 one creaks like hell. It's what happens when you have chairs from the seventeenth century. You want to do a 20-minute round is what you say, Scott? You want to try? Yeah, let's see what's going on. Let's see if we don't end up doing, you know, a damn two hours. Yeah, okay. Because we've been goofing off now for what? Almost 45 minutes. Yeah. Hi, I'm Scott Rasmussen, my body language expert and analyst. I train law enforcement in the military and interrogation and body language. I'm also a trial consultant. Chase? Hey, I'm Chase Hughes. I teach numberal communication, persuasion, and influence, and I develop tactics for our intelligence agencies. I'm also a trial consultant here in the United States. Mark? Mark Bowden, expert in human behavior and body language. I help people all over the world to stand out, win trust, gain credibility every time they speak, including some of the leaders of the G7. Greg? I currently am a former Army interrogator, interrogation instructor, resistance to interrogation instructor, written a few books on body language and behavior, and I spend most of my time in corporate America and Wall Street. Excellent. Well, today's going to be a little bit different than what we usually do. We're not going to analyze anybody. We're going to start telling you how we analyze people because the debates are coming up. And so that's going to be fairly interesting. And if you're trying to figure out what's happening, what you're seeing, we're going to help you do that. We're going to sort of break down what we look for. So you'll know what you can look for to make decisions about what you think is happening or how it looks to you because we're telling you what, how things look to us. You're going to be able to say, here's the way it looks to me and feel confident about that with your answer or your suggestion or your idea because of the information we're going to give you. So Greg, why don't you start with explaining how we're going to go about doing this? Yeah. So today we're going to start by talking to you about some basics and everyone will use a little bit different language and each of us will add some nuance to this whole thing. But we'll start by giving you five categories of body language that we look for. These are not absolutes. This is just boxes to put information into. I usually use a hand because you've got two of them and you carry it around to remember this by. Number one is a gesture. You see me putting my thumb up. In the US, that means something very specific. That means something very specific. A gesture means that you have to understand it. You can't suddenly just make up your own gesture or you look crazy. And that kind of thing doesn't work. So to be able to communicate, it needs to be universally understood. Americans are really bad at leaving the country and thinking that's universally understood when it's not. Culture plays a huge part in the gesture. The second one is an illustrator. You're here us talking about illustrators punctuating your brain's thought. And we call this batoning and I think that's probably Desmond Morris who coined the phrase, but Hitler did this. People do that. They baton, they're whipping you. Bill Clinton, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. It's a way of illustrating what your brain is thinking. Simply that it's a category. Looking for ways to illustrate may use your forehead, you may use your hands, you may use a device, cruise ship with a shoe, clearly a great one. So there's gestures illustrators. The next and I'll be a little rude here is a regulator. That's the way you control conversation. You remember that because it's in the middle of your hand and it's a way to control conversation. Other ways can be this, depending on where you're at in the world, not a good choice. It can be touching someone. Some people are more tactile than others. It can be covering your mouth to control conversation in another person. Can be any of that. So that's gestures, illustrators, regulators. Next is an adapter. And I use the ring finger. An adapter is something that you use to make the uncomfortable comfortable. If I lock you in a cage, you'll play with your ring coyotes pace in a cage when they're locked in. It's a way of making the unknown comfortable. And it's a powerful tool. Then finally, the last of the five is a barrier. And I use all my hands together to show you barrier. It means I need space. And you'll see that in all kinds of people. And the barrier can be powerful when combined with an illustrator. I call that sacred space when you create space and make yourself comfortable. That's all there is to it, guys. We'll take this as the basics. And there's your category. So Chase, I'll hand it off to you to talk about the next piece. Sure. So one of the things that I think is really important for you to look at during the debates is going to be blink rate and how often this happens. So what we're talking about with blink rate specifically is how often a person is blinking. The average times that human beings blink every minute is around 12 somewhere around 12. And if we see an increase in how often someone is blinking, we're seeing an increase in stress, almost universally with a few exceptions, one of those being maybe allergy season. We see a decrease in blink rate when we see someone get more focused and more comfortable on the stage. So if you're watching these debates or watching any conversation and you hear someone just talk about taxes or IRS and you see blink rate go up in the other person, that's an indicator that you're seeing some kind of a stress response. So the last time you were really stressed out, your blink rate can go all the way up to like a 90 to 100. And the last time you watched a movie that was really just captured all of your attention, your blink rate might have been around a five or a four sometimes. So the more interested and focused, the less often we