Behavioral science interviews
Behavioral science interviews: 4 conversations, 1 finding
By Merlin OBrecht · Dean of Academic Affairs, NCI University
Behavioral science interviews on this site are 4 long conversations recorded by Merlin OBrecht with people inside NCI University: founder Chase Hughes, Kris Mullins, Nick Karvon and Rosie Hayer. Across roughly 5 hours, every guest describes the same finding from a different starting point: the technique works about as well as the person running it.
Four people who have almost nothing in common said the same thing to me in four different accents, and none of them knew the other three were going to say it.
One of them spent 20 years in the US Navy and came out of it with a chief petty officer’s rate, a stack of interrogation schools and a resume he shredded. One came out of marketing, DJ booths and a childhood spent reading rooms for safety. One was running a business and had a background deep in NLP when his life came apart in a way he had no technique for. One had been selling real estate for 15 years and had hit every number she set for herself.
They all say a version of this: the skill starts working when the person running it changes, and it stays flat until then.
I should tell you the obvious thing first rather than let you find it. All four are inside the same training institution. Chase Hughes founded NCI University. The other three came through its courses. That is the premise of the page and it is also the strongest argument against taking the page seriously, so I have written a whole section further down that states the objection in its plainest form and then answers it with the one fact I think survives it. If you want to skip straight there, it is the section called four doors, one finding.
Here is the small agreement I would like from you before we go any further. If you have ever taken a technique that visibly worked for somebody else and watched it do nothing in your hands, you have already noticed the thing these conversations are about. The words were the same. Something underneath them had changed hands.
My job at NCI is a narrow one and worth naming once. Chase explores. NCI standardises the exploring into a curriculum. I sit in between and ask the question that puts the missing step back, because a man 30 years inside his own material tends to start at step 4, and the person learning is still on step 1 asking why. That is the entire relationship and there is no competition inside it.
These conversations exist because of that gap. I wanted the versions of these stories that nobody gets on a normal podcast, which means the boring middle, the parts where nothing was working yet, and the specific week each of them changed direction. Chase has done something like 100 interviews and almost every one asks him what is in the books. Nobody asks him about the D grades.
Four conversations were recorded, the most recent in June 2025, and there have been none since. I am writing them up as a finished set rather than as a series in progress, because that is what they are. If a fifth gets recorded it will go on this page and the argument will get stronger, which is a good property for an argument to have.
The image I keep coming back to, and I have used it enough now that I should probably own it: these are four people standing at four different points on the shore of the same pool, describing the same water. What none of them can tell you from where they are standing is how deep it goes.
Key takeaways
- Four long conversations, four guests, all of them inside NCI University: founder Chase Hughes, Kris Mullins, Nick Karvon and Rosie Hayer.
- Chase Hughes spent 20 years in the US Navy, including interview, interrogation, SERE and agent-recruiting schools, and built the NCI system after concluding that the training he was given was thinner than its reputation.
- Every guest describes the same order of operations: the internal state changes first, and the technique starts working afterward.
- Three of the guests arrived carrying a system they already knew (NLP, marketing and movement-building, sales scripts) and describe the same shift happening anyway.
- One of these conversations has been watched more than 190,000 times, which is more than everything else on the channel combined.
Who is Chase Hughes?
Chase Hughes is the founder of NCI University, the author of Six-Minute X-Ray, and a US Navy veteran of 20 years. He enlisted at 17 after testing out of high school, served as a deck seaman, signalman, navigator and chief petty officer, and retired to build a behaviour curriculum full time.
The route there is stranger than the summary. He failed most of school. His parents’ standard was that a C minus got him taken out of dinner, and by the end of high school his own description of his report card was that somebody had to give it CPR every May for him to scrape into the next year. At 12 he was sent to a military boarding school in Missouri, 1,000 miles from home, and he used the pay phone on the first floor to negotiate his way out. His parents said no. He now says that school probably saved his life, for reasons that have nothing to do with academics and everything to do with what it taught him about self-discipline and leadership.
He left before graduating, tested out at 17, and walked into a mall in Houston where a Navy recruiter was standing in dress whites with all his medals on. Chase’s entire decision process, verbatim: “Whatever that is, that sounds cool.” The Army recruiter had offered Germany. The Navy recruiter offered Thailand, Japan and Singapore.
