Chase Hughes: Why micro-compliance powers the biggest yeses

Chase Hughes 0:00 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. It's the number one way that we influence another human being, micro-compliance. And hypnosis is a great example of this. Like, I can have a person laying on the floor unconscious in maybe a minute and a half, and it's very easy to do. Anybody can learn to do it. But one of the things you'll see me do at the beginning of that is, like, give me your hand. Put both hands out like this, and then flip them over. Look all the way up, and look all the way down. I'll make them do, like, 50 things. None of the things that I just did with them are meaningful. Everything was micro-compliance. You don't realize that you're going through massive amount of compliance. In order to get your behavior to change or influence another human being, use what works for brainwashing because our brains have not developed one more wrinkle in the last two hundred thousand years. So a regular example of this is novelty. Anything novel hijacks our brain. So if you're trying to change your beliefs or you want to lose this weight, change something up in your life. Change your wardrobe. Repaint the walls in your office. You need to tell the animal part of our brain here because this has been proven on fMRI studies that the decision shows up before we're conscious of it.

Steven Bartlett 1:09 What about human-to-human skills?

Chase Hughes 1:11 So people are starving to have great conversations that are very influential, which means that if I'm an attorney, I can sway a jury. If I'm a hostage negotiator, I save people's lives. If I'm a parent, I raise better kids because I can communicate in a way that gets the outcome that I'm looking for. And you can do that with any of these techniques like negative dissociation, the childhood development triangle. There's this thing called the PCP model, and when it comes to influencing human beings, that is the most important thing that you could ever understand.

Steven Bartlett 1:38 That might just be the most important skill in the world. So let's do some role playing.

Chase Hughes 1:41 All right.

Steven Bartlett 1:44 Guys, I've got a quick favor to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show, and roughly sixty-nine percent of you that listen and love this show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favor, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that subscribe button. And it means so much to myself but also to my team because when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate. And it's the thing, the simple free easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favor I would ask you. And, um, if you do hit the subscribe button, I won't let you down and will continue to find small ways to make this whole production better. Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world. And, uh, yeah, let's do this. [upbeat music] Chase, the world is changing rapidly before our eyes on so many fronts in terms of geopolitics but also in terms of technology with this whole AI thing that's rapidly accelerating. And with that you've got things like robotics that are on the way and Elon Musk saying that we'll have ten billion humanoid robots in the world in the future. And these are gonna be intelligent robots because the software within them is now artificial, and it's incredibly intelligent. One of the things people say to me a lot is in a world where we're gonna have all this intelligence, what jobs are gonna remain? And one of the points of consensus from interviewing all these great AI experts is that human skills, any skills that are irreplaceably human, social skills, people skills, are gonna be of extreme value. You spend a lot of time teaching people these skills. I asked you a question just before we started recording. The question I asked you is, what is the thing you like talking about the most that you think adds the most value to people? What did you say?

Chase Hughes 3:29 Helping people understand how to guide human decision and, and have great conversations that are very influential.

Steven Bartlett 3:38 What does that mean in, in real specific practical terms?

Chase Hughes 3:42 It means that if we are in a conversation, I become more likely to help you achieve the outcome that I see for you. So if I'm a leader, then I can do that. If I'm an attorney, I can sway a jury. I can make a jury pick a certain decision. If I'm a hostage negotiator, I save people's lives. If I'm a parent, I raise better kids because I, I can communicate in a way that gets the outcome that I'm looking for from another person.

Steven Bartlett 4:08 That might just be the most important skill in the world.

Chase Hughes 4:10 I think it is.

Steven Bartlett 4:12 Increasingly so in a world of AI where computers are gonna be able to handle a lot of the sort of intelligent white collar related stuff for us, and we're gonna be rendered useful only for that which humans can do, which is probably this stuff.

Chase Hughes 4:25 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 4:25 The IRL in real life human-to-human stuff.

Chase Hughes 4:28 And I think people are starving for it. You've got a podcast that's non-performative, and people are attracted to realism. There's so much that's artificial and performative that people are starving for realism already, and this is pre-AI. This was starting to blow up because it just gave us a sense of something that was real. We are in a epidemic right now of loneliness where people are, are disconnected from each other, and these human skills are gonna matter more than ever as AI comes out.

Steven Bartlett 4:58 I, I was thinking about what you teach in terms of human behavior and getting the best out of people and influencing people to do what you want them to do, and, um, AI does a lot of that.

Chase Hughes 5:07 It does.

Steven Bartlett 5:07 It seems like it's been programmed to understand human behavior and to get me to like it. So let's get into some of that human behavior that you think is critical in a world of AI. In a world of AI, if the skills that matter the most are human-to-human skills, where does one, where does one begin?

Chase Hughes 5:30 Let's understand humans first. Like, how could AI compromise a person? And when it comes to influencing human beings, the most important thing that you could ever understand, whether you're a CEO, a, a mom or a dad, is this thing called the PCP model. And PCP is a three-step cascade that happens inside the human brain when we get influenced, whether we're doing something massively extreme like some Manchurian candidate type stuff, or we're, we're just having a sales call and we ma- we make a sale. Everything goes through PCP. So P is perceptionSo the first step to really changing somebody's outcome, getting you to make a decision later on, is to change how you're viewing this situation. So when people talk about owning the frame of a situation or redefining what a situation means right there is changing the perception of it. If we're just talking about AI, AI can say, "Yes, uh, Steven, I see what you mean, and I can see why you're frustrated." And you, you know, one of those like standard responses, but here's what's-- here's what this is really about, and it gives you this layer that makes you say, "Oh, shit," like this is... it's going deep. So now it's hit the P on the PCP model, so it's modified your perception of a situation.

Steven Bartlett 6:49 And how has it specifically done that there? Is it because it's acknowledged my point of view, but then ch- given a new one?

Chase Hughes 6:56 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 6:57 So if it's just given me a new one, I might not have believed it, but because it first acknowledges my point of view before delivering it a different one, that's more effective.

Chase Hughes 7:05 Yes. So a- and the biggest mistake that people make with language is language should be resonating and not directing. If you wanna 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.

Steven Bartlett 7:28 Okay. So let's, let's do some role playing.

Chase Hughes 7:31 All right.

Steven Bartlett 7:31 I say to you, "Chase, I think the sky is purple." Your job is to carry out the perception shift.

Chase Hughes 7:40 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 7:41 What would you say to me?

Chase Hughes 7:42 [chuckles] So if somebody says something that is an idea that's far out there, I'll always acknowledge it, and I would say like 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 that 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, a situation in life. Does that make sense?

Steven Bartlett 8:18 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 8:19 So I've never, [chuckles] I've never had to respond to somebody calling the sky purple, but if I can modify how you perceive a situation...

Chase Hughes 8:28 So let's say we're at a business networking event, and I walk up to you, and I say... let's say I call out the script, openly call out the script, and I say, "It's, 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, like, 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. So 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.

Steven Bartlett 9:15 Ah.

Chase Hughes 9:16 So like if you shook my hand super aggressively or somebody shook my hand like a, 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." And 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 a script. Any script that we push down is going to be a lot more powerful in that person. We're increasing power.

Steven Bartlett 9:55 On that example of the ma- very, you know, over the top handshake, by calling it out, what have you done? What, what have you done in my head? So I've... I'm the one that's just squeezed your hand really tight-

Chase Hughes 10:06 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 10:06 ... 'cause I wanna be an alpha male. You call it out. What, what does that do? It dis- it disarms me, or it-

Chase Hughes 10:12 Nope

Steven Bartlett 10:12 ... makes me feel great or?

Chase Hughes 10:13 No, and, and I'm not saying that that's a tactic anybody should do, but if there's a script running, here-- like here's what we're supposed to do. You and I are on a podcast. We're supposed to l- 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.

Steven Bartlett 10:28 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 10:29 And that gives us a little permission to break away from it.

Steven Bartlett 10:32 Oh, to break away from it.

Chase Hughes 10:33 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 10:33 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 10:33 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 wanna say out loud.

Steven Bartlett 10:43 Oh, okay.

Chase Hughes 10:44 Does that make sense?

Steven Bartlett 10:45 Oh, okay. So you're like kinda calling it out, but without it being-

Chase Hughes 10:48 Without making fun of it

Steven Bartlett 10:49 ... aggressive or whatever.

Chase Hughes 10:50 Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 10:50 Okay.

Chase Hughes 10:52 So after I shift your perception, I, I-- all I need to do is get you to see a situation a little bit differently. And if you turn on the news, oh my God, are you gonna 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 did this blatantly, and they're-- and now it's in your face. They do all of this stuff to shift your perception. And in order to get your behavior to change, once I shift your pers- perception, then I change the C in the, 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 some... almost everybody's going to get naked. We're probably not gonna do it in the middle of an office building, like at work. Context dictates what behavior is permissible. So if, if you go back to nineteen-- I think it was 1957, there's this guy running a stage hypnosis like comedy show, you know, 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's concealed... he has a concealed handgun. But one of the skits in this, or one of the bits that this comedian does, he tells the people that all of you are sheriffs and you can't leave the stage, but everybody in the, in the a- 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, they're not even listening to you. They're not respecting you." And then he says, "They're, they're p- you can't leave the stage," but 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 12:54 This is a true story?

Chase Hughes 12:54 True story.

Steven Bartlett 12:55 Really?

Chase Hughes 12:56 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 on- the, 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 a, an example from UK. In, in 19, in 1979, I think, there was a fire in, in Manchester, in Woolworth's department store.

Steven Bartlett 13:43 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 13:43 And it was during the daytime. Doors were open, and it turned out that most of the people that died were in the restaurant. And these... The, the restaurant was right by the door. So the fire inspector looked and, 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. 'Cause no one gave them permission to kind of 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.