are going to be blinking in a conversation. We get stressed out if a topic or something that's being spoken about stresses us out, you'll see the blink rate go up. So one thing to look for is not just, oh, their blink rate is fast or it's slow, what we're looking for are changes. We want to note is it increasing or decreasing, not fast or slow. So much body language books and articles will give you these still images and that makes us think I need to look for these still image shots. But what we're looking for is movement and change. Wherever we're watching nonverbal communication, we're looking for movement and change. So I saw the blink rate go up and my head's automatically going to go right before that. The guy who's asking the questions said riots. And I know that's a sensitive subject for that person. I saw those blink, those eyes start blinking more often. And I'll pass it off to Scott. All right. When it comes to blinking and eye behavior, one of the things I look for is when someone says something, you see an eye flutter. Sometimes it's a flutter. Sometimes their eyes and chase refers to it as shutter speed, which I think is brilliant. I think that's awesome. I never thought of it that way. It's almost like they're using their eyelids as a barrier or almost as what we call eye blocking. For example, if you tell someone a joke in at work and you know it's that, you know, you've heard the joke before and somebody else's tell it, let's say. And you know that the end is coming and it's not going to be clean at the end. And you may start doing that. You may do this or a couple of other people that know what the joke is as well. They may start blocking their eyes as well. And I've told this story before there was a guy named Doc Watson, who was my dad's best friend since as long as I can remember. He was a blind guy. He was a guitar player, a famous guitar player. And what would happen is this, my, and I remember this when I was a child, this is why this always sinks in so tight with me. He would, he would come over to our house. He and his wife Rosalie would be at our house. And we'd be sitting around eating and then the women would get up and leave the room as the men were, the men were talking, you know, me and my dad and my brother and Doc. And where they would leave, then my brother or I, either one of us would start telling the just nastiest joke you can possibly imagine. And he didn't know they left. He was a funny guy. So he loved stuff like this. But he didn't know they left. So as we started these horrible things, you can see him start doing this. And he's blind, but he's still doing eye blocking. So I thought that was, I was, and I started thinking, why is he blocking his eyes like that? Even as a kid, I remember thinking, why is he doing things like that? So there's something to that. We don't really know what it is yet. Why blind people will block your eyes as well. But we but you'll see people do that when they're trying to block the information, the bad news, the the information they weren't expecting. So that's what I see blink rate when I see it sort of flooded for a second or I see it go tight or just a couple of times when you say something to someone that lets me know something might be up with that or they just got information that they weren't ready for and didn't didn't know that person knew that kind of So Mark, what do you got? Yeah, so this is specifically about election debates. When I'm looking at an election debate, what I'm interested in is the fact that leaders in democracies are made up in the minds of the audience. The audience get an idea of the leader and it's mainly based on the picture that they see. They're doing other stuff at the same time. They're always doing something else and watching the potential leader. So I want to look for a simplicity around the leader because simplicity is understandable complexity can be confusing and we don't vote for people who confuse us. We vote for the ones that are easy for us to get. Here's something very simple about the body. It's either symmetrical or asymmetrical and it's built with a lot of symmetry and in fact, in nature, nature favours symmetry. If you're looking for a mate and you're any kind of organism out there, the more asymmetrical you are, the more confusing you are to the potential mate. If both sides of you look pretty much the same, it can tell what you are from most angles. The moment you're asymmetrical, the other organism is going, I can't quite work out what that is. I'll go and mate with something else. OK, so we get more symmetrical through natural selection. When somebody's communicating to you, they're either going to communicate in a very symmetrical way and we'll see, for example, Trump do this moderating gesture. It's an open, moderating gesture where he kind of goes, so I'm open to this, but at the same time, I'm shutting you down. I'm closing this down. This is symmetrical. It's not asymmetrical because the moment it goes asymmetrical, can you see how much more confusing it is for your brain to try and work out what I might be saying? So there's symmetry. There's also single gestures that go down what we call what I call the wheel plane, down the symmetry, the centre of the body. And we'll see some of the extraordinary leaders within history will often gesture right down their wheel plane in order to be very emphatic about what they're doing. So I'm looking for symmetry or are they gesturing down the wheel plane and getting a symmetry by going directly down the centre? They're more likely to be more understandable. Asymmetry is more likely to be less understandable. But at the same time, you will see Trump using asymmetry as well in quite a purposeful way to be confusing so that he can then go into symmetry and get you to join up to an idea that he's symmetrically putting across. So that's what I'm looking for. Symmetry or asymmetry? Simple one to look at.