Manipulation Expert: How To Influence Anyone & Make Them Do Exactly What You Want! - Chase Hughes

27:06And like 1 % of people said yes, as opposed to like 85 % in the other neighborhood. But it's a tiny agreement about who you are as a person. So this is the power of pre-committing, getting someone to pre-commit to something before you ask them to do it. Yeah. And you get them to pre-commit in terms of their identity and who they think they are and who they want to be. Yeah. But you're not getting them. I'm not using this technique to make you sign a contract. I'm using it to just make subtle shifts in how you're behaving in our conversation. So if I wanted you to focus on me more, I'd do the opposite of the negative dissociation thing.

27:42And remember, I'm not talking about you. Because if I'm sitting here saying, oh, Stephen, you pay attention so well in a conversation, that sounds super weird and manipulative. People say that to me all the to tell him. Yeah. Maybe they want you to. In reality, if I do the opposite of what that negative dissociation statement did, and I make a positive group of people and assign an attribute to them, so that's how you would do this. So it's like, you know, Stephen, 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.

28:21You sit down with these people and they stop what they're doing and they just completely tune in to other people when they talk to them. So I'm taking a quality that I know you admire, like CEOs, all this kind of stuff, and I'm assigning a trait to that. And you're going to nod and you're going to, that sounds kind of true, but it also means that you're agreeing that you are also that type of person. But I'm never saying it about you. So this is, if I'm talking directly about you, which is what so many influence people teach out there, they're like, oh, I can tell that you this, or I can tell that you're the kind of person that blank and blank and blank.

29:01This is called aiming language. My language is aimed at you and you can feel it and people can feel that there's something going on if somebody's sitting there making guesses and weird assumptions about them. So anytime you're using any of these techniques, it should feel and sound like you're making an observation about the world. It's interesting how this sort of power of pre-commitment can also be used on yourself to get you to do things. Yeah. As you were saying, I was looking down at some research here. There's multiple studies that I find fascinating. One of them is a study conducted at MIT with students.

29:39They gave these MIT students three major papers for their semester. One class was given ultimate freedom. they could turn in all three papers at the very end of the semester with no penalty. The other class was forced to pre-commit to strict, evenly spaced deadlines throughout the semester. And the students who had total freedom performed the worst and experienced the most stress. The students who pre-committed to certain deadlines produced the highest quality work and gave the best work and got the best grades. It proved that intentionally restricting our own future choices through pre-commitments is often the best way to beat procrastination.

30:12And I remember the study they did with people on a beach where they had a fake thief run past someone next to you on the beach and grab a radio, and 20 % of people would chase the person. But if someone had said to you in a different study where someone runs up, grabs the radio, but someone has said to you seconds earlier, hey, I'm just going to get an ice cream. Can you take a look? Can you just watch my stuff? 95 % of people would then chase the person stealing the radio because we've made a pre-commitment to another person. So pre-commitments can work with yourself or, you know, with others, which is fascinating because especially to yourself, I find that interesting, that I can change my own behavior by making a pre-commitment attached to my own identity.

30:57I guess there's one more I'll share, which is this study around savings. They found that people who committed to saving, even if they wrote it on a piece of paper, were up to five times in terms of percentage terms. They went from saving 3 % to saving 15%, roughly 15%, just because they'd done a pre-commitment even years earlier that they would save. That's beautiful. I love that. And you're kind of just pre-doing your own identity. And if somebody wants to master that, you make it about your social commitment to yourself, to other people, but publicly say, like, I am this kind of person to yourself.

31:35So it's not like I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow. It's I am the kind of person that goes to the gym is a much more powerful identity-based action. And identity is the number one thing in the world. When it comes to persuasion and influence, there's basically the way that I teach this to intelligence people is when you're good at influence, you're building two walls. One wall is anxiety and the other one is cognitive dissonance. And the hallway that you're creating is the relief from those things. What are those two things? So I know what anxiety is, but what's cognitive dissonance? Well, the anxiety is like, if I don't do what I say, I'm going to face social rejection.

32:20Or if I go here and I break this rule or I don't do this, I'm going to break a social contract with somebody. The cognitive dissonance is, I am the kind of person that does this. And if I don't do this, I'm not keeping with who I said I am and who I agreed to be. And I'm facing cognitive dissonance. So that's like when some politician wins the presidential election that someone doesn't like. Like you have that cognitive dissonance. Either A, I have to decide that, wow, a lot of people like this person. Or B, everyone's stupid. And it's a lot easier for me to just say everybody's stupid. And we always take that path.

33:00So cognitive dissonance means that it's bouncing them back into the hallway every time they bump up against something that they've previously agreed to. And identity is the way that you can hack your own behavior so fast. And the way that I explain this to people, it takes 30 seconds to understand it. If you were an Olympic athlete and you had a badass body, like you had a healthy diet, that everything was in perfect shape. You woke up every morning. You had great energy and all that stuff. And one day you woke up for some reason and you're 295 pounds. And you wake up, you look in the mirror and there's something weird happened overnight.

33:42How 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 that, oh, I want to lose this weight so I can be healthy. It's this is not me. And anytime you're feeling this is not me or this is against who I am as a person, it's the most powerful motivator when it comes to influencing other people and influencing ourselves. Hmm. and like a goal like a weight loss thing that i that i have a lot of my clients do is to download the face app there's like an app that'll make you look super fat and real real beast and print it off and put it on your refrigerator and then people are like oh well aren't i programming my subconscious to be fat like no you're you're programmed to go away from bad things first never toward positive things first it's always a way your ancestors lived because they mistook a a rock for a bear not the other way around yeah never the other way around yeah so you're not going to accidentally program your brain and i'm i'm the brain guy but put that on the fridge and you start you start hacking into your own identity but you're doing it in a way that your mammalian brain, the thing that runs the show, can see it and understands it instantly.

35:11There's no words, there's no motivational phrases or anything like that. It picks up on it instantly and starts setting a course forward because it's cognitive dissonance that you're creating for yourself. 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. It's probably, you know, we spoke for six, seven hours, I think, me and Nir. There's just one phrase I always think about he said that humans are discomfort avoiding creatures and like we think that we're pleasure seeking creatures but when he said discomfort avoiding i really like interrogated him i was like yeah but what about like horniness that makes me have sex and he was like well actually that horniness is a form of discomfort your body is sending you this sort of almost irritation which is making you take an action and i stress tested it across many areas of my life i was like actually he's true he's right i'm trying to avoid discomfort and in your example of seeing myself on the fridge yeah i would i would want to avoid that it would cause such dissonance to my identity that i would do everything to avoid that some big ass fat steven on the fridge yeah i mean that's actually every couple of years what gets me back in shape is like catching myself in the mirror or because i'm always on camera sometimes i don't see myself kind of getting out of shape and then i watch the podcast back and i'm like oh fuck yeah like jack didn't tell me no one's told me.

36:29And then I'm like, right, gym every day again. And yeah, interesting. And it's social because you're I mean, you're making this commitment in front of a million people. Yeah. What else do you think is important to know as we head into this AI world where human skills and people skills can be more important than ever? What other frameworks have you got for me that I should bear in mind or ideas? As we go into AI, your leadership style, everyone's leadership style needs to be front and center. And I know there's a lot of books out there that are technically about leadership, but I think they're about management and they call themselves a leadership book.

