode we looked at the question of human influence from a lighter angle. Surprisingly, with an FBI spy recruiter had hacked evolutionary psychology to learn how to change anyone's behavior. We discussed the five steps for strategizing trust. How to get someone's brain to reward them for engaging with you, the vital importance of self-awareness, the how are not keeping score and much more with Robin Dreeke. If you want to get more information on the lighter side of influencing others, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

[0:02:41.4] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Chase Hughes. Chase is the founder of the Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and the Amazon best-selling author of the Ellipsis Manual. He previously served in the U.S. Navy as part of a correctional and prisoner management department. Chase speaks on a variety of topics including brainwashing and attraction and frequently develops new programs for the U.S. government and members of antihuman trafficking teams around the world. 

Chase, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:10.8] CH: Thanks, Matt. It's good to here. Thanks for having me on. 

[0:03:13.4] MB: We’re really excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and your story, tell us a little bit about your background and the world that you come for. 

[0:03:21.6] CH: I’m in the military and I grew up in the military pretty much. I went to military school when I was a kid, and around the age of 19 I had this kind of epiphany experience to where I finally got the realization that I didn't really get human behavior and it was at a bar. I went home that night and I remember spending hours on Google just s printing out every document I could find. I just went on there, I typed in how to tell when girls like you. That was the catalyst that served for me learning all of these and just kind of getting so deep into this. 

[0:04:03.4] MB: You've obviously gone very, very deep in this. Tell me about —You named your book the Ellipsis Manual. Why ellipsis and what does that mean? 

[0:04:13.2] CH: We chose to name the company ellipsis, because I think it’s a grammatical or punctuation symbol where you have the three dots. The meaning of that is just removed or omitted language or language that isn't there. I also just thought it sounded cool. We use that as a company named just it because it kind of has a little cool back story to it. 

[0:04:36.8] MB: You mentioned that you kind of started going down this rabbit hole by Googling how to tell if women were interested in you. I find that really fascinating. Pick up and that kind of associated world is something that I've done a little bit of research and digging on and it's amazing all of the different kind of behavior patterns and things that you can really pick up. Tell me a little bit about how that informed your journey into understanding a lot of the nonverbal elements of human behavior and how to kind of design and engineer human behavior.

[0:05:08.7] CH: When I first got started in doing body language reading, it was very revealing, because I spent a lot of time on it and it. It got to a point where at first it's depressing almost at the beginning because you just see that every human being is suffering in one way or another. I think that we’re all suffering so much that seeing the way that someone hides their suffering is usually the most powerful and revealing piece of information you can get. 

After that period, it kind of just humanizes everybody to the point where you can see those weaknesses or those fears or insecurities and is not a point of looking down on so on, because you can see all that. It's a point of just that guy is just like me. That guy who used to be threatening is just as scared as I am in the situation, or just as flawed as I am. 

Seeing that was just a huge eye-opener for me that changed the way I see people forever. I wanted more of that, and it's very addicting especially when you really dig into it and spend some time learning behavior. It got to the point where I started social profiling and behavior profiling, and then I got into conversations into how to analyze what people are saying. Then it got into the hypnosis aspect of it, and then it got into behavior engineering and then interrogation started coming into it that kind of intertwined with some stuff I was doing. It was just kind of along a snowball effect of information that all kind of revolved around the main theme of trying to discover how vulnerable all of us are. In the end, it's kind of scary to see that we all walk around thinking that we've got some kind of firewall mechanism or some kind of antivirus systems to where we know BS when we see it, but we don't. Just seeing through the development phase, like just seeing how weak we all are or how vulnerable we all are is a truly shocking revelation. 

[0:07:32.8] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that. When you say seeing how weak and vulnerable everyone is, what does that mean and how did you come to that conclusion? 

[0:07:41.6] CH: I wanted to see with persuasion. I wanted to see how far we could go. I thought like the end, like the greatest thing — This was maybe 10 years ago. I thought the greatest thing that we might be able to do this by creating a Manchurian candidate in real life. It turns out it's been done before in a much different way where they used drugs and all kinds of dangerous stuff, but I thought maybe that there is some therapeutic applications of that. Maybe we could work on depression or even schizophrenia with that kind of stuff. Going through that with the vulnerability aspect that you just asked about, I specifically mean how we can be talked into doing things that are not in our best interest very easily. 

[0:08:31.4] MB: Give me an example. How can somebody be either sort of manipulated or hacked into doing something that's not necessarily in their best interest? 

[0:08:40.9] CH: A good example would be if you look up people that are hypnotist bank robbers that go up to the bank and use some really just preschool level skills. Of course, the guy might be really suggestible behind the counter, but I think an example of that would be you talking someone into doing something against their will, like buying something or going home with someone or using the skills for a business negotiation or at a job interview. 