He signed as a mineman and arrived at boot camp to find his job card said undesignated seaman. He raised his hand. The drill commander’s answer was “Put your hand down, Hughes,” and that was the appeals process.
The training he names on camera is specific: interview school, interrogation school, SERE (the survival and resistance-to-interrogation course, where he was on the receiving end), agent recruiting, and 2 in-house programmes he describes as sales instruction. He later added postgraduate certificates from Harvard and Duke in neuroscience and neuroendocrinology, then medical neuroscience and neuroimaging, studying 5 to 10 hours a day. He is clear that none of this happened because he became a good student. His word for what actually drove it is desperation.
The part I keep coming back to is the end of the 20 years. He had a resume typed up and reviewed by the Navy’s transition programme, aimed at a job in the Norfolk shipyard fitting paint respirators to people’s faces for about $16 an hour. That is where 2 decades of running warships had left his estimate of his own ceiling. A mentor told him that if he kept the resume, he would use it. So he shredded it.
“I’m going to shred the resume and we might be poor for a little while.”
His wife Michelle said that was fine, they would be poor. He has since said her belief in him was roughly 20 times his own.
On why the company exists at all, he gives an answer that no marketing department would have written for him:
“It was never about a company. I wanted this system to be out there.”
I have the only long-form account of that life on record, told in order, and it is written up in full as the whole life story, from Arkansas to the Navy to NCI. About half of what came out of that 90 minutes I had never heard, and I speak to the man constantly.
The reason any of it matters to you sits in his verdict on the training itself. Asked what the most advanced influence instruction available to an elite operator actually contained, he said it was nothing more than a How to Win Friends and Influence People book. Look them in the eye. Use their name. Touch them on the shoulder. Remember their kids’ names. “That’s what our most elite intelligence operatives were getting.”
He built something else because of that sentence.
What Chase Hughes actually teaches
Chase Hughes teaches behaviour profiling and influence as named, sequenced models with a fixed teaching order, rather than as a list of tells. Six-Minute X-Ray is his rapid profiling system for reading communication style, drivers and needs in a short first conversation. The Behavioral Table of Elements is his reference chart, which organises behaviours so they can be read in clusters. The empathy test is his ethical gate.
All three of those are his, and I attribute them every time because the attribution is the point. A framework with a named origin can be argued with. Advice with no author cannot.
What almost no interview gets out of him is how he thinks, which is a separate subject from what he teaches. His own description of the engine is an addiction:
“It’s addicting because you live in a layer of reality that other people don’t live in. And that’s not hyperbole.”
Then the mechanic underneath it. Every time you get better at reading behaviour, another layer appears underneath the one you just learned to see, and the summary of his last 3 decades is a repeated question: what is the next layer, what is the next level. I called it a never ending onion on camera. He said that was exactly it.
The origin of the whole thing is one night when he was 19. He was on a ship, reading Carl Jung, a stack of profiling books and an FBI profiling manual he had somehow got hold of. “It was a government manual that you couldn’t even find on Amazon. To this day, you can’t find it on Amazon.” He had no instructor and no course, and his own description of the process is the funniest honest thing in the conversation: “piecing all this stuff together like a schizophrenic with the yarn.”
His objection to the state of the field follows directly from having built his own:
Then, on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, there was a large Austrian man behaving badly and everybody was giving him a wide berth. Chase’s read went somewhere else.
“Something like, I went from brain to heart instantly. Something shifted where I was like, there’s a voice in my head is like, oh my god, he’s scared, he’s just fearful.”
He compares it to Neo seeing the code behind the Matrix. What actually happened is smaller and more useful than that. He changed the question, from what is this man doing to what is this man feeling, and the answer inverted. Everyone else on the beach was watching an angry man. He was watching a frightened one.
“You’re not going to go use a rotary telephone just because it works. We have an iPhone now, and our persuasion and influence and behavior profiling stuff should evolve.”
And the reason it left the military and reached civilians at all is one line he says almost in passing while realising it out loud: a human brain is a human brain. They were human skills all along, taught in a military building to people who happened to be wearing a uniform.
The methodology half of that interview, including what he says he is still chasing and what he wants the system to become after he is gone, is written up as the methodology half of the Chase Hughes conversation.