37:04When I teach what's most important when it comes to understanding ourself is developing authority. But that authority has those five traits of authority. This is confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. Do you do show notes where people can download stuff in the description? Yeah, sometimes. I'll send this inventory to you where people can take this quiz and it's the most revealing thing about your leadership power. But what people tend to do is seek out the wrong type of authority. I've learned this with 20 years of working with people that we will tend to seek one of these little avenues that looks a certain way because we think that's what leadership is supposed to look like.

37:45That's what authority is supposed to look like. But there are three types and the three types that I've broken them down into in how authority channels to other people? Because authority looks different in different people. So it's the president, the professor, and the artist. And we can have that authority. So like the artist, you can think of somebody like Johnny Depp. The president, you can think of somebody like Obama. The professor, you can think of like the classic movie, Professor. It's still broadcast authority, but it's not loud. It's not extremely directive. and the artist can hold a ton of attention and in some rooms doesn't hold any attention at all.

38:28The 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 this president. So they're faking their way into this thing and it never feels real. They still like, even though their authority is really high, they have this weird feeling of inauthenticity because they're pushing towards the wrong authority channel. What's the cost of that? I think that it detracts from your level of authority, which automatically means that you're getting less outcomes that you want in life.

39:04Because your inauthenticity to both others and yourself like pays a toll on you. So if I'm inauthentic to you, then that's going to hurt my authority. But then if I'm inauthentic to myself, it's going to hurt my happiness, I guess. Yeah. I'm going to feel like I'm, again, going back to your point about identity. Unfulfilled. Living in someone else's life. Yeah. Yeah. And I think when people say authenticity, we should note that what we call, most people call authenticity is a costume of childhood beliefs. Like my authentic self and how I act is typically what I was in childhood. How I deal with conflict.

39:40How 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 removal of ego and a willingness to receive social injury. And that's the best way that I've ever been able to describe that to somebody. Like if I'm being authentic in a conversation, then I'm willing to receive a social injury for it. Cody Sanchez said something to me, which has stayed with me. She said, again, I'm going to butcher it, but words to the effect of, I won't be friends with anyone in private that won't say something in public that will cost them something.

40:25And going to a point about social injury, I think what Cody's actually saying is like, that's how I know that they're authentic. Is they're willing to risk something for something they believe? Yeah. I also think this is how you know a brand's authentic. Like, are they willing to cause social injury in the near term for something they believe in the long term? Yeah. You know? Yeah. And a lot of what, a lot of the recent brand debacles that we've had is they thought they were doing something to avoid social injury that caused a massive social injury. Because people said you're not being authentic to your audience.

41:04Yeah. Yeah. When they tried to do like, get into identity politics and stuff like that. Yeah. And okay, like extreme virtue signaling and stuff like that, which backfires. Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick? Sure. I think it's super important for people to know. Sure. And I'm a behavior profiler. And if anybody listening didn't know that. And one of the things that I teach everybody is this thing called the childhood development triangle. So it's just three sides of this triangle. So when you're growing up, what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends?

41:38So friends is one. And then to feel safe. What did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like, I don't know, somebody gives me a hug at the end of the day. For some kids, it was like, am I going to eat today? For some kids, it's like cracking jokes. Yeah, I'm going to crack jokes and keep friends. I'm going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. I'm going to become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me. Or I'm going to become safe by being 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.

42:17So it's like, what are the scripts that that child needed to run on autopilot to feel safe, to make friends, and then to get rewards? And that would be the third side. and the rewards for some kids might just be like appreciation and it's typically just appreciation affection love and that tends to get written in childhood and the kid who writes all these permanent scripts they put them in a backpack and carry them all the way into adulthood yeah and 90 of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life and if you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there's a meeting, she wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down and all that kind of stuff.

43:04You'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. I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what you've just said. I have two colleagues that I work with, and I got six months into working with one of them. And I could always tell that there was something not quite right because whenever I was in the room they would they would stare at me a lot and um they would be a little bit more on the pessimistic pessimistic side than I'm used to and one day at dinner I was talking to them about their childhood and they offered up that their dad was his mood could change rapidly and he was always pointing out why something would never work and why and he was an extreme pessimist and suddenly this person who is in my life suddenly made sense.

43:53I completely understand it. Because you grew up in that environment where to be safe, you... Agree with it. ...had to pay attention to the authority figure. And then, yeah, you had to also... You learnt, maybe, that pessimism was a way to... Yeah, safety. And then there's another colleague who's actually in the room over there, and I'll ask her before we publish this if I can say this publicly, but similar thing. She expressed to me that she had a dad that his mood would change rapidly. And I said to her one day, I said, I call her Sarah. I said, Sarah, you're always staring at me. Whenever I look at you, you're already looking at me.

44:28And it's like you're like overanalyzing and overthinking. And she explained to me the same thing. She said, when I grew up, my dad's mood would just change like this. So every time I'm preempting, I'm like a radical preemptor. I'm thinking 20 steps ahead of like what might go wrong or, you know, which makes her exceptional at her job. But I would, you know, one might assume that that comes at some kind of cost. Yeah. Yeah. It's a safety. Very true. Very true. And the way that I explain this, if somebody wants to, like, it's not where you can kind of go back and, like, sit there for five minutes, put it on a Post-it note, and then figure your whole life out.

45:02I wish I had a trick to do that. But the way that, like, I want people to think about this is, going back to your childhood, a lot of those things, these are just contracts that were written in a child's voice. And when you start hearing these patterns repeating in your head, force yourself to hear the voice of a kid. That's all it is. It's just a kid who made these choices. It's not an adult. So we're typically three different people, all of us. We have a work self, like a professional kind of self. We have a home self, and we have a self with friends. And what is that as a kid? That's classroom, playground, home.

45:46So I'll typically take people through this process of where were you around authority figures, which is like classroom or home? What were you around when all your friends were around, you got made fun of, or you had to become really small? And that goes on the friends side of the triangle. And that talks about how the social patterns that are going to show up for me. And somebody says, well, I keep attracting these negative people into my life. Why do I do that? And that goes to these patterns. Because if I do this, I know this is going to happen. I know that's going to happen. It's just completing a story archetype.

46:20So that's the childhood development triangle. And it is really powerful to start understanding our own patterns. And I'm not saying that you can go out there and there's like, here's six steps that are going to change your whole freaking life if you do these six things. 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'm never understood. Because most of what happens when we get into arguments with our spouse, we get into these bitchy arguments with people at work. It's our argument to be understood more than it is for us to come to a solution.

47:05I need you to understand me. So getting okay with the idea that you might not ever be understood is like step number one. Number two, I am not special. And that helps us to open the door to start coming into a lot of these things. But if you're a leader at work, you can start seeing these patterns in your employees and you can be like, I see an eight-year-old there. And if you get to a point where you're seeing some of these, a behavior that might've 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.

47:41You don't need to make some prediction or fortune-telling thing about their childhood, but you're starting to see these patterns and you know now how your team's going to respond in conflict. And 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 and you'll see your own. So do you think I should go to the key people in my life, maybe my team, and ask them these questions around how did you make friends? Is that the question? What did you do to make and keep friends?

48:12What did you do to make and keep friends? And what was the safety question again? Like what did you need to do or avoid to feel safe? And the rewards one? What did you feel? And this one's always, you want to put the word feel in there. What did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards? And what were rewards to you? It was appreciation or somebody that's like hyper significance driven. Like I've got to have the Rolex. I've got to have the Ferraris and all this kind of stuff. They never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate. Their teacher called and said they did a good job.

