Diary Of A CEO: w/ Behaviour Expert Chase Hughes (Transcript)

If you want to speak well, you’re not directing people to think certain things or to feel certain things. It should resonate with what they’re already feeling and then start guiding them. So you’re getting into their river, so to speak, and flowing with that first.

The PCP Model in Action: Role Play

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so let’s do some role playing.

CHASE HUGHES: All right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I say to you, “Chase, I think the sky is purple.” Your job is to carry out the perception shift. What would you say to me?

CHASE HUGHES: So if somebody says something that is an idea that’s far out there, I’ll always acknowledge it. And I would say, every human being is different. And it’s fascinating how many rods and cones we have in our eyes, how we all perceive things differently. And it’s amazing when you see one thing — you might see something that’s purple, and I see the exact same thing. We may be seeing the identical color, but our brains are just interpreting it differently. Or maybe we have a different word for it. And it’s amazing how much we agree on, and we just don’t realize how much aligned we are with a situation in life. Does that make sense?

So I’ve never had to respond to somebody calling the sky purple. But if I can modify how you perceive a situation — let’s say we’re at a business networking event, and I walk up to you and I openly call out the script, and I say, “It’s amazing how many people are just running the script of: I need to look like a business professional. I can’t say anything that makes me look emotional. I can’t say anything that’s personal. I have to hand out a business card. I have to put on this persona.”

So I’m just openly saying the script that’s running inside that person’s head, and I’m making you aware of it, which means that I’m changing your perception of the situation. Anything I can get you aware of that’s running inside of your own head, I can massively start transforming your behavior. And we’ll get to identity here in a minute. But any script that you call out, you’re weakening its power.

So if you shook my hand super aggressively, or somebody shook my hand like a pretend alpha male, and you call out exactly what they’re wanting to happen, and you say, “Wow, that handshake is really firm. I just read an article a few weeks ago that only alpha males do that.” You say the quiet part out loud. So any script that’s running in the background, or some kind of social script, if I can surface that, then I become a lot more powerful over the situation because I’ve lessened the power of that script. Any script that we push down is going to be a lot more powerful in that person.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the example of the very over-the-top handshake, by calling it out, what have you done in my head? So I’m the one that’s just squeezed your hand really tight because I want to be an alpha male. You call it out. What does that do? It disarms me, or it makes me feel great, or…?

CHASE HUGHES: No. And I’m not saying that’s a tactic anybody should do. But if there’s a script running, here’s what we’re supposed to do. You and I are on a podcast. We’re supposed to make eye contact with each other. We’re supposed to nod throughout this entire thing. I’m making both of us more aware of this. And that gives us a little permission to break away from it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, to break away from it?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So your desire to be the alpha male in the handshake situation would be temporarily kind of broken because I’m openly saying out loud what you didn’t want to say out loud.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay. So you’re kind of calling it out, but without it being…

CHASE HUGHES: Without making fun of you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Aggressive. Yeah.

Context: The Most Powerful Force in Human Behavior

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So after I shift your perception, all I need to do is get you to see a situation a little bit differently. And if you turn on the news, you are going to see this all day, every day — the perception changes. “Oh, you thought it was about this. Guess what? Here’s what they did today.” And they do all of this stuff to shift your perception.

And in order to get your behavior to change, once I shift your perception, then I change the C in this model. And the C is context. And context is the most important thing in the world, and nobody’s talking about it.

Probably everyone watching this or listening to this right now is going to get naked today. They’ll get in the shower, they’ll get in a bath, whatever it is. But almost everybody’s going to get naked. We’re probably not going to do it in the middle of an office building at work. Context dictates what behavior is permissible.

So if you go back to 1957, there’s this guy running a stage hypnosis comedy show, where they bring people up on stage and make them do silly stuff. And one of the guys that’s up on stage — he’s knocked out and he’s doing all this crazy stuff — he’s an off-duty police officer, so he has a concealed handgun.

One of the bits that this comedian does, he tells the people on stage, “All of you are sheriffs and you can’t leave the stage. But everybody in the audience right here is rowdy. They’re making lots of noise. You need to tell them to keep it down.” So this starts, and the hypnotist says, “Now they’re not even listening to you. They’re not respecting you.” And then he says, “One of them’s pulling out a gun.” And this off-duty police officer pulls out his service weapon and starts firing into the crowd.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is a true story.

CHASE HUGHES: True story.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. But is he a monster? Of course not. Because context dictated what he would do. So if I can change context to where what I want you to do is just an automatic thing, I can make you do anything. The real skill is just being able to shift perception and context. If you can just shift perception and context, you can radicalize someone on the Internet and turn them into a shooter. You can radicalize somebody politically and make them excommunicate their entire family over a Thanksgiving.

I’ll give you an example from the UK. In 1979, there was a fire in Manchester in a Woolworths department store.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: And it was during the daytime. Doors were open, and it turned out that most of the people that died were in the restaurant. The restaurant was right by the door. So the fire inspector looked, and they were trying to figure this out. And a psychologist finally came along and said they died because they were waiting to pay their bill, because no one gave them permission to stand up and walk out. No one did it first. So they kind of just went along with the crowd. And in the context of a restaurant, you don’t stand up and walk out until you’ve paid your bill.

So the context can also lead us into something like that. The perception of the situation — even though there’s a fire — I’m locked in the context of sitting in a restaurant. And that’s been tested time and time again, where people will sit in a smoke-filled room long enough to die just because nobody else is moving. So context matters.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how does that pertain to being able to persuade people? For Debbie in Ohio, who’s listening — how does she work and think about context when she’s in a sales meeting, speaking to her husband, her son, whoever it might be?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

The Power of Framing and Context in Conversations

CHASE HUGHES: One of the best things that you can learn when it comes to being able to shift context is setting the frame of what every interaction is, and being the one to openly say what the frame is as the conversation starts.

Let’s say you’re talking to a kid and it’s a parent talking to a kid. The kid thinks they’re in trouble. That’s the context they have. And I need to shift their perception of our situation before I can change their context. So we sit down, we start the conversation, and I’m like, “I’m so glad that we can have this talk in a calm way that is focused on learning instead of punishment.” A massively transformed perception and context. So I’ve changed what this means and the definition of what’s allowed here.

So context gives us the final P, which is permission. So if I change your perception of a conversation — and you can do that right away — and if I’m entering into a negotiation and we start the room with, “I’m glad that we could all come here for this. And I know both of us want to find common ground as fast as possible. And I suggest that maybe we even start there.” So I’m setting a frame right from the very beginning.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s so surprising how few of us do that when we go into a conversation. I was just thinking back over the last sort of 10 days of my life in business meetings, very important business meetings in Los Angeles with new potential partners, and walking into the boardroom and sitting down and doing the formalities of like, “Oh, hi, how’s your weather? Where do you live? Oh, fine.” And then a little bit of quiet. We introduce ourselves. And nobody really sets the frame, or someone sets the frame, but it isn’t you.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And actually that meeting would have been much more productive if I had volunteered up a frame very early. And it was a frame in line with whatever I’m trying to get out of that meeting.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And anytime you’re setting a frame or just kind of setting the perception of what’s going on, especially in business, start out with a negative first, because people complain about stuff in business all the time, and then go to the positive. So you’re doing kind of a contrasting statement. So like, let’s say in the last meeting you had, if you said something like, “I’m so glad we’re meeting today, guys. There’s so many people out there that just fall into these competitive mindsets. And it’s really good to do business with people that are in a collaborative mindset instead of a competitive mindset.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: The frame that I wish I’d said, based on all of the context, was I’d walked into that room wanting to get a deal done because I’m sick of f*ing talking about it on emails and meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. So I wish I’d walked in and said something to the effect of, “I’m so glad we could meet in person to finally really make progress on this. Because there’s been so much talk about theoretical deals. And I feel like getting us together can get us much closer, much quicker to figuring out a real deal that we can work on.” Or words to that effect. Because I think that would have started the conversation away from the theoretical if I just called it out. But unfortunately I didn’t say that. And we spent a lot of time just talking about theoretical stuff again.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And you can do that with permission at the beginning, with a permission phrase, and just say, “Hey, just so I understand — and I may be wrong here — but what I understand is the purpose of this meeting is for us to kind of compile all these Zooms that we’ve been on for months and months and finally get something done and put a bow on it, that we have some kind of finished product, even if it’s not perfect yet. We have something tangible.” And that’s permission. So you’re like, “I might be wrong about this.” But of course, they’ll probably agree with that.

Framing in Relationships and Media

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the same applies, actually, for romantic relationships. Thinking about having an argument with your partner, you can go in just emotion versus emotion if you don’t take a minute to just define what we’re trying to accomplish from this. And then when people drift — because they do in emotional situations — you’ve got a frame to bring them back into that you pre-agreed on. Because when you get those, they’ll bring up something your mother did four years ago or something, and it just drifts away from the frame.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And if you watch the media, especially the opinion side of the media, and they talk about a politician that they don’t like, what do they start out with? “This is going to scare you.” “In another piece of terrifying news, here’s what this guy did today up on the stage, this politician did.” So they set the frame for it to be terrifying. They’re setting up your perception from the very beginning. And then if I change the context — in one context, yeah, maybe this politician’s a bad guy. Another context is this person is a threat to democracy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard that phrase a lot.

CHASE HUGHES: A lot. And what do we do to threats to our entire democracy? We kill them. So we start radicalizing people instantly, without them really even processing that they’re internalizing it. We were radicalizing people just through that context.

So if you can modify perception and context, you can give someone that permission — that final piece — to do anything. Let’s go back to the police officer in the hypnosis show. He had the permission to start firing his firearm because of the context of being attacked by someone with a weapon. So once the context shifts, your social permission of what you’re allowed to do changes. Like, I don’t strip down and get naked in my office, but I do when I’m standing in front of a hot shower. That is the permission to do things differently.