[0:09:14.9] MB: I want to dig in to specifically some of the tools and strategies around how to engineer that type of behavior. What are some of the tactics that you’ve seen from your research, from your work in the military engineering human behavior that can help people either recognize when someone is trying to do that to them or use some of these strategies to influence others? 

[0:09:39.7] CH: Sure. I can give you guys some basic ones. I want to touch on this real quick if you don't mind me going off a little bit here, Matt. When we see like one of those articles online about learn body language quickly, or like quick tips to do X, Y, and Z, I think a lot of us grossly underestimate how much work is usually involved in mastering something or being really good at something. 

If you take a piano for example, there's plenty of videos on YouTube where you can just walk through a song. You know what I’m saying? 

[0:10:15.3] MB: Yeah. 

[0:10:16.3] CH: To where you could just walk through a song and you might be able to maybe impress a few people for 30 seconds at a party, but to get really good at this you'll need an investment and time. One of the things that I always kind of compare this to is like the first level would be like the paramedic. He knows some basic skills just enough to kind of be dangerous, and then you have a nurse who studied for several years, then you have a doctor who studied this in depth. Way down at the bottom, underneath the paramedic, you have the guy who watches like Gray’s Anatomy and thinks he's a doctor.

I think that just estimating how much time it will take is usually if you think it’s less than a year to get really good at this stuff. I would say more power to you, but this stuff is incredibly complex and it’s far more complex than a piano. In fact, if you can imagine mastering a piano and then every time you sat down at it, the keys were in different places. That’s kind of where we’re at with just basically human behavior engineering. 

With body language and behavior profiling, that's what makes the difference between really being able to influence someone and just knowing a few tricks, because if you read any influence book nowadays they’re going to give you all these methods that are supposed to work for all people, but every single person that you talk to is different and is fundamentally different from the core of their being. If you can't see that and you can't profile that and kind of tailor what you're saying and doing to meet that person's needs or their fears or weaknesses, whatever you’re trying to do with that person, you’re going to get some really basic level of success. That's why we tried to integrate every single part of this, every aspect inside of the ellipsis manual to be able to get that engineered scenario to where you can create an outcome that you'd like. 

For your listeners specifically, I would say one of the main things you need to start doing every single day is disengage people's autopilot response, and the autopilot response is basically the roles that we play or the hats that we put on. If you’re at work, you have a workout on and you talk to people as if you’re at work. It’s going to be completely different than the way you talk to your wife. It's going to be completely different than how you talk to your kids. 

We change roles throughout the day, and once we get into a roll, our neurons that have kind of connected for that role start to fire in sequence there just to where everything is kind of automated and we’re not really paying much attention to what's going on. When someone is in autopilot, it’s usually a role. So like an employee and a customer, that's one that you’re probably going to encounter every single day. 

I would say breaking someone's autopilot is the most fantastic way to start capturing that focus and the attention that you’re going to need, and breaking autopilot can be done with anything that breaks them out of their mental state. If you're getting a coffee at Starbucks and you ask really quickly which direction Northeast is, just to make them start — They've never been asked that question before. They start going internal to their head and they kind of break out of that employee mode for just a few seconds, and then you start doing what we call FIC, which stands for focus interest and curiosity, which you want to develop in sequence. A really good technique for developing focus is just talking about focus. 

Does that make sense? 

[0:14:06.9] MB: Tell me more about that. 

[0:14:08.8] CH: Okay. I didn’t know how far you wanted to go in here. 

[0:14:10.7] MB: Yeah. No, I want to dig in. I want to learn a lot. Tell me about FIC and tell me specifically about how we can kind of cultivate each of those pieces. Then I still want to drill down a little bit more as well and kind of how we can break someone out of a pattern. 

[0:14:24.4] CH: Okay. FIC is focus, interest and curiosity. The first part of that is focus, and the easiest way to establish or get someone to start focusing on you is to have authority. I know you wanted to talk about that, and this would be a great segue to that. 

[0:14:42.1] MB: Perfect. Let’s dig in to authority and then we’ll come back to FIC. 

[0:14:47.0] CH: Great. Let's talk about focus. The main way, the number one way that human beings start to focus on something or view it as important is when someone has authority. Authority is probably the most important thing that you can possibly master. There's a thing in our brains called a reticular activation system or the RAS, which is kind of like a precursor to the fight or flight response. This RAS is consistently looking for threats, things that are threatening to you or things that are socially valuable. If you're in a doctor’s office, all of your attention is going to go to the doctor. If you get pulled over by police, all of your attention is going to go to that person. If you're sitting in a restaurant and George Clooney walks in and starts talking to you, all of your attention, no matter what you were doing is going to go to George Clooney. That has to do with social authority or perceived authority.

My goal is to try to convince your listeners that authority is more important and more effective than influence. The main reason being that — Are you familiar with the Milgram Study? 

[0:16:03.0] MB: Oh, yeah. Definitely. 