Here is the sentence from it that the rest of this page depends on, so I am placing it deliberately. He learned all of this with no instructor, from Jung and an out-of-print government manual, roughly 15 years before any of it was a curriculum and about 20 years before anybody could enrol in it.
Is influence ethical?
Influence is ethical when the person being influenced, seeing your full intent, would agree it was in their interest. Chase Hughes teaches that as the empathy test, and he frames it as a question rather than a rule: if the person you are doing this to could sit inside your head and watch the whole plan from behind your own eyes, would they say yes, that is what I need?
If the answer is yes, you are influencing. If it is no, you already know what you are doing, and the concealment is the tell.
The conversation this comes from was the first video ever posted to the NCI University channel, in April 2025, with Kris Mullins across from me. Kris was a relatively new student at the time. He had come to a live course I taught in Austin, then to Chase’s Black Course a couple of months later, and he was consuming the material faster than almost anyone I had seen. About 80 minutes in, it turned into the ethics argument, and that is the part people still send me.
He kept going at that pace. Since we recorded, Kris has been through NCI-2 live, NCI-3 live, the exit retreat and Avery practitioner training, and he is one of a handful of people to have done all of it. He is a US Navy veteran and a former corporate detective for two Fortune 50 retailers, which is where the behaviour work started for him, and he has bootstrapped 9 companies past $1M in revenue.
My own position on it is one of the few things I will say without hedging:
“The tool does not define the morality of the action. The intention and the action defines the morality and ethics of the action.”
A knife has no opinion. Neither does a question.
Kris’s example is the one I use with people who think influence is something exotic. He flew home from that course, got delayed an hour and a half, and ended up on a plane full of angry people. The flight attendant came aboard having one of her worst days and opened with “I know everybody’s pissed off. I’m having a real bad day too.” Kris knew exactly what she had just done, because he had spent the week learning it. So he set himself a target of making her laugh. She laughed. After the flight she came back with a bag of drinks and told him he had helped.
His standing rule, in his own words: “If I can make one person laugh every day, I’ve completed my mission for the day.”
The part of that conversation I would fight to keep is a claim about mechanism rather than about ethics. It concerns what contempt is actually made of:
“In order for us to denigrate another person or to get really angry at someone, there is an inherent but often sort of hidden or concealed dehumanization of that person.”
Somebody cuts you off on the freeway and within half a second you have decided what kind of person they are. It does not feel like dehumanising anybody. It just arrives. To get there, though, you had to build a small gap where their actual life should be. Now hold that against your own child. If your kid started bullying another kid in front of you, you would be furious and your empathy would not move an inch, because you know the history underneath the behaviour. Reading a stranger accurately does the same job history does for your own child. It makes contempt hard work.
The whole argument, including the 4 questions I run on myself before a conversation that matters, is at the ethics argument in full, with the empathy test.
Kris ends up somewhere I think is more honest than most ethics writing on this subject. He had watched Chase list the characteristics that successful movements share, looked at the communities he was already part of, and found the same machinery running in daylight, doing good.
“The core concepts are there. It’s up to the person to intend to use them well or not.”
What changes before the technique does
Nick Karvon and I met in a Wednesday night study group. He gave an example, I told him it was tired old NLP, and he took it about as well as anybody could. Two and a half years later he is the 4th person ever certified at NCI-4, he is on our coaching team, and he helps run NCI’s Avery department alongside Kisma Orbovich. He is a graduate of Chase Hughes’s Black Course, an Avery practitioner, and a former studio musician who moved into business.
That sentence skips everything that matters, which is why I wanted him on camera.
When the pandemic hit, his daughter was taken out of school and he was not able to see her. Courts were closed, nothing could be done procedurally, and it ran on for more than a year. He describes his own situation as parental alienation, and I will leave the description where he put it. She was 12, and his framing of why the timing landed so hard is that the years from roughly 12 to 16 are the formative ones and they were going past him.
He found Chase through The Behavior Panel while he was looking at Mark Bowden’s work. His background was deep in NLP, so he had a reference point to judge it against, and his verdict was that this was in a category of one. What came next reads closer to triage than curiosity. His own summary of the decision: if this man was for real and the skills were real and he could actually teach them, then this was his guy.
