You’re Sabotaging Your Future Without Even Knowing It | Chase Hughes
Behavior and influence specialist Chase Hughes joins Doug Bopst for a long, practical conversation about the quiet ways people sabotage their own future. Hughes turns his interrogation and profiling toolkit inward, arguing that most of what we call fate is unconscious programming, and the whole game is making it conscious so it becomes a choice. He hands over concrete tools: the dopamine map, the childhood development triangle, the FATE model for leading your animal brain, neurogenic tremors for trauma, and the butler of your future self practice for discipline. Bopst, who rebuilt his life after addiction and prison, tests every idea against his own recovery, and the two also dissect how modern platforms keep people pacified, distracted, and sedated.
Published May 1, 20261:50:37 video41 min readAdded Jul 5, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
Doug Bopst sits down with behavior and influence specialist Chase Hughes for a long, practical conversation about the quiet ways people wreck their own future without noticing. Hughes spent a career in the military teaching interrogation and behavior profiling, and he turns that same toolkit inward: most of what we call fate, he argues, is unconscious programming running in the background, and the whole game is dragging it into conscious awareness where it becomes a choice. The conversation moves from how to bounce back from failure, to why your goals are usually just symptoms, to a hands on map of where your dopamine actually comes from, to the finite nature of discipline, to a full teardown of how modern platforms keep people pacified, distracted, and sedated.
Along the way Hughes hands over the concrete tools he uses with clients and intelligence operators: a dopamine map you draw on a sheet of paper, a childhood triangle that explains your adult fears, the FATE model for leading your own animal brain, neurogenic tremors for discharging trauma, and the "butler of your future self" practice for building discipline that lasts. Bopst, who was once incarcerated on felony drug charges and rebuilt his life, presses every idea against his own recovery, so the theory keeps getting tested against a real story. The through line is blunt and hopeful: your brain does not speak English, it responds to awareness and repetition, and once you can see the script you are running, you get to stop running it.
Below is the whole conversation rebuilt in order, every framework, every number, every story, with the specifics kept intact.
Bouncing back from failure: change the narrator
Bopst opens with the question that names the episode: how do people bounce back after failing without building an identity around being a failure? Hughes says the fix starts with two realizations. First, we all have a narrator running our life. Second, we choose what that narrator highlights and focuses on, and that choice dictates what we think and how we view everything. Almost all of it comes down to two words, "perspective and priority." He acknowledges the resistance people feel: it seems insulting that a problem you have carried your whole life could yield to one small shift. His answer is that complex problems do not require complex solutions.
The second move is a warning against a hidden arrogance. When you declare "I am a failure and this will keep happening to me," you are quietly claiming to know every detail of the story, to have picked the correct perspective, and to be able to predict the future. Hughes calls that a "narcissistic self referential bubble." The antidote is to become, in his words, "delusionally self forgiving." Unless you are an actual psychopath, radical self forgiveness is step one to changing the narrator.
Bopst pushes on the lived difficulty: the cognitive dissonance when the positive momentum you are building does not feel good enough, because you are comparing it against social media or against the false dopamine of the substances you used to lean on. Hughes says to start dissecting the beliefs themselves. Is this objective or subjective? Am I really as buried as I feel?
Making the limiting belief absurd on purpose
Then Hughes gives his favorite exercise. Take a client's core limiting belief, for example "I am a failure," and make it extreme, then put it somewhere they cannot avoid seeing it. One client had money guilt, a belief that making money made him a bad person because he was not donating it. Hughes made him a desktop wallpaper with beautiful mountains and the exaggerated text of what the belief really said: "my kids don't deserve money." The point is to yank the internal dialogue into conscious awareness so you can see how absurd it is. He notes that every awakening, whether from a psychedelic journey, a loss, or a spiritual revelation, starts at the same place: everything you thought was a huge deal turns out not to be a big deal at all.
Your goals are symptoms, not causes
Bopst raises unrealistic goals, the "millionaire by 25," and the three ways they backfire: they defeat people who cannot see a path, they push people to do horrific things because they care about the goal more than the journey, or they collapse midway when reality does not cooperate. Hughes adds a fourth failure mode he has watched repeatedly: people hit the number and are still depressed, staring at the bank account feeling nothing.
His reframe is the spine of the whole episode. A million dollars by 25, or a yacht at 23, is a symptom of having done something with your life. When people set goals, they set symptoms, and they forget to set the causes. The work is to ask, "for that to be a byproduct, what would I have to do with my life?" Then make the shallow surface goal a byproduct of how you live. The real goals become the behaviors and habits, the wake up time, the daily actions. The million dollars is the byproduct.
Symptoms (what most people set)
Causes (what Hughes says to set)
The goal
Be a millionaire by 25, own the yacht at 23
The daily behaviors that would make that a byproduct
Where focus goes
The outcome, the number, the arrival
The process, the wake up time, the repeated action
When it is slow
"The world is not giving me success" victim
"My causes are not dialed in yet" agency
If you hit it
Still empty, because the cause was never built
Fulfilled, because the identity was built first
Figure 1. Hughes reframes goal setting. Most people chase symptoms, the visible byproducts of a life well built. Set the causes instead, and the symptoms arrive on their own.
On staying grounded when success is slow, Hughes is unsentimental. The world is not fair and never will be. He points to Oprah Winfrey, whose early years were more brutal than most people's worst day, as proof that for anything you have been through, a hundred successful people went through worse. That should delete the excuses. If your definition of success is a cause rather than a symptom, then following your behaviors is itself the achievement.
The dopamine map: pleasure is not happiness
Bopst asks how people build a healthier relationship with dopamine. Hughes gives a paper exercise. Take a sheet of printer paper, draw a line down the middle with a small circle on it so it looks like a basketball court. On the left, honestly write everything you get pleasure and dopamine from: chocolate, cheesecake, porn, drugs, alcohol, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Then assign point values from a budget of 100 across all of them. On the right, write where the good dopamine should come from, which for most people should start with themselves and their own actions, plus kids, coursework, the things they actually want to be driven by. When your kids score eight and Twitter scores 39, the imbalance is suddenly impossible to ignore. You have taken something unconscious and made it conscious.
The core distinction Hughes hammers: confusing pleasure and happiness is "the number one way to ruin your life." They do not even touch. His test for whether something is dopamine: it feels great in the moment and captures all your attention, then feels bad or empty afterward. He learned it from a course on spotting a psychopath in conversation. One of the biggest tells is that the conversation feels fantastic the entire time, then the good feeling drops off a cliff the second it ends, because that person trained themselves to trigger your dopamine hit points. A conversation rooted in oxytocin and serotonin fades gently instead. Social media works like the psychopath.
Figure 2. The dopamine map. Draw the court, list every source, spend exactly 100 points, and the imbalance becomes undeniable. Then draw a second map with arrows moving points from the draining side to the side that actually fulfills you.
How addiction hijacks the reward system
Bopst shares the analogy that reframed addiction for him, from an addiction therapist. When you are not an addict, thinking about the Grand Canyon is a 10 out of 10 pleasurable experience. Start using cocaine and you flood the brain with artificial dopamine. The coke climbs from a one to a two to a three, and the Grand Canyon slides from a 10 to an eight. A few months down the road the reward system is fully hijacked, the Grand Canyon is boring, and you cannot enjoy an aquarium, a football game, or a baseball game without a substance. Bopst says part of getting out of the "simulation" is accepting the normalcy of it: your brain is responding exactly as it should given how you are treating it, and it will keep doing so until you change the treatment.
Hughes notes that when Bopst talked about the Grand Canyon his face lit up, and when he talked about cocaine it did not, because the Grand Canyon is not just dopamine, it is a fully immersive 3D core memory. That is the case for mindfulness. He compares becoming present to being Cesar Millan with your own animal brain, gently forcing the "mofo" back into the present moment every time it drifts. Peer reviewed research supports plain mindfulness, and you do not need incense and spa music, you can do it while you mulch the yard, sit in traffic, cook, or change a diaper. It has been studied for 5,000 years under names like meditation and Zen.
Both men then compare notes on the same real trip: a Maverick Helicopters ride into the Grand Canyon. Bopst took it solo from the Wynn during a fitness conference and calls it the most complete way he could have seen it. Hughes did the identical Maverick ride a month or two before recording, landing in the canyon with his son. His point: giant nature does what psychedelic therapy does, it shows you how small and unspecial you are, in the most beautiful way possible. A great deal of our stress is the effort of convincing ourselves we are extremely special and cannot survive any social injury.
The childhood development triangle
Bopst asks what commonly holds people back from confidence and authority. Hughes says it traces to three patterns formed in childhood, which he draws as a triangle. Around age eight, what did you do to earn and keep friends, to feel safe, and to earn rewards, where rewards differed by child, food for one with a rough home, praise for the violin for another. And what did you avoid to get those same three things. For 99 percent of people, those childhood answers become how you handle conflict as an adult, and the fear of stepping out is really a fear of loss: losing friends, safety, or rewards.
Figure 3. The childhood development triangle. The strategies you built by age eight to secure friends, safety, and rewards became the fears and conflict styles you carry as an adult. Hughes calls locating yourself on it the fastest entry point into self knowledge.
At 44, Hughes says, he can take his own quiz and spot a pattern that started in middle school and is still running. Pulling that file out of the cabinet and into the open converts it from an automatic behavior into a choice. Before you open the closet, there is no choice at all.
Therapy, psychedelics, and the physiology trap
Asked about cognitive behavioral therapy and other modalities, Hughes gives rough numbers while noting he is not a therapy expert. Average therapy for extreme anxiety, stress, and PTSD runs 6 to 9 years, and he says the same result is reachable in about 4 hours of psilocybin, roughly nine years of therapy in one session. Hypnosis works for many people at a 70 to 80 percent rate. CBT works if you keep at it for years. Psychedelics work above 90 percent, in one four hour session, making them the fastest route. Working with a good coach who walks you through unpacking your own material matters, because a workbook alone gets filled with self deception. He is candid that he saw a therapist about six years ago and was full of it until he really dug in, so he is not immune.
Then the point that undercuts most self help: some of what looks psychological is physiological. People try every mindset trick for 11, 12, 15 years, then finally get their vitamin and neurotransmitter levels tested and discover a plain vitamin D deficiency. They were trying to think their way out of a physical problem. A doctor can order those tests, and vitamin B and vitamin D deficiencies, or an epinephrine and norepinephrine imbalance, can severely damage your life. He gives the extreme version too: a person told they have social anxiety when their numb tingling hands and racing heart turned out to be a brain tumor. As a culture we ignore physiological causes for mental symptoms, and when the cause is physiological the fix is often very easy.
Small wins, right action, and the FATE model
Bopst argues for a strong focus on small wins, because big things are just compounded small wins, and we live in a world of instant gratification. Hughes agrees and calls it "right action," the old coaches' term. People want "the Ozempic version of discipline," referencing Ozempic, and some things simply take time. But the deeper point is that your human brain is not in charge, the mammal is. To lead a mammalian brain, whether a human, a dolphin, or a dog, you need four things, and he asks how Cesar Millan would handle it: focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. It spells FATE, and he says it is your fate.
Figure 4. FATE. Your mammal brain does not respond to a calendar of Xs on the wall or a wall of affirmations, because it cannot read. It responds to focus, authority, tribe, and emotional images. Get the mammal on board and the human's direction finally sticks.
This is why a calendar of Xs or a wall of affirmations does nothing on its own, Hughes says: your dog cannot see it, and neither can your animal brain, unless there is a strong emotional attachment. That is where vision boards and the people you spend time with matter. Show your goals to the mammal with thousands of associated images so it understands the direction, then celebrate after the run so the mammal learns.
Discipline is finite: become the butler of your future self
Bopst plays a client: "Chase, I struggle with discipline and procrastination, how do I unlearn the bad habits and stay consistent even when I don't feel like it?" Hughes calls out a mistake in the language: "discipline to do all these things I don't want to do." Then he drops the reframe. When you watch someone go to the gym every day, none of that is discipline, it is routine. The discipline was only there when the habit was started. Discipline is a finite resource, a shot glass, not a well.
So you start one habit at a time, and most people fail because they try to install 19 at once, eating hot dogs and scrolling 18 hours a day but expecting in six weeks to be muscular, rich, and have extremely white teeth. Spend your one shot glass of discipline on the single habit that sprouts rewards everywhere: taking care of your future self. He cites roughly 64 days to set a habit, while noting any exact number is wrong and only roughly useful. Once prioritizing your future self is a habit, every other habit gets easier, because you now have an emotional relationship with the future version of you.
To make the mammal care about a future self it has never met, Hughes uses FaceApp to age a selfie to about 95, prints it on a color printer, and puts it on the fridge, by the bed, in the office. The practice is to act like a butler for your future self: set up the coffee maker the night before, lay out clothes, and think bigger, because how you spend money, what you eat, and what you buy at the grocery store all answer one question, am I prioritizing me now or me later. He plants a literal reminder too, tucking a 100 dollar bill and a note into a winter jacket before it goes to the basement, so future him meets past him with gratitude instead of regret. Then rate yourself daily in ten seconds: where were my priorities today. The act of rating pulls it into awareness, and, like a new car you suddenly see everywhere, the mammal starts working the problem for you.
Stop the bleeding: mapping discomfort against anesthetic
Bopst asks what Hughes sees people doing over and over that destroys their focus. Hughes walks each client through an inventory that maps two things: where you feel discomfort in life, from social settings to checking your bank account to pitching on stage, and where you seek comfort, from Instagram and TikTok to alcohol, which act as anesthetic. Then you deliberately add a little discomfort on the comfort side and add comfort on the stress side. So much of self sabotage is just seeking comfort in Netflix binges, video games, and scrolling, which numb you. Pulling energy off the anesthetic side frees up willpower and discipline everywhere else, and he has watched people change in a week and a half to two weeks just from mapping it honestly. Hypnosis, he adds, is a fast way to accelerate that change.
Reading people is really stress detection
A lot of Hughes' work is about reading people and body language, so Bopst asks for the elevator pitch on why an ordinary person should care when nobody around them is a spy. Hughes corrects the premise: people assume behavior profiling is lie detection, but it is stress detection. The nose scratch equals lying myth is one of the biggest and it is false. What he actually teaches reduces to three abilities that determine success in life: communication, self mastery, and observation. Our failures trace back to one of the three, I failed to communicate, I was not in charge of myself and sent the wrong signals, or I failed to read the room.