[0:16:05.0] CH: Okay. Just for your listeners who haven't heard of this, this was done at Yale University. It was by a man named Dr. Stanley Milgram whose parents were refugees from the Nazis. He came to America and he did this study where a guy walks into a room and they say, “This is a learning experiment. There's a guy with a lab coat on and they're taking down notes on clipboard,” and he says, “You’re going to shock this guy in the other room,” and every time he gets this set of words wrong so to speak. 

The guy goes in the other room, gets hooked up to a shocking machine and this other guy who’s being experimented on is sitting there, he’s supposed to shock this guy on the side of this wall every time the guy gets words wrong. Td the guy just keeps repeatedly doing it and the guy continues to ramp up the voltage in accordance with the instructions of the guy wearing the lab coat. It turned out that almost 80% of the people who did this experiment shock the person on the other side of the wall to the point of death. To death. Social psychologist, before the experiment was conducted, estimated that .011% of people would shock someone to death, and it was almost 80%. 

A lot of people got some stuff out of that and they got a lot of scientific research out of that, but I took away something completely different. Of course, they got away like people who say, “I was just following orders,” like a lot of Nazis did after they're brought in front of a tribunal for war crimes. 

Think about the authority aspect of this. A guy just standing there in a gray lab coat tells you to shock another human being to death and you do it. Stand up and leave, you don’t protest. Of course, everyone — 100% of people would say, “No. I would never do that,” but then 80% of people do. 

A man with no medical name tag on, he has no identifying marks other than he’s just wearing a tie and a lab coat and he's uttering phrases, he’s not ordering anyone to do it. He just speak in phrases like it's important that the experiment continues or it's important that you continue. Just little phrases like that. 

Let's go back to influence and contrast these two things together. With influence, it might take you two hours to talk somebody into buying a new car per se. A guy in a lab coat in less than 45 minutes suggested that a stranger kill another person and they did it. 80% of people, which is better than most sales numbers. That's with no neurolinguistic programming. No hypnosis. No Robert Cialdini influence methods. None of that, and you just have that tiny bit of authority, just that perceived social authority. The guy was a nobody, he was just a volunteer who was an actor. Just that is enough to convince a stranger to commit murder, that tiny bit of social authority. 

[0:19:18.5] MB: That's fascinating. The Milgram experiment obviously is one of the kind of groundbreaking and fundamental experiments in psychology. For listeners who wanted to get it, we actually have a previous episode which I’ll link to in the show notes where we go super deep on the authority bias. I'm curious, tell me what are some — You write about and talk about the idea of hacking this sort of authority and how we can create it. What are some of the factors that we can use in order to hack authority? 

[0:19:45.1] CH: There are five basic qualities that dictate authority, and one of them is interchangeable. I’ll give them to you now. There are dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun, or just having a sense of adventure. The first one, dominance, does not mean being domineering. You can be dominant and still be completely supportive and nice to everyone around you. It's a common misconception that you have to be mean or serious all the time in order to be dominant. You can be a really fun person and just be a natural leader. 

The only thing that dominance can really be replaced with is ambition. If you think about like a starving artist who is opening a new art gallery or something like that. That's the only thing that we found that can be replaced. Those five qualities really dictate whether or not other people will respond to you, and especially the opposite sex. Whether or not you will have that automatic kind of obedient response, and it’s not necessarily an obedience response. What happens when we get exposed to authority, we go through what Dr. Milgram called an agentic shift. While this shift is taking place, our brain actually shifts responsibility for our own actions on to the person that's telling us to do something. That is profound, and I think a lot of people really look over that piece of information when they read the research. A person makes a shift to where they no longer feel responsible for their actions just in the presence of someone they think might be an authority figure. 

Developing that level of authority takes time and I it’s hard for me to get that point across to my students sometimes that somebody will come up and say, “Hey, man. I want to fly out there and do training with you for a few weeks.” Somehow they’ve got all the money to do that, but they're the type of person who's got a pile of dishes in the sink. They’ve got clothes piled up in their bedroom. I know for a fact this guy does not make his bed every day. He doesn't even trim his fingernails. He doesn’t even have his own wife together and he wants to come and learn how to take control of another human being. 

You have got some master yourself first, and with the students that I teach for private coaching, we have a few steps that you need to master environment first if you're trying to get this authority. It has to start with the environment. It has to start with cleaning your house, living in a clean place, hanging out with good friends, then mastering your time, keeping a planner and really sticking to it and starting to learn how to discipline yourself into habits, because discipline only needs to last long enough to get the habit done, and then you’re good. Then you can kind of cool off a little bit. You just only do one at a time. After you master the environment, then it becomes mastery of time, and after time you start to master your mechanics every day. What you're studying and mastering your attention span. You pick one thing to do every day. Today I’m going to study whether or not people are breathing from their chest or their stomach. Today I’m going to watch pupil dilation. Today I’m going to do X, Y and Z. 

Developing the authority is almost more important than learning any kind of influence method. I know a lot of people really are into influence and they’re into learning sales, but if you don't have that authority or you basically don't have your “shit together” you won't get the results you want. 

