Chase Hughes teaches psychological influence, persuasion, and human behavior on The Diary of a CEO
Steven Bartlett interviews Chase Hughes, a former US Navy Chief and behavior expert, on psychological influence, persuasion techniques, and human connection.
Summary
Steven Bartlett interviews Chase Hughes, a former US Navy Chief specializing in applied behavior and interrogation, about the psychological frameworks underlying human influence, persuasion, and decision-making. Hughes presents his PCP model — Perception, Context, Permission — as the foundational cascade through which all human influence operates, from cult recruitment to sales calls to political radicalization. He argues that identity is the single most powerful lever in persuasion, and that micro-compliance — getting people to agree to small things before large ones — is the mechanism behind everything from hypnosis to social media addiction. The conversation expands into childhood development patterns, courtroom strategy, archetypes in persuasion, and the nature of consciousness, including Hughes's personal experience as one of the first people in the world to undergo intravenous DMT therapy. Both speakers converge on the view that human-to-human connection will become the most irreplaceable skill as AI advances.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The most important human skill in an AI world
Steven Bartlett: 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. 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. These are going to be intelligent robots because the software within them is now artificial and incredibly intelligent. One of the things people say to me a lot is, in a world where we're going to have all this intelligence, what jobs are going to 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 going to 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: Helping people understand how to guide human decision and have great conversations that are very influential.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean in real, specific, practical terms?
Chase Hughes: 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, 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 can communicate in a way that gets the outcome that I'm looking for from another person.
Steven Bartlett: That might just be the most important skill in the world. I think it is increasingly so in a world of AI where computers are going to be able to handle a lot of the sort of intelligent white-collar related stuff for us, and we're going to be rendered useful only for that which humans can do, which is probably this stuff.
Chase Hughes: Yeah, the IRL, in-real-life, human-to-human stuff. 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 an epidemic right now of loneliness where people are disconnected from each other, and these human skills are going to matter more than ever as AI comes out.
Steven Bartlett: 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 AI does a lot of that. 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. If the skills that matter the most are human-to-human skills, where does one begin?
The PCP Model: Perception, Context, Permission
Chase Hughes: Let's understand humans first. When it comes to influencing human beings, the most important thing that you could ever understand — whether you're a CEO, a mom, or a dad — is this thing called the PCP model. 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 just having a sales call and we make a sale, everything goes through PCP.
So P is Perception. The first step to really changing somebody's outcome — getting you to make a decision later on — is to change how you're viewing the situation. 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, it can say, "Yes, Steven, I see what you mean and I can see why you're frustrated," and then give you this layer that makes you say, "Oh, this is going deep." So now it's hit the P on the PCP model. It's modified your perception of a situation.
Steven Bartlett: Is it because it's acknowledged my point of view but then given a new one? So if it just gave me a new one, I might not have believed it. But because it first acknowledges my point of view before delivering a different one, that's more effective.
Chase Hughes: Yes. And the biggest mistake that people make with language is that language should be resonating and not directing. If you want to speak well, you're not directing people to think certain things or to feel certain things. It should resonate with what they're already feeling and then start guiding them. You're getting into their river, so to speak, and flowing with that first.
Steven Bartlett: Let's do some role playing. I say to you, "Chase, I think the sky is purple." Your job is to carry out the perception shift. What would you say to me?
Chase Hughes: So if somebody says something that is an idea that's far out there, I'll always acknowledge it. I would say, "Every human being is different. It's fascinating how many rods and cones we have in our eyes, how we all perceive things differently. It's amazing — when you see one thing, you might see something that's purple and I see the exact same thing. We may be seeing the identical color, but our brains are just interpreting it differently. Or maybe we have a different word for it. It's amazing how much we agree on and we just don't realize how much aligned we are with a situation in life. Does that make sense?"
So I've never had to respond to somebody calling the sky purple, but if I can modify how you perceive a situation — let's say we're at a business networking event and I walk up to you and I openly call out the script. I say, "It's amazing how many people are just running the script of: I need to look like a business professional, I can't say anything that makes me look emotional, I can't say anything that's personal, I have to hand out a business card, I have to put on this persona." I'm openly saying the script that's running inside that person's head and making them aware of it, which means I'm changing their perception of the situation. Anything I can get you aware of that's running inside your own head, I can massively start transforming your behavior. Any script that you call out, you're weakening its power.
Steven Bartlett: So like if you shook my hand super aggressively — a pretend alpha male handshake — and you call out exactly what they're wanting to happen and say the quiet part out loud. So any script that's running in the background, if you can surface that, you become a lot more powerful over the situation because you've lessened the power of that script.
On that example of the very over-the-top handshake — by calling it out, what have you done in my head? I'm the one that just squeezed your hand really tight because I want to be an alpha male. You call it out. Does it disarm me or make me feel great?
Chase Hughes: I'm not saying that's a tactic anybody should do, but if there's a script running — like here's what we're supposed to do: you and I are on a podcast, we're supposed to make eye contact with each other, we're supposed to nod throughout this entire thing — I'm making both of us more aware of this.
Steven Bartlett: And that gives us a little permission to break away from it.
Chase Hughes: To break away from it. Yeah. So your desire to be the alpha male in the handshake situation would be temporarily broken because I'm openly saying out loud what you didn't want to say out loud.
Steven Bartlett: Oh, okay. So you're kind of calling it out but without being aggressive.
Chase Hughes: Without making fun of it. Yeah.
So after I shift your perception — all I need to do is get you to see a situation a little bit differently. And if you turn on the news, you're going to see this all day, every day. The perception changes: "Oh, you thought it was about this? Guess what? Here's what they did today." They do all of this stuff to shift your perception.
In order to get your behavior to change, once I shift your perception, then I change the C in this model. And the C is Context. Context is the most important thing in the world and nobody's talking about it. Probably everyone watching or listening right now is going to get naked today — they'll get in a shower, get in a bath. But we're probably not going to do it in the middle of an office building. Context dictates what behavior is permissible.
If you go back to — I think it was 1957 — there's this guy running a stage hypnosis comedy show where they bring people up on stage and make them do silly stuff. One of the guys up on stage is knocked out and doing all this crazy stuff. He's an off-duty police officer, so he has a concealed handgun. One of the bits this comedian does is he tells the people on stage that all of them are sheriffs and they can't leave the stage, but everybody in the audience is rowdy and making lots of noise. They need to tell them to keep it down. The hypnotist says, "Now they're not even listening to you. They're not respecting you." And then he says, "They're — you can't leave the stage, but one of them's pulling out a gun." Then this off-duty police officer pulls out his service weapon and starts firing into the crowd.
Steven Bartlett: This is a true story?
Chase Hughes: True story. But is he a monster?
Steven Bartlett: Of course not. Because context dictated what he would do.
Chase Hughes: So if I can change context to where what I want you to do is just an automatic thing, I can make you do anything. The real skill is just being able to shift perception and context. If you can just shift perception and context, you can radicalize someone on the internet and turn them into a shooter. You can radicalize somebody politically and make them excommunicate their entire family over a Thanksgiving.
I'll give you an example from the UK. In 1979, I think there was a fire in Manchester in Woolworths department store.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
Chase Hughes: It was during the daytime, doors were open, and it turned out that most of the people who died were in the restaurant, right by the door. The fire inspector looked into it and a psychologist finally came along and said they died because they were waiting to pay their bill — because no one gave them permission to stand up and walk out. No one did it first. So they just went along with the crowd. In the context of a restaurant, you don't stand up and walk out until you've paid your bill.
Steven Bartlett: So the context can also lead us into something like that. The perception of the situation — even though there's a fire — I'm locked in the context of sitting in a restaurant. And that's been tested time and time again where people will sit in a smoke-filled room long enough to die just because nobody else is moving.
So how does that pertain to being able to persuade people — for, say, Debbie in Ohio who's listening? How does she work and think about context when she's in a sales meeting, speaking to her husband, her son, whoever it might be?
Chase Hughes: One of the best things you can learn when it comes to shifting context is setting the frame of what every interaction is, and being the one to openly say what the frame is as the conversation starts. Let's say you're talking to a kid and it's a parent talking to a kid. The kid thinks they're in trouble. That's the context they have, and I need to shift their perception of our situation before I can change their context. So we sit down, we start the conversation, and I'm like, "I'm so glad that we could have this talk in a calm way that is focused on learning instead of punishment." That's a massively transformed perception and context. I've changed what this means and the definition of what's allowed here.
