Government Brainwashing Expert On How To Spot Lies & Influence Anyone - Chase Hughes

The fastest way to read a human being is to keep one question in your head: it is. Today, I’m talking to Chase Hughes, a US Government brainwashing and interrogation expert who spent 20 years in the military, trained intelligence agencies, later on became a neuroscientist, and is regarded as the number one human behavior expert in the world. There’s a formula that I used to teach for actual brainwashing, and it works the same to brainwash ourselves out of a behavior. In this episode, we dive into how to read anyone and cover their true motivations, how to spot a lie and get them to reveal the truth, how your personality shows up in the shape of your face, a miracle compound that he takes to heal his brain, and how to brainwash yourself before the world does it for you. So put on your seat belts; let’s get into it.

Being on the behavior panel, you’ve looked at countless cases where you analyze human beings, whether they’re lying or not, whether they’ve abducted or killed their own children. Yeah, what’s the most fascinating or chilling case that you remember that you analyzed?

Aaron Cathy, and that was the true embodiment of what a psychopath is. And she had her parents murdered and her little brother, who was a child, and her boy; she convinced her boyfriend to do all this, and the boyfriend was not a psychopath. No, he—I think he was just super suggestible, and she knew how to pull—he was just really, really into her. Yeah, and Dr. Phil interviewed her, and you could see those eyes and like, just—I never—I’ve studied psychopathy for a long time, but I never felt it until that video where you could just feel that that—that’s not a human being; almost like there’s no human in there; that’s—that’s a wild creature that has no—that views a human being the same as throwing away a paper cup.

So you just see through the behavior of human beings, little signs in their behavior, in their facial expressions, in their tone, the words they use, whether someone is a psychopath or whether someone’s lying, whether someone’s concealing information. What—what did you see in her that gave that away? And—and I mean, how could—what are the—what could we look for?

The horrifying truth is that you can’t—can’t spot a psychopath until after they’ve done something like that. So you could have the 50 best behavior profilers in the world, the top 50, and 99% we would be inaccurate in predicting who is a psychopath and who’s not. They’re so hard to spot. I teach a course for women on how to spot narcissists on a first date, and that’s a lot easier, where if you ask him about an ex-relationship, everything is someone else’s fault; they’re always the victim. Narcissists will never have friends that are local; they’ll never have local people that are their friends; they’re always out of town. I’ve got my friends are in another city, uh, so they—they have a hard time maintaining relationships, so you’ll see a lot of that, and that’s like the number one trend you’ll see. Very similar things with psychopaths, and psychopaths are attracted to large cities, uh, in—in my analysis, uh, Dr. Robert Hare has done most of the research on psychopaths. In my analysis, I think that cities are not just attracting psychopaths; I think that cities are helping to manufacture them. In the book I have coming out, I have a chapter in there called “Psychopath Factories,” where I talk about the elements of a city and how it manufactures psychopathy. There wasn’t psychopathy before, or at least not to the ex—same extent, and it breeds that; it increases that; I think it does.

Let’s talk about one thing that’ll—that’ll make sense right away. You’ve heard of the bystander effect, right? So for your listeners, what this means is if I’m in a big city like New York or something like that, and I get hurt and I’m laid on the ground and I’m wounded and I’m begging for help, the more people that are around me, the less likely I am to get help; like people will take pictures, they’ll take videos, they all assume that somebody else is going to call 911, but they’ll stand there and watch. So if I took this behavior in isolation and I told you a story about a person watching another person get stabbed and they stand there and watch, they watch an interest, you would call that person a psychopath. When you get into a large city, that behavior is common; that is the bystander effect is the behavior of psychopaths. So these—us—not relying on reputation, and we’re not in a tribe anymore; our brains are not wired to handle millions of people; they’re wired to handle a tribe of about 150. So when we get to a big city, we have no capacity for empathy for that many people, so it gets shut off; our brains say, “I can’t do that,” and empathy goes away. That’s why we’re—we’re in LA right now; um, we’re driving around; we just got off the freeway; we shared a car here together; people are bad drivers because there’s no reputation; you’re never going to see those people again; I don’t have to rely on reputation; that means I don’t care what other people think; so more psychopathy; it’s—it’s—I think psychopathy is a spectrum, and some people view it as a diagnosis of you have to fit this checklist of all these things to be a psychopath; you can get close, right? Which means that there’s a line; there’s some kind of a spectrum there. So what is it that you saw in that case that made it—that specifically the most frightening, chilling, fascinating case for you?

The way that she recounted it was the same way that if I described picking up broccoli at—at a grocery store is how she described all of that and the horror that happened. She burned the house down, uh, afterwards, or her boyfriend did, but she, uh, made sure to rescue her dog, and she was holding this dog while her boyfriend did all this, and you could see zero emotion on her face, and you could see these little defense mechanisms; she’s a teen, I think, at the time, uh, these little defense mechanisms that she’d built throughout her life of looking innocent at Dr. Phil with these little innocent eyes, eyes, and knowing that her looking like an innocent little girl was a learned, deceptive, calculated behavior is—is horrifying to me. Wow.

So psychopaths, you can’t spot them because they’re so good at imitating certain behaviors; they’re very good at it. Wow. But one of the—one of the best ways to start, and I’m never going to say like, “Here’s the list on how to do that,” because if anyone tells you they’re like, “Here’s the way to spot a psychopath,” they’re full of it, um, but you can start spotting a psychopath by looking at a person’s face and seeing if they mirror your expressions. If I’m saying something exciting and that’s cool, see how your eyebrows just went up, right? Yeah, that’s called an eyebrow flash reflex. I’m not a psychopath, that’s a—well, as far as you know. So if—if I’m saying something sad, like my aunt just got foot in the hospital or something like that, and you see somebody’s face kind of fall a little bit, you’re seeing a mirrored emotion; other people’s face, sometimes psychopaths don’t know how to react, so you’ll either see a lack of affect where their—their face has no reaction to it, or you’re going to see an inappropriate response, so they’ll smile on accident because they’re trying to fake an expression. If I want to tell you—let me put you in the mind of a psychopath really quick, and this is a story from Dr. Hare, so I want you to imagine you live in a big city, and you go down and you say, “You know, I’m going to go get some fried chicken,” and I walk down and it’s two blocks away, and you’re walking to the fried chicken place, and you’re walking by a car accident and a mom is bleeding out of her head; she’s holding her infant that’s dying in her arms; it would—it would make anybody cry; you know, like it—it’s horrifying; just me even talking about the simulated situation has been making me emotional, but you walk by the situation and you stare at it for about a minute or two minutes; you look at the people around, and in your head you’re going, “Fried chicken; that’s it.” Then you go pick up your fried chicken; you go home and you stare at your face in the mirror going like this, trying to mimic all the facial expressions that you just saw from the crowd that was observing this accident. That’s—is so freaky. Yeah, that is a movie scene you just described. If anyone—if there’s any director out there who want to make a video about a movie about a psychopath, this is the scene that you start with; that’s what you need. Yeah, wow.

So I’m not really afraid of psychopaths in my life; I’ve never encountered one. Oh yeah, you have. I probably have—what’s the percentage? I’m not sure what the percentage is, but—but we’ve all encountered some; met—I’ve never been affected by them to the point where I feel like, “Oh, I need to learn about it,” right? However, like anyone listening, I have intimate relationships, business partnerships, people I do business with, people I get close to, family members, right? What are some of the things that we can do to spot certain patterns in them that we should be aware of, or like, how can we get a quick read on someone? Not—not for psychopathy, right? For anything, to realize whether they’re trustworthy, whether they’re telling the truth, whether they—they’re authentic.

The fastest way to read a human being, number one way, is to keep one question in your head: what does this person want me to feel about them, and what do they want me to notice? Number one: so what do they want me to notice about them? And that’s going to show you the beginnings of understanding the mask that people wear, because everyone wears some kind of a mask, and I’m not talking about a COVID mask, but I’m talking about like a persona that I put on to the world. And the way that I teach this to military and government is the mask is made up of the things that this person built to conceal shame; to conceal—and shame is what we put on when we feel like we’re not enough. Yeah, shame is—“I shouldn’t have done that; I’m a bad person for doing that; I need to hide it”—and not agreeing with something in our past or something that we’re ashamed of, and shame today is institutionalized; it’s—it’s a public weapon; to use shame, you could just log into Twitter, and you’ll see it in 30 seconds; you’ll see how shame is being weaponized. So shame creates cognitive dissonance, which is a mental discomfort; mental discomfort says, “I don’t want to be this uncomfortable in front of people,” that creates a mask, so we wear these personas and these masks to cover up something. So if you see somebody—90%—99% of us have a mask, and this is the population of Earth; how thin it is, how thick it is; that’s what changes and what the mask is made of. So if I’m seeing somebody who’s acting like he’s posturing all the time, he’s yelling, he’s, uh, like just puffing his chest out, the mask is usually the opposite of what it’s concealing. So I’m seeing a fearful little boy that’s afraid of being hurt; a Chihuahua. Yeah, I’m seeing a Chihuahua that’s barking, and if I bark enough, no one’s going to hurt me, and that’s what I’m really seeing there; that’s what a mask is. And then I guess another factor is how open or vulnerable are—are they with just revealing that they do wear a mask? Because I think some people, they’re just like, “Yeah, I do wear a mask,” yeah, and this is my mask, yeah. And if—if somebody’s willing to talk about it and—and be open about it. And the second thing that I’m looking for is somebody’s level of self-control; every time. So what does their mask look like? What do—what do they want me to believe? So when I was, uh, raising my kids, they were seven, eight, and nine years old; we’d pull up to a stoplight, and there’d be a car in front of us covered in bumper stickers; I would tell my son or my daughter, “What do you think those bumper stickers are trying to say if they had a voice?” And it would be like, “I did Yosemite,” and there’s a marathon thing, and like, “I go fishing,” and like all kinds of crazy stuff, and my daughter, uh, her name’s Charlotte, she would go, “Well, I’m adventurous.” I said, “All right, keep going; keep going. What—what does that mean to other people, though? Uh, it means that you can trust me.” Okay. “What else? It means I’m fun.” Okay. “What else? It means I’m, uh, I—I’m a good friend.” What else? “I need friends.” What does that mean? “I’m lonely.” And like, the—you see so much going on, and that’s just one data point, and I’m not saying that that’s what that means every time, mhm, but if you start going down this rabbit hole of understanding human behavior, the better you get at understanding humans, the more that you’re going to see loneliness, shame, and suffering; it’s every human being. So the way that I, uh, deal with loneliness, conceal shame, and kind of anesthetize myself from suffering or equal human behavior.

What are some other common masks that you see? You have the puffing out the chest; you have the, “Oh, look, I’m so fun; yeah, I’m friendly and fun; be my friend; I don’t want to be alone.” What else is there?

There’s a lot, uh, and there’s the—let’s call it a porcupine. So the porcupine is anybody that gets close, uh, needs to be reminded that this—this is too close; I don’t want anybody in my intimate space, so my—my mask is, “I need to keep people away,” and it’s different than the Chihuahua because I’ll let people get close; I’m not barking all the time; they only get hurt when they get close to me. Mhm. So that’s another great mask, and I—I think there’s different ways that we wear our masks, and another mask is the—let’s call it a baby or a puppy; like I—I deal with conflict by rolling over and looking innocent; I’m—I’m kind of using innocence as a way to do things. And if you want to understand human behavior, I’ll give you the most—this is the most perfect formula that you will ever get, as far as I’m concerned. So this is my opinion; here’s the most perfect formula for human behavior that I think will ever explain a human being: I want to find out how this person reacts to conflict, and how they make friends, and how they socialize, because every human being is a product of how—when they were eight or nine years old—how they earned friends, gained rewards, and kept themselves safe. So what did I do at eight or nine years old to be safe? All of those three—well, we have a tri—we have something called a childhood development triangle; maybe you could throw it up on the screen, but what did I do to earn friends, earn rewards, and sometimes rewards are recognition; if you grew up in a really bad environment, sometimes the reward was water or food, uh, for a kid, and then the third is what did I do to feel safe? And those little behaviors that we memorize at eight or nine years old, without us ever knowing, we carry that into adulthood. So I’m seeing childhood behaviors in every adult; I’m seeing how they deal with conflict; that’s what worked at eight or nine—and I just say eight or nine is a random number—but in the—in those formative developmental years. So there’s—who do they want me to think—what—what do they want me to think about them? Uhuh. And then what was the second thing again? Want me to notice; what do they want me to notice? Level of self-control; level of self-control. What does that mean? So I will look at somebody and—and measure their level of discipline, and you need no training for this. So if you and I were seated at—in the middle of an airport together, and I said, “Show me somebody who has a lot of discipline in their life,” you could see a high degree of self-control; you’d be able to spot somebody; anybody listening right now, uh, will be able to spot somebody with discipline, and that’s one of the first things I look at; somebody’s degree of self-control, and I know that instantly, even if they’re a stranger; they’ll be more predictable in a good way; like they’re more likely to be trustworthy because they already discipline themselves; they have self-control. So if I know that I’m—I’m getting into a business relationship or someone—something with somebody that has self-control problems, um, and you may see this, uh, some people might think that that’s somebody being overweight, and they might have some self-control issues, um, then I’m just a little more cautious; it’s not that I’m not going to do it; it’s just I know to be a little cautious about any indicators of low self-control. So if you’re looking for a business partner, somebody who’s fit, looks healthy, takes care of themselves, I mean, it seems obvious, right? Yeah, but I think it’s easy to overlook that. I guess it’s the same thing with an intimate partner, right? Yeah. And one of the fastest ways to estimate this for—for ourselves is one of the ways that I ask my clients on a survey; one of the questions on my client surveys is, “What would a stranger rate my diet on a 1 to 10 scale, just by looking at me from 10 yards away? How would a stranger rate what I eat every day? Is it good or bad?” And that’s a pretty good way to—to start that off, and just thinking about it in my own life or your own life is, “What kind of self-control am I projecting to the world?” Mhm.