I would like to suggest if your listeners could just try this on for a month or two, that the results you want socially, the results you want from other people, especially when someone’s into studying influence, those things start to happen as a byproduct of you just making your life better and starting to master authority. 

We have one chapter in the Ellipsis Manual called authority, and it talks about this and it’s got a step-by-step system and it’s got a bunch of ways to kind of hack it. I'll give you a couple here if I'm not droning on too long here, Matt. 

[0:24:19.4] MB: No. That’s perfect. I'd love to hear some of those strategies. I think that’d be great. 

[0:24:23.3] CH: Okay. If you just want to start mastering authority today, start to express genuine interest in other people and make them feel interesting, not interested. Find out what they're excited about and remember the phrase leadership through support. Leadership through support. You have to make the other people understand that you are genuinely interested in them, and that level of interest will start to help you get more comfortable with having authority over other people. 

Because as soon as someone who’s new or just start studying this, they get that first taste of authority or somebody completely goes into the agentic state in front of them. It makes people immediately pull the plug and start to back out. It's a strange feeling, especially when it's your first time. Not necessarily having control over another human, but having that authority for the first time is strange, but it addicting, so it’s a good thing especially if you have good motives and you want to help others.

I would say especially with people who are the alpha male types who I would not describe as alpha males, but the people who we think are alpha males are usually not the alpha males. They’re the ones who want people to think they’re alpha males, because it’s usually the tiniest, the smallest dogs that barks the most. The Chihuahuas always worried about getting attacked, and the giant dogs don't really feel the need to bark. 

Dealing with those type of people, try what we call the Colombo method. I don’t know if you're familiar with that show, Matt. 

[0:26:08.7] MB: Yeah, the old detective show. 

[0:26:11.7] CH: Yeah, it is fantastic. I would say that is the point where you need to make some deliberate expression of insecurity. Then you can still have authority and you can still make deliberate errors, like maybe look insecure on purpose or make a deliberate social error, like your shirttail is hanging out or something like that. Those people need to feel dominant at the beginning of a conversation in order to relax. 

It works the same in an interrogation room. If I paid a police officer to yell at me like I was in trouble as I was walking in the room or I tripped on purpose or had a giant coffee stain on my shirt. It depends on who you're talking to. I would say start working on yourself immediately. That is going to be the game changer for you. We tend to seek things outside of us. All of these stuff we see on the Internet, we think the products or the things are going to make us better, but I strongly encourage your listeners to start from the inside out, especially when you're learning influence. That will help you basically to talk to strangers every day. I think using that level of social skill, you should be talking to a stranger every single day. You should make it a goal to discover a fact about a stranger in your area every single day. 

[0:27:38.5] MB: I love that strategy, and something that I'm a big fan of is kind of the idea or rejection therapy and the whole notion of constantly be sort of putting yourself out there failing, talking to people, pushing your comfort zone and even something as simple as talking to a stranger every day can be a great way to start to get outside that comfort zone and work on your ability to interact and connect and talk to people. 

[0:28:02.1] CH: Absolutely. I think the conference zone thing is really what's going to hold people back, and starting a conversation starts to get easy, then you need to take it to the next step, because you’re back in your comfort zone once it becomes easy. Then you need to start going further. 

[0:28:18.6] MB: Yeah, it's so key. As soon as it becomes easy for, you need to find kind of that next challenge and start pushing through the resistance. 

We talk all time on the show about how important it is to master new skills and abilities, and that’s why I’m so excited to tell you about sponsor for this episode, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo designed, to social media marketing, to street photography, and they offer unlimited access for a single low monthly price so you don't pay per class. 

There's some really cool courses on Skillshare. They have an absolutely awesome course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. It basically runs my entire life. They also have a really, really cool course on productivity planning. They have a number of those actually. A course that piqued my interest when I was looking at it today that looks absolutely awesome, which is a course on how to create awesome mind maps. If you don’t what mind maps are, they’re so cool. It’s an amazing tool for note taking and remembering and summarizing things that speaks directly to your mind. It’s an absolutely fascinating strategy, and I use mind maps to record or kind of keep notes on things like book ideas or summarizing or even brainstorming. 

Skillshare is giving my listeners this month in month of unlimited access. You can get Skillshare completely for free for one month. All you have to do is to go to skillshare.com/success to redeem a free month of classes. I would highly recommend checking that out. If mind mapping sounds cool, go check out the mind mapping class. You can get all these course for free for a month. If you’re looking to add some new skills, if you want pickup to some productivity tips or even get into something like drawing, definitely check out Skillshare. 

Going back to these five key factors that you can use to hack authority, we got dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun/sense of adventure. Tell me about — I guess is leadership kind of encapsulated in authority as well or is that sort of a separate piece of the puzzle, and then what about gratitude and fun? I think those are kind of surprising things to see on a list of hacking social authority. 