So context gives us the final P, which is Permission. If I change your perception of a conversation — and you can do that right away — and if I'm entering into a negotiation and we start the room with, "I'm glad that we could all come here for this, and I know both of us want to find common ground as fast as possible, and I suggest that maybe we even start there" — I'm setting a frame right from the very beginning. It's so surprising how few of us do that when we go into a conversation.
Steven Bartlett: I was just thinking back over the last ten days of my life, in business meetings — very important business meetings in Los Angeles with new potential partners — walking into the boardroom and sitting down and doing the formalities of, "Oh, hi, how's your weather? Where do you live? Oh, fine." And then a little bit of quiet. We introduce ourselves and nobody really sets the frame, or someone sets the frame but it isn't you. And actually that meeting would have been much more productive if I had volunteered a frame very early — a frame around whatever I'm trying to get out of that meeting.
Chase Hughes: Yeah. And anytime you're setting a frame, especially in business, start out with a negative first — because people complain about stuff in business all the time — and then go to the positive. So you're doing a contrasting statement. Like, let's say in the last meeting you had, if you said something like, "I'm so glad we're meeting today, guys. There are so many people out there that just fall into these competitive mindsets. It's really good to do business with people that are in a collaborative mindset instead of a competitive mindset."
Steven Bartlett: With what you said, the frame I wish I'd set — based on all the context — was I'd walked into that room wanting to get a deal done because I'm sick of talking about it on emails. Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. So I wish I'd walked in and said something to the effect of, "I'm so glad we could meet in person to finally make real progress on this, because there's been so much talk about theoretical deals and I feel like getting us together can get us much closer, much quicker to figuring out a real deal that we can work on." Words to that effect, because I think that would have started the conversation away from the theoretical. But unfortunately I didn't say that and we spent a lot of time just talking about theoretical stuff again.
Chase Hughes: Yeah. And you can do that with permission at the beginning with a permission phrase. Just say, "Hey, just so I understand — and I may be wrong here — but what I understand is the purpose of this meeting is for us to compile all these Zooms that we've been on for months and months and finally get something done and put a bow on it, so we have something tangible. Even if it's not perfect yet."
Steven Bartlett: I think the same applies actually for romantic relationships. Thinking about having an argument with your partner — you can go in just emotion versus emotion. If you don't take a minute to define what we're trying to accomplish from this, and then when people drift — because they do in emotional situations — you've got a frame to bring them back into that you pre-agreed on. Because when you get emotional, they'll bring up something your mother did four years ago or something, and it just drifts away from the frame.
Chase Hughes: Yeah. And if you watch the media — especially the opinion side of the media — when they talk about a politician 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." They set the frame for it to be terrifying. They're setting up your perception from the very beginning. And then they change the context: in one context, yeah, maybe this politician's a bad guy. Another context is, "This person is a threat to democracy." I've heard that phrase a lot.
Steven Bartlett: A lot. And what do we do to threats to our entire democracy?
Chase Hughes: We kill them. So we start radicalizing people instantly without them really even processing that they're internalizing that.
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. Context shifts your social permission of what you're allowed to do. 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 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 ten different things out of eleven, then the automatic thing would be for us to sign an agreement together. Or if I'm being shot at, the automatic thing for me is to draw my weapon and fire back. It's an automatic behavior that typically in another situation would violate social permissions.
Steven Bartlett: I was reading about the story you referenced. I think I found the one — December 1923, the New York Times reported on it regarding a tragedy in Croatia where an Austrian hypnotist ended up firing into the crowd and killed three people and wounded several others before he was snapped out of his trance. Upon realizing what he had done, the officer reportedly arrested the hypnotist on the spot, which is strange.
Chase Hughes: That's called cognitive dissonance.
Steven Bartlett: Wow. Okay. So, PCP — I understand that. One of the things I was thinking about is: is there any way, based on everything you know about the way we're manipulated with media, that we might be able to help people be more objective in a world that is trying to force them into one frame or the other? Because as a podcaster — and this is maybe a selfish thing — I speak to so many different people. I'm going to speak to someone on the right, someone on the left, up, down, left, right. As long as I think I'm going to be able to have a conversation with them, I'm going to meet them as I find them. There's really no external pressure that's going to change that. I've had all the external pressure in the world and I'm not going to change that, because I have to do this myself for a long period of time. The thing that's going to keep me in love with this job is to follow my curiosity and not be trapped by anyone else's pressure. But that requires your audience as well to be open-minded.
Negative Dissociation and Identity Hacking
Chase Hughes: Let's talk about how to influence your next podcast guest into being more open-minded. This technique is something we teach called negative dissociation. The way it works is I'll make a small statement — it should sound like an observation about the world. So in our discussion, let's say we just sat down and I'd say, "You know what, I'm glad I'm interviewing with you. There are a lot of people out there that are just so closed off and locked in these little rigid beliefs. I'm not sure whether it is that they're just terrified of what people are going to think about them if they step outside the lines, or if they're scared of being open-minded to other beliefs. I'm not sure which one it is, but you meet these people so often."
And you're going to nod. You nodded your head while I was saying that, because what I'm saying sounds true. And it probably is. But you're making that person very covertly agree that they are not that person.
Steven Bartlett: That makes perfect sense.
Chase Hughes: So throughout the conversation, what you're really doing is not getting them to make an agreement about how they're going to act. You're getting them to make an agreement about who they are as a human being. The moment you can get them to covertly make an "I am" statement in their head, you're hacking your way into that person's identity.
So let's say you said that, they nodded, and then maybe a few minutes later you're like, "I've got a confession to make. I had social anxiety growing up. How did you get this open about everything? Have you always been this way, or was this through some kind of leadership training you went to?" And the moment they answer that question, I've got them to commit. Now they're fully committed to being wide open for the rest of the conversation.
Steven Bartlett: What would you assume they would then say in such a scenario?
Chase Hughes: They're like, "I don't know. I think I've always been really open. I haven't been really scared about what people think about me, and I've always tried to wear my heart on my sleeve." So now you're getting them to make all these commitments that they're going to be like that going forward.
Steven Bartlett: You're not permanently changing a human being.
Chase Hughes: But it's a temporary change that they will make for one little compartment of an interaction with you. And is this because you're speaking to their identity, their sense of who they want to be? And that's heavily driven by social perception of what I think of them.
It's not who they want to be. It's who they say they are. And those are different.
Bob Cialdini's got a great example of this. They got people to stick signs in their yard — these giant ugly signs that say "Drive Safe." The way they got 85% of this neighborhood to stab them into their yard was a week prior, they knocked on their door and said, "Hey, I have a one-question survey. It'll take 15 seconds. Do you support safe driving? Yes or no?" Of course, everyone's going to say yes. So now they've made a commitment about who they are. And then: "Just to show your support, could you put this tiny small sticker in the window of your house facing the street?" And they'd go stick it on the window.
But anyone who said yes, I support safe driving, a week later would stick that giant ugly sign in their front yard. They double-blinded this. In another neighborhood where they didn't go door to door first — they just went door to door and said, "Hey, can we put this giant ugly sign in your yard?" — like 1% of people said yes, as opposed to 85% in the other neighborhood. But it's a tiny agreement about who you are as a person. This is the power of pre-committing. Getting someone to pre-commit to something before you ask them to do it.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. 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: But you're not getting them to sign a contract. You're using it to make subtle shifts in how they're behaving in the conversation.
So if I wanted you to focus on me more, I'd do the opposite of the negative dissociation thing. And I'm not talking about you directly — because if I'm sitting here saying, "Oh, Steven, you pay attention so well in a conversation," that sounds super weird and manipulative.
Steven Bartlett: People say that to me all the time.
Chase Hughes: Maybe they want you to. In reality, if I do the opposite of that negative dissociation statement — I make a positive group of people and assign an attribute to them — that's how you would do this. It's like, "Steven, it's amazing. Every time I meet these really high-performing CEOs, all of these Fortune 100 companies that I work with — you sit down with one of these CEOs, it's like they all have the exact same quality. You sit down with these people and they stop what they're doing and they just completely tune in to other people when they talk to them."
So I'm taking a quality that I know you admire, like CEOs, and I'm assigning a trait to that. And you're going to nod, and that sounds kind of true, but it also means that you're agreeing that you are also that type of person — but I'm never saying it about you.
This is the problem with so many influence people out there: "Oh, I can tell that you're the kind of person that blank and blank and blank." This is called aiming language. My language is aimed at you and you can feel it. People can feel that something's going on if somebody's sitting there making guesses and weird assumptions about them. So anytime you're using any of these techniques, it should feel and sound like you're making an observation about the world.