Steven Bartlett 14:21 Hmm.

Chase Hughes 14:21 So the context can also lead us into something like that. So the perception of the situation, even though there's a fire, I'm locked in context of I'm sitting in a restaurant. And, and that's been tested time and time again, where people will sit in a smoke-filled room long enough to die just 'cause nobody else is moving. So context matters.

Steven Bartlett 14:44 So how does that pertain to being able to persuade people for like, I don't know, Debbie in Ohio-

Chase Hughes 14:52 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 14:52 ... who's listening?

Chase Hughes 14:53 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:53 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 15:00 Yeah. So 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.

Steven Bartlett 15:24 Mm.

Chase Hughes 15:24 So we sit down, we start the conversation, and I'm like, "I'm so glad that we could have this talk in a calm way that is focused on learning instead of punishment." I massively transformed perception and context, so I've changed what this means and the definition of what's allowed here.

Steven Bartlett 15:43 Mm.

Chase Hughes 15:44 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, 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 wanna find common ground as fast as possible, and I suggest that maybe we even start there." So I'm setting a frame right, right from the very beginning.

Steven Bartlett 16:10 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 ten 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, like, formalities of like, "Oh, hi. How is your weather? Like, how's the weather? Where do you live?" "Oh, west. Fine." And then a little bit of quiet. We introduce ourselves, and nobody really sets the frame-

Chase Hughes 16:36 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 16:36 ... or someone sets the frame, but it isn't you.

Chase Hughes 16:38 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 16:39 And actually, that meeting would've been much more productive if I'd 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 16:48 Yeah. And a- anytime you're setting a frame or just kind of setting the perception of what's going on, especially in business, start out by a negative first, because people bitch 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, 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."

Steven Bartlett 17:13 Mm.

Chase Hughes 17:13 "Uh, and it's really good to do business with people that are in a collaborative mindset instead of a competitive mindset."

Steven Bartlett 17:20 With what you said, the frame that I wish I'd set based on the, all of the, the context, was I'd walked into that room wanting to get a deal done 'cause I'm sick of fucking talking about it on emails-

Chase Hughes 17:29 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 17:29 ... and meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. So I wish I'd walked in and said something, words 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, a real deal that we can work on." Words to that effect.

Chase Hughes 17:50 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 17:50 'Cause I think that would've started the conversation away from the theoretical-

Chase Hughes 17:53 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 17:54 ... 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 18:00 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, 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.

Steven Bartlett 18:23 Mm.

Chase Hughes 18:24 And that's, that- that's permission. So you're like, "Now, I might be wrong about this," but of course, they'll probably agree with that.

Steven Bartlett 18:30 I think the same applies actually for romantic relationships. Thinking about-

Chase Hughes 18:34 How are we-

Steven Bartlett 18:34 ... having an argument with your partner, you can go in just emotion versus emotion if you don't take a minute to just-

Chase Hughes 18:40 Define

Steven Bartlett 18:41 ... define what we're trying to accomplish from this.

Chase Hughes 18:44 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 18:44 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. You know, 'cause you, when you get in those mo- they'll bring up something your mother did six, you know, four years ago or something you... And it just drifts away from the frame.

Chase Hughes 18:58 Yeah. And if you watch the media, uh, 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, 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 19:34 I've heard that phrase a lot.

Chase Hughes 19:35 A lot. And that mean- 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, they're internalizing that.

Steven Bartlett 19:47 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 19:48 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.

Steven Bartlett 20:08 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 20:09 So once the context shift, your social permission of what I'm allowed to do, 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 we-- the automatic thing would be for us to sign an agreement together.

Steven Bartlett 20:43 Okay.

Chase Hughes 20:44 Or if, if I'm being shot at, the automatic thing for me is to draw my weapon and, and fire back. So it's an automatic behavior based that typically in another situation would violate social permissions. Like, I don't have social permission to, to behave in that way.

Steven Bartlett 21:01 Mm-hmm. 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, um, 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 [laughs] which is strange to-

Chase Hughes 21:31 That's called cognitive dissonance.

Steven Bartlett 21:33 Yeah. [laughs] Wow, okay.

Steven Bartlett 21:36 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 th- be more objective in a world that is trying to force them into one frame or the other? Because I'd... You know, as a podcaster, this may be a selfish thing. I speak to so many different people, and I'm gonna 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 gonna ha- be able to have a conversation with them, I'm gonna meet them as I find them, and I'm gonna have a conversation with them, and there's really no external pressure that's gonna change that-

Chase Hughes 22:14 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 22:14 ... unfortunately. Like I've, I've had all the external pressure in the world, and I'm not gonna change that because I have to do this myself for a long period of time. So m- my-- the thing that's gonna 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, I want my audience to come into the conversation with as an open mind as they possibly are able to.

Chase Hughes 22:43 Let's talk about how to manipulate your next podcast guest-

Steven Bartlett 22:46 [laughs]

Chase Hughes 22:46 ... into being more open-minded.

Steven Bartlett 22:47 Okay.

Chase Hughes 22:48 And this technique is something we teach called negative dissociation, and the way that it works is I'll make a small ob... It, 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, 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, what people are gonna think about them if they step outside the lines-

Steven Bartlett 23:17 Mm-hmm

Chase Hughes 23:18 ... or if they're scared of being open-minded for these other beliefs. I'm not sure which one it is, but I mean, you meet these people so often," and you're gonna nod. You nodded your head-

Steven Bartlett 23:29 Yeah

Chase Hughes 23:29 ... dur- while we were saying it, 'cause what is... what I'm saying sounds true.

Steven Bartlett 23:33 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 23:33 And it probably is, but you're making that person very covertly agree that they are not that person.

Steven Bartlett 23:40 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 23:42 Does that make sense?

Steven Bartlett 23:42 That makes perfect sense.

Chase Hughes 23:43 So throughout the conversation, what you're really doing is n- you're not getting them to make an agreement about how they're gonna act. You're getting them to make an agreement about who they are as a human being.

Steven Bartlett 23:52 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 23:54 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, like, let's say you said that, they nodded, and then maybe a few minutes later you're like, "I g- I got a confession to make. I ha- you know, 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 ofLike leadership training or something like that, that you went to?

Steven Bartlett 24:20 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 24:20 And the moment you answer that question, I've got you to commit. Now you're fully committed, uh, to being wide open for the rest of the conversation.

Steven Bartlett 24:29 What would you assume they would then say in such a scenario?

Chase Hughes 24:32 They're like, "Uh, I don't know. I, I think I've always been really open. I, 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 to make all these commitments-

Steven Bartlett 24:42 That they're gonna be like that going forward.

Chase Hughes 24:44 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 24:45 Okay.

Chase Hughes 24:45 It-- I mean, you're not permanently changing a human being.

Steven Bartlett 24:48 Mm.

Chase Hughes 24:49 But it's a temporary change that they will make for one little compartment of a, of an interaction with you.

Steven Bartlett 24:54 And is this because you're really... You're speaking to their, you said their identity, their sense of who they want to be, and that's heavily driven by social perception-

Chase Hughes 25:06 It is

Steven Bartlett 25:07 ... and what I think of them.

Chase Hughes 25:08 Yeah. Uh, it-- but it's not who they want to be. Uh, it's who they say they are.

Steven Bartlett 25:14 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 25:14 And those are different. So,

Chase Hughes 25:18 uh, and man, uh, Bob Cialdini's got a great example of this. They got these, uh, people to stick signs in their yard, these giant ugly signs that say, "Drive safe" on them, and the way that they got this, like, 85% of this neighborhood to stab them into their yard, nasty, stupid looking sign, was a week prior, a week before, they knocked on their door and they said, "Hey, I have a one-question survey. It'll take 15 seconds. Do you support safe driving, yes or no?" Of course, uh, uh, everyone's gonna say yes. And then, so now they've made a commitment about who they are. Do you support... So it's 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 'cause they just said yes. But anyone who said, "Yes, I support safe driving," a week later would stick that giant stupid looking sign in their front yard. And the... 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 stab 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 26:39 So this is the power of pre-committing, getting someone to pre-commit to something before you ask them to do it.

Chase Hughes 26:45 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 26:46 And you get them to pre-commit in terms of their identity and who they think they are and who they want to be.

Chase Hughes 26:51 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 26:52 Okay.

Chase Hughes 26:52 But you're not getting them... Uh, it-- 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.

Steven Bartlett 27:00 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 27:01 So if I wanted you to focus on me more-

Steven Bartlett 27:03 Mm-hmm

Chase Hughes 27:03 ... I would do the opposite of the negative dissociation thing. And remember, I'm not talking about you, 'cause w- if I'm sitting here saying, "Oh, Steven, you pay attention so well in a conversation-"

Steven Bartlett 27:12 Mm-hmm

Chase Hughes 27:12 ... that sounds super weird and m-manipulative.

Steven Bartlett 27:16 People say that to me all the time. [laughs]

Chase Hughes 27:18 Yeah. Maybe they want, maybe they want you to. In reality, if I do the opposite of what that negative dissociation statement did, and I s- 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."

Steven Bartlett 27:53 Mm.

Chase Hughes 27:55 So I'm taking a quality that I know you admire-

Steven Bartlett 27:57 Mm-hmm

Chase Hughes 27:57 ... like a CE- CEOs, all this kind of stuff, and I'm assigning a trait to that, and you're gonna nod, and you're gonna... That sounds kind of true, but it also means that you're agreeing that you are also that type of person.

Steven Bartlett 28:11 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 28:11 But I'm never saying it about you. So this is w- if I'm talking directly about you, which is what so many influence people teach out there, they're 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 ang- my language is aimed at you, and it... you can feel it, and people can feel that there's something going on if there, somebody's sitting there making guesses and weird assumptions about them. So any time you're using any of these techniques, it should feel and sound like you're making an observation about the world.

