Weaponising Identity in the Algorithmic Age with Chase Hughes

Welcome to The Future of You. Today I'm talking to Chase Hughes, who retired from the US military in 2019. He began his career developing new interrogation tactics and spent 15 years researching human influence, behavior profiling, and persuasion in the most extreme conditions. He is now a world leader in human behavior and influence, teaching interrogation, sales, influence, and persuasion, and he is the author of the number one bestselling book on this subject, The Ellipsis Manual, as well as many more books besides. He is, of course, also very well known as one of the ever-insightful Behaviour Panel, along with Scott, Greg, and Mark. Now, if you don't watch the Behaviour Panel, where on earth have you been? You must, so check out the show notes for the links. Our conversation delves into the manipulation of human identity through various means, including social media and advertising. But more importantly, we talk about the chaos and confusion that surrounds our identity today. And what purpose that is serving. Chase, with his background in military psychological operations, discusses how identity has been weaponized and corrupted to make individuals more vulnerable to influence. He talks us through the power of social media, the legacy of Edward Bernays, and the growing bystander effect, where people are less likely to help in crowded situations. And he offers at least 2 or 3 fantastic tips for resisting manipulation, which I suggest every one of us should learn and practice on a daily basis. We discuss identity and cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, and even consciousness. Overall, the message is that, well, we have an urgent need for more critical thinking and skepticism in the digital age. But over to Chase. So Chase Hughes, welcome to The Future of You. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Not at all. I'm a massive fan of you and the Behaviour Panel. But the reason I wanted to chat to you, Chase, was, as you know, this podcast is all about identity in the 21st century. And I'd heard you speak about how important identity was, more important than ideas in terms of persuading people. So I can't do it justice. I wonder if I could hand over to you and you could just explain how you got into this business, what you do, and why identity is really important, is at the core of what you're talking about.

Yeah, so I, uh, I did 20 years in the U.S. military, and, uh, during that time I was obsessed with human behavior, and it became a expert and started training the Psychological Operations Command and the intelligence operatives and people like that in persuasion, interrogation, and psyops. And all of those— any persuasion leverages identity. If it's good, then there's identity involved. And I think that over the years I've published a number of books A few of them have been number one bestsellers, but there are so many aspects of identity that are being weaponized and used today that this is the podcast I hope really blows up because people need to learn so much about how the more you believe that your identity is tough and hardened and can't be fooled with, the better target you become.

So have you got an example of that in terms of how somebody might wrap some ideas or persuasion around their identity?

A million examples, but to give you an example of what I just talked about, if I don't believe that computer viruses are dangerous, I don't download McAfee, I don't download the antivirus software. And if I believe that about my own brain, then I don't learn enough to defend that when that attack comes in. The social media computers that we're dealing with on a daily basis are $1 trillion machines. And I don't care if you have a 500 IQ, 3 times what Einstein did, you are vulnerable to that. And it is— your brain is no match for a $1 trillion machine. And it will outthink us every, every step of the way. I've been studying brainwashing and all kinds of crazy mind control kind of stuff my whole life, and I am not immune. I am very much not immune to this. I have timers on my own devices to where I can't get on social media for more than 60 seconds a day. And we're getting to a place where identity is being corrupted. And the first step in corrupting a population or changing the narrative of a population is not for me to go install a new identity at all. And it's not for me to start messing with your identity and giving you new ideas to think about. My first step is to make you confused about your identity. So a big step of doing that is making you— if you agree with this one idea, I I let you become and feel like you are intellectually and morally superior to other people. You don't have to read a book, you don't have to study a podcast, you don't have to do anything. You just agree with this one idea and I make you feel, starting to feel superior. Then I get you addicted to, I have all of these costumes that you can wear and it's going to change the way that people perceive you. It's a different mask that you can put on and The more I can start messing with your identity and make you use different labels and different terms and then make you confused about who you are, because 90% of the world already doesn't even know themselves. So it becomes easier and easier because the two main goals of advertising are, number one, make you think, A, I'm not enough yet. I'm not enough yet. And B, compare myself to other people, which— and both of those things are forcing us into this separation where I don't view myself as part of Tracey Follows Follows. Like, I view we are separate and completely apart from each other and we're not alike at all. We have the exact same cells. If you put your blood and my blood under a microscope, nobody in the world could tell a difference without some crazy machine, right? It's the same cells. But they start pushing the idea of separation, number one. And separation automatically makes me again start questioning, who am I? Let me look for things that can help me to define myself. And the moment that I can get you to socially share something, I've got your identity. I might make you agree with it off camera. But the moment I can get you to tell your friends, to tell a stranger next to you on an airplane or to post about it on social media. Now I've gotten you to sign a very covert contract. I've got you to sign a behavioral contract where I'm, I'm building walls around what I'm going to allow you to do in the future. And you are not even aware that the walls are being built. I'm guiding your behavior and narrowing down what I'm allowing you to do. So if I get you to make a few agreements about who you are as a person, I can modify your behavior in the future. Like crazy.