He joined the graduate programme on New Year’s Day 2023.
Here is the part I would underline on the whole page. The first thing he worked on was the Hughes authority assessment, Chase Hughes’s measure of a person’s own authority and composure. Nothing aimed at his daughter at all. He went in assuming he would score well, since he was confident and running a business, and his verdict on what it actually told him was that he was not even close.
Six months later, day one of the Black Course, in a very large house in northern Virginia full of CEOs, lawyers, investors and hypnotists:
“In my head I’m going, you don’t belong here. You haven’t had enough training. You haven’t had enough skill. What are you doing here?”
He calls that an internal meltdown. What kept him in the building was that his purpose outranked his embarrassment, and 2 other students got him through the first hours of it. I like that passage more than any success story on this page. A grown man had a private collapse in front of impressive people and stayed anyway.
About a week after that course ended he went home and ran one of Chase Hughes’s influence formulas on his daughter. His own assessment of his execution: rusty around the edges.
“The result was a hug for my daughter, which I hadn’t had in over a year, and an apology. And then a whole lot of other stuff came out of her.”
He is careful about what did the work, and so am I. Nothing on this page suggests that behavioural training produces custody outcomes or reconciliations. It is one man’s account of his own situation, and the mechanism he names sits underneath the formula rather than inside it. The full arc, from the study group to the certification, is at the composure story, told from the middle.
Nick was a professional drummer in a former life, so he explains the end state better than I do. You practise rudiments until they are muscle memory and slightly boring, then you play a gig and your brain reaches for the patterns it already built. “I couldn’t even tell you sometimes what technique I’m doing. You just become it and it just oozes out of you.”
Which is why he reframed the whole question, and this is where he ends up:
“Rather than how do I do this, who do I need to become?”
Why hitting the goal can feel like nothing
Rosie Hayer has been in real estate for over 15 years and holds the Eagle Award for Business and Cultural Excellence. She was born in India and came to America at 20, which she describes as getting 2 lifetimes inside one life. She holds NCI-4 Author, is board certified in Cognitive Modification Technology, is an Avery practitioner and a graduate of Chase Hughes’s Black Course, and she is now CEO of NCI Sales, where she built and ran the first live event in Austin in May 2026. I have watched her run one of Chase’s hardest influence formulas better than almost anyone alive. The thing I wanted to ask her about was Christmas 2018.
She had hit the number. Everything outside was working. She could not make herself pick up a phone.
“Instantaneously, I hit the number. It was always like bells and whistles for like 40 seconds, and then it’s complete silence, complete void.”
So she would set a bigger number and run it again. Her description of the trap is precise: “Everything on the outside was perfect. This is what success is, you got to have these many clients, these many closings, business relationships. But inside I felt so empty.”
Her account of what changed her performance is worth reading carefully, because she puts it in the least flattering place possible, which is on herself. She describes going from a 0% closing rate on her first 100 calls to a 90% closing rate on her last 100 appointments, and she raises it in order to ask her own question about it: what changed in her? Did she use a different script, or did she become more aware of the person on the other side, more willing to address the emotion there, better at creating safety? Those figures are hers about her own work, and they say nothing about what any course produces for anyone else.
The mechanism she teaches is the reason arguing yourself into a better mood does not work. Here is how I put it to her on camera, and I want to keep it at exactly the level I keep it, which is an explanation rather than a research claim:
“We’re basically asking the limbic region of our brain which is generating the emotions to be influenced by the prefrontal cortex which is interpreting language and thought and rational thinking. And unfortunately the limbic system just does not speak English.”
Telling your brain to stop thinking about something is a top-down instruction to a bottom-up system, and it gets ignored. Rosie’s version is blunter and better:
“Happy thoughts are not like thoughts you create. You can’t create thoughts. I think thoughts are wild. They are disobedient. They don’t listen to you.”
The image she uses for the fix is hers, and I have stolen it about 40 times since. A hot air balloon has an enormous canopy on top and a small basket underneath with a burner in it. The canopy is your thoughts. The burner is the emotion.
“We don’t fight the thing on the top to bring it down. That would be such a heavy effort. What we do is we turn the heat down and we slowly land the basket.”