What’s your read on—on my mask?

Uh, your mask is, “I need to be harmless,” and so you have more of a puppy mask, and that’s how you dealt with conflict at the age of eight or nine is, “I’m going to be more and more innocent, and I’m going to use innocence to solve this problem; I’m going to stay out of conflict if I can; kind of just be nice and kind; let’s just everybody become friends with each other really quick, as fast as possible.” Mhm.

Yes, I think that’s very accurate. One of the things we talked about yesterday as well: MH, how do I get out of that? Because I have a side of me that’s—when that comes out, you do not want to get in my way, right? Yeah, and I’m afraid of that, MH, but it—it—it comes out in moments where it’s necessary, but my first go-to is kind—

How would you approach something like that? Somebody notices their mask, whatever it might be.

I—you need to get in touch with whatever the opposite of that mask is. So for yours, it would be becoming harmful, and I am not a violent person, would you agree? Like I’m—I’m a pretty chill dude, MH, uh, but I am better at violence than probably most people that you know, so I’m excellent at violence; that does not make me, uh, harmless; it makes me do no harm. So I—I think that once you get familiar and intimately familiar with whatever the opposite of the mask that we wear is, we get to a point where we no longer need the mask to cover things up. It’s so fascinating because as you’re talking about this, I feel like with certain people, I am humble, gentle, yeah, whereas I think there’s a bunch of people, and I told you this before in the previous episode, there’s a lot of people who found me intimidating, and when I’m around them, they’re just—you can just sense that, and I’m finding myself being gentle on purpose to make them comfortable. Yeah, so I guess we can have multiple masks depending on who we’re interacting with, right?

Yeah, yeah. But I think that that’s the same mask, though. Okay? I need to—I need to become softer so that they can get softer; I soften to solve problems, and that’s kind of what that is; like I’m—I’m going to get softer, and for somebody that wears that mask on a regular basis, they’re going to say, “Well, yeah, that’s how we solve problems; like I’m not going to be a dick,” because they see me not wearing this mask means it’s—I’m the opposite of this; not a spectrum; they view like if I don’t do this, it’s the opposite; I have to be a dick. Does that make sense? Yeah. But there’s a way to deal with conflict in a very direct way and very confident, uh, dealing with it, and—and it’s not a dick, you know what I mean? So it sounds like if you’re a Chihuahua who’s barking a lot and he’s puffing your chest, yeah, you’re actually a—

Yeah, I was—I was until 24, I was a—

Okay. And if you’re a puppy who’s like, “Oh, look how nice I am,” then you’re actually a dick, just—

Okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that—I think that, uh, I—I have that side of me where I’m like very impatient; I can be very impatient with people, and I hit the brakes; I’m like, “It’s fine; kindness,” you know, but I have that like—so, and I guess embracing that, making peace with that dick side—

Yeah, and that was—I mean, Carl Jung spent his whole life talking about this and like getting familiar with our shadow, and I think if we do that and we know ourselves—I think that’s the biggest problem for most people is that we don’t fully know ourselves, and I think I was like 26 before I realized who the hell I was, and it took maybe another 10 years before I started really getting it. My wife knew herself in like middle school, mhm, like 10 times more—more mature than I am, uh, and I think that’s a—the biggest problem for most people is that they don’t know who they really are, because—and that means that someone else will—will be able to tell you, and other people will be able to influence that. If I’m not absolutely certain of what I am, then somebody else can tell me what I am. So if like you’re certain that you drive a—a Chevy truck, and you come over and say, “Oh, that’s—that’s a Honda Accord,” that’s—that’s hilarious to me because I know it. And we know other things in our life better than we know who we truly are as—as a human being, and I mean, like the faults, the insecurities; can I be okay with just knowing that about myself, and then just live? And maybe that’s just getting out of the simulating, uh, life and just living a real one. Yeah, and I guess people can actually see behind our masks very clearly; some—

Yeah, I guess so, because I feel like even when I’m playing nice, people can still feel the undercurrent of, “He’s doing this because he’s actually impatient,” yeah, and he’s like, “Come on, let’s go,” yeah, and he’s actually intense. Yeah, and so I’m like, “Why do people think I’m intense? I’m trying so hard to—” But you know—and the same thing is with—with a—with a guy who’s beating his chest, and everyone’s like, “Deep down, that guy’s really insecure,” like we all know it; everybody knows it, right? And so I want to make this relevant for everyone listening instead of just making it about my—everything’s got to be about you; that’s what you’re doing right now; I love it.

That’s true; that’s part of my mask again, right? It’s like, “Oh, let’s put the focus on other people as well.” That’s what I notice in conversations as well; like if somebody asks me a question to talk about myself, I take it like this and then bring it right back to them.

You did that to me last night.

Yes, like two or three times.

Yeah, yeah. I do that all the time; it’s—I think—yeah, I think it’s a—it’s a protective—it’s a protective mechanism; like I don’t want you to look into me as much; I want to figure out your stuff, yeah, because then I’m in control. Yeah, um, and I’ve seen that so many times in this—this program that I did recently with—it’s like an emotional intelligence type of thing, and you work with a bunch of people, um—but so it sounds like for people listening, if they can figure out, okay, “What—what’s my mask? Is it the puppy? Is it the beating the chest? Is it the porcupine? Get away from me; don’t mess with me,” um, whichever other ones there are that I think people can figure it out—we could throw the chart on the screen if you—

Yeah, I’ll throw the chart on the—on the screen. I guess the—the way to get out of that is to go the opposite; embrace the opposite.