So if you want someone to do something that they normally wouldn’t do, the question you ask yourself is: in what context would the decision I need this person to make be an automatic thing? If we agreed on 10 different things out of 11, then the automatic thing would be for us to sign an agreement together.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: Or if I’m being shot at, the automatic thing for me is to draw my weapon and fire back. So it’s an automatic behavior that typically in another situation would violate social permissions. Like, I don’t have social permission to behave in that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was reading about the story that you referenced. I think I found the one. In December 1923, the New York Times reported on it regarding a tragedy in Croatia, where an Austrian hypnotist ended up firing into the crowd and killed three people and wounded several others before he was snapped out of his trance. Upon realizing that he had done it, the officer reportedly arrested the hypnotist on the spot, which is strange.

CHASE HUGHES: That’s called cognitive dissonance. Yeah.

Helping Audiences Stay Objective in a Polarized World

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow. Okay, so PCP — I understand that. One of the things I was thinking about is, is there any way for my audience listening now, based on everything you know about Psyops and the way that we’re manipulated with media, is there any way that we might be able to help them be more objective in a world that is trying to force them into one frame or the other?

Because I speak to so many different people, and I’m going to speak to someone on the right, someone on the left, up, down, left, right. I don’t really — as long as I think I’m going to be able to have a conversation with them, I’m going to meet them as I find them and I’m going to have a conversation with them. And there’s really no external pressure that’s going to change that. I’ve had all the external pressure in the world and I’m not going to change that, because I have to do this myself for a long period of time. So the thing that’s going to keep me in love with this job is to be able to follow my curiosity and not be trapped by anyone else’s pressure.

But that requires your audience as well to be open-minded. Which means that if I sit here with Kamala Harris or with Donald Trump, I want my audience to come into the conversation with as open a mind as they possibly are able to.

CHASE HUGHES: Let’s talk about how to manipulate your next podcast guest into being more open-minded.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

Negative Dissociation: A Technique for Opening Minds

CHASE HUGHES: This technique is something we teach called negative dissociation. And the way that it works is I’ll make a small — it should sound like an observation about the world. So in our discussion, let’s say we just sat down and I’d say, “You know what, I’m glad I’m interviewing with you. There’s a lot of people out there that are just so closed off and locked in these little rigid beliefs. And I’m not sure whether it is they’re just terrified of what people are going to think about them if they step outside the lines, or if they’re scared of being open-minded to these other beliefs. I’m not sure which one it is, but you meet these people so often.”

And you’re going to nod. You nodded your head while I was saying that, because what I’m saying sounds true and it probably is. But you’re making that person very covertly agree that they are not that person. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It makes perfect sense.

CHASE HUGHES: So throughout the conversation, what you’re really doing is you’re not getting them to make an agreement about how they’re going to act — you’re getting them to make an agreement about who they are as a human being. So the moment you can get them to covertly make an “I am” statement in their head, you’re hacking your way into that person’s identity.

So let’s say you said that, they nodded, and then maybe a few minutes later you’re like, “I got a confession to make. I had social anxiety growing up. How did you get this open about everything? Have you always been this way? Or was this through some kind of leadership training or something like that that you went to?” And the moment they answer that question, you’ve got them to commit. Now they’re fully committed to being wide open for the rest of the conversation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would you assume they would then say in such a scenario?

CHASE HUGHES: They’re like, “I don’t know. I think I’ve always been really open. I haven’t been really scared about what people think about me. And I’ve always tried to wear my heart on my sleeve.” So now you’re getting them to make all these commitments that they’re going to be

STEVEN BARTLETT: like that going forward.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. I mean, you’re not permanently changing a human being, but it’s a temporary change that they will make for one little compartment of an interaction with you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is this because you’re really speaking to their — you said — their identity, their sense of who they want to be. And that’s heavily driven by social perception and what I think of them.

The Power of Identity and Pre-Commitment

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, but it’s not who they want to be, it’s who they say they are. And those are different. Bob Cialdini’s got a great example of this. They got these people to stick signs in their yard — these giant, ugly signs that say “Drive Safe” on them. And the way that they got like 85% of this neighborhood to stab them into their yard, these nasty, stupid-looking signs, was a week prior they knocked on their door and said, “Hey, I have a one-question survey. It’ll take 15 seconds. Do you support safe driving? Yes or no?” Of course everyone’s going to say yes. And so now they’ve made a commitment about who they are — who are you as a person?

Then they said, “All right, thank you so much for that. And just to show your support, could you put this tiny, small sticker in the window of your house facing the street?” And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah.” And they go stick it on the window. But they’re more likely to do it because they just said yes.

Anyone who said, “Yes, I support safe driving,” a week later would stick that giant stupid-looking sign in their front yard. And they double-blinded this. They did it in another neighborhood where they didn’t go door to door first — they just went door to door and said, “Hey, can we put this giant ugly sign in your yard?” And like 1% of people said yes, as opposed to like 85% in the other neighborhood. But it’s a tiny agreement about who you are as a person.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this is the power of pre-committing — getting someone to pre-commit to something before you ask them to do it.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you get them to pre-commit in terms of their identity and who they think they are and who they want to be.

The Power of Pre-Commitment and Identity

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, but you’re not getting them. I’m not using this technique to go to make you sign a contract. I’m using it to just make subtle shifts in how you’re behaving in our conversation. So if I wanted you to focus on me more, I’d do the opposite of the negative dissociation thing. And remember, I’m not talking about you. Because if I’m sitting here saying, “Oh, Steven, you pay attention so well in a conversation,” that sounds super weird and manipulative.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People say that to me all the time.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, maybe they want to. In reality, if I do the opposite of what that negative dissociation statement did, and I make a positive group of people and assign an attribute to them. So that’s how you would do this.

So it’s like, “You know, Steven, it’s amazing. Every time I meet these really high performing CEOs, all of these Fortune 100 companies that I work with, you sit down with one of these CEOs, it’s like they all have the exact same quality. You sit down with these people and they stop what they’re doing and they just completely tune in to other people when they talk to them.”

So I’m taking a quality that I know you admire, like CEOs, all this kind of stuff, and I’m assigning a trait to that. And you’re going to nod, and that sounds kind of true, but it also means that you’re agreeing that you are also that type of person. But I’m never saying it about you.

So if I’m talking directly about you, which is what so many influence people teach out there, like, “Oh, I can tell that you this,” or “I can tell that you’re the kind of person that blank and blank and blank,” this is called aiming language. My language is aimed at you and you can feel it. And people can feel that there’s something going on if somebody’s sitting there making guesses and weird assumptions about them.

So anytime you’re using any of these techniques, it should feel and sound like you’re making an observation about the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting how this sort of power of pre-commitment can also be used on yourself to get you to do things.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As you were saying, I was looking down at some research here. There are multiple studies that I find fascinating. One of them is a study conducted at MIT with students. They gave these MIT students three major papers for their semester. One class was given ultimate freedom. They could turn in all three papers at the very end of the semester with no penalty. The other class was forced to pre-commit to strict, evenly spaced deadlines throughout the semester. And the students who had total freedom performed the worst and experienced the most stress. The students who pre-committed to certain deadlines produced the highest quality work and got the best grades.

It proved that intentionally restricting our own future choices through pre-commitments is often the best way to beat procrastination.

And I remember the study they did with people on a beach where they had a fake thief run past someone next to you on the beach and grab a radio. And 20% of people would chase the person. But if someone had said to you seconds earlier, “Hey, I’m just going to get an ice cream.”

CHASE HUGHES: “Can you take a look?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: “Can you just watch my stuff?” 95% of people would then chase the person stealing the radio, because we’ve made a pre-commitment to another person.

So pre-commitments can work with yourself or with others. Which is fascinating, especially to yourself. I find that interesting, that I can change my own behavior by making a pre-commitment attached to my own identity.

I guess there’s one more I’ll share, which is this study around savings. They found that people who committed to saving, even if they wrote it on a piece of paper, were up to five times — in percentage terms, they went from saving 3% to saving roughly 15% — just because they’d done a pre-commitment, even years earlier, that they would save.

CHASE HUGHES: That’s beautiful. I love that. And you’re kind of just pre-doing your own identity. And if somebody wants to master that, you make it about your social commitment to yourself, to other people. But publicly say, “I am this kind of person,” to yourself. So it’s not like, “I’m going to go to the gym tomorrow.” It’s, “I am the kind of person that goes to the gym.” That is a much more powerful identity-based action.

And identity is the number one thing in the world when it comes to persuasion and influence.

Anxiety, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Hallway of Influence

The way that I teach this to intelligence people is: when you’re good at influence, you’re building two walls. One wall is anxiety and the other one is cognitive dissonance. And the hallway that you’re creating is the relief from those things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are those two things? I know what anxiety is, but what’s cognitive dissonance?

CHASE HUGHES: Well, the anxiety is like, if I don’t do what I say, I’m going to face social rejection. Or if I go here and I break this rule or I don’t do this, I’m going to break a social contract with somebody.

The cognitive dissonance is, “I am the kind of person that does this,” and if I don’t do this, I’m not keeping with who I said I am and who I agreed to be. So that’s like when some politician wins the presidential election that someone doesn’t like — you have that cognitive dissonance. Either A, I have to decide that, wow, a lot of people like this person, or B, everyone’s stupid. And it’s a lot easier for me to just say everybody’s stupid. And we always take that path.

So cognitive dissonance means that it’s bouncing them back into the hallway every time they bump up against something that they’ve previously agreed to.

And identity is the way that you can hack your own behavior so fast. The way that I explain this to people, it takes 30 seconds to understand it.

If you were an Olympic athlete and you had a badass body — like you had a healthy diet, everything was in perfect shape, you woke up every morning, you had great energy and all that stuff — and one day you woke up for some reason and you’re 295 pounds, and you wake up, you look in the mirror, and something weird happened overnight. How fast would you get back to that body? It would be lightning. You may set world records for weight loss, because your identity is with that body. It’s not, “Oh, I want to lose this weight so I can be healthy.” It’s, “This is not me.”