[0:30:40.6] CH: I think that gratitude and self-discipline are both extremely contagious and they're both extremely visible on your body. Somebody else might call it energy, and I don't profess to know how. It just beams out of you, but it really does. You can tell when you meet somebody that's really got their stuff together. It just shines through everything that they do. It almost puts every person into kind of a followership role to where they want to keep experiencing that. Leadership and authority are very, very closely related. Authority is something you want people to perceive and leadership is something that you're doing internally, the thought processes that you have. 

[0:31:31.0] MB: What are those internal thought processes behind leadership? 

[0:31:35.7] CH: I would say the number one thing you can do is just continually ask yourself how can I lift this person up or these people up. The authority would be a natural byproduct of having your stuff together and just managing your life. 

[0:31:54.4] MB: Essentially, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding this, but essentially the idea is that if you have your life together, if you're firing on all cylinders, you’re having fun, you’re grateful, you have kind of positive energy beaming out from you, you’re organized, you’re getting things done, that sort of state naturally puts people around you into a mode where they defer to you almost or feel like they want to do what you tell them to do. 

[0:32:23.2] CH: Yes. We’re got a huge section on there on how to kind of hack that for lack of a better term. That definitely makes the agentic shift start to happen. Just as an example of this, how looks matter. They did a crosswalk, what they called a crosswalk study in Texas and this was decades ago. It’s been repeated several times, but this guy in a blue jeans and t-shirt in a downtown area, busy traffic, decides to break the crosswalk signal and just — Of course, the street is open, like there's no cars coming, but he goes against the crosswalk signal that tells him not to go. A couple of people follow him, and the same guy goes back to his apartment or wherever and changes into a really nice business suit and decides to break that crosswalk and go ahead and cross the street. The chances of people following him were increased by 89%, just because of his clothing. Just changing your clothes or changing that guy’s clothes made people break the law where they otherwise wouldn't have. 

[0:33:34.8] MB: Fascinating, and that's a really good sort of crystalline demonstration of the idea that even simple shifts in the way that people perceive you can lead to massive changes in the way that they react to you and their behavior. 

[0:33:49.3] CH: Absolutely, and it's not just how they perceive you just your clothing. You will, once you start getting that self-discipline, and you’ve got your social skills all these stuff start to get handled, you will walk differently. You don't need a tactic anymore. You don’t need conversation starter tactics anymore. Once all of these stuff happens and once you get those five qualities kind of hammered down, everything else starts to become a byproduct. The success is a byproduct of having that stuff figured out.

[0:34:19.4] MB: Let’s go back up to the concept of a FIC that you talked about before and how cultivating focus, interest in curiosity are keystones of hacking human behavior for lack of a better term. How does authority tie back into that? 

[0:34:35.2] CH: Okay. Authority activates that reticular activation system we talked about, which starts the beginning processes of interest. When a person becomes interested, that is when you would start to ask a really unique questions, you’d start to do something that is just unusual that they don't see all the time, even if you're asking them for help on a setting on your iPhone. 

The authority gives you permission to do that to where another person asking the exact same question with the exact same words won't get away with that. They can't get away with that. They don’t develop that interest. The curiosity — Imagine if you're saying, ask them what kind of book they like, and as the person talks about the book they like you respond with its incredible how easy it is to just become so captivated. When you say captivated, you touch your own chest. Like you're pointing toward yourself and completely get lost in something and you point at yourself one more time. You say the whole entire world around you just completely disappears. This is a very crude example here, but I want to give you the nuts and bolts so it makes sense. 

Everything around you just kind of disappears and you gesture away from yourself, and that would start to establish the curiosity. With the curiosity, if I asked you what kind of book was your favorite or what book did you really, really get totally wrapped up in. I'm literally sending electricity to all of those little memories and triggering them and getting them warmed up. I'm not even saying anything. You're doing most of the work, and this is just the first maybe 10 to 25 seconds of the conversation.

[0:36:21.5] MB: What happens after that? 

[0:36:23.1] CH: There is a very long process here depending on what you want to do. Then you would start to develop a profile of the person that you're speaking to, and we have three tools that we made for that. One is a social weakness chart based on who you’re talking to. It'll illustrate what type of weaknesses they have that you can either speak to or choose to avoid to develop a deep rapport. Then we use a human needs map. There's only seven needs on this needs map. If you can identify these needs, it will also identify fears and insecurities for that person. The needs map is publicly available on our website. It's on just Google images or wherever you want to look for it. Just type in Ellipsis needs map. Finally, with that profile development, you’re using the behavioral table of elements for seeing the effectiveness of your methods.

[0:37:14.8] MB: I want to dig in to each of those. Tell me about, when you say social weakness, what is a social weakness. What does that mean? 

[0:37:22.9] CH: A social weakness might be a fear of abandonment, a fear of public judgment or a fear that you will be emasculated in front of a large crowd. That would be a social weakness, and those are typically personality weaknesses we have that involve something being witnessed by multiple people.