Which is, if you're a porcupine, for example. I know, I know friends of mine who are like, "I don't give a what anyone thinks," yeah. And I know deep down they actually really care, right? And they want other people to think—they want everyone to think—that they don't care. Yeah, what they think, which is like goes back to question number one: Is what do they want me to feel? Or what do they want me—how do they want me to interpret their behavior? The way they want me to interpret them is they don't need me. Yeah, they're independent and and powerful and strong and don't need a lot of people in their life. Yes. And those people I know deep down care the most, and it's the most beautiful part about themselves. Yeah, and they really care what other people think. And sometimes I have a specific friend of mine where that it shows up, and yeah, I think what what's behind that is trust issues. And it's—I actually really care about what people think. I want you to love me, yeah, but I'm trying so hard to be independent and so… right. I guess—guess it is about what is my masque? What's the opposite of that? What's the emotion that I don't want to—I don't want to feel or that I don't want to want other people to perceive about me? What would I be embarrassed if someone revealed at a party? What would embarrass me most? And that's what's under your mask. So, and that's the shame that's hiding, right? So if I was in the middle of a party and somebody threw something up on TV, that would be what—that would be what it is. And I'm—I don't want anybody to think that once you find your mask that it's some kind of exit door. There's no exit. Like we're programmed to do this. We're programmed to wear masks as human beings. MH. That's one of the four things you talked about in one of your books, the six-minute X-ray: four truths about human beings. And two of them were: We all wear a mask, and we all pretend to not wear one. Yeah, so it's so true. And the the fourth law is um, everyone is a product of childhood suffering and childhood reward. We're just children. Yeah. What did we need? To be loved, be safe, yeah, be liked. And I—I—I think up until I was probably 35, and this is embarrassing to say, but I was a pure unadulterated ego addict. Absolutely addicted to my ego, how I looked, to the point where I—I started deliberately destroying um the clothing that I thought was really cool looking and stuff, and I would wear stuff that was too baggy for a little while, and I did everything I could until I found my first psychedelic journey and like just unzipping and stepping out of that—that ego was like, "Whoa, none of this matters." All right, none of this matters. There goes the monetization of this video. Anyways, let's talk psychic. Okay, let's do [Music]. It—my bank account just went—what if we uh say this video is sponsored by uh exactly? Yeah, by Nature. Um, yeah, I definitely want to get into psychedelics um because it's—I mean, it's a huge part of I guess your journey, right? Uh, and what part? Um, and I'm fascinated by it. I want to put a pin in that and close the loop on the whole idea of what can we look for in other people when we engage in business, in intimate relationships, in anything like that? What are the key characteristics you look for? One of the things you mentioned was self-control. Mhm. That's a good sign. What is another sign that I can trust this human being? They have solid character. Like is it like—you talk, for example, you talk about suggestibility. You can tell whether someone's suggestible or not. Is that a good thing? Agreeableness is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Um, social skill, like can they handle conflict well? Do they know how to kind of deescalate conflict without a whole lot of problem? MH. The one big one that I look for, and if—if it's a business partner, is do they—are they interested in other people? Like do they actually ask questions, or—or do they view life as a transactional process? And if it's a transactional person, I don't want them anywhere near me. I don't even want them knowing my address. So I will—I will, if especially if it's business, I—I do not want anybody that's a transactional relationship person because they will view my clients as little ATMs, numbers. And I—on screen. Yeah, it's disgusting to me. And I invited my clients to my wedding, and they met my parents, and—and I was like, I'm challenging you. Like I talk about—do I live off camera the same way that I talk about online? This in my—because I think most gurus don't. I think the—like and I hate that word, but I think people who train in self-development and confidence—let's do this morning routine—I don't think they do that. And I think that's one of the biggest problems is that if you're out there saying you need—you need to wake up at 4:00 A.M., and you're not doing it, uh, that shows—so—we're not all body language experts, and—but the lower part of our brain is a body language expert. It's reading behavior all day, every single day, and it's very good at it. The problem is that the lower part of your brain cannot speak English. It has no language comprehension whatsoever, so it can't tell you what's going on. It speaks feelings though, so it gives that little feeling in your stomach like, "Something's not right. Something doesn't add up here." So one of the first things I teach to all the clients that are going through my like a VIP thing that I've got going on—it's called graduate school—is you are in the business of manufacturing gut feelings in other human beings. You're making gut feelings in other people all day, every day, on accident, and now it's time to learn how to do this on purpose. And you go into the bathroom and you try to imitate… Yeah, that's going to stick in your head for a while. Oh God, that's a chilling image. Horrifying. Yeah, yeah. Um, how do you know whether someone's transactional? What are the telltale signs? How do they respond uh after an evening out? Like do they send a text the next day and say, "Hey, thanks for that," or are you seeing just like data? Like or they only want to know data? Like, "What time are we meeting next? Or what time is this going to happen?" And you get into a conversation with them, and they—let's say you get into a one-hour talk with them on Zoom or something, and the—the entire talk is business, numbers, strategies, not—"Where you from? Do you have kids? You know, how is everybody—is everybody doing okay?" There—are they connecting with a human or are they connecting for some kind of bank transaction? MH. And it's pretty obvious to see pretty quickly if somebody's a real human or not a real human. Yeah. And I want only those kind of people in—in my company. Like if anyone talks to my sales people—my sales staff—nicest human beings in the world, and they care about people. They—they follow up with you for years afterwards asking about your kids. And this is not some SOP that I wrote. That's just the type of people that I hired. You know, because they're good human beings. Yeah. I could see a lot of people sending the follow-up text the next day now because they like, "Oh, I learned this somewhere—to not be transactional." Um, so that's for business partner. Yeah, what about a—a close friend or an intimate partner? What are some of the things that you—the traits that you would look for that give the Chase stamp of approval? At least—at least a good indicator. I—green flags. If I'm looking for a partner—I am married, by the way—but if I am looking for a partner, number one thing above everything else is the degree of artificiality that that person is comfortable with. So if I see someone and they're getting their dopamine from likes on Instagram, I will never compete with that. Even if we're in a relationship, that—that addiction is still going to be there. And they're living this kind of artificial life on Instagram. They're—and they make YouTube videos, and their personality is fake, their background is fake. They—they clean up just the little area of their house or like the video is going to be—m—and everything on Instagram is curated and perfect. I know that that person is extremely comfortable with artificiality. They're—they're living in a simulation, literally. Mhm. They're simulating it. I guess they just wear a thick mask. Yeah. And not just online, but probably shows up in real life as well, big time. Yeah. And how can you tell whether someone took their mask off? Is it just a feeling? Is it just—how do you know they wear a mask? Uh, when somebody is comfortable talking about like, "Oh man, I was really embarrassed by that," instead of—in it, or you know, "Wow, that was an uncomfortable silence. I—I felt a little anxiety when we had that"—just openly talking about things that most people would normally hide. You mentioned yesterday two questions you would ask someone. What were they? Number one: On a scale from 1 to 10, how authentic would you rate yourself? Yeah, to be—and the least authentic people are going to say nine or 10. Yes. What if they say three or four? Yeah, if they say—say three or four, and you say, "Well, why would you rate yourself a three or four?" And they're like, "Well, I mean, when I'm—when I'm really anxious in public, I'll put a suit jacket on and make myself feel more important, or I'll—I'll get really nervous if I'm on camera and—and somebody's filming me. I don't take pictures very well. Little self-conscious." That's an authentic person. MH. Because an authentic person never feels really authentic because they are open about all the ways that they are inauthentic, which means their comfort level with inauthenticity is low. Yes, they're aware of the mask and they're willing to talk about it. Yeah. And so anyone who says 10—"I—I don't wear a mask"—yeah, either they—they're so unself-aware that they actually believe they don't wear a mask, or they're the Dalai Lama. Or they're the Dalai Lama, or they know they're wearing a mask, but they're so inauthentic that they're not even willing to admit it. Yeah, right. Like there's a part of them that know—know like, "Oh, yeah." And they just—let me fast forward this video. Yes. Second question you asked someone—this was specifically for meeting women. Yeah, you remember the second question? Yeah, I want you to say it though because I'm—my—I'll never say anything on a podcast I wouldn't want my mom to hear. Okay, so Chase didn't say this—this is just what I suggested as a second question would—would be if you're meeting a—a woman as a man, you ask her—"Do you fought"—this is—and again, this is not the opening line. This is as a joke. Oh, that's why that didn't work in the middle of the conversation. Yeah, I'm sorry, instructions unclear. Yeah, so just that question alone, uh, if it's presented in a fun way, and you're a confident person, and you ask it kind of in a joking way, the response to that question is going to be so profoundly revealing of how authentic that person is and how fun they are. You'll—you'll get an instant measurement of like the fun level and the authenticity at the exact same time. Yeah. What would be a question for women to ask men uh that reveals authentic—that does the same thing? Yeah, it's like a funny question because obviously men are disgusting, and they—of course they've—well, women are more likely to dig right and ask about someone's family and things like that. MH. So for women, the number one question that a woman can ask a guy is, "What's the biggest thing you learned about yourself through—through like the last few relationships you had?" And you'll hear a lot of people say, "Well, I learned not to trust people because this girl was a—" or you know, "She—some girl cheated on me, and I learned that I should never do X, Y, and Z because of this." And it's always—even all the stuff they learned about themselves is somebody else's fault. MH. The second thing that they're going to do is—"What I learned about myself is that I am strong enough and I deserve more," and like then they'll start inflating themselves. So the authentic person will say, "Whoa, I had this relationship. I realized that I was not strong enough to do X, or I had insecurities around this." That question alone—"What is the biggest thing you learned about yourself?" If someone has a mask on, that's the perfect opportunity for me to show you how powerful my mask is. MH. It's also the perfect opportunity for an authentic person to—to really genuinely give you an answer. Yeah. Great. I love that. To stay on the topic of influence, reading people, yeah, what are some of the things you use day-to-day to get an outcome that you want—to get someone to reveal information? Like what are some of the things that people could use right away if they wanted to leave with something that they—yeah, just want to use right now? There's a tactic that uh all intelligence operatives learn, and it's called elicitation. I just burped really big. You can leave it in. Yes, I will. Um, elicitation was invented by this guy named John Nolan—or invented, discovered, uh, written about, whatever—uh, and his book uh, *Business Secrets*, and you can't find it anymore unless you get a used copy on eBay. But you use statements instead of questions to get the most powerful information from other people. When a person's being asked a question, it raises—is a—a little door in the brain that says, "I need to be careful about the answer." If you're responding to a statement, your brain does not have that little security guard that comes out. And so as a light example, let's just imagine you and me took an Uber to get here, and let's imagine you and me get—we're going to take an Uber back after this. We get into that Uber, and I say—"You—I just read online that Uber drivers were rated the number one job satisfaction of all the jobs in the country," and I just said a statement, right? And he's going to turn—turn around and go, "What? Where—where did you see this?" So that starts a conversation. And then he says, "No, it's really bad. You know, I do this—this, and they take the money and this and this, and then I do—disbelief…" This is another technique: disbelief. "No way! There's no way that company would treat you like that." He goes, "Oh yeah, you will never guess what happened just a couple weeks ago," and then he just kind of goes into this deep story that he would never tell another client. What—who does he tell these stories to? Friends. I've made his brain start behaving in friend mode, and I haven't even asked any questions yet. And then let's say he goes into a story, and then I say, "You know, my neighbor's daughter uh started driving for Uber, and she said she saw the wildest things happen in her back seat," and then you're going to hear a story again, and I have not asked any questions. And the way that I teach this is if you and I are standing at the grocery store and there's a—a young lady over there stalking fruits, and I said, "All right, Leon, you've got 60 seconds to go up to this person and find out how much they make for a living, and you're not allowed to ask any questions." It's—it's tough to think about that. So if—if I went over to her and I said, "Hey, I'm trying to find the baby carrots," or whatever, and she starts walking me over somewhere—haven't asked a question yet. That was a statement. And then I say, "I just read on LinkedIn that you guys got bumped up to $22 an hour. That's unbelievable. That's great. Congratulations to everybody here. That's amazing," and she goes, "What? We only make 17.50. Everybody does." I've got the—I've got that. And there was no willingness—there was no uh stress around this—is financial information. I can't talk about sex, can't talk about money because we're in America. So there—I avoided that social barrier because there was no question being asked. So the—a different way to do this is called quotes, facts, and figures, and you deliberately say, "I saw a YouTube video, read an article, did something that said X, Y, and Z," and it triggers a need in the human brain that's almost irresistible, and it's called the need to correct the record. "I need to set the record straight," H, which is what I was talking about in the Uber. That's fascinating. And the next way we do this is just making what's called a provocative statement. So let's say I asked you what you do for a living, and you say, "Well, I make YouTube videos, and uh, I'm now—I'm starting this new podcast thing, and it's been uh interesting. It's been a good career change," and I say, "Wow, YouTube—that has got to be challenging," yeah, and then you—and then it—it starts coming out. It's like people can't resist. And then let's say you said, "Well, yeah, it's challenging. We did this—this, and monetizing and YouTube language and whatever else." I said, "I cannot imagine what that is like. That's got to be really stressful. It's—it's got—probably keeps you up at night," and then just—yeah, I mean, when I'm editing videos—and then I'll just—let's say you just talked about editing a video, and I said, "Editing videos"—and then you would keep talking. I would probably push the question back on you. "What do you do?" Yeah, yeah. Well, you did. Yeah. What were—what were the instances where I did that? Actually, last night, do you remember the questions? Did—are you thinking we had this conversation? Oh, redirected it—redirected it back to you. I think we were talking about psychedelics, and you were—and I was asking you like about your journey, and you said—"What was your journey like? What was it like for you?" Why do you think I'd do that? I think uh, number one, you're a great listener. You like learning about people. Number two, uh, it makes sure in your brain that the other person becomes vulnerable first, okay, which I was—okay with. Yeah, interesting. The—the—the techniques you just shared about getting someone to reveal information they normally wouldn't. Yeah, I think the reason why the getting the record straight is so powerful because when you bring up a stat, a figure, something—I noticed that too in—in YouTube videos when I talk about something, there's always someone who's like, "No, that study is not real. That's—it's not right." I think it—it just giving someone the opportunity to prove a study or a statistic wrong with their own insider information is such a dunk opportunity. Like feels so good for those people. It's so irresistible. Yeah. Um, and then the provocative statement—how—what exactly is the—a—vative statement? It's—it's something that—like how do I make sure that—is that—it is a provocative statement? It's any statement that elicits a response from the other person is a provocative statement. So technically me doing quotes, facts, and figures, saying, "I saw this video," or whatever, is still a provocative statement. But most short, easy provocative statements start with the word "so"—like, "So you've been doing this for a year, and you're—you've probably become an expert by now," or "I bet so," or "I bet so—I bet that's got to be really challenging. I can't imagine that's good." So—or "I bet," okay. So we got a way to elicit information from people—y—that they normally wouldn't. What are some other things that you use on a day-to-day basis that people could use as well to see if they can trust someone—to test someone's honesty? Anything really, or even just to read someone. Yeah, I think uh, in everyday conversations, if you're—if you're looking at a person, the number one thing that you can look for is how often they're blinking. And this sounds really behavior nerdy, but our blink rate—how often our eyes blink—is the number one indicator of stress, and we are unaware. So like if you're watching this video right now, you've been watching us for 38 minutes, or however long it is, without being aware of how often you're blinking, and it's unconscious, which means that it's reliable because you're not paying attention to it. So stress makes our blink rate go way up. So our average blink rate every day in conversation is about 15 to 18 per minute, and in high-stress scenarios—like when I was taking like the math part of my SATs or taking an exam that I was unsure about—my blink rate was probably 80s or 90s. It's that high. And when you're watching a movie that you really love—it's—so when we have an increased level of focus—focus lowers blink rate—stress increases it. Focus can bring it down. Like if I'm watching a movie like *Interstellar*, uh, my blink rate was probably three. Not joking. Don't notice. Yeah, so your eyes stay open longer because we're focused on something. So if I'm in a conversation with a person, and the moment they start talking about finances or taxes or a—a criminal record or you know any kind of topic, and I see that blink rate start going up—you don't have to count—I mean, it's very obvious if someone's blinking—I start a conversation—are they blinking regular, fast, or slow? That's it. All I'm looking for from that point on is a change—a change in that person's blink rate. And what—what were they talking about when I saw those eyes start blinking faster? And were they talking about uh their ex? Were they talking about um something that they saw on TV that stressed them out? And I know this topic is stressful even though they're pretending like it's not. That is one of the most reliable indicators of stress in the moment. Can we talk about the conversation we witnessed yesterday? What happened yesterday with FaceTime? Yes, let's not say any names, but—Okay, we won't say any names. I was—I was going to do that too. Okay, so there's a friend of yours that we spent some time with yesterday. Yeah, and he called up a girl that he's been seeing. Yeah, and you told him, "Hey, do this, and then let's see what happens." Yeah, and he basically tried to figure out if this girl has been with someone the previous day because she went out with some friends, or if she was being deceptive. Yes. Yeah, she was concealing something. Yeah, and it was fascinating to witness because we were all sitting there—he's FaceTiming her, and you—like you pull up close to the screen and you're like, "She's hiding something. She's hiding something." Yeah, "She's not on the truth." Instantly. Instantly. And it was so incredible to witness and so exciting. I wish I would have filmed the whole thing, but of course there was, you know, privacy needed. Yeah. But what are the things that you saw in that girl, and what—what went down where you're like, "Okay, something's up here." So Leon's not saying the word "woman" because she is young enough to use the word uh "girl." Ah, yeah, yeah. I know some people find it offensive—"woman"—whatever. He asked her, "Did anything happen last night?" Over FaceTime. So my face is like this far from the iPad—off camera though—like I'm not in—in the scene. Imagine this—like you're just sitting right next to—hovering over the—the lens. Who's this guy? So he—he asked her this question, and right away there was an increase in blink rate. There was uh pupil dilation, and there was sclera exposure—the white of the eye got exposed above—up here—meaning the eyes widened. The eyes widened like this. It's probably a sign of danger—"Something bad is happening. I need to really pay attention right now and not say anything wrong." Yep. Be careful. The—the pupil dilation is the black of the eyes gets wider. Yes, the black part of the center of the eye widens. And you could tell that even through a FaceTime—on a FaceTime video. Yeah. Wow. Next, the lips drew horizontally backwards, and this is a fear response. You can see it in a—all of these facial expressions you can see in a three-month-old baby or a newborn. They're still there. Like if you have a newborn baby and like you let it think that the baby's falling—like you lower it really quickly—you'll see that movement. So the next movement is this little muscle jumps out in front of the carotid artery to protect your arteries. It's the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and we saw all of…

That so we saw increased blink rate, pupil dilation, scleral exposure, with the eyes widening, mouth going back towards the face, and the sternal cleidomastoid muscles and vocal hesitation. She paused more than every other question that he asked her, and we saw a lack of pronouns. A sudden lack of pronouns is a very good indicator, and I mean sudden; if the person never uses pronouns, then it's worthless.