Steven Bartlett 28:47 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 28:54 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 28:54 As you were saying, I was looking down at some research here. There's multiple studies that I find fascinating. One of them is a study conducted at MIT with students. Um, th- 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 gave the best 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 now 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 beef, and... on the beach and grab a radio, and 20% of people would chase the person. But if someone had said to you, uh, in a different study where someone runs up, grabs the radio, but someone has said to you seconds earlier, "Hey, I'm just going to get an ice cream. Can you-

Chase Hughes 29:55 Can you take a look?

Steven Bartlett 29:56 ... 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, you know, with others, which is fascinating 'cause especially to yourself, I find that interesting, that I can change my own behavior by making a pre-commitment attached to my own identity, um-I guess there's one more I'll share, which is this, the 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 terms of percentage terms. They went from saving three percent to saving fifteen percent, roughly fifteen percent just because they'd done a pre-commitment even years earlier that they would, they would save.

Chase Hughes 30:40 That's beautiful. I love that. And, and, and you're kind of just pre-doing your own identity, and if, if somebody wants to master that, you make it about your social commitment to yourself, to other people, but publicly say like, "I am this kind of person," to yourself. So it's not like, "I'm, I'm gonna go to the gym tomorrow," it's, "I am the kind of person that goes to the gym," 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. There's basically-- The way that I teach this to intelligence people

Chase Hughes 31:20 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, from those things.

Steven Bartlett 31:33 What are those two things? So I know, I know what anxiety is, but what's cognitive dissonance?

Chase Hughes 31:37 Well, the, the anxiety is like, if I don't do what I say, I'm gonna have some so-- I'm gonna face social rejection. Or if I, if I go here and I, and I break this rule or I don't do this, I'm gonna 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, and who I agreed to be, and I'm facing cognitive dissonance. So that's like when some politician wins the presidential election that someone doesn't like. 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, that you can hack your own behavior so fast. And the way that I explain this to people, it takes thirty seconds to understand it. If you were an Olympic athlete and you had a, a, a badass body, like you had a healthy diet, everything was in, in perfect shape. You woke up every morning, you, you had great energy and all that stuff, and one day you woke up for some reason and you're two hundred and ninety-five pounds. And you wake up and you look in the mirror and this something weird happened overnight. How fast would you get back to that body? It would be lightning. You, you may set world records for, for weight loss because your identity is with that body. It's not that, oh, I need to... I wanna lose this weight so I can be healthy. It's this is not me. And anytime you're feeling this is not me or I'm-- this is against my, who I am as a person, it's the most powerful motivator when it comes to influencing other people and influencing ourselves.

Steven Bartlett 33:37 Hmm.

Chase Hughes 33:39 And like a, a goal, like a weight loss thing that I, that I have a lot of my clients do is to download the Face app. There's like an app where-- that'll make you look super fat and real-

Steven Bartlett 33:51 Oh, yeah

Chase Hughes 33:51 ... real obese. And 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?" I'm like, "No." You're pro- you're programmed to go away from bad things first, never toward positive things first. It's always away. Your ancestors lived because they [chuckles] mistook a, a, a rock for a bear, not the other way around.

Steven Bartlett 34:15 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 34:15 Never the other way around.

Steven Bartlett 34:17 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 34:17 So you're not gonna accidentally program your brain. And I'm, I'm the brain guy. But put that on the fridge and you start, 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 34:43 I remember Nir, Nir Eyal, who I interviewed, who wrote the book on like procrastination called Indistractable, said to me a phrase that's always stayed with me. It's probably... You know, we spoke for six, seven hours, I think, me and Nir. There's just this one phrase I always think about. He said that humans are discomfort avoiding creatures, and like we think that we're pleasure seeking creatures. But when he said discomfort avoiding, I really like interrogated him. I was like, "Yeah, but what about like 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-"

Chase Hughes 35:15 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 35:15 ... which is making you take an action." And I stress tested it across many areas of my life. I was like, "Actually he's tr- he's right." I, I'm trying to avoid discomfort and in your example of seeing myself on the fridge, yeah, I'm, I would, I would want to avoid that. It would cause such dissonance to my identity that I'd do everything to avoid that-

Chase Hughes 35:31 Some big ass-

Steven Bartlett 35:32 ... feeling

Chase Hughes 35:32 ... fat Steven on the, on the fridge.

Steven Bartlett 35:34 Yeah. Yeah.

Chase Hughes 35:34 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 35:34 I mean, that's actually [chuckles] every couple of years what gets me back in shape is like catching myself in the mirror or because I'm always on camera. [chuckles] Sometimes I don't see myself kind of getting outta shape and then I watch the podcast back and I'm like, "Oh, fuck."

Chase Hughes 35:49 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 35:49 Like, "Jack didn't tell me." [chuckles] Like, "No one's told me." And then, then I'm like, right, gym every day again. And-

Chase Hughes 35:55 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 35:56 Uh, interesting.

Chase Hughes 35:57 And it's social 'cause you're, I mean, you're making this commitment in front of a million people.

Steven Bartlett 36:01 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 36:02 What else do you think is important to know as we head into this AI world where human skills and people skills are gonna be more important than ever? What, what other frameworks have you got for me that I should bear in mind or, or ideas?

Chase Hughes 36:13 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 or-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 ourself is developing authority, uh, 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 36:43 Yeah, sometimes, yeah.

Chase Hughes 36:43 I'll send it... I'll send this inventory to you where people can take this quiz, and it's, 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've learned this with tw-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. But there are three types, and the three types that I've broken them down into and how authority channels to other people, 'cause authority looks different in different people. So it's the president, the professor, and the artist, and we can have that authority. So, like, the artist, you can think, like, somebody like Johnny Depp. The president, you can see-- think of somebody like, uh, Obama. The professor, you can think of, like, the classic movie professor. Still broadcasts authority, but it's not loud. It's not extremely directive. And the artist can hold a ton of attention-

Steven Bartlett 37:48 Mm-hmm

Chase Hughes 37:48 ... and in some rooms doesn't hold any attention at all. The authority's still there. The, 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. They still-- Like, 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 38:19 What's the cost of that?

Chase Hughes 38:21 I think that it detracts from your level of authority, which automatically means that you're getting less outcomes that you want in life.

Steven Bartlett 38:27 Because your inauthenticity to both others and yourself, um, like, pays a toll on you. So if I'm inauthentic to you, then that's gonna harm my authority. But then if I'm inauthentic to myself, it's gonna harm my happiness, I guess.

Chase Hughes 38:41 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 38:42 I'm gonna feel like I'm-

Chase Hughes 38:43 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 38:43 Again, going back to your point about identity-

Chase Hughes 38:44 Unfulfilled

Steven Bartlett 38:45 ... living somebody else's life. Yeah.

Chase Hughes 38:45 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 38:46 And I think w-when people say authenticity, we should note that what we call, most people call authenticity is a costume of childhood beliefs. Like, 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 eight or nine. 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 r- a 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. It's like if I'm being authentic in a conversation, then I'm willing to receive a social injury for it.

Steven Bartlett 39:34 Cody Sanchez said something to me which has stayed with me. She said, um, again, I'm gonna 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-

Chase Hughes 39:51 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 39:51 ... I think what Cody's actually saying is, like, that's how I know that they're authentic, is they're willing to risk something for something they believe.

Chase Hughes 40:00 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 40:01 I also think this is how you know a brand's authentic. Like, are they willing to cause social injur- inju-injury in the near term for something they believe in the long term?

Chase Hughes 40:09 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 40:10 You know?

Chase Hughes 40:11 Yeah. And a, a lot of what-- [chuckles] a lot of the recent brand debacles that we've had is they thought they were doing something to avoid social injury that caused-

Steven Bartlett 40:23 Yes

Chase Hughes 40:23 ... a massive social injury.

Steven Bartlett 40:24 Because people said, "You're not being authentic-"

Chase Hughes 40:26 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 40:26 "... to your audience."

Chase Hughes 40:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 40:28 Yeah. When they tried to do like get into identity politics and stuff like that-

Chase Hughes 40:31 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 40:31 ... then, okay, like s- like vir- extreme virtue signaling and stuff like that, yeah.

Chase Hughes 40:36 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 40:36 Which backfires.

Chase Hughes 40:37 Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick?

Steven Bartlett 40:39 Sure.

Chase Hughes 40:40 I think it's super important for people to know.

Steven Bartlett 40:41 Sure.

Chase Hughes 40:42 And I'm, I'm a behavior profiler, and if, if anybody listening didn't know that, 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. So when you're growing up, what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends? So friends is one. And then to feel safe. What, what did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like, I don't know, somebody gives me a hug at the end of the day. For some kids, it was like, "Am I gonna eat today?"

Steven Bartlett 41:17 For some kids, it's like cracking jokes.

Chase Hughes 41:19 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 41:20 And-

Chase Hughes 41:20 I'm gonna crack jokes and keep friends. I'm gonna feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. I'm gonna become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me. Or I'm gonna become safe by being hypervigilant because I don't know if Dad drank before he got home or if he's gonna start drinking when he got home. So i-it's like what did that child... 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. And the rewards for some kids might just be, like, appreciation, and it's typically just appreciation, affection, love. And 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.

Steven Bartlett 42:11 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 42:11 And 90% of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life. And if you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there's a meeting, uh, she wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down and all that kind of stuff.

Steven Bartlett 42:27 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 42:28 You're seeing an eight-year-old who got yelled at at a family dinner table.

