Confidence Classic: How To Decode Behavior And Instantly Understand People with Intelligence Behavior Expert Chase Hughes

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Speaker 2 The title, Fake It Till You Make It, automatically carries some negative connotation. Yes.

Speaker 2 Where I think we should maybe replace that with just give yourself permission to do it because that's the threshold. That's the threshold between faking it and doing it for real.

Speaker 2 The moment you give yourself permission, no one else cares.

Speaker 1 Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.
Best or no sneaker. I'm ready for my close-up.

Speaker 1 Did you know I recently celebrated having created 450 episodes of this podcast and we are still going strong? Thank you for listening. That That is a lot of topics and amazing guests.

Speaker 1 So, I thought I would put together a few of my listener favorites for the month of September as bonuses on Thursdays to help you catch up on what you may have missed so you can keep growing your confidence with these confidence classics.

Speaker 1 Let me know what you think.

Speaker 1 Meet a different guest each week.

Speaker 1 You are going to freak out at how good my guest is today. I'm freaking out.
I love this guest. I think this is one of the best interviews that I've had, especially over Zoom.

Speaker 1 We were able to have such a strong connection. He's such a talented and amazing man.
Chase Hughes retired from the U.S. military in 2019 after a 20-year career.

Speaker 1 Chase now teaches interrogation, sales, influence, and persuasion. He developed the 6MX system for intelligence agencies, which is now the gold standard in Tradecraft.

Speaker 1 Chase is also the only trial consultant in the world who offers a whopping 300% money-back guarantee. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Chase is the author of the number one best-selling book on behavior, profiling, persuasion, and influence, the ellipsis manual. Chase is a total badass, and you are going to love him.
So hang tight.

Speaker 1 We're going to be right back. We need a different guest each week.

Speaker 1 Confidence clear.

Speaker 3 Chase, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Speaker 2 Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Heather.

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. And I can't believe featured with Elon Musk top 20 CEO list for 2020.
Are you kidding me?

Speaker 2 I know. I still, it doesn't feel real at all.

Speaker 3 I mean, do you get to hang out with him now? Like, what does this include?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I've been waiting for some kind of an access card to Tesla or something.
I haven't, I haven't gotten anything yet.

Speaker 3 All right. Well, hopefully, I hope COVID wraps up soon and they have some kind of award ceremony that you get to hang out because that is going to be an amazing day for you.

Speaker 2 It should be cool.

Speaker 3 And much deserved. I mean, as you were saying, I mean, this was not something that happened overnight.
You've only been living the civilian life for just the past couple of years.

Speaker 2 Two years, yeah.

Speaker 3 The amount that you have accomplished in two years is mind-numbing. What does that look like behind the scenes?

Speaker 2 I write every day from 4 to 11 a.m. And I'm booked in 15-minute increments until 9 p.m.
after that on calls and stuff. And I take one day off a week, but I still write from 4 to 11.

Speaker 2 So 4 to 11 is the sacred writing time every day.

Speaker 3 I would assume that the discipline comes from the military experience.

Speaker 2 I think, you know, a lot of people assume that, but most guys in the military, I'll be the first to admit it. You're waking up early because you don't want to get in trouble.

Speaker 2 You don't want to get your ass handed to you. So you get up early.
So a lot of what we think is discipline is actually habit.

Speaker 3 So these are just habits you've created for yourself.

Speaker 2 That's it. Yeah.
So you just need a little teaspoon of discipline and then the habit starts. Like, you know, you see somebody going to the gym working their butt off off every day.

Speaker 2 You know, you hear people say, Oh, I wish I had that kind of discipline. That's not discipline.
That's just a habit.

Speaker 3 Well, a teaspoon, a little, a little bit of discipline.

Speaker 2 Just a little bit just to get it started off. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I'll take that kind of discipline. I, for me, writing a book was definitely not a 4 to 11 a.m.
window. I feel like that your regimen makes a lot better sense to be consistent with it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I got that from Dan Brown, the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code. That's his routine.
So I just copied it. I figured if he can write a best-selling book, then I'll do the same.