[0:37:42.9] MB: And is this something you think that everyone has social weakness or only certain people have them? 

[0:37:47.7] CH: I think we all do. I think we’re hardwired to have social weaknesses that kept us in line 10,000 years ago when we’re kind of a nomadic tribes people, the average tribe was around 60 to 100 people. If people had no social consideration for what’s going on, they probably get killed pretty fast. 

[0:38:09.4] MB: Do you start out when you're kind of going down this journey, do you look at yourself and figure out what are my social weaknesses? 

[0:38:15.9] CH: Oh, yeah. Man! I dug into it really — It was a dark place, and I started seeing everything that I was doing. Of course, I got to work trying to fix everything and finally I got to the point where a lot of people ask if I manage my body language and I control all of these blinking and breathing and all that, like, “No. I made the choice to just let go.” 

[0:38:45.5] MB: For somebody who's listening that maybe wants to drill down and understand their own social weaknesses, what are the strategies or kind of exercise you might recommend to peel back the layers and start to understand what your fears are and how those are driving your behavior. 

[0:39:01.7] CH: Oh, yeah. I would say definitely use the needs map. If you don't have the Ellipsis Manual with you, the needs map, you can download, just put it on your phone. Have your friends go through the needs map and pick out what your needs are, and then you can look at that social weakness chart which has the needs associated with fears and insecurities and you can start to just go to work on all of that stuff. 

I would caution a lot of people that when I first started I thought if I worked on those needs hard enough, like I would just be a human that’s free of needs, like some enlightened Tibetan monk. It doesn't work like that. There's no vaccination to being socially vulnerable to other people. In fact if you become socially invulnerable to people it will just make you just a nasty person in general. 

[0:39:55.4] MB: Why is that? 

[0:39:56.5] CH: I think it diminishes your ability to connect with others and it takes away your ability to feel empathy and nervousness for other people during conversations. 

[0:40:07.8] MB: In many ways, being foldable and having these weaknesses are things that you can use to your advantage. 

[0:40:15.1] MB: Absolutely, I think being vulnerable isn't some tactic you could apply, although it's in the book. There's part of the book that tells you how to make confessions to other people about small little things that make you seem like a more caring person. I would strongly suggest that you just be actually vulnerable and say what's really going on and be completely real especially with your own self, so you’re not hiding anything. 

Not only just so you're a good person, but trying to hide stuff and manage her body language or manage any part of your behavior really starts to suck up some of your CPU power, so you're paying less attention what's going on, you’re paying less attention to your ability to influence the other person and you’re just kind of — You’re running on fumes at that point when it comes to your ability to influence, because you're managing herself so hard. 

[0:41:13.8] MB: You also talked about having your friends go through the needs map and figure out what your needs are. Why would you recommend doing that as supposed to doing it herself? 

[0:41:22.3] CH: I think like the old quote, “A fish under water and a man unto himself,” where I think we’re blind to a lot of our own idiosyncrasies, I’ll call them. I think our friends especially we’ll be able to pick them out faster than we can ourselves. I know my friends absolutely good. 

[0:41:42.9] MB: That’s a great quote, and I think it's such a true statement that often times it's so hard to see our own predicaments with the same objectivity that we have when we look at a friend coming to us for advice even if it's kind of the exact same scenario. 

[0:41:58.6] CH: Absolutely. 

[0:41:59.8] MB: Let's dig in to you. You touched on the behavior table of elements, and we talked about that before the interview began, but we haven't really dug in to it in this conservation. I found that to be one of the most fascinating concepts and pieces of the book. You go through everything from having your hands in your pockets, to whether your legs are crossed, the tilt of your head, your lip retractions, so many different elements. How do those all factored together, and what is that behavior table of elements and how do you use it in the work that you do? 

[0:42:31.1] CH: I originally designed this thing. I’ll give you one to put in the show notes. This thing looks like the periodic table, and we designed it to be a reference guide so people watching a video of an interrogation would be able to break down the lies that we’re told, the insecurities every time a person reached like a critical point where we knew they had more information. This thing kind of makes it into a universal or semi-universal grading system to where on the top of the behavior table you have the top of the head, on the very bottom you have the feet, and there's two rows that are disconnected that take place outside of the human body. 

Every little cell where you would see like tungsten or copper or nickel or something like that, every one of these cells is a different human behavior and they all have different deception ratings on them, and this is not that anyone gesture means deception, but a group of behaviors can mean deception. From the left to the right side of the table, it goes from least deceptive, or let's call it least stressful to the right side, which is the highest stress. 

[0:43:54.0] MB: There's a ton of stuff on the behavioral table developments. I’m looking at a copy of it right now. How did you come up with all the different pieces on here and how do you practically implement it when you're using it yourself? 

[0:44:08.0] CH: The bibliography for this thing alone was astounding. I went through a lot of research to make sure this was culturally relevant. Some of these I wanted to see like the no gesture is less common in Belgium when we shake our head no. 