Steven Bartlett: It's interesting how the power of pre-commitment can also be used on yourself to get you to do things. As you were saying, I was looking at some research here. There are multiple studies I find fascinating. One was conducted at MIT with students. They gave these MIT students three major papers for their semester. One class was given ultimate freedom — they could turn in all three papers at the very end of the semester with no penalty. The other class was forced to pre-commit to strict, evenly spaced deadlines throughout the semester. The students who had total freedom performed the worst and experienced the most stress. The students who pre-committed to certain deadlines produced the highest quality work and got the best grades. It proved that intentionally restricting our own future choices through pre-commitments is often the best way to beat procrastination.
And I remember the study they did with people on a beach where they had a fake thief run past someone next to you and grab a radio. Twenty percent of people would chase the person. But if someone had said to you seconds earlier, "Hey, I'm just going to get an ice cream — can you watch my stuff?" then 95% of people would chase the person stealing the radio, because they'd made a pre-commitment to another person.
Pre-commitments can work with yourself or with others. I find it interesting that I can change my own behavior by making a pre-commitment attached to my own identity. There's also the study around savings — they found that people who committed to saving, even if they just wrote it on a piece of paper, went from saving roughly 3% to saving roughly 15%, just because they'd done a pre-commitment.
Chase Hughes: That's beautiful. And you're kind of just pre-doing your own identity. If somebody wants to master that, you make it about your social commitment to yourself and to other people. Publicly say, "I am this kind of person" to yourself. So it's not "I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow." It's "I am the kind of person that goes to the gym" — that's a much more powerful identity-based action.
And identity is the number one thing in the world when it comes to persuasion and influence. The way I teach this to intelligence people is: when you're good at influence, you're building two walls. One wall is anxiety and the other is cognitive dissonance. And the hallway you're creating is the relief from those things.
Steven Bartlett: What are those two things? I know what anxiety is, but what's cognitive dissonance?
Chase Hughes: The anxiety is: if I don't do what I say, I'm going to face social rejection, or I'm going to break a social contract with somebody. The cognitive dissonance is: I am the kind of person that does this, and if I don't do this, I'm not keeping with who I said I am. That's like when some politician wins the presidential election that someone doesn't like. You have that cognitive dissonance. Either A, I have to decide that wow, a lot of people like this person, or B, everyone's stupid. And it's a lot easier to just say everybody's stupid, and we always take that path.
So cognitive dissonance bounces them back into the hallway every time they bump up against something they've previously agreed to. And identity is the way you can hack your own behavior so fast.
The way I explain this: if you were an Olympic athlete and you had a healthy diet, everything was in perfect shape, you woke up every morning with great energy — and one day you woke up for some reason and you're 295 pounds, and you look in the mirror and something weird happened overnight — how fast would you get back to that body? It would be lightning. You may set world records for weight loss because your identity is with that body. It's not "I want to lose this weight so I can be healthy." It's "This is not me."
Anytime you're feeling "this is not me" or "this is against who I am as a person," it's the most powerful motivator when it comes to influencing other people and influencing ourselves.
A weight loss thing I have a lot of my clients do is to download the face app — there's an app that'll make you look super obese — print it off, and put it on your refrigerator. And people are like, "Oh, well, aren't I programming my subconscious to be fat?" No. You're programmed to go away from bad things first. Never toward positive things first. It's always away. Your ancestors survived because they mistook a rock for a bear. Not the other way around. Never the other way around.
So you're not going to accidentally program your brain. Put that on the fridge, and you start hacking into your own identity in a way that your mammalian brain — the thing that runs the show — can see it and understands it instantly. There are no words, no motivational phrases. It picks up on it instantly and starts setting a course forward because it's cognitive dissonance that you're creating for yourself.
Steven Bartlett: I remember Nir Eyal, who I interviewed, who wrote the book on procrastination called Indistractable, said to me a phrase that's always stayed with me. He said that humans are discomfort-avoiding creatures. We think we're pleasure-seeking creatures, but when he said discomfort-avoiding, I really interrogated him. I was like, "Yeah, but what about horniness that makes me have sex?" And he was like, "Well, actually that horniness is a form of discomfort. Your body is sending you this almost irritation which is making you take an action." And I stress-tested it across many areas of my life and I was like, actually, he's right. I'm trying to avoid discomfort. And in your example of seeing myself on the fridge — yeah, I would want to avoid that. It would cause such dissonance to my identity that I would do everything to avoid that.
Chase Hughes: Some big fat Steven on the fridge.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. I mean, that's actually every couple of years what gets me back in shape — catching myself in the mirror, or because I'm always on camera, sometimes I don't see myself getting out of shape, and then I watch the podcast back and I'm like, "Oh, f***." Nobody told me. And then I'm like, right, gym every day again.
Chase Hughes: And it's social because you're making this commitment in front of a million people.
Leadership, Authority, and Authenticity
Steven Bartlett: What else do you think is important to know as we head into this AI world where human skills and people skills are going to be more important than ever? What other frameworks have you got for me?
Chase Hughes: Your leadership style. Everyone's leadership style needs to be front and center. I know there are a lot of books out there that are technically about leadership, but I think they're about management and they call themselves a leadership book. When I teach what's most important when it comes to understanding ourselves, it's developing authority. That authority has five traits: confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment.
What people tend to do is seek out the wrong type of authority. I've learned this with 20 years of working with people. We 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. But there are three types, and the three types I've broken them down into are the President, the Professor, and the Artist.
The Artist — you could think of someone like Johnny Depp. The President — you could think of someone like Obama. The Professor — you can think of the classic movie professor. It still broadcasts authority, but it's not loud, it's not extremely directive. And the Artist can hold a ton of attention in some rooms and doesn't hold any attention at all in others. The authority is still there; the attention isn't.
For somebody that's super calm, even if they're the CEO of a company, they might be the Professor, and the whole time their idea of what leadership looks like is the President. So they're faking their way into this thing and it never feels real. Even though their authority is really high, they have this weird feeling of inauthenticity because they're pushing toward the wrong authority channel.
Steven Bartlett: What's the cost of that?
Chase Hughes: I think it detracts from your level of authority, which automatically means you're getting fewer outcomes that you want in life. Because your inauthenticity — both to others and to yourself — pays a toll on you. If I'm inauthentic to you, that's going to hurt my authority. And if I'm inauthentic to myself, it's going to hurt my happiness.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. And I think when people say authenticity, we should note that what most people call authenticity is a costume of childhood beliefs. My authentic self and how I act is typically what I was in childhood — how I deal with conflict, how I make friends, how I stay safe. All these little patterns that I learned when I was 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 a removal of ego and a willingness to receive social injury.
Chase Hughes: That's the best way I've ever been able to describe that to somebody. If I'm being authentic in a conversation, then I'm willing to receive a social injury for it.
Steven Bartlett: Cody Sanchez said something to me which has stayed with me. She said, 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." Going to your point about social injury — I think what Cody's actually saying is that's how she knows someone's authentic: they're willing to risk something for something they believe. I also think this is how you know a brand's authentic — are they willing to cause social injury in the near term for something they believe in the long term?
Chase Hughes: And a lot of the recent brand debacles we've had is they thought they were doing something to avoid social injury that caused a massive social injury, because people said, "You're not being authentic to your audience." When they tried to get into identity politics and extreme virtue signaling and stuff like that.
Steven Bartlett: Which backfires.
The Childhood Development Triangle
Steven Bartlett: Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick? I think it's super important for people to know.
Chase Hughes: Sure. I'm a behavior profiler, and one of the things I teach everybody is this thing called the childhood development triangle. It's just three sides of a triangle. When you're growing up, what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends? Friends is one side. Then: to feel safe. What did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like someone gives me a hug at the end of the day. For some kids, it was: am I going to eat today? For some kids, it's cracking jokes. I'm going to crack jokes and keep friends. I'm going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. I'm going to become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me. Or I'm going to become safe by being hypervigilant because I don't know if dad drank before he got home or if he's going to start drinking when he got home.
So what are the scripts that child needed to run on autopilot to feel safe, to make friends, and then to get rewards? That would be the third side. The rewards for some kids might just be appreciation — and it's typically just appreciation, affection, love. That tends to get written in childhood, and the kid who writes all these permanent scripts puts them in a backpack and carries them all the way into adulthood.