And anytime you’re feeling, “This is not me,” or “This is against who I am as a person,” it’s the most powerful motivator when it comes to influencing other people and influencing ourselves.

A goal — like a weight loss thing — that I have a lot of my clients do is to download the Face app. There’s an app that’ll make you look super fat and really obese. Print it off and put it on your refrigerator. And then people are like, “Oh, well, aren’t I programming my subconscious to be fat?” No. You’re programmed to go away from bad things first, never toward positive things first. It’s always away. Your ancestors lived because they mistook a rock for a bear, not the other way around. Never the other way around.

So you’re not going to accidentally program your brain — and I’m the brain guy — but put that on the fridge and you start hacking into your own identity. But you’re doing it in a way that your mammalian brain, the thing that runs the show, can see it and understands it instantly. There’s no words, there’s no motivational phrases or anything like that. It picks up on it instantly and starts setting a course forward, because it’s cognitive dissonance that you’re creating for yourself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember Nir Eyal, who I interviewed, who wrote the book on procrastination called Indistractable, said to me a phrase that’s always stayed with me. We spoke for six, seven hours, me and Nir. Just this one phrase I always think about. He said that humans are discomfort-avoiding creatures, and we think that we’re pleasure-seeking creatures.

But when he said discomfort-avoiding, I really interrogated him. I was like, “Yeah, but what about horniness that makes me have sex?” And he was like, “Well, actually that horniness is a form of discomfort. Your body is sending you this sort of almost irritation which is making you take an action.”

And I stress-tested it across many areas of my life. I was like, actually he’s right, I’m trying to avoid discomfort. And in your example of seeing myself on the fridge — yeah, I would want to avoid that. It would cause such dissonance to my identity that I would do everything to avoid that feeling.

CHASE HUGHES: Some big ass fat Steven on the fridge.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I mean, that’s actually every couple of years. What gets me back in shape is catching myself in the mirror, or because I’m always on camera, sometimes I don’t see myself kind of getting out of shape. And then I watch the podcast back and I’m like, “Oh, f*.” Like Jack didn’t tell me, or no one’s told me. And then I’m like, right, gym every day again. Yeah, interesting.

CHASE HUGHES: And it’s social because you’re making this commitment in front of a million people.

Authority, Leadership, and the AI Age

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. What else do you think is important to know as we head into this AI world where human skills and people skills are going to be more important than ever? What other frameworks have you got for me that I should bear in mind?

CHASE HUGHES: As we go into AI, your leadership style — everyone’s leadership style — needs to be front and center. And I know there’s a lot of books out there that are technically about leadership, but I think they’re about management and they call themselves a leadership book.

When I teach, what’s most important when it comes to understanding ourselves is developing authority. But that authority has those five traits of authority. This is confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. Do you do show notes where people can download stuff in the description?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, sometimes.

CHASE HUGHES: I’ll send this inventory to you where people can take this quiz. And it’s the most revealing thing about your leadership power.

But what people tend to do is seek out the wrong type of authority. I learned this with 20 years of working with people — that we will tend to seek one of these little avenues that looks a certain way because we think that’s what leadership is supposed to look like, that’s what authority is supposed to look like.

There are three types, and the three types that I’ve broken them down into — and how authority channels to other people, because authority looks different in different people — are the president, the professor, and the artist.

So like the artist, you can think of somebody like Johnny Depp. The president, you can think of somebody like Obama. The professor, you can think of the classic movie professor. They still broadcast authority, but it’s not loud, it’s not extremely directive. And the artist can hold a ton of attention, and in some rooms doesn’t hold any attention at all. The authority’s still there, the attention isn’t.

For somebody that’s super calm, even if they’re the CEO of a company, they might be the professor. And the whole time their idea of what leadership looks like is this president. So they’re faking their way into this thing, and it never feels real. Even though their authority’s really high, they have this weird feeling of inauthenticity because they’re pushing towards the wrong authority channel.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the cost of that?

CHASE HUGHES: I think that it detracts from your level of authority, which automatically means that you’re getting less outcomes that you want.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In life, because your inauthenticity — to both others and yourself — pays a toll on you. So if I’m inauthentic to you, then that’s going to hurt my authority, but then if I’m inauthentic to myself, it’s going to hurt my happiness, I guess.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to feel like I’m — again, going back to your point about identity — unfulfilled.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And I think when people say authenticity, we should note that what most people call authenticity is a costume of childhood beliefs. “My authentic self” and how I act is typically what I was in childhood — how I deal with conflict, how I make friends, how I stay safe. All these little patterns that I learned when I was 8 or 9, I’m still repeating a lot of that stuff.

So when we say authenticity, it’s always important to think that it’s authenticity plus removal of ego and a willingness to receive social injury. And that’s the best way that I’ve ever been able to describe that to somebody. Like, if I’m being authentic in a conversation, then I’m willing to receive a social injury for it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cody Sanchez said something to me which has stayed with me. She said, again, I’m going to butcher it, but words to the effect of, “I won’t be friends with anyone in private that won’t say something in public that will cost them something.” And going to your point about social injury, I think what Cody’s actually saying is, that’s how I know that they’re authentic, is they’re willing to risk something for something they believe.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I also think this is how you know a brand’s authentic. Like, are they willing to cause social injury in the near term for something they believe in the long term? You know?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And a lot of the recent brand debacles that we’ve had is they thought they were doing something to avoid social injury that caused a massive social injury.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because people said, “You’re not being authentic to your audience.” When they tried to get into identity politics and stuff like that. Like extreme virtue signaling and stuff like that.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which backfires.

The Childhood Development Triangle

CHASE HUGHES: Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sure.

CHASE HUGHES: I think it’s super important for people to know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sure.

CHASE HUGHES: I’m a behavior profiler, and one of the things that I teach everybody is this thing called the childhood development triangle. So it’s just three sides of this triangle.

The first side is: what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends? Friends is one side. Then, to feel safe — what did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like somebody gives me a hug at the end of the day. For some kids it was like, “Am I going to eat today?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: For some kids it’s like cracking jokes.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, “I’m going to crack jokes and keep friends.” “I’m going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room.” “I’m going to become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me.” Or “I’m going to become safe by being hyper vigilant,” because I don’t know if dad drank before he got home or if he’s going to start drinking when he got home.

So it’s like, what are the scripts that that child needed to run on autopilot to feel safe, to make friends, and then to get rewards? And that would be the third side. The rewards for some kids might just be appreciation — and it’s typically just appreciation, affection, love.

That tends to get written in childhood. And the kid who writes all these permanent scripts, they put them in a backpack and carry them all the way into adulthood. And 90% of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life.

If you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there’s a meeting, she wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down and all that kind of stuff. You’re seeing an 8-year-old who got yelled at at a family dinner table, that’s all. But you’re just seeing it in a grown-up body.

Recognizing Childhood Patterns in the People Around Us

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what you’ve just said.

I have two colleagues that I work with and I got six months into working with one of them and I could always tell that there was something not quite right. Because whenever I was in the room, they would stare at me a lot and they would be a little bit more on the pessimistic side than I’m used to.

And one day at dinner I was talking to them about their childhood and they offered up that their dad’s mood could change rapidly and he was always pointing out why something would never work. He was an extreme pessimist. And suddenly this person who is in my life suddenly made sense. I completely understand it. Because you grew up in that environment where to be safe, you had to pay attention to the authority figure. And you learned maybe that pessimism was a way to safety.

And then there’s another colleague who’s actually in the room over there. I’ll ask her before we publish this if I can say this publicly, but similar thing. She expressed to me that she had a dad whose mood would change rapidly. And I said to her one day, “Sarah, you’re always staring at me. Whenever I look at you, you’re already looking at me. It’s like you’re overanalyzing and overthinking.”

And she explained to me the same thing. She said, “When I grew up, my dad’s mood would just change like this.” So every time she’s preempting — she’s like a radical preemptor, thinking 20 steps ahead of what might go wrong — which makes her exceptional at her job. But one might assume that that comes at some kind of cost.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, very true, very true.

Understanding and Applying the Triangle

CHASE HUGHES: The way that I want people to think about this — it’s not where you can kind of go back and sit there for five minutes, put it on a post-it note, and then figure your whole life out. I wish I had a trick to do that.

But the way I want people to think about this is: going back to your childhood, a lot of those things are just contracts that were written in a child’s voice. And when you start hearing these patterns repeating in your head, force yourself to hear the voice of a kid. That’s all it is. It’s just a kid who made these choices. It’s not an adult.

So we’re typically three different people. All of us. We have a work self, a professional kind of self. We have a home self. And we have a self with friends. And what is that as a kid? That’s classroom, playground, home.

I’ll typically take people through this process of where were you around authority figures — which is like classroom or home. What were you like when all your friends were around, you got made fun of, or you had to become really small. That goes on the friends side of the triangle, and that talks about the social patterns that are going to show up for you.

Somebody says, “I keep attracting these negative people into my life. Why do I do that?” That goes back to these patterns. Because if I do this, I know this is going to happen. It’s just completing a story archetype.

So that’s the childhood development triangle. And it is really powerful to start understanding our own patterns. I’m not saying that there are six steps that are going to change your whole freaking life. The awareness is what you want. You want massive self-knowledge and self-awareness, with the side agreement of: “I am not special, and I’m completely okay if I am never understood.”

Because most of what happens when we get into arguments with our spouse, or we get into these arguments with people at work — it’s our argument to be understood more than it is to come to a solution. “I need you to understand me.” So getting okay with the idea that you might never ever be understood is step number one. Number two: “I am not special.” And that helps us to open the door to start coming into a lot of these things.

But if you’re a leader at work, you can start seeing these patterns in your employees and be like, “I see an 8-year-old there.” And if you get to a point where you’re seeing behavior that might have pissed you off in somebody that works for you and you’re like, “Wait a second, now I can see exactly what’s going on because this, this, and this probably happened” — you don’t need to make some prediction or fortune-telling thing about their childhood. But you’re starting to see these patterns, and you know now how your team’s going to respond in conflict.