Speaker 3 I definitely like that. And I'm going to have to try that next time too.
I mean, don't reinvent the wheel, people. If it's working for Da Vinci, like, I think I'm going to jump on that.

Speaker 3 All right, Chase. So, what's so interesting to me is obviously the massive amount of success that you're having.

Speaker 3 It's mind-blowing. But for people who don't know, as a child and a teenager, you were anxious or had social anxiety.

Speaker 2 Tremendous. Yeah.
I just kind of learned to mask it growing up. I got my start doing that in my whole career.
Like some girl turned me down one night.

Speaker 2 I just asked her on a date and I went home and I literally typed into Google how to tell when girls like you and printed out a giant stack of stuff, went down the wormhole and got addicted to reading behavior.

Speaker 2 And I got addicted to behavior profiling because I could see people's insecurities, their fears. I could see all kinds of stuff way behind the curtain after a while.

Speaker 2 And And I started realizing that everybody else is screwed up too. Everybody's screwed up.
Everybody's suffering. Everybody's insecure.
Then I'm like, oh, it's, it's not just me.

Speaker 2 And I didn't feel superior to anybody. It was just, it made people more human.

Speaker 2 And I think it, it just injected some empathy into me that I think that's the number one thing that's lacking in people with social anxiety is that empathy factor that that guy's screwed up too.

Speaker 2 That guy, you know, has insecurities or that woman does just as well as anybody else.

Speaker 2 I completely understand how you googled you know how do you know when a girl likes you because i google everything and i get that but the fact that you took it down the rabbit hole as you said i mean that's beyond where was that curiosity or do you just think this was what you were meant to do you felt something different with this topic it seemed like a superpower so i wanted to study reading people and then once you can read people you can persuade them on a completely different level it's not just the normal here's a persuasion technique that technique becomes surgically sharp when i know the exact way that this person's brain works so i wanted to compound this into a superpower and i couldn't find it so i wound up spending my life putting this stuff together and eventually started bringing this into intelligence operations and overseas interrogations and I wanted to make this a tool to where it wasn't just something that I did, but something that was saving people's lives.

Speaker 2 And that's what really pushed me over the edge to really get obsessed with this stuff because it was so effective.

Speaker 3 That had to be intimidating, or at least it sounds intimidating to me to think of making the leap of studying something in theory and then going into the military to the level at which you rose and actually implementing it.

Speaker 2 It's hard only because they've got a, we've got it figured out mentality.

Speaker 2 We've paid some guy a bunch of money, which means that your information, it's free, so it couldn't be very valuable, which is, you know, I was offering it for free.

Speaker 2 And at that time, there was a lot of budget constraints and things like that. But bringing it in, I only asked that you test it out.
If it doesn't work, then don't use it. I'll teach 10 people.

Speaker 2 And if it's not the best, then don't ever use it again.

Speaker 3 And so clearly it worked.

Speaker 2 It did. And it does.
Yes.

Speaker 3 What are some of the things that you can teach us about how to utilize profiling and really help us understand? Because to me, it seems like a movie.

Speaker 3 It seems so far away from the natural teachings or things that we learn in school and day-to-day life.

Speaker 2 One thing I think that's an essential ingredient in doing any of this stuff, surprisingly, is confidence.

Speaker 2 And I think that confidence is a manufacturable trait or skill, you know, whatever the heck label you want to stick on it.

Speaker 2 But it's so hardwired into us to feel unconfident because it's a default to safety.

Speaker 2 And if you go back 100 million years when our brains were, you know, evolving, go back 200 million years, our brains were still evolving back then.

Speaker 2 You know, the average group of people was about 100 to 150 in a little tribe.

Speaker 2 And if you were overly confident and got smacked down, you had social consequences, which means you probably wouldn't have sex or reproduce.

Speaker 2 Your DNA stops existing the moment you become too confident for your britches, we say in Texas. But that moment also happens when if I'm overconfident and I piss off the wrong guy, now I'm just dead.

Speaker 2 I get thrown off a cliff or I get my head smashed with a club. That was millions of years of that stuff happening.
And so we have an existential fear that happens there.

Speaker 2 And it's the same part of our brain. If you stick your fingers in your ears, that's the part of the brain that we're working with.
It's all in the limbic system. So all of our fear is right in there.

Speaker 2 And back in these, in this time, a million years ago, if you didn't feel that fear, like if you're walking past a bush and a stick breaks and you don't care about it and it's a saber-toothed tiger, it's kind of a big deal.

Speaker 2 Luckily, none of our ancestors died a virgin. None.
So, you know, we all got that instinct passed down.

Speaker 2 So literally the exact same part of the brain that's afraid of a saber-toothed tiger is the same part of the brain telling you, no, you shouldn't ask for a discount on that coffee. Don't do it.

Speaker 2 So our brain is thinking, there's a tiger. I will get killed or or I won't reproduce.

Speaker 2 So it's interesting in that regard, thinking of it from an evolutionary perspective, just understanding and just getting a grip on the knowledge that there is a little animal in there that's afraid of tigers standing with you in Starbucks.

Speaker 2 And it's trying to tell you like the tiger is going to get you if you ask for, I don't know, a discount on your coffee or whatever. And I think it helps to just understand that there's no tigers.

Speaker 2 There are no tigers. And just repeating that and understanding that there's a little piece of my brain.
It's not my conscious human part of my brain that's doing that. It's an evolutionary holdover.

Speaker 2 It's a little residue from how we evolved. And just the knowledge that that is in there really does help to understand, whoa, that thought wasn't real.
And you had a quote in an interview.

Speaker 2 I don't remember where it was. I stalked you on YouTube, you know, before we did our recording here.
But you had a quote.

Speaker 2 you said fear is a lie or fear is a liar one of those two oh it's from the elvis duran show yeah fear is a liar yes yeah that really rang true because it's it's not a truthful fear that's going to represent i'm in some kind of danger and what we're doing is like what we need to feel confident in these tribes when we're our ancestors are growing up is proof.

Speaker 2 If this guy respects me, this guy's always respected me, and everyone's always listened to everything I say, I have evidence and proof.

Speaker 2 Those are the two things that we're scanning for, and that gives me permission. And that's the key word.
Once I see evidence and proof, now I have permission to act a certain way.

Speaker 2 I can be more confident. But most of us and people who lack confidence, of course, me on many occasions, we're looking and waiting for evidence and proof.
or permission that is never going to come.

Speaker 2 No one's going to come tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, hey, Heather, you've got permission to be confident today. That's never going to happen.
And no one needs to. You can do that yourself.

Speaker 2 Or if you need it from me, you've got permission. And that's the thing, that we need some kind of permission.

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Speaker 1 Confidence creator you,

Speaker 1 I ask you to try to find your passion and your mission.

Speaker 2 And that's where the confidence ladder really starts. And there's three things internally and two things externally in my estimation that happen when confidence occurs.

Speaker 2 We have an internally assumed permission to act. So I just think there's no tigers.
Nobody's going to give me permission. I'm going to start acting a certain way.

Speaker 2 And that produces the next phase internally for us is a lack of reservation and doubt. So it reduces reservations.
It reduces the amount of doubt that we experience.

Speaker 2 And the third thing is it gives us a sense of authority. And I want you to think of the word authority a little bit different.
Like the first part of that word is author.

Speaker 2 I'm creating what's happening right now. I'm not responding.
I'm involved in the creation of what's happening right now.

Speaker 2 And once you feel like the author of this situation or this part of your life, then it goes external. And that, there's an external acceptance from the other person.
Because guess what?

Speaker 2 Those other people around you, they won't act confident without proof either. So they will assume, automatically assume that if you're acting a certain way, you have proof other places.

Speaker 2 You have already gotten proof from other people. If he's acting this way or she, they must be respected by everybody.

Speaker 2 So they automatically get something called social proof just from that confident behavior. And the true essence of confidence is the final stage here.

Speaker 2 So it started with internal permission, and now we're passing the permission over to the other person to act in a different way.

Speaker 2 So the true power of confidence is in your ability to transfer it to someone else and not just possess it.

Speaker 2 If you go to the dark side of that, like Frank Abignale, Captain Me If You Can, his true power of confidence was to give it to others. He made other people confident in him.

Speaker 2 And that turns into a chain reaction because the moment that it works just for a little bit, your brain collects a piece of data. And we're looking for evidence and proof.

Speaker 2 And your brain starts to collect that from the first time that you just push yourself and get that done.

Speaker 3 And collecting that data, is that what the profiling is?

Speaker 2 Well, collecting the data is done on an unconscious level your brain is saying well you really pushed yourself out of your comfort zone but it actually worked so next time it'll be a little bit easier you're not going to have to fight the little kid in there worried about tigers anymore he might still have a voice but his voice is going to get quieter and quieter because we're looking for evidence and proof before we act confident which is never going to come This is just so interesting to me because how you just described it, I've never heard confidence described that way.

Speaker 3 I agree 100% with everything that you're saying. And I mean, the fear and I mean, it can be visceral and feeling.
And I mean, everything that you're explaining is so spot on.

Speaker 3 How did this become applicable in the military for you when you were just initially researching and learning about this?

Speaker 3 When it's starting with girls, I don't understand how that ended up taking you into the highest levels of government and military.

Speaker 2 It started with a mentor I had. It was a 72-year-old intelligence guy, a military intelligence guy.
And I had bought this book.

Speaker 2 I won't say the name of it because I'm going to talk poorly about it, but it was on like these tactics to meet women. I was 20 years old.

Speaker 2 I was a naive kind of a douchebag.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I tell this guy, we're having lunch together and I'm a kid. He's the, he's agreed to mentor me.
And I bring the book. I've got it in a bag and I'm telling him about this book.
I'm excited about it.

Speaker 2 And he goes, do you have it with you? And I said, yeah. He said, put it on the table.
So I brought it up there. It's got a girl on the cover.
And

Speaker 2 he said, I want you to flip through there and find one technique that isn't a way to fake or pretend like you have your shit together.

Speaker 2 And I couldn't do it. And at that point, I was done.
But I still understood that all of those things in that book were.

Speaker 2 If you have your stuff together and you work at a certain level, you are confident. All those fake things are just byproducts of a good person.

Speaker 2 So once you, you know, you level up, those things are just a byproduct of your personality or your character. So I started working in the correctional part of the military in detention facilities.

Speaker 2 And I initially got on as a counselor and just talking to people and started seeing that this stuff is working. I'm seeing interrogators come in and out.

Speaker 2 And it got to a point where that stuff became just for this one little facility, it became something that people started to use.

Speaker 2 And I thought, wow, I'm going to just figure out a way to package this up and I can replicate it to other people because it started doing a lot of good.

Speaker 2 And that's kind of how it came into the military side of it.

Speaker 3 And that was you transferring confidence to them?

Speaker 2 The whole transferring confidence came about when we had a guy who worked for me and he was one of the guys who talked to these prisoners regularly. I'll just say that.
But he was super confident.

Speaker 2 Everyone would describe him like, oh, he's extremely extremely confident, but he didn't transfer it to anybody else. He was the guy that was confident and kind of pushed other people down.

Speaker 2 The more confident he was, the further down he made other people feel.

Speaker 3 So that's not confidence. We all see people like that for sure.