His book Six Minute X-Ray is built on the idea that in six minutes you can surface a person's insecurities, fears, secret desires, and decision type from hidden information in their language, the tiny pauses and seemingly insignificant words. As a leader that makes you far more effective, but the bigger payoff is inward: learning to read others makes you read yourself, because you start noticing what your own language reveals. The most common problem he has ever seen is that people do not know who they are.
The route to self knowledge is radical honesty in real time. If a pause feels awkward, say it out loud. If you feel nervous, say you are nervous. Reveal the small things you used to hide out of fear of judgment. And the single fastest entry point into self knowledge is locating yourself on that childhood triangle of friends, safety, and rewards, which starts untying everything else. He offers a free class of roughly 6 to 7 hours that walks through this shift in how you view the world and other people, and says learning to read people is the best place to start because it makes you read yourself at the same time, a pathway to self mastery.
Motivation is often neurochemistry
Bopst asks whether motivation, the mirror pep talk, actually works or is BS. Hughes says a lot of motivation is neurochemically based. The person who reports a big epiphany may actually have traveled, taken a supplement, or rebalanced their brain chemistry. He repeats the pattern: people work one on one with a mindset coach for years, then discover a vitamin D deficiency, a zinc deficiency, or an epinephrine and norepinephrine imbalance that a diet or lifestyle change fixes. We assume psychological symptoms are psychologically rooted when the deficit is physiological, and, as with the brain tumor mislabeled as social anxiety, our culture ignores physical causes for anything happening in the mind.
Quitting drinking: education, not resistance
Asked about recent changes in his own life, Hughes reveals he quit drinking 39 days ago. Many of his friends had stopped, and he was lying to himself that alcohol was not harmful. He has a "brain disease," and, red wine aside, alcohol is a neurotoxin, so he was hurting himself. The shift was not white knuckling withdrawals. It was flooding his brain with so much truth and data about alcohol that every reason to drink collapsed, so the decision to be sober became a byproduct of knowledge and awareness rather than resistance.
There was no dramatic crossroads. His company grew, he hired his sister Holly as CEO, and Holly had quit drinking seven years earlier. At a family Thanksgiving, with everyone pouring wine and scotch, he asked her how she resisted it. She said, "It's not about resistance. It's about education." Know enough about it and no desire remains in your body. That conversation was the catalyst.
What quitting taught him about behavior change
The lesson: we very often lie to ourselves about why we do destructive things, whether drinking, staying in a bad relationship, or raging in traffic, and the right amount of truth pulls us out of most negative behaviors. This is why psychedelics help people stop addictions, they zoom you out so far that you see three illusions clearly, that you are special, that you are separate from everyone, and that your private reasons for your behavior are false.
Bopst frames addiction as a simulation people get trapped in, and notes the first months of recovery are crucial because cravings run high while you recalibrate. Hughes adds a mechanical insight most people miss: about 90 percent of addictions are "hand to mouth" addictions, overeating, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, weed. People obsess over the chemical withdrawal and DTs, delirium tremens with its microseizures, but forget the hand to mouth gesture itself is part of the habit. Replacing that physical movement pattern while you wean off the chemical matters, so he sets up something to sip through the evening. On the heavier side, and explicitly not medical advice, he points to psychedelics as one of the fastest tools: a psilocybin journey, or increasingly a doctor prescribed 25 milligram microdose ketamine troche dissolved under the tongue, which can help with addiction, anxiety, depression, and PTSD, with very low abuse potential. Mushrooms, he notes, are anti addictive, nobody gets hooked on them, and our ancestors used these for millennia. He calls the current psychedelic revolution something people should take more advantage of.
Neurogenic tremors: how mammals shake off trauma
Bopst asks for a way to reach the subconscious without psychedelics, especially for people in 12 step recovery for whom any substance is off limits. Hughes points to neurogenic tremors. Every mammal is programmed to tremble after trauma. A squirrel, fox, impala, or polar bear that survives a crocodile bite does not go curl under a tree for weeks, and you do not see foxes or monkeys with depression. The researcher behind this, Dr. David Berceli, a trauma expert, noticed that after a trauma these animals enter a vibrating, seizure like shaking state that discharges it. Humans have the same instinct, which is why a person's hands shake when they try to dial 911, but we suppress it because shaking looks sick and socially alarming, so onlookers rush to calm and stop us.
Berceli's system is called Trauma Release Exercises, it is free, and you can learn it on YouTube. The tremors are built into your nervous system, so the only thing to learn is how to stop suppressing them, how to take your finger off the kill switch. Because the process is mostly brain stem and spinal cord, you can hold a conversation, watch TV, or read a book while it happens. It was mandatory for Hughes' team coming back from an overseas deployment, and the first time he did it, it was life changing. It takes 30 to 45 minutes the first time to find the tremor state, and afterward you can return to it in about five seconds for the rest of your life. He walks people through an "ego phase" first, using a stress position to induce muscle tremors while you tell the brain stem "yes, I want this," giving it permission to do what it has not been allowed to do for a long time. The ego phase is the part that takes time.
Lacking control: loneliness, locus of control, and internal esteem
Bopst says Hughes' audience often feels they lack control. Hughes maps it to Maslow's hierarchy of needs: we are in a pandemic of loneliness, and a failure at the social belonging level cascades up into shaky self confidence and personal discipline, which blocks self actualization. The first step out is realizing that social media is a placebo of relationships that does not fulfill the primal need for belonging.
The second is locus of control. An internal locus says I decide what happens and it is my fault when things go wrong, an external locus says the world happens to me. Successful people run internal. But Hughes adds a piece most people miss, an internal locus of self esteem. Pointing to Bopst's YouTube plaque and his own, he says the same window that lets glowing comments feed your esteem is the exact window that lets hateful comments in. If your self esteem is internally derived, nothing external can touch it. Step one is refusing to let the positive out there define you, so the negative cannot either.
A healthier relationship with validation
Bopst pushes back honestly: external metrics like views and subscribers are a useful signal that you are on the right track, so how do you use them without being ruled by them. Hughes gives the test: does the information make me act or feel. It should change how I act, not my self worth. "If I need love from strangers, that means my door is open to hate as well." These are strangers you would not invite into your house or around your kids, so they do not belong in your head. Feeling good about positive signals is fine, letting them dictate your self worth is toxic, and catching yourself in the act is enough to start shifting it.
Discipline, revisited: your number one dopamine source should be you
Circling back, Hughes restates that your number one source of dopamine should be you and your actions, not your kids, wife, or family. He re walks the journal map, the basketball court with the center circle and 100 points, and stresses that most people have literally never mapped where their pleasure comes from. If dogs and kids score 10 and alcohol scores 65, that metric is very hard to ignore. Step two is a second map with an arrow from the negative to the positive, borrowing dopamine points from the high source toward the low one, finding the midpoint so at least the two balance. You do not have to quit all the way at once.
The definition he says nobody talks about: discipline is the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your present self. Over time you do small repetitive things that reward future you, so that when the reward arrives you look back at past you with gratitude, not regret. You become the butler of your future self, and it extends to money, food, and groceries, all of which answer whether you are prioritizing now you or later you. There is no formula or 17 tricks, you just do it as much as you can and rate yourself every day in a notebook. That repeated exposure recruits the reticular activating system, the same mechanism that makes a newly bought car appear everywhere, so the mammal starts hunting for the priority on its own.
The five domains and Doug's identity rebuild
Asked what people most need to prioritize, Hughes lists the domains: time management and environment management first. If you want to run a company but cannot keep your desk or office clean or pick up after yourself, part of your brain knows you are faking it, and that incongruence leaks out as the gut feeling other people get that "something is not adding up," no matter how many LinkedIn lists of "14 ways to look confident" you follow. The full set is environment, time, appearance and hygiene, social skills, and financial. On social, he stresses that most of your social dopamine should come from 3D humans, your closer friends and actual neighbors across the street, not 2D people on a screen.
Bopst then shares his own hardest chapter: incarcerated on felony drug charges, he had to completely change his identity, and his brain was convinced he would fail at life because before jail he had failed at everything. How do you trick a beaten down brain into becoming a new version of itself? Hughes says it comes down to confidence, and the enemies are self doubt and, even bigger, shame and self judgment. The fastest way is to become so self forgiving that people would think you are bat crazy, because if you are down and doubting yourself you are already being delusional, so pick your delusion in the other direction. Confidence has three parts here: radical self forgiveness, a generalized expectation that things will be okay, and stop waiting for permission. People treat milestones, a bank balance, other people's respect, as permission slips to feel confident, but those are placebos. No one is coming to give you permission, so give it to yourself.
Confidence is removal, not addition; composure over posturing
Bopst names the cognitive dissonance of building yourself up while your finances, relationships, and health are not where you want them. Hughes says it comes back to whether you are managing environment, time, appearance, social, and financial, and to living right "off camera." Your behavior when no one is watching, not your results, dictates how people feel about you. If you did not make your bed or get up early but you perform confidence in public, the gap shows.
The biggest lesson from a career training operatives: confidence is not additive. He does not add anything to make you confident, he removes things. Remove the fear of social judgment, which is why public speaking ranks as the number one fear, and remove self shame, which does not make you a better person, it makes you less effective and more judgmental of others. The final element is composure. Most people go out in one of two failure modes, posturing, puffing the chest out and speaking louder to overdo confidence, or collapse, shrinking so others feel comfortable. The middle is composure, and making composure a daily practice is the fastest route to confidence. Bopst calls the puffed chest "invisible lat syndrome," the guys who walk around as if their upper body is bigger than it is.
Domain
Sabotaging your future
Serving your future
Goals
Chase the symptom, the number empty
Build the daily cause fulfilled
Dopamine
Mostly from screens, alcohol, porn
Mostly from you and 3D people
Discipline
19 habits at once, then quit
One shot glass, one habit: future you
Self esteem
External, rides the comments
Internal, strangers cannot touch it
Presence
Posturing or collapse
Composure, slow and relaxed
Self talk
Shame proves you are good
Delusional self forgiveness
Attention
News and flooding, 2D strangers
Awareness, the present, real tribe
Figure 5. The two columns of the whole conversation. Every row is a place people quietly sabotage the future self, and the move Hughes offers to serve it instead.
The neuroscience of composure
Composure works because the mammalian limbic system governs 99 percent of life while we think we are in charge, and that part of the brain does not speak English or read affirmations. The mistake that destroys 90 percent of people, one Hughes says he has never heard anyone else name, is thinking in terms of hierarchy and status, am I above or below this person. The first step is agreeing to treat everyone equally, so you would treat Jeff Bezos exactly like a Starbucks barista. That consistency sets the stage for composure. Then, since our brains are hardwired to compare with other animals, permanently change the comparison to two things: be the slowest person in the room and be more relaxed than the other person. Same on a multimillion dollar sales call as with the barista. Rate yourself daily on a one to ten for composure, and yes, practice mindfulness, which is everywhere for a reason.
There are no tigers: disarming the fear of judgment
Asked the single biggest thing people are uncomfortable with socially, Hughes says a fear of future judgment. We are tribal, and a million years ago being judged and outcast meant no sex, no babies, and dead genes, which is why public speaking tops the fear list. We are not afraid of speaking, we are afraid of judgment. The trap is two part: sensing potential judgment, the brain decides it must manage how it is perceived, which makes you less you, which sends off a vibe that something is off, which draws the skeptical looks you feared. The brain treats the fear of judgment like being attacked by a saber tooth tiger, so the fastest reset is the phrase "there are no tigers," a reminder that this mammalian alarm is outdated and society has outpaced it. Second, practice worrying less about perception management, because people are looking far less than you think and it will never matter at the end of the day.
On forcing yourself to embrace discomfort, Bopst raises cold plunge, sauna, and intense workouts. Hughes confirms they are proven, citing a study as far back as 1951 on why men in Norway and Sweden, surrounded by saunas, were so emotionally resilient, measured in soldiers returning from combat. He adds yoga: a good instructor tells you to smile and breathe slower through the uncomfortable poses, training your brain to stay mindful and breathe through discomfort.
Crushing fear and the ancient texts
For the bulletproof way to crush fear, Hughes says start by identifying every fear and tracing it back, "I fear going in public" to "I fear judgment" to "in middle school I got made fun of." Awareness is the fastest way to unwire it. Live as if life is a game you are leveling up in, as fearlessly as possible. He offers a free PDF his intelligence operators use to assess authority and what holds them back, the authority assessment inventory, available on his site.
Then he widens out. Even if you are not religious, consider that ancient texts hold real wisdom, whether Judaism, Christianity, or Hindu texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which he cheerfully admits he may be mispronouncing. The most recurring phrase in the entire Bible, he says, is "do not fear," 365 times reminding you not to be afraid. Plato wrote about the same waking up long before Christianity in the allegory of the cave. Every ancient text seems to reflect a lower case truth: we are all one thing, do not be scared of anything, and do not be a jerk.
Is the system rigged? Pacify, distract, sedate
Bopst asks if the system is rigged to keep people in their 20s and 30s stuck. Hughes says not by one puppet master, maybe two thirds of it is just algorithms pushing profit. But to get anyone stuck you run PDS: pacify, distract, sedate. Look at the rise of anesthetic behaviors, porn, video games, VR through the roof. Then he lays out the modern psyop tactics, clarifying he means a psychological operation, not the US Army: flooding to drown real signals with memes, drama, and fake news, repetition until a message becomes internalized truth, mimicry that imitates everyday content on TikTok and Instagram, gamification that makes ideology feel like a lifestyle or team sport, and false consensus using bots and fake accounts to simulate popular opinion.
Figure 6. Hughes' teardown of how platforms keep people stuck. PDS is the objective, the five tactics are the method, and the output is an engineered apathy that never lets you rise from Maslow's belonging level to real esteem.
The deepest layer is Maslow again. Our brains cannot manage a social network this large, so social media becomes a placebo for the love and belonging need. We get dopamine hits that feel like connection but never satisfy the ancestral brain, so we never climb to esteem. Overloaded with global bad news we cannot act on, we go numb, outraged about one distant thing while ignoring a murder two blocks away. He believes this apathy is engineered, and it is the real cause.