So has this always been going on? Has it been going on using different media, or are we now at a special time with networked media, social media, AI? Is it the same thing but different, or are we in a different environment?

I think we're in a different environment in many ways. But if you just go back to ancient Rome, this was like, oh, I don't want my kids watching the gladiators fighting. That pollutes their brain. It's, you know, I mean, this has been going on since recorded history. That kind of thing. But when it comes to this, these are algorithms that maybe have $10 billion at the lowest end possible, $10 billion algorithm designed to manipulate dopamine circuits in our brain. Nothing like that has ever existed in human history. And we think, oh, since we have iPhones, then we have advanced. We have not advanced. Our technology has definitely advanced, but we've made zero advancements whatsoever in our brain. We have the same brain in our head that we had 200,000 years ago, and it's not equipped to deal with modern-day technology. The example would be our brains are designed to handle a tribe of about 150 people. The moment we start getting this giant thing that we cannot comprehend, our brains cannot comprehend. It's like when a scientist tries to explain like the fifth dimension on YouTube. And like, you're like, what? Like, we just can't get it. Our brains just can't understand it. So once we have all of this stuff, we don't know what to worry about. We're used to worrying about our tribe, and even more importantly than that, we're used to worrying about our reputation. And especially in large cities and stuff today, we don't have worry about reputation. And just to give you an example, Tracey Follows Follows, if I just explained to you that I just saw a guy watch a woman get stabbed in the middle of the street, and all he did was stand and, and watch the whole thing happen. Just watched. Now, if I said that to you, would you think that that person is maybe a psychopath? That's everyone who lives in a major city, because what I just explained to you is something called the bystander effect. And the bystander effect means I'm going to back away from this emotionally because I don't have the capacity to worry about everyone around me. So the bystander effect means— and we see this in cities over and over again— it's not just something that happens occasionally. It's 100% of our population is prone to, to this. This is, uh, just to give a little background, that they did tons of research on this. Dr. Philip Zimbardo has done the most recent on this. He ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, but he also did this. He has a wonderful a wonderful YouTube channel called the Heroic Imagination Project where he teaches you about these biases. And if you're watching this and you're thinking, oh, I don't have those biases, then you have an even bigger bias that's called the non-bias bias. And so essentially, the more people that are around when you get hurt or stabbed or robbed or something, the less likely you are to get help.. And it is bizarre that we just, we see it on YouTube and we're like, wow, that's weird how people act in crowds. But we really don't understand that I'm looking at the behavior of a psychopath, but it's copy-pasted everyone around me. Everyone I know is capable of that. So there's something that's been done that, that has completely disrupted and manipulated our internal mechanisms. And I published a paper a few months ago called Confused Ancestor Theory, that if you just imagine that there's a 200— let's call it a million-year-old ancestor living inside of your brain, the more time you spend every day exposing that ancestor, because they can see right through your eyes, they can look, they can see what you see, that they don't speak English. But the more you're exposing that ancestor to things that are confusing to them, that our ancestors can't process, we have psychopathy. And we start developing a— not clinical psychopathy, but little tiny psychopath behaviors. And when we eat stuff that our ancestors' bodies and cells wouldn't have recognized, we have biopathy. Our bodies start getting sick. This is proven. So It's not just our identity. Like, the cells in our body have stuff that they're supposed to have, and we go and eat all these crazy processed foods, and that— our cells look at this thing and they're like, what the hell is that? They don't know what to do with it. And obviously our body just tries to tuck it away somewhere, and that becomes a tumor or Alzheimer's or diabetes. So our identities are easy to manipulate for sure.