Steven Bartlett 42:32 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 42:33 That's all. But you're just seeing it in a grown-up body

Steven Bartlett 42:36 I have two examples that are super friend of mine 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 [chuckles] whenever I was in the room, they would, they would stare at me a lot and, um, they would be a little bit more on the pessimistics- 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 was... His mood could change rapidly, and he was always pointing out why something would never work and why... And he was an extreme pessimist. And suddenly this person who, who's in my life suddenly made sense. I completely understand it, 'cause you grew up in that environment-

Chase Hughes 43:19 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 43:19 ... where to be safe, um, you-

Chase Hughes 43:22 Agree with it

Steven Bartlett 43:23 ... had to pay attention to, to the authority figure, and then, yeah, you had to also... You learnt maybe that, you know, pessimism was-

Chase Hughes 43:32 Safety

Steven Bartlett 43:32 ... a way to... Safety, yeah, safety. And then there's another colleague who's actually in the room over there, and I'll ask her before we publish this if I can say this publicly, but similar thing. She, she expressed to me that she had a, a dad that was... His mood would change rapidly. And I said to her one day, I said, um, I'll call her Sarah. I said, "Sarah, you're always staring at me." [chuckles] I said, "Whenever I look at you, you're already looking at me, and it's like you're, like, 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 I'm preempting, I'm like a radical preempter. I'm thinking 20 steps ahead of, like, what might go wrong or..." You know, which makes her exceptional at her job, but I would, you know, in one way assume that that comes at some kind of cost.

Chase Hughes 44:12 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 44:13 So safety. Yeah.

Chase Hughes 44:14 Very true. Very true. And the, the way that I explain this, if somebody wants to, like... It's not where you can kinda go back and, like, sit there for five minutes, put it on a Post-It note, and then figure your whole life out.

Steven Bartlett 44:26 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 44:26 I wish I had a cool... a, a trick to do that. But the way that, like, I want people to think about this is going back to your childhood, a lot of those things, these 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, like a professional kinda 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. So I'll typically take people through this process of where were you around authority figures, which is like classroom or home. What were you around when your... all your friends were around, you got made fun of or you had to become really small? And that, that goes on the friends side of the triangle, and that, that talks about how the social patterns that are gonna show up for me. And somebody says, "Well, I keep attracting these negative people into my life. Why do I do that?" And that, that goes to these patterns because if I do this, I know this is gonna happen, I know that's gonna 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. And I, I'm not saying that you can go out there and there's like, "Here's six steps that are gonna change your whole fricking life if you, if you do these six things." The awareness is what you want. You want massive, like, self-knowledge and, and self-awareness.

Steven Bartlett 46:05 Hmm.

Chase Hughes 46:06 Uh, w-with the side agreement of, "I am not special, and I'm completely okay if I am never understood." Because most of what happens, uh, when we get into arguments with our spouse, we get into these bitchy arguments with people a- at work, it's our argument to be understood more than it is for us to come to a solution. I need you to understand me. So getting okay with the idea that you might not never, ever be understood is, like, step number one. Number two, I am not special, and that, that helps us to open the door to start coming into a lot of these things. But if you, if you're a leader at work, you can start seeing these patterns in your employees, and you can be like, "I see an eight-year-old there." And if you get to a point where you're seeing some of these, a 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 gonna respond in conflict. And if the, if it's a conflict and it's social, you're seeing all their friends' patterns. If it's a conflict and somebody might be losing their job, you're gonna see their safety patterns come out, and you'll see your own.

Steven Bartlett 47:24 So do you think I should go to the key people in my life, maybe my team, and ask them these questions about, around how did you make friends? Is that the question?

Chase Hughes 47:34 What did you do to make and keep friends? Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:35 What did you do to make and keep friends, and what was the safety question again?

Chase Hughes 47:39 Like, what, what did you need to do or avoid to feel safe?

Steven Bartlett 47:43 And the rewards one?

Chase Hughes 47:45 What did you feel... And this one's always, you wanna put the word feel in there. What did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards, and what were rewards to you?

Steven Bartlett 47:52 Okay.

Chase Hughes 47:53 It was appreciation or somebody that's, like, hyper si- significance driven, like, "I've gotta have the Rolex, I've gotta have the Ferraris," and all this kind of stuff. They never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate, their teacher called and said they did a good job. 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.

Steven Bartlett 48:18 And am I right in thinking here that these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways? Because when you're-

Chase Hughes 48:22 Oh, yeah

Steven Bartlett 48:22 ... 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. [chuckles]

Chase Hughes 48:32 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 48:32 So I, like-

Chase Hughes 48:33 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 48:33 ... I touched all three of them, and part, in part because we... You know, I was thinking w- 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, um, um, other than maybe one other kid, I think, in the area, in Plymouth in 1994 or 5.Um, so some of the material things I wanted, like the, the shoes that everyone had, made me s- feel safe 'cause they made me fit in.

Chase Hughes 48:56 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 48:56 And that, you know, and that got me friends.

Chase Hughes 48:59 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 48:59 Or at least I thought it did. So like, for me it really was like an interconnected triangle.

Chase Hughes 49:03 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 49:03 That's just one of many examples that I could think of.

Chase Hughes 49:05 It does tend to do that, and I will typically wait for somebody to figure that out, and, and as they're figuring it out, they're, they're kinda like, "Oh, I did this because of this to get to this."

Steven Bartlett 49:14 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 49:15 And it... You'll see a little cycle start happening. Uh, but it's great for self-knowledge, but if you're a behavior profiler, that's what's gonna run people. You're gonna know how they're gonna respond to conflict, you're gonna know what they're gonna avoid, you're gonna... Like, if you're putting teams together, I know what people I wanna have working with each other.

Steven Bartlett 49:32 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 49:32 And it doesn't have to be some complex nine-hour thing. Like, you can see this stuff in everyday life.

Steven Bartlett 49:39 And you're not saying that I need to radically change.

Chase Hughes 49:42 No.

Steven Bartlett 49:43 But what if one part of this triangle or one behavior I've learned for safety or for rewards or for friends is making my life worse?

Chase Hughes 49:52 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 49:53 You know, what... 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, like, getting in the way now.

Chase Hughes 50:02 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 50:02 What do I do, Chase?

Chase Hughes 50:04 So you- you've identified the pattern. Let's assume that you've, you've got it. You're like, "Oh, I've got this shit that's, 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, this... Here's how the child wrote the contract, made the promise to themselves, developed the contract. And then even if you make it up, like, when... Let's... I'm gonna write down a little thing, 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 you... The voice is not gonna go away. That's the sad part. That's like me, 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, just like one of these things. The, the... 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 gonna have this forever. I'm gonna need this as an adult. I'm gonna bring this into my adult life." Part two of this is you make a m- like a wallpaper or something for your desktop, and we talked about being negatively, uh, motivated. We're away from negative things. You make a, like, 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 gonna be safe." Uh, and he was in a bus- like, he owned a business, but he wouldn't go get these big clients, and he wouldn't, 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. 'Cause 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're, you have a feeling of disgust, and there's a hyper-awareness of that thing running in your head. You're gonna 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 gonna start hearing fiction. You're still hearing the same sentence, but you're hearing a fictional story.

Steven Bartlett 52:39 There's two parts to this. I, I love this, and there's two parts to it that I think I wanted to talk about. The first is, in doing so, in waking up in the morning and seeing my wallpaper that says, like, "My kids don't deserve a great life," or whatever, um, of course it's gonna motivate me to take action, which is then gonna start to build new evidence once I take action, once I win that big client and I realize that everything's fine, which is gonna change my life. And then the second point I wanted to point out is, like, 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. Like, I think one of the best realizations I ever had was realizing that the bullshit 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 or whatever, my survival mechanisms, they will b- be with me forever. And actually, instead of trying to delete them or, like, throw them out the backpack, what I was able to do-

Chase Hughes 53:54 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 53:54 ... is, like, turn down their ability to make the decision.

Chase Hughes 53:58 That's it. That's it. You've totally got it. And, 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. Uh, when you watch a hy- hypnotist, and hypnosis is f- anybody can learn to do it. It's a, 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, like, "Go ahead and sh- give me your hand," and I'll hold their hand for a second. Like, "Put both hands out like this, and then flip them over. That's great. Now just to, 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." And I'm gonna 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. So like you go through a doctor's physical, and they go through like this 90-point checklist, and 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.

Steven Bartlett 56:01 Hmm.

Chase Hughes 56:01 Everything.

Steven Bartlett 56:03 It reminds me of that, uh, famous study they did where they got people to give electric shocks to other people via Milgram obedience experiment.

Chase Hughes 56:11 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 56:12 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 like wearing white jackets-

Chase Hughes 56:24 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 56:24 ... white overalls, et cetera.

Chase Hughes 56:26 And here's the second thing in that experiment that's gonna c- gonna perfectly tie back to this. So this experiment that you're talking about happened at Yale University. It was 1962. Uh, and we, I mean, there's tons of data on it, but essentially strangers would shock another person seemingly or what they thought was to death just 'cause some dude in a lab coat told them to. But what they didn't account for, a-a-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, uh, it's a professional setting. But really think about if you go back to our ancestors, like the most important resource to your ancestors was y- was focus. There's nothing more important than focus. And the number one way to generate focus, and you, 'cause you... If, if I don't have your focus, I can't command authority, right? So focus is always first. My 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. And the way to get focus is through novelty.

Steven Bartlett 57:35 Novelty meaning?

Chase Hughes 57:36 Something unexpected is occurring. So like if you walk past the same bush every day, uh, uh, 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 ass s- uh, stick snap, all of your focus, all of it is on that stick. Not, it's not on your kids, it's not on your health, it's not on anything that's going on. It's to this new unexpected piece of information. That hijacks our brain. Anything novel hijacks our brain. So if you see like... And, and it follows that pathway, focus, then authority, and then tribe, what's everybody else doing, and then emotion, then how do I feel about it? So it's... And, and what happens is we are hardwired to respond to these things. You cannot decide not to respond to novelty. Your head turns it to, to loud sounds. All this stuff happens. So the way that if, 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, if you can. I want you to like just imagine is 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 gonna know something's different.