Speaker 2 That's not confidence. So what you see in a situation like this is that person believes in themselves.
They might have a high self-esteem.

Speaker 2 but their confidence is low because it relies on the external world. So esteem and confidence, of course, you know, are absolutely different things.

Speaker 2 But the true power of confidence, the guys who did really well talking to detainees, the guys who do well in sales, the guys who are good therapists or good clergy or good parents are very confident and they make other people confident.

Speaker 2 So even somebody that's around you with social anxiety, we think, oh, if I just kind of crumble down a little bit, it'll make them more comfortable. But it works the opposite.

Speaker 2 You know, it makes them feel bad too. Now it's like double awkward.

Speaker 2 So somebody who has a natural confidence, even if they're around somebody that has social anxiety, they lift them up and they bring them up. So I noticed that that was one of the key things.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't just military. It took me a while to realize that.
It wasn't just interrogations or stuff like that. It was everything.
And I realized I wasn't learning hardcore intelligence skills.

Speaker 2 I was learning human. This is just applied to all humans.

Speaker 3 It took me a long time to figure that out, but I didn't think anybody outside of the military would ever be interested in this stuff isn't that so funny whatever bubble we're immersed in we only see within that lens and think it's so unique to that one little area when yeah so true thankfully you know you were able to look beyond that and see that it it's ubiquitous i mean it's unbelievable and when you brought up just now you were talking about when you try to shrink yourself down in order to make someone else feel better whether they have social anxiety or whatnot for me being in a negative work environment and seeing that someone felt threatened by me, I tried that same tactic, not aware of what you're teaching now, that, okay, maybe that will make her feel more comfortable.

Speaker 3 And again, it did not work. You know, in fact, it actually made my situation much worse.

Speaker 3 However, still today, Chase and I don't know what it is.

Speaker 3 I don't know if it's just with women, but there's this sense out there or this understanding that isn't talked about that if you appear too confident, it's a negative.

Speaker 3 Or if, you know, you speak out about, you know, your success or you just are an open, strong person, that there's something that, ooh, you might want to, you know, dim that down a little bit.

Speaker 3 It could intimidate others.

Speaker 2 I think that that might be.

Speaker 2 I don't think they're talking about confidence because if confidence made you ruin relationships, Emma Stone would not be a badass.

Speaker 2 She's one of the most naturally confident people on camera, off camera that I've ever met. And that's true confidence.
So that doesn't, that doesn't need to put anybody else down.

Speaker 2 And I think the trouble comes when you have a confident person who is unconsciously thinking about status on a very regular basis. They walk into a new conversation and they think, where am I?

Speaker 2 Am I on top? Am I a little below? They may not be trying to climb. They may not feel the need to be on top all the time, but they're thinking about status probably more than they should.

Speaker 2 And that bleeds into their behavior.

Speaker 3 You brought up the fake it till you make it with that first book that you were sitting with your mentor reviewing. Does that mean you don't believe in the concept of fake it till you make it?

Speaker 2 No, I absolutely do because there's no such thing as faking it. If you act confident, then you're confident because other people will see confidence.

Speaker 2 So I think fake it just means that I'm doing something without mental permission from myself to do it. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 I like that because I agree with you. The more you start behaving a certain way, the more you start feeling it.
And like you said, other people are responding to it as if it is, as if it is real.

Speaker 3 So that has been a successful tactic in moments when I've need it for sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I always ask people, where's the line?

Speaker 2 Where's the line from faking it to reality? Are you judging this by how other people respond? Then if that's the case, then faking it is for the rest of your life.

Speaker 3 If you're going to keep growing and keep wanting to go to that next level and keep entering into that next Starbucks to negotiate, you have to be able to keep challenging yourself to do that.

Speaker 2 And I think the whole concept or the title, Fake It Till You Make It, automatically carries some negative connotation. Yes.

Speaker 2 Where I think we should maybe replace that with just give yourself permission to do it because that's the threshold. That's the threshold between faking it and doing it for real.