It's interesting because it does feel like it's something being done to us. And you mentioned they, and I'm gonna ask you who you think they is. Obviously, we kind of know where social media came from. It did come out of the intelligence services and DARPA and all these sorts of, it has military connotations. So it has already a connection to psyops, doesn't it? And sometimes when you're down the rabbit hole of some kind of social media, it does very much feel like that. But I wanted to ask you, when you thought this particular era of vast polarization or the us-and-them dynamics that I know you've talked about really started. Because I feel like in the UK anyway, it was definitely around Brexit. There was this sense of if you didn't vote for Brexit, you had a superiority. And then that just went— it was absolutely turbo boosted on everything else then. Everything that came after that, whether it was COVID-related or Ukraine-related, whatever it was. And I don't know about the US, you can tell me, but it feels like there was something around Trump at the same time. And something since 2016 in both our countries seems to have— I'm trying to say, choose my words— seems to have just gone up a level in terms of that psychopathy, that polarization, that need to really grab people's identity and then persuade/manipulate them. Am I wrong?

Yeah, it's definitely gone uphill recently. And I think If you want to spot some of this stuff very quickly, is just one question. And we could— I could give you a few questions to ask yourself, but just if you just memorize this one question: whose ideas need people to be quiet or suppressed in order for them to flourish? So if it's a good idea, you don't need to silence anybody. If it's a good idea, it's going to be a good idea. So if someone's trying to silence someone or, or like restrict speech around an idea, that's a huge problem. And I'll give you a corollary to this. One of the things I told my kids is if you're looking at a product and they don't tell you the problem that that product is trying to solve, you need to be very scared. As an example of this is If you just look at like Amazon, Amazon says you don't need to go to the store anymore. You don't need to take a trip. We're going to deliver it to your house. It'll get there in a couple of days. It's very affordable. The shipping is free. We're going to save you time. All the problems that they solve are out in the open. And if you look at the Apple Vision Pro or the Facebook Meta goggles, they can't tell you that you will never see an ad or a description of the problem that they're trying to solve because it's loneliness. The second part of that is that the problem they're trying to solve is people wanting anesthetic so that they don't have to sit there with their own thoughts. So it's an anesthetic and a treatment for loneliness, and they know it, but they can't say it. So when you see a product Or you see something where they're saying they can't tell you the problem that they're solving. That's a bad deal. Really bad deal.

It's interesting that is, because on the Apple Pro Vision Pro ad, or the long film they made, there's a particular phrase in there that's always got me. It's just your apps come to you. So when they show the apps in like in the spatial computing environment, the ambient computing, your apps come to you. Well, not really. You're showing them in the living room. They're more with me on my device that I'm actually touching. But it's a funny kind of repositioning they've done or reframing of your apps come to you because they're in your home, but they were already in my hand and that's like already with me. So it's kind of, it's, that's interesting. That is, I will remind myself of that question.

If you go back and watch it again, they humanize the apps first and then they say they're going to come to you like friends. So it goes back to the very covertly selling to loneliness and selling it as it remedy for loneliness. And with our social media and people living in cities like New York or Los Angeles— I was in Los Angeles last week filming a podcast— and it's— everyone is lonely. And because of that thing, I don't have time to worry about everybody else. And we get this, what I call psychopathy, not in a psychopath diagnostic criteria, but we get separate. They're pushing an agenda of separation. And that's the biggest thing, because we start pushing ourselves away. The closer you go to a big city, the more loneliness you see. And that is on record. This is loneliness, depression, anxiety, suicide, heart disease. All, all of these kind of things are just— are all like surrounded in these little cities. And you read research about— Dr. Robert Hare talks about psychopaths all the time, and he says that psychopaths are attracted to large cities. I think large cities might be creating some and or at least fueling the fire of some of those behaviors. And when it comes to just who we are as a species, the separation is the number one thing. And all of this started to answer your question in the longest way possible. In like the 1950s. And this guy came on the scene. His name was Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew, which most people don't know. And he, he reads this word propaganda and he's like, no, that's not a good word for it because I want to, I want to redefine it. And he calls it public relations. He's the guy who came, who rebranded propaganda into public relations. He changed the War Department to the Department of Defense. He's the reason that margarine is dyed yellow and common in the United States. He's the reason that Americans eat bacon for breakfast. It was never some tradition. It was engineered by Edward Bernays. He was the reason that Virginia Slim cigarettes were smoked by women, and he used identity to do every single one of those things. And if you really understand how to use a person's identity, I get you to make a small agreement, and then I make that agreement social, and then I get you to make one more agreement. I own you at that point. So here's how I could do it really quickly. Let's say you and I just met like in a, in a bar or restaurant or something, and I said, uh, do you agree to X, Y, and Z? Do you believe in doing good things for animals? Let's, let's just keep it on that level. And you're going to say, yes, of course. And I'd say, I've got to introduce you to my friend. He runs this animal shelter. Would you mind if I made the text introduction? I'll just connect you two, even if you two had a conversation. And I send a text to this person, let's call him Ian. And I say, hey, Ian, this is Tracey on the text. Say Tracey Follows Follows loves animals and wants to do everything she possibly can for our world. And then Ian says, hey, can you come by Sunday and volunteer? I've just made your agreement social. So now they can start digging and digging and digging and getting you to go out of your way.

Oh God, I'm trapped.

Yeah.

Yeah. So is that what happens online in social networks, et cetera? Is that, is that what's operating or is, is there something different there?

It is. And so there's two layers happening at the same, well, three. There's marketing and media that make you compare yourself to others, feel like you're not enough. Number 2 is it's a constant confirmation bias machine. So if you think you like start binge-watching insane videos of people cooking dogs and stuff in China and beating the crap out of dogs, it's going to start feeding you more. So anything that you think you're interested in, it's going to convince you that more people like it and more people like it and more people like it, and it's going to normalize it, and it's going to make you think, oh, there's lots of people in this. So now it becomes social, like what we just talked about. And the second thing that it does is social media uses cognitive dissonance as a weapon. So cognitive dissonance is when our internal thoughts and something outside of me aren't really matching up. So it shows you stuff every once in a while to bring you up and then take you down, bring you up and take you down. So it's, it's programming cognitive dissonance into your head. I'm not that type of person at all. I'm going to back further away from that behavior, further away from that behavior. And one of the things that I teach persuasion for a living, and I teach people to weaponize cognitive bias like psychotherapists, except to get people to stop an eating disorder or to talk someone out of hurting themselves. So there's a lot of good ways you can do it. So when— if anybody's listening and you're thinking that these are dangerous, they're dangerous if your intent is to do bad stuff. A scalp— I can kill you with a scalpel, I can save your life with that exact same tool. So it's a good tool to have. And I think in the— at the end of the day, when it comes down to ethics, If, if the person receiving your influence could read your mind and see in your head and see your intent and your desired outcome, would they agree? Would they still go along with what you're doing? And if they would, then that— I would say that's probably ethical. So if people could read your mind and you're in the media doing all these algorithms to, to do stuff— Facebook is already on record having I think use the algorithm to determine if it could— if somebody would hurt themselves and they could maybe make that happen. And it's a weird place to be because our identities have never been as fragile as they are right now because they're— they have been absolutely deliberately undermined and shaken.

Yes. This is what I want to ask you about deliberately. Why? So that we are insecure, confused, more susceptible to even more control. Is that why?

That's it, yeah. Like, if I'm going to paint the wall here in my office, I got to sand it down first. So, and that's what it means. Like, I have this idea of who I am, and I'm— I need that to be sanded down first, or I need some holes in there so it can be filled. The second aspect of why that's happening a lot more recently is that something about this generation— I can't put my finger on it, I'd like to be a smart guy who can say something definitively, but I don't know. The people that are like 25 right now don't even know themselves. They really don't fully, truly understand who they are. And when you don't know who you are and you are like fueled by separation, separation from everything, you are in "I will join a cult" territory right there. I talk about I've interviewed 100 cult recruiters. I've spent time with cult recruiters.

I wanted to ask you about cults. That's very interesting what you say about this generation. You're talking really about Gen Z or Zed. I mean, I've done loads of research with them. I've asked them tons of stuff. And one that really stuck in my mind was a fashion student. She was 21 at the time. I mean, she was really into fashion, but to cut a long story short, she said she wanted an AI algorithm or assistant to help her, advise her on her own fashion. I thought that was incredibly interesting because I was like, well, in my generation that would be like a best friend. You know, you'd go shopping together and you'd advise each other and you'd say, well, this looks good on you. No, she wanted something that was objective and analytical because she felt that that was like the truth. And I would have said, no, the truth is inside you. Like, your gut feeling, your instinct is another data point, but that's just subjective and therefore nonsense to her. And it was really interesting to me that somebody who was Obviously an enthusiast and an expert in a certain area thought that even though that was the case, they wanted something external and objective. And it just felt to me like they'd lost all trust, or she had lost trust in her sense of self.

Yeah, or, or definition. It was just like, I'm going to try things on, which one, which one defines me best? And that's one of the things I taught my kids when they were growing up is I would make them look at the back of vehicles that bumper stickers on them and stuff, crazy amounts of stuff, or people wearing a funny outfit. And I would always say, what do you think that person wants you to think about them? What do you think they want you to think? So like somebody had these bumper stickers all over the back of their car. It was like, uh, Tahiti and travel more and life's a beach, marathon running, and like all of this kind of adventurous stuff. All it was like a Subaru, I think. My daughter, who I think was 8 at the time, we were behind them at a stoplight, and I said, what do you think all of those stickers say? If those stickers could talk for the person, it's like the person couldn't talk, they want the stickers to talk for them. What would those stickers say? My daughter said, well, I, uh, I do lots of cool stuff. And I said, all right, keep going. Uh, well, I do cool stuff because I'm a fun person. Keep going. And she said, well, I'm fun, so I would be a good friend. And I'm nice, and I'm nice to people. I have good friends. And I said, are those stickers for her friends to look at or strangers? And Charlotte, my daughter, said, strangers. And I said, well, keep going to the next level. And she said, I'm lonely. Wow. So kids can get this. Kids can get this. And if you like, if you know, most people that are like under the age of 35 feel insane amounts of loneliness. That's unprecedented. And I think we're never more isolated because of this forced idea and identity of I am separate from everybody else. And that is so rampant today that loneliness is kind of like a new epidemic.

So is Taylor Swift a cult?

Well, I think we'd have to define first, but I think there are good cults and I think there are dangerous or bad cults for people.

Yeah. So how does one know where one is when one is?

I was in a cult for 20 years. It's called the United States military.

Yeah. I went to the Landmark for, you know, the Landmark. Forum stuff. Yeah, yeah. I went, a friend dragged me along. I thought, oh, it's not really me, I'm gonna do this. And I've never felt like— the whole weekend I've never felt so uncomfortable. But I mean, I could see some of it, I could see some of it operating, you know. I could see some of it behind the curtain. Like, you can't have a drink, you have to get up and go to the table to have a drink, you have to do this, you have to— how they were sort of— I don't know, well, you'll tell me— but how they were sort of unpicking you to stitch you back together again. It really was the most bizarre. I really hated it. But, um, yeah, you were in that— you were in a cult for 20 years.

Yeah, well, what they were doing is sanding down the wall. Yeah, they're sanding your identity.

That's how I need to think of it now.

When I show up to boot camp, what do I identify as? Well, especially as a 19-year-old, like, well, I had a lot of hair back then. Like, you walk in, they shave off your head. You don't get your clothes anymore. You have to wear their clothes. You have to obey their rules, sleep in their bed, drink water when they tell you to. And that was, you know, the military is an example of what I think is a good cult. I think it's the reason I'm successful. And when you get into the bad cult, you'll see those things like what you were just talking about with the water was, are— can I get you to very covertly start making small agreements to be compliant to me. So I'm going to get you to comply with very small things at first. So by the time that I get to a big thing, it's an automatic response when I tell you to do something. You're ready to go because you've been doing this, you've been doing this, and you did it in front of people. So you made a social contract that I am compliant. And they will take all of those emotions out and take you on this emotional roller coaster. There is a name for this, it's called Fractionation. So that's psychological Fractionation, and it's the fastest way to emotionally, or maybe psychologically, what I call capture a person. So I teach a formula only to my VIP clients and government people, but it's called CAPTOR, where it's a 12-minute formula that kind of puts a human brain into the state of being in a cult for a month in like this, these 12 minutes. But you captivate a person like that just by getting small levels of compliance, letting them know, like, what did they do? Like, there were name tags. You learned everybody's names, where they're from. They had friend-building exercises. So I get small compliance. I very covertly convince you that this is your ticket out of loneliness is also happening there. So I'm working up Maslow's Pyramid here with your connection to self. Like, I'm, I'm around groups and family members, then I go up, and then like this sense of self and the sense of confidence, and then this like self-actualization towards the end of this little cult experience. Where it's really emotional. So I've got— I've gotten rebuilt from the ground up. So I have small amounts of compliance. This might be your cure for loneliness. I'm gradually increasing your openness in front of these people in a cult. I don't care what cult it is. You're going to cry. You're going to talk about some kind of emotional stuff. I'm going to make you use all of the mental scripts that you use for family and very close friends in front of these strangers and rewire those people in your head to be a brand new social circle. There's like 10 other things happening, but that's just those things that I talked about now are enough to capture people.