Steven Bartlett 59:07 Yeah. I think this is one of the great secrets of good marketing is that it beats your brain's wallpaper filter. And, um, I read 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 like... And then they put the rat in the maze the second time and there's like almost no brain activity because it's on autopilot.

Chase Hughes 59:42 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 59:42 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.

Chase Hughes 59:49 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 59:49 The maze is no longer surprising. Whizzes through the maze to the chocolate. And even like 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.

Chase Hughes 1:00:00 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:00 Um, but you would've paid attention if you walked down there and your like sofa wasn't there. Um, and how does that then apply to marketing? So like how do you surprise people is like a central question of anyone who's trying to build a personal brand, start a podcast, or do marketing. Um, but I guess also to, to persuade people. It's one of the things I think about a lot when I talk on stage-

Chase Hughes 1:00:20 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:00:20 ... is I know I'm competing with your mobile phone, your Twitter feed, or your TikTok.

Chase Hughes 1:00:27 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:27 So I have to do something almost like every 10 seconds to like 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-

Chase Hughes 1:00:38 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:00:38 ... because the minute that video starts, doof, doof, doof-

Chase Hughes 1:00:41 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:00:41 ... doof, doof. [chuckles]

Chase Hughes 1:00:42 You're hooked in.

Steven Bartlett 1:00:42 You're hooked.

Chase Hughes 1:00:43 You're hooked. 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 like jerks your attention, like some kind of weird novelty thing that happens, and that video's probably short, 20 maybe 40 second video that, that-It 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 gonna 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?

Steven Bartlett 1:01:55 Well...

Chase Hughes 1:01:55 Ad.

Chase Hughes 1:01:57 [page flipping]

Steven Bartlett 1:01:57 Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming, and we're all very, very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post. What people will think of you. Am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stan Store, which you've probably heard me talk about, and what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts, and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration, and sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life, and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search coach.stan.store now to get started. [page flipping] I've had so many founders speak to me and say, "Why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?" Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative wasn't strong, but usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person. And if you're in B2B marketing, that is much of the game. And this is where LinkedIn Ads solves that problem for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone's skill set. And their network includes over a billion professionals. About a hundred and thirty million of them are decision makers. So when you use LinkedIn Ads, you're putting your brand in front of the right people. And LinkedIn Ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you wanna give them a try, head over to linkedin.com/diary. And when you spend two hundred and fifty dollars on your first LinkedIn Ads campaign, you'll get an extra two hundred and fifty dollar credit from me for the next one. That's linkedin.com/diary. Terms and conditions apply. [page flipping]

Steven Bartlett 1:04:00 I heard you say something as well that, um, if you want to persuade other people, you should make them feel clever.

Chase Hughes 1:04:05 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:06 Explain this to me.

Chase Hughes 1:04:07 I refer to this as maybe the most dangerous persuasion skill there is. And what I'm-- It, it-- The ten-second brief is I basically-- I'm gonna put a Lego right here on the table in front of you, and I'm gonna put another Lego right here on the table in front of you, and I'm just gonna keep having the conversation to where eventually your brain is gonna be like, "Oh, I bet those things go together." So the idea came from you. So I'm gonna 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. So a regular example of this is, let's say you're watching the news and they say, uh, "Local Austin woman has been reported missing. Neighbors said that earlier this day, people saw her arguing with her boyfriend."

Steven Bartlett 1:05:11 Oh, yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:05:12 "Details after the break."

Steven Bartlett 1:05:13 [laughs] So yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:05:15 A-and your brain is like, "Oh, I know what happened."

Steven Bartlett 1:05:17 [laughs] Yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:05:18 "Oh, I know exactly what happened." But they make you feel clever.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:23 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:05:23 They give you a piece of data and a piece of data, but they don't tell you to put it together.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:28 The media do this all the time.

Chase Hughes 1:05:30 Yes. And if you can do this in a courtroom, it, it-- you-- it will be the biggest unfair advantage you'll ever have i-in a legal standing because it'll win, uh, lots of trials. The way that... Like if there's a formula on how to use this is here's a piece of information here, 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, it has to be two things that, that make sense to your brain, 'cause it's like you're not gonna experiment with something that you're not familiar with. So two pieces of familiar information close enough together where the brain is gonna say, "Oh, you know what I can do? I'm gonna put those two things together."

Steven Bartlett 1:06:14 Isn't this how conspiracy theories take hold as well?

Chase Hughes 1:06:16 Oh, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:06:17 'Cause I was, you know... Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:06:20 You know, there's a big, um, there's a big enduring conspiracy theory that someone like Bill Gates has done things that are nefarious as it relates to health. And they're like, I guess the two pieces people are connecting is they're saying, "Well, he's worked a lot. He's very rich and powerful, and he's very, very interested in health-

Chase Hughes 1:06:38 Biotech and, yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:06:39 ... and, and vaccines and all these other things." And, and, you know, someone very, very, very, very powerful. We often think of, you know, very powerful, successful, influential people as being somewhat, like, evil or not having our interests at heart. And then someone who's spending a lot of money on, like, health and medical side, side of things, um, is an-- is quite an unusual thing. So we put two and two together. We have, you know, we think they have bad intentions because they are a billionaire.

Chase Hughes 1:07:04 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:04 And that word is, you know, comes with certain pre-preconceptions and then health, and then a pandemic happens and I think people, you know-This is how I think a lot of conspiracies rise

Chase Hughes 1:07:16 Name, 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.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:24 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:07:25 Yeah. I mean, it's programmed into the media and it's a definite programming that was very deliberate i-in our country. It's like always the rich people are evil. Uh, but then people will say, "Oh, well, Tony Stark was rich." They made him a sociopath.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:41 It's interesting because I think y- you know, I can make the case that 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, like, writing movies or else it doesn't make sense to people.

Chase Hughes 1:07:55 Yeah. And I'm not saying-

Steven Bartlett 1:07:56 So-

Chase Hughes 1:07:56 ... it was intentional within the last, like, 200, 300 years. I'm ta- we're talking about, like, the Brothers Grimm, uh, ancient fairy tales, and it wa- I think it was intentional then, like, having wealth is bad. There's virtue in poverty.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:10 Mm.

Chase Hughes 1:08:11 That's the big thing they wanted to communicate to their kids. Um, it... poverty is virtuous. And of course, like, we're, we're still doing a lot of that stuff today, but the reason is exactly what you're saying is correct. I think it's, it's burned into, like, some collective archetype-

Steven Bartlett 1:08:27 Yeah

Chase Hughes 1:08:27 ... of, of what stories ha- have become.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:29 And we wouldn't recognize it. So like 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.

Chase Hughes 1:08:38 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:38 You're thinking private jet.

Chase Hughes 1:08:39 Already got it.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:39 You're thinking how they treat people.

Chase Hughes 1:08:41 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:41 You're thinking, you know, they're on their phone with a briefcase. You're thinking, you know, that they have... what they're wearing. You know what they're wearing, and I didn't say any of that stuff.

Chase Hughes 1:08:49 Yeah. And you made me feel clever 'cause I put all that stuff together.

Steven Bartlett 1:08:52 Mm.

Chase Hughes 1:08:53 It came, it came from my own mind. And speaking of archetypes, that's the second way that you can win any court case in the world.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:00 Have you got experience with court cases and stuff like that?

Chase Hughes 1:09:03 A lot.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:03 What is your experience?

Chase Hughes 1:09:05 As far as I know I- I'm the only trial consultant that offers a 200% money back guarantee, uh, when I work.

Steven Bartlett 1:09:11 So what does that mean as a trial consultant? What's your objective in simple terms?

Chase Hughes 1:09:15 It's always a little different, and it depends on w- whether I'm working for prosecution or defense. Uh, I know nothing about the law, like just about nothing, but I know people. So I will typically go in and we'll pick a jury, and we'll select a jury, and we wanna select a jury based on this factor and this factor and based on this ZIP code. Here's the question that we wanna ask to find out which is gonna 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? So one case I worked for was with a... was for a large grocery store company who was being sued because a lady slipped on a green bean. Real shit. Uh, and they hired me 'cause it was, it was a big, big lawsuit, and, uh, I want a jury that has an internal locus of control, that they are in charge of their own life. They're, they're responsible for their destiny, and we wanna weed out the people that have the opposite. We wanna weed out 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 is, B, covert, and, C, is not gonna 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'll get one person that answers, "Well, these stupid kids picking their boogers. They're wiping one 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, uh, if I've ever caught a cold, I was in pla- 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."

Steven Bartlett 1:11:17 [chuckles]

Chase Hughes 1:11:18 Very, very different. So we'll... we know what, what is satisfactory for us to select a jury, and that's just one, uh, tiny example.

Steven Bartlett 1:11:27 But I'm gonna pause you there 'cause I just wanted to share something before we carry on with this story 'cause it's fascinating. So actually the last question I ask on our culture test when we employ people for my company, we, 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 asks them, it says, "The people I worked with," "I wasn't given clear enough instructions from a client or a boss," or, "Myself." And 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 'cause it's gonna ruin my test, but I'm gonna just say it. That scores the highest marks on that, that particular question because, again, we're trying to reveal, like, if you have that sense of personal responsibility-

Chase Hughes 1:12:14 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:12:14 ... and i- internal locus of control, internal center of control in your life, which correlates to better work, more ambition, harder work, better long, long-term success, and better happiness, more happiness. Sorry. Please do continue.

Chase Hughes 1:12:28 And you, you can tell they're driven, too.

Steven Bartlett 1:12:30 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:12:30 They're gonna own their mistakes. They're gonna, they're gonna help other people be more accountable.