Ninety percent of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life. If you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there's a meeting wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down. You're seeing an eight-year-old who got yelled at at a family dinner table. That's all. But you're just seeing it in a grown-up body.
Steven Bartlett: I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what you've just said. I have two colleagues that I work with. I got six months into working with one of them and I could always tell that there was something not quite right, because whenever I was in the room they would stare at me a lot and they would be a little bit more on the pessimistic side than I'm used to. And one day at dinner, I was talking to them about their childhood and they offered up that their dad's mood could change rapidly and he was always pointing out why something would never work — he was an extreme pessimist. And suddenly this person who is in my life suddenly made sense. I completely understand it, because you grew up in that environment where to be safe you had to pay attention to the authority figure, and you also learned that pessimism was a way to safety.
And then there's another colleague — similar thing. She expressed to me that she had a dad whose mood would change rapidly. I said to her one day, "You're always staring at me. Whenever I look at you, you're already looking at me, and it's like you're overanalyzing and overthinking." And she explained to me the same thing. She said, "When I grew up, my dad's mood would just change like this." So every time I'm preempting — I'm thinking 20 steps ahead of what might go wrong — which makes her exceptional at her job, but one might assume that comes at some kind of cost.
Chase Hughes: Very true. And the way I explain this — it's not where you can sit there for five minutes, put it on a post-it note, and figure your whole life out. The way I want people to think about this is: going back to your childhood, a lot of those things are just contracts that were written in a child's voice. 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.
We're typically three different people, all of us. We have a work self, a home self, and a self with friends. And what is that as a kid? That's classroom, playground, home. I'll typically take people through this process of where were you around authority figures — which is like classroom or home. What were you like when all your friends were around? You got made fun of, or you had to become really small. That goes on the friends side of the triangle and talks about the social patterns that are going to show up for you.
And somebody says, "Well, I keep attracting these negative people into my life. Why do I do that?" That goes to these patterns, because if I do this, I know this is going to happen. It's just completing a story archetype.
The awareness is what you want. You want massive self-knowledge and self-awareness, with the side agreement of: I am not special, and I'm completely okay if I am never understood. Because most of what happens when we get into arguments with our spouse or with people 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 never ever be understood is step number one. Number two: I am not special. That helps us open the door to start coming into a lot of these things.
But if you're a leader at work, you can start seeing these patterns in your employees. You can be like, "I see an eight-year-old there." And if you get to a point where you're seeing behavior that might have pissed you off in somebody that works for you, and you're like, "Wait a second. Now I can see exactly what's going on because this, this, and this probably happened." You don't need to make some prediction about their childhood, but you're starting to see these patterns and you know now how your team's going to respond in conflict. If it's a 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 going to see their safety patterns come out.
Steven Bartlett: So do you think I should go to the key people in my life, maybe my team, and ask them these questions? What did you do to make and keep friends?
Chase Hughes: What did you do to make and keep friends? What did you need to do or avoid to feel safe? And the rewards one — you want to put the word "feel" in there: what did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards? And what were rewards to you?
Somebody that's hyper significance-driven — I've got to have the Rolex, I've got to have the Ferraris — they never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate, or their teacher called and said they did a good job, or they played the piano recital and lots of people were acknowledging them and clapping for them. They only got acknowledged when they were socially significant.
Steven Bartlett: Am I right in thinking these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways? Because when you're talking about safety, I was running through my head the things that made me feel safe and they were rewards that I could tell my friends about. I touched all three of them, in part because I was very different to my social group when I was younger. We were a Black family. There wasn't another Black family that I knew of, other than maybe one other kid in the area in Plymouth in 1994 or '95. So some of the material things I wanted — like the shoes that everyone had — made me feel safe because they made me fit in. And that got me friends. Or at least I thought it did. So for me it really was like an interconnected triangle.
Chase Hughes: Yeah. It does tend to do that. I'll typically wait for somebody to figure that out, and as they're filling it out they're kind of like, "Oh, I did this because of this to get to this," and you'll see a little cycle start happening.
But it's great for self-knowledge, and if you're a behavior profiler, that's what's going to run people. You're going to know how they're going to respond to conflict. You're going to know what they're going to avoid. If you're putting teams together, you know what people you want working with each other.
Steven Bartlett: What if one part of this triangle — one behavior I've learned for safety or for rewards or for friends — is making my life worse? It could be ruining my life. It could be the thing standing in the way of me having a romantic relationship or getting a promotion or building a business. What do I do, Chase?
Chase Hughes: You've identified the pattern. Let's assume you've got it. You're like, "I've got this thing that's happening on repeat." Part two of this is I need to focus on that being a kid that belongs to a child. I need to write down: here's how that child wrote the contract, made the promise to themselves, developed the contract. And then — even if you make it up — when did this kid bring it into adulthood? "I need to stay small in order to stay safe." Let's say that's one of those things. And then you just start telling yourself: that is a child's voice. That's a child's voice.
The voice is not going to go away. That's the sad part. It's like trying not to complete the sentence "Mary had a little..." in your head. You can't get rid of it no matter how hard you try. 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 just assumed, "I'm going to have this forever. I'm going to need this as an adult."
Part two of this: you make a wallpaper or something for your desktop. We talked about being negatively motivated — we're away from negative things. You make a motivational wallpaper that has your big limiting belief on it and then take it to an extreme. I had a client that had "if I stay small I'm going to be safe." He owned a business but he wouldn't go get these big clients. The guy's got three kids. 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. 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 costing you in your life: my kids don't deserve money. And that's what it comes down to.
Every day you look at it, you have a feeling of disgust. There's a hyper awareness of that thing running in your head. You're going to be more prone to hear it when it does come up. And you're also training yourself to hear it as a child's voice, which means you're going to start hearing fiction. You're still hearing the same sentence, but you're hearing a fictional story.
Steven Bartlett: There are two parts to this that I wanted to talk about. The first is: in doing so, in waking up in the morning and seeing my wallpaper that says "my kids don't deserve a great life" — of course it's going to motivate me to take action, which is then going to start to build new evidence once I take action, once I win that big client and realize that everything's fine, which is going to change my life.
The second point is: people listen to podcasts like this and they write this stuff down and then they have relapses and things don't change fast enough. And I think that can sometimes make them feel hopeless or inadequate. And I think in part this happens because we live under the presumption that this stuff is easy and fast, and that at some point in the future I can fix my trauma. One of the best realizations I ever had was realizing that the stuff I've carried with me in that backpack since I was a kid — 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 are — they will be with me forever. And actually, instead of trying to delete them or throw them out of the backpack, what I was able to do was turn down their ability to make the decision.
Chase Hughes: That's it. That's it. You've totally got it.
Micro-Compliance: The Engine of Influence
Chase Hughes: And I would say this for anybody out there that's trying to go through this and having a hard time: the number one way that we influence another human being — let me just metaphor this for one second. When you watch a hypnotist — and hypnosis is something anybody can learn to do, it's a pretty easy thing, it just looks very dramatic — one of the things you'll see me do at the beginning of that is: "Go ahead and give me your hand." I'll hold their hand for a second. "Put both hands out like this and then flip them over. That's great. Now, 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." I will make them do like 50 things. None of the things I just did with them are meaningful. None of them. Everything was micro-compliance.
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. You go through a doctor's physical and they go through like a 90-point checklist — they've made you do 50 things — and then they recommend a weird drug. Take some time to think about it, because our brain is hardwired for these micro-compliances.
So I say this to say: if you're going through any of these things and you're trying to change your beliefs or change something in your body, use what works for brainwashing. 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. Everything in influence should be looked at as a wedge.
Steven Bartlett: It reminds me of that famous study they did where they got people to give electric shocks to other people — the Milgram obedience experiment. And they managed to get a member of the public to give another member of the public lethal electric shocks just through micro-compliance, but also through authority, because the experimenters were wearing white jackets, white overalls, et cetera.
Chase Hughes: And here's the second thing in that experiment that's going to perfectly tie back to this. This experiment happened at Yale University in 1962. Strangers would shock another person — what they thought was to death — just because some guy in a lab coat told them to. But what they didn't account for — and even Dr. Milgram's book was called Obedience to Authority — they thought it was all about the authority, the lab coat, the guy's tall, it's a professional setting. But really, think about this: if you go back to our ancestors, the most important resource to your ancestors was focus. There's nothing more important than focus. And the number one way to generate focus — because if I don't have your focus, I can't command authority — so focus is always first. My framework is: focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. Those are the four things that govern a mammal. All mammals. Dolphins, doesn't matter. I have to have focus before authority. And they didn't talk about that.