Speaker 2 The moment you give yourself permission, no one else cares. They care so little

Speaker 2 whether or not, hey, does he really feel this way?

Speaker 2 No one gives a shit.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I think that's the threshold. When you talk to a human, it's even if you're faking confidence until you make it.
There's no graduation ceremony where you get a certificate.

Speaker 2 Okay, you're not faking it anymore. Heather is officially confident.
Hang it on the wall. If we're outside our comfort zone, I think it's a good thing.

Speaker 3 When you were initially out of the military, just in the past two years and you decided to start taking on this work, were you questioning yourself?

Speaker 2 All the time. Two days after I retired, I did 20 years in the military.
Two days after I retired, I retired on a plane on the way to London. And I'd never been to London before.

Speaker 2 And I was doing a seminar there. And I'd never taught civilians in my life.
I've never done a keynote. I didn't do anything.
And I had a hundred people sign up for this big thing.

Speaker 2 I rented out the entire Winston Churchill underground war bunker for this seminar.

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I had a major imposter syndrome for that. Like, well, I'm not qualified because I haven't taught civilians before.

Speaker 2 I'm not qualified because I'm used to teaching in uniform and now I'm wearing a suit. I'm not wearing camouflage anymore.
I'm not qualified because I don't bring my body armor overseas.

Speaker 2 There's so many things that I tried to convince myself. I looked for evidence and proof that I wasn't qualified instead of just ignoring that that stuff doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 And you are so educated in this arena. That's so interesting that someone who's so knowledgeable still defaults back to these same issues that everyone has.

Speaker 2 100%. I think the difference between me and the average Joe is that I'm looking at myself like, what a dipshit.
Like I'm, as I'm experiencing the thoughts, I'm like,

Speaker 2 I know that it's happening. I know I'm experiencing it.
And it's down there in that little mammalian part of the brain.

Speaker 2 And I know that it's a completely irrational part of my brain, but still, it's got a visceral, like you said, it's a visceral effect.

Speaker 2 And it's also the part of the brain that's making your heartbeat, that's making your intestines work right now. And it's powerful.

Speaker 2 And if you start pissing it off and start getting out of your comfort zone, it's going to say, okay, dude, I'm just going to make your body feel like crap for the next 15 minutes.

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Speaker 1 Confidence clearing.

Speaker 1 I ask you to try to find your passion and your mission steps.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's why we feel so stressed out when we do something, we're faking confidence, for example, or we do something out of our comfort zone.

Speaker 2 That thing stresses us out so much we feel like crap so we'll go back to safety it's a little kid i want you to try to imagine that part of your brain as a little nine-year-old kid who doesn't know any better and is trying to pull you back into safety and you understand that you can speak back to that part of you like an authority figure and say well i i appreciate you're trying to do the right thing here but i'm going to make the decisions as a human instead of an animal or a small child for for that matter The way that you just described it to me resonates with me so much because I liken it to learning as a 46-year-old woman.

Speaker 3 It's crazy. I'm just learning this recently that fear is a green light that means go and step into fear instead of running away and hiding from it.

Speaker 3 And I always liken that to we learned as children, if you feel fear, go home, go under your bed, hide, don't do anything that would put you, you know, in harm's way.

Speaker 3 But somehow along the way that just becomes like you said the habit the norm and you don't even notice that you're implementing it in your daily life right it's so unbelievably eye-opening so tell me about six minute x-ray six minute x-ray is a new book that just came out and i spent 20 years developing this system because everybody says i train the military with a six-week course and everybody says, oh, we need a shorter course.

Speaker 2 Chase, we need a shorter course, shorter course.

Speaker 2 And so I had to get a system down to eight hours for intelligence agencies to read a person on an extremely deep level that is more than any psychiatrist or psychologist is trained to do.

Speaker 2 What are the essential things that make this person tick? What are their insecurities, their secret fears? What are they hiding behind? What does their mask look like?

Speaker 2 And we're all wearing, everyone wears a mask, everybody. And how do they run on the inside?

Speaker 2 And I wanted to be able to teach these intelligence people to be able to profile a human in a conversation in six minutes or less. And that's what my courses teach.

Speaker 2 And that's what the book is all about.

Speaker 3 That seems incredibly difficult and beyond aggressive. And you feel like you were able to accomplish it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I teach this to law firms when they're doing jury selection and things like that as well.
So I teach it to police departments, law firms, intelligence agencies, and civilians now.

Speaker 3 And I was going to say, and you should teach it to people dating as well. I mean, this could apply to anything, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. One of the courses that we have is a course designed for women, but anybody can take it.

Speaker 2 It's got a lot of this in here, and then it's a huge bonus throughout the entire course on how to unmask and reveal narcissists on a first date.

Speaker 2 And how would you be able to unmask and spot a narcissist or a manipulator within the first six minutes, within the six-minute window?

Speaker 3 Can you share one of those strategies with us?

Speaker 2 Sure. I'll share a couple.
So one thing you'll see with narcissists, especially on that first date, I'll do three. Their friends are all out of town.

Speaker 2 They live in another state, another city, another country. They don't really have a lot of local friends.
Their friends are elsewhere. Second, you'll see just asking a small question.

Speaker 2 You'll hear their past relationships, everything was someone else's fault. They were a perfect human being.
And you'll hear a lot of that type of language.

Speaker 2 But most of all, if you want to spot like someone who's a malignant narcissist who preys on the weakness of others, is if you say something that's really exciting and your face lights up, see how your eyebrows just went up when mine did?

Speaker 2 That's called reflective empathy. So your face lit up the same way mine did.

Speaker 2 And if I'm saying something sad, like if I'm talking about a relative of mine who was just diagnosed with some illness or whatever, you'll see their face change to a little bit of more sympathetic tone to match yours.

Speaker 2 And when you're dealing with someone who's a malignant narcissist, you won't see reflections of emotions in their face when you do those things.

Speaker 3 That's kind of, I mean, that sounds like a killer, not a narcissist. I mean, that sounds a little bizarre to me.
So what happens then?

Speaker 3 Are you teaching, because if you're teaching women how to spot the narcissist, Obviously, then the narcissist could be learning how to teach themselves not to exhibit these behaviors, right that's right and that's why you got to look for a cluster of things and not just one or two because you can't manage all of them

Speaker 3 how do you know that people are using all this information for good and not evil that you're putting out there i'm an arms dealer i guess i mean

Speaker 2 99 of the people are going to use it for good stuff and you got to remember all psychopaths are narcissists but not all narcissists are psychopaths yeah so i did not know that so i could not remember that until you just shared that with us, but I definitely appreciate that knowledge.

Speaker 3 Wow, that is really eye-opening.

Speaker 3 I would imagine, though, and tell me if I'm wrong, that if someone's doing, like you were saying, you know, raising the eyebrows or whatever, that you would be, anyone would be able to tell if someone was faking that.

Speaker 2 It depends. Especially with, you know, if you work with people on the spectrum, the way that they cope as they're growing up is to mimic facial expressions.
And

Speaker 2 if you send a narcissist to a psychotherapist for treatment, there's no treatment. What they're going to do is learn how to wear a better-looking mask.

Speaker 3 What do you mean by that? You said everybody is wearing a mask, pretending to be something they're not?

Speaker 2 No, everyone has a mask that they present. And that's typically one of the biggest mistakes that I identified.

Speaker 2 in my career is that I'll just use the word selling instead of getting someone to confess to a crime.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 2 Provided selling. So if I'm selling to a person,

Speaker 2 the best advice I could give somebody is due to the fact that every sales training, every influence, every persuasion training teaches you how to sell to the mask instead of the person behind it.