If it’s a social conflict, you’re seeing all their friends patterns. And if it’s a conflict where somebody might be losing their job, you’re going to see their safety patterns come out. And you’ll see your own.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think I should go to the key people in my life, maybe my team, and ask them these questions? Like, “How did you make friends?” Is that the question?

CHASE HUGHES: “What did you do to make and keep friends?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: “What did you do to make and keep friends?” And what was the safety question again?

CHASE HUGHES: “What did you need to do or avoid to feel safe?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the rewards one?

CHASE HUGHES: You want to put the word “feel” in there: “What did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards? And what were rewards to you?”

It was appreciation for some. Or somebody that’s hyper significance-driven — like, “I’ve got to have the Rolex, I’ve got to have the Ferraris” — they never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate, or their teacher called and said they did a good job, or they played the piano recital and did a great job and lots of people were acknowledging them and clapping for them. They only got acknowledged when they were socially significant.

How the Triangle Connects — A Personal Example

STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I right in thinking that these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways? Because when you’re talking about safety, I was running through my head the things that made me feel safe and they were rewards that I could tell my friends about. So I touched all three of them.

Part of it is because I was very different to my social group when I was younger. We were the black family. There wasn’t another black family that I knew of — other than maybe one other kid — in the area in Plymouth in 1994 or ’95. So some of the material things I wanted, like the shoes that everyone had, made me feel safe because they made me fit in. And that got me friends. Or at least I thought it did. So for me it really was like an interconnected triangle.

CHASE HUGHES: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s just one of many examples that I could think of.

CHASE HUGHES: It does tend to do that, and I will typically wait for somebody to figure that out. As they’re filling it up, they’re kind of like, “Oh, I did this because of this, to get to this.” And you’ll see a little cycle start happening.

But it’s great for self-knowledge. And if you’re a behavior profiler, that’s what’s going to run people. You’re going to know how they’re going to respond to conflict. You’re going to know what they’re going to avoid. If you’re putting teams together, you know what people you want to have working with each other. And it doesn’t have to be some complex nine-hour thing. You can see this stuff in everyday life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re not saying that I need to radically change.

CHASE HUGHES: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But what if one part of this triangle — one behavior I’ve learned for safety or for rewards or for friends — is making my life worse? It could be ruining my life. Like it could be the thing standing in the way of me having a romantic relationship, or getting a promotion, or building a business. It’s getting in the way now. What do I do, Chase?

Rewiring Limiting Beliefs: The Wallpaper Technique

CHASE HUGHES: So you’ve identified the pattern. Let’s assume that you’ve got it. You’re like, “Oh, I’ve got this. That’s happening on repeat.”

The part two of this is I need to focus on that being a kid that belongs to a child. And I need to write down, like, here’s how that child wrote the contract, made the promise to themselves, developed the contract. And then even if you make it up, like, when did this kid bring it into adulthood? “I need to stay small in order to stay safe.” Let’s say it’s one of those things. And then you just start telling yourself, “That is a child’s voice. That’s a child’s voice.”

So the voice is not going to go away. That’s the sad part. That’s like you trying to not complete the sentence, “Mary had a little…” in your head. You can’t get rid of it. No matter how hard you try to delete that, it’s repeated over years and years.

What truly changes for you is hearing a child, hearing a misguided child who developed a coping mechanism for the world, not knowing that they were like, they just assumed, “I’m going to have this forever. I’m going to need this as an adult. I’m going to bring this into my adult life.”

Part two of this is you make a wallpaper or something for your desktop. And we’re talking about being negatively motivated, we’re away from negative things. You make a motivational wallpaper that has your big limiting belief on it. And then take it to an extreme.

I had a client that had this, “If I stay small, I’m going to be safe.” And he was in a business, he owned a business, but he wouldn’t go get these big clients and he wouldn’t go do this. And the guy’s got three kids. And I said, “I want you to make a desktop wallpaper that says, ‘My kids don’t deserve for me to be successful.’ And I want you to look at it every single day when you turn your computer on, because that’s exactly what your belief is saying.”

Because if your kids truly deserved it, it would override the belief. So you just need to write the belief in plain English. And what it’s truly, truly costing you in your life is, “My kids don’t deserve me to be successful. My kids don’t deserve money.” And that’s what it comes down to.

And every day you look at it, you have a feeling of disgust, and there’s a hyper awareness of that thing running in your head. You’re going to be more prone to hear it when it does come up. And you’re also training yourself to hear it as a child’s voice, which means you’re going to start hearing fiction. You’re still hearing the same sentence, but you’re hearing a fictional story.

Building New Evidence and Embracing the Long Game

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s two parts to this. I love this. The first is, in doing so, in waking up in the morning and seeing my wallpaper that says, “My kids don’t deserve a great life,” or whatever, of course it’s going to motivate me to take action, which is then going to start to build new evidence. Once I take action, once I win that big client and I realize that everything’s fine, which is going to change my life.

And then the second point I wanted to point out is, people listen to podcasts like this, and they write this stuff down, and then they have relapses and things don’t change fast enough. And I think that can sometimes make them feel hopeless or inadequate because they heard it on the Diary of a CEO or whatever, and then they did it for a bit and they struggled and it didn’t quite work out, and then they went back to their old behavior.

And I think, in part, this happens because we live under the presumption that this stuff is easy and it’s fast and that at some point in the future, I can fix my trauma. I think one of the best realizations I ever had was realizing that the stuff that I’ve carried with me in that backpack since I was a kid, that the stuff about what will make me safe or what will reward me or how I’ll make friends or who I am, whatever my survival mechanisms, they will be with me forever. And actually, instead of trying to delete them, like throw them out the backpack, what I was able to do is turn down their ability to make the decision.

Micro Compliance: The Secret Behind Influence and Belief Change

CHASE HUGHES: That’s it. That’s it. You’ve totally got it. And I would say this for anybody out there that you’re trying to go through this and you’re having a hard time. I get it. It’s totally tough.

The number one way that we influence another human being — let me just kind of metaphor this for one second. When you watch a hypnotist, and hypnosis is something anybody can learn to do, it’s a pretty easy thing, so it looks very dramatic. But one of the things you’ll see me do at the beginning of that is, “Go ahead and give me your hand,” and I’ll hold their hand for a second. “Put both hands out like this and then flip them over. That’s great. Now just, just to test your eyes really quick, look all the way up and look all the way down. Look all the way left. Look all the way right. All right, then spread your feet a little further apart. A little closer together. Actually, no, face this way.”

Now I’ll make them do like 50 things. None of the things that I just did with them are meaningful. None of them. Everything was micro compliance.

So this is how social media starts roping you in. This is how politics starts roping you in. This is how cult leaders will recruit you into a cult — micro compliance. And you don’t realize that you’re going through this massive amount of compliance.

Like, you go through a doctor’s physical and they go through like this 90-point checklist. They’ve made you do 50 things and then they recommend a weird drug or they recommend you get on some other drug. Take some time to think about it, because our brain is hardwired for these micro compliances.

So I say this to say that if you’re going through any of these things and you’re trying to change your beliefs or you’re trying to change something in your body, use what works for brainwashing, and figure out a way that you can get micro compliance with your own goals on a very regular basis. Small little wins. So your brain has that. Just like hypnosis, just like cult recruiting, just like brainwashing, small little things at the very beginning. So everything in influence should be looked at as a wedge. Everything.

The Milgram Experiment and the Power of Focus

STEVEN BARTLETT: It reminds me of that famous study they did where they got people to give electric shocks to other people. The Milgram obedience experiment.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they managed to get a member of the public to give another member of the public lethal electric shocks just through sort of micro compliance, but also through authority, because the experimenters were wearing white jackets, white overalls, et cetera.

CHASE HUGHES: And here’s the second thing in that experiment that’s going to perfectly tie back to this. So this experiment that you’re talking about happened at Yale University. It was 1962. And there’s tons of data on it. But essentially, strangers would shock another person seemingly, or what they thought was to death, just because some dude in a lab coat told them to.

But what they didn’t account for, and even Dr. Milgram’s book was called Obedience to Authority, they thought it was all about the authority. The lab coat, the guy’s tall, it’s a professional setting. But really, think about if you go back to our ancestors — the most important resource to your ancestors was focus. There’s nothing more important than focus. And the number one way to generate focus, because if I don’t have your focus, I can’t command authority.

So focus is always first. Focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. Those are the four things that govern a mammal. All mammals, dolphins, doesn’t matter. So I have to have focus before authority. And they didn’t talk about that.

The way to get focus is through novelty, meaning something unexpected is occurring. So if you walk past the same bush every day 10,000 years ago, and your job is to carry fish from the river, and suddenly you walk past that bush and you hear a big stick snap, all of your focus, all of it, is on that stick. It’s not on your kids, it’s not on your health, it’s not on anything that’s going on. It’s on this new, unexpected piece of information that hijacks our brain. Anything novel hijacks our brain.

So it follows that pathway — focus, then authority, then tribe, what’s everybody else doing, and then emotion, then how do I feel about it? And what happens is we are hardwired to respond to these things. You cannot decide not to respond to novelty. Your head turns to loud sounds. All this stuff happens.

So the way that if you’re trying to do this, like brainwash yourself, is change your house up, change something up in your life, change your wardrobe, repaint the walls in your office, move your furniture around, buy a new car if you can. I want you to just imagine, how would I influence my dog in this situation? I would need imagery. I would need something to shift. If I move the kitchen table to the side and move all the furniture, when my dog comes out of the bedroom, he’s going to know something’s different.

Novelty, the Wallpaper Filter, and the Secret of Great Marketing

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I think this is one of the great secrets of good marketing, is that it beats your brain’s wallpaper filter. And I wrote a little bit about this in my last book about this idea of beating the wallpaper filter. I think we talked a little bit about it last time.