The way out: disrupt the scripts, make the unconscious conscious
Hughes makes videos about the way out, and it is not going Amish or living in a cave, it is throwing the iPad in the trash and, more importantly, learning to see what is simulated versus real in your life. We mistake the label for the thing, the word for the thing, treating Facebook connection as real connection. The result is a culture of pretending, where content creators look great on camera and falsified off camera. The engineered fear of social injury is weaponized, so the counter is to stop being a victim to the fear of judgment and to be okay taking a social injury once or twice and being imperfect.
His concrete step one: stop watching the news. He calls it worse for your health and mental well being than smoking a few packs of cigarettes, and he has not watched it in eight or nine years, trusting that a neighbor or family member will text him anything that truly matters. Our brains are wired for maybe 100 to 150 people, echoing Dunbar's number, not a world full of news, and they have not evolved in 200,000 years.
On staying informed without wrecking yourself, Hughes says he is not the health expert, he is the guy who studies how this damages people because he teaches interrogation, getting people to act against their own interest. The balance is deep awareness. He quotes "Papa Carl," Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate." Most of what we call fate is unconscious background noise. So get hyper aware of your screen time and of where you feel a need to pretend, and remember the mammalian brain does not speak English, you cannot affirmation your way out, you use awareness. Feed the reticular activating system the way a new white 2025 Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro suddenly appears everywhere once you own it. The biggest shifts in life, falling in love, watching your child be born, are never rooted in language.
The first move for someone on autopilot: disruption
For someone stuck on autopilot, scrolling and neglecting their health, the number one tool is disruption. Any deprogramming, forward or backward, starts with destabilization and agitation of the routine. Brush your teeth with the left hand, rearrange the furniture, repaint the bedroom, set an app time limit not to block the app but to interrupt the script when the limit pops. He has clients wear KT Tape somewhere on the body, which pulls attention all day and tells the brain, without any words, that something is new and worth paying attention to. Break the scripts on a regular basis.
On escaping the victim mindset, Hughes calls it brutally hard because it is a behavioral pattern. He recommends listening to the expert, Jocko Willink, who can snap you out faster than he could, but warns that even reading all of Jocko's books is still language, and you are still running scripts. We are on autopilot ten times more than we think. The fix is disrupting patterns so the brain can no longer predict the future and starts paying attention.
His journaling prompts to break the loop: what do I do automatically every day, what makes me emotional or upset, which reveals the identity fragments Jung wrote about, and, most powerfully, where and how am I judging other people, which exposes the concealed shame I am carrying. People hiding shame think they are the only one, and Hughes says everyone does this. The hardest, most freeing correction: feeling bad about a thing from middle school does not make you a good person, that is "the biggest load" you could hold in your brain. Bopst names the trap of using the past, being picked on, divorced parents, jail, to justify current behavior, because there is a commodity in the sob story and people pat you on the back for it. Hughes' answer is a perspective shift: take the GoPro stuck behind your head and put it out in front of your eyes. That single shift is why psychedelic therapy tests as one of the most effective treatments ever for depression and PTSD.
Finally, on becoming consistent after years of a fixed worldview, the number one move is forming a visual relationship with your future self, the aged FaceApp photo on the fridge, because most people cannot prioritize a future self they cannot visualize. And since the brain is wired to move away from negatives more than toward positives, our ancestors were far likelier to mistake a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick, you can also print the negative future, missing teeth, on drugs, morbidly obese at 85, so the mammal recoils and moves away from it. Bringing it all together day to day: build the future self relationship the mammal can see, and make the unconscious conscious, tracking your screen time in giant Sharpie on a poster from Michael's or Walmart, forcing what you used to pursue unconsciously into the open. That, Hughes says, is exactly the opposite of what he would do to keep a country pacified, distracted, and sedated.
Key takeaways
Change the narrator first. Perspective and priority run your life, and radical, almost delusional self forgiveness is step one to changing what your inner narrator highlights.
Set causes, not symptoms. A million dollars is a symptom of a life well built. Make the surface goal a byproduct of daily behaviors, and let those behaviors be the actual goal.
Pleasure is not happiness. Map every source of dopamine on a sheet of paper, spend exactly 100 points, and borrow points from the draining side toward the fulfilling side until they balance.
Your brain does not speak English. The mammalian limbic system runs 99 percent of your life and cannot read affirmations, so lead it with FATE: focus, authority, tribe, and emotional images.
Discipline is a finite shot glass, and what looks like discipline in others is routine. Spend your one shot on a single habit, prioritizing your future self, and become its butler.
Confidence is removal, not addition. Remove the fear of social judgment and self shame, then practice composure, be the slowest and most relaxed person in the room and treat everyone equally.
There are no tigers. The fear of judgment is an outdated saber tooth alarm, and people are looking far less than you think.
Physiology can masquerade as psychology. Before years of mindset work, test vitamin D, vitamin B, and neurotransmitter levels.
Disrupt the scripts. Brush with the other hand, rearrange the room, cap the apps, wear KT tape, and make the unconscious conscious by tracking it where you cannot avoid seeing it.
Quit the news and stop pretending. Awareness, real 3D tribe, and radical honesty beat the placebo of a social network your brain was never built to hold.
Chapters
Chapters are estimated, since the video ships without markers. Timestamps still seek the player.
0:00:00 Bouncing back from failure: change the narrator
0:04:30 Delusional self forgiveness and the narcissism trap
0:08:00 Making a limiting belief absurd on purpose
0:12:00 Your goals are symptoms, not causes
0:17:00 Staying grounded when success is slow (Oprah)
0:20:30 The dopamine map: pleasure is not happiness
0:26:00 How addiction hijacks the reward system
0:30:00 Mindfulness as forcing the animal brain present
0:34:00 Grand Canyon helicopters and the perspective shift
0:38:00 The childhood development triangle
0:42:00 Therapy, psychedelics, and 9 years in 4 hours
0:46:00 The physiology trap: the vitamin D deficiency
0:49:30 Small wins, right action, and the FATE model
0:54:00 Discipline is finite: butler of your future self
0:59:30 Stop the bleeding: discomfort vs anesthetic
1:02:30 Reading people is really stress detection
1:07:00 Radical honesty and knowing yourself
1:10:30 Quitting drinking: education, not resistance
1:15:00 Hand to mouth addictions and ketamine microdosing
1:19:00 Neurogenic tremors: how mammals shake off trauma
1:24:00 Loneliness, locus of control, internal esteem
1:29:00 The butler of your future self, revisited
1:33:00 The five domains and Doug's identity rebuild
1:37:00 Confidence is removal; composure over posturing
1:42:00 There are no tigers: disarming the fear of judgment
1:45:30 Is the system rigged? Pacify, distract, sedate
1:49:00 The way out: disrupt the scripts, make it conscious
Notable quotes
"We all have a narrator that narrates our life, and we choose what that narrator highlights and focuses on." Chase Hughes, 0:00:20
"People need to be delusionally self forgiving, and that is the biggest step one to start changing the narrator." Chase Hughes, 0:03:40
"When people are setting goals, what they're typically setting are symptoms. What they're not setting are the cause of those symptoms." Chase Hughes, 0:13:00
"Confusing pleasure and happiness is the number one way to ruin your life. Pleasure and happiness are not the same. They don't even touch." Chase Hughes, 0:21:20
"Nine years of therapy in a short little package. Psychedelics work higher than 90 percent, and that's in like four hours." Chase Hughes, 0:43:30
"That guy goes to the gym every day, none of that is discipline. It's routine. The discipline was there when the habit was started only." Chase Hughes, 0:54:20
"I am the butler of my future self." Chase Hughes, 1:31:00
"If I need love from strangers, that means my door is open to hate as well." Chase Hughes, 1:27:10
"Confidence is not additive. I need you to remove this fear of social judgment and all this crap you're carrying for no reason." Chase Hughes, 1:38:40
"Your brain is wired to equate the fear of judgment with the same as being attacked by a saber tooth tiger. There are no tigers." Chase Hughes, 1:43:00
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate." Carl Jung, quoted by Chase Hughes, 1:47:20
"There is no one coming to give you permission. You've just got to give it to yourself." Chase Hughes, 1:35:40
Resources mentioned
Chase Hughes, behavior and influence specialist, and his free authority assessment inventory and free class
Doug Bopst and The Adversity Advantage podcast, the host
Ozempic, invoked as the "shortcut" people wish existed for discipline
Full transcript
How can people effectively bounce back after failing so that they don't fall into that trap that so many of us do and that you create this identity that you're act that you are a failure. Yeah. This is great. Uh so the the first thing is we have to realize that we all have a narrator that narrates our life. The second thing is we choose what that narrator highlights and focuses on.
So that narrator is going to dictate what we think and how we view our life and all of that. But it it a lot of this narrator is also about perspective. So like all these problems that we've talked about so far are perspective and priority. And that's it. Perspective and priority.
And it it sucks to to have this problem throughout our life and then like oh this this one little shift can change this thing I've been dealing with. So we we have some mental resistance to that. Like why would something so simple solve this big complex thing? And I realized that people have very complex issues in their life but this that doesn't mean the solution has to be complex. So number one, the narrator is there.
And number two you can remind yourself for anybody going through this, remind yourself that going off of these details, saying that I am a failure and then I know that this won't happen in the future for me. Uh that's your we're starting to border on narcissism. Because we're saying I picked to the right perspective. I know how I know every detail of the story and I know what to focus on and I can predict the future. Uh so we're starting to get into this little narcissistic self-referential bubble of I know what the future holds.
So number one, change the narrator. And number two, anything that's happened in your past, um unless you're some weird psychopath or something, like people need to be delusionally delusionally self-forgiving. And and that is the biggest step one to start changing the narrator. It's tough, man. And it's tough cuz I mean, I just speak for my own personal experience of like the with with the the the toughest part about it is the cognitive dissonance that exists where you are trying to change the narrative and because you you're so far back in life or you think you're so far back in life, like what's in front of you just doesn't match the narrative you're trying to change.
And then the idea of creating like the positive momentum you are creating doesn't feel good enough because, you know, you're paying attention to social media or you're like addicted to you were addicted to substances which create this false sense of dopamine. Like how can people you know, start to feel good again and make life kind of exciting for where they're at even though they still have a lot to learn and a long way to go on their journey. Yeah, I think just dissecting some of those beliefs is the biggest way to do that. And dissecting it meaning like, is this objective or subjective? Am I really buried in this?
And then uh one of the things I've I've done with a lot of my clients is take one of those beliefs. So, let's say we've got somebody that says, "I am a failure." So, that means I'm not I I can't be successful or I can't do this thing. I can't have this stuff in my life. Then we'll make a giant meme like with beautiful mountains on it and we'll put the text on the screen like uh you have to be perfect in order to be successful. Which is ridiculous, stupid.
But we see the stupid idea on a regular basis and we bring it into conscious awareness so we realize how stupid some of this internal dialogue is. So we made it like this his desktop wallpaper this big photo of mountains and then we put on there I think this guy that I'm referring to right now he had some money psychology stuff. But his limiting belief was like I can't make money or I feel guilty if I make money and then I can't make a lot of money cuz that means I'm a bad person cuz I'm not donating it. So we made we took his limiting belief and made it extreme. So we want to exaggerate that.
So we took his limiting belief and I think what he put on his desktop wallpaper was my kids don't deserve money. Because I I told him at the end of the day that's really what you're saying. And if somebody thinks they're a failure it's my kids and the people that I leave don't deserve me at my best. They need me to think that I'm a failure. Or I might put on the wallpaper if I think I'm a failure that means I'm a good person.
Just to kind of bring that into conscious awareness as fast as we can and and show ourselves how absurd and ridiculous some of this stuff is. And I think at the end of the day you watch somebody go through a psychedelic journey some spiritual revelation happen in their life they lose their loved one and everything in their life changes the first big thing that happens is all the that I thought was a really big deal is not a big deal anymore. Everything that I thought was a huge deal is no longer a big deal. And this is no matter what kind of huge awakening someone has that's step one to all of these awakenings is everything I thought was a big deal ain't a big deal. Shifting gears a little bit kind of building off of the the failure conversation is I think people I think it helps for people to have goals in life.
And like we talked about this forward-thinking approach. I also think again, this quote-unquote simulation that people live in, it's easy to get sucked into these insanely unrealistic goals. Like I want to be a millionaire by the time I'm 25. Is it possible? Sure, but is it likely?
No. Like all these insanely unrealistic goals that either A defeat people in their tracks cuz they're like, how the hell am I going to get there? B they end up doing like horrific things to get there because they want they they care more about the goal than the journey. And C they end up falling flat on their face like midway through because they've they realized like, oh, like life doesn't work this way. How do you How do you think about goal setting?
And how can people effectively do so? Yeah, or they get the million and they're still depressed and they're like, wait That too. That that is the other Yeah, exactly. I'm logging in and I'm looking at my bank account and I still feel like So, any of those goals I would I would say for everybody and I've studied human motivation for a while. I don't think I'm a goal setting expert but I would definitely say that making being a million What What was it the goal?
Having a million dollars by the time I'm 25. That is a That is a thing. Right? So, that is a symptom of something. Owning a yacht when I'm 23 is a symptom of having done something with my life.
So, when people are setting goals, what they're typically setting are symptoms. These are the symptoms that I want to have, but what they're not setting are the cause of those symptoms. So, like being a millionaire by the time before 25, to do that, for that to be a byproduct, what would I have to do with my life? So, for all of our goals, we have to go back and say, "How do I make my goal, this little shallow goal that I have on the top here, how do I make that a byproduct of how I live my life?" So, that's how we have to set goals. So, most people are setting symptoms instead of goals.
What we want to set are the causes. How can I cause that million dollars to be in my bank account? So, that means I have to wake up at a certain time. That means I have to do this and this and this. Those should be the goals.
The byproduct should be the million dollars by by the time you're 25. How do people stay grounded like in the process when um when they're when things aren't happening immediately for them like and when they're doing all the right things and yet success isn't right in front of them. Like how can people kind of course correct their mind? I think that the reason that we're we're like, "Oh, I'm not getting success that I want." is that we're we're seeking and I I'm just going to go back to this. We're seeking we're we're defining success as symptoms.