48:46They played the piano recital and did a great job. And lots of people were acknowledging them and clapping for them. They only got acknowledged when they were socially significant. And am I right in thinking here that these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways? Because when you're talking about safety, I was running through my head the things that made me feel safe. and they were rewards that I could tell my friends about. So I touched all three of them. And in part because I was thinking, I was very different to my social group when I was younger. We were the black family. There wasn't another black family that I knew of other than maybe one other kid, I think, in the area in Plymouth in 1994 or five.

49:25So 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. That's just one of many examples that I could think of. It does tend to do that. And I will 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. But if you're a behavior profiler, that's what's going to run people.

49:59You're going to know how they're going to respond to conflict. You're going to know what they're going to avoid. You're going to like, if you're putting teams together, I know what people I want to have working with each other. And it doesn't have to be some complex nine hour thing. Like you can see this stuff in everyday life. And you're not saying that I need to radically change. No. But what if one part of this triangle or one behavior I've learned for safety or for rewards or for friends is making my life worse? Yeah. You know what? It could be ruining my life. Like it could be the thing standing in the way of me having a romantic relationship or getting promotion or building a business.

50:37It's like getting in the way now. Yeah. What do I do, Chase? So you've identified the pattern. Let's assume that you've got it. You're like, oh, I've got this shit that's happening on repeat. Part two of this is I need to focus on that being a kid. That belongs to a child. and I need to write down like this, here's how that child wrote the contract, made the promise to themselves, developed the contract. And then even if you make it up, like when, I'm gonna write down a little thing. When did this kid bring it into adulthood? I need to stay small in order to stay safe. Let's say it's one of those things.

51:15And then you just start telling yourself that is a child's voice. That's a child's voice. So the voice is not gonna go away. That's the sad part. That's like you trying to not complete the sentence, Mary had a little in your head. You can't get rid of it. No matter how hard you try to delete that, it's repeated over years and years, just like one of these things. What truly changes for you is hearing a child, hearing a misguided child who developed a coping mechanism for the world, not knowing that they were like, they just assumed, I'm going to have this forever. I'm going to need this as an adult.

51:54I'm going to bring this into my adult life. Part two of this is you make a, like a wallpaper or something for your desktop. And we talked about being negatively motivated or away from negative things. You make like a motivational wallpaper that has your big limiting belief on it, and then take it to an extreme. I had a client that had this, if I stay small, I'm going to be safe. And he was in a business, like he owned a business, but he wouldn't go get these big clients and he wouldn't go do this. And the guy's got three kids. And I said, I want you to make a desktop wallpaper that says, my kids don't deserve for me to be successful.

52:33And I want you to look at it every single day when you turn your computer on, because that's exactly what your belief is saying. Because if your kids truly deserved it, it would override the belief. So you just need to write the belief in plain English. And what it's truly, truly costing you in your life is my kids don't deserve me to be successful. My kids don't deserve money. And that's what it comes down to. And every day you look at it, you have a feeling of disgust and there's a hyper awareness of that thing running in your head. You're going to be more prone to hear it when it does come up.

53:07And 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. There's two parts to this. I love this. And there's two parts to it that I think I wanted to talk about. The first is in doing so, in waking up in the morning and seeing my wallpaper that says, like, my kids don't deserve a great life or whatever. Of course, it's going to motivate me to take action, which is then going to start to build new evidence. Once I take action, once I win that big client and I realize that everything's fine, which is going to change my life.

53:38And then the second point I wanted to point out is like, people listen to podcasts like this and they write this stuff down. And then they have relapses and things don't change fast enough. And I think that can sometimes make them feel hopeless or inadequate because they heard it on the Diary of a Sea or whatever. And then they did it for a bit and they struggled and it didn't quite work out. And then they went back to their old behavior. And I think in part this happens because we live under the presumption that this stuff is easy and it's fast. And that at some point in the future, I can fix my trauma.

54:09Like, I think one of the best realizations I ever had was realizing that the bullshit that I've carried with me in that backpack since I was a kid, that the stuff about what will make me safe or what will reward me or how I'll make friends or who I am or whatever, my survival mechanisms, they will be with me forever. And actually, instead of trying to delete them or like throw them out the backpack, what I was able to do is like turn down their ability to make the decision. That's it. That's it. You've totally got it. And I would say this for anybody out there, that you're trying to go through this and you're having a hard time.

54:46I get it. It's totally tough. The number one way that we influence another human being, let me just kind of metaphor this for one second. When you watch a hypnotist, and hypnosis is fun. Anybody can learn to do it. It's a pretty easy thing. So it looks very dramatic. But one of the things you'll see me do at the beginning of that is like, go ahead and Give me your hand and I'll hold their hand for a second. Like put both hands out like this and then flip them over. That's great. Now, just to 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.

55:18All right. Then spread your feet a little further apart, a little closer together. Actually, no, face this way. And I want to make them do like 50 things. None of the things that I just did with them are meaningful. None of them. Everything was micro compliance. So this is how social media starts roping you in. This is how politics starts roping you in. This is how cult leaders will recruit you into a cult. Micro compliance. And you don't realize that you're going through this massive amount of compliance. So like you go through a doctor's physical and they go through like this 90 point checklist.

55:55They've made you do 50 things and then they recommend a weird drug or they recommend you get on some other drug. take some time to think about it because our brain is hardwired for these micro-compliances. So I say this to say that if you're going through any of these things and you're trying to change your beliefs or you're trying to change something in your body, use what works for brainwashing and figure out a way that you can get micro-compliance with your own goals on a very regular basis. Small little wins so your brain has that, just like hypnosis, just like cult recruiting, just like brainwashing, small little things at the very beginning.

56:32So everything in influence should be looked at as a wedge. Everything. 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 sort of micro compliance, but also through authority because the experimenters were like wearing white jackets white overalls etc and here's the second thing in that experiment that's going to going to perfectly tie back to this so this experiment that you're talking about happened at Yale University it was 1962 and we I mean there's tons of data on it but essentially strangers would shock another person seemingly or what they thought was to death just because some dude in a lab coat told them to.

57:25But what they didn't account for, and even Dr. Milgram's book was called Obedience to Authority. They thought it was all about the authority, the lab coat, the guy's tall. It's a professional setting. But really think about, if you go back to our ancestors, like 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, right? So focus is always first. My focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. Those are the four things that govern a mammal, all mammals, dolphins, doesn't matter.

58:04So I have to have focus before authority and they didn't talk about that. And the way to get focus is through novelty. Novelty meaning? Something unexpected is occurring. So like 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 ass stick snap. All of your focus, all of it is on that stick. It's not on your kids. It's not on your health. It's not on anything that's going on. It's to this new unexpected piece of information that hijacks our brain. Anything novel hijacks our brain. So if you see like, and it follows that pathway, focus, then authority, and then tribe.

58:50What's everybody else doing? and then emotion. Then how do I feel about it? And what happens is we are hardwired to respond to these things. You cannot decide not to respond to novelty. Your head turns to loud sounds, all this stuff happens. So the way that if you're trying to do this, like brainwash yourself is change your house up, change something up in your life, change your wardrobe, repaint the walls in your office, move your furniture around, buy a new car if you can. I want you to like just imagine is how would I influence my dog in this situation? I would need imagery. I would need something to shift.