But I talked about a study where they got a rat and put it in a maze with chocolate at the other end of the maze. And they looked at the rat’s brain as it went through the maze the first time and they saw that the rat’s brain was like exploded with activity. It’s smelling the walls, it’s trying to figure it out. And then they put the rat in the maze the second time and there’s almost no brain activity because it’s on autopilot. It knows the maze, so it doesn’t need to use any of its cognitive resources. Its cognitive resources can be allocated to new surprising things. The maze is no longer surprising. Whizzes through the maze to the chocolate.

And even as you think about how you got out of your bed this morning and got down to the kitchen, you didn’t have to think, so you paid no attention. But you would have paid attention if you walked down there and the sofa wasn’t there.

And how does that then apply to marketing? How do you surprise people? That is a central question of anyone who’s trying to build a personal brand, start a podcast, or do marketing. But I guess also to persuade people.

So one of the things I think about a lot when I talk on stage is I know I’m competing with your mobile phone, your Twitter feed, or your TikTok. So I have to do something almost every 10 seconds to catch you off guard. And MrBeast, I guess, is the great master of this. And it’s probably why he’s got half a billion YouTube followers. Because the minute that video starts,

CHASE HUGHES: We’re hooked in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re hooked.

The Four-Step Attention Formula: Focus, Authority, Tribe, Emotion

CHASE HUGHES: But this, I mean, that’s the power of novelty. I would challenge anybody to take this challenge. If you’re scrolling through short-form content, watch for something that jerks your attention, like some kind of weird novelty thing that happens. And that video is probably a short 20, maybe 40-second video that captures your focus through novelty.

The next video, watch for an authority figure — a famous YouTuber, a celebrity, a politician, a pop singer who thinks that they know politics, all that kind of stuff. Watch for an authority figure.

Next, watch for a tribe signal. So a tribe signal is going to be, “Here’s how many people agree with this. Here’s lots of people doing one thing. These tickets are selling out. Here’s the Taylor Swift concert, here’s everyone cheering at the concert.” Here’s how you’re supposed to behave is basically what that means in the tribe section. You’re supposed to do what these people are doing.

And then watch for the emotion. So watch for this pattern. It’ll be a focus-generating novelty, then it’ll be authority, then you’ll see tribe, then you’ll see an emotional video. And guess what happens after the emotional video? Ad.

Making People Feel Clever: The Most Dangerous Persuasion Skill

STEVEN BARTLETT: I heard you say something as well, that if you want to persuade other people, you should make them feel clever.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Explain this to me.

CHASE HUGHES: I refer to this as maybe the most dangerous persuasion skill there is. The ten second brief is I’m going to put a Lego right here on the table in front of you and I’m going to put another Lego right here on the table in front of you, and I’m just going to keep having the conversation to where eventually your brain is going to be like, “Oh, I bet those things go together.” So the idea came from you.

I’m going to give you one piece of information and another piece of information, but I will never put them together for you. And the reason is that any idea that you think came from your own mind, you have no ability to resist it. So all I have to do is make you have an idea.

A regular example of this is let’s say you’re watching the news and they say, “Local Austin woman has been reported missing. Neighbors said that earlier this day people saw her arguing with her boyfriend.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: “Details after the break.” And your brain is like, “Oh, I know what happened. Oh, I know exactly what happened.” But they make you feel clever. They give you a piece of data and a piece of data, but they don’t tell you to put it together.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The media do this all the time.

CHASE HUGHES: Yes. And if you can do this in a courtroom, it will be the biggest unfair advantage you’ll ever have in a legal standing because it’ll win lots of trials.

The formula on how to use this is: here’s a piece of information, and it’s a piece of information that you will absolutely agree with, that makes sense to you, and another piece of information that makes sense to you. It has to be two things that make sense to your brain, because you’re not going to experiment with something that you’re not familiar with. So two pieces of familiar information close enough together where the brain is going to say, “Oh, you know what I can do? I’m going to put those two things together.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Isn’t that how conspiracy theories take hold as well?

CHASE HUGHES: Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a big enduring conspiracy theory that someone like Bill Gates has done things that are nefarious as it relates to health. I guess the two pieces people are connecting is they’re saying, well, he’s very rich and powerful, and he’s very, very interested in health, biotech, and vaccines and all these other things. And someone very, very powerful — we often think of very powerful, successful, influential people as being somewhat evil or not having our interests at heart. And then someone who’s spending a lot of money on the health and medical side of things is quite an unusual thing.

So we put two and two together. We think they have bad intentions because they are a billionaire, and that word comes with certain preconceptions, and then health, and then a pandemic happens. And I think this is how a lot of conspiracies form.

CHASE HUGHES: Name a movie from when you were a kid where the bad guy, or where the super rich person in the movie, wasn’t the evil one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s programmed into the media. It’s a definite programming that was very deliberate. In our country, it’s like always the rich people are evil. But then people will say, “Oh, well, Tony Stark was rich.” They made him a sociopath.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting because I think at some point it’s intentional, but at some point also, it becomes such a clear stereotype that you have to follow that stereotype when you’re writing movies, or else it doesn’t make sense to people.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, and I’m not saying it was intentional within the last 200 or 300 years. We’re talking about the Brothers Grimm, ancient fairy tales. I think it was intentional then — like, having wealth is bad, there’s virtue in poverty. That’s the big thing they wanted to communicate to their kids: poverty is virtuous. And of course, we’re still doing a lot of that stuff today. But I think it’s burned into some collective archetype of what stories have become.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we wouldn’t recognize it. So if I watched a movie and there was a very successful billionaire businessman, all I have to say is that for you to fill in the gaps — you’re thinking private jet, you’re thinking how they treat people, you’re thinking they’re on their phone with a briefcase, you’re thinking what they’re wearing. And I didn’t say any of that stuff.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, and you made me feel clever because I put all that stuff together that came from my own mind. And speaking of archetypes, that’s the second way that you can win any court case in the world.

Trial Consulting: Winning Court Cases Through Human Behavior

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you got experience with court cases and stuff like that?

CHASE HUGHES: A lot.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is your experience?

CHASE HUGHES: As far as I know, I’m the only trial consultant that offers a 200% money back guarantee when I work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean, as a trial consultant? What’s your objective?

CHASE HUGHES: In simple terms, it’s always a little different, and it depends on whether I’m working for prosecution or defense. I know nothing about the law, just about nothing. But I know people.

So I will typically go in and we’ll pick a jury. We want to select a jury based on this factor and this factor and based on this zip code. Here’s the question that we want to ask to find out which is going to be a good juror and which is a bad juror. But then I have to figure out questions that are covert. How can I covertly ask a question where the opposing counsel, the other attorney, won’t know what I desire and what I don’t desire based on the answer?

One case I worked was for a large grocery store company who was being sued because a lady slipped on a green bean. Real s*. And they hired me because it was a big, big lawsuit. I want a jury that has an internal locus of control — that they are in charge of their own life, they’re responsible for their destiny. And we want to weed out the people that have the opposite, the people that kind of have a victim mentality, like “the world happens to me,” that kind of thing.

So we have to figure out: how do I ask a question that A) reveals that, B) is covert, and C) is not going to expose what we’re looking for to opposing counsel?

So we’ll come out with a question like, “How does a person catch a cold?” And then you get one person that answers, “Well, these stupid kids picking their boogers or wiping them on the escalator, they’re coughing, sneezing all over the place, people aren’t wearing masks.” We ask the next guy, “How does a person catch a cold?” And he says, “Well, if I’ve ever caught a cold, I was in a place I shouldn’t have been. I didn’t wash my hands thoroughly enough. I didn’t take care of my body. I didn’t take vitamins. I didn’t take care of myself.” Very, very different. So we know what is satisfactory for us to select a jury. And that’s just one tiny example.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to pause you there because I just wanted to share something before we carry on with this story, because it’s fascinating, actually.

The last question I ask on our culture test, when we employ people for my company, we ask them 35 questions before they are offered the chance to interview. And the last question is, “When I don’t do great work, who’s to blame?” And it says: the people I worked with, I wasn’t giving clear enough instructions from a client or a boss or myself.

It’s remarkable that 45% of the population will click, “It was me.” When I don’t do great work, it’s not my team to blame, it’s not the person above or below me or some other factor — it is me. And that scores them — I shouldn’t say this because it’s going to ruin my test, but I’m going to just say it — that scores the highest marks on that particular question, because again, we’re trying to reveal if you have that sense of personal responsibility and internal locus of control, internal center of control in your life, which correlates to better work, more ambition, harder work, better long-term success, and more happiness. Sorry, please do continue.

CHASE HUGHES: And you can tell they’re driven too. They’re going to own their mistakes. They’re going to help other people be more accountable.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably going to learn faster because they’re going to take responsibility.

CHASE HUGHES: Absolutely. So with an archetype in the jury room — let’s say we’ve picked a jury. Then the goal is: what is the overall archetype of the case that’s playing out in front of us right here?

It’s a small person suing a big company. Let’s say if I’m on the opposite side, let’s say I’m on that lady’s side, then I’m going to come out and, without ever saying the name, I’m going to make you think David and Goliath all day long without knowing that I made you think David and Goliath. I might say “giant.” I might say “someone small.” I might say “slingshot.” I might say all these little keywords that are probably in your head about the David and Goliath story, just to plant that narrative in your head. And that might be the first three hours of the day, and I’ve jammed that into your head and you think it’s your own idea. This makes sense so far?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: So then the next time, maybe it’s a deposition or something like that, we’ll talk about waiting in line at the DMV. We’re going to talk about —

STEVEN BARTLETT: For people that don’t know the context there, because they’re not in the U.S. —

CHASE HUGHES: So waiting in line at this government identification card office —

STEVEN BARTLETT: Everyone around the world will have some form of that, when you’ve gone to get a passport or whatever.

The Time-Distance Problem and Archetypes in Persuasion

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. Waiting at passport control, your doctor’s office keeping you waiting for 45 minutes and not caring about your time. We’re going to talk about all these situations where a big, big company is screwing over another person or a big, big government doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing, they’re incompetent. So the attorney doesn’t say any of this. He’s just mentioning the scenario.

So if I mention a scenario, there’s like a little file clerk in your head. And if I mention any scenario, I can get that little guy to run down to the file cabinet and pull out a folder that has that stuff in there. So when I say hot air balloon, your file clerk runs down there and like, okay, I was at a hot air balloon festival in New Mexico or something and pulls that file out.

So if I can get your file clerk to keep pulling files out throughout the day, the one thing the file clerk does, and this is a gross generalization, is anything that’s pulled out throughout that day. And if it’s in one context, the file clerk leaves them all out on the desk. And if I can get enough files, all the files that I want out on that desk, that’s going to influence every decision that you make when you go home tonight.

So that’s kind of the pre-suasion, except I’m putting it in there in the form of an archetype. And if I get you to think David and Goliath, I want you to think that this is the midpoint of that story, not the end. So if I just get you to think this is probably David and Goliath, this is the middle part of the story. This is when the little kid, the shepherd kid, is walking down the hill to challenge the giant, your brain comes up with the ending to the story automatically. So these archetypes are so woven into us that we think, if I could just complete an archetype story, it’s justice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does archetype mean?

CHASE HUGHES: So an archetype is just like a brand of story.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: So like a hero’s journey, like a beginning, a middle tragedy, a loss and return, a rags to riches story, a wounded healer story, all these classic story types. So there’s like 12 story types. Joseph Campbell’s talked a lot about this. But if our brain has about 12 of these little archetypes, and if it’s like a wounded healer story and there’s a redemption thing at the end, which is called a redemption arc, I’m going to get the audience to see that we’re at the 75% mark right where it’s about to happen.

And if I just get you to see a situation through the lens of an archetype, your brain automatically, not just predicts, but you know how it’s going to end. And you want to make it in that way because it looks like justice, it looks like the right thing to do. And you don’t even know why your brain is trying to do that, even though I’m the one that’s jammed the archetype into your head for a couple of days.

Applying Archetypes in Everyday Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: So bringing this back to Debbie in Ohio.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How might she use such a strategy in her own life to get the best out of the people she works with or those around her?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So you can also use this as a profiling tool. If you take notes on this stuff about people in your office, I would keep them private, but figure out, like, what movie are they in? When they talk about their life, what movie are they in? You have that one guy in the office that wants to go on crazy adventures and do stuff that nobody else has done. That’s a Back to the Future archetype. You can make up your own archetypes. But if they’re doing all of this and everything’s going good, what’s the next thing they’re going to predict? They’re going to have a problem coming up in their life. So I know how they’re going to predict their future if I just know what story they’re in.

Ideology, the Hero’s Journey, and Persuasion

STEVEN BARTLETT: Andrew Bustamante, the CIA spy who I’ve had on the show a few times, told me about his RICE framework in espionage. Reward, ideology, coercion and ego. Reward being the things you want, like money. Ideology being, doing this is good for your family, doing this is good for your country. The C being coercion, which is pressurizing people, and the E being ego. He said of all four of these, ideology, understanding someone’s ideology, is the most persuasive, for when he was a spy.

And the way that I’ve kind of conceptualized that and maybe built upon it a little bit, and I’m saying that because I don’t want to be butchering his idea, is I think everybody has a hero’s journey that they’re on right now. And when you’re meeting them to get them to, maybe come and work at your company or persuading them to do a deal, the first great challenge is listening to them long enough for them to hand over their ideology to you so that you can speak to them not through your own ideology and what you want, but you can talk through their ideology.

And even with me, obviously, there’s a hero’s journey in my mind. There’s a story, all of us, that is behind me, but also, I want to be ahead of me. And if you can listen long enough to figure out what that is, you can tell me. Okay, Steve, I’m going to sell you this Range Rover and tell me the features of it or the benefits of it through the hero’s journey that I want to live out. Everyone listening right now has that. You have a hero’s journey that you’re on. And the most persuasive thing I think anyone could do is not just give you money or whatever, is to let them know that the thing you’re offering is going to realize that story or

CHASE HUGHES: at least the next chapter. Okay, so we don’t always want to sell a completion. We just want to say this is the logical next step of this story. Like, this guy did a bad thing. He needs to be punished. And what happens after the punishment? This is the learning the lesson and being redeemed arc. So we’re not going to tell a jury, or suggest to a jury, that he’s going to go learn a lesson and then come back. We’re just going to suggest, what’s this next thing that happens?

So if somebody has this arc, if we figure out what is my journey, what archetype am I living right now, what type of story? Then I can figure out how my brain is predicting the future. Because archetypes are so woven into our brains without language. So the language is not necessary for the archetype to exist. If you know someone else’s archetype, you can understand how they’re going to predict their future and how they’re going to make choices.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do you get their archetype out of them?

CHASE HUGHES: You’re going to hear it. It’s so funny. You don’t even need special questions. You ask them about their life, ask them where they’re from. Ask them to give you a summary of what happened when you worked there at that company. “Well, I did this and this and this and nobody thanked me. It was a thankless job. The manager was a total asshole.” So now you’re starting to see an archetype. The guy was in a tragedy there. The guy was a victim, and they

STEVEN BARTLETT: want to be appreciated. Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: So now he’s here at this brand new company for redemption. So now we’re in a redemption story arc.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

The Time-Distance Problem

CHASE HUGHES: So it just comes out naturally in everybody’s speech. But the funny thing is I’ve never seen it applied to courtrooms in the way that we do it. And it’s just such a powerful tool.

The number one thing that I specialize in is this thing called the time-distance problem. This is what I wanted to solve throughout my entire career. So we have two axes, our vertical axis and horizontal axis. So this horizontal axis is the distance line, and the vertical axis going up and down is the time line. Okay, so we have time and we have distance.

So distance is how far away from a behavioral norm can I get a person to go? So can I get Steven to confess to a crime, like doing something that’s going to send you to jail for 30 years, which is way outside of your behavioral norm. And for me to be able to do that in an interrogation room, I have to do some techniques, I have to do some crazy stuff. If I do it in sales, then I’m getting you to make a decision that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t have. Maybe if I’m in timeshare sales or something like that. And at the end of the day, some people can get people far on the distance line, but it’s going to take forever to do it. It’s going to take maybe a year to make something happen of persuading them

STEVEN BARTLETT: and trying to sell to them, etc.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And the last interrogations I did that were for a corporation in California, I had to do 45 interrogations in like two days. And I had maybe 25 minutes per interrogation, the least amount of time I’ve ever been given. And that was the time-distance problem. So how do I layer on the techniques, the identity, their perception, context, and permission? How do I get that layered into a conversation as fast as possible so I can shift someone’s behavior as fast as possible? So everything that you’re looking at is typically a time-distance problem.

Perspective, Trauma, and Mental Wellbeing

And there’s one more universal thing, and this may not even fit anywhere in the episode because it’s random, but you were talking earlier about carrying this trauma in your backpack. So many people are trying to get rid of this trauma. The reason that psychedelics can rewire PTSD so effing fast is that it doesn’t delete your trauma at all. The memory is still there. All that stuff is still there. It changes the perspective so massively that you can still see the event, but it forces you to see all of that stuff through a different lens.

So if you look at somebody that has some depression stuff going on, some weird mental stuff going on in their life, so much of what ails us, even someone who’s lacking confidence, and they say, “I can’t be a leader. I can’t go into this meeting, I can’t do this negotiation.” It’s a perspective problem. It’s like 90% of the problems that people have that I work with is just a perspective issue and nothing else.

And occasionally, if somebody’s been going through a lot for a long time, I would get your neurotransmitters tested and get your brain tested and see if you’ve got some chemical imbalance that’s causing a lot of stuff. Just sometimes a vitamin deficiency can cause a lot of that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Outside of psychedelics, is there any useful ways you found to change one’s perception?

DMT, Psychedelics, and the Nature of Reality

CHASE HUGHES: There are all kinds of sensory deprivation tanks and darkness retreats, all those things that people talk about with breath work and they go on these big retreats. I don’t know anything about those things. I do study psychedelics a lot, and I think Johns Hopkins this year said that it was the most effective drug ever tested in human history

STEVEN BARTLETT: for depression, treatment resistant depression or for psychological problems.

CHASE HUGHES: Treatment resistant depression, PTSD, addiction. And now we have this new drug called ibogaine. It’s not new, it’s been around for thousands of years. But that’s helping people with addiction. And there are now people able to do intravenous DMT for like five hours at a time instead of five minutes at a time. And I was the 41st person in the world to do the intravenous DMT.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you do that?

CHASE HUGHES: I did it because DMT has a massive boost of BDNF, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor. And it also produces a lot of plasticity, a lot of brain plasticity. So I was trying to fix my brain. I’ve got a brain disease. So I went down there on this five hour thing and I’ve been completely different ever since that day. It is a massive benefit. And it’s heavy, though. DMT is a heavy, heavy thing to go through. I can’t see any reason why any human being would use it recreationally.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For anyone that hasn’t experienced DMT, how would you describe the experience? I know that’s going to be hard to do because some of my friends have done it and when you ask them to describe it, it seems to be quite abstract.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, it’s like if we had some two dimensional creatures that were living on this piece of paper right here on the table, and one of those creatures figured out that he can smoke some DMT and that somehow enabled us to peel this two dimensional creature to where it could see in three dimensions and see everything in this room. That’s DMT. You’re getting peeled out of reality into some other realm. And the weird thing is, every scientist that I know that’s studying DMT, not one of them thinks it’s a hallucination.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do they think it is?

CHASE HUGHES: I think the more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell’s going on. But everyone, literally everyone who uses DMT pretty much goes to the same exact places and they all meet the same entities, the same seven or eight different types of entities. And it’s been the same for 4,500 years of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It’s an endogenous chemical.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Has it changed your perception of what reality really is?

CHASE HUGHES: 100%. Yeah. It’s so much more real than this reality. It’s so ineffable, there are no words that can describe it. But it’s a thousand, maybe a million times more real than this, in such a way that just coming back to this feels like everything is kind of claymation for a little while. Claymation, or just fake, like a cartoon of some kind. It’s just really low resolution.