Right. Instead of causes. So, if I work on these causes hard enough that that my lack of success is a lack of me kind of working and getting to the place I need to be. 100% the world's not fair, never will be. We just be got to get over that.
It and that sucks. But like if you read the autobiography of like Oprah and like read how Oprah was born in her early years, uh most people's life doesn't even compare to that level of horror and nasty upbringing and unfairness. So, that should delete all of your excuses. Like there are for everything that anybody would say that they've been through, there are a hundred successful people who've been through way worse uh than than you have. So, it's definitely out there.
But, my my vision of success should not be a symptom. It should be a cause. So, am I am I following all these things? Then yes, then that's that I'm achieving my goals. So, my actual goals are just these behaviors and habits that I need in order for that million dollars to be there.
I know we talked in our last conversation about dopamine and how people get have a unhealthy relationship with dopamine. I'd like to kind of revisit that because I don't think you know, I don't think things have gotten better with that for people. And maybe there's people who didn't listen to our first conversation. Um like why do you think or how can people have a better relationship with dopamine so that they can you know maintain this real sense of joy and fulfillment about life? Yeah, so the first is to figure out where where we're getting dopamine from.
And the way to do this is you take a like a regular sheet of printer paper. I was looking around to see if I had some in here. But, you draw a line down the middle. A little circle on that line. So, you kind of make it look like a little basketball court.
And on the left side of the page, you write down everything that you're getting dopamine from in your life. Everything that you're getting pleasure from. And confusing pleasure and happiness is the number one way to ruin your life. Pleasure and happiness are not the same. They're not even they don't even touch each other at all.
So, where am I getting deriving this dopamine pleasure-seeking behavior from? Maybe it's chocolate or cheesecake. Maybe it's uh watching porn or maybe it's uh doing drugs or alcohol or, you know, fill in the blank. All these things that I'm getting it from. And that's the time to be honest that I'm also getting it from Twitter or Instagram or Facebook.
I'm getting dopamine hits all right there. So, I'm going to draw out a map of where all that dopamine is. And then I'm going to assign a point value. Let's say I'm limited to 100 points. And I'm going to assign a point value to each one of those.
And then on the right side, where are all the places I'm getting good dopamine from? And the our number one source of dopamine should be X and Y and Z. So, it's different for everybody. It should be us, right? It should be me.
It should be if I'm really setting myself up for success, then I wake up I'm going to wake up at 4:00 a.m. The moment that I wake up, I feel fantastic because the nighttime version of me took the multivitamin, took the magnesium, uh went to bed on time, drank a full glass of water, fill in the blank. All of these things to make me present day feel fantastic. But if I if I have all these negative things down this one side of the sheet and I go over here and I'm writing stuff like doing my course assignments in college or spending time with my kids or doing all the things that that I want to get dopamine from. And let's say I give my kids are getting eight points and Twitter is getting 39.
You're starting to see this imbalance. So, we're it's again, we're taking something unconscious and putting it into conscious awareness. the way to know whether or not you're getting dopamine out of something is if it feels good or captures all of your attention during that moment and then it it doesn't feel good later. So, like I took a course once on how to tell if you're in a conversation with a psychopath. We And of course you can't I mean this it's hard, but we went through this big checklist, but one of the big ones on there was if you feel fantastic during the conversation, everything feels great, and then you you stop the conversation and all of it just drops off.
That is a person who's trained for or mentally trained themselves to trigger all of your dopamine hit points. And so you didn't a conversation that feels good afterwards is more rooted in oxytocin and and serotonin. So, if I'm doing something in my life and it the great feeling of it doesn't kind of fade off gently over time, probably dopamine, which is what we do with social media and all that. So, really identify this list of dopamine and I'm willing to bet that most people drew out a map of where it's coming from and here's all the good things that I get dopamine from. Where it's coming from is probably not going to be the right amount.
And we want to change we don't want to tip those scales for sure. Yeah, I think once people can understand what dopamine is, I think their life will dramatically change. I mean, it really shifted for me understanding more about like addiction, you know, and how certain substances just completely hijack the brain. And I think I've talked about this on the show before, but you know, one of the greatest descriptions of like how your reward system is hijacked was when I was I was sitting in a therapist's office who I think I believe he was like an addiction therapist or psychiatrist, but any event, he he said to me, he said, "You know, when you're not an addict, like thinking about something like the the Grand Canyon is like a 10 out of 10 pleasurable experience." And he's like, "What happens is you start to do some coke and then you get this influx of artificial dopamine. Now, the coke starts to go from like a one to a two to a three and then the Grand Canyon goes from like a 10 to an eight.
And then you've like reversed it to where now like few months down the road, your reward system has been completely hijacked and the thought of going to a Grand the Grand Canyon is so boring to you because you're so used to getting all this artificial dopamine from a substance like Coke. And it really shifted things for me because I remember like being that person that like I couldn't go to the aquarium, I couldn't go to a football game, a baseball I couldn't do anything without being under the influence of a substance when I was younger. And it it totally made sense for me and I think that it part of getting out of the simulation and what we're talking about now, I just think is acceptance of normalcy in that you know, your brain it you're the way your brain is responding is kind of normal based on how you're treating it, right? And if you're not changing the way you're treating your brain, it's going to continue to do the same And and that's why it's I think these conversations are are paramount um and like how how do you think like what what how can people like survive in this in this world where again you know, we're talking about dopamine uh recalibrating and stuff and yet like I mean there's just dopamine like everywhere. Like you said, you can't like live in a hut and like turn off everything, but you got to stay like kind of tuned in to you know, what's really going on around you.
And I I think it it sounds so ridiculous, but I think you can look at all the research, it's peer-reviewed research that just mindfulness practices on their own and you don't have to like sit in a room with incense and like spa music playing and all that kind of stuff. You can do this while you're remulching your yard if you want to. But having a practice of mindfulness and being mindful not just while you're doing the app or while you have the little mindful audio thing in but doing that throughout your day, while you're in a meeting, while you're in um traffic, while you're cooking, while you're stressing out about having to change a diaper or fix a mess or your roof starts leaking. Can you do the mindfulness in there? So, getting good at being present is so powerful cuz you talk about the Grand Canyon, your face lit up.
Because you have memories. You have real core memories of being present in that moment. You talk about the dopamine from Coke, your face didn't light up. Cuz we don't have the core memories from that. So, the Grand Canyon is not just a bunch of dopamine.
It's 3D experience in being so immersed in a moment. That's why if we have people that really study mindfulness, and there's some really neuroscientists and and psychologists that are studying the effects of mindfulness, but I mean, this has been studied for 5,000 years, but they just called it meditation, or they called it Zen, or they called it some other word. But, it's just forcing It's like Cesar Milan, you're like you're taking your little animal brain, and you're becoming the dog whisperer, and you're forcing that mofo into the present moment as much as you possibly can. Like, every time there's a little shift in awareness, you're bringing it back to the moment. Bring it back to the moment.
And then there's a way to find like this almost a pleasure in everyday things. Just enjoying your life as it is. It's not like you're popping confetti cannons everyday, but you're just quietly enjoying what's going on in the present moment. My face lit up because, you know, one of the most memorable experiences of my life is I was in Vegas by myself for a fitness conference. And I had some time to to kill, and I was staying um at the hotel as the Wynn, and there was like a um a flyer for like helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon.
And it was like the most thing I've ever done was, you know, getting in this helicopter and leaving from Vegas, and you fly like into the canyon. It was so cool. I highly recommend uh people try that. I mean, it was just I had never been to the Grand Canyon, but it was a hell of a way to see it. And I'm like, I think I ever need to go back because I saw it in like the most complete way possible.
And it got like the thrill, you know, the thrill seeker in me lit up. It got the serenity part of me. Like all the things were just engaged during that time. You know, one of the things that that the Grand Canyon does that's similar to psychedelic therapy is it shows you how small you are and how insignificant we are in in the most beautiful way possible. And I just did that that exact same helicopter ride probably a month and maybe 2 months ago.
Oh, really? For the first time ever, yeah. And we landed down there in the canyon. It was me and my son. It was so much fun.
Yeah, it's cool, right? And you're there for like 30 minutes, 45 minutes. And did you go through Maverick? Was that the company? Yeah, that's what we did.
That's what I did, too. That's really cool. And we landed a little picnic area. They give you some snacks and stuff. Man, it it was profound for me to see I'd never see the Grand Canyon until just a few months ago.
Unless it's like looking out of an airplane window or something on the way to LA. But I think there's a there's a profound perspective shift when you go to giant things like that. The Grand Canyon shows you how tiny you are and how big the world is and how beautiful nature is and how powerful it is and how not powerful we are and not special we are. And there's a lot uh a lot that goes on in our life that we get stressed out about is us trying to convince ourselves that we're super super special. And we we can't be socially injured.
Nobody can make fun of us. We can't get any kind of social injury because we're really really special. What have you found to be like the common thread of what typically holds people back from you know, feeling confident, having authority, etc. It's going to be a deep answer. It's not like, "Oh, it's putting a forgetting a posted note on your window or something, but it will falls back to three things and all three of those things are patterns that we develop in childhood.
And if we can identify what those patterns are and how they're how we kind of unconsciously put stuff them in this backpack and then carried them into adulthood without us really acknowledging it without our awareness, then we have so much more control over our life. And those three things, if you imagine a triangle, and we call this the childhood development triangle. And I can send it to you if you want to like overlay it right now or put it down where people can grab it. It's what did I do around the age of eight to earn and keep friends, to feel safe, and to earn rewards from somebody. And the rewards are different.
Some for some kids it was like food because they had a rough life. And other kids it may have been praise for playing the violin really well. But what did I do for friends, safety, and rewards? And how did I avoid things to feel safe, to get friends, to get rewards? What did I avoid?
And whatever those responses are for 99% of people, those are the ways that we handle conflict as an adult. Those become the kind of fear of stepping out that we have as an adult because it's a fear of loss. I'm going to lose friends, I'm going to lose safety, I'm going to lose rewards. Those three things and they start when we're like eight or nine years old. And just kind of going back and this quiz is going to help everybody that's listening right now with this, I can start seeing this pattern like I'm a 44-year-old man now.
I could take this quiz right now and be like, oh this started in middle school. I'm still doing this one little thing from middle school. And just kind of dragging that thing that file out of the cabinet and putting it out in the open gives me a a more control over it because I'm conscious of these patterns. So now they become a choice of like do I want to continue this or not? Before we don't have a choice because we never open that closet and never looked inside and pulled those files out.
I've heard you've give your thoughts on like cognitive behavioral therapy. Like have you found that any other therapies to be like effective at like kind of revamping the mind? Uh I'm not a like a therapy expert. But I as far as I understand now, the average therapy session for extreme anxiety, stress, PTSD, all of those kind of things to kind of get through that is like 6 to 9 years. And it's the same thing that's accomplished in 4 hours of of psilocybin mushrooms.
And the same results. Like 9 years of therapy in in a short little package. There are some therapies, hypnosis has been proven to work with a lot of people. And it kind of has like about a 70 to 80% success rate. Cognitive behavioral therapy has a high success rate over time.
So if you keep at it and and keep doing it for several years, it will work. Psychedelics work higher than 90% and that's in like 4 hours. That's in one one session. So that's the fastest route to do it. Working with a coach if you can, like if you have a coach that's really digging through and and walking you through a lot of this stuff and unpacking your your your own to yourself is is the biggest thing.
Because if if you're just sitting there filling out a little workbook along with a book that you got on Amazon or something like that, it's going to be full of BS because we we're very deceptive to ourselves. I mean, I'm an expert in this stuff. I saw a therapist probably 6 years ago and I was I was full of it until I really unpacked a lot of this stuff. So it I'm not immune to any of this. But that's the fastest way to do it is to get a coach, hypnosis, psychedelics, and cognitive behavioral therapy really powerful for that.
What have you found to be the relationship between like dopamine and motivation? Cuz I think a lot of this comes down to people just don't feel motivated to change their life. Yeah, and I think that goes back to the dopamine map. It's like where the where the dopamine's coming from is a big deal. they may not be setting the right goals and the motivation might not be there.
And here's the thing that nobody's going to say. You're going to see all these mindset coaches, therapists, you're going to see people saying you need to think differently, you need to set different goals, you need to wake up earlier in the morning, brush your teeth with your opposite hand, all of these little pieces of advice, and people try this for 11, 12, 15 years, and they're not really getting better, and finally they go see somebody that test their vitamin levels, that test their neurotransmitter levels, and all they discover, "Oh, I've just had a vitamin D deficiency this whole freaking time." They were trying to like think their way out of a vitamin deficiency or a neurotransmitter problem, and they had a physiological problem, not a psychological problem. So, that is a big powerful thing. A doctor can order those tests, and man, vitamin B, vitamin D deficiencies can severely impact your life. And then you're going to every everybody you see is going to say, "Oh, well, you need to think more positive.
You need to think differently. You might have a hormonal, neurotransmitter, vitamin imbalance that's just ruining your life." The good news, if that's true, is it's a very very easy solution. 99% of the time. Well, and I I but I I I think like from the action perspective and behavior perspective, I think there there needs to be a a strong focus, in my opinion, on like small wins for people when they're looking to try to change their life. Because what happens is we live in this world of instant gratification where we want to achieve these big things and you know, an hour when really it's just a com it's just compounding small wins to achieve that big thing.
I would love to hear your perspective on it as far as behavior. Like what is the importance of just doing the right thing every day and having that lead up to something major? Yeah, and they I think all the old coaches back in the day would call this right action. Am I Am I doing the right action? And that's the same with so many people now get upset and they kind of get into a a little emotional rut because they're so used to things being quick.
They They're kind of thinking, I want the Ozempic version of of discipline. I want that Give me the Ozempic so I can do X. not everything has that and some things just take time. And those small wins are so critically important. But what's more important is my human brain is not fully in charge of all of this.
It's that mammal. So always think of how could I dis How would Cesar Millan handle this So if I have a problem with a dog's motivation, I need four things to lead a mammalian brain, whether it's a human mammalian brain, a dolphin, or a dog. It's focus. Where is all my focus going? What are the sources of authority?
And then tribe and emotion. Focus, authority, tribe, emotion. It spells out fate and it is your fate for sure. So just figuring that stuff out. So how can I change the mammalian focus?