Her first move was a decision rather than a technique: “I became more interested in making life than making a living.” Then a daily practice she started in March 2019 and has not missed a day of since, which she describes without a shred of romance. It was the most painful experience of her life. Her ankles hurt, her back hurt, and an alarm went off outside the room every morning at exactly the wrong moment.
The full practice, step by step, including what to do with an emotion once you have named it, is at the enjoyment conversation, and the practice underneath it.
The meditation was a means. The target underneath it was self-trust, and she names it in the middle of the conversation, in the least technique-shaped sentence any guest on this page says:
“How long am I going to say that I’m going to do something and not do it before I stop trusting myself?”
Four doors, one finding: what these behavioral science interviews share
Four people arrived at the same conclusion from four starting points that share nothing.
| Guest | Arrived from | What they already had | What they say changed it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chase Hughes | 20 years in the US Navy, interrogation and SERE schools | The most advanced training the military offered him | Reading a frightened man as frightened, at 19, with no framework for it |
| Kris Mullins | Marketing, DJ booths, and a childhood spent reading rooms for safety | A working understanding of how groups get organised | The intent behind the tool, rather than the tool |
| Nick Karvon | A business, and a background deep in NLP | Technique, and plenty of it | Becoming composed, and being read as safe |
| Rosie Hayer | 15 years in real estate sales | A number she hit, and the scripts that hit it | Working the emotion underneath the thought |
Nobody set out to agree with anybody. Three of them had never met the other two at the time they were recorded. The conversations were recorded months apart, on 4 different subjects, and the only instruction any guest got was to tell me what actually happened.
The finding, stated once and plainly: the person running the technique decides what the technique does. Every guest says a version of it in their own vocabulary. Nick says he became safe and his daughter responded to that before he did anything. Rosie says she turned the burner down and the thought lost its lift. Kris says the concepts are there and the person decides what they are for. Chase says he went from brain to heart on a beach at 19 and the reading skill switched on afterward.
My own version is the one I said on camera and it is the closest thing this page has to a thesis:
“Who you are is going to define the outcomes… way before we’re talking about any kind of techniquey stuff.”
The objection, stated properly
Here is what a careful reader is thinking by now, and I would rather write it out than let it sit unaddressed.
Four people trained by the same institution agree with that institution’s central claim. That is what a curriculum sounds like coming back. It is what you would expect to hear whether the claim were true or false, because everyone in the room learned the vocabulary in the same building, from the same materials, sometimes from me. Selection is doing work too. I picked the guests, they said yes, and people who found the training useful are far more likely to sit down in front of a camera and talk about it than people who found it useless.
That objection is correct as far as it goes, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If this page tried to wave it away, everything else on it would deserve less trust.
The one fact that survives it
There is one thing in the set that the objection does not reach.
Chase Hughes describes the shift arriving at 19, on a beach in Honolulu, from Carl Jung and a stack of profiling books and a government manual he could not buy. He had no instructor, no course and no curriculum. NCI did not exist. Nothing that anyone could enrol in would exist for about 2 more decades. In his own account, the curriculum is downstream of the shift rather than the source of it. He noticed the thing first, spent roughly 15 years building a way to teach it, and only then did anyone start arriving to be taught.
The other guests describe the same shift arriving through that curriculum.
Something that shows up both before the training exists and after somebody takes it is doing something other than being taught. That is the argument, and it is the whole of it. It falls well short of proving the curriculum is good. What it does suggest is that the thing the curriculum points at was there before the curriculum was, which is a different and more interesting claim than the one the objection defeats.
There is a weaker supporting point and I will keep it in its place, second. Three of these guests arrived carrying a system. Nick had years of NLP and a professional reference point sharp enough to judge new material against. Kris had marketing, movement-building, and a childhood in which reading a room accurately was a safety skill before it was a professional one. Rosie had 15 years of sales and scripts that had produced a number most people never reach. None of them lacked technique. Every one of them describes technique as the part that was already in hand and still not enough.
What this is worth, at its actual strength
Four accounts make a pattern. They do not make a study.
I want to be exact about the difference, because the whole subject of these conversations is people making confident claims about other people on thin evidence. There is no control group here. There is no measurement, no independent verification and no way to know how many people went through the same training and describe nothing of the kind, because those people are not the ones who end up on a podcast. Anyone who tells you 4 interviews demonstrate the efficacy of a training programme is selling you something, and they are doing it with a device you will learn to spot in the first module of the course.