All of the cultural implications had to be included in there, because I’d know where an interrogation was going to be taking place. The way that we put this together — I laid all of these stuff out in my living floor on little notecards and that was probably three years of going through these notecards and building the research. Every night I’d just pile them up and put a rubber band around them and the following morning I’d lay them all back out again and continue with the research. It was a long process. 

[0:45:03.5] MB: Using a tool like the behavior table of elements, for somebody that’s listening, how could they take this which is a very information-dense document and apply it or use it in their day-to-day lives? 

[0:45:17.2] CH: We found out a lot of people are doing that and it was never in my head that this would be a body language training tool, and it’s become one. With the evolution of the table, it started to become a training element for a lot of law enforcement teams and a lot of interrogation teams around the country. Basically, just reading through the behavior table and then reading through the book about every single gesture and then using that to either conduct post-analysis, so you go through your day, you take a bunch of notes on what you see your coworker is doing and then you want to go home and look up what it was, or you watch something on YouTube or you watch somebody who's like a suspected murderer get interviewed on a news television show and you go back through that video and start looking at the behavior table to figure out whether or not there was deception involved in the interview. 

Eventually your ability to see the table and see behavior at the same time starts to become a kind of like speaking a language, and this thing is just ultimately designed to be a quick reference for behavior now. It's got everything you could pretty much see another person do and you can locate it on here without knowing the meaning of what it is. You can tell whether it's deceptive, whether it's not deceptive or whether it's associated with being happy or sad or all kinds of other emotions. 

[0:46:49.6] MB: Is it possible to using a tool like this determine if somebody's lying? 

[0:46:54.6] CH: There is nothing that’s a hundred percent, and a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is actually biased against people that are telling the truth. This gives you a fairly good estimation from what I've seen so far that it is accurate especially in interview situations and where there is a genuine conversation between two people. If it's one person talking to a group, it's probably 10 times harder to detect deception anyway. This really gives you the edge as far as profiling tools and lie detection tools go. This is probably your best bet. 

[0:47:39.1] MB: I think I remember you talking about a possible strategy for using something like this behavioral table of elements to hone your own ability to detect stress and potentially deceptive body language would be to watch interviews on YouTube and kind of seeing when guests react a certain way and jot it down, kind of go back and look through your notes and determine what you think they may or may not have been lying about. 

[0:48:06.5] CH: Absolutely. I was talking to Jordan Harbinger and I told him one of the videos that we really like to use in our training scenarios is videos of Conan O'Brien interviewing walk-on celebrities, and Conan has this incredible ability to just produce that just high anxiety, socially awkward situations on to people and the body language of on the right side of the behavior table, the more stressed-out body language starts to really ramp up with those interviews and it's really apparent. If you're just looking to spot stress and deception, Conan O'Brien is a fantastic place to start. 

[0:48:51.5] MB: Zooming out a little bit, and we talked about this earlier. I know what a long journey it can be really master a lot of these ideas and tools and truly understand the complexity of human behavior and try to decipher body language and understand what it means. For somebody who wants to just start out and kind of slowly begin internalizing a lot of these mental models, how would you recommend beginning the journey of studying human behavior and starting to build this knowledge? 

[0:49:25.7] CH: For that I would say grab a body language book. It doesn't have to be the Ellipsis Manual. I would recommend it just because you can flip to a number really quick that’s on the behavior table, but in the beginning you should spend several weeks, especially somebody that's beginning, if you have the time, you should take the time to just to observe behavior on its own without trying to interpret it, without trying to make meaning out of it. It’s like this person is crossing their arms. It doesn't mean you automatically assume they’re being defensive. It doesn't mean you think about the temperature in the room, whether or not the person is cold. Just notice that they do it. Just start to become mindful of the behavior, and then once you're mindful of the behavior, you watching behavior starts to become an unconscious process. Then work on the next conscious chunk. Then you’re going to start interpreting some of that. Then once you start interpreting most of behavior, it kind of becomes an unconscious thing. Ten grab the next piece. Then start with lie detection. 

I would say only focus on one jam. Use your conscious mind over and over again to jam a habit into your subconscious. Then once it's in there, boom, start on the next thing, which would be lie detection, behavioral profiling, deception or the influence stuff that we talked about in the Ellipsis Manual. 

[0:50:47.5] MB: I think you touched on this earlier, but one of the concepts that I was really curious about is the idea of embedded commands. Tell me a little bit more about that. 

[0:50:55.3] CH: On embedded command is something that was — I don’t want to say invented, but it was kind of made popular or conceptualized by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Those guys are the founders of NLP, and embedded commands are a hidden command that's kind of couched inside of a sentence and it's designed to make a person start to take action or to have a thought without it being inside of their conscious awareness. 

I wouldn't say like if you mixed up like a confusion statement. Are you familiar with those? 