So if I have affirmations on my wall or I have a a calendar that has X's on it every time I work out or every time I get into ketosis or or whatever somebody's trying to do, my an your dog doesn't understand that. That's the big piece that everybody seems to be missing. A dog can't see that. Your mammalian brain isn't excited about a black and white thing on the wall with a bunch of X's on it. Unless you have this tremendous emotional attachment to it.
So, that's where like these vision boards come in, who we're hanging out with, who we're spending time with, where that why that tribe is so critically important. And all of these elements of our life, like how could I show my goals to my dog? How would I make my dog happy that they're doing the right thing? And do those things for yourself. I'm going to go on a run, and then I'm going to celebrate with something.
If I'm setting goals, I'm going to put thousands of pictures associated with each goal, so that there I can see images, so that the mammalian brain starts to understand the direction. So, it's not human going this direction, and mammalian brain doesn't know the human wants to go this direction. So, getting that mammalian brain on board is so critically important. So, say I I hired you, and I said, "You know what? Like Chase, like I have been struggling with discipline, procrastination for years, and I just can't seem to figure it out.
I got my dopamine chart here, and it's like I'm doing all the wrong habits. What How can I quickly like start to unlearn some of these bad habits, and then be able to build discipline, and stay consistent even when I don't feel like it?" So, one of the biggest mistakes that I see clients making. So, if you're my client here, and I'm I'm talking to you, and this is our our thing here, there was a mistake in your language that I hear from so many people, if you don't mind me calling you out. Of course. You said it, discipline to do all of these things that I don't want to do.
A lot of people see people eating healthy, and going to the gym, maybe eating a keto diet or or something like that. And they're doing these things all the time. Maybe they're writing a book. And they're they're disciplined about writing the book. But that our mind says, I wish I had that level of discipline.
Or or we internally think they're so disciplined about that. Nothing of what you're seeing is discipline. That guy goes to the gym every day, none of that is discipline. It's routine. The discipline was there when the habit was started only.
So, it's very important that we understand discipline is a finite resource. So, let's let's start one habit at a time. So, we're setting habits instead of goals. And the discipline is only we only need like a little shot glass full of discipline to kick off a habit. And most people have these 19 goals.
Like they're sitting there eating hot dogs every day. And they're surfing social media for 18 hours a day. They have this really horrible lifestyle. And they're like, "You know what? In 6 weeks, I'm going to be muscular, fit, thin, successful, rich, good-looking, and have extremely white teeth." So, you need one Try to do one discipline habit formation at a time.
And the fastest discipline thing that kind of sprouts to rewards in every other area of life is, "I'm going to use this little shot glass of discipline to start forming a habit of taking care of my future self. If I can do that, if that becomes a habit, everything benefits. Every single aspect of my life starts changing cuz I'm getting I'm using my discipline to force this one thing into a habit for like I think it's 64 days it takes to set a habit. And whatever number somebody says is wrong. Some of them are are useful.
But it's probably around around that time. I'm going to use that little shot glass of discipline to do that. So, now if I have a habit of prioritizing my future self, every other habit that I want to form starts getting easier because I have an emotional relationship with that future version of me. And if how do I get the mammalian brain involved? You download that app on your phone that's like make me look old or I think it's called FaceApp.
And it makes you like 95-years old. You can take a selfie with it and it makes you super old. Print those out on a nice color printer and put it on your fridge. Put it it next to your bed. Put it in your office where you're going to see it.
So, we don't really prioritize our future self because we never met them. We have no relationship to our future self. So, this helps that mammalian brain start prioritizing and connecting with that longer vision, that older version of ourself. We've talked quite a bit about self-awareness and understanding some of the things in our life that might be limiting us whether be like, you know, how we show up in situations, our environment, our relationship with dopamine, etc. And you talked about like you kind of called me out and said the number one mistake that you know, you see people make is that they think that, you know, you said to get people to do things they don't necessarily want to do.
In that same conversation, is there anything that you see like right off the bat common thread that you help people kind of stop the bleeding where you're like, all right, generally speaking there's like three or four five things that you see most people do time and time again that's destroying their focus and their inability to reach their goals? Yes, so we'll go through kind of an I have a separate little inventory I walk each of my clients through and I want to identify where you're feeling discomfort in your life. So, it's social settings and all this other stuff and then I'm going to identify where you seek comfort like Instagram, TikTok, alcohol, all of these things in your life. And we're going to pull come we're going to start making it more uncomfortable in those areas and increasing the comfort in the other areas. So, so much of this stuff comes down to being comfortable.
So, I'm seeking comfort like most people are seeking comfort in video games, TV, Netflix, binging, TikTok, or whatever. And that's more acting as an anesthetic. So, I want to find out where all of these little situations we have this long questionnaire we go through, but essentially, what are all these little scenarios where I experience some kind of discomfort? Maybe when I go to the bank, when I when I log in to check my account, when I have to speak on stage, when I have to do a pitch, all of these other things. And then where am I seeking comfort?
And then So, this is kind of like a dopamine map, except it's stress versus anesthetic is really what we're we're finding out here. So, I'm going to pull out of the anesthetic and start pulling some of that on to the stress side. And you'd be wildly surprised at how fast those things can kind of reverse. So, where are we seeking comfort? And I can start polo pulling away from that, and it gives more energy, more discipline, more willpower to all of these other things and and start It is such a rapid change.
I've seen people change in as little as like a week and a half, 2 weeks, just from mapping this out and getting super raw and real on a lot of this stuff. And hypnosis is is a fast way to do that, and a fast way to really make that change that you're asking about. And a lot of your work talks about like controlling the mind, understanding people's body language, understanding how to read people. You know, and I think sometimes people are like, "Well, how does that apply to me? Like, what when am I ever going to really need to " do that?
Like, the people I'm around I already trust. You know, when I go into certain situations, like no one's going to be deceitful. Like give the elevator pitch as to why people should care about that area of your work, even though they're not like in an in the in the intelligence agency. So, I think when people hear behavior profiling or body language expert, they assume that it's about lie detection. And the truth is it's it's more about stress detection.
I really want to spot these little stress signals and I want to spot what makes somebody really be comfortable with somebody's interested in. And everything that I teach in my company goes down to three things. And if you look at what determines success in life, we can we can look at communication skills, like can I communicate, persuade, influence very effectively? Can I master myself? So, communication, self-mastery, and observation.
So, our failures can be traced back to I failed to communicate, I wasn't really in charge of myself, I was sending all the wrong signals, or I didn't observe the room. I failed to read the room. So, this goes back to understanding what people are really feeling and understanding from a behavior profiling perspective, they use these three sentences, so I know one of their hidden insecurities is this. So, there's hidden information in language that's not just oh, this guy scratched his nose and he's lying, cuz there's so much of that on the internet already, which is not true. That's one of the biggest myths, but we can also develop a little profile of everybody that we know, not as some intelligence asset, but I'm truly as a leader, the better I am at understanding people, understanding that person's needs, their the values that they're not even talking about, we can find these things hidden inside of people's language, and this is in everyday conversations.
One of my books is called Six-Minute X-Ray. And within 6 minutes, you can find out a person's insecurities, their fears, their secret desires, how they make decisions, what decision type they are, and all kinds. You would be stunned at how much information you can see in like 6 minutes just getting good at some of that stuff. How can people apply that stuff to better themselves and to improve their life like once they know information like that? Well, I think it allows you to communicate with everybody a lot differently.
I think it makes you a better leader because you're understanding the people that are working for you, that the people that you know, but you're also when you're going through this inevitably, when somebody goes through this this training with me, especially the 6-minute x-ray stuff, it's a huge lens into our self as well cuz we're learning about how we use language and what our language reveals about us, these tiny little pauses and these seemingly insignificant words that people say. So, we're learning not just to be a better communicator, but we're we're getting better at knowing ourself. And what are the you asked about the most common problem. I think the most common problem I've ever seen is that that people don't really know who they are. They don't know themselves.
It's tough, right? Cuz it's like you have to be comfortable with all those parts of you, right? And I think so is there anything else that people can do to get good at knowing themselves other than what we've talked about? Yeah, I mean there's there's all kinds of workbooks and therapy and stuff like that, but this just getting to a point of radical honesty. So, you get to a point of if if I'm in a conversation and I'm feeling that there was an awkward pause, I'll just say that out loud.
And if I'm feeling like nervous about something, I'll say that I'm nervous out loud. And starting to get to a point where I used to would have never revealed this little thing because I feared judgment, and start getting yourself used to making those little revelations in conversation. And I guess the end result of all of this, the most important thing that I could ever tell you about like getting to know yourself, is that if once we start like the starting point for all of this is am I able to locate me on that childhood triangle, the friends, safety and rewards, and this is the one thing that starts untying all of the other stuff. That is definitely the from what I've seen, the fastest entry point into a lot of that self-knowledge. Yeah.
I mean radical honesty is is so important and I think you know people's ability to do that I think is just so transformational like once they get to that point, you know, you you touched on like some of the reading people and talking about how to communicate with other people and the mind control stuff. Like which one of those skills do you think is the most like if somebody were to to take a deeper dive into your work and that side of things, like which skill do you think they should they should focus on for first? I think it going into learning how to read people automatically makes you start reading yourself and seeing it in yourself unless you're like a psychopath and you have no no self-awareness whatsoever. And there's I have a free class that's like I don't know, 6 7 hours that kind of walks you through this fundamental shift on how you view the world and how we view other people. And I think that is definitely the best place to start because if I can learn how to see what's going on around me and learn about myself at the exact same time, that becomes a little pathway to self-mastery.
What are your thoughts on on motivation? Do you think it actually works? Like can somebody like you know, read something and or look at themselves in the mirror and be like, "Hey, you know, I want to make this change." Like can that carry them or do you think it's BS? I think a lot of motivation is going to be based in neurochemistry. But some people say I had this big epiphany and it it may not have been the idea that they had.
They they might have traveled and they might have taken a supplement or they might have balanced something inside their heads. I think a lot of motivation is is neurochemically based. there are so many cases where we see people that are going to see a coach. They're working one-on-one with a coach that's working on their mindset and walking them through these questions, exercises, and all this other stuff. Meanwhile, 10 years later, they discover that they've got a vitamin D deficiency.
Or later on down the road, they're deficient in zinc or their epinephrine norepinephrine brain chemistry is out of whack and they just need to add something to their lifestyle or their diet to get that back in. So, I think we tend to assume that a lot of psychological problem symptoms are psychologically rooted when in fact it's a physiological deficit of some sort that's causing the psychological symptom. And there's I mean, there's cases where uh somebody goes to a therapist's office or goes to see a therapist and they're like, "Well, my I Every time when I'm walking to work, my hands get numb and tingly. I feel really nervous. My heart's racing.
I have this weird thing where I stop from walking and just feel kind of paralyzed as I'm I'm doing these things." And they're like, "Oh, we have social anxiety. Let's work on that." And then they discover a few years later the person got a brain tumor that was causing a lot of these We tend as a as a culture, we tend to ignore in anything that's happening in our mind, we tend to ignore physiological issues that might be causing the symptoms. Is there anything like more recently, like any kind of habits or shifts you've made in your own life um that you've made that have that have led to some self-improvement? Yeah, 39 Yeah, 39 days ago I quit drinking. Because so many of my friends had stopped drinking.
Um And it just I was lying to myself uh that it's not harmful. And I have a brain disease. And alcohol makes with the exception of maybe red wine, alcohol is a neurotoxin. It's a neurotoxic substance. I was hurting myself.
And uh that was the the one of the biggest shifts I've ever made. And the shift wasn't being like trying to quit and getting through the process of quitting alcohol and going through withdrawals and all that stuff. It's shifting your world view to where you know so much truth about that alcohol that all the reasons that you might come up with for drinking are false. So, you're flooding your brain with a maximum amount of truth and data to the point where the decision becomes a byproduct of your knowledge. And your awareness creates the byproduct of sobriety.
Was there anything in your life that was kind of going on in the moment or were you just like, "Hey, you know, I got this brain condition. My friends are doing this." Because I mean, a lot of times with addiction, I'm sure as you well know, like something happens where it's like, "Crap, I'm at this crossroads. I either fix my life or things are about to get much worse." I don't think I had a big crossroads. I think we uh our company started growing a lot and I hired my sister as as my CEO. So, I had her quit her old job and she came on and she my sister Holly is is running our company now.
And she quit drinking like 7 years ago. what I noticed we were at like a family Thanksgiving thing. People were kind of pouring out wine and and everybody was having a cocktail, scotch, and all that kind of stuff. And she didn't drink and it and I asked her like if how do how do you resist it? That was my question.
The So that conversation with Holly was my big turning point. I said, "How do you resist the alcohol?" She said, "There's not a It's not about resistance. It's about education." So like if you if you know enough about it, then you just won't there will be no desire left in your entire body. Uh and that that conversation with Holly was was a big catalyst for that. What did that experience like teach you about behavior change?
Like going through something like that. I mean it's quitting alcohol is like for many it's like nobody people don't do it because it's so tough and for a lot of people it's like this challenge that takes months or years. Like what did that experience teach you? we very often lie to ourselves about the reasons that we do destructive things. Whether it be in in a relationship or drinking too much or getting pissed off in traffic when when we really shouldn't be.
We are lying to ourselves and we typically the right amount of truth will get us out of a lot of these negative behaviors like it does alcohol or anything else. I'm just missing pieces of truth which goes back to what we talked about this massive shift of perspective that psychedelics create is why that helps people stop addictions and stuff because it's gives you such a it like zooms you out so far uh on everything that like you're you're you realize like I'm I'm spending a whole lifetime thinking that A, I'm special. B, I'm separate from everybody else and C, uh all of my little reasons that I have in my head for doing a lot of weird that I are completely false. I think addiction is a simulation for a lot of people where they're just caught in the cycle of it and they can't get out. They don't know what to do.
And I think these from what I know, the first few months of recovery for people are very crucial because it's the time I think when when cravings are really high. It's like you're recalibrating your mental well-being if you were somebody who numbed with substances. Again, I'm not saying you did this, I'm just saying this is generally speaking. And I think it comes down to habits, right? And what you're doing on a day-to-day basis to keep yourself busy and again towards this future version of yourself.