59:36If 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. Yeah. I think this is one of the great secrets of good marketing is that it beats your brain's wallpaper filter. And I wrote a little bit about this in my last book about this idea of beating the wallpaper filter. I think we talked a little bit about it last time, but I talked about a study where they got a rat and put it in a maze with chocolate at the other end of the maze. And they looked at the rat's brain as it went through the maze the first time.

1:00:06And they saw that the rat's brain was like exploded with activity. It's smelling the walls. It's trying to figure it out. And then they put the rat in the maze the second time. And there's like almost no brain activity because it's on autopilot. It knows the maze, so it doesn't need to use any of its cognitive resources. Its cognitive resources can be allocated to new surprising things. The maze is no longer surprising. Whizzes through the maze to the chocolate. And even like, as you think about how you got out of your bed this morning and got down to the kitchen, you didn't have to think. So you paid no attention.

1:00:37But you would have paid attention if you walked down there and you're like, sofa wasn't there. And how does that then apply to marketing? So like, how do you surprise people is like a central question of anyone who's trying to build a personal brand, start a podcast or do marketing. But I guess also to persuade people. It's one of the things I think about a lot when I talk on stage. Yeah. Is I know I'm competing with your mobile phone, your Twitter feed, or your TikTok. So I have to do something almost like every 10 seconds to like catch you off guard. And Mr. Beast, I guess, is the great master of this.

1:01:11And it's probably why he's got half a billion YouTube followers. Because the minute that video starts, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You're hooked. You're hooked. But this, I mean, that's the power of novelty. I would challenge anybody to take this challenge. If you're scrolling through short form content, watch for something that like jerks your attention, like some kind of weird novelty thing that happens. And that video is probably short 20, maybe 40 second video that captures your focus through novelty. The next video, watch for an authority figure, a famous YouTuber, a celebrity, a politician, a pop singer who thinks that they know politics, all that kind of stuff.

1:01:55Watch for an authority figure. Next, watch for a tribe signal. So a tribe signal is going to be, here's how many people agree with this. Here's lots of people doing one thing. These tickets are selling out. Here's the Taylor Swift concert. Here's everyone cheering at the concert. Here's how you're supposed to behave is basically what that means in the tribe section. You're supposed to do what these people are doing. And then watch for the emotion. So watch for this pattern. It'll be a focus generating novelty. Then it'll be authority. Then you'll see tribe. Then you'll see an emotional video. And guess what happens after the emotional video?

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1:04:32That's linkedin.com slash diary. Terms and conditions apply. I heard you say something as well that if you want to persuade other people, you should make them feel clever. Yeah. Explain this to me. I refer to this as maybe the most dangerous persuasion skill there is. And what I'm, the 10 second brief is, I basically, 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.

1:05:14So I'm going to give you one piece of information and another piece of information, but I will never put them together for you. And the reason is that any idea that you think came from your own mind, you have no ability to resist it. So all I have to do is make you have an idea. So 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. Oh, yeah. Details after the break. So, yeah. And your brain is like, oh, I know what happened. Oh, I know exactly what happened.

1:05:56But 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. The media do this all the time. 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 way that like if there's a formula on how to use this is here's a piece of information here and it's a piece of information that you will absolutely agree with that makes sense to you and another piece of information that makes sense to you it has to be two things that that make sense to your brain because it's like you're not going to experiment with something that you're not familiar with so two pieces of familiar information close enough together where of the brain is going to say, oh, you know what I can do?

1:06:49I'm going to put those two things together. Isn't this how conspiracy theories take hold as well? Oh, yeah. Because, you know, yeah. You know, there's a big enduring conspiracy theory that someone like Bill Gates has done things that are nefarious as it relates to health. And they're like, I guess the two pieces people are connecting is they're saying, well, he's worked a lot. He's very rich and powerful. And he's very, very interested in health. biotech and vaccines and all these other things and and you know someone very very very very powerful we often think of you know very powerful successful influential people as being somewhat like evil or not having our interests at heart and then someone who's spending a lot of money on like health and medical side side of things um is on it's quite an unusual thing so we put two and two together we have you know we think they have bad intentions because they are a billionaire and And that word is, you know, comes with certain preconceptions.

1:07:45And then health and then a pandemic happens. And I think people, you know, this is how I think a lot of conspiracies rise. Name a movie from when you were a kid where the bad guy or where the super rich person in the movie wasn't the evil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's programmed into the media. It's a definite programming that was very deliberate in our country. It's like always the rich people are evil. But then people will say, oh, well, Tony Stark was rich. They made him a sociopath. It's interesting because I think, you know, I can make the case that at some point it's intentional. But at some point also, it becomes such a clear stereotype that you have to follow that stereotype when you're like writing movies or else it doesn't make sense to people.

1:08:32Yeah, and I'm not saying it was intentional within the last like 200, 300 years. We're talking about like the Brothers Grimm, ancient fairy tales. And I think it was intentional then, like having wealth is bad. There's virtue in poverty. That's the big thing they wanted to communicate to their kids. Poverty is virtuous. And of course, like we're still doing a lot of that stuff today. But the reason is exactly what you're saying is correct. I think it's burned into like some collective archetype of what stories have become. And we wouldn't recognize it. So like if I watched a movie and there was a very successful billionaire businessman, all I have to say is that for you to fill in the gaps.

1:09:15You're thinking private jet. You're thinking how they treat people. You're thinking, you know, they're on their phone with a briefcase. You're thinking, you know, that they have what they're wearing. You know what they're wearing. And I didn't say any of that stuff. Yeah. And you made me feel clever because I put all that stuff together. That came from my own mind. And speaking of archetypes, that's the second way that you can win any court case in the world. Have you got experience with court cases and stuff like that? A lot. What is your experience? As far as I know, I'm the only trial consultant that offers a 200 % money back guarantee when I work.

1:09:48So what does that mean as a trial consultant? What's your objective in simple terms? It's always a little different. And it depends on whether I'm working for prosecution or defense. I know nothing about the law, like just about nothing. But I know people. So I will typically go in and we'll pick a jury and we'll select a jury. And we want to select a jury based on this factor and this factor and based on this zip code. Here's the question that we want to ask to find out which is going to be a good juror and which is a bad juror. But then I have to figure out questions that are covert. How can I covertly ask a question where the opposing counsel, the other attorney, won't know what I desire and what I don't desire based on the answer?

1:10:31So one case I worked for was for a large grocery store company who was being sued because a lady slipped on a green bean. Real shit. And they hired me because it was a big, big lawsuit. And I want a jury that has an internal locus of control, that they're in charge of their own life. They're responsible for their destiny. And we want to weed out the people that have the opposite. We want to weed out the people that kind of have a victim mentality, like the world happens to me, that kind of thing. So we have to figure out how do I ask a question that A reveals that is B, covert, and C, is not going to expose what we're looking for to opposing counsel.

1:11:24So 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 them on the escalator. They're coughing, sneezing all over the place. People aren't wearing masks. We ask the next guy, how does a person catch a cold? And he says, well, if I've ever caught a cold, I was in a place I shouldn't have been. I didn't wash my hands thoroughly enough. I didn't take care of my body. I didn't take vitamins. I didn't take care of myself. Very, very different. So we know what is satisfactory for us to select a jury.

1:12:01And that's just one tiny example. But I'm going to pause you there because I just wanted to share something before we carry on with this story because it's fascinating. So actually the last question I ask on our culture test when we employ people for my company, we ask them 35 questions before they are offered the chance to interview. And the last question is, when I don't do great work, who's to blame? And it asks them, it says, the people I worked with. I wasn't giving clear enough instructions from a client or a boss or myself. And it's remarkable that 45 % of the population will click, it was me.

1:12:33When I don't do great work, it's not my team to blame. It's not the person above or below me or some other factor. It is me. And that scores them, I shouldn't say this because it's going to ruin my test, but I'm going to just say it. That scores the highest marks on that particular question. Because again, we're trying to reveal, like if you have that sense of personal responsibility and internal locus of control, internal center of control in your life, which correlates to better work, more ambition, harder work, better long-term success, and better happiness. More happiness. Sorry, please do continue.

1:13:05And 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. Absolutely. So with an archetype in the jury room, so we've selected, let's say we've picked a jury, Then the goal is, what is the overall archetype of the case that's playing out in front of us right here? It's a small person suing a big company. Let's say if I'm on the opposite now, let's say I'm on that lady side. Then I'm going to come out with, without ever saying the name, I'm going to come out and I'm going to make you think David and Goliath all day long without knowing that I made you think David and Goliath.

1:13:48I might say giant. I might say someone small. I might say slingshot. I might say all these little key words 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. Does this make sense so far? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then the next time I'm going to talk about uh maybe it's a deposition or something like that we'll talk about waiting in line at the dmv we're going to talk about for people that don't know the context there because they're not in the yeah so waiting in line at the at this government identification card office everyone everyone around the world will have some form of that when you're going to get a passport or whatever yeah waiting at passport control um your doctor's office keeping you waiting for 45 minutes and not caring about your time.

1:14:41We're going to talk about all these situations where a big, big company is screwing over another person or a big, big government doesn't know what the hell they're doing. They're incompetent. So the attorney doesn't say any of this. He's just mentioning the scenario. So if I mention a scenario, there's like a little file clerk in your head. And if I mention any scenario, I can get that little guy to run down to the file cabinet and pull out a folder that has that stuff in there. So when I say hot air balloon, your file clerk runs down there and like, okay, I was at a hot air balloon festival in New Mexico or something and pulls that file out.

1:15:22So if I can get your file clerk to keep pulling files out throughout the day, the one thing the file clerk does, and this is a gross generalization, is anything that's pulled out throughout that day, and if it's in one context, the file clerk leaves them all out on the desk. And if I can get enough files, all the files that I want out on that desk, that's going to influence every decision that you make when you go home tonight. So that's kind of the pre-suasion, except I'm putting it in there in the form of an archetype. And if I get you to think David and Goliath, I want you to think that this is the midpoint of that story, not the end.

1:16:05So if I just get you to think this is probably David and Goliath, this is the middle part of the story. This is when the little kid, the shepherd kid, is walking down the hill to challenge the giant. Your brain comes up with the ending to the story automatically. So these archetypes are so woven into us that we think if I could just complete an archetype story, it's justice. And what does archetype mean? So an archetype is just like a brand of story. Okay. So like a hero's journey. Like a beginning, a middle, a tragedy. A loss and return, a rags to riches story, a wounded healer story, all these classic story types.

1:16:51So there's like 12 story types. Joseph Campbell's talked a lot about this. but if our brains has about 12 of these little archetypes and if it's like a wounded healer story and there's a redemption thing at the end which is called a redemption arc I'm going to get the audience to see that we're at the 75 percent mark right where it's about to happen and if I just get you to see a situation through the lens of an archetype your brain automatically not just predicts, but you know how it's going to end. And you want to make it in that way because it looks like justice. It looks like the right thing to do.

1:17:28And you don't even know why your brain is trying to do that. Even though I'm the one that's jammed the archetype into your head for a couple of days.

1:17:39So 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 yeah so you can also use this as a profiling tool if i have and uh if you take notes on this stuff about people in your office i would keep them private but figure out like this guy's on a you don't even have to know and memorize all these 12 archetypes what movie are they in when they talk about their life what movie are they in you have that one guy in the office that wants to go on crazy adventures and do stuff that nobody else has done, that's a back to the future archetype.

1:18:19You 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. Andrew Bustamante, who's that CIA spy who I've had on the show a few times, told me about his RICE framework in espionage, reward ideology, coercion, and ego. reward being the things you want like money ideology being you know doing this is good for your family doing this is good for your country the c being coercion which is pressurizing people and the e being ego he said of all four of these ideology like understanding someone's ideology is the most persuasive for when he was a spy and the way that I've kind of conceptualized that and maybe built upon it a little bit and I'm saying that because I don't want to be butchering his idea is I think everybody has a hero's journey that they're on right now.

1:19:14And when you're meeting them to get them to, you know, maybe come and work at your company or persuading them to do a deal, like the first great challenge is listening to them long enough for them to hand over their ideology to you so that you can speak to them, not through your own ideology and what you want, but you can talk through their ideology. And like, even with me, obviously there's like a hero's journey in my mind there's like a story all of us that like is behind me but also i want to be ahead of me and if you know if you can listen long enough to figure out what that is you can tell me okay steve i'm going to sell you this range over and tell me the features of it or the benefits of it through yes the hero's journey that i want to live out yeah everyone listening right now has that like you have a hero's journey that you're on and the most persuasive thing i think anyone could do is not just give you money or whatever is to let them know that the thing you're offering is going to realize that story.

1:20:08Or at least the next chapter. Okay. So we don't always want to sell a completion. We just want to say this is the logical next step of this story. Like this guy did a bad thing. He needs to be punished. And what happens after the punishment? This is the learning the lesson and being redeemed arc. So we're not going to tell a jury or suggest to a jury that he's going to go learn a lesson and then come back. We're just going to suggest like what's this next thing that happens? So if somebody has this arc, if we figure out what is my journey, what archetype am I living right now, what type of story, then I can figure out how my brain is predicting the future.

1:20:48Because archetypes are so woven into our brains without language. So 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. And how do you get their archetype out of them? You're going to hear it. It's so funny. You don't even need special questions. You ask them about their life, ask them where they're from, ask them to give me this summary of what happened when you worked there at that company. Well, I did this and this and this, and nobody thanked me. It was a thankless job.

1:21:23The manager was a total asshole. So now you're starting to see an archetype. Like the guy was in a tragedy there. The guy was a victim. And they want to be appreciated. Yeah, so now he's here at this brand new company for redemption. So now we're in a redemption story arc. That makes sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So it just comes out naturally in everybody's speech. But the funny thing is I've never seen it applied to courtrooms in the way that we do it. And it's just such a powerful tool. The number one thing that I specialize in is this thing called the time-distance problem. This is what I wanted to solve throughout my entire career.

1:22:05So we have two axes. Our vertical axes and horizontal axes. So this horizontal axis is the distance line. And the vertical axes going up and down is the time line. Okay, so we have time and we have distance. So distance is how far away from a behavioral norm can I get a person to go? So can I get Stephen to confess to a crime? Like doing something that's going to send you to jail for 30 years is way outside of your behavioral norm. And for me to be able to do that in an interrogation room, I have to do some techniques. I have to do some crazy stuff. If I do it in sales, then I'm getting you to make a decision that you maybe otherwise wouldn't have.

1:22:58Maybe if I'm in timeshare sales or something like that. And at the end of the day, some people can get people far on the distance line, but it's going to take forever to do it. It's going to take maybe a year to make something happen. Of persuading them and trying to sell to them, etc. Yeah. and the last interrogations I did that were for a corporation in California, I had to do 45 interrogations in like two days. And I had maybe 25 minutes per interrogation. It's the least amount of time I've ever been given. And that was the time distance problem. So how do I layer on the techniques, the identity, the perception, context, and permission?