And I come back with no certainty about anything. And I think everybody comes back with that lack of certainty. You’re not coming back and be like, “I saw this exact thing and here’s what it means and here’s how the universe is created.” But you go up there and you come back and you’re like, “Something about this plane doesn’t feel real anymore.” And that is a permanent shift that’s hard for some people to make. And you can’t unsee that. You were kind of able to poke your head out of the side door of the Truman Show and look out backstage for a little while.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So has it made you believe that this isn’t real? This reality that we’re living in now is not real?

CHASE HUGHES: We’d have to define real. How would you define real?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s a good question. So that’s why I paused.

CHASE HUGHES: You can touch it, you can measure it, you can taste it, smell it. Would that be real?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we’re living in a

CHASE HUGHES: simulation? We have to define simulation. Because I think every society has this hubris of, “The universe is whatever’s cool to us right now.” Electricity came out, the universe was energy. Industrial revolution came out, the whole universe was a giant machine. And right now everybody says, “Oh, we just discovered computers. The universe must be a computer.” It’s like the hubris of every generation.

What I mean by simulation — is it rendered in some way by something? I study this stuff all day, every day of my life. And I think that the more discoveries we have in particle physics and quantum mechanics, the more they’re proving the hermetic principles.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

CHASE HUGHES: These are the seven ancient principles of this guy named Hermes Trismegistus, also known as Thoth, like an Egyptian guy. They’re confused about his name, but he wrote these. The first two principles are the most important. The first one is: “All is mind.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: All is mind.

CHASE HUGHES: All is mind. “The all is mind, the universe is mental.” And then the second one is: “As above, so below.”

And here’s how I explained this to my son a couple days ago. I said, “Have you ever had a dream where there’s a building in the dream? Maybe there’s a house in front of you. What are you looking at the house with?” And he’s like, “Well, my eyes.” I said, “Which eyes are they? Are they your eyes that you’re seeing the house with?” And he said, “No, because you’re imagining your own set of eyes to see the house with in your dream. Your eyes aren’t there. Your body isn’t there, so you’re imagining the whole body and the world.”

And I said, “What’s the distance between you and that house in your dream?” He said, “30 feet.” I said, “What is the air made out of between you and the house?” And he said, “Air.” And I said, “You have air in your dreams. Is it real air?” He said, “No, it’s just my brain.” I said, “So is there distance between you and the house?” He said, “No.” “What’s the house made out of?” “Me.” “What’s the air made out of?” “Me.” The entire thing is me — the ground I’m standing on, the house, the clouds in the sky.

So in a dream, you can verifiably prove that something is real. You can test it, you can touch it, and all of that. And the perception of it is very much real. So the theory now — and I don’t have any certainty about this — but one interesting theory that I’ve heard from many different neuroscientists is, if we look at “as above, so below,” a universe spins like a DNA double helix. You can zoom in on a human eyeball and it looks the same as a nebula.

What if dreams are level one, and this is level two of that, where we’re hallucinating distance? I have no theories about it myself. But whatever the case is, I do think that separation is the greatest lie ever told to the entire world — the idea that you are separate from that person, that you are separate from this. And how people say, “I need to go spend time in nature” — like, you are nature. You’re made out of that stuff. You’re made out of that dirt.

So I think the illusion of separation is the one thing that I think will help a lot of people. And that’s why psychedelics can really just rewire somebody’s brain so fast. It just deletes that separation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I feel like I just had some DMT because you said level one is dreams, level two is maybe this reality. So the question in my mind was, what’s level three?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. Then that would maybe be what you see on DMT.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said that world was more real than this one.

CHASE HUGHES: Oh, yeah. Exponentially, immeasurably.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why? How do you quantify realness? Like, what’s the measuring stick there?

CHASE HUGHES: There are no words for it.

Spirituality, Ego, and Empathy

STEVEN BARTLETT: Has this changed your view on religion?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. I wasn’t really a religious person. I think it made me a much more spiritual person. And I think before any psychedelic therapy that I went through, I was performing spirituality. Spirituality was something I did to show people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. To signal virtue.

CHASE HUGHES: And now spirituality — you kind of see it like it’s not a big deal. You don’t have to go buy linen yoga pants and wooden beads and bathe in essential oils to be spiritual. You can just maybe have a hand up there and be less certain. I think the certainty is the enemy. We haven’t been here very long. We’re very, very newborn creatures on this planet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Has it made you more empathetic?

CHASE HUGHES: Unbelievably so, yeah. At the end of the day, everybody wants to — after your first or second time going to psychedelic therapy, you’re like, “Oh, I need to understand the secrets of the universe now.” You go in there with these very egoic, egocentric desires, and then they’re like, “Okay, you want to understand the universe? They’ll show it all to you.” And your brain’s not capable of understanding it, remembering it, or translating it once you come back anyway.

And I think over time you learn that the more ego I have, it’s like I’m performing. And then every time I kind of reflect on that experience, it helps me to unzip my little ego costume a little bit more.

Did you know that you can get banned from DMT?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

CHASE HUGHES: Dude, you’ve got to look this up. There are thousands of people out there who are using DMT recreationally. And the beings up there basically told them, “You are done.” And the journey stops right there in that moment, and the guy can take hit after hit after hit of DMT and nothing happens. You can be banned from that realm, or whatever it is. I think they call it hyperspace now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the culture surrounding DMT, there is a widely reported phenomenon called being locked out of hyperspace. Many frequent users report reaching a point where the drug simply stops working as expected, regardless of the dose. The common descriptions include: the waiting room wall — getting stuck in the initial onset phase and being unable to break through; the grey room — seeing only flat, colorless or dull visuals instead of the vibrant geometry; the hyperslap — a terrifying or deeply uncomfortable experience where entities appear to tell you that you aren’t welcome or shouldn’t be here anymore; the sudden blackout — smoking the substance and simply falling asleep or remembering nothing, effectively being denied entry.

CHASE HUGHES: I think there are thousands of people.

Consciousness, Connection, and the Human Experience

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the very, very random but persuasive thought experiments I sometimes use to explain why I’ve started to believe that there’s probably something more is weirdly how much I’ve learned about the gut microbiome. And it sounds like a strange thing, not a connection one would expect to make.

But when I sat here with these experts and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, there’s 38 trillion living organisms in your gut right now.” I, you know, you’re saying, like, “What is below is above,” whatever that phrase was. I was like, okay, so those 38 trillion creatures — I know that you could argue that maybe they’re not conscious or whatever you want to say. But they have no idea. Like, if they work, they have no idea that they’re living inside another organism down there. If they could debate, they would be debating religion. They’d be saying, “Do you think we have a creator?” And they’d look around and they wouldn’t see him, but because they don’t realize that they’re inside, I guess, their God — like their creator, the thing that’s feeding them every day and keeping them alive. And that kind of, you could argue, created them because I created the environment for them to reproduce.

And when I thought about that, I thought about the oceans. I was like, the animals at the very bottom of the deepest ocean have no idea that there’s anything above. They have no idea. And then you’ve got to ask yourself, am I arrogant enough to believe, or naive enough to believe, that this is it — that I am at the top of the mountain and there’s nothing. It’s so egotistical to think there isn’t. There could be nothing above me.

And then the other thing that’s been really persuasive for me in my journey of spirituality or religion or whatever you want to call it is I did a bunch of star tours and generally getting interested in the stars, and sitting there with a star expert and him saying to me at nighttime in Joshua Tree, “Look over there.” And he’d get this big binocular out, this one meter binocular, and you see what you’re seeing there is — he’d say something crazy, like, “28 million light years away.” And I’m looking at a whole other galaxy, and it’s just this speck, and it’s 28 million light years away. I’m scratching my head, like, what the f*. That is inconceivably far away. And it’s just this dot. And he goes, “Yeah, there’s like trillions of those.” And I’m thinking, oh, like the gut microbiome, there’s like 38 trillion of those.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they’re just specks with life on them that we understand at some granular level, but maybe not the deepest granular level. So maybe I’m just another gut in the bug of some toddler in some other space, and I just don’t know the answer. What do you do with that information? No idea.

CHASE HUGHES: But the new theory is that consciousness is external to our body.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

CHASE HUGHES: Like, our brains act as a receiver and a filter for consciousness, and not a creator of consciousness. So that hypothetically, maybe DMT is something that just pops that filter off and allows us to experience full consciousness. And then if the all is mind — so if everything in my dream is made up of me and we just copy paste that up to this level — we’re all maybe part of one mind, and there aren’t any people, it’s just a mind. So the distance between us doesn’t exist. It’s just like a dream, except we’re sharing a dream up here. And that’s one of the — I think that’s a part of that new consciousness theory. I don’t subscribe to any one of them in particular.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You haven’t got to believe any of this stuff because it’s hard to. You’re never going to know for sure. But even hearing it makes me feel a lot more empathetic for my fellow being.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because it makes you — exactly. It makes your enemy you, it makes your friend you, makes the person you love, hate, whatever. It makes all of them you. And I think we treat ourselves much better sometimes than we would treat someone a thousand miles away in a different country with a different color skin.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s what I love about this conversation. And actually every time I bring myself back to this point about consciousness being one, it does make me more empathetic to things.

CHASE HUGHES: It does. And it’s not because you’re a moral person. Like, you don’t have to have morals anymore. So if I see you as me, I’m just protecting myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: Like, it’s just a natural —

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the same way I would with my children. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: And the morality doesn’t need to exist anymore. It’s just the right thing.

The Most Important Human Skills in an AI World

STEVEN BARTLETT: Chase, what is the most important idea we didn’t talk about that we should have talked about — specifically as it relates to the most important skills people are going to need, whether it’s body language or people skills or sales skills — in the world we’re heading towards, where they’re positing that robots are going to take away lots of the manual labor jobs and artificial intelligence is going to take away a lot of the cognitive work, and we might be rendered left with each other in the real world?