Like what what types of things do do you do like regularly now to keep yourself like away from potentially going back and drinking? I mean, I have a I have a full bar in my living room. And just And this is for when people come over. Somebody wants to make themselves a cocktail or something or maybe we have a party here at the house. I think just the enjoyment of after you break the physical and the physiological addictions, the enjoyment of not needing that thing feels a lot like freedom to me.
I'll speak for myself. But I think the that people focus a little too much on the chemical addiction to alcohol. I'm going to go through these withdrawals. I'm going to have I'm I'm worrying about DTs, which is delirium tremens, like this microseizures that can happen when somebody's withdrawing. But we forget that about 90% of addictions are hand-to-mouth addictions.
So I'm overeating food. I'm smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol. I'm I'm taking drugs. I'm smoking too much weed or whatever it is. A lot of these addictions are hand-to-mouth.
So when we try to get off, we miss out this this hand-to-mouth gesture that that we're so fond of and that we're so used to. So replacing that during the process of getting off of addiction um or getting off of the substance is is really important to have something there to help you wean off of the physical movement pattern as well as the the chemical itself. And so what what can be helpful for for people to do that? Well, on the light side, kind of the caffeine-free diet advice part of this would be like just having something there. So, from quitting drinking, I'm going to set up a scenario where I'm going to have something there that I can I'm sipping on throughout the evening or if I drink at night or or whatever it is.
on the the heavier side of this, and this is not advice uh for anybody, but uh you need to talk to your doctor, but psychedelics are one of the fastest ways that you can do this. And this is through uh a psilocybin journey. And now ketamine prescriptions are are getting more commonplace. And doctors are feeling less anxiety and insecurity about writing that the prescription for microdose ketamine, like to be used throughout the day. And this is like a 25 mg uh troche that you can dissolve under your tongue.
And it can help with addiction and coming off of things and anxiety and depression and PTSD and so much of these other things, even though it's a man-made uh substance, it's it's proven to be so incredibly helpful. And it's it's likelihood for abuse is so low. And it like if you look at mushrooms, they're anti-addictive. Nobody's addicting getting addicted to uh like psychedelic mushrooms or anything like that. So, I think that that's a huge revolution that I think people should be taking more advantage of.
I mean, our ancestors used the stuff for millennia. And we kind of uh it's good to see that we're going through this psychedelic revolution right now where there's so much of this stuff is starting to come out and I think people are waking up to it. So, is there a way to mimic that without psychedelics? Cuz obviously like there's costs involved with that and you want to make sure you're doing it under medical care and there maybe there's people that you know, a lot of people who struggle who have struggled with addiction and they're like completely sober and that's like against their moral compass, especially if they're in like 12-step to do anything like that. So, have you found um like any practices that can you know, over time get you deeply connected to your subconscious so that you can kind of move forward with the pain and trauma in your life?
There is one uh the the most effective thing I've ever seen that doesn't involve any I hate to use the word drug. It's such a stupid word and it it's not appropriate to talk about psychedelics at all. But, the thing that uses just our body is this thing called neurogenic tremors. And if you look at a mammal, the average mammal is the program All mammals are programmed to go through this trembling process. So, when a squirrel or a fox or a impala or a tiger or polar bear goes through some kind of traumatic experience, let's say they're drinking water at some watering hole, crocodile bites them in the neck, and they survive, they don't go back to their little tribe area or their den and like curl up under a tree for weeks at a time.
And why don't why don't we have that? Why don't we have psychogenic trauma in animals? Um and one thing that this guy who did the research on this, his name is Dr. David Berceli, brilliant brilliant guy. Uh he was a trauma surgeon.
Um but he noticed that after these animals had this trauma experience, they go into this state that looks like the body is vibrating or shaky. Almost like it looks kind of like a seizure. And you can even ask if you know a police officer, you can ask a cop. They roll up on a car accident and there's an infant in the backseat in a in a stroller or or a not stroller like a car seat. And they survived, their body goes into the shaking response.
But think about this for a second. Throughout your life, like if you get into something that's super heavy, traumatic, or stressful, and your hands are shaking. Like let's say you're trying to maybe dial 911. And what's the first thing people say when their hands are shaking? They say, "I can't stop shaking." Because we develop this instinct to suppress these tremors.
And we're the we we all have the instinct to to go into these tremors. But we have this instinct like if I if I lay on the ground and shiver and shake around, that is going to make me look sick. It's going to look like a seizure. Cuz what are people going to do if you're going into this tremor state? They're going to try to stop you as soon as possible.
They'll lay you down, tell you to stop, tell you everything's okay. So it's socially weird for us to do that. So we suppress this. Uh but the cool thing is you're you're not going to see a fox or a monkey or a squirrel with depression. You're not going to see it.
Uh and the one thing that that we really suppress that they don't is this tremor response. And Dr. Berceli's work is is he had he has named these tremors himself. Uh but his system is called trauma release exercises. And it's free.
You can watch it on YouTube. You can learn about it. And the cool thing is it's not like you have to learn how to do it. It's built into your nervous system to handle this trauma response. The one thing the thing that takes time to learn is how to stop suppressing it.
How to kind of take your finger off of that kill switch and let that stuff start coming out. And the the really fascinating thing about it is that it's mostly just brain stem and spinal cord. You can have a full conversation while your body's going into this stuff. You look this up on YouTube separately, but you can watch TV, you can read a book, you can listen to an audio book. You do not need to be consciously involved in the process.
So, the body really knows how to fix itself. Uh and I've seen this This is It's so popular and so effective that it was mandatory for us to go through some of this training coming back from a deployment uh overseas. And it changed my life. The first time I ever did it, it was life-changing. And it takes you maybe 30 or 45 minutes to to find your way into this tremor state, but once you do it, once you do it one time, you can come back to those tremors very easily within like 5 seconds for the rest of your life.
That's fascinating. That's wild. It's cool. And when you walk somebody through it, the first phase that that we go through is is called the ego phase because I'm I'm starting to do these tremors. I might be laying down.
We'll put somebody in a stress position for a minute to kind of induce the muscle tremors so that you're you're saying, "Yes, I want this. I want this." So, you're teaching the brain stem that it's okay. You're kind of giving the brain stem permission to do what it's been not allowed to do for a very long time. And but the ego phase is what prevents us from really doing it. And that's what takes the time is going through that ego phase of it's okay for me to do this and I'm I want this to happen.
I've heard you say that like one of the biggest things that people struggle with that consume your content is they feel like they're lacking control in their life. What do you think they're lacking control of? Well, this has multiple levels. I think our we are in a pandemic of loneliness. And that is the top part of Maslow, like this social belonging, confidence, and all of that, leads to an increase in the next level, which is our self-confidence, our personal discipline, which leads to a failure in the top part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is like this self-actualization.
Can I like Can I accomplish the crap that I want to accomplish this year? And what do you think people can do if they're feeling lonely, out of control, they don't know what their future's going to hold? Like, what's the first step, you know, that somebody can take to kind of get themselves out of that rut? One of the first is realizing that all of this social media and stuff is a placebo of relationships, and it doesn't actually fulfill your your primal need for belonging and connection with the second part is develop just an You know, we we Have you heard of locus of control? I haven't.
So, a person with an internal locus of control says, I decide what happens in my life. I'm in charge of the outcomes. It's my fault if something goes wrong. And an external locus of control is kind of like the world happens to me. So, like my control center is all out there.
So, obviously, people who are successful have that internal locus of control, and they're in charge. But, there's also an internal locus of self-esteem. So, where does my self-esteem come from? Does it come from in here or comments on social media or something like that? And I see your YouTube plaque back there.
I've got a uh a bunch of those here, and like if I allowed those those really positive comments, and that that's my source of esteem, that's the same exact window that opens to for the negative comments to come in and just make me feel like that means I have an external locus of self-esteem. If your self-esteem is internally derived, then there's nothing external that can really happen. So, that would be number one is I'm going to start doing everything I can to not allow this positive things out here to influence how I feel about me and all the negative things can't influence me either. So, that is an internal self-esteem locus. So, step two is developing that sense of personal discipline.
And we can dig into that if you want to do that. And there are some proven ways to absolutely do that and that ways that nobody's talking about. Yeah, I would love to get into like how you can kind of hack your brain to become more disciplined, but first like following up on what you just said, I think it's so true. However, I think it's much easier said than done because I do think that in many ways like external validation and praise can be a great metric for how you're doing in life. Like, you know, I see the views and subscribers and stuff on YouTube and it's like, okay, I'm on the right track.
However, you know, if I let that be the basis of how I feel about myself, it can be a very slippery slope. So, how can people get how can people develop a better relationship with external validation and and not be how can people develop a better relationship with the external and feel good about themselves without focusing on that? Yeah, so that it starts with one thing and that is when I see positive or negative information, does that help me act or feel? So, it should be acting. So, it I should act a different way cuz I'm using these YouTube comments or YouTube metrics.
Is it influencing how I feel about me? Is it changing my self-worth? And if I receive love, if I need Sorry, if I need love from strangers, that means my door is open to hate as well. And these are absolute strangers who should never dictate a single ounce of your self-esteem or how you feel about yourself. So, feeling great about it and you can feel good, but it dictating your self-worth is absolutely toxic.
And it's pretty easy to start just kind of getting that into your mind on a regular basis. When I'm reading the comments, I'm reading I don't know messages on social media. If I allow that to change my self-esteem, something is wrong. But it should be I don't know this person. I I wouldn't invite them into my house at this point.
They should they also shouldn't be invited into my head. So, if if you wouldn't allow them in your in your around your kids, hanging around your house, they don't belong in your head, either. Well, and I think the the thing that takes over is this dopamine trap, right? I know you talk a lot about dopamine and how the most successful people in the world, they like know how to harness their dopamine, not let it get out of control. Like talk more about what you mean by that and what are some things people can do to have a really healthy relationship with dopamine?
Your source of dopamine, your number one source of dopamine should be you. Not your kids, not your wife, not your family. It should be you and your actions. And we'll get into that in the discipline part. But what most people don't do, like if you just get like a simple journal.
So, like if you just get like a blank page in your journal and you kind of draw out It looks like a basketball court. So, I'm going to do a circle in the middle here and then I'm going to write down all the places in my life I get dopamines. It And and I'm going to be honest. I'm going to put Instagram comments, alcohol, or drugs, or pornography, or you know, all these places that people are getting dopamine from. I'm going to write that down.
And then, what I do with all of my clients is on a 1 to 100 or you have 100 points and you have to spend all 100 points, but you have to put a point value on where you're getting your dopamine from. So, and that's typically the first time ever in somebody's life where they've actually mapped out where their pleasure is coming from. Not happiness. Dopamine is not happiness. Dopamine is pleasure.
And most people confuse the difference between those two. So, if I have a score of 10 for throwing the ball for my dogs or playing with my kids or things that I should that should be higher and the score for alcohol is like 65, you've never like once people see that metric, it is very, very hard to ignore. So, the step two is like where do where should the dopamine be? So, here's where it is now. I'm going to draw a little map and on the next sheet of paper, we're going to draw a new map and start, you know, drawing an arrow from the negative to the positive.
Like where am I'm going to borrow dopamine from this location. Maybe you don't have to quit all the way. I'm just going to borrow some points so at least these two are equal. And that's that's the next step. I'm going to get this from a 12 on this and this one's like a 50, I'm going to find out the midpoint of that and borrow dopamine from the high dopamine area.
Does that make sense? Totally. And what do you what have you found to be the most like effective things for having a healthy dopamine score? Like what are the things that people can do for themselves that keep their dopamine at the most healthy level? Well, that that goes straight into the discipline thing if you're ready to talk about it.
Yep. So, when I said that like your number one source of dopamine needs to be yourself, there are a few things you can do. The number one thing when we talk about discipline, the definition of discipline is that no one talks about your ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own. And that's all it is. Can I prioritize future me above my present self?
So, over time, I'm going to try to do things on a repetitive basis as often as possible to where future me is getting some kind of reward. I might set up the coffee maker the night before. I might put clothes out for myself. I might just put a thing on my phone that reminds me at certain times. And this is short-term, right?
So, these are small little things. It's springtime right now as you and I are recording this or spring has just started. I might go into my winter jackets that we're about to take out of this closet and kind of put it down in the basement for a while and put a $100 bill in one of those and write maybe write a note to myself on there. So, the more actions I can take to set up my future self for success, the more once that success comes, I'm looking backwards to my past tense self not with regret but with gratitude. That's the most important shift to make.
And I'm going to continuously do this. I'm essentially acting like a butler except I'm doing it for myself. I am the butler of my future self. And this isn't just like folding clothes and and setting up coffee. This is how we spend money, the food that we're eating, the the stuff we're buying at a grocery store is all going to dictate am I prioritizing me now or me later?
a lot of people never really have this conversation of where are my priorities. And they're typically when people are not really getting the results they want out of life, their priorities are now, here and now and maybe a little bit in the future, but they're not really prioritizing all the things that are happening in their life. So, what happens is my daily interactions are a I'm looking backwards or I'm anticipating stuff that my past and self is set up for me. So, I've got dopamine coming in, anticipation, and drive to start setting my future self up and I'm getting dopamine to get stuff from my past and self. So, I'm getting dopamine from both directions of versions of me.
And that is the the most powerful way that we can start doing that. And just the way to do this, there's not like here's 17, you know, super cool tricks to do this or some formula. You just do it as much as you can and you rate yourself every single day. How did I do? Where were my priorities today?
And it takes 10 seconds to put it in a notebook, or journal, or calendar, or whatever. And you put it down. And just the act of rating yourself and bringing it into your conscious awareness is the fastest way to get that process into your life. Cuz it's the same thing like when you buy a new car and you start seeing it all over the place. I'm just repetitively exposing myself to that level of awareness.
And you don't need to change anything. Your mammalian part of your brain's going to do that for you. And what have you found to be the most like common things that people need to write pre-prioritize in their lives as far as like working on their future self? The most common is probably time management. And environment management.
Like if you're thinking that you're going to be a multi-millionaire or you want to run a company or something like that and you can't organize your office or your desk or and you can't keep your area clean. Like you can't even pick up after yourself. Every time that you go out and you want to look like a CEO, you want to look like a leader, you're going to know. There's a part of your brain dedicated to knowing that you're faking it. And that's where we have incongruent behavior.
And that's how we we make these gut feelings in other people. We have this conversation, everything looks great. We follow that LinkedIn article that we read of 14 ways to look more confident and command respect like a leader. And that person kind of gets a gut feeling. And the gut feeling is like something's not right.
Something's not adding up. So, no matter what we do, we're sending off these small signals. So, environment, time, appearance, and appearance is like my hygiene, all of that stuff that might signal that I'm an authority to other people. So, environment, time, appearance, social skills, and social is one of the ways that we should be getting dopamine and we're not. We're getting it from social media instead of my closer circle of friends, my next door neighbors that live next to my house, the people that live across the street, the people in 3D are where most of your social dopamine should come from 3D human beings and not 2D human beings, people that you know.
And financial is the last one. So, I was somebody that was incarcerated on felony drug charges. I share that because one of the hardest things I had to do was completely change my identity and transform into this new version of myself. And I think it's so challenging for people because you know, for me, I was so used to being a failure. My brain was convinced that I was going to fail at life because before I was in jail, I failed at everything.
And so, how can people like quickly or efficiently kind of trick their brain into becoming that new version of themselves when the old version of themselves has been beaten down over and over and over again? There's a couple of things that and that always comes down to confidence. If I have a lot of self-doubt, that's going to be a big one, but even bigger than self-doubt is shame and self-judgment. And you know, most judgment is us kind of casting that off onto other people. So, the the fastest way and there's no hack for this, but the fastest way to do this is to become so self-forgiving that people would think that you're crazy.
Like you're bat crazy because you're so forgiving of yourself because shame and the fear of shame is what holds people back from really doing that stuff. And when it comes to confidence, that there's two main elements of confidence. And that number one is radical radical self-forgiveness. Like who gives a crap what happened in the past? Just radical.
To the point where it's insane cuz if you're feeling down, you're in the dumps, like you're a little you're doubting yourself all the time, that's already delusional. You're already delusional. So just pick delusions in the other direction and be more delusionally self-forgiving. The part two of that confidence is a generalized, it does not need to be specific, but a very generalized expectation that things are going to be okay. And just those two things you will drastically just shed so much weight that you notice like so many people carry this stuff around like shame about some thing that happened like when they were 20 or when they were in in high school.
If you get to the point of radical forgiveness for other people and for yourself, you get to a point of I have confidence, but I would say the third part is stop waiting for permission. Because a lot of people are waiting for some signal. Once my bank account reaches this much, once people respect me and I can prove that to myself, they'll they'll just wait on these little milestones. And those milestones act as little permission slips for us to feel confident. And they're they're completely artificial.
They're absolutely placebos. They don't do anything to make you more confident. It's just a placebo. So there is no one coming to give you permission. You've just got to give it to yourself.
And speaking of being radical and confident, you know, I think one of the tough things, and again, this is just speaking from my own experience and people I've talked to, is like when when you're kind of on the come up and your life isn't where it wants to be, you have this kind of cognitive dissonance going on that's like, well, my finances aren't where they are, my relationships aren't, my health isn't, but I'm on the journey up, and it's like, how do I become confident even though my circumstances are crap? Like, how can people become like delusionally confident when they're out trying to make it, introducing themselves to other people, even though their life at home isn't where it wants to be? Yeah, and that that goes back to do I manage my environment, my time, appearance, social, financial? And if those things are on the up, like you you're actually taking care of yourself, you're living life how you really want to live it, but you're it doesn't matter what the metrics are. If you're doing the right things and you're living off camera, so not you're not not your results, but your behavior when you're off camera will dictate how people feel about you.
So, if you try to act confident and you're feeling insecure about all of this stuff because you haven't made your bed, you didn't get up early, you don't have a lot of discipline, but you're trying to give this appearance of confidence or discipline out in public, you've got to start living that way off camera so that it's it's just a natural thing. And most people view confidence as something that you do, like it's a thing that I do. And then all it is is removal of things. It's not adding in anything. the biggest lesson I've ever learned in my lifetime training operatives and stuff is that confidence is not additive.
Like, I don't need to add things to you to to get you to be confidence. I need you to remove this fear of social judgment. This is my public speaking is the number one fear. And second, I really need you to remove this self-shame and all this crap that you're carrying for no reason. It doesn't make you a better person at all.
It doesn't make you a better person to feel ashamed of stuff. It makes you a worse person. It makes you less effective and it makes you more judgmental of other people. And the the final element of this is composure. And when most people go out and try to be confident, they're either in posturing mode or collapse mode.
So in posturing mode, someone's like puff their chest out, they speak louder than they they normally would, and they try to overdo confidence. And then the collapse mode is I'm going to shrink so other people feel more comfortable around me. But I think the middle of that is just composure is the word I would have for that. So just make composure like this daily practice. And composure is is the fastest route when it comes to practicing things, composure is the fastest route to confidence.
Yeah, the puffing the chest out is kind of like the invisible lat syndrome. You familiar with that where Pete where guys will like walk around like this just to give the impression that they're they're bigger than they actually are as far as their upper body. You talked about composure which I think it gets into like how can you be more comfortable in difficult situations? You know, what have you found to be like a hack or something that you worked on yourself or with the people that you've trained to help people practice becoming more composed you know, during difficult situations? So there's a few things and we the first we have to understand like the neuroscience of this and why that works.
we we have this mammalian part of our brain, this limbic system that kind of governs 99% of our life. So we think that we're in charge and this this animal brain is actually in charge. And most people need to realize that that part of our brain doesn't speak English. It can't read affirmations at all. Like, there's no language ability in that part of our brain.
So, when it comes to coming into life and trying to get more composure in conversations and having that that level of discipline where you're kind of a lot more in charge. You're not in charge of the room, you're in charge of yourself. Mistake number one that destroys 90% of people. The The biggest mistake, and I've never heard anybody else say this, is thinking in terms of hierarchy and status. So, am I above or below this other person?
And the the first step to that is, am I willing to agree to treat everyone equally? This means that if I meet Jeff Bezos tomorrow, I'm going to treat him the exact same way as I treat a Starbucks barista. Everybody gets the same. There's no hierarchy. I'm going to I'm going to be the same to every person that I talk to.
And that level of consistency sets the stage for that level of composure. So, to going going into that mammalian part of this, uh it's a practice. So, composure is a a lifelong practice. But, you get good at it by making your body get involved first. So, our brains are hardwired to kind of compare with other animals and stuff.
So, with other other humans. the moment you get in a conversation, the way that you should permanently change the way you compare yourself is slowness and movement. And am I willing to be the slowest person in the room? And am I willing to be more relaxed than the other person? That's it.
Those are Those are the only things. Doesn't matter if it's this multi-million dollar potential client on a sales call or the barista at Starbucks, they're going to be identical. I'm going to be slower than the other person, more relaxed, treat everybody the same. And that is the fastest way to do that. And then kind of rating yourself at the end of the day, how did I do on a one to 10 on composure?
Was I more in collapse? Was did I lean into the posturing side? definitely, absolutely, rating yourself every day is going to bring more and more awareness. And of course, it's kitschy and it it's something that's all over the internet, but mindfulness, this practice of mindfulness throughout the day, just because it's all over the damn place, there's a reason for that. It doesn't mean we should dismiss it.
It's absolutely powerful, especially when it comes to composure and and leadership and authority. What have you found to be the the number one thing that people struggle with as far as being uncomfortable? You mean in in social settings? Yeah, like what's the the the biggest thing that you find people to be uncomfortable with? I I think it is a fear of future judgment.
So, it's imagining some kind of social judgment. And we're we're tribal animals and if a a large number of people in our tribe a million years ago started judging us and and making fun of us, we could be outcast. We're not going to have sex, we're not going to have babies, and then our genes die. And this is one of the reasons public speaking is the number one fear. We're not afraid of speaking in public, we're afraid of the potential for judgment.
And that's a two-part thing. So, the moment I am thinking about the potential for judgment, my brain automatically defaults to saying, "If there's a potential for judgment, that also means that I need to manage how I am perceived." So, this leads to there's a potential fear of judgment, I'm going to change how I'm acting to to where everything's good, I'm going to manage everything a lot more, which makes us less us, which which sends off a little vibe to people that's like something's not right, there's something not really fully adding up, and then we see more skeptical facial expressions or more doubting, so it changes who we are, it makes us more self-managing and more self-managing. So, we get out of that that need like judgment's not going to hurt me. Your brain is wired to equate the fear of judgment with the same as being attacked by a saber-tooth tiger. the fastest way to get your brain to understand this is the phrase there are no tigers, and it's going to remind you that this is a mammalian response system that is outdated, and a lot of our society has outdate has kind of outpaced our brain's ability to adapt to it.
So, just kind of that reminder, there're no tigers, and the second is is start like a daily practice of worrying less and less about perception management, because people are looking a lot less than you think. Everybody's thinking how what are they seeing, how are they judging me? They're they probably don't care. And it's not going to matter. It will never matter at the end of the day.
Do you think there are things that people can do that like force them like naturally to embrace discomfort? I mean, I know that one of the things that's helped me is like the cold plunge, sauna, like doing like intense workouts. Like there's a big trend for that now, and they're linking it to getting better at managing stress and being better in social settings. Like have you found anything like that to be instrumental? Yeah, those are are proven to work.
I mean, the first study on it on it managing mental health stress was like 1951. They were studying dudes in like Norway and Sweden where there's like saunas everywhere, and why they were so emotionally resilient to stress. And this was in they were measuring it in combat and soldiers returning from combat and how the saunas and and cold water helped manage stress. And those are fantastic. Another one to add on to that is just getting into a practice of yoga, which a lot of people don't associate with that, but if you have a good yoga instructor, they're going to walk you through this little yoga session, and they're going to remind you like when you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable, they're going to tell you to smile.
They're going to tell you to breathe slower and and smile through that whole process. And it is fantastic at helping somebody manage stress. Mind I'm mindful, I'm in the moment, I'm continuing to breathe through discomfort, and your brain starts learning these habits. So, that is definitely, Doug, you hit it on the head right there. I think that one of the the things that people are really I think one of the things that people really struggle with is fear.
And fear like really like trap them from making a decision. Fear can trap them from going out and changing their life, and it can just be completely overwhelming. I know we've kind of touched on, you know, some of this stuff already, but like if somebody came to you and they're like, "Hey, like Chase, like I want to I want the the bulletproof way to crush fear so that it it doesn't let me so it doesn't like overpower me and prevent me from like living my best life. Like what can they do?" Well, the the first way is to start identifying all of those fears. Because every fear is like, "I don't want to go out in public.
I'm scared of going in public." Well, why? I have a fear of judgement. And then we go, "Why is that?" And why is that? And you kind of get back to like, "Well, in middle school I got made fun of or in high school this thing happened." And starting to get aware, the awareness is the fastest way to start getting some of these things unwired. And living in a way where you know that this is kind of a a simulation and you kind of gamifying your own life by taking these notes every day where living in a way that I'm kind of in a video game and I want I want to level up my character.
I'm going to live in a way that is as fearless as possible. So to get out of those fears, the fastest way to do that is to really really dig down on each one of those and figure out what it was. I have a system actually if you do PDFs or show notes, I'll just send you the PDF and you can stick it in the description below the video that all of our intelligence operators go through to assess their level of authority and what's what's really holding them back in their life and it's free. It's it's called the authority assessment inventory. And that's one of the fastest ways and if you if you think even if you're not religious if there's any belief in your mind that says all of these ancient texts might contain some stuff that's really powerful and some really good wisdom whether it's the the teachings of Judaism or Christianity or reading Hindu texts like the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads and I mispronounced that.
I have no no doubt I mispronounced that. But all of these texts have these things in common and even just zooming in on one of those like the the Bible the most common phrase in the entire Bible is do not fear. It's the most recurring phrase in the entire Bible 365 times reminding you not to be afraid of anything. It's not a big deal. Nothing is a big deal.
And it's every single ancient text that seems to reflect that there's some truth with a lower case T in all of these and there may may not be one absolute truth but I think that even Plato before Christianity was even around Plato wrote about this and wrote about the folly and and waking up from kind of the simulation and realizing that it kind of is a game. With the Plato's allegory of the cave, wrote about this a long time ago, way before Christianity was around. But no matter what book you look at, if it's an ancient text and this ancient wisdom, every single thing that you see is telling us that we're all kind of like one thing. Don't be scared of anything in your life, and just kind of go forward and and don't be a douchebag. We're all one thing, and don't be scared.
That's kind of the main theme of all these books. And I think just living your starting to live your life that way is such a powerful move. And how can I be less fearful? Is the system rigged to keep people in their 20s and 30s stuck in their head, stuck in life forever? I think the This is a We're going deep pretty fast.
I think the system is not necessarily rigged as if there's one puppet master, one guy holding the the strings of all this stuff. I think it's many many things, and maybe 2/3 of it is just the algorithms that are pushing profit. But when it comes down to you want to get anyone stuck, there's three steps that you need to do to get people stuck, and that's PDS. That is pacify, distract, and sedate. Pacify, so we're like pacify as much as possible, distract you as much as we can, and then sedate you.
And if you look at the rise things that people are doing in life that are anesthetic quality, not just like drugs, but um people looking at porn, video games are up VR is is through the roof, and that becomes kind of an anesthetic for our life. But if we look at modern tactics of the psyop that is happening to keep people stuck. It starts with one thing called flooding. So, we want to drown out the real signals that are with overwhelming noise. This is memes and drama and fake news and riots.
So, we want to I want to drown out as much as I can. Just overwhelm. And then it's repetition. So, I want to repeat a message enough and it becomes an internalized truth for And then the next step is mimicry. the way that it's working now.
And when I say psyops, I'm not talking about the US Army. I'm talking about a psychological operation. I just want to put that out there. But, they now imitate everyday content. And this is TikTok that Instagram posts influencing and and stuff like that.
And then we have gamification. the next step of this the final two steps are are the biggest. The gamification is where we make ideology feel like a lifestyle or a team sport. Uh and that's big. And then just to seal it in, we use false consensus.
So, we use a bunch of bots or fake accounts to simulate popular opinion. once that's happening, we get people who can't really grow up. And I think the biggest layer, this is a super nuanced answer, but the biggest layer is if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is this little triangle where you have like survival and then safety and then love and belonging and then we have like self-esteem and all that stuff. But, the love and belonging, that's our social need.