Yeah, they did this whole thing about, you know, come up to the microphone and share, you know, X, Y, Z. I, I think it was about 3 of us who just didn't do it. I was just the whole weekend. Just anyway, gosh, it's brought back some memories.

When I was 29, I did it with, with a very similar group to that. And I wasn't skeptical at all. I wanted to go all in just to experience it. And it was one of the greatest times I've ever had. And during this little emotional— they made it emotional on purpose— but this graduation ceremony, I cried like I was in it. And man, it felt good. It felt like I am better than other people because I agree with this this organization, which is the step 1 that we talked about 20 minutes ago, or whatever.

Superiority. Yeah, yeah.

I want you to pretend, just entertain me for a moment, that each neuropeptide associates with one of these human needs up here. And I want to make this very clear: when we're looking at this needs map, is this a need to be significant or to be seen as significant? Seen as. Big difference. Do I have a need to be intelligent or to be seen as intelligent? That's me, right? Both of those. I was hoping I could demonstrate that first before I started talking about it. Thank you. What we're really doing here with neuropeptides is flooding the brain with the correct ones, but I want you to pretend there's a neuropeptide for every every single need. There's significance neuropeptide, acceptance, approval neuropeptide. So I know if this person has lived their whole life trying to get this from other people. Needs are what we want from other people. Needs are what we want from other people. If I'm looking to buy a car, through my needs lens, How will this make other people see me? If I'm picking a university, how will this make other people see me? If I'm joining a social group, how will this make other people see me? That's what the needs lens is. Needs are what we get from other people.

It's interesting, that superiority. You don't, as you said, I think you said, you don't really need a reason, do you? It's just posited and then agreed to, and there you Therefore you are superior. I mean, you've mentioned a couple of things, but how do we resist some of this manipulation out in the, out in the world? You've identified a very good, you know, fundamental question we should always ask ourselves. Are there other watchwords or tips or tricks?

Yeah. So the number one thing that I've taught my kids is every time you hear something that sounds good, not even too good to be true, anything good, or anything really bad, I want your head to automatically say the word maybe. Just use the word maybe and program that into your brain because it sounds simple, but I promise you, when your brain is flooded with dopamine and serotonin, you think you're getting some kind of great information, great advice, that maybe doesn't come out automatically. You've got to be ready for it and you've got to kind of rehearse that. Quite a bit. So when somebody gives you any kind of piece of news, you're watching the television or news, then I would say maybe. And the more you spend time on social media, the more easily hacked your brain is, period. Because that machine is made to make suggestible human beings. Every once— I don't do this often, but every once in a while I'm speaking on stage, I'll call up a random audience member. Within 3 seconds, I will have them unconscious on the floor. Just doing some covert, very covert hypnosis stuff. 3 seconds. And one of the ways that I do that is earlier on in the day, I'll say, who spends an hour or more on social media? Put your hands up. Let me see the hands. And I look around the room, it's like maybe 1,000, 2,000 people. And I'll say, all right, so if you spend more than 3 hours, keep your hands up. 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours. Just those people who spend a lot of time on social media, I can pick out the suggestible people. In no time at all, instantaneously, because I know how good that computer is. I didn't hypnotize that person who came up on the stage. They were already ready to go because of their habits and their lifestyle. I just leveraged what I knew would turn their brain off, dropped them on the stage. It's very dramatic, uh, and it's not that hard to do. But I, I would say it's one thing to just say, I'm going to protect my brain— it's another to tell yourself, like, social media can't affect me. I would beg you, beg you to reconsider that idea, that it is more dangerous than— in my opinion, it's more dangerous than a lot of the illicit drugs that exist out there.

Wow. I want to ask you two things, really. What your theory of identity is, and also whether you think we are one self or many selves or many expressions of a self, because obviously we've got in the West now, we've got several different versions of theories of identity. Some of them are quite Eastern influence, but plurality and multiplicity of the self, and, and a lot of this is burgeoning because of the digital environment where you can show up as multiple different avatars, use different masks and personas. So I wondered what your core theory of identity was and where you thought it sort of can be preserved or maintained in this digital world, or whether it can be at all.

I do have a sort of a theory of identity, and I think most people have what's called a role-based identity. Here's kind of what I am and what I'm doing and what I do. And not just your job, but this— I'm kind, I'm loving, I'm here to help people. I love helping people. I want to make money and do this in the world. I want to be a successful entrepreneur. This is what I do right now. I'm a bestselling author. That's a role, right? So that's kind of a, it's a, what you might call a character identity. Another version of that is called a historical identity. I am a person who's been through X, Y, and Z. I've been through all of this stuff. Or if you hear somebody that comes on a podcast and can't stop talking about, I did 20 years in the US military. That would be like a historical identity. I'm based on my history.

Is that the same as a narrative theory of identity, or is that different?

I would say that's probably the same, that narrative identity. And when, when it comes to that, I just say that I think the identity is very fluid because 90% of our world does not know who they are. They really genuinely don't know who they are as a person. So that's a fluid thing, and my identity just becomes what's going to get me the most dopamine in this situation, and that's who I'm going to become. I'm going to get some kind of social reward. So when we're growing up as kids, there's what I have called a childhood triangle of development. So what did I do as a kid to keep myself safe or feel safe? Number 1, the second side of the triangle on the right side is friends. What did I do to win social circles, to gain social circles, or to get some kind of alliance with, with other kids? And the other side, the left side of the triangle, is rewards. What did I do to get rewards? For, for some kids, that was recognition. For other kids who had a harder life, that was like a glass of water. I had to work for it, or, or food. So all of those behaviors, those 3 behavioral patterns, carry into adulthood. And I think that is really who we truly become. And that is maybe identity. And then we get into another 5-hour discussion on identity versus consciousness and the consciousness theory. I'm working on 3 different neuroscience studies and neurology studies right now on consciousness. And all the evidence is suggesting, which I think is beautiful, even if it turns out not to be true. I don't ever think we'll fully understand consciousness or the brain.

Maybe we never should. Maybe we shouldn't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We don't even know where memories are stored for real. And but all the science is starting to prove and point in the direction of consciousness being outside of us. And we are filtering consciousness, not creating it in any way. So if that is the case and it's surrounding us and we're just kind of like experiencing consciousness, not making it—

we're—

it's like this— your kitchen sink does not manufacture water, right? It just, it just filters it a little bit and cuts it down. So what we're really seeing of reality is you and I are not as separate as we thought. We, we are sharing some, something that we don't understand. And I think it's beautiful to say we have no idea and we might never know, but we are definitely sharing something. We have some similarities in our consciousness, enough to say it's possible that you and I have the same consciousness. We are so connected to each other, all of us, not just you and me.

That has some interesting implications for causation, I think.

Yeah. Certainly does.

That maybe it's not the will inside or, or whatever. I wanted to ask you what you thought about neurotech and everything that is being suggested to us at the moment about how our brainwave data needs to be understood so that we can know when we're distracted, we can know when we're really paying attention, and actually we can avoid any sort of burnout or cognitive overload. And therefore we should really be assessed and monitored all the time, especially at work. And our brainwave data, who knows, could become the most important biometric. And obviously they're already putting it into our AirPods and caps, hats, helmets, because if you're on a construction site— what is your point of view on this sort of burgeoning area or battlefield, which is, which is our brain monitoring?

I love getting new data, but when we say new data is going to solve problems that were solved 5,000 years ago. Uh, so like, I read an article 2 days ago from the University of Texas, and it says groundbreaking— they use the word groundbreaking— and new research on psilocybin psychedelics could help treat depression and PTSD. Groundbreaking. We've been using mushrooms since before humans existed to treat, to treat ourselves, to become more spiritual, to feel better about the world. But science is thinking that all the stuff that we figured out a long time ago is groundbreaking. Now, the, the stuff that's groundbreaking is that they can assign it in an Excel spreadsheet, but we've known that it works for a long time. If you have successful people for the last 2,000 years, they weren't biohackers. They're not sitting there, uh, studying the ultimate morning routine. They get it done. They get passionate about something and get it done. So they're not sitting there like doing exactly 17 minutes of staring into the sun while meditating in the morning and simultaneously going through the checklist for the day. We keep thinking like, I'm going to find the secret to doing stuff. The secret's been out there for 2,000 years.

Yeah, maybe it was just AI wrote that, wrote the, um, the title for the research report. Yeah, I don't know, maybe it wrote the title. But actually, I wanted to ask you about AI, because AI agents, I mean, I was listening to Mustafa Suleyman the other day, well, not the other day, he was still at Inflection doing his Pi AI agent before he went to Microsoft. And he was talking really interestingly about how you'll have your AI agents or more than one, and obviously it'll be an extension to you. It knows your tone of voice, it knows your objectives, your goals, your mission, and it also is connected to you in terms of having a fiduciary responsibility. It's like it's on your team, it's by your side, it's sort of part of you, and it goes off and does these things on your behalf. But he was talking about how it, AI, the agent, whatever, will also be negotiating values with you because it'll have its own ideas about what your values will be. You have your own ideas about, well, maybe you can't express them, but you certainly will have them and they'll come out somehow. So, is this kind of negotiation between you and the AI about what values would take you forward or decide your behavior in any sense. And so my question is around, will AI end up programming us our values? Maybe it already does, maybe technology always has and we can't get away from that. But in particular with AI, because it seems to be being built a lot of the time as some kind of digital twin, some version of you, cybernetic version of you which will go out into the world and do things on your behalf. I don't know if you've got— I'm sure you've got thoughts on that.

I do. I'm actually— I don't say this ever on the internet— I'm the chairman of the board for one of the major AI companies in the United States. And I don't use the term AI because every time these guys try to explain it to me, I don't understand it. And I've they made a crappy decision, you know, because I don't get that stuff. But, um, I would always just use the word algorithm because we can— everything is an algorithm, especially even with AI, there's algorithms at place. So if we look at what dipshits on TikTok, how much influence they are capable of issuing about people's values and ethics and never going upward. There's no upward trend, uh, in, in values unless you're in China. Have you seen the Chinese version of TikTok? Yeah, it's patriotic, it's educational. There's no, uh, crazy like videos and stuff on there.

Programming a different race.

Yeah. So if you just use the word algorithm, since probably 2006 almost half of relationships, or more now, like intimate adult relationships, started because of an app or a website, or we met online, or we met through an online friend, which means that half of the babies born in the last almost 20 years were created by an algorithm. So it's already just making humans. So it— and we don't even realize it. We're not realizing the influence of it already in our lives. So it is very powerful and, and very dangerous. It is, it is the biggest threat to the entire planet.

I was thinking particularly as well, in if you look at the gender disparity for when you're talking about the younger generation, Gen Z, the way in which the, the boys or the males are going towards more traditional conservative values and the girls are moving towards more liberal, progressive. And I wonder how that's going to, um, eke out over time if you've got a generation who should be dating, um, and getting on with each other and conversing and socializing actually becoming more and more and more polarized politically. I don't think that— that doesn't really bode well for lots of things, including fertility, does it? So what haven't I asked you about identity that I should have asked you about, Chase?

I think human beings— there's so much hubris in us as a species that every generation laughs at the previous generations for how little they knew. And then we pat ourselves on the back for how much we know now. We've got it all figured out now. And that— but the next generation will laugh at us. We know so little. And I think that it's okay for us to say I'm not certain about something because we tend to feel like I'm losing power if I don't know something, I can't label it, I can't describe it, that it's okay. Like if we're describing identity using modern-day language, it's just not capable. It's not enough to fully to get what's going on or even to describe the world that we're living in, trying to describe identity just with words. I think is like me describing a sunset to you by giving you the temperature of the air. It's so inadequate. But that's okay. The problem is that we feel like I have to have all this shit figured out or I'm dumb or I'm powerless. It's okay to just say, I don't know. And I think the words that I don't know for sure is the most intellectually accurate answer that people can give. And I think more people need to get comfortable comfortable with that.

Okay, I think that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for this time and chatting about identity. It's absolutely fascinating. Talk to you for hours.

Yeah, thanks, Tracey Follows.

But thank you for your time today. Hopefully we can revisit this sometime in the future. Thanks, Chase.

Indeed, thanks.

Thank you for listening to The Future review hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Be sure to check out the show notes for more info about the topics we covered today. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know someone who would love this episode, please share it with them. For more on the future of identity in a digital world, visit futuremade.group/thefutureofyou. To explore the future of everything else, head over to futuremade.group. The Future Review podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.