Steven Bartlett 1:12:34 Probably gonna learn faster-

Chase Hughes 1:12:35 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:12:35 ... because they're gonna take responsibility.

Chase Hughes 1:12:37 Absolutely. So with an archetype in the jury room, so we've selected... let's say we've s- picked a jury, then the goal is what is the, 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 now. Let's say I'm on that lady's side, then I'm gonna come out with, without ever saying the name, I'm gonna come out and I'm gonna 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 m-might be the first three hours of, of the day. And I've jammed that into your head, and you think it's your own idea. Does this make sense so far?

Steven Bartlett 1:13:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:13:34 So then the next time I'm gonna talk about, uh, maybe it's a deposition or something like that, we'll talk about waiting in line at the DMV. We're gonna talk about-

Steven Bartlett 1:13:44 For people that don't know the context there 'cause they're not in the US-

Chase Hughes 1:13:46 Yeah. So waiting in line at the, at this government identification card office.

Steven Bartlett 1:13:51 Everyone every around the world will have some form of that-

Chase Hughes 1:13:54 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:13:54 ... when you're going to get a passport or whatever.

Chase Hughes 1:13:55 Yeah. Waiting at passport control. Um, w- your doctor's office keeping you waiting for forty-five minutes and not caring about your time. We're gonna 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, what I'm... 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, your file clerk runs down there and like, "Okay, I, 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, what... 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 gonna 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, uh, challenge the giant. Your brain comes up with the ending to the story automatically.

Steven Bartlett 1:15:46 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:15:47 So these archetypes are so woven into us that we think if I could just complete an archetype story, it's justice.

Steven Bartlett 1:15:55 And what does archetype mean?

Chase Hughes 1:15:57 So an archetype is just like a, a brand of story.

Steven Bartlett 1:16:02 Okay.

Chase Hughes 1:16:02 So like a, a hero's journey.

Steven Bartlett 1:16:04 Like a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Chase Hughes 1:16:05 A tragedy.

Steven Bartlett 1:16:06 Okay.

Chase Hughes 1:16:07 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, uh, talked a lot about this. But if our brains 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 gonna get the audience to see that we're at the seventy-five percent 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 gonna end.

Steven Bartlett 1:16:45 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:16:46 And you want to make it end 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.

Steven Bartlett 1:16:59 Hmm. So bringing this back to Debbie in O-Ohio.

Chase Hughes 1:17:05 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:17:06 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 1:17:14 Yeah. So you can also use this as a profiling tool. If I have... And, uh, if you take notes on this stuff or about people in your office, I would keep them private.

Steven Bartlett 1:17:24 [chuckles]

Chase Hughes 1:17:25 But figure out like this guy's on a... You don't even have to know and memorize all these 12 archetypes. What movie are they in? When they talk about their life, what movie are they in? You have the one guy in the office that wants to go on crazy adventures and do stuff that nobody else has done. This is, that's a Back to the Future archetype. You can make up your own archetypes. But if they're, if they're doing all of this and everything's going good, what's the next thing they're gonna predict? They're gonna have a problem coming up in their life. So I know how they're gonna predict their future if I just know what story they're in.

Steven Bartlett 1:17:59 Andrew Bustamante, who's that CIA spy who I've had on the show a few times, told me about his RICE framework, um, in espionage, reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. Um, reward being the things you want, like money. Ideology being, you know, doing this is good for your family, doing this is good for your country. Uh, the C being coercion, which is pressurizing people, and the E being ego. He said of all four of these, ideology, like 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, I'm saying that 'cause I don't wanna 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, you know, maybe come and work at your company or persuading them to do a deal, like 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 like even with me, obviously, there's like a hero's journey in my mind. There's like a story-

Chase Hughes 1:19:00 All of us

Steven Bartlett 1:19:01 ... that like is behind me, but also I want to be ahead of me. And if you know, if you can listen long enough to figure out what that is, you can tell me, "Okay, Steve, I'm gonna sell you this Range Rover," and tell me the features of it or the benefits of it through-

Chase Hughes 1:19:15 Yes

Steven Bartlett 1:19:16 ... the hero's journey that I wanna live out.

Chase Hughes 1:19:17 Yep.

Steven Bartlett 1:19:18 Everyone listening right now has that. Like you have a, 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 gonna realize that story.

Chase Hughes 1:19:32 Or at least the next chapter.

Steven Bartlett 1:19:34 Okay.

Chase Hughes 1:19:35 So not-- it-- we don't always wanna sell a completion. We just wanna 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.

Steven Bartlett 1:19:51 Mm.

Chase Hughes 1:19:51 So we're not, we're not gonna tell a jury or suggest to a jury that he's gonna go learn a lesson and then come back. We're just gonna suggest like, what's this next thing that happens? So if somebody has this arc, if we figure out what, what is my journey? What is-- 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 th-the language is not necessary for the archetype to exist.

Steven Bartlett 1:20:21 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:20:21 So it's-- if you know someone else's archetype, you can understand how they're gonna predict their future and how they're gonna make choices.

Steven Bartlett 1:20:28 And how do you get their archetype out of them?

Chase Hughes 1:20:30 You're gonna hear it. It's so funny. Like there's-- you don't even need special questions. You ask them about their life, ask them where they're from, ask them to give me like this summary of like, 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 a-an archetype, like the guy was in a tragedy there. The guy was a victim.

Steven Bartlett 1:20:54 And they wanna be appreciated.

Chase Hughes 1:20:55 Yeah. So now he's here at this brand new company for redemption. So now we're in a redemption story arc. That make sense?

Steven Bartlett 1:21:03 Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Chase Hughes 1:21:04 So it, it, it just comes out naturally in everybody's speech. But the, the funny thing is I've never seen it applied to courtrooms in the way, in the way that we do it, and it's a 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 m-my entire career. So we have two axes, our vertical axes and horizontal axes. So this horizontal axes is the distance line and the vertical axes 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?

Steven Bartlett 1:21:58 Mm.

Chase Hughes 1:21:59 So can I get Steven to confess to a crime? Like doing something that's gonna send you to jail for thirty years 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, uh, sales or something like that. And at the end of the day, s-some people can get people far on the distance line, but it's gonna take forever to do it. It's gonna take maybe a year to, to make something happen.

Steven Bartlett 1:22:40 Of persuading them and trying to s-sell to them, et cetera.

Chase Hughes 1:22:43 Yeah. And the last interrogations I did that were for a corporation in California, I had to do forty-five interrogations in like two days and I had maybe twenty-five minutes per interrogation. So the least amount of time I've, I've ever been given and that was the time distance problem. So how do I layer on the techniques, the identity, the 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. And there's one more universal thing, and this may not even fit anywhere in the episode 'cause it's random, but you were talking earlier about like carrying this trauma in your backpack and so many people are trying to get rid of this trauma. The reason that psychedelics can rewire PTSD so effing fast is that it-- it-- that doesn't delete your trauma at all. The memory's still there. The whole-- 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.

Steven Bartlett 1:23:53 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:23:53 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, of what ails us, even someone who's lacking confidence and they say, "I, I can't be a leader. I can't go into this meeting. I can't do this negotiation," it's a perspective problem.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:09 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:24:09 It's like ninety percent of the problems that, that, that people have that I work with is just a perspective issue and nothing else. And occasionally, um, i-if somebody's been going through a lot for a long time, uh, I would get your neurotransmitters tested and get your brain tested and see if you've got some chemical imbalance that's, that's causing a lot of stuff. Just sometimes a vitamin deficiency could cause a lot of that.

Steven Bartlett 1:24:32 Do any of you remember a conversation I had on this podcast with anthropologist Dr. Daniel Lieberman? It was one of the most viewed conversations of all time on The Diary of a CEO and interestingly the most replayed moment of that entire conversation was when I talked about a specific pair of shoes that I wear. They're called barefoot shoes and they're made by a brand called Vivobarefoot who have become one of the sponsors of this show now. All of their shoes have significantly reduced support which gives my feet the opportunity to strengthen just by wearing them and research from Liverpool University backs this up. They've shown that wearing Vivobarefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to sixty percent. So if you want to start strengthening your feet which are the foundation for the rest of your body head to vivobarefoot.com/doac and if you do that I'll give you fifteen percent off when you use my code STEVENB15. Use that code at checkout and I'll also give you a one hundred day money back guarantee. STEVENB15. Enjoy.We have finally caved in. So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the Conversation Cards with The 1% Diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair, they leave a question in the Diary Of A CEO, and then I ask that question to the next guest. We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible Conversation Cards. These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams, in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other. With that, we also have The 1% Diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together and you can buy both at the same time. And if you wanna drive connection and instill habit change in your company, head to thediary.com to inquire, and our team will be in touch. [paper rustling] Outside

Steven Bartlett 1:26:25 of psychedelics, is there any useful ways you've found to change one's perception?

Chase Hughes 1:26:30 There's... They have all kinds of, like, sleep depriva- or, uh, not sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation tanks and darkness retreats, all those things that people talk about with breathwork, and they go on these big ass retreats. I don't know anything about those things. Do study psychedelics a lot, and I, I think Johns Hopkins this year, I think, said that it was the most effective drug ever tested in human history.

Steven Bartlett 1:26:55 For depression, treatment-resistant depression, or?

Chase Hughes 1:26:57 For psychological problems. The 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, uh, that's helping people with addiction. And there's now people ab-able to do intravenous, uh, DMT for, like, five hours at a time instead of five minutes at a time. And I was the forty-first person in the world to do the, uh, intravenous, uh, DMT.

Steven Bartlett 1:27:26 Where did you do that?

Chase Hughes 1:27:27 Uh, Denver. I did it because it... DMT boosts, 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, this five-hour thing, and I've been completely different ever since that day. So it is a, it is a massive benefit, and it's heavy, though. DMT is a heavy, heavy thing to go through. I don't see... I can't see any reason why any human being would use it recreationally.

Steven Bartlett 1:28:05 For anyone that hasn't experienced DMT, how would you describe the experience? I know that's gonna be hard to do 'cause I've... M-some of my friends have done it, and when you ask them to describe it, it seems to be quite abstract.

Chase Hughes 1:28:16 Yeah. It's like if you... 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, the weird thing is every scientist that I know that's studying DMT, not one of them thinks it's a hallucination.

Steven Bartlett 1:28:52 What do they think it is?

Chase Hughes 1:28:53 I think the, the more someone... The more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell's going on. But everyone, 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 forty-five hundred years of, of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It's, it's an endogenous chemical.

Steven Bartlett 1:29:21 Has it changed your perception of what reality really is?

Chase Hughes 1:29:24 One hundred percent. Yeah. It's so much more real than this reality. It's like... It's, y- it's so ineffable. There are no words that, 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.

Steven Bartlett 1:29:49 Claymation?

Chase Hughes 1:29:50 Or just fake, like a cartoon, uh, of some kind. It's just really low resolution, and it... I, 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 was created," and, and all of that. 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, out of the side door of The Truman Show and, and look out backstage for a little while.

Steven Bartlett 1:30:31 So has it made you believe that this isn't real, this reality that we're living in now is not real?

Chase Hughes 1:30:38 We'd have to define real. But-

Steven Bartlett 1:30:40 Um, the only...

Chase Hughes 1:30:43 How would you define real?

Steven Bartlett 1:30:45 Yeah, that's a good question, so that's my first-

Chase Hughes 1:30:47 You can see it. You can touch it. You can measure it. You can taste it, smell it. Would that be real?

Steven Bartlett 1:30:51 Do you think we're living in a simulation?

Chase Hughes 1:30:54 Then we'd 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, and the universe was energy. Industrial Revolution came out, and the whole universe was a giant machine. And right now everybody says, "Oh, the... We in... We just in- discovered computers. The universe must be a computer." It's like the, the hubris of, of every generation. What I mean by simulation, I, I think, like, is it rendered in some way by something? Uh, I, I, I study this stuff all day, every day of my life, and I think that the more we... the more discoveries we have in particle physics and quantum mechanics, the more they're proving the Hermetic principles right.

Steven Bartlett 1:31:41 What's that?

Chase Hughes 1:31:42 These are the seven ancient principles of this guy named Hermes Trismegistus, also known as Thoth.Like an, an Egyptian guy. They're confused about his name. But he's like, uh... He wrote these... Like, these first two principles are the most important. The first one is all is mind.

Steven Bartlett 1:32:00 All is mind.

Chase Hughes 1:32:01 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, like, a building in the dream? Maybe there's a house in front of you. And what are you looking at the house with?" And he's like, "Well, my eyes." I said, "Why? Which eyes are they? Are they your eyes that you're seeing the house with?" And he said, "No." "'Cause you're imagining your own set of eyes to see the house with in your dream. Your eyes don't, 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?" And he said, "Thirty 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?" And he said, "No, it's just... It's my brain." And 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 sc- 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, is very much real. So the theory now, and I don't, I don't have any certainty about this, but I... One interesting theory that I've heard from many different neuroscientists is, like, if we look at as above, so below, like 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 this level, level one, and this is like level two of that, where we're hallucinating distance? We're hallucinating... And I think that whatever the case is, I have no idea. 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, of like the, "You are separate from that person," like this, "You are separate from this." And how people say, "I need to go spend time in nature." Like, you are nature. Like, that's, that's part of who you are. You're made out of that stuff. You're made out of that dirt. So I think the illusion of separation is, 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, so fast. It just deletes that separation.

Steven Bartlett 1:34:34 I feel like I just did, had some DMT [chuckles] 'cause you said, you know, level one is dreams, level two is maybe this reality. So the question in my mind was what's level three?

Chase Hughes 1:34:45 Yeah. And that would maybe be what you see on DMT.

Steven Bartlett 1:34:49 You said that world was more real than this one.

Chase Hughes 1:34:52 Oh, yeah. Exponentially. Immeasurably.

Steven Bartlett 1:34:56 Why? How, how do you quantify realness? Like, what's the s- the measuring stick there?

Chase Hughes 1:35:01 It, it... There i- there are no words for it.

Steven Bartlett 1:35:07 Has this changed your view on religion?

Chase Hughes 1:35:10 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:35:11 How has it changed your view?

Chase Hughes 1:35:12 I wasn't really a religious person. I, I think it made me a much more spiritual person, and I think before any psychedelic therapy that I went through, I was, I was performing spirituality. So spirituality was kinda something I, I did to show people.

Steven Bartlett 1:35:28 Yeah. Virtue, virtue, to signal virtue-

Chase Hughes 1:35:30 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:35:30 ... of sorts.

Chase Hughes 1:35:31 And now spirituality, you kind of see it like it's not a big deal. It, it doesn't... You don't have to go buy linen yoga pants and, and wooden beads and bathe in essential oils to be spiritual. Like, you can just maybe have a hand up there and be less certain. I think the certainty is the, is the enemy. Like, we haven't been here very long. We're very, very newborn creatures on this planet.

Steven Bartlett 1:35:56 Has it made you more empathetic?

Chase Hughes 1:35:58 Unbelievably so. Yeah. At the end of the day, it... Everybody wants to... Like, after your first or second time going to psychedelic therapy, you're like, "Oh, I need to understand the secrets of the universe now." Which you go in there with this, like, very egoic, uh, egocentric, uh, desires. And then they're like, "Okay, you wanna 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, once you come back anyway. And I think o- over time, you learn that the more ego I have, it's like I'm performing, and then every time I go back in there or every time, like, I kind of reflect on that experience, it helps me to unzip this, my little ego costume, uh, a little bit more. Did you know that you can get banned from DMT?

Steven Bartlett 1:36:52 Really?

Chase Hughes 1:36:53 Dude, you gotta 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 you're, you're banned from, from DMT," and the journey stops right there in that moment. And the guy can take hit after 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 1:37:22 In the culture, culture surrounding DMT, there is a widely reported anecdote 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 gray room, seeing only flat, colorless, or dull visuals instead of the visual vibrant geometry.The hyper slap, 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 1:38:08 Hmm. And it is, there are thousands of people.

Steven Bartlett 1:38:12 One of the, um, very, very random but persuasive thought experiments I sometimes, um, 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.

Chase Hughes 1:38:29 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:38:29 And like 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 thirty-eight trillion living organisms in your gut right now," I ... You know, you, you're saying like, what is below is above or whatever that phrase was. I was like, okay, so those thirty-eight million creatures, I know that you could argue that maybe they're not conscious or whatever you wanna say.

Chase Hughes 1:38:51 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:38:51 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-

Chase Hughes 1:39:15 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:39:15 ... and that kind of you could argue created them because they create the environment for them to reproduce.

Chase Hughes 1:39:21 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:39:21 And when I thought about that, I thought about the oceans. I was like the, you know, the animals at the very bottom of the deepest ocean have no idea that there's anything above. They have no idea. And then I, and then you've gotta ask yourself, am I like arrogant enough to believe or naive enough to believe that like, this is it? That I am at the top of the mount and there's nothing. It's so egotistical to think like-

Chase Hughes 1:39:39 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:39:39 ... 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 like spirituality or religion or whatever you wanna call it, is I did a bunch of star tours and generally getting interested in the stars and sitting there with a, a star expert and him saying to me at nighttime in Joshua Tree, "Look over there." And he'd like get this big binocular out, this one meter binocular, and he'd say, "What you're seeing there is..." He'd say something crazy like, "Twenty-eight million light years away." And I'm looking at a whole nother galaxy and it's just this speck and it's twenty-eight million light years away. I'm scratching my head-

Chase Hughes 1:40:13 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 1:40:13 ... being like, "What the?" That is inconceivably far away-

Chase Hughes 1:40:17 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:40:17 ... 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 thirty-eight trillion of those.

Chase Hughes 1:40:25 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:40:26 And they're just specs 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

Steven Bartlett 1:40:42 idea.

Chase Hughes 1:40:43 But the new theory is that this consciousness is external to our body.

Steven Bartlett 1:40:48 What does that mean?

Chase Hughes 1:40:49 Like our brains act as a receiver and a filter for consciousness. It's 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.

Steven Bartlett 1:41:07 Hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:41:07 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 like the distance between us doesn't exist, it's just, 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, that new consciousness theory. I don't subscribe to any of them, any one of them in particular.

Steven Bartlett 1:41:38 You haven't gotta believe any of this stuff, um, because it's hard to... You're never gonna know for sure, but even hearing it makes me feel a lot more empathetic for my fellow being.

Chase Hughes 1:41:51 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:41:51 Because it makes me you.

Chase Hughes 1:41:53 Exactly.

Steven Bartlett 1:41:53 It makes, it makes your enemy you, it makes your friend you, it makes the person you love, hate, whatever, it makes all of them you. And none of us would, I think, I think we treat ourselves much better sometimes than we would treat, uh, someone a thousand miles away in a different country with a different color skin.

Chase Hughes 1:42:08 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:42:09 Um, 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 1:42:19 It does. And it's not because you're a moral person.

Steven Bartlett 1:42:22 Hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:42:22 Like you don't have to have morals anymore. So if I see you as me-

Steven Bartlett 1:42:26 Mm

Chase Hughes 1:42:27 ... I'm just protecting myself.

Steven Bartlett 1:42:29 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:42:29 Like it's just a natural-

Steven Bartlett 1:42:31 In the same way I would with my children.

Chase Hughes 1:42:32 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:42:33 Or, yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:42:34 Yeah. And I mean the, the morality doesn't need to exist anymore. It's just the right thing.