And what we have on social media now, we have this TikTok, Facebook, you know, whatever you want to say. Our brains are not capable, 100% not capable of managing a social network that large. And the social media serves as a placebo of fulfilling that social need. So, what happens is our brains are thinking that we're getting that social fulfillment, but we can never go past it, which means we never get to esteem. We never get an actual fulfillment of that.
We get these dopamine hits that feel like social connection, but they're not. It's not satisfying that ancestor part of our brain. So, it is stuck in that place and massively what happens as a result of that is I can't have empathy for every bad thing that goes on around the world. It's not possible for anybody. Uh so, we see people then outrage about one or two things, but there there's a guy that maybe got murdered two blocks away from their house.
They don't have time to deal with that because they're worried about Ukraine or they're worried about something else going on. So, now that we have so much overload of social connection and negative news, we have apathy. And and I I do believe that this is an engineered apathy and that's the that's the real cause of all this. So, do you think there's a way out? I do.
I make videos about this on my channel all the time. It I think the way out is not just like go live in a cave and like become Amish. It's like throw your your iPad in the trash. I think the way out is starting to realize what is simulated and what's not in your life. And we're are we looking at a label of something and thinking that that's the thing.
The word is the thing. Where am I looking at social connection on Facebook and and tricking myself into thinking it's real. Because what this has made us do is pretend. And all of us just fallen into this trap of I need to fake something. I need to pretend like I've got all my together.
Like we see all of these videos online of these content creators. Like everything looks good in the background. But you go to their normal life, their off-camera life, it's absolutely falsified. The way that we do this is we realize what's fake in our life and where we are pretending. the biggest thing that's been engineered over the last few years is this fear of social injury.
And that is weaponized. If you look at like the the biggest fear of people is public speaking, but it's actually So the the fear of judgment has been weaponized and we talked about this like it with your first question. Stop being a victim to the fear of judgment is the biggest thing. And even even if you're just starting small, just be okay with receiving a social injury once or twice and be okay with being non-perfect. if you're watching the news on a regular basis, I would say that is a that's worse than in my opinion, I would say that's worse than like smoking a few packs of cigarettes for your health and for your mental well-being.
I would say like if you're watching the news, that would be step one is like I haven't watched the news in probably nine years, eight or nine years. And it's amazing, but if something's going to happen here, my neighbor's going to text me. My family's going to say, "Hey, did you see this thing that happened?" Maybe I'll see some events that are important, but our brains are not wired to handle a world full of news. Our brains are wired to handle 100 people max, maybe 150. that little tribe is what we're supposed to handle and we're tricking ourselves because our brains have not evolved in 200,000 And how can people have like a nuanced relationship or is that possible?
Like meaning like I heard you say that social media creates this false sense of connection. And yet I think people want to still figure out how can I stay informed, how can I stay connected to people online that I may or may not be friends with? And then the same thing with the news where they're like, "Hey, like probably shouldn't be watching the news every night before I go to bed. And I also want to stay informed with what's going on. Like, is there a way to have a healthy balance with these things so that it doesn't wreck people's lives?" I I don't think I'm the expert.
I'm I'm the guy that studies how damages us and how and I'm not even studying it for health reasons. I'm studying it because I teach interrogation. I teach people how to make people do things that are not in their best interest. And this is getting someone to confess to a crime. This is uh or if they think it's not in their best interest.
So, if somebody has a a severe uh depression and they go see a psychologist, they think getting rid of that, which is a part of themselves, is not in their best interest. So, uh this is this is what I really study. But, I think the balance comes down to awareness. A deep deep awareness because Papa Carl, as as we call him in all of my trainings online, Carl Jung, famously said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate." And most of what we think is our fate is just a bunch of running in in the background, a bunch of unconscious stuff that's going on that we're not aware of. So, getting hyper aware of your screen time, getting hyper aware of where I feel this need to pretend.
And why do we feel a need to pretend? Social media has hijacked this thing so we fear social injury. So, getting hyper aware is step one. There's not like you need to wake up at 5:00 and take a cold shower and take zinc and magnesium and all this like perfect morning routine. Just make the in your life that's unconscious, bring it as much as you can to the surface.
And do it on a regular basis. And keep in mind that the mammalian brain that makes all of our decisions and that governs our whole life doesn't speak English. You will never affirmation your way out of this stuff. Like that's using language is not the right way to do it. Using awareness is.
We have this part of our brain called the the reticular formation. People online commonly refer to it as a reticular activating system. So in in your brain if if Doug is searching for white 2025 white Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro and you've got all these specifics and stuff. And then you finally go and buy one, the day you start driving it, you're going to see it everywhere. You're going to be like, "Whoa, everybody's got the same car as me." And that's not because you told your brain using language to do that.
The biggest changes in our life, when we fall in love, we watch our kid get born, um all of these big things that happen in our life, these big shifts in our unconscious, are never rooted in the use of language. So, how can I get the awareness of there's so much that I'm telling that reticular formation in the brain that this is very important so that the mammalian side of our brain starts searching for it. What do you think's a good like first step for someone who is like in this simulation and on autopilot and they're just used to doing the same stuff over and over again. They're scrolling social media, they're not taking care of their health. Like what's the first thing they can do to develop such to develop this hyper self-awareness?
So, the number one thing is disruption. Anytime you want to start deprogramming someone or even brainwashing someone, either way, back or or backwards or forwards, you want to start with destabilization and some kind of agitation with lifestyle. So, if I expect something, I need to disrupt the expectation. I'm going to wake up, I'm I'm to brush my teeth maybe with my left hand. I'm going to repaint my bedroom and remove my furniture around.
I'm going to routinely do things that disrupt the scripts that I'm following through my So, if the script if one of my scripts scrolling on Instagram for an hour, maybe a couple hours a day, I'm going to set a time limit. There's like if you look at the new iPhone, you can set app time limits and stuff on your on yourself. And I don't mean that I can't reopen the app, but I'm just going to disrupt the script when that time limit thing pops up. I'm going to do everything I can to start disrupting those routine scripts in my everyday life. One of the things I've had my clients do there's this uh stuff that uh physiotherapists use called KT tape.
You ever heard of that stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's like stretchy stuff. It's got two sticky ends on it. And it's kind of like to pull the fascia away from muscles.
I'm probably making that up. I'm not an expert. But, just putting that on your body, uh no matter where you put it, is going to refocus your energy throughout the entire day. So, just having like pulling your chest apart or having it to where like if you slouch, it it's going to like tighten up. That's going to tell your brain over and over without English, without any words, it's going to tell your brain over and over something is different, something is new, you need to pay attention.
So, the fastest way to break out of the scripts is to start disrupting them on a regular basis. And I think that sometimes people, when they hear what we're talking about or they have this gut feeling that the world is " " against them or they've they're wired to fail or whatever, they fall into like the victim mindset. Like how would you How do you How would you like interrogate yourself? What questions would you ask to be able to snap yourself out of a rut like that and escape the victim mindset? That is so so tough, especially when it's a behavioral pattern.
I would say the fastest way to do it is listen to the expert on a regular basis, and I would say that's like Jocko Willink. Uh can can snap you out faster than Chase Hughes ever could. But if you want to snap out of any kind of rut like that, and you see yourself kind of going into this victim mindset, that is amazing, and you should celebrate that because 99% of people aren't even aware that they're in it. So, if you've got to that point where you realize that I might be, victimizing myself, you need to get out of that mindset, but the fastest way is I need to start disrupting scripts. Cuz even if you watch Jocko all day, every day, you read all of Jocko's books, you're running on scripts.
So, we're running on autopilot 10 times more than we think we are. Throughout our entire day, we're running these autopilot scripts from our behavioral patterns. So, no matter what we read, remember that's language, we have to disrupt patterns so that the brain pays attention. So, we have to do things differently where the brain has no more ability to predict the future. I think when sometimes people are trying to get momentum, like journaling or even like putting their thoughts out there, setting goals can help.
You know, what what do you think are some of the most important like questions someone should ask themselves or uh important maybe like journaling prompts. Like if you were trying to, you know, get someone to snap out of that behavior change and be consistent with how they're moving forward in life. Some of the most important questions to raise are, what are the things I do automatically every day? Like what are the things I'm doing automatically, and how can I start breaking out of that? But second is, what are the things that make me emotional?
What are the things that I get upset about? And that's where we're going to find those little identity fragments. And Carl Jung talks about this so much that I have my office is just like full of of Carl Jung's books. What I really want to do is on a repetitive basis, what am I doing not just on autopilot, but how am I judging other people? And that number one is going to help you start identifying those unconscious patterns of like I had I'm carrying some kind of secret concealed shame that I don't want anybody to know about.
and when people are concealing shame and guilt, the the biggest thing is they think that they're the only one. but I can tell you that this is 100% people are doing this. And whether or not you feel bad about it is is the measure. So, where am I judging other people? And where am I carrying some kind of a hidden shame?
And that the hard part about the the hidden shame part is that some people will carry this hidden shame and they will feel like me feeling bad about this one thing that happened in middle school or this thing that happened a couple of years ago, if I feel bad about it, that makes me a That's the biggest load of that that you could ever hold inside of your brain. Feeling bad about something does it does not make you a good person. Yeah, and it's tough because I think that a lot of times like going back to this victim mindset, I think people will use their past as a way to justify current behavior. They'll say, "Well, I was picked on in school, my parents got divorced. I mean, I did all of this and I want wound up in jail." And they people end up using these excuses as a way to justify how they act now.
And it's tough because their brain has now convinced them that it's okay to behave that way because they're used to getting people patting them on the back and telling them that it's okay. And then the sob story is there's commodity in that. There There really is. And I think if you look at it from a different angle, that's the first big thing that we all need to do is I need to take my little GoPro that's normally stuck way behind my head and put it out in front of my eyes and start changing my perspective. This is why like just a shift in perspective can solve depression and it can it can help people with PTSD and all kinds of other things.
This is why that we're starting to see that psychedelic therapy is like one of the most effective things ever tested. Well, and I think it's tough because people for decades, like they they are just used to seeing like one perspective, having one view of the world. And they've essentially kind of manipulated their own perception of of reality. And it just takes so much work to to snap out of it. And it it it's tough like how how do you think people can be consistent with it when they have been inconsistent for years and they're just somebody that has had the same like type of world view for a period of time and they're trying to like make that shift to be consistent with behavior If they're trying to change themselves, the number one thing that we can do is is form a a visual relationship with your future self.
And this sounds I mean maybe we talked about it on the last podcast. I don't remember, but you you get you download an app that makes you look like a 95-year-old and you you do that thing, you take the selfie look looking at it and it makes like AI warps your face or I don't know how it works, but you print that sucker out and you put it on your fridge, you put it on everywhere you want it to you want to be reminded. so most people don't prioritize their future selves because we have no ability to visualize them. They're hard to think about. But what we're doing is not using language.
We're not using affirmations. We're showing the mammal part of our brain what we want to focus on and where we want to place priority. if I want to be consistent, the only reason I failed to be consistent is because I'm prioritizing myself right now. What do I want? What is present tense me want right now?
And we're saying FU to the the future tense version of us. So, shift number one to make to to make so many changes in your life is can I teach my mammalian brain to start forming a prioritized relationship with future me? How could you could you do that with like situations like, you know, I imagine if somebody is like in a relationship and they're acting disrespectfully to their partner. Like would there be a way to like look at like a future version of that relationship? Or someone who's addicted to drugs and they're like, "Hey, what's my life going to be like in 10 years?" Like can that app do something similar or would you like have to almost like draw a completely different picture?
I think that our brain is is wired to go against things a lot more than it is towards something positive. It's it's made to go away from something negative. If you look at at our ancestors, they were way more likely to confuse a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick. So, we're our brain's default's to negative to keep us safe. So, if if you're trying to avoid something, maybe printing two versions of that picture out, one where you're missing some teeth, maybe somebody's on drugs or something, or one where you're morbidly obese and 85 or 90 years old.
Uh a lot all those can help the mammalian brain say, "I don't want that." Because our brain People are saying like you're programming your brain all the time. But, if your brain doesn't like something, it's going to be repulsed by And I know that you're not if you're putting negative stuff into your brain on a very regular basis, it's very hard to just want that negative thing. You're not going to drive toward it automatically. So, keep in mind our brains are wired to move away from negative stimuli. So, we just create that negative stimuli to help us form that relationship with the future self.
So, from a on a day-to-day basis, like we just kind of bringing this together, like we've got companies and things that have created this simulation to feel like they're stuck or even more stuck than they actually are in their life. And then you have these people that are trying to change and they're watching your content. Maybe they're listening to this episode and they're Okay, you know, I realize my relationship with social media is unhealthy. I probably should change my friends. I probably should put the substances down.
I should probably work out. Like all the things. And yet they're up against this battle that exists that's way more powerful than they are, right? How can people navigate that on like a day-to-day basis? Like what would that framework look like so that they are working toward self-improvement and yet but yet they're not letting this, you know, side up kind of affect them while they're on their way.
I think that from a day-to-day basis, the the main thing that a person can do to start getting out of this rut is A, developing that future self relationship where mammalian brain sees it. That is number one. But, number two is making the unconscious conscious. So, let's go back to that for just a second with with this new question. If I am if I know that I need a new friend network, there's part of me that I'm not really aware of that I need to make more aware in my brain.
So, I need to like write all this stuff out. Maybe I need to build a spreadsheet. Maybe it's some visual thing that I need to do. I need to make these problems as crystal clear to my conscious brain as I possibly can. So, if I'm on social media today, maybe I go to Michael's or Walmart and I'm going to get a big poster.
I'll draw a little grid on there and with a big Sharpie, I'm going to go up there every day. I'm going to I'm going to write how many hours cuz your phone tracks it all. I'm going to write my screen time on this big board. The stuff that we used to just unconsciously pursue is now getting forced closer and closer and closer to conscious awareness. That is the fastest way you can do it because if I want to manipulate you, if I'm running a psyop against a country that of the any size, the first thing I want you to do is pacify, distract, sedate.
Those things so all of the negative behaviors, all the things that I want you to be doing are happening unconsciously. And the fastest way to do that is just to get someone to do something on a regular basis and second, get you to believe that lots of people are doing it so I can normalize the behavior.