MH: So what did she say? Do you remember?

So the first couple of questions, she says, "I did this, and then we went to do this, and then we went to a restaurant, and then I did this, and both of us did this." And then he said, "What happened last night? And or what happened after that?" And she goes, "Well, went home, watched a movie, went to bed," instead of, "We went," "I went." There's no "we," there's no "I." All the pronouns disappear, and that's a very reliable deception indicator. And all those indicators that I just talked about—that giant mountain—happened in less than 4 seconds. So we saw this interaction—mhm—him talking to her. He was, I think he was surprised. He was, "Oh no, okay."

Makes sense. And you were like, "She's concealing something."

Yeah, like 10—I saw 10 signs.

Yeah. And that happened in 4 seconds. That immediately—boom—there's a stress response. Yeah, because she's concealing information; her entire nervous system responds differently, and you see a cluster of behaviors. One of them could be something else, right? Like maybe the eyes are dry, whatever, but combined it creates more reliability. There's something being concealed because now I'm seeing a mountain. So the way to read human behavior is change first. Can you detect changes? Screw all the other books about body language. Are you can you get good at spotting changes in how a person acts? Next is clusters. So I'm spotting a change, right? Is it just one change, or is it a cluster? So now we get into clusters, then we get into context. Like she crossed her arms and never uncrossed her arms. Well, is it 50° in the room? So, so that's context, right? So there's context that changes it, and then you're still dealing in likelihood.

So then he hangs up the phone for just—he's like, "Oh, I got to talk to my mom"—hangs up the phone, and then I give him a two-minute, maybe a 75-second-long course in interrogation. I say, "You say this, this, this, and this," and he did that, and the truth came out. There was something being concealed for sure.

And you were there watching.

Yeah. So what—yeah—what would you do if you wanted someone to reveal information once you see they're concealing something? What is something that could be done to get behind it? Because it could mean anything. It could be, okay, she cheated; it could be that there's something else she's not wanting to reveal, which was the case. Which was the case—she did not cheat, um, but there was something that she concealed. And so how could—how could you—once you know somebody likely concealing—likely concealing—like it's one way to know, but it's another way to actually get the information out. Like, what is it?

Yeah. This is where elicitation—those techniques of using statements—is not enough. So at this point in an interrogation, uh, that what we call this a confrontation. So now it's time to actually have a confrontation, and it doesn't have to—you don't have to be an—but you need to say—say something that says you know something's not—something's not was off about that. And in the interrogation room, I might say something like, "Uh, Leon, I know you're a good person. I've been doing this a long time, and if there's one thing I know for sure, it's when I'm not getting the full story."

MH: And you can feel the stress, right? I can see the stress on your face just from doing this, and it's very kind, but it produces some stress.

I've been doing this a long time. Or if I'm just talking to a person I know, I'd say, "Leon, I like you as a person. I've known you a long time, and if there's one thing I know, it's when I'm not really getting the full story here." It doesn't accuse them. Yep. It creates a safe space. Safe space. And then we move into something called a monologue, and this is where we have four goals: socialize, rationalize, minimize, and project. Socialize—people are going to understand; minimize—not a big deal; rationalize—anybody would have done that; it makes perfect sense; and then project—it's not your fault. So this is just creating a bedrock foundation of whatever you're sharing with me. It's safe. Yeah, and there's—there's not going to be consequences. In *The Art of War*, Sun Tzu has a quote that I think is so perfect to describe this, and it's, "Build your opponent a golden bridge upon which they can retreat," and that's what that is. So socialize, minimize, rationalize, project. Those—in real language—let's say I'm really trying to get a confession out of a person. Let's say it's a person who, um, stole a bunch of money from a business or a bank. I was going to do like a predator type person, but I don't think the transcript of this video would probably get it blocked or something, or deplatformed, or whatever it's called.

Yeah. So let's do the money guy. So we want to socialize, right? The first—and I would say, "John, this makes sense, and I think once people understand the kind of person you are and the reason that you did this, I think everybody who understands this is going to fully agree and understand why you did this." Minimize: "And we're not talking about a million dollars. I deal with those people all the time. I talk to bad people every day of my life, and I know you're not one of those people. This is a small, tiny amount of money. It's not a big deal. What happened was not a big deal, and people get over this. People get through this. It's not—it's not huge."

I feel the golden bridge being built. I can slowly take my first few steps.

Yeah. What's the next step?

Rationalize. Rationalize: "And John, I know that your aunt has had piling up medical bills. She's been suffering. She's going through chemotherapy and all that stuff. Anybody in their right mind—this makes perfect sense why you could do this." And now we're moving into—to project: "And this company doesn't pay you; they don't pay any of their employees anything, and your—that your medical bills are piling up as well because you don't have good medical insurance. I think anybody in your situation, especially with the way this company treats you, and they don't check for any security; they don't—if they wanted to keep that money secure, they would have locked it up. They don't—anybody would have done this in your situation, and it makes perfect sense." So what I'd like to put in my report here is that you did this for good reasons. So what I want to know is, "Did you take that $10,000 to go spend on cocaine and heroin, or were you trying to help someone?"

Well, I didn't do it, right? Hopefully.

So here's the thing, right? If—if somebody's innocent, they would still be like, "Yeah, well, that's all good for that person, but I didn't do it."

Yeah. And so that's probably the first response that you get from someone who's innocent. It's like, "Well, you don't need to give me this monologue."

I—yeah. You get anger. Yeah. It's like innocent people get angry; guilty people try to build rapport. Yes, they—they—they take the first step on the golden bridge, and they're like, "Is this safe? Is this—is this—" Yeah. Let me make you into a friend. Uh, I need to make you a friend. And innocent people don't care how you view them. There's—they're saying, "This is insane. I do not belong here."

And there's a few questions before we get to that part of an interrogation. There's a couple of questions that we use to get a good read on whether or not I'm dealing with the right person. And the first one is called a, um, bait question, or—or you can call it a mind virus. Uh, so let's say you're O.J., all right? And you were O.J. Simpson. You were at—what you did—whatever—last night, and you come into the interrogation room, and I say, "Hey, O.J., I appreciate you coming in. Um, we've got officers out there canvasing the streets, and we've got tons of people doing lots of research. I just want—and I like you a lot as a—as a person—and I just want to say I—I want you to think carefully before you answer: Is there any reason that somebody would have said that they saw you at Nicole's last night?" If you were there, you're freaking out. And I didn't say I have a video; I didn't—I'm not lying in saying that I have any of this evidence, but I am saying, "Is there any reason that this would have happened? And or that you would know, because you may have inside information."

Right. Right. And I—I did this recently with a massage therapist who was accused of sexually touching people while giving them massages and doing weird stuff, and we lined him up to this, and I finally went in and said, "Is there any reason that a video would surface now—that may be a cell phone or something like that—that shows some of the stuff happening?" And it was instantly—you could see sweat. This is on the Dr. Phil show, live on TV.

Wow. And it—you could see sweat, and we—we didn't want to get to full confession mode there, so it was working. The next question to figure out whether I need to do the confrontation in golden bridge is—now let's put you back in the mindset of a perpetrator again, or somebody who did something—O.J.—O.J.—"And O.J., I'm curious, like what do you think should happen to the person that did this? What do you think should happen to the person that did this?" And that helps me to kind of differentiate innocent and guilty people, especially if a child was harmed. Uh, and you'll hear this a lot in people who hurt kids—I'll just say that—so that people know what I'm talking about. And I'll say, "What do you think should happen to the person that—that did this?" And they'll say, "Oh, uh, definitely an apology to the family. Definitely an apology to the family, but this—this person probably needs some kind of help or counseling, something like that. They need some kind of help, but they should definitely apologize. This is not—not okay, and they—they really need to—to see some therapy and fix themselves."

Who would say that? Who would say this in the world about a person who hurt children? Somebody who's guilty, right? And wants to minimize what they did and wants to get off the leash as much as possible.

Yeah. Wow, fascinating. And the reason why it's so powerful—the question of, "Is any reason to believe that I may have heard something"—it—it gives them the chance to at least be honest and be like, "Yes, I did it," or, "Yes, I'm—I wasn't fully honest with you," because if you find out later that they lied, it's much more severe than, "Okay, they admitted it." And those are the worst people to do interrogations on because you've got to say things like, "She was old enough to know what she was doing. Her mom didn't raise her right. I'm willing to bet this was her idea. She probably talked you into doing this." You projected on the victim.

Yeah. And you have to—yeah—kind of put yourself on that mindset. Just—it's—I'm getting nauseous thinking about it, but yeah, that's the way to get those people to confess. To get anybody to confess to anything, it's—it's a pretty similar formula for everything. And the powerful thing about the mind virus is it creates a lot of stress in them when you ask them, "Is there any reason that I would have a video or have heard something that—right—would prove this?" Yeah, it creates a ton of stress in them if they're guilty or they're concealing something, and zero stress for innocent people. If they're innocent, they're like, "Go ahead."

Yeah. Personally, I would probably be worried that there's some sort of AI-generated video or something, and I'm—that's actually one of my fears is being wrongfully accused of something.

Yeah. And then going to jail for that. I'll—would be—that's awful. So I guess it could still create stress, but not—it's a different kind—it's a different kind—different flavor.

Yeah. I just finished building an entire protocol for Chris Hansen, the guy who catches predators on TV.

Mhm.

Uh, so Chris and I—are—are friends now, and I built this like nine-page protocol of these perfect scripted one-liners that will make these guys start to confess on camera. So the upcoming episodes—I'm so excited about.

Wow. You can see—that's my line.

Yeah, he did nice. So those are things that people can use. One of the things you mentioned yesterday casually is you're talking with your friend about—"Oh, yeah, you like"—you randomly mentioned my name, and you said something like, "Oh, yeah, Leon's pretty open-minded. You can see it by his—his eyes. They're pretty low eyelids."

Lower eyelids.

And I was like, "What do you mean?" "Oh, you have lower eyelids," which is a sign that I'm less likely to make this facial expression where you—you pull your eyelids in—skepticism.

Skepticism.

And but both of us have the same lower eyelids. Let's both look into our individual cameras. We can maybe do a side-by-side here.

I'm giving you editing work of your own podcast. Great. Okay. So over time, our facial expressions etch onto the face, usually by the time we're like 16, 17. It's not like old people wrinkles. So like if someone's seeking social approval their whole life—this is how we seek approval from other people—

No, that's why I have the lines on my forehead. Yeah, because I'm seeing a social person. You see a psychopath—blank forehead, beautiful, wrinkle-free. Yes, it looks like Botox in a psychopath. You see a person that spent their whole life super happy and in full enjoyment, you're going to see these crow's feet here from smiling all the time on the side of the eyes. Yeah, you see somebody who's been depressed or angry, you're going to see this muscle right here forms these two wrinkles. This is called the glabella; it forms these two wrinkles. So you'll see lifetimes of behavioral patterns etched onto the face. I call this facial etching. And when somebody's depressed, you see it on the face. But skepticism makes us squeeze the lower eyelid up like this, and you can see this in anybody. I have no idea whether it's proven science or not. My science—I've done research on this for 30,000 hours in—in real life on facial expressions. But skepticism squeezes this lower eyelid up here. So somebody—the less skeptical someone has spent their lifetime—this is my theory—uh, grain of salt—MH—the more suggestible that person is. And—and I think people are happier.

Okay. Your theory is that people with lower eyelids are more suggestible, but the idea that people who are skeptical for most of their life have different low eyelids—that's—that's not your theory—that's widely accepted amongst people—or—

Well, the facial expression of skepticism is widely agreed upon. Okay, that—that expressions etch onto the face is agreed upon. So what are some of the signs that people can see in the people in their lives when they look at them? The lower eyelids is one thing; the crow's feet you mentioned—happiness; consistent seeking of social approval. I could see somebody 30 yards away and see if they're even 30 years old, 20 years old, those lines on the forehead and know that that person will be very easy to start a conversation with because all I've got to do is go, "Oh, hey, how are you?" And the eyebrow flash is repeated by humans 90% of the time without the other person knowing—just walking by a total stranger, saying, "Oh, hey, good morning," their eyebrows will instinctively go up, especially if they're a social person. Uh, then if—if we see anything in the center here—this glabella—is a person with anger, depression, because that's the facial expression of anger—squeezes those two muscles together. And if you ever see a horseshoe muscle like right here, uh, it's very hard to fake. I try to do it all the time, but if you just type in "grief muscle" into Google Images, you'll have something to slap on the screen right now. That's a grief muscle. What you're looking at right now—I'm intentionally going to do it a few seconds after you said "right now."

Perfect. I can't wait. Okay, so that's it. And you can determine suggestibility by the lower eyelid, and I've tested this with three hypnotists who have tested it out on over 15,000 hypnotic subjects, and it is a 100%—according to these three guys—a 100% correct. So those are the most easily hypnotized people in a crowd because they do like comedy hypnosis in a bar where they like bring people up on stage like, "Oh, you're smelling a fart, and it smells real bad," that kind of stuff. Um, so that they've told—come back and said that is the most accurate predictor of suggestibility I've ever seen—the smoothness of the lower eyelid. Yeah, so there is a—there's a young lady in here running our podcast behind a big screen—there—also smooth lower eyelids—suggestible. I'm—I'm very suggestible, so I'm not like vaccinated because I learned all this stuff where I—I can't get manipulated or anything. I'm—I'm just as susceptible as anybody else.

MH: But it is a great indicator, and I used it in my fictional book called *Phrase S*, which will be a—a TV series soon. Um, this bad guy uses the lower eyelids to determine who's going to be the easiest to make into a killer using hypnosis.

Wow. I bet that not only in the face can we tell what emotions people consistently feel, but also the posture, because it's part of the whole nervous system, right? If you have someone with—I mean, it's obvious—if you have someone who's hunched over—the protected—they're heart. If you have someone who tucks in their tailbone or something—I think all these are indicators, right? One—one of the biggest ways to see this is if you see constant behavior of limbs protecting arteries. So the upper bone of the arm—this is called the humerus—squeezes in toward the torso on a regular basis to protect the brachial artery. The person's shoulders are raised up a little bit to protect the carotid artery—a little bit more—these ones—yep—on the neck—yep. So if someone was like that, they would be really comfortable.

Yeah. And you think that's how primates will show each other that they—"I'm not—you're not a threat to me, and I'm challenging you." Humans do it too. When you do that, you say, "Oh, what's up?" I'm opening all these arteries at the same time. I'm—I'm not threatened at all. So that's when you see bar fights start to happen. It's like this artery exposure behavior, and you see it in baboons, uh, bonobo chimps, human beings—exactly the same.

Why are suggestible people happier? What do you think? Is it because they just have less masks and they're less on defense?

Yeah, I think they—they spend their life in—they're more present. Instead of being like screening every piece of information that's coming in, they're not vigilant; they're not on guard.

Yeah, yeah. I guess they're vulnerable and able to—yeah—able to just experience life's ups and downs.

Yeah. And I think the vulnerability is the pathway—the pathway to a better life, no matter what mask you wear. If you can force yourself to be more vulnerable, people like it. And there's some disgusting belief in our culture that if I'm on social media, I've got to pretend to be perfect; that's the only way I'm going to be liked is to pretend to be perfect. And we were doing this yesterday—the friend that we were talking about—my friend going through Instagram, and he's showing me—he's asking me to profile women for him and going through all these accounts. I'm like, "No, this woman is a complete simulation. This woman is absolutely fake. Everything—personality—everything is fake." And it's—if you ever watch the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial, that is the difference between someone who's open to being wounded—Johnny Depp—just open—open to everything. He's very vulnerable; openly talks about the drugs and all that stuff. And on the flip side, the person that takes a—on the bed—yeah—and pretends to be perfect at the same time—and flawless. You can't do both at the same time.

Take a—on someone's bed—allegedly.

Allegedly. Oh, that was not confirmed. Yeah, it was never fully confirmed, so we need to make sure you say that. Okay. Yeah. Wow, fascinating—vulnerability. Mhm. Maybe it could segue into psychedelics and also your journey with your brain disease. Yeah, so I forgot to mention this last time in the episode—you have a neuroscience degree from Harvard, as well.

Certification.

Certification. Yeah, why'd you get into that? What did you learn? What's your brain disease like? Just catch people up to speed to that.

I found out I had a brain disease after becoming a neuroscientist. So I had been having seizures for three years, and these are called temporal lobe seizures. So you're not like jiggling all on the ground and shaking around and stuff like a tonic-clonic seizure, but these are absence seizures where like I leave planet Earth—like drool comes out of my mouth—and in six—the seizures are about 60 seconds to 90 seconds, and inside of one of those seizures, it's like three years of memories—that—that brand new memories that don't exist—that my brain has to—now—is trying to file in with real life—three years—and that's one seizure. And at—at the peak of this, I had nine seizures a day—nine of those a day—to the point—point where I didn't know who my wife was. I looked her right in the eyes and—and thought, "If I just pretend like I know who she is long enough, we're going to be okay. Like it's going to come back to me." I thought my dog was fake. Like it—it broke me out of reality completely.

What do you mean it was fake? Like I thought that I—I thought that my dog was not my dog, and somebody like put a different dog that looks like my dog in my house.

Ah, the dog is an impostor. Yeah, it's the dog is a spy. Yeah, and there's so much déjà vu that happens with a temporal lobe seizure, uh, to where everything is like a memory. I'm like—I'm looking around—all these tripods—right? So my brain would start seeing every detail in the room—the reflection off of the tape on that Amazon box right there—every single detail is coming back from like hundreds of memories as if I'd remembered all of this, and it's so much déjà vu that your brain automatically goes, "The only way this is real is if someone's setting me up. Someone set this up," and right at that moment when you realize—like you're thinking like, "Somebody set this up"—bam—the seizure starts. Oh, and then you're just launched into this nightmare that's like three years long that lasts 60 seconds. It's the ultimate time warp, uh, and I'm losing about a million neurons a second during those seizures. That's what it feels like. That's a fact. So it—it was bad, and my hippocampus was kind of just eating itself. And this—my family—so here's the second part—the seizures come with amnesia—a side effect of amnesia. So I had been having seizures for three years; my family knows that I studied neuroscience; they know that I've—well versed in how the brain works. So they said, "Oh, if Chase is going through anything, he would know; he would go to a doctor," and I remembered nothing about the seizures—didn't remember having them. My brain would delete it. So finally, I'm filming an episode of *The Behavior Panel*. I'll send you this video. I had a seizure while we were filming our YouTube show. I'll send you the video of the seizure, and I got it on camera, and I watched my face and I thought, "That's a—I have temporal lobe epilepsy."

So you didn't know you were having these seizures.

Yeah. So you couldn't even solve it because you didn't know the problem existed because of amnesia.

Oh my God. Despite having the degree, despite everybody else said, "Oh, Chase would know if he needs to go to a neurologist." So finally, I see it on camera and I say, "I have temporal lobe epilepsy. I need to go to the emergency room, and—uh—I—I need to go to the ER because I wanted a—a prescription to stop my neurons from dying," right? So I wanted a drug called toymate or Topamax.

And I asked the doctor in the ER for Topamax. Got the prescription, seizure stopped. Then I started looking at the side effects of all of these drugs. Number one side effect: seizures. Most common side effect: seizures. And I said that this is so dumb. There has to be something that that's going to stop my seizures that's not going to kill me. That's terrifying. Why do why does medication like that exist? Like, anti-depressant side effect: Suicidal Thoughts.

Yeah, I think in Western medicine, medication is not designed to cure; it's designed to treat an individual symptom. And doctors get training on treating symptoms instead of people. I'm going to just take this, you like this chemical is too high, I'm going to give you a pill that's going to make that chemical too low, but then it might make this other chemical too high. So you're going to see this other doctor who's a specialist in that chemical; he's going to give you another pill to push that chemical down where it's supposed to be. And that one doctor has an affiliate link for the other doctor. Yeah, it's and none of the doctors are have any malice; it's just the way our the system works right now. And it works okay, but we need to start seeing humans instead of symptoms.

Uh, so I discovered this miracle that saved my entire life. And now I drive a car; I have zero seizures. Uh, my brain, my most recent brain scan says that everything is reversed; the damage has been reversed because of what I found. And it was a miracle. What is it? I'm just going to leave you hanging on what is it. All right, this is the show. Thank you for watching. Like and subscribe.

What did you find? I mean, I know um I mean you've been talking to me about it uh and it seems too good to be true, big time. Which what I thought for a long time. Yeah, I thought I'm trained; I'm trained in medical Neuroscience; I'm trained in all this stuff. I would totally know if if this was a thing; I would know about it. Yeah, my ego was so huge. And I was browsing Instagram shorts. What? This I'm not I'm not an expert here, but you you're not just some dude who found something. Like, there's there's papers on it; there's studies on it. I've published medical papers on published medical papers on it. Yes. So before we get into any of that, let's establish that. And then yeah, and I'm let's let's just say I'm not an expert either, but I have published academic papers on this.

Um, so I'm scrolling YouTube shorts or Instagram one day, and all of my feed is recommending brain stuff. CU. That's I'm obsessed; I'm absolutely obsessed. And at this point, I'm finishing up uh my training in neuro Radiology, like reading brain scans and stuff like that at Duke University. So I'm obsessing over the brain because I'm studying it. I'm obsessing over the brain because I'm desperate to fix my own brain at the same time. And I scroll up, and this guy sounds like a Huntington Beach beach bum, like a surfer dude, uh and he's talking about this chemical. He says it's a miracle cure. And ego came up again, and I said, well, he doesn't sound doesn't sound like my professor, so I swiped up. But right when I swiped up, my brain processed what he was saying. He was talking about this magical chemical in our bodies called cytochrome C oxidase and monoamine oxidase. And I heard and I was processing these, and I tried to swipe back down to find him to look listen to what he said, and I hit the home button on accident. So you know, like when you're in the middle of a scroll, you can't go back.

