Chase Hughes: What ACTUALLY Makes Someone Evil?

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]But I've been struggling a lot with this concept, especially after Epstein.

[00:00:05]What makes somebody evil? Because Chase, at what point you look at these billionaires, and I remember I've talked about this before, so don't laugh at me. I remember watching a TED talk where the person giving it said if you are president of the United States, right? Or you're you're running some huge corporation like Netflix or Facebook >> and you're a billionaire, of which there are maybe 3,000 in the world. To get to that level of power and wealth, you have to be a little bit sociopathic because you got to mow a lot of people down along the way. And I wonder sometimes like how much money do you need? Like what compels people to engage in this kind of darkness just so you can sell that ad slot for a little more like a little more money. And I I get the whole like, oh, don't don't hate the player, hate the game. Somebody made the game.

[00:01:08]Who is making the game? And are they inherently evil? What is this in like insatiable greed?

[00:01:18]>> It is uh so let's talk about what makes a psychopath first.

[00:01:23]Uh and it we talked about it right at the beginning of the show, you and I. It is separation. All psychopathy starts with separation. This is my opinion, but I've been studying it for a little while. And if you live in a city like large cities and you're connected to everybody and uh you you've heard of the bystander effect.

[00:01:48]So where somebody gets wounded or something in a crowd of people, the more people that are around, the less likely you are to receive help.

[00:01:57]So and and this is proven. They've done studies. You can watch videos about it.

[00:02:01]They've replicated it on video. And you can watch a woman uh in in the UK um just do this like holding her stomach like somebody stabbed her or something, laying on the ground at at Liverpool Street Station in London where they filmed this. And she's begging for help and and crying out and groaning and people are stepping over her to get on the train. And this is it's horrifying and sad, deeply saddening that um it's they call it the bystander effect. The other the other name that they gave it is called diffusion of responsibility.

[00:02:41]And what they're saying is there's so many people around that everyone assumes maybe someone else is going to call an ambulance, someone else is going to stop and help. Uh this woman sat on the ground. I think 90 something people either stepped over her or or altered their path to walk around her. And she's dressed in business clothes, not like not like the the Home Alone homeless lady.

[00:03:08]>> Um and and begging and screaming for help. So what happens is this is the bystander effect. And then you just take that into a city. Uh, our brains are wired to process about 120 tribe members. And our brains have not changed materially in 200,000 years, exactly the same brain. So, we're still wired for 120 people. We get smashed into these cities on a very regular basis. We have a contagious apathy that takes place.

[00:03:41]And so, it's the bystander effect, but at scale. I I don't have the cognitive willpower to care about people. So, and and some people that gets engineered to an extreme. They have a genetic predisposition to psychopathy. And we could go into that, but you have to develop some degree of absolute apathy um about other how other people are going to react, how other people feel.

[00:04:07]And in some ways, that's good. Like you you get like the Buddhist who is immune uh from everything. Okay.

[00:04:15]>> But still cares because he sees himself in other people.

[00:04:19]>> But what that separation is I am me and this little skin here of my meat costume is this boundary of me and I end here and then other things end outside of me.

[00:04:32]And if you see other people as a reflection of yourself, as connected to you, and like you're actually viewing the lack of separation, when I look at somebody else hurting, that's me. Like I'm seeing me. So it's not because I have training. I'm not I don't need training in how to be polite. I don't need morals at all. I just need to dissolve that feeling of separation. And me caring for this other person is a I'm helping myself in in some way. I'm helping us. like everything I'm looking at is us. I I can see us everywhere. So, if I can actually and I don't want to drift into like spiritual Allen Watts territory.

[00:05:09]>> Actually, that is one of the that that is actually one of the ways you've changed my life. So, I was going to to bring it up, but we'll we'll get there in just a minute, but but I'm going to go there anyway. So, please please continue.

[00:05:21]>> Yeah. So I mean the separation uh when when somebody develops this sociopathy or psychopathy there uh Robert Hair had a great story that's like a minute long or maybe two minutes but it's worth telling.

[00:05:34]>> Let's say you're a psychopath. You don't really know you're a psychopath.

[00:05:37]Psychopaths don't know they are. And so people are like oh he's a psychopath. He needs to die or kill him or whatever.

[00:05:44]They don't choose that. Um, and when psychopaths go to therapy, the only thing that they get from therapists is here's how to pretend like you're not a psychopath. It's the only thing that they can really do.

[00:05:54]>> Oh god.

[00:05:55]>> Because it's a it's a physiological problem as much as a psychological problem. But let's say you're a psychopath. You live in the middle of a big city and you're like, you know what?

[00:06:04]I'm going to go get some orange chicken from that Chinese place. Let me get some orange chicken. And then you walk downstairs. You're walking down the street to the Chinese place and there's a a horrific car accident.

[00:06:16]um that just happened a few minutes ago.

[00:06:18]There's a mom uh screaming to the sky, holding this little seven-year-old girl who's her skin's starting to turn blue.

[00:06:26]You don't know if she's dead or not. And you look at it for a second and then you think to yourself, orange chicken. That's what I want. I'm going to get that orange chicken. And then you go get your food. And then you take it home, you eat. And that night after you're brushing your teeth, you're looking in the mirror and you'll see yourself going like this, like rehearsing the shock and sadness that you saw on the street so that you could mimic that behavior in the future.

[00:06:55]Uh that's that's psychopathy.

[00:06:59]Um and they learn to mirror those things in a way that is like straight out of a movie a lot of times. And most psychopaths aren't murderers.

[00:07:10]Almost all psychopaths are not murderers. Uh but but they do have an equal amount of concern for human beings as they do about like a Kleenex uh and their well-being and their lives because their entire life is a complete walledoff separation from everybody else. And all psychopaths are narcissists, but not the other way around.

[00:07:36]How many people are walking around like this?

[00:07:40]>> It's like I don't know what the estimates are, but I think it's about one in 10,000.

[00:07:48]>> So, we've all met one.

[00:07:49]>> A lot of people >> worked with one. We've had a neighbor, sat next to one on a airplane. Uh we've all we've all been around them and never known. And even as a as a behavior profiler, expert guy, there's no you can't you can't spot a psychopath. You know, there's a lot of like tips and tricks that might give you a little bit of likelihood, but no, there's nobody out there that's going to say, "Oh, here's exactly how you spot a psychopath." Uh there is no definitive checklist.

[00:08:21]It's hard to it's hard to find.

[00:08:25]>> Okay. When one of them does reveal themselves to you though, why do the other 9,999 not recoil? And what I mean by that is once, again, not to go back to Epstein, but I think it's the perfect example.

[00:08:42]Once you now have a criminal record for soliciting sex from a minor, really I I mean really, how does he not get cast out from the tribe? How is this man not a social pariah? I I have a hard time believing that everybody who was drawn to this guy was also a psychopath or a sociopath. So what what happens there? What is that apathy? I would like to believe that if I had known who Epstein was and been introduced to Epste and then someone subsequently said, "Hey, just FYI, you know, he was convicted of this in 2008." And then you start to see the behavior that I would recoil.

[00:09:30]>> Yeah.

[00:09:30]>> Is that me wanting to be morally superior? What happened to the other 9,999 people that let this happen?

[00:09:37]Sorry. Just I I struggle so deeply with this chase. You have no idea. You have no idea.

[00:09:43]>> No.

[00:09:44]>> And it says a lot about our world where uh and not just the people who knew him.

[00:09:51]I think the people who knew him there was either some weird sociopathy going on or uh they were worried about something compromising being released.

[00:10:00]So they just kind of went along with everything. Um, but I think for everybody like it's um I haven't been on social media in a long time, but there's a counter online that says here's how many people have been arrested since the files came out.

[00:10:16]Um, and I think it was uh in in the n late 90s a guy I can't remember his name but he wrote a book called the death of outrage uh where there is so much uh negative stuff going on that we develop an event apathy. So we have there's so much going on that I don't have time to worry about every little thing. And this is one of those things. It's a diffusion, another layer or level of the diffusion of responsibility to where people are just I don't have time for that. I don't have time to do this. I'm already pissed off at my neighbor because they put out that political sign that's closer to home for me. I'm worried about the uh oil gas prices are going up to four and a half$5 dollars. Now, there's so much going on that the moment I want you to stop worrying about something and I want you to stop looking into something, let's say Jillian, you're starting to look into this, all I have to do is threaten the bottom two levels of your Maslo's hierarchy of needs, survival and safety, even with a mild threat to your survival or your safety. And I automatically redirect 100% of your focus to that thing. So the moment just pay attention to the media when somebody gets in trouble, some uh high-powered person gets in trouble and then some big thing happens that makes you worry about your safety. Do I need to carry a gun every day? Am I going to be safe if I go to the mall? And that somehow comes out right the next day. The this has been proven since the 70s and published in many articles. I just threatened survival and safety and I gain literally 100% of somebody's attention. So, I can redirect you uh away from anything just with one of those things. And we see it play out all the time.

[00:12:09]>> All right, guys. If you like this clip and you want to watch the full episode, click here. And if you want more content like this, you can subscribe to the show by clicking