1:23:47How do I get that layered into a conversation as fast as possible? So I can shift someone's behavior as fast as possible. So everything that you're looking at is typically a time distance problem. And there's one more universal thing. And this may not even fit anywhere in the episode because it's random. But you were talking earlier about like carrying this trauma in your backpack. So many people are trying to get rid of this trauma. The reason that psychedelics can rewire PTSD so effing fast is that it doesn't delete your trauma at all. The memory is still there. All that stuff is still there.

1:24:20It changes the perspective so massively that you can still see the event, but it forces you to see all of that stuff through a different lens. So if you look at somebody that has some depression stuff going on, some weird mental stuff going on in their life, so much of what ails us, even someone who's lacking confidence, and they say, I can't be a leader. I can't go into this meeting. I can't do this negotiation. It's a perspective problem. It's like 90 % of the problems that people have that I work with is just a perspective issue and nothing else. And occasionally, if somebody's been going through a lot for a long time, I would get your neurotransmitters tested and get your brain tested and see if you've got some chemical imbalance that's causing a lot of stuff.

1:25:05Just sometimes a vitamin deficiency could cause a lot of that. Do any of you remember a conversation I had on this podcast with anthropologist Dr. Daniel Lieberman? It was one of the most viewed conversations of all time on The Diary of a CEO. And interestingly, the most replayed moment of that entire conversation was when I talked about a specific pair of shoes that I wear. They're called Barefoot Shoes and they're made by a brand called Vivo Barefoot, who have become one of the sponsors of this show now. All of their shoes have significantly reduced support, which gives my feet the opportunity to strengthen just by wearing them.

1:25:38And research from Liverpool University backs this up. They've shown that wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. So if you want to start strengthening your feet, which are the foundation for the rest of your body, head to vivobarefoot.com slash DOAC. And if you do that, I'll give you 15 % off when you use my code StephenB15. Use that code at checkout and I'll also give you a 100-day money-back guarantee. StephenB15. Enjoy. we have finally caved in so many of you have asked us if we could bundle the conversation cards with the one percent diary for those of you that don't know every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair they leave a question in the diary of a ceo and then i ask that question to the next guest we don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible conversation cards these have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships people in teams in big corporations and also family members to connect with each other.

1:26:38With that we also have the 1 % Diary which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together and you can buy both at the same time and if you want to drive connection and instill habit change in your company head to thediary.com to inquire and our team will be in touch. Outside of psychedelics, is there any useful ways you found to change one's perception? They have all kinds of like sleep deprivation, not sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation tanks, darkness retreats, all those things that people talk about with breath work, and they go on these big ass retreats.

1:27:19I don't know anything about those things. Do study psychedelics a lot. And I think Johns Hopkins this year, I think said that it was the most effective drug ever tested in human history for depression treatment resistant depression or for psychological problems the treatment resistant depression ptsd addiction and now we have this new drug called ibogaine it's not new it's been around for thousands of years but uh that's helping people with addiction and there's now people able to do intravenous uh 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.

1:28:03Where did you do that? Denver. I did it because DMT boosts, has a massive boost of BDNF, which is brain derived nootrophic factor. And it also produces a lot of plasticity, a lot of brain plasticity. So I was trying to fix my brain. I've got a brain disease. so I went down there on this five hour thing and I've been completely different ever since that day so it is a it is a massive benefit and it's heavy though DMT is a heavy heavy thing to go through I don't see I can't see any reason why any human being would use it recreationally for anyone that hasn't experienced DMT how would you describe the experience I know that's going to be hard to do because some of my friends have done it.

1:28:49And when you ask them to describe it, it seems to be quite abstract. Yeah. It's like if we had some two-dimensional creatures that were living on this piece of paper right here on the table, and one of those creatures figured out that he can smoke some DMT, and that somehow enabled us to peel this two-dimensional creature to where it could see in three dimensions and see everything in this room, that's a DMT. You're getting peeled out of reality into some other realm. And the weird thing is, every scientist that I know that's studying DMT, not one of them thinks it's a hallucination. What do they think it is?

1:29:30I think the more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell's going on. But everyone, literally everyone who uses DMT pretty much goes to the same exact places and they all meet the same entities, the same seven or eight different types of entities. And it's been the same for 4 ,500 years of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It's an endogenous chemical. Has it changed your perception of what reality really is? 100 percent yeah it's so much more real than this reality it's like it's it's so ineffable there are no words that can describe it but it's a thousand maybe a million times more real than this in such a way that just coming back to this feels like everything is kind of claymation for a little while claymation or just fake like a cartoon uh of some kind It's just really low resolution.

1:30:33And I come back with no certainty about anything. And I think everybody comes back with that lack of certainty. You're not coming back and be like, I saw this exact thing and here's what it means and here's how the universe is created and all of that. But you go up there and you come back and you're like, something about this plane doesn't feel real anymore. And that is a permanent shift that's hard for some people to make. and you can't unsee that you were kind of able to poke your head out of the side door of the Truman Show and look out backstage for a little while. So has it made you believe that this isn't real?

1:31:11This reality that we're living in now is not real? We'd have to define real. The only... How would you define real? Yeah, that's a good question. You can see it, you can touch it, you can measure it, You could taste it, smell it. Would that be real? Do you think we're living in a simulation? We have to define simulation. Because I think every society has this hubris of the universe is whatever's cool to us right now. Electricity came out, the universe was energy. Industrial revolution came out, the whole universe was a giant machine. And right now everybody says, oh, we just discovered computers, the universe must be a computer.

1:31:52It's like the hubris of every generation. What I mean by simulation, I think, like, is it rendered in some way by something? I study this stuff all day, every day of my life. And I think that the more discoveries we have in particle physics, in quantum mechanics, the more they're proving their hermetic principles right. What's that? This is the seven ancient principles of this guy named Hermes Trismegistus, also known as Thoth, like an Egyptian guy. They're confused about his name. But he's like, he wrote these, like these first two principles are the most important. The first one is all is mind.

1:32:36All is mind. All is mind. The all is mind. The universe is mental. And then the second one is as above, so below. And here's how I explained this to my son a couple of days ago. I said, have you ever had a dream where there's like a building in the dream? Maybe there's a house in front of you. And what are you looking at the house with? And he's like, well, my eyes. I said, why? Which eyes are they? Are they your eyes that you're seeing the house with? And he said, no, 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.

1:33:13So you're imagining the whole body and the world. And I said, what's the distance between you and that house in your dream? And he said, 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, it's my brain. I said, so is there a 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.

1:33:50You can test it, you can touch it, and all that. And the perception of it is very much real. So the theory now, and I don't have any certainty about this, but one interesting theory that I've heard from many different neuroscientists is that if we look at as above, so below, like a universe spins like a DNA double helix. You can zoom in on a human eyeball and it looks the same as a nebula. What if dreams are this level, level one, and this is like level two of that, where we're hallucinating distance? We're hallucinating. And I think whatever the case is, I have no idea. I have no theories about it myself.

1:34:33But whatever the case is, I do think that separation is the greatest lie ever told to the entire world. of like the you are separate from that person like this you are separate from this and how people say i need to go spend time in nature like you are nature like that's that's part of who you are you're made out of that stuff you're made out of that dirt so i think the illusion of separation is is the one thing that i think will help a lot of people and that's why psychedelics can really just rewire somebody's brain so, so fast. It just deletes that separation. I feel like I just had some DMT.