Oh wow, that's fascinating that that it was that split second, and you could have missed it. Yeah, what happened? You looked it up. So it took two or three days because I typed in Surfer Dude doctor cytochrome oxidase. I tried everything I could think of to try to find him. So his name is Dr. John Lorance. He is a functional neurologist; he's a doctor; he has a practice in Sarasota, Florida. But he was talking about this chemical called methylene blue, and he said it's an industrial blue dye. And I'm like, okay, yeah, sounds legit. Yeah, what what is that going to do? And at the time, I thought a doctor would know; a neurologist would have told me this would be famous; everybody would know about it if if it was pop if it was effective; it would have been on my uncle's podcast, guaranteed in my head. Yeah, it would have been on your uncle's podcast. Uncle Huberman, so I who's a real neuroscientist, by the way. I consider myself a lowercase n neuroscientist; he's an uppercase N guy. Yeah, so I I hear about this chemical, and it's the most effective thing I've ever taken in my life for my skin, my eyes, my lungs, my heart, my brain. Every single cell in my body is benefiting from methylene blue. And the first time a human being ever uttered the words Magic Bullet was in like 1897. This doctor who discovered methylene blue discovered that it basically cures just about everything, and not not treat, not treat which American drugs treat things. This is a this is can cure and reverse damage of all cellular stress. Like, I'm going to get in trouble here with YouTube again, but go on. This is magical. C uh as as I'm talking about any of this, all of the studies are out there, and it's not like some fringe study that was done in like Madagascar or something. This is like Johns Hopkins; this is Mayo Clinic; this is Harvard, Oxford University, Stanford's done a work on this. Uncle Huberman may may have written a paper or two on it. I doubt it, but it's been used since 1890. The patent expired in the early 1900s. And as a quick I can't I can't explain all the ways that it works without like going into super crazy detail about how cells breathe, but I will say that it targets neuronal mitochondria, the mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell. In your neurons, you have so much mitochondria in your body that it makes up about 6 to 7% of your body weight. That's it's a lot of mitochondria. So methylene blue goes in there, and it dyes all of your cells blue temporarily. Blue your mitochondria especially. As a fun fact, mitochondria do not have human DNA; they are not human. The things that are running every cell in your body has zero human DNA; it's closer to bacteria. This is a result of a symbiotic relationship that was formed a billion something years ago, a treaty between between these two things, men and bacteria. Yes, we will emerge; we we became one. You can look that up later. But methylene blue goes into the cell and prevents these things called reactive oxygen species. Other people call them free radicals from building up. It converts water or converts oxygen into water; that's your body's main job. So if I have an oxygen molecule that's got too many hydrogens on it, that's called the reactive oxygen species. And we also have reactive nitrogen species, which methylene blue helps. Methylene blue gathers up electrons. So that's the root of most disease is free radicals and inflammation. Like, is this not disputed by anyone on Earth? For example, Alzheimer's, myasthenia gravis, urinary tract infections, herpes, fill in the blank, STDs, neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson's, inflammation, Alzheimer's, any form of inflammation. I mean, that's where most diseases, almost all forms of inflammation come from. This wow. So methylene blue just gets rid of it. And I thought that's not possible; not going to happen. Then I learned methylene blue helps gets electrons from doing all this and goes back to your little mitochondria and donates those electrons down into the mitochondria of your cell. So your mitochondria have a few layers to it, if and these are tiny microscopic, right? So an electron jumps into this layer; an electron spins around all the time. So as the electron is passing through these four layers of your mitochondria, it's generating heat, and that's cellular energy. That's how our cells generate heat to make energy for our body in the form of ATP, adenosine triphosphate. So on top of that, it helps to make this chemical; it like I don't remember the exact numbers; I would say it triples the amount of this chemical inside your cell called cytochrome C oxidase. So cyto meaning cell, chrome meaning color, oxidase meaning an oxygen. So it increases is intracellular oxygen and something called the Krebs cycle, which anybody who's been through med school has like nightmares about the Krebs cycle because it's you have to memorize this crazy formula for how a cell breathes air and how a cell breathes oxygen is more complex than how we breathe oxygen, way more complex. So if a cell starts getting low oxygen and your body has a buildup of reactive oxygen species, you have disease guaranteed, cuz now your cells can't run on electrons anymore, and they start doing something called uh Brewery, or they're kind of like fermentation running. And that's the backup power system of your body is the cells use fermentation to start bubbling up energy inside the cell because they're not getting enough electrons; they're not getting enough energy. There's a million things. I've published a paper on methylene blue, um which you can put in the in the description if somebody wants to read it. I wrote it so that my mom could take get to her doctor. I don't give a crap about who else reads the paper. I wrote it for my mom to be able to give to her doctor so her doctor understands what it is; that's what the paper's for. So it is a it's been a miracle; it stopped my entire seizures; it's reversed brain damage. I have more energy, more mental focus; I'm in a better mood than I've ever been since I was like 20 years old. And that's just the methylene blue. And then we stack on high-dose melatonin on top of that, a 200 milligram melatonin that I also get from Dr. Lorance. Um, I saw him in person just a couple weeks ago, and he kind of rebooted my entire nervous system. Um, the high-dose melatonin does very similar things to methylene blue but on a different level, in just different dimensions of it. And I'll let I'll let somebody who's watching just look that up. Please look that up; please look it up. Look what up, high-dose melatonin, and it's a suppository, 200 mg melatonin suppository. But the the final thing that methylene blue, two more things that methylene blue does: number one is red light therapy. If you're red light therapy is proven proven to work, and if you have a good red light machine, it penetrates your body up to 4 inches. You could tell I'm like three times as excited talking about this because I'm desperate for people to like know about this chemical. And I felt like the biggest dumbass in the world for narcissistically thinking that I would know about it if it was good; I I would have I would have read some studies on it, uh and I'm trying to be that messenger for everybody to just look it up and talk to your doctor. Obviously, doctor needs to be spoken to, but if you're doing red light therapy, methylene blue is blue because it it reflects a lot of blue light and it that which means it absorbs tons of red light. So if I'm in a red light therapy machine and I have methylene blue inside my body, it's all in my veins; it's all all throughout my body; that means every cell is absorbing that red light, and that allows some of your CS to start running on that photon energy, and it like I would say 600x the effects of red light therapy if you're using methylene blue. And the final benefit of methylene blue is that it has the capacity to cure or treat depression and anxiety because it's it's something called a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And for a hundred years, we used MAOIs, which is the abbreviation for that, to treat depression, and it was proven, clinically proven to work. And I would say don't take my word for it because I was mistrusting in in the beginning, and I thought there's no possible way I would have heard about it; my doctor would have told me about it; it would be all over TV. And I don't know why it's not prescription; it's over-the-counter; side effects: zero, none. So the patent running out is do people not know about it because nobody has a patent and can make a ton of money off of it? I think that's probably the reason. And one of the big I mean you only see commercials for things that are patented; there's money in it. Doctors are only telling you about the drugs that are common. Makes you wonder what other cures are there out there that nobody know knows about that's right under our nose. There's probably so much. And what's funny is that science uh my dad texted me an article. Hold on, I'll read you the title of this article, and you can edit this out if you want to. So here it is: UT Health, University of Texas Health Houston, to test psychedelic mushrooms as a treatment for depression. I love how science is just now like this is is a breakthrough, and we've been doing mushrooms as a species for like 10,000 years, 50,000 years uh and treating depression with it for that whole time, but now they're like, oh, we're we're just making this discovery, and they use those words like that, which is ridiculous to me.

Close the loop on your story with your brain. Yeah, it's cured now; it's completely it's absolutely cured. Wow. And the brain scans prove it, like the the the brain has rebuilt itself; it's healthy; everything is functioning perfectly. You can test it on an MRI, a PET scan, and an ambulatory EEG, which means I wear a brain uh Electro machine that scans brain waves for like an extended period of time, like 72 hours, and people analyze all of that to make sure that there's no misfirings of neurons going on. Wow. And so psychedelics, yeah, what have you learned? What have you experienced? And it's made a big difference for you. I I think psychedelics changed my life, and I think it's the first time that I was able to like unzip this ego costume and start stepping out of it. And it was terrifying, like who who will I be if I'm not this this Halloween costume of of Chase Hughes? What was your Halloween costume? Tough guy, tobacco chewing, tobacco chewing gunman, gunfighting, military guy, 20 years in the military. Yeah, how many deployments? Nine. Nine deployments. Wow. For anyone who's like, don't find any records, you mentioned this, I'll send them to you. Yes. But uh there was a hater online, just for context, that would yeah. So I I think just stepping out of that was the most meaningful experience of my entire life. And I judged mushrooms for decades, and I thought there's no way that that could be a spiritual molecule, that there could be anything spiritual about that, and you cannot there's no words in the English language to be able to describe the the depth that that thing can take you to or show you or expose you to. I don't know how it works; I'm not claiming to know the the GPS coordinates of whatever dimension you go to or if you're imagining it or if it's all hallucination; I don't care. Uh, it it unzips your ego, and I think if you do it every few months, even a lighter dose every few months, wherever it's legal, um I think you come like if we're doing a little chart here, here's my little ego up here, and I have one psychedelic journey, and my ego just disappears, and I'm I see myself as less separate; that's kind of what ego is. I'm separate from from everybody else. Yeah. And a psychopath is somebody who is ultimate the ultimate separation. Yeah, no one else is meaningless but me; that's the perfect ultimate separation. So now ego, you have this little brief experience of ego dying, and then you start coming out of that and be like, wow, that was like I'm I was connected to stuff; like I was this military guy, no spirituality whatsoever, and I've never been spiritual until that day. I became permanently spiritual, not religious uh by any means, but just so spiritual that I would say I have no idea what this is, this existence; I don't know what it is. So then you come down out of the ego; you go back up after the dose; you're back into ego again, but this little this little peak is like a millimeter lower than the last peak. Then you maybe a few months later do it again, and this peak is a little bit lower, and this little ego peak's a little bit lower. Uh, I don't know how big my ego peak is; maybe it's 3 inches or you know whatever it is on that graph. Mhm. But man, it feels so good; it's such a freeing experience. U to have that. And one the reason that I started trying psychedelics was they they create something called neuroplasticity, more specifically than that; they create something called synaptic plasticity, which your uncle Huberman could tell you about, but uh your synapses, neurons can not just talk to each other differently, but they can make connections where they need to be made. That's why mushrooms are being used for PTSD and anxiety and depression, addiction disorders. So I think that's that's what got me into it was just trying to fix my brain. I did not know; I did not know that there was going to be some kind of spiritual component to it. I thought I was just going to put a blindfold on, see a bunch of like Beatle songs kind of stuff like in my vision, and then I'd wake up and and I be back to normal. And I'm thank God that I'm I didn't go back to what defined as normal back then because it was full of ego, completely full of ego. Consult your doctor; don't listen to anything that we're saying; none of this is advice; do everything legally. Yes. So you gave me this massive Ops manual. Yeah, for reading people. This is something that intelligence agencies would use. Mhm. Or are using. I don't know if you can disclose that. Yeah, they are using it to train people. Yes, US Government. Um, and then you told me about the new thing that you have coming out. The Exit is is that what it's called? It's a book called Exit, a user's guide to the simulation. The way you pitched it to me was so fascinating because it's not this simulation like Elon Musk would say that we're in a video game, right? But it's it's something that where you what's the origin story of that? So it's basically getting off of the map, glitching out of the map. So and this is this is not conspiracy theory stuff; this is not at all; this is just reality, dealing with reality. Yeah, because one of the things you said to me was, okay, going to a grocery store is a simulation; it is simulating going to the forest and picking your berries. Yep, right. Instagram is a simulation of life uh a a department store is a simulation of like a market. Uh, if you go to Disneyland, for example, there are simulations of characters that have no original; it's a simulation of something you saw on TV that has no original; it's a copy of a copy, but there is no original, and it's simulating cities; it's simulating towns in so much perfection, and so much of our lives are these little simulations of things like the menu at at a fast food place has these perfect luxurious-looking burgers on it, and we know for a fact that that's a simulation; that's not what it really looks like. So all of our lives, like people, the Disney World is attractive; theme parks are attractive because they're a simulation of reality that's more perfect than reality, and we've gotten to a place where people prefer almost prefer refer the simulation; the the presidential debate is about who can fake it better; who can say the exact right words more, and we're we know that they're lying; we know politicians are are full of it; we prefer the person who simulates better. I want the better simulated person. And just so much of our lives are about simulation. And I if you just look at any study, the further we get from nature, like if I take an orca whale and I stick it in a tank at at a theme park, I won't say the name, shme shme world, shme world. Yeah, let's just call it, and I shorten that creature's life instantly the moment they start living in captivity; their life is shortened. If I take an octopus out of the ocean, I shorten their lifespan by 3 to 4 years; a third of their life goes away, no matter how perfectly I manage that saltwater they're living in, the pH levels, the algae I add in, all of this perfect stuff so that the octopus can live the most perfect life possible, and I'm simulating the what their environment is supposed to be like; it shortens its life because it's a simulated environment, no matter how perfect. And you take a human out of where our ancestors lived, and we're we're no longer seeing things and being around the environment where we're supposed to be; our lives are shortened. And you can see the the places where people live the longest are closer to Nature; they have smaller tribal groups. This is Malcolm Gladwell wrote books about this; Outliers was written about this, or a chapter in Outliers. And I published a paper a year ago called Ancestor Confusion Theory, where if we imagine and this this part you have to imagine because we we know that part of it's true, but if you imagine an ancestor living inside of me, my ancestors from a 100,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago living inside of me, if I spend time in places that that ancestor does not understand, like cities and office buildings with artificial lighting, and I'm eating processed foods that my cells, my ancestor cells don't understand how to deal with that, I have disease. And if I'm in the simulated environment enough, like cities and all this or simulated places, it's not like none of it's real; it's a simulation of life and how life is supposed to be; I have disease. And this is even this is a simulation right now, right? Yeah, we're talking into a mic; it feels like there's a bunch of people. Yep, but there isn't. Yeah. And for people who are listening, they feel like they're in a conversation with us. Yes, and they're watching us on a screen, and they're getting sick while they're listening to it. Yeah, but it if we if if what I'm looking at every day would confuse my ancestors, the first thing that starts is psychopathy, and the second thing that that starts is what I call bopath, because that word should have been invented, but I don't think it was; it's yours now; you it's a pathology of biological functions, like I'm eating things my cells don't recognize because our bodies and our brains have not changed in about 200,000 years; it's about the same exact cells, same brain; our brain has gotten bigger, and so we think like, oh, since we have iPhones now, our bodies must be evolving at the same pace as technology; we we have not, and technology has outpaced our ability to deal with it, which is evident when we have have rampant depression, anxiety; suicides are through the roof. And what's causing all this is us kind of living too much inside of a simulated world. And if you just look at any of the statistics, the closer somebody is to Nature, whether it's food, how much time they're spending in it, the the type of light they're being exposed to all the time, uh they're healthier. And I'm not saying this is like, oh, this is going to stop cancer or this is going to like prevent disease; I'm just saying the human is better off in our natural environment, in the place we're supposed to be. And I think one of the biggest mistakes of all time in human history is us remember psychopathy starts at what separation is viewing ourselves as separate from nature instead of a peace of nature; they're like, oh, I need to go spend more time in nature; like you're not spending time in nature; that's you; those are yourselves; the stuff that makes this up right here is not me; I have more in relation to this piece of wood on on this desk right here. So viewing ourselves as separate from the earth, separate from nature, is and this sounds so hippie, but the science is there; we spend time where our ancestors would have been comfortable in some a place where our ancestors would it would make sense to them; this is my theory, but you can look up the statistics if you want to. What do we do with this information? I have no idea because I don't I don't want to go live in nature in a cabin in a hut, a tiki hut. Well, there's probably the 80/20 that we can avoid, right? I mean, when I look at the like I can't imagine what it's like growing up with a phone; I was blessed to

I had an iPhone with access to social media at all times when I was 16. I had that started with 12 or eight. Like this, this, this chilling Instagram reel that I saw once. Uh, yeah, Chris Williamson, I showed it to him, and he was like, "Send me that; I want to talk about that at some point as well." It's this really dystopian, real—I can probably find it and put it up here where you see these kids just on phones. You see these kids in a classroom, all of them wearing VR goggles—simulation, simulation—just separation from reality. And there's kids who are so tired they can barely fall; they're about to fall asleep, and they're scrolling, or they're actually falling asleep, but they're still doing the movement of scrolling on TikTok. Yeah, and it's so dystopian, horrifying.