[0:51:34.1] MB: No, I’m not. 

[0:51:34.9] CH: One of the things that — Like to go to weapon that I teach for days at a time is how to use confusion and conversation. When you confuse a person, you can also throw an embedded command immediately after that and that goes directly to the subconscious part of the brain processing center. 

The theory with confusion is that a person that's drowning will grab onto the nearest solid object that touches their hand. Does that make sense? 

[0:52:06.0] MB: Definitely. 

[0:52:07.2] CH: With confusion, your brain is trying to make sense of what's going on. It’s trying to process a statement that is kind of confusing, and it will accept the first thing that it hears. I would say you can use embedded commands at any time, but they are 10 times more effective when you mix them in with confusion. 

An example, a confusion statement would be what is the difference between not thinking and realizing what you aren’t thinking about? 

[0:52:37.5] MB: That’s definitely confusing. 

[0:52:39.2] CH: Okay. On the end of that, so let's throw a small leading statement followed by an embedded command. This is an extremely powerful phrase right here if anybody wants to write it down. Are you ready, Matt? 

[0:52:53.3] MB: I’m ready. 

[0:52:54.5] CH: Alright. What's the difference between not thinking and realizing what you aren’t thinking about? Everyone knows the real difference is in choosing to let go and allow the world to spin or just surrendering and becoming in control of yourself. There were a couple of embedded commands in there and a lot of people say you're supposed to say the volume louder or supposed to space them out a little bit. It doesn't matter. 

[0:53:17.6] MB: I kind of felt when you said that like the first phrase obviously is very confusing, and then after that I was like, “Yeah, that didn’t make a lot of sense, but I'm going to go with this let go thing, because that makes sense and that’s like the next thing that he said.” 

[0:53:31.3] CH: Yeah. That would be a phrase that you would throw out there for somebody who was into yoga or something like that. If some into golf, I would throw a little golf metaphor with the exact same let go phrase. The only time you ever suck at golf is when you don't really let go. Does that make sense? 

[0:53:50.8] MB: Yeah. It definitely makes sense. 

[0:53:52.4] CH: Okay. That’s an example of an embedded command for anybody that’s not familiar with it. 

[0:53:58.5] MB: What would you use an embedded command for? 

[0:54:01.0] CH: You can use them for anything. An example for just the beginning of a conversation, if you said it's just really hard to focus right now. Focus right now is an embedded command, and you can maybe say it louder. That starts to get the subconscious mind in the direction that you’re trying to push it at the end of your outcome or whatever goal you're trying to achieve.

[0:54:25.9] MB: Got it. I think that makes sense. For someone who wants to drill down or maybe integrate some of these confusion statements into their strategies of influence, is there a resource or a way that they can kind of come up with or create more of them? 

[0:54:44.2] CH: Oh, man! There is a formula to do it inside the Ellipsis Manual, and I think there's like 20 or 30 examples there. 

[0:54:51.5] MB: Awesome. We’ll make sure to have obviously all the resources you talked about, the needs map, the behavior table of elements, everything in the show notes and links of the book as well. For listeners who’ve been listening to our conversation, want to start somewhere simply and easily, what would kind of one piece of homework that you would give to them be to just begin down this journey? 

[0:55:13.8] CH: For the next week, ask yourself the question internally, not externally, whenever you see another person, ask yourself the question; what does this person like to be complimented on and what makes them feel significant? Those two questions will start to get you to see the inner part of people. I want you to ask those questions to even the people that are annoying, some guy that cuts you off in traffic or the guy wearing the giant tap out fight shirt standing line in front of you in Starbucks. Start asking those questions and you’ll start seeing people differently. That will change you a lot if you do it for a week. 

[0:55:52.1] MB: Chase, this has been a fascinating conversation. So many different avenues and strategies and lots and lots of things to dig into the show notes, but thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your wisdom. 

[0:56:03.4] CH: You bet, Matt. I had a good time. 

[0:56:05.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, say hi, share your story, shoot me an interesting article, tell me about your life, whatever you want to do, shoot me an email. I get them all the time. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listeners that reaches out to me. 

I’ll give you three reasons right now why you should sign up and join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an amazing free guide that we created based on your feedback and listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything and it lets you keep track of all the information you get from reading books, article, podcasts, etc., and it's an awesome system. It’s a system I personally use to organize my entire life. You’d get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, where we tell you articles, stories, ideas, things that are fascinating us right now in the world of evidence-based growth. Lastly, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, become part of the Science of Success, voting on guests, questions, changing our into music and must more. The new into we recently rolled out was from listener feedback like yours. So sign up on the email list, just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right in the homepage, or if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referrals to a friend, either live or online. It really means a tremendous amount, and the way the show has grown is through word-of-mouth referrals from people like you. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. It really matters. Every single review impacts the iTunes algorithm. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the information that we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts books, etc., be sure to check out the show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com just by hitting the show notes button at the top of the page. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.