Steven Bartlett 1:42:41 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 gonna 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 gonna take away lots of the manual labor jobs and artificial intelligence is gonna take away a lot of the like cognitive work, and we might be rendered left with each other in the real world.

Chase Hughes 1:43:06 Yeah. 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, that third row of Maslow's pyramid cannot be fulfilled through electronic means as of yet anyway, and maybe the, they're gonna start making sex robots and all that kind of stuff when these, 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, 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 and, uh, these pseudo social apps, YouTube. We have these parasocial relationships on YouTube, and it's-- it cannot fulfill that level. Our brains were not wired to receive digital connection. Uh, uh, we have-- Our brains have not developed one more wrinkle in the last two hundred thousand years. Exactly the same brain.

Steven Bartlett 1:44:36 Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes 1:44:37 So we're not gonna out science, uh, the lower part of the brain, and you can't, like, meditate your way out of having good relationships and being around 3D people. You, you need it in your life. And I, I genuinely think AI's never gonna replace it.

Steven Bartlett 1:44:53 I would agree. 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, like, maybe sixteen years old, Mrs. Lowney... I've always missed Mrs. Lowney. Mrs. Lowney, if you're listening, please get in touch. My-- I shouldn't say my email. Um, but just get in touch through Gareth. He knows m- knows me. But I just wanted to say that 'cause she, 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, Lowney's lessons. The others I found a bit tricky, but I th- thought those two teachers saw something in me. Mrs. Lowney was talking about the rhesus monkeys experiment, where they got these, like, rhesus monkeys to, um... Either they gave them a fake mother but had, that had cloth on it, or they gave them a wire mother, so 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 if you want... 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 s- the monkeys that became erratic and clearly had deep psychological problems were the ones that just had a wire mother. So, uh, that's always reminded me that even in a world of robots or AI, whatever, there's still something irreplaceably human about physical human connection and touch-

Chase Hughes 1:46:15 Yeah

Steven Bartlett 1:46:15 ... which I actually think is gonna become-- is gonna absolutely surge in a world where we do have robots and intelligence and retentive algorithms. I think there's gonna be this bifurcation of society where many people flee back to the real world.

Chase Hughes 1:46:27 Yeah. And the, the two biggest things that we have as a result of all this is loneliness and division, and the division is manufactured, then the loneliness is a byproduct.

Steven Bartlett 1:46:38 Is there anything else you wanted to share?

Chase Hughes 1:46:40 You know, maybe some good news. That was some shitty-

Steven Bartlett 1:46:43 [laughs]

Chase Hughes 1:46:43 That'd be shitty to stop on that note.

Steven Bartlett 1:46:45 Give me some good news.

Chase Hughes 1:46:47 I think one of the, 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, crazy thing about how you thought it was a big deal, you have to forget, forgive yourself for that shit you did when you were twelve. You have to, uh, stop doing this. You have to, 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 hundred people, you wouldn't be able to find your own. You'd, 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, and it would shock you. Uh, 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 shit that we hide 'cause 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, like, "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." Uh, and that's it.

Steven Bartlett 1:48:15 That means a lot to you, doesn't it? That particular point I've, I've... It's almost like you've changed since the last time we spoke in a way.

Chase Hughes 1:48:22 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:48:22 Like there's been a bit of an evolution.

Chase Hughes 1:48:24 Yeah. And I, 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, put, put... Make a poster and put this up on your wall. It's supposed

Chase Hughes 1:48:39 to be fun. It's supposed to be a game. And I think Alan Watts had a quote that said, "Most of man's memory comes from taking very seriously what God made for fun."

Steven Bartlett 1:48:53 [laughs] 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 1:49:15 Right. Depending on your perspective, and that's where the big perspective shift comes in of, like, I gotta remind myself this is supposed to be fun.

Steven Bartlett 1:49:26 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 is-

Chase Hughes 1:49:32 Sounds like you've rehearsed that.

Steven Bartlett 1:49:33 Yeah, I've said it quite a few times now, probably five hundred times. Um,

Steven Bartlett 1:49:39 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 1:49:53 I think, uh, developing the ability toShut the fuck up and celebrate when there's a win. Uh, we just had, like, a giant record month in our company, massive record month, and I was like, "Okay, okay." And then I just w- I joined another meeting and it fell by the wayside, and I think I'm gonna regret doing that, and I think celebrating wins is a skill, uh, that I need to cultivate better.

Steven Bartlett 1:50:25 Mo Gawdat, um, 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, um, 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, ro-robots and all that stuff. And I remember he, he, like, 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, 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've, I always come back to this because, like, 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.

Chase Hughes 1:51:23 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:51:24 A podcast, whatever. And when it f- when you fall short of one's expectation, that gap is, like, is dissatisfaction and frustration and whatever else. And so can one play with this by being grateful? 'Cause I think great gratitude is a proxy of realizing that expectations you once had are now being met and succeeded. But the problem is as striving creatures we keep a delta between where we are and where we expect to be. So, like, when you talked about celebrating your win there, I think the problem is you're already thinking about the next one.

Chase Hughes 1:51:59 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:51:59 So you've already created a delta.

Chase Hughes 1:52:00 Instantly. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:01 And that's gonna keep you unha- whereas, like, the, you know, w- uh, is it Eastern traditions are all about gratitude which in that moment is going, "Fuck, Chase, we did it."

Chase Hughes 1:52:09 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:10 "This was a dream."

Chase Hughes 1:52:11 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:11 "And you did it." And, like, 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 1:52:26 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:26 So when it didn't automatically show up when I became a millionaire or the podcast did well, I thought maybe it will show up on the next one. [laughs]

Chase Hughes 1:52:36 Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:37 Instead of, like, taking a moment and forcing it out of me, like, reminding myself that, "This was it, Chase."

Chase Hughes 1:52:43 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:43 "This was the dream."

Chase Hughes 1:52:44 And that's the perspective.

Steven Bartlett 1:52:45 Yeah, perspective.

Chase Hughes 1:52:46 Like, your, your camera angle's like mine, I'll speak for myself, is just so zoomed in on, 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, like, dragging that camera by the throat and pulling it up to, like, when you zoom out on Google Maps and be like-

Steven Bartlett 1:53:05 Mm.

Chase Hughes 1:53:05 "This is a big deal."

Steven Bartlett 1:53:08 Mm.

Chase Hughes 1:53:08 Like, you have time to pause. Nothing you think is a big deal is a huge deal. You can pause. You can s-cancel that meeting, uh, and really celebrate. It, it's so true. And it maybe... Like, when I became a millionaire I thought it was like, "It's gonna fix my posture."

Steven Bartlett 1:53:25 [laughs]

Chase Hughes 1:53:26 "It's gonna make my skin look better." Um, it didn't do anything. It didn't do shit.

Steven Bartlett 1:53:32 Hm. And the crazy part about that is you hear, often hear of what they call gold medal depression which again is a prime example of, like, you, you had an expectation of that moment. You thought confetti and a marching band, and it would be on the, like, front page of the newspaper or whatever. And the reality is it didn't do shit. [laughs] So now you've got a problem. Now you're... Now a lot of people, they get upset. They come back from the Olympics with a gold medal and they're depressed because they climbed to the top of the mountain, they go... and it didn't change anything? Now that's a problem.

Chase Hughes 1:54:01 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:54:01 So I actively practice, especially ahead of an accomplishment, I actively practice forced gratitude which is, like, really taking a moment and, and zooming out, as you say. And then the other is, like, before I just got my house in LA, which is this incredible fucking house and, like, blows... Like, from where I come from, it's, you know, a kid born in Botswana, moves to the UK. Ex- Um, before I walked into the house, I, I literally out loud reminded myself that this was not gonna change anything in my life. It wasn't gonna make me a, an inch happier in any way.

Chase Hughes 1:54:33 I love that.

Steven Bartlett 1:54:33 It was gonna have no material impact on anything. No one's opinion of me is gonna change. Nothing. It's gonna 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. [laughs]

Chase Hughes 1:54:48 That's beautiful.

Steven Bartlett 1:54:49 So it was very easy to exceed my expectations 'cause I had none. You know? And I actually enjoy it every day when I walk downstairs because it's, like, blowing my mind.

Chase Hughes 1:54:56 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:54:56 You know?

Chase Hughes 1:54:58 That is awesome. But you still get to celebrate the, that you got the house.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:02 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:55:03 Without it meaning something about you.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:05 Yeah.

Chase Hughes 1:55:05 That's... I think that's the difference.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:07 Yeah, yeah. You're right.

Chase Hughes 1:55:08 Like, you can feel good about a good YouTube comment without it s- without you going, "Yeah. Yeah, Steven is a good guy."

Steven Bartlett 1:55:16 [laughs]

Chase Hughes 1:55:16 You know? Like, where you're not writing identity statements about it.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:19 Identity, that's the key.

Chase Hughes 1:55:20 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:20 That's what I was clearly doing there is I'm saying, "This is not gonna impact my identity in any way. Don't fucking think it's gonna, going to."

Chase Hughes 1:55:25 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:25 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 1:55:29 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:30 You know?

Chase Hughes 1:55:30 So true. So true. I fully resonate with that.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:34 Chase, where do people go to get more of you? W-where's the best place?

Chase Hughes 1:55:38 The best place is nci.university.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:41 Nci.university. I'll link that below for anyone that's looking for the link.

Chase Hughes 1:55:46 And my YouTube channel is just my name.

Steven Bartlett 1:55:49 We'll try and collab with you on this video. So if you sh- if you look-

Chase Hughes 1:55:52 Oh, nice

Steven Bartlett 1:55:52 ... 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 1:56:02 Thanks, Steven.

Steven Bartlett 1:56:03 YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior, and the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out, and I bet you you might love it