You made a document as well that shows the signs of societal collapse—our society collapses. Yeah, what was that document, and what was it made for? So I made the document for US Army SCOPS, Psychological Operations Command. And it's a document that, on three little axes, you can predict how close a society is to collapsing. And you can throw it up on the screen right now, so get ready to take a screenshot. And I'm not going to do a three-count because Leon will put it in at a wrong time, um, but one of those—talk about it from your perspective, having read it and just kind of gone through it yourself. So there are three sliding scales from 1 to 10. The higher it is, or the lower it is—I'm not sure—lower the lower it is, I think might—yeah—on one out, if I'm wrong. On one extreme, it's bad. Yeah. And so one of them is, I think, separation between individuals. Yeah, which Facebook's goal is to connect people—is it really? Or it has disconnected people more. Yeah, right. So there's things like that—how much separation is there? Another thing, I don't remember the other thing, the third thing was, how close are we to reality?

Yeah, in a perfect world, we would live in harmony with nature, in harmony with ancestral DNA that hasn't caught up yet, which I'm not saying we all need to go be naked all day, barefoot, walking around in the woods eating berries, but that would be like the perfect thing for our body. Well, at least move closer to that. And the worst case would be we're in a simulation; we're hooked up on VR goggles, and we are not in touch with reality. Yeah, you don't have to worry about Elon Musk's digital simulation; we're in a physical simulation right now. And this is one thing I told my kids—we were talking about this last night—that if a product is being advertised and they can't tell you what problems that the product is solving, you need to be very, very scared. Mhm. You need to be terrified. Like, look at—if you look at amazon.com—we bring stuff to your house; you don't have to go to the store; you get stuff shipped to you faster; you have more time to do what you want to do; we'll take care of all the shipping and everything. And you look at something like a VR headset—I won't say the name—should I say it? Yes. So Amazon is an example of a company that can disclose what problem they're solving openly. Talk about—yeah—the problem that they're addressing; CU, they're actually solving a problem, which is I don't have to go to a grocery store; I can just get it. Not saying Amazon is a flawless, great company, but at least there's utility; there's a real need being fulfilled. Yes, right. Yeah. And now if there's VR goggles, what problem are they solving? iPhones—do they tell you what problem they solve? It's just cool; it's just great. Wouldn't it be great to have all these cool features? But what problem do I actually have that—well, it is definitely solving a problem, but they're not willing to disclose it. Correct. And it is loneliness, depression, and a need to anesthetize myself from my real life—escape. Yeah, I mean, the least—the most innocent one would be boredom, right? Because you could say, what's—what's—what problem does a movie solve? Or boredom. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Well, same thing with smoking, with cigarettes—like, what problem is it solving? Right. Yeah, same thing there—loneliness. If I'm smoking for social reasons, boredom. Yeah. And it's a social anesthetic. I'm stressed out; I need to go have a cigarette, or I need to put a dip in—is what I would say on deployment, which you don't have in Germany, do you? What, dip tobacco? I was never able to find it in the UK or in like anywhere in the Middle East. So you had to like ship these logs of Copenhagen, which I don't do anymore; I quit a long time ago, but that was like—that was the hardest thing in my life I've ever done is quit dipping tobacco—nasty stuff.

So distance from nature and proximity to simulated living—and not some digital Matrix simulation—are the measurements of societal collapse according to the document that I made for the US Army. M. Do you know the third one? There's separation between people. It's been five years; it's all rooted in a lot of data. Is it information access? Is it something like that? Is it—I think that might be it. We'll throw it up on screen and yeah, maybe edit this out so I can pretend like I know what it is. I can't remember. Yeah, perfect. I do think that is one of the most powerful ways to predict the proximity to the collapse of a society is how much are they simulating in their everyday life? And this—we can go back 800 years, and people are still—there's simulations still going on, but it's just become rampant. And a lot of this work on simulation—if you're interested in this, and it's something that's interesting to you—you need to read the book called *Simulacra and Simulation* by Jean Baudrillard. He's a French philosopher, and he goes way off into communism and crazy stuff, but this one book, I think, is brilliant, and it's a perfect example of how we are living almost in *The Truman Show*, to where if you start trying to get out, and like, "I'm going to get on the boat," like crazy stuff starts happening; you get canceled. Think about the people getting canceled; it's like—it's bizarre. And in the real-life example, the stage that's being put up—so for anyone who hasn't seen *The Truman Show*, it's basically this man who's—his entire life is a TV show, and he doesn't know it because he was born in it, I guess he was—yeah—brainwashed into it, whatever. And so everything's put together and fake. Everyone's an actor; everyone's an actor in his life. Yeah, but—and he's the main character of a TV show, and he doesn't—he doesn't know it. And then there's these advertisements that are being read out in a really weird way, and he thinks, "Oh, it's just weird; sometimes people just talk about a product like that." Yeah, but he doesn't know because it's—that's his reality life. So what is that—what do you think that is in our lives? I guess it's just the masks that we wear ourselves and the things that we pretend. So it's not just—it's not that there's some evil producer who's putting it all together, but we're putting it together ourselves, ourselves, and the people around us are helping to support that simulation. And one of the—one of the things that happens is Truman starts to see cracks; he starts to see little cracks. He walks randomly into a building that he never goes into one day, and the elevator doors open, and he—there's no elevator there; it's just a break room for all the actors in *The Truman Show*, and he like sees through the set and he sees kind of behind the scenes one day, which is like someone in our life realizing that marketing and advertising and all this kind of stuff is ruining us; it's building a prison that we can't see, just like in *The Truman Show*. And he starts like questioning reality, and the moment he does that, everyone around him steps in to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, man, you need to come back to—come back to earth; you need to come back here; stay here; you need to stay here," which is like what our friends do when we start going like, "Hey, I don't want to do this anymore; I don't want to—I don't want to do that; I don't want to participate in that." It's very eerily similar. But the reason that—Kristoff was the director of the show in the movie, played by—I can't remember his name—but the director of *The Truman Show* in the movie is willing to put him through all this turmoil—fires, explosions, all this stuff—to try to keep him in this little world they built for him, which is a TV set. And Truman is willing to die for the truth; he's willing to die for the truth. And if you're in the business of finding truth and your price isn't your life, then you—you are for sale; your version of truth is for sale. You asked me that yesterday—how much money would somebody have to pay you to lie? Yeah, and I said, "Well, it depends on the lie. If it's something serious, it could really harm someone, then I wouldn't—" Doesn't matter if it's like a little lie then or like a joke. Yeah, like if I were, for example, to lie about somebody being my uncle—maybe a neuroscientist on YouTube—and then not—not actually—and it's just a joke, then yeah, I do it; I'd do it for free. Yeah. But so what you said was, if you were willing to tell a serious lie for an amount of money, even if it's 100 million, even if it's a billion, to yourself or to myself—oh, are you in the business of truth-telling? And I don't mean on YouTube; I just mean in my life. And that's something we can aspire to be, but I don't think we're—we're—we're flawed little creatures. And if we aspire to truth-telling, the wares that we mark, the masks that we wear, waiting for the coffee to kick in—um—the stories we tell ourselves of who we should be, where we feel shame—social enforcement shame, societal shame—what can I shame you into believing? Then I can start controlling your behavior, and then you're not you anymore; you're simulating a version of you that doesn't have this bad shame quality. This is where we see propaganda in World War II, World War I. Why don't you flex your biceps in the middle of a podcast like that? How I want you to perceive me. I like it. Yes, I could beat you at arm wrestling. If you're watching this, I sent a video of his thighs to my wife yesterday versus my thighs—the big difference. Send me that video; I'll put it in there. Um, so I mean, when I scroll through Instagram, I can feel—I can feel it, even if I'm—even if I judge people, and I'm like, "This is—this is all pretend; this is all—this is all—" That I can feel, man. I feel this stress in me—this stress of that guy is more jacked than me; this girl looks perfect, and—and they have the perfect lifestyle, and what am I doing with my life? Those are the two things that make you feel: number one, compare yourself to other people; number two, make you feel like you're not enough—yet—you're not enough yet—till something *kaching*—fill in the blank. Yeah, make a purchase. I buy stuff—I don't anymore—up until about four months ago. So I'm not saying I've got anything figured out, uh, and I'm not one of those people who like, "Oh, I'm perfect; you need to like follow this example," but I was very prone to Instagram ads. I bought all kinds of crazy stuff. The watch that I'm wearing right now was because of an Instagram ad, and it was so powerful that I deleted all the apps off my phone. It's—I just have it on an office iPad, and I have a social media manager now. But that is the simulation, and if you think about how powerful the simulation is—and I don't mean that in some kind of weird sense, like we're just faking stuff—is all I'm saying—um—the power is so grave, and the fear of social judgment is so powerful online now that people will stifle themselves; they will not speak the truth; they won't say anything real anymore; they're afraid of being canceled. And it's that powerful that I'm willing to simulate that I agree with this or that, I—or I'm like, have no opinion on this. Um, and that's the ultimate simulation—am I willing to participate in the creation of that for other people by agreeing to it? Yeah, going with the crowd. And now once we see it happen to someone, and somebody gets like canceled on social media, nothing happens, and we're back to the online version of the bystander effect.

Do you think canceling is a real thing—like it actually has an effect? Because what I see is—or what I believe is—if someone would have canceled me, or basically make an exposed video, tons of people jump on it; everyone thinks I'm horrible. I feel like most of it is just in my head; technically, I could keep putting out videos like nothing happened. Yeah, and that's what some people do, and then it's fine. But it's the perceived feeling of—yeah—and that stress is fake, and none of it's real, and it's just—I guess it's just the reaction to it that really messes people up. Yeah, the stress that it puts on them, and then they stop putting stuff out because of that. It's not actually that—and it is shaming; it is—we will never forget it that you did this, that you—you allegedly—even if it's not true. And what I'm saying is there's no ultimate truth. I'm not saying, "Hey, here are the six steps you need to follow to get like the perfect life." Just saying, spend more time in nature; be closer to who you truly are—like, who do I—who did I want to be when I was little? Who do I really need to be right now? And how can I like involve passion in the life I'm living? I made—I kind of forced you to watch a movie clip last night, and it's one of the most beautiful things in the world. You kind of forced me. Yeah, that was your experience of it; it felt that way 'cause I'm not the guy—I'm not a video-showing kind of guy. That's funny you put it that way. No, but I was on my phone; I was trying to get back to an important message, so I probably came across as—yeah. So we—I started playing this video, and he's texting, so I kind of—I did this on his leg; I was like, "This, you need to watch this." Yeah, and I was like, "Okay," and I was like, "Oh," the final message—I haven't sent it yet—but I really enjoyed that. I—maybe I can include it. I think we should get away with it; it's a beautiful thing that—that some—that Nicholas Cage playing this guy who used to own or owns this truffle-sniffing pig, and he needs his pig back, but he sees this chef in a restaurant that has turned his entire being into a simulated person and a simulated restaurant. And Nick Cage sits down, and he says, "None of this is real; you know that, right? Nothing's real; these people aren't real; you're not real." And it's just—this guy has this awakening; there's a moment where he breaks, and he's looking at his restaurant that he's crafted based on what people want, what people like, what he thinks will get him liked. Yeah, which is—he's starting to defend the prison; he's starting to defend, "No, no, this is what—this—you have to do it this way; this is what people want." And Nick kind of breaks him out of that, and that—I think that's so beautiful. He—he may have been mean about it or something, but just helping someone to realize—it's like, "You're better than this; these people who you're craving admiration from don't care about you; you're getting your dopamine from all the wrong places; you're getting 90% of your dopamine from running this restaurant or whatever you're doing—running your Instagram account—and 10% from your kids and your family and things that you're passionate about." And Dr. Phil pulled me aside—or where—at dinner one night—and do—Dr. Phil said, sitting right beside me, kind of at the corner of a table, and I was asking him about getting nervous and going on stage and all this stuff, and he squeezed my arm, and he said, "This is one of the most deadly diseases you could ever have; it's the desire for love from strangers." And that was like—I was the chef in that moment. And I keep having these moments where I realize where I'm being that chef all throughout my life, and I'm trying—now—I used to avoid that; I try to like force myself into those situations now—like, "Show me what I'm—what I'm still faking; what am I still faking?" And that's what mushrooms do, by the way, is kind of—they really show you your BS. But that quote from Dr. Phil—it was just between him and I—saying, "You need affection from strangers"—that made me—that shook me to my core and changed the direction of my life. I've never told him this, uh, and he's probably too busy to watch, but maybe I'll send him this clip. MH. And in that scene, what Nicholas Cage reveals to the chef is, "Didn't you want to start a—what was it—an Irish pub?" Yeah, start a pub—a proper English pub. And you can see him shoving that aside; it's like, "Oh, no, people wouldn't want that—that's here in this town"—like, but you can see there's like this passion that's brewing inside of him—that this innocent, untouched desire and passion that he had to start this. Yeah, that was suppressed. And the first time I watched that clip, I was in the—I was in Nicholas Cage's POV; I was like, "I'm the badass"—you identified as him. Yeah, because I wanted to be the cool guy in the scene, right? And I watched it a couple more times, and I was like, "I'm still the chef in many ways; I can be Nick Cage for a lot of people, but I'm somebody else still—is always going to keep being Nick Cage for me, and I'm still the chef in many situations." So I think that's why it's so beautiful because you can—if you're honest—I think if somebody's honest and they can see, "Whoa, that's me," they can really reflect in some of that behavior. It's some of the best acting I've ever seen, too. I think we all are that chef—that mask-wearing, people-pleasing, prison-maintaining chef—in some areas in our lives. For me, it was partly in the old channel, right? Where I had a vision for what I wanted to build, the things that I wanted to talk about. And I think every creator has that; everyone who's building a business—yeah—you have the opportunity to make a lot of money with something, but is that the thing that you want to do? So one thing that I always got to go back to is what's the vision? Because I know how to make tons of money; I know how to get tons of views; I know how to please those people, but are those the people that I want to serve? And is that the stuff that I want to make? And so I get off track, and I need to bring myself back on track. And so starting the new channel for the long-form podcast, starting with a clean slate, different audience, different expectations, has been so freeing for me. And you—you did this in the car on the way over here; we were riding in the back of an Uber on the way here, and I told you, I was like, "If you do this, this, and this, it's going to get a shitload of views," and you—then you look back at me; you're like, "But who is the type of person clicking on that? That's not what I want." Uh, and that was—that was huge because I didn't think—I didn't even think about that; I thought YouTube was just for views; I didn't think about like, "Who's the desired audience here for this?" Yes. Not all views are the same; I'd rather have a thousand people watching who are intelligent, they're open-minded, they understand nuances, then dumb things down and get 100,000 views on something. And yeah, you have to keep it dumb to keep reaching a wide audience. Yeah, make a box for it; yeah, pop some whipped cream balloons in there; give somebody 10K in a parking lot. Yes. And I mean, this is where everyone listening can look at—where am I doing that in my life? Where am I getting validation from people that I—why am I doing this? And you told me about this yesterday as well; you mapped out where you're getting dopamine from. Yeah, not valid—not just validation, but specifically dopamine. Yeah, where am I getting—where am I motivated to go seek validation, which is dopamine? So I'm—I'm driven to get motivation from this one place or to get validation or acceptance or a good feeling, even if I'm by myself, if I'm drinking alcohol or whatever that is. And if I—you want me to walk through the dopamine map? So the way that I do this with any of my clients, we have like a regular sheet of paper; we draw a line in the middle with a little circle in the center of it, and that—like kind of like a basketball court—and we put me right there in the middle. And on the left is all the—all the sources of dopamine that are good for me, right? All the sources that are bad for me. And I make the clients draw a big circle for big sources, smaller circles for smaller sources, because I want them to see that in a lot of ways. Sometimes we'll see porn—a circle is this big, and family circle is this big—small. Yeah. And getting to the point where you see that—I had that for my life; I did that for me. And social media was big on there—really big—it's like, "How many views am I getting on YouTube?" And we—we have—I think I have a million subscribers total now, and—um—it's meaningless—utterly meaningless. And it's one of the best feelings in the world of not needing that love from strangers, but I'm still putting out good content; I'm—I'm putting—making videos as if it's to my family. And if—if you map out your dopamine, it shows you—it's a very unusual reminder and a visual thing where I can see what my brain is doing. And what the final thing I made with the clients do is, out of 100, you have 100 points, and you have to assign a point value of dopamine that equals 100; you have to allocate for all—where am I getting this little validation and stuff from? MH. And then it's—it's very difficult to have to sit there and write 65 on cocaine or, you know, whatever I'm doing, and put a 12 next to my kids. How do I know something is high? Is it that I'm very motivated to seek that? When I look at the actions that I take throughout the day—not what I want to value, but what I actually value with actions—is that what determines the size of the—I determine it by proximity—so how close are you to that thing—time—how much time of your day does it occupy? And feeling like—do you feel good while doing it? Does that make sense? So like, am I driven—am I motivated to go do this thing? MH. Not necessarily—do I feel good after getting it? But not after. Yeah, because you can feel empty but still keep pursuing it. Yeah. So it's—it's am I motivated to pursue that. Yeah. So if you don't feel good after something, that's a good indicator that that's a dopaminergic thing and not a serotonergic thing; it's not love; it's not oxytocin—is the feel-good chemical—which it's—it's not—it's actually the gap chemical; it's—I want—I'm—I'm going—that's what makes a baby crawl. Yeah, dopamine makes our muscles move towards things, and it makes our muscles move. So if you look at somebody with Parkinson's, that's a dopaminergic pathway disorder—so it's a dopamine disorder because their muscles are kind of shutting down.

And getting the hand trimmers and things like that. U so dopamine is so much more than, oh, it makes me feel good. If I, if I had liquid dopamine and put it in your neck, you would not feel good. You would, you would try to peel your skin off and and escape from this feeling of like needing to move so much. It's insane. So map out dopamine, and then what do we do with that once we know? Is being aware of it enough? Because this ties into everything that we talked about with, we live in a world that we've constructed on who we should be. We're not enough. This is the mask I should wear. This is what's accepted. And then I guess creating the map can allow us to become aware of, oh, this is where I'm falling into the Trap of needing validation from these strangers. Yeah, is just being aware enough of it, or do you think? I think it is because it would be easy for me to say, yeah, download my free three-step course right now to remap your dopamine so you can be the link down below so you can be enough. But I don't think there's a plan that's that fits everybody.

But I think the lower part of our brain, the part of our brain that keeps us breathing at night, keeps our heart beating at night, this mammalian part of our brain can handle that stuff. It knows how to handle those problems. It's been around a lot longer than our frontal cortex. It's smarter in many, many ways. So if I every day I'm maybe drawing a dopamine map, or every day getting that back into my awareness that that I can't talk to my lower brain. I can't talk to the mammalian brain, right? Because it doesn't speak English. I'm pushing that awareness back down into that brain as much as I possibly can. That goes into something called the reticular activating system, or the what's called the reticular formation is the actual part of the brain. So I just whatever you want to change in your life, anything you want to change in your life, jam it down into that part of the brain. And the way to jam it down in the part of the brain is, how can I communicate this to a dog? I remember you talking about this the last episode. That's it. It requires imagery, emotion, and other sensory input, smell, and then repetition.

Mhm. Just training a dog. If there's a formula that I used to teach for actual brainwashing, and it works the same to brainwash ourselves out of a behavior or into a new Behavior. It's Focus, emotion, agitation, and repetition. It spells fear. So agitation meaning I'm going to change my environment very regularly so my brain doesn't go into I'm familiar with this mode. So it's like, wow, these walls are a different color in my office. This my couch in my living room's in a different place. I'm going continuously move things around to force my brain to see the lower brain to say things are new. You need to pay attention. Interesting. So if, if I wanted to build the Driven Community into a cult, brainwash them into things that are obviously only good for them, a good cult, a good cult because there are good Cults out there. I was a member of one for 20 years. It's called US military.

Yeah. What are some suggestions? How can I build a raving community of people who love being around like-minded people who love challenging each other, supporting each other, and um, yeah, really committed? Number one thing is to have an identity statement around where they become. So this is the first step. If, if you're creating a cult, Step One is whatever you're inside of, you have an identity statement where a person can complete the sentence of, I am a veteran. I am a. It's a, it's a badge of honor, right? And no, it's not identity for me to say I'm a member of The Driven Community. It's, it's identity when I say I am a 38, or whatever name that you want to give it. So first step is identity labeling. So second step is Insider language. So we have words to describe people that are non-members, civilians, right? That's one of the things you told me yesterday. It is. Yeah, civilians, civilians, different crowd. And then so after that, you have an initial kind of a wake-up call, and you want people to go through some kind of assessment that shows them all their vulnerabilities Without You exploiting them. And that would be the difference between a bad cult would say, let me see your vulnerabilities. I'm going to record them on this video here and save it in case you ever do anything stupid. And B, I'm going to use them all against you instead of help you with them. So get them to aware of their vulnerabilities because just like what we talked about, if I'm aware of something often enough, it starts going away if it's a problem.

And finally, well, there's a million on the third thing. What does that mean? What vulnerabilities? Vulnerabilities to, let's say someone signs up for the Driven Community. I can help you build this if you want, but you have like, here's our 28 question thing that keeps you from being your best driven self. Need to work on The Branding a little bit, but I like where this is going. Whatever it is, yeah, and like here's like, and the person knows I'm low on this, I'm low on that, I'm low on that. So if I focus on just what I'm good at, we need to, we need to know our insecurities, right? Cuz imagine if like my kids are in elementary school and they're failing math, they're failing English, they're failing history, and I say, oh yeah, don't worry about that. Let's focus on what you're good at. It's a recipe for failure. If the engine fails in your car, you're not going to go change your brakes because your brakes are good. Well, it's like going to school and not having any grades. You don't even know if you're failing at math, right? Yeah. So letting people get aware of that helps them to bring those things up, and you keep it private to them. It's not some publicly open thing.

But having making the group a source of dopamine is number one, which means that you need to deliver unexpected bonuses on a regular basis that the person's not expecting. They're getting dopamine just waiting for the next one, not from receiving the first. MH so they get excitement because of the first, that dopamine for the next and the and the continu ones. And then the other ways that the group becomes a source of dopamine is that you're continually sharing content that is good quality, but it's with other members, and someone achieving something, they're witnessing someone that's a member of the community achieving a milestone or goal that is similar to their own. They get dopamine for themselves moving forward in their life, and they get dopamine for the next video, the next interaction, group call, whatever it is. So what I'm really thinking of if I'm, if I'm a cult leader is, how can I direct and issue dopamine as if it were a, a ticket that I'm handing out on a regular basis? And if you're doing the right things, you're helping people with their life, and and there's a standard for ethics that I have. We talked about this last night, like if I'm influencing another person and they could genuinely see inside of my head, my Integrity, my character, my my desire and my intent for what I'm doing in this situation, and they would still agree with it, then, then we're doing the right thing. Uh, if they wouldn't go ahead and sign up for it if they saw everything that's in my head, then I'm not doing a good thing. Yeah, and I'm being unethical.

Yeah. So I guess even sharing this and being like, Hey, how do I get people to be really committed and really love this so much that they, they want to stay in it and stuff like that and contribute is part of that, right? Yeah. And just having those meetups around the world. So setting up a way for them to meet up in person. And if they're ever in trouble, the entire Community comes together like a beehive to, like one person loses their company or goes bankrupt or something, everybody gives them a th000 bucks or five grand or something like that, and that's like a policy. Uh, so it's like a beehive mindset. Yeah. Another thing you mentioned that I loved is an initiation process. Yeah, right. They have to drink some blood, maybe. I, I didn't say that. Okay, no, that was my idea. No wait. Uh, let's not do the bad thing. Let's do it in, in a good way. But initiation process, some way to, and again, like all of these things you see in universities, you see it in sports teams, you see it in companies, Apple, whatever, you see it in even the science Community. Like science is a massive cult. Yeah, it is. Anything that's not science that's BS, that's outside. Sharing a win is, oh, they, this University, these scientists, they discovered this. Oh wow, right? There is the initiation can be something as simple as like every time somebody joins, we do this one weird thing and everybody remembers it forever. And a great piece of initiation if you ever want to incorporate this and make it truly memorable is their first day is a member of the community, Comm, they write a letter to their future self, a thank you letter. Got it. So they write that letter, their future self, maybe triggered her on an auto email or something like that, but I would say it needs to be printed out, needs to be handwritten if possible, and they open it in a year. And so they're encouraging their future self, they're doing all this, and then now they're looking back, and you have them kind of encapsulated this little time capsule where they're interested in their growth, they're actually working hard to make their goals come true, cuz now they got to read that letter and have people share their letter a year later. Yeah, I just received my letter from a year ago. Yeah, wow, that would be really interesting. And you're required to share it. I love that. That's great. I'm going to start doing that. I just, I'm going to start doing that with my VIP clients. Cool. I'm going to do it before you, so it looks like you copied me. I'm going to do it first. Okay, we'll see about. I'm going to do it soon as we're recording. Awesome. Um, where can people find out more about you, what you do, what you have coming up? Um, go to NCI.do University. That's N is in November. NCI.do University, or just type CH us into Google. Awesome. And you have a new book coming out? New book coming out in October. It's called Exit, a user's guide to the simulation, not the digital one. Not the digital one. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks, man.