1:35:14Because you said, you know, level one is dreams, level two is maybe this reality. So the question in my mind was, what's level three? Yeah, and that would maybe be what you see on DMT. You said that world was more real than this one. Oh, yeah, exponentially, immeasurably. Why? How do you quantify realness? Like what's the measuring stick there?

1:35:41There are no words for it. Has this changed your view on religion? Yeah. How has it changed your view? I wasn't really a religious person. I think it made me a much more spiritual person. And I think before any psychedelic therapy that I went through, I was performing spirituality. so spirituality was kind of something i i did to show people yeah virtue virtue to signal virtue yeah and now spirituality you kind of see it like it's not a big deal it doesn't you don't have to go buy linen yoga pants and and wooden beads and bathe in essential oils to be spiritual like you can just maybe have a hand up there and be less certain i think the certainty is that is the enemy Like, we haven't been here very long.

1:36:30We're very, very newborn creatures on this planet. Has it made you more empathetic? Unbelievably so. Yeah. At the end of the day, everybody wants to, like, after your first or second time going to psychedelic therapy, you're like, oh, I need to understand the secrets of the universe now. Which you go in there with this, like, very egoic, egocentric desires. and then they're like, okay, you want to understand the universe. They'll show it all to you and your brain's not capable of understanding it, remembering it, or translating it once you come back anyway. And I think over time, you learn that the more ego I have, it's like I'm performing.

1:37:13And then every time I go back in there or every time I kind of reflect on that experience, it helps me to unzip my little ego costume a little bit more. did you know that you can get banned from dmt really dude you 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 you're you're banned from from dmt and the journey stops right there in that moment and the guy can take hit after hit after hit after hit of dmt and nothing happens. You can be banned from that realm or whatever it is. I think they call it hyperspace now.

1:37:58In the culture surrounding DMT, there is a widely reported anecdote phenomenon called being locked out of hyperspace. Many frequent users report reaching a point where the drug simply stops working as expected regardless of the dose. The common descriptions include the waiting room wall, getting stuck in the initial onset phase and being unable to break through. The grey room, seeing only flat, colourless or dull visuals instead of the visual vibrant geometry. The hyper slap, a terrifying or deeply uncomfortable experience where entities appear to tell you that you aren't welcome or shouldn't be here anymore.

1:38:35The sudden blackout, smoking the substance and simply falling asleep or remembering nothing, effectively being denied entry. I think there are thousands of people. One of the very, very random but persuasive thought experiments I sometimes use to explain why I've started to believe that there's probably something more is, weirdly, how much I've learned about the gut microbiome. And it sounds like a strange thing. Not a connection one would expect to make. But when I sat here with these experts, and they're like, oh, by the way, there's 38 trillion living organisms in your gut right now. I, you know, you're saying like, what is below is above, or whatever that phrase was.

1:39:22I was like, okay, so those 38 million creatures, I know that you could argue that maybe they're not conscious or whatever you want to say, but they have no idea. Like if they work, they have no idea that they're living inside another organism. Down there, if they could debate, they would be debating religion. They'd be saying, do you think we have a creator? And they'd look around and they wouldn't see him. But because they didn't realize that they're inside, I guess, their God, like their creator, the thing that's feeding them every day and keeping them alive. And that kind of, you could argue, created them because I created the environment for them to reproduce.

1:39:57And when I thought about that, I thought about the oceans. I was like, you know, the animals at the very bottom of the deepest ocean have no idea that there's anything above. They have no idea. And then you've got to ask yourself, am I like arrogant enough to believe or naive enough to believe? that like this is it. That I am at the top of the mountain and there's nothing. It's so egotistical to think like there isn't, there could be nothing above me. And then the other thing that's been really persuasive for me in my journey of like spirituality or religion or whatever you want to call it is I did a bunch of star tours and generally getting interested in the stars and sitting there with a star expert and him saying to me at nighttime in Joshua Tree, look over there.

1:40:33And he'd like get this big binocular out, this one meter binocular. And he'd say, what you're seeing there is, he'd say something crazy are like 28 million light years away. And I'm looking at a whole nother galaxy and it's just this spec and it's 28 million light years away. I'm scratching my head and I'm like, what the? That is inconceivably far away. And it's just this dot. And he goes, yeah, there's like trillions of those. And I'm thinking, oh, like the book got microbiome. There's like 38 trillion of those. Yeah. And they're just specs with life on them that we understand at some granular level, but maybe not the deepest granular level.

1:41:10So maybe I'm just another gut in the bug of some toddler in some other space. And I just don't know the answer. What do you do with that information? No idea. But the new theory is that this consciousness is external to our body. What does that mean? Like our brains act as a receiver and a filter for consciousness, not a creator of consciousness. so that hypothetically maybe DMT is something that just pops that filter off and allows us to experience full consciousness. And then if the all is mind, so if everything in my dream is made up of me and we just copy paste that up to this level, we're all maybe part of one mind and there aren't any people.

1:41:57It's just a mind. So like the distance between us doesn't exist. It's just like a dream, except we're sharing a dream up here. And that's one of the, I think that's a part of that new consciousness theory. I don't subscribe to any of them, any one of them in particular. You haven't got to believe any of this stuff.

1:42:20Because it's hard to, you're never going to know for sure. But even hearing it makes me feel a lot more empathetic for my fellow being. Yeah. Because it makes me you. Exactly. It makes your enemy you. It makes your friend you, makes the person you love, hate, whatever. It makes all of them you. And none of us would, I think, 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. Yeah. So that's what I love about this conversation. And actually, every time I bring myself back to this point about consciousness being one, it does make me more empathetic to things.

1:42:55It does. And it's not because you're a moral person. Like, you don't have to have morals anymore. So if I see you as me, I'm just protecting myself. Yeah. Like it's just a natural. In the same way I would with my children. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the morality doesn't need to exist anymore. It's just the right thing. Chase, what is the most important idea we didn't talk about that we should have talked about specifically as it relates to the most important skills people are going to need, whether it's body language or people skills or sales skills? in the world we're heading towards where they're positing that robots are going to take away lots of the manual labor jobs and artificial intelligence is going to take away a lot of the cognitive work and we might be rendered left with each other in the real world.

1:43:42Yeah. Number one is making people feel heard and seen and resonating with them when they're heard and not judging them when they're seen. That's the number one. Because AI, you can mark my words, AI will never in a million years serve as a replacement for humans on the social level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Where we have survival, safety, belonging, that third row of Maslow's pyramid cannot be fulfilled through electronic means, as of yet anyway. And maybe they're going to start making sex robots and all that kind of stuff when these things come out. But we cannot fulfill that desire. We cannot fulfill that need.

1:44:33So 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 and these pseudo-social apps, YouTube. We have these parasocial relationships on YouTube. and it cannot fulfill that level. Our brains were not wired to receive digital connection. Our brains have not developed one more wrinkle in the last 200 ,000 years. Exactly the same brain. So we're not gonna out-science the lower part of the brain. And you can't meditate your way out of having good relationships and being around 3D people.

1:45:24You need it in your life. and I genuinely think AI is never going to replace it. I would agree. I would agree. I think one of the things that's been really persuasive in this regard is I remember in psychology lessons when I was like maybe 16 years old, Mrs. Lowney, I've always missed Mrs. Lowney. Mrs. Lowney, if you're listening, please get in touch. I shouldn't send my email. But just get in touch through Gareth. He knows me, but I just wanted to say that because she was a great teacher for me in psychology. I really only like two lessons in school, business and psychology. So Mr. Hughes and Mrs.

1:45:59Lowney's lessons. The others I found a bit tricky. But I thought those two teachers saw something in me. Miss Lowney was talking about the rhesus monkeys experiment, where they got these like rhesus monkeys to, either they gave them a fake mother, but that had cloth on it, or they gave them a wire mother. So a mother made out of wires. And they looked at their psychological outcomes over time. I'm probably butchering this, so please community note me. Do I have a CO team so that the facts are on the screen? And what they found is the monkeys that grew to be most psychologically stable and happy and weren't psychopaths were the ones that had a cloth mother.

1:46:37And the monkeys that became erratic and clearly had deep psychological problems were the ones that just had a wire mother. So that's always reminded me that even in a world of robots or AI or whatever, there's still something irreplaceably human about physical human connection and touch, which I actually think is going to absolutely surge in a world where we do have robots and intelligence and retentive algorithms. I think there's going to be this bifurcation of society where many people flee back to the real world. Yeah. And the two biggest things that we have as a result of all this is loneliness and division.

1:47:10And the division is manufactured, then the loneliness is a byproduct. Is there anything else you wanted to share? Yeah, maybe some good news. That'd be shitty to stop on that note. Give me some good news. I think the number one thing that people need to know is that if you wrote down the biggest insecurities that you've ever had in your entire life, every crazy, crazy thing about how you thought it was a big deal, you have to forgive yourself for that shit you did when you were 12. You have to stop doing this. You have to stop hiding yourself from other people. If you just wrote down every one of your insecurities with 100 people and then had someone type all of them out, all 100 people, you wouldn't be able to find your own.

1:48:05You'd be very confused. You'd think that someone just paraphrased you 100 times if you're digging through that hat trying to find your insecurities. And it would shock you. And it's one thing to hear it maybe on a podcast, but to see it in real life, if you see the depth of other people, we are so much the same. And all the shit 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 like, I should have treated it more like a game. I should have figured out what was important in the game and done what was actually important.

1:48:47And that's it.

1:48:51That 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. Yeah. There's been a bit of an evolution. Yeah. And I think that level of empathy is super important to life and it helps slow things down. And no matter what you're going through, make a poster and put this up on your wall. it's supposed to be fun it's supposed to be a game and I think Alan Watts had a quote that said most of man's memory comes from taking very seriously what God made for fun

1:49:34it's hard not to take it seriously though when it seems to threaten some of our prehistoric design. And if we go back to the triangle where you've got friends and rewards and you've got safety, if it threatens any of these things, then it doesn't feel so fun. Right. Depending on your perspective. And that's where the big perspective shift comes in of like, I got to remind myself this is supposed to be fun. Chase, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is - Sounds like you've rehearsed that.

1:50:10Yeah, I've said it quite a few times now, probably 500 times.

1:50:16If 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? I think developing the ability to shut the fuck up and celebrate when there's a win. We just had like a giant record month in our company, massive record month. And I was like, okay, okay. And then I joined another meeting and it fell by the wayside. And I think I'm going to regret doing that. And I think celebrating wins is a skill that I need to cultivate better.

1:51:01Mo Gordat from episode 101 was the most shared episode of any podcast in 2023 on Apple in the UK, according to Apple. And one of the things he said in that conversation, he's head of Google X, who left when his son died in a routine operation and he went in search of happiness. So at Google, he was leading the innovation teams, all like the AI stuff, robots and all that stuff. And I remember he becomes a backpacker at 50 odd years old, ends up having a divorce from his wife after 18 years. And his whole life, when he sat in the chair, he was like backpacking. He had this one shirt. He'd come to my studio in Shoreditch in London, this old kitchen.

1:51:33This used to be my kitchen. And he said a line to me, which has always stayed with me. He said, happiness is when your expectations of how your life are supposed to be going are met. And so from that, I can deduce the opposite to be true, which is unhappiness is when your expectations of how you thought your life was supposed to be going go unmet. And in there, I always come back to this because like almost all of my unhappiness is when I had an expectation of how my life was supposed to be going or something was supposed to be going, your relationship, getting cut off in traffic, whatever it might be, a podcast, whatever.

1:52:01and when it when you fall short of one's expectation that gap is like is dissatisfaction and frustration whatever else and so can one play with this by being grateful because i think great gratitude is a proxy of realizing that expectations you once had are now being met and succeeded but the problem is as striving creatures we keep a delta between between where we are and where we expect to be. So like when you talked about celebrating your win there, I was like, the problem is you're already thinking about the next one. So you've already created a delta. And that's going to keep you on. Whereas like, you know, Eastern traditions are all about gratitude, which in that moment is going, fuck Chase, we did it.

1:52:46This was a dream. Yeah. And you did it. And like, are you able to sit in that? The problem I've also discovered with this spiel is I expected it to be automatic. I expected the gratitude and the excitement and the joy to be automatic. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Instead of like taking a moment and forcing it out of me, like reminding myself that this was it, Chase. Yeah. This was the dream. And that's the perspective. Yeah, perspective. Like your camera angles, like mine, I'll speak for myself, it's just so zoomed in on on this exact moment on what's going on in the business this meeting that's coming up in a few minutes you're just like dragging that camera by the throat and pulling it up to like when you zoom out on google maps and be like 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.

1:53:54It's so true. And it maybe, like when I became a millionaire, I thought it was like, it's going to fix my posture. It's going to make my skin look better. It didn't do anything. It didn't do shit. And the crazy part about that is you often hear of what they call gold medal depression, which again is a prime example of like, you had an expectation of that moment. You thought confetti and a marching band and it would be on the front page of the newspaper or whatever and the reality is it didn't do shit so now you've got a problem now you're now a lot of people they get upset they come back from the olympics with a gold medal and they're depressed because they climbed to the top of the mountain and it didn't change anything now that's a problem yeah so i actively practice especially ahead of an accomplishment i actively practice forced gratitude which is like really taking a moment and zooming out as you say and then the other is like before i just got my house in la which is an incredible fucking house and like blows like from where i come from it's you know kid born in botswana moves to the uk um before i walked into the house i 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.

1:55:12No 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. That's beautiful. So it was very easy to exceed my expectations because I had none, you know, and I actually enjoy it every day when I walk downstairs because it's like blowing my mind. Yeah. You know? That is awesome. But you still get to celebrate that you got the house. Yeah. Without it meaning something about you. Yeah. I think that's the difference. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Like you can feel good about a good YouTube comment without you going, yeah, yeah, Stephen is a good guy.

1:55:53You know, like where you're not writing identity statements about it. Identity, that's the key. That's what I was clearly doing there is I'm saying, this is not going to impact my identity in any way. Don't fucking think it's going to. Yeah. But it still means that when I wake up in the morning and see a view, I go, wow, that's so, wow. Yeah. You know? So true. So true. I fully resonate with that. Chase, where do people go to get more of you? Where's the best place? Best place is nci.university. nci.university. I'll link that below for anyone that's looking for the link. And my YouTube channel is just my name.

1:56:26We'll try and collab with you on this video. So if you look down below, you should see two icons. You'll see the Diary of a CEO icon and Chase's icon. If you're watching on YouTube, just click Chase's icon and you'll go over to his YouTube channel. Chase, thank you so much. Thanks, Stephen.