The way to get focus is through novelty. Novelty meaning something unexpected is occurring. If you walk past the same bush every day 10,000 years ago and your job is to carry fish from the river, and suddenly you walk past that bush and you hear a big stick snap — all of your focus, all of it, is on that stick. Not on your kids, not on your health, not on anything else. It's on this new unexpected piece of information that hijacks our brain. Anything novel hijacks our brain.
So it follows that pathway: focus, then authority, then tribe — what's everybody else doing? — and then emotion — how do I feel about it? And we are hardwired to respond to these things. You cannot decide not to respond to novelty. Your head turns to loud sounds. All this stuff happens.
So the way to brainwash yourself is: change your house up. Change something up in your life. Change your wardrobe. Repaint the walls in your office. Move your furniture around. Buy a new car if you can. Imagine how would I influence my dog in this situation? I would need imagery. I would need something to shift. If I move the kitchen table to the side and move all the furniture, when my dog comes out of the bedroom, he's going to know something's different.
Steven Bartlett: I think this is one of the great secrets of good marketing — it beats your brain's wallpaper filter. I wrote a little bit about this in my last book, about this idea of beating the wallpaper filter. I talked about a study where they got a rat and put it in a maze with chocolate at the other end. They looked at the rat's brain as it went through the maze the first time and the rat's brain was exploding with activity — it's smelling the walls, trying to figure it out. Then they put the rat in the maze the second time and there's almost no brain activity because it's on autopilot. It knows the maze, so it doesn't need to use any of its cognitive resources. Its cognitive resources can be allocated to new, surprising things. The maze is no longer surprising. It whizzes through to the chocolate.
Even thinking about how you got out of your bed this morning and got down to the kitchen — you didn't have to think. You paid no attention. But you would have paid attention if you walked down there and your sofa wasn't there.
And how does that then apply to marketing? How do you surprise people is a central question for anyone trying to build a personal brand, start a podcast, or do marketing. But also to persuade people. It's one of the things I think about a lot when I talk on stage — I know I'm competing with your mobile phone, your Twitter feed, your TikTok. So I have to do something almost every ten seconds to catch you off guard. And Mr. Beast, I guess, is the great master of this — probably why he's got half a billion YouTube followers. Because the minute that video starts, you're hooked in.
Chase Hughes: That's the power of novelty. I would challenge anybody to take this challenge. If you're scrolling through short-form content, watch for something that jerks your attention — some kind of weird novelty thing that happens. That video is probably a short 20- or 40-second video that captures your focus through novelty. The next video, watch for an authority figure — a famous YouTuber, a celebrity, a politician, a pop singer who thinks they know politics. Watch for an authority figure. Next, watch for a tribe signal. A tribe signal is going to be: here's how many people agree with this, here's lots of people doing one thing, these tickets are selling out, here's the Taylor Swift concert, here's everyone cheering. Here's how you're supposed to behave — that's basically what the tribe section means. You're supposed to do what these people are doing. And then watch for the emotion.
Watch for this pattern: a focus-generating novelty, then authority, then tribe, then an emotional video. And guess what happens after the emotional video?
Steven Bartlett: An ad.
Making People Feel Clever: The Most Dangerous Persuasion Skill
Steven Bartlett: I heard you say something as well — that if you want to persuade other people, you should make them feel clever. Explain this to me.
Chase Hughes: I refer to this as maybe the most dangerous persuasion skill there is. The ten-second brief is: I'm going to put a Lego right here on the table in front of you, and I'm going to put another Lego right here on the table in front of you, and I'm just going to keep having the conversation to where eventually your brain is going to be like, "Oh, I bet those things go together." So the idea came from you. I'm going to give you one piece of information and another piece of information, but I will never put them together for you. And the reason is that any idea you think came from your own mind, you have no ability to resist it. So all I have to do is make you have an idea.
A regular example of this is: let's say you're watching the news and they say, "Local Austin woman has been reported missing. Neighbors said that earlier this day people saw her arguing with her boyfriend." Details after the break. And your brain is like, "Oh, I know what happened." They make you feel clever. They give you a piece of data and a piece of data, but they don't tell you to put it together.
Steven Bartlett: The media do this all the time.
Chase Hughes: Yes. And if you can do this in a courtroom, it will be the biggest unfair advantage you'll ever have in a legal standing because it'll win lots of trials. The formula for how to use this is: here's a piece of information that you will absolutely agree with and that makes sense to you, and another piece of information that makes sense to you. It has to be two things that make sense to your brain, because you're not going to experiment with something you're not familiar with. Two pieces of familiar information close enough together where the brain is going to say, "Oh, you know what I can do? I'm going to put those two things together."
Steven Bartlett: Isn't this how conspiracy theories take hold as well?
Chase Hughes: Oh, yeah. There's a big enduring conspiracy theory that someone like Bill Gates has done things that are nefarious as it relates to health. The two pieces people are connecting are: he's very rich and powerful and very interested in health, biotech, vaccines, and all these other things. And someone very powerful — we often think of very powerful, successful, influential people as being somewhat evil or not having our interests at heart. And then someone who's spending a lot of money on health and medical things is quite an unusual thing. So we put two and two together. We think they have bad intentions because they are a billionaire, and that word comes with certain preconceptions. And then a pandemic happens.
Name a movie from when you were a kid where the super rich person in the movie wasn't the evil one.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Chase Hughes: It's programmed into the media. It's a definite programming. It's always the rich people who are evil. But then people will say, "Oh, well, Tony Stark was rich." They made him a sociopath.
Steven Bartlett: I think at some point it's intentional. But at some point also, it becomes such a clear stereotype that you have to follow it when you're writing movies, or else it doesn't make sense to people.
Chase Hughes: I'm not saying it was intentional within the last 200 or 300 years. We're talking about the Brothers Grimm, ancient fairy tales. I think it was intentional then — having wealth is bad, there's virtue in poverty. That's the big thing they wanted to communicate. Poverty is virtuous.
Steven Bartlett: And of course we're still doing a lot of that stuff today.
Chase Hughes: But the reason is exactly what you're saying — I think it's burned into some collective archetype of what stories have become, and we wouldn't recognize it. So if I watched a movie and there was a very successful billionaire businessman, all I have to say is that, and you fill in the gaps. You're thinking private jet. You're thinking how they treat people. You know what they're wearing. And I didn't say any of that stuff.
Steven Bartlett: And you made me feel clever because I put all that stuff together. That came from my own mind.
Archetypes in the Courtroom
Chase Hughes: And speaking of archetypes — that's the second way that you can win any court case in the world.
Steven Bartlett: Have you got experience with court cases and stuff like that?
Chase Hughes: A lot. As far as I know, I'm the only trial consultant that offers a 200% money-back guarantee when I work.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean as a trial consultant? What's your objective in simple terms?
Chase Hughes: It's always a little different and it depends on whether I'm working for prosecution or defense. I know nothing about the law — just about nothing. But I know people. I'll typically go in and we'll pick a jury. We want to select a jury based on this factor and this factor and based on this zip code. Here's the question we want to ask to find out which is going to be a good juror and which is a bad juror. But then I have to figure out questions that are covert. How can I covertly ask a question where the opposing counsel won't know what I desire and what I don't desire based on the answer?
One case I worked was for a large grocery store company being sued because a lady slipped on a green bean. Real stuff. And they hired me because it was a big lawsuit. I want a jury that has an internal locus of control — they are in charge of their own life, they're responsible for their destiny. And we want to weed out the people that have the opposite — the victim mentality, the "world happens to me" kind of thing. So we have to figure out: how do I ask a question that A, reveals that, B, is covert, and C, is not going to expose what we're looking for to opposing counsel?
So we'll come out with a question like, "How does a person catch a cold?" And then you get one person that answers, "Well, these stupid kids picking their boogers, they're wiping on the escalator, they're coughing and sneezing all over the place, people aren't wearing masks." Then you ask the next guy, "How does a person catch a cold?" And he says, "Well, if I've ever caught a cold, I was in a place I shouldn't have been. I didn't wash my hands thoroughly enough. I didn't take care of my body. I didn't take vitamins. I didn't take care of myself." Very, very different. So we know what is satisfactory for us to select a jury.
Steven Bartlett: I want to pause there because it's fascinating. It's actually the last question I ask on our culture test when we employ people for my company. We ask them 35 questions before they're 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: "The people I worked with, I wasn't given clear enough instructions from a client or a boss, or myself." It's remarkable that 45% of the population will click "it was me." When I don't do great work, it's not my team to blame, it's not the person above or below me or some other factor — it is me. And that scores the highest marks on that particular question, because again, we're trying to reveal if you have that sense of personal responsibility and internal locus of control, which correlates to better work, more ambition, harder work, better long-term success, and more happiness.
Chase Hughes: And you can tell they're driven too. They're going to own their mistakes. They're going to help other people be more accountable. Probably going to learn faster because they're going to take responsibility.
So with an archetype in the jury room — let's say we've picked a jury. The goal is: what is the overall archetype of the case that's playing out in front of us? It's a small person suing a big company. Let's say I'm on that lady's side. I'm going to come out and, without ever saying the name, I'm going to make you think David and Goliath all day long without knowing that I made you think David and Goliath. I might say "giant." I might say "someone small." I might say "slingshot." I might say all these little keywords that are probably in your head about the David and Goliath story, just to plant that narrative in your head. And that might be the first three hours of the day, and I've jammed that into your head and you think it's your own idea.
So then the next time, I'm going to talk about maybe waiting in line at the DMV.
Steven Bartlett: For people that don't know the context there because they're not in the US —
Chase Hughes: Waiting in line at this government identification card office. Everyone around the world will have some form of that — when you've gone to get a passport or whatever.
Steven Bartlett: Waiting at passport control. Your doctor's office keeping you waiting for 45 minutes and not caring about your time.
Chase Hughes: We're going to talk about all these situations where a big company is screwing over another person, or a 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.
If I mention any scenario, there's like a little file clerk in your head, and I can get that little guy to run down to the file cabinet and pull out a folder that has that stuff in there. So when I say "hot air balloon," your file clerk runs down there and pulls out a file — okay, I was at a hot air balloon festival in New Mexico or something. If I can get your file clerk to keep pulling files out throughout the day, and if it's all in one context, the file clerk leaves them all out on the desk. And if I can get enough of the files I want out on that desk, that's going to influence every decision you make when you go home tonight.
So that's the persuasion — 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. If I just get you to think this is probably David and Goliath, this is the middle part of the story — this is when the little kid, the shepherd kid, is walking down the hill to challenge the giant — your brain comes up with the ending to the story automatically.
Steven Bartlett: And what does archetype mean?
Chase Hughes: An archetype is just a brand of story. A hero's journey, a tragedy, a loss and return, a rags-to-riches story, a wounded healer story — all these classic story types. There are about twelve story types. Joseph Campbell has talked a lot about this. If our brains have about twelve of these little archetypes, and if it's like a wounded healer story with a redemption arc at the end, I'm going to get the audience to see that we're at the 75% mark, right where it's about to happen. If I just get you to see a situation through the lens of an archetype, your brain automatically not just predicts but knows how it's going to end. 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 who jammed the archetype into your head for a couple of days.
Steven Bartlett: So bringing this back to Debbie in Ohio — 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: You can also use this as a profiling tool. If you take notes on this stuff about people in your office — I would keep them private — figure out: 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. That's a Back to the Future archetype. You can make up your own archetypes. But if they're doing all of this and everything's going good, what's the next thing they're going to predict? They're going to have a problem coming up in their life. So I know how they're going to predict their future if I just know what story they're in.
Steven Bartlett: Andrew Bustamante, who's that CIA spy I've had on the show a few times, told me about his RICE framework in espionage — Reward, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. Reward being the things you want like money. Ideology being doing this is good for your family, doing this is good for your country. Coercion being pressurizing people. And Ego. He said of all four of these, ideology — understanding someone's ideology — is the most persuasive, for when he was a spy.
The way I've conceptualized that and maybe built upon it a little 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, say, come and work at your company or persuading them to do a deal, the first great challenge is listening to them long enough for them to hand over their ideology to you, so that you can speak to them not through your own ideology and what you want, but through their ideology. Even with me — obviously there's a hero's journey in my mind, a story that's behind me but also that I want to be ahead of me. And if you can listen long enough to figure out what that is, you can tell me, "Okay, Steve, I'm going to sell you this Range Rover and tell you the features and benefits of it through the hero's journey that you want to live out."
Chase Hughes: Everyone listening right now has that. You have a hero's journey that you're on. And the most persuasive thing anyone could do is not just give you money or whatever — it's to let them know that the thing you're offering is going to realize that story, or at least the next chapter. We don't always want to sell a completion. We just want to say this is the logical next step of this story.
So if somebody has this arc — if we figure out what arc type they're living right now, what type of story — then I can figure out how their brain is predicting the future. Because archetypes are so woven into our brains without language. The language is not necessary for the archetype to exist.
So if you know someone else's archetype, you can understand how they're going to predict their future and how they're going to make choices.
Steven Bartlett: And how do you get their archetype out of them?
Chase Hughes: You're going to hear it. You don't even need special questions. You ask them about their life. Ask them where they're from. Ask them to give you a summary of what happened when they worked 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 jerk." So now you're starting to see an archetype — the guy was in a tragedy there. The guy was a victim and they want to be appreciated. So now he's here at this brand new company for redemption. Now we're in a redemption story arc.
It just comes out naturally in everybody's speech. And the funny thing is I've never seen it applied to courtrooms in the way that we do it, and it's such a powerful tool.
The Time-Distance Problem in Interrogation
Chase Hughes: The number one thing that I specialize in is this thing called the time-distance problem. We have two axes: a horizontal axis and a vertical axis. The horizontal axis is the distance line and the vertical axis is the time line. So we have time and we have distance.
Distance is how far away from a behavioral norm can I get a person to go. Can I get Steven to confess to a crime? Doing something that's going to send you to jail for 30 years is way outside of your behavioral norm. For me to be able to do that in an interrogation room, I have to do some techniques. If I do it in sales, then I'm getting you to make a decision you maybe otherwise wouldn't have — maybe if I'm in timeshare sales or something like that.
Some people can get people far on the distance line, but it's going to take forever. It's going to take maybe a year of persuading them and trying to sell to them. The last interrogations I did were for a corporation in California. I had to do 45 interrogations in like two days, and I had maybe 25 minutes per interrogation. That was the least amount of time I've ever been given. And that was the time-distance problem. How do I layer on the techniques — the identity, the perception, context, and permission — as fast as possible so I can shift someone's behavior as fast as possible?
Psychedelics, Consciousness, and Perspective
Chase Hughes: There's one more universal thing, and this may not even fit anywhere in the episode because it's random, but you were talking earlier about carrying this trauma in your backpack. So many people are trying to get rid of this trauma. The reason that psychedelics can rewire PTSD so fast is that it doesn't delete your trauma at all. The memory is still there. All that stuff is still there. It changes the perspective so massively that you can still see the event, but it forces you to see all of that stuff through a different lens.
If you look at somebody that has some depression going on, some weird mental stuff going on in their life — so much of what ails us, even someone who's lacking confidence and they say, "I can't be a leader, I can't go into this meeting, I can't do this negotiation" — it's a perspective problem. It's like 90% of the problems that people have that I work with is just a perspective issue and nothing else. And occasionally, if somebody's been going through a lot for a long time, I would get your neurotransmitters tested and get your brain tested and see if you've got some chemical imbalance that's causing a lot of stuff. Sometimes a vitamin deficiency could cause a lot of that.
Steven Bartlett: Outside of psychedelics, is there any useful way you've found to change one's perspective?
Chase Hughes: There's sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation tanks, darkness retreats, all those things people talk about with breathwork and big retreats. I don't know anything about those things. I do study psychedelics a lot, and I think Johns Hopkins this year said it was the most effective drug ever tested in human history for psychological problems — treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, addiction. And now we have this drug called ibogaine — it's not new, it's been around for thousands of years — that's helping people with addiction. And there are now people able to do intravenous DMT for like five hours at a time instead of five minutes at a time. And I was the 41st person in the world to do the intravenous DMT.
Steven Bartlett: Where did you do that?
Chase Hughes: Denver. I did it because DMT has a massive boost of BDNF — brain-derived neurotrophic factor — and it also produces a lot of brain plasticity. So I was trying to fix my brain. I've got a brain disease. So I went down there on this five-hour thing and I've been completely different ever since that day. It is a massive benefit, and it's heavy. DMT is a heavy, heavy thing to go through. I can't see any reason why any human being would use it recreationally.
Steven Bartlett: For anyone that hasn't experienced DMT, how would you describe the experience? I know that's going to be hard because some of my friends have done it and when you ask them to describe it, it seems to be quite abstract.
Chase Hughes: It's like if we had some two-dimensional creatures 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 so that it could see in three dimensions and see everything in this room. That's DMT. You're getting peeled out of reality into some other realm. And the weird thing is every scientist I know that's studying DMT — not one of them thinks it's a hallucination.
Steven Bartlett: What do they think it is?
Chase Hughes: The more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell's going on. But everyone — literally everyone — who uses DMT pretty much goes to the same exact places and they all meet the same entities, the same seven or eight different types of entities. And it's been the same for 4,500 years of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It's an endogenous chemical.
Steven Bartlett: Has it changed your view on what reality really is?
Chase Hughes: 100%. Yeah. It's so much more real than this reality. It's so ineffable. There are no words that can describe it, but it's 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 — or just fake, like a cartoon of some kind. It's just really low resolution. And I come back with no certainty about anything. I think everybody comes back with that lack of certainty. You're not coming back and being like, "I saw this exact thing and here's what it means and here's how the universe is created." But you go up there and you come back and you're like, "Something about this plane doesn't feel real anymore." And that is a permanent shift that's hard for some people to make. You can't unsee that you were kind of able to poke your head out of the side door of the Truman Show and look out backstage for a little while.
Steven Bartlett: Has it made you believe that this reality we're living in now is not real?
Chase Hughes: We'd have to define "real."
Steven Bartlett: How would you define real? You can touch it, you can measure it, you can taste it, smell it — would that be real?
Chase Hughes: Do you think we're living in a simulation? We have to define simulation, because I think every society has this hubris — the universe is whatever is cool to us right now. Electricity came out, the universe was energy. The industrial revolution came out, the whole universe was a giant machine. And right now everybody says, "Oh, we just discovered computers, the universe must be a computer." It's the hubris of every generation.
What I mean by simulation — I think, is it rendered in some way by something? I study this stuff all day, every day of my life. And I think the more discoveries we have in particle physics and quantum mechanics, the more they're proving the hermetic principles.
Steven Bartlett: What's that?
Chase Hughes: These are the seven ancient principles of this guy named Hermes Trismegistus, also known as Thoth — an Egyptian figure. They're confused about his name, but he wrote these principles. The first two are the most important. The first one is: all is mind. The universe is mental. And then the second one is: as above, so below.
Here's how I explained this to my son a couple of days ago. I said, "Have you ever had a dream where there's a building in the dream? Maybe there's a house in front of you. What are you looking at the house with?" And he said, "Well, my eyes." I said, "Which eyes are they? Are they your eyes that you're seeing the house with?" And he said, "No, because you're imagining your own set of eyes to see the house with in your dream. Your eyes aren't there. Your body isn't there. So you're imagining the whole body and the world." And I said, "What's the distance between you and that house in your dream?" He said, "30 feet." I said, "What is the air made out of between you and the house?" And he said, "Air." And I said, "You have air in your dreams? Is it real air?" He said, "No, it's just my brain." I said, "So is there distance between you and the house?" He said, "No." "What's the house made out of?" "Me." "What's the air made out of?" "Me." The entire thing is me. The ground I'm standing on, the house, the clouds in the sky.
So in a dream, you can verifiably prove that something is real. You can test it, you can touch it, and the perception of it is very much real. So the theory now — and I don't have any certainty about this — but one interesting theory I've heard from many different neuroscientists is: if we look at "as above, so below" — a universe spins like a DNA double helix. You can zoom in on a human eyeball and it looks the same as a nebula. What if dreams are level one and this is level two of that, where we're hallucinating distance?
Whatever the case is, I do think that separation is the greatest lie ever told to the entire world. "You are separate from that person." How people say, "I need to go spend time in nature" — you are nature. 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 the one thing that I think will help a lot of people. And that's why psychedelics can really just rewire somebody's brain so fast. It just deletes that separation.
Steven Bartlett: I feel like I just did some DMT because you said level one is dreams, level two is maybe this reality. So the question in my mind was: what's level three?
Chase Hughes: Then that would maybe be what you see on DMT.
Steven Bartlett: You said that world was more real than this one.
Chase Hughes: Oh yeah. Exponentially, immeasurably.
Steven Bartlett: Why? How do you quantify realness? What's the measuring stick there?
Chase Hughes: There are no words for it.
Steven Bartlett: Has this changed your view on religion?
Chase Hughes: Yeah. I wasn't really a religious person. I think it made me a much more spiritual person. And I think before any psychedelic therapy I went through, I was performing spirituality. Spirituality was kind of something I did to show people.
Steven Bartlett: Virtue signaling.
Chase Hughes: And now spirituality — you kind of see it like it's not a big deal. You don't have to go buy linen yoga pants and wooden beads and bathe in essential oils to be spiritual. You can just maybe have a hand up there and be less certain. I think certainty is the enemy. We haven't been here very long. We're very newborn creatures on this planet.
Steven Bartlett: Has it made you more empathetic?
Chase Hughes: Unbelievably so. Yeah. At the end of the day, after your first or second time going to psychedelic therapy, you're like, "Oh, I need to understand the secrets of the universe now." You go in there with these very egocentric desires and then they're like, "Okay, you want to understand the universe? They'll show it all to you." And your brain's not capable of understanding it, remembering it, or translating it once you come back anyway. And I think over time you learn that the more ego I have, the more I'm performing. And then every time I kind of reflect on that experience, it helps me to unzip my little ego costume a little bit more.
Steven Bartlett: Did you know that you can get banned from DMT?
Chase Hughes: Really, dude? You've got to look this up. There are thousands of people out there who were using DMT recreationally and the beings up there basically told them, "You are done," and the journey stops right there in that moment. The guy can take hit after hit after hit of DMT and nothing happens. You can be banned from that realm — or whatever it is. I think they call it hyperspace.
In the culture surrounding DMT, there is a widely reported phenomenon called being locked out of hyperspace. Many frequent users report reaching a point where the drug simply stops working as expected regardless of the dose. The common descriptions include: the waiting room wall — getting stuck in the initial onset phase and being unable to break through; the gray room — seeing only flat, colorless, or dull visuals instead of vibrant geometry; the hyperspace slap — a terrifying or deeply uncomfortable experience where entities appear to tell you that you aren't welcome or shouldn't be here anymore; and the sudden blackout — smoking the substance and simply falling asleep or remembering nothing, effectively being denied entry.
Steven Bartlett: One of the very random but persuasive thought experiments I sometimes use to explain why I've started to believe that there's probably something more is, weirdly, how much I've learned about the gut microbiome. When I sat here with these experts and they're like, "Oh, by the way, there are 38 trillion living organisms in your gut right now" — I was like, okay, so those 38 trillion creatures, you could argue maybe they're not conscious or whatever you want to say. But they have no idea that they're living inside another organism. 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 one. But because they don't realize that they're inside — I guess their god, their creator, the thing that's feeding them every day and keeping them alive, the thing that created the environment for them to reproduce.
And when I thought about that, I thought about the oceans. The animals at the very bottom of the deepest ocean have no idea that there's anything above. And then you've got to ask yourself: am I arrogant enough or naive enough to believe that this is it? That I am at the top of the mountain and there's nothing above? It's so egotistical to think there couldn't be anything above me.
And then the other thing that's been really persuasive for me in my journey of spirituality or religion or whatever you want to call it — I did a bunch of star tours and got interested in the stars, sitting there with a star expert at night time in Joshua Tree. He'd get this big binocular out and say, "What you're seeing there is" — he'd say something crazy like — "28 million light years away." And I'm looking at a whole other galaxy and it's just this speck. And he goes, "Yeah, there are like trillions of those." And I'm thinking, like the gut microbiome — there are like 38 trillion of those. And they're just specks with life on them that we understand at some granular level, but maybe not the deepest granular level. So maybe I'm just another gut in the bug of some toddler in some other space. And I just don't know the answer. What do you do with that information?
Chase Hughes: The new theory is that consciousness is external to our body. Our brains act as a receiver and a filter for consciousness, not a creator of consciousness. So hypothetically, maybe DMT is something that just pops that filter off and allows us to experience full consciousness.
And then if all is mind — so if everything in my dream is made up of me, and we just copy-paste that up to this level — we're all maybe part of one mind and there aren't any people. It's just a mind. So the distance between us doesn't exist. It's just like a dream except we're sharing a dream up here. And that's part of that new consciousness theory. I don't subscribe to any one of them in particular.
Steven Bartlett: You haven't got to believe any of this stuff, because it's hard — you're never going to know for sure. But even hearing it makes me feel a lot more empathetic for my fellow being. It makes your enemy you. It makes your friend you. Makes the person you love, hate, whatever — it makes all of them you. I think we treat ourselves much better sometimes than we would treat someone a thousand miles away in a different country with a different color skin. Every time I bring myself back to this point about consciousness being one, it does make me more empathetic.
Chase Hughes: It does. And it's not because you're a moral person. If I see you as me, I'm just protecting myself. In the same way I would with my children. The morality doesn't need to exist anymore. It's just the right thing.
Human Connection in the Age of AI
Steven Bartlett: Chase, what is the most important idea we didn't talk about that we should have talked about — specifically as it relates to the most important skills people are going to need? Whether it's body language or people skills or sales skills in the world we're heading towards, where robots are going to take away lots of the manual labor jobs and artificial intelligence is going to take away a lot of the cognitive work, and we might be left with each other in the real world.
Chase Hughes: Number one is making people feel heard and seen, and resonating with them when they're heard, and not judging them when they're seen. That's the number one. Because AI — you can mark my words — AI will never in a million years serve as a replacement for humans on the social level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where we have survival, safety, belonging. That third row of Maslow's pyramid cannot be fulfilled through electronic means, as of yet anyway. And we cannot fulfill that desire, that need. What's above that? Then we have esteem, our self-esteem, and our self-actualization. We can never move past level three because we're getting a placebo of connection from Twitter and TikTok and all these apps — these pseudo-social apps. We have these parasocial relationships on YouTube and it cannot fulfill that level. Our brains were not wired to receive digital connection. Our brains have not developed one more wrinkle in the last 200,000 years.
So we're not going to outscience the lower part of the brain. And you can't meditate your way out of having good relationships and being around three-dimensional people. You need it in your life. And I genuinely think AI is never going to replace it.
Steven Bartlett: I would agree. I think one of the things that's been really persuasive in this regard — I remember in psychology lessons when I was maybe 16 years old, Mrs. Lowry. I've always missed Miss Lowry. Miss Lowry, if you're listening, please get in touch. She was a great teacher for me in psychology. I really only liked two lessons in school: business and psychology. Miss Lowry was talking about the Harlow monkey experiment, where they got these rhesus monkeys and either gave them a fake mother that had cloth on it, or a wire mother — a mother made out of wires — and they looked at their psychological outcomes over time. What they found is the monkeys that grew to be most psychologically stable and happy were the ones that had a cloth mother. The monkeys that became erratic and clearly had deep psychological problems were the ones that just had a wire mother.
That's always reminded me that even in a world of robots or AI, there's still something irreplaceably human about physical human connection and touch.
Chase Hughes: Which I actually think is going to absolutely surge in a world where we do have robots and intelligence and retentive algorithms. I think there's going to be this bifurcation of society where many people flee back to the real world. The two biggest things that we have as a result of all this are loneliness and division. The division is manufactured and the loneliness is a byproduct.
Steven Bartlett: Is there anything else you wanted to share?
Chase Hughes: Yeah, maybe some good news. I'd be remiss to stop on that note.
Steven Bartlett: Give me some good news.
Chase Hughes: I think the number one thing that people need to know is: if you wrote down the biggest insecurities you've ever had in your entire life — every crazy thing about how you thought it was a big deal — and you had a hundred people do the same thing and then had someone type all of them out, you wouldn't be able to find your own. You'd be very confused. You'd think that someone just paraphrased you a hundred times if you were digging through that hat trying to find your insecurities. And it would shock you.
It's one thing to hear it maybe on a podcast, but to see it in real life — if you see the depth of other people, we are so much the same. And all the stuff that we hide because we don't want anybody else to see it — everyone else is hiding the exact same stuff. Everybody else is feeling the exact same way.
The number one thing that people regret on their deathbed is: I should have treated it more like a game. I should have figured out what was important in the game and done what was actually important.
Steven Bartlett: That means a lot to you, doesn't it? That particular point. It's almost like you've changed since the last time we spoke in a way.
Chase Hughes: Yeah. I think there's been a bit of an evolution.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. I think that level of empathy is super important to life and it helps slow things down. And no matter what you're going through — put this up on your wall: it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be a game. And I think Alan Watts had a quote that said, "Most of man's misery comes from taking very seriously what God made for fun." 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 safety — if it threatens any of these things, then it doesn't feel so fun. Depending on your perspective. And that's where the big perspective shift comes in of: I've got to remind myself this is supposed to be fun.
Closing: Celebrating Wins and the Expectation Gap
Steven Bartlett: Chase, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is: if you were going to take on a new challenge this year to expand the territory of your skill set in a way that would make you happy, what would it be?
Chase Hughes: I think developing the ability to shut up and celebrate when there's a win. We just had a giant record month in our company — a massive record month — and I was like, "Okay, okay." And then I just joined another meeting and it fell by the wayside. And I think I'm going to regret doing that. I think celebrating wins is a skill that I need to cultivate better.
Steven Bartlett: Mo Gawdat, from episode 101, was the most shared episode of any podcast in 2023 on Apple in the UK according to Apple. He was head of Google X who left when his son died in a routine operation, and he went in search of happiness. At Google he was leading the innovation teams — all the AI stuff, robots, all that. And I remember he became 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 backpacking, he had this one shirt, he'd come to my studio in London, this old kitchen that 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: unhappiness is when your expectations of how you thought your life was supposed to be going go unmet.
I always come back to this because almost all of my unhappiness is when I had an expectation of how my life was supposed to be going — your relationship, getting cut off in traffic, whatever it might be. And when you fall short of one's expectation, that gap is dissatisfaction and frustration. So can one play with this by being grateful? Because I think gratitude is a proxy of realizing that expectations you once had are now being met and exceeded. But the problem is, as striving creatures, we keep a delta between where we are and where we expect to be. So when you talked about celebrating your win there, the problem is you're already thinking about the next one. So you've already created a delta.
Chase Hughes: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: And that's going to keep you on. Whereas the Eastern traditions are all about gratitude, which in that moment is going, "Chase, we did it. This was a dream. And you did it." Are you able to sit in that? The problem I've also discovered with this is I expected it to be automatic. I expected the gratitude and the excitement and the joy to be automatic. So when it didn't automatically show up when I became a millionaire or the podcast did well, I thought maybe it'll show up on the next one. Instead of taking a moment and forcing it out of me — reminding myself that this was it, Chase. This was the dream.
Chase Hughes: And that's the perspective.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. Perspective. Like your camera angle — mine, I'll speak for myself, is just so zoomed in on this exact moment, on what's going on in the business, this meeting that's coming up in a few minutes. Just dragging that camera by the throat and pulling it up — like when you zoom out on Google Maps and be like, "This is a big deal." Like you have time to pause. Nothing you think is a big deal is a huge deal. You can pause, you can cancel that meeting, and really celebrate.
It's so true. And maybe when I became a millionaire, I thought it was going to fix my posture, it was going to make my skin look better. It didn't do anything. It didn't do anything. And the crazy part about that is you often hear of what they call gold medal depression, which again is a prime example of — you had an expectation of that moment. You thought confetti and a marching band. And the reality is it didn't change anything. Now a lot of people 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 and it didn't change anything.
So I actively practice, especially ahead of an accomplishment, forced gratitude — really taking a moment and zooming out. And then the other thing: before I just got my house in LA — which is this incredible house, blows my mind from where I come from, a kid born in Botswana who moves to the UK — before I walked into the house, I literally out loud reminded myself that this was not going to change anything in my life. It wasn't going to make me an inch happier in any way. It was going to have no material impact on anything. No one's opinion of me is going to change. Nothing. It's going to do nothing for me. And when I walked into that house for the first time, I could actually really enjoy it because my expectations were so low. It was very easy to exceed my expectations because I had none. And I actually enjoy every day when I walk downstairs because it's like blowing my mind.
Chase Hughes: That is awesome. But you still get to celebrate that you got the house, without it meaning something about you. That's the difference.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. You're right. Like you can feel good about a good YouTube comment without going, "Yeah, Steven is a good guy" — where you're not writing identity statements about it.
Chase Hughes: Identity. That's the key.
Steven Bartlett: That's what I was clearly doing there — saying this is not going to impact my identity in any way. But it still means that when I wake up in the morning and see a view, I go, "Wow, that's so wow."
Chase Hughes: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: So true. I fully resonate with that.