CHASE HUGHES: Number one is making people feel heard and seen. And resonating with them when they’re heard, and not judging them when they’re seen. That’s the number one.

Because AI — you can mark my words — AI will never in a million years serve as a replacement for humans on the social level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where we have survival, safety, belonging. That third row of Maslow’s pyramid cannot be fulfilled through electronic means, as of yet anyway. And maybe they’re going to start making sex robots and all that kind of stuff when these things come out. But we cannot fulfill that desire. We cannot fulfill that need.

So what’s above that then? We have esteem, our self-esteem, and our self-actualization. We can never move past level three because we’re getting a placebo of connection from Twitter and TikTok and all these apps — these pseudo social apps. YouTube, we have these parasocial relationships on YouTube, and it cannot fulfill that level. Our brains were not wired to receive digital connection. Our brains have not developed one more wrinkle in the last 200,000 years. Exactly the same brain. So we’re not going to out-science the lower part of the brain. And you can’t meditate your way out of having good relationships and being around 3D people. You need it in your life. And I genuinely think AI is never going to replace it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would agree. I think one of the things that’s been really persuasive in this regard is I remember in psychology lessons when I was maybe 16 years old. Mrs. Lowney — I’ve always missed Ms. Lowney. Ms. Lowney, if you’re listening, please get in touch. I shouldn’t send my email, but just get in touch through Gareth. He knows me.

But I just wanted to say that because she was a great teacher for me in psychology. I really only liked two lessons in school — business and psychology. So Mr. Hughes and Mrs. Lowney’s lessons. The others I found a bit tricky. But I thought those two teachers saw something in me.

Ms. Lowney was talking about the rhesus monkeys experiment, where they got these rhesus monkeys — either they gave them a fake mother that had cloth on it, or they gave them a wire mother, a mother made out of wires. And they looked at their psychological outcomes over time. I’m probably butchering this, so please, community, note me — Diary of a CEO team, so that the facts are on the screen.

And what they found is — the monkeys that grew to be most psychologically stable and happy and weren’t psychopaths were the ones that had a cloth mother. And the monkeys that became erratic and clearly had deep psychological problems were the ones that just had a wire mother.

So that’s always reminded me that even in a world of robots or AI or whatever, there’s still something irreplaceably human about physical human connection and touch, which I actually think is going to absolutely surge. In a world where we do have robots and intelligence and retentive algorithms, I think there’s going to be this bifurcation of society when many people flee back to the real world.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And the two biggest things that we have as a result of all this is loneliness and division. And the division is manufactured, and the loneliness is a byproduct.

Good News: You Are Not Alone in Your Insecurities

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything else you wanted to share?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, maybe some good news — that’d be sh*y to stop on that note.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me some good news.

CHASE HUGHES: I think the number one thing that people need to know is that if you wrote down the biggest insecurities that you’ve ever had in your entire life — every crazy thing about how you thought it was a big deal — you have to forgive yourself for that stuff you did when you were 12. You have to stop hiding yourself from other people.

If you just wrote down every one of your insecurities with a hundred people, and then had someone type all of them out — all 100 people — you wouldn’t be able to find your own. You’d be very confused. You’d think that someone just paraphrased you a hundred times. If you’re digging through that hat trying to find your insecurities, it would shock you.

And it’s one thing to hear it maybe on a podcast, but to see it in real life — if you see the depth of other people, we are so much the same. And all the stuff that we hide because we don’t want anybody else to see it, everyone else is hiding the exact same stuff. Everybody else is feeling the exact same way.

The number one thing that people regret on their deathbed is, “I should have treated it more like a game. I should have figured out what was important in the game and done what was actually important.” And that’s it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That means a lot to you, doesn’t it? That particular point. It’s almost like you’ve changed since last time we spoke. In a way.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think there’s been a bit of an evolution.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. I think that level of empathy is super important to life, and it helps slow things down. And no matter what you’re going through, make a poster and put this up on your wall: it’s supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a game. And I think Alan Watts had a quote that said, “Most of man’s misery comes from taking very seriously what God made for fun.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s hard not to take it seriously, though, when it seems to threaten some of our prehistoric design. And if we go back to the triangle where you’ve got friends and rewards and you’ve got safety — if it threatens any of these things, then it doesn’t feel so fun.

CHASE HUGHES: Right. Depending on your perspective. And that’s where the big perspective shift comes in of like, I’ve got to remind myself, this is supposed to be fun.

Closing Question: Expanding Your Skill Set

STEVEN BARTLETT: Chase, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you —

CHASE HUGHES: Sounds like you’ve rehearsed that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I’ve said it quite a few times now, probably 500 times. If you were going to take on a new challenge this year to expand the territory of your skill set in a way that would make you happy, what would it be?

CHASE HUGHES: I think developing the ability to shut the f* up and celebrate when there’s a win. We just had a giant record month in our company — massive record month. And I was like, “Okay, okay.” And then I just joined another meeting and it fell by the wayside. And I think I’m going to regret doing that. And I think celebrating wins is a skill that I need to cultivate better.

Happiness, Expectations, and the Art of Gratitude

STEVEN BARTLETT: Mo Gawdat from episode 101 was the most shared episode of any podcast in 2023 on Apple in the UK, according to Apple. And one of the things he said in that conversation — he’s head of Google X who left when his son died in a routine operation. And he went in search of happiness. So at Google, he was leading the innovation teams, all like the AI stuff, robots and all that stuff.

And I remember he becomes a backpacker at 50 odd years old, ends up having a divorce from his wife after 18 years. And his whole life, when he sat in the chair, he was like backpacking. He had this one shirt. He’d come to my studio in Shoreditch in London. This old kitchen, this used to be my kitchen. And he said a line to me which has always stayed with me. He said, “Happiness is when your expectations of how your life are supposed to be going are met.”

And so from that I can deduce the opposite to be true, which is unhappiness is when your expectations of how you thought your life was supposed to be going go unmet. And in there, I always come back to this because almost all of my unhappiness is when I had an expectation of how my life was supposed to be going, or something was supposed to be going — your relationship, getting cut off in traffic, whatever. It might be a podcast, whatever. And when you fall short of one’s expectation, that gap is dissatisfaction and frustration, whatever else.

And so can one play with this by being grateful? Because I think gratitude is a proxy of realizing that expectations you once had are now being met and exceeded. But the problem is, as striving creatures, we keep a delta between where we are and where we expect to be. So when you talked about celebrating your win there, I was like, the problem is you’re already thinking about the next one. So you’ve already created a delta.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s going to keep you on. Whereas the Eastern traditions are all about gratitude, which in that moment is going, “F, Chase, we did it. This was a dream.”*

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you did it. And are you able to sit in that? The problem I’ve also discovered with this spiel is I expected it to be automatic. I expected the gratitude and the excitement and the joy to be automatic.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when it didn’t automatically show up when I became a millionaire, or the podcast did well, I thought, maybe it’ll show up on the next one.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Instead of taking a moment and forcing it out of me — reminding myself that this was it, Chase.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This was the dream.

CHASE HUGHES: And that’s the perspective.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Perspective.

CHASE HUGHES: Your camera angle — like mine, I’ll speak for myself — it’s just so zoomed in on this exact moment, on what’s going on in the business, this meeting that’s coming up in a few minutes. And you’re just dragging that camera by the throat and pulling it up to — like when you zoom out on Google Maps — and being like, “This is a big deal. You have time to pause. Nothing you think is a big deal is a huge deal. You can pause, you can cancel that meeting and really celebrate.”

It’s so true. And when I became a millionaire, I thought it was going to fix my posture, it was going to make my skin look better. It didn’t do anything. It didn’t do sh*t.

Gold Medal Depression and Forced Gratitude

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the crazy part about that is you often hear of what they call “gold medal depression,” which, again, is a prime example of — you had an expectation of that moment. You thought confetti and a marching band and it would be on the front page of the newspaper or whatever. And the reality is it didn’t do sh*t. So now you’ve got a problem. A lot of people come back from the Olympics with a gold medal and they’re depressed because they climbed to the top of the mountain and it didn’t change anything. Now that’s a problem.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I actively practice, especially ahead of an accomplishment, I actively practice forced gratitude, which is really taking a moment and zooming out, as you say.

And then the other thing is — I just got my house in LA, which is this incredible house. From where I come from, it blows my mind — a kid born in Botswana, moves to the UK. Before I walked into the house, I literally, out loud, reminded myself that this was not going to change anything in my life. It wasn’t going to make me an inch happier in any way. It was going to have no material impact on anything. No one’s opinion of me is going to change. It’s going to do nothing for me.

And when I walked into that house for the first time, I could actually really enjoy it because my expectations were so low.

CHASE HUGHES: That’s beautiful.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it was very easy to exceed my expectations because I had none. And I actually enjoy it every day when I walk downstairs because it’s blowing my mind.

CHASE HUGHES: But you still get to celebrate that you got the house.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: Without it meaning something about you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s —

CHASE HUGHES: I think that’s the difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.

CHASE HUGHES: You can feel good about a good YouTube comment without going, “Yeah, Steven is a good guy.” Where you’re not writing identity statements about it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Identity — that’s the key. That’s what I was clearly doing. I’m saying, “This is not going to impact my identity. Don’t fing think it’s going to.”*

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But it still means that when I wake up in the morning and see a view, I go, “Wow, that’s so — wow.”

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So true.

CHASE HUGHES: So true. I fully resonate with that, Chase.

Where to Find Chase Hughes

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where do people go to get more of you? Where’s the best place?

CHASE HUGHES: Best place is NCI University.

STEVEN BARTLETT: NCI University. I’ll link that below for anyone that’s looking for the link.

CHASE HUGHES: And my YouTube channel is just my name.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ll try and collab with you on this video. So if you look down below, you should see two icons — you’ll see the Diary of a CEO icon and Chase’s icon. If you’re watching on YouTube, just click Chase’s icon and you’ll go over to his YouTube channel. Chase, thank you so much.

CHASE HUGHES: Thanks, Steven.

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