Speaker 2 So the person that's behind it is typically what makes the decisions because our brains are extremely driven by the subconscious, by that mammalian emotional part of the brain.

Speaker 2 And then we'll go do something, stupid or not, and then reverse rationalize it after we've already done it.

Speaker 2 So we'll come up, you stop somebody walking out of a Best Buy with a big ass TV and you're like, hey, why did you buy that TV?

Speaker 2 And they're going to say, oh, they're going to list off all these logical things.

Speaker 2 And they're going to say, I've never been influenced by a commercial before. None of those things.
My neighbor's TV, no, that did not make me want to buy a bigger TV.

Speaker 2 Like all these little emotions happen and it's so powerful. Listen to this.

Speaker 2 They did a study where they opened someone's skull, put electrodes down into the brain and moved a person's arm with the electrodes. So they made them reach forward.
They made them reach up.

Speaker 2 So they moved their arms around. Even then, the person knowing full well that there's a neuroscientist back there doing this stuff, swear up and down.

Speaker 2 They absolutely affirm they chose to do those things. That's how powerful that conscious brain is that tries to take credit for a lot of stuff that goes on down in the basement.

Speaker 3 That is really

Speaker 3 crazy to hear that. I mean, that's kind of scary, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so your whole concept is to understand who is beneath the mask then so that you can impact that person, not the mask that people think they're speaking to. Correct.
How can you do that?

Speaker 2 Well, the system that I teach is to identify who the person is within six minutes, what their social needs are, what are the things that drive them on a social level.

Speaker 2 Because if I'm in a conversation, if I'm talking to you right now, we are in a social situation here.

Speaker 2 So I'm not worried about your actual needs on whether or not you're hungry or, you know, this pyramid of needs.

Speaker 2 That goes to the side. This is a social situation.
So I'm worried about what do you need socially? Do you need to feel intelligent? Do you need to feel accepted or do you need approval?

Speaker 2 Do you need to feel significant? Do you need other people to feel pity for you or to acknowledge how bad you have it more than everybody else?

Speaker 2 So, all of these little social drivers are really important and they help us to expose what the person is very privately afraid of in a lot of their decisions because our decisions are emotional and social and they take place on that level that's way behind the mask.

Speaker 2 And that's one of the things I teach to start peeling that mask off.

Speaker 3 This is just so unbelievable. I was a psych major all through college, and I find it so incredibly interesting, but we didn't learn things like this.

Speaker 3 I mean, they need to somehow combine your teachings for students so that they're learning more day-to-day applicable things that they can implement in their life versus theories.

Speaker 2 It's a ton of theories. I majored in psychology too.

Speaker 3 Of course you did.

Speaker 2 And it's like, oh, here's a study that says that humans typically tend to do X, Y, and Z.

Speaker 2 And I've always got to the ends of those things and just praying that I would see another, like, okay, and here's the end of the article. Here's 15 ways you can actually use this shit.
Right.

Speaker 2 It never happens.

Speaker 3 Well, Chase, obviously everyone is going to want to learn so much more after this interview. Where can we send everybody to find out more about you and your very real world teachings?

Speaker 2 You could just Google Chase Hughes anywhere, or you can go to chasehughes.com. Pretty simple.

Speaker 2 And you can check out our YouTube channel I have with three other behavioral experts where we dissect true crime interviews, people that say they were impregnated by aliens, tell you whether or not they're telling the truth or not.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 with science-based, research-based things, we'll break it down and teach you how to do it in your daily life, whether or not you're interviewing a babysitter when stuff like that is really critical.

Speaker 2 You can learn to do that yourself. And that is called the behavior panel on YouTube.

Speaker 3 Chase, thank you so, so much. Love this conversation and so appreciate your time today.
It means the world to all of us. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Likewise, thanks for having me, Heather.

Speaker 2 I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing.
Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

Speaker 2 You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Speaker 1 Come on this journey with me.