So here is the hedged claim, stated as a claim. Across 4 accounts recorded separately, months apart, on different subjects, the same order of operations shows up every time: the state changes, and the skill starts working afterward. That is a pattern worth noticing and worth testing on yourself. No one of these conversations proves it, and 4 of them together still do not.
What makes it worth your attention anyway is that it is checkable. You do not have to take anyone’s word for the order of operations. You can run it. Take one conversation this week that usually goes badly, change nothing about your words, and change your own state before you walk in. Then watch what the other person does. That test costs nothing and it answers the question for exactly one person, which happens to be the only person whose answer you need.
Why the curriculum is built in that order
The order these guests describe is the order the training is built in, which is either evidence of a real finding or evidence of a well-taught idea, and I have already told you why I think it leans the first way.
The marketing hook for material like this is always learn to read people, and then the first thing the curriculum does is turn you around and start on you, because reading anybody else depends on it. Nick’s first assignment was a measure of his own authority and composure, months before anything aimed at his daughter. Rosie’s whole practice runs on her own emotional state and she says the point of it was never the practice. Chase’s first module frustrates people who arrive wanting a list of tells, and he built it that way on purpose.
If you want the mechanics of the reading skill itself, that lives at how behaviour profiling actually works. If you want the state work underneath it, which is what every guest on this page is really describing, it is at the authority and confidence work every guest describes.
NCI’s own name for the end of that road is authorship. Its values run as an acronym, A.U.T.H.O.R.: Awareness, Understanding, Tactical Communication, High Agency, Ownership, Results. Its top certification is formally called Author and Elite Operator. The construct is the institution’s, and my human-scale version of it is the line I keep coming back to: how you stop being a character in everyone else’s story, and how you start to become the author of your own.
Nick Karvon puts the same idea better than either of us usually manages it:
“It’s not necessarily about creating outcomes that are for you. You’re learning these skills so that you can help others break free from the chains that are holding them back and then be able to do whatever the hell they want.”
What NCI University is, for anyone who arrived cold
NCI University is a behavioural training and certification institution founded by Chase Hughes. NCI stands for Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence. It sells structured progression toward a credential rather than a library of videos, and its curriculum is organised as a ladder with 4 levels.
- NCI-1, Behavior Observer. $252. A 6-hour course covering foundational nonverbal reading. This is where every student starts, me included.
- NCI-2, Behavior Profiler. $795. A 12-hour course built on a 3-part model of baseline, deviations and drivers, with 22 video modules and 32 practice calls run with facilitators.
- NCI-3, Behavior Scientist. $2,987. Influence, persuasion and authority at a professional level, 6 to 8 weeks self-paced.
- NCI-4, Author and Elite Operator. A 12-month graduate programme with weekly live mentorship, an application and an orientation call. Nick Karvon is the 4th person ever certified at this level, by his own account on camera.
The material is field-derived. It came out of military interview, interrogation, elicitation and source-handling work, and Chase translated it into civilian language and a fixed teaching order. Alongside the ladder there are live certification events, a community layer and an app.
Two things worth knowing that the sales pages do not put first. The curriculum starts with the student rather than with the target, which is the single most common reason people are surprised by the first module. And NCI publishes a list of who it does not want, which is unusual enough to be worth reading before you spend anything: people looking for quick tricks, people who want confidence theatre without training, people uncomfortable examining their own blind spots, people who want power without responsibility, and people looking to dominate others rather than develop themselves.
I am the Dean of Academic Affairs there, I teach the live events, and I host these conversations. You should factor that in when you read anything on this page. It also means the descriptions above are accurate, because I would hear about it within a day if they were not.
If you want the sequenced version of where a person actually starts, that is written up at where to start if you want to learn this properly.
Where a page like this stops being enough
Here is the honest limit of what you have just read.
Four people described a change in themselves, and I have given you no way to start one. Watching 5 hours of other people’s accounts sits in the same category as reading a book about swimming, which is genuinely useful right up until the moment you are in water.
Everything on this page that actually did the work happened in reps. Nick built composure over months of ordinary conversations, and stopped strangers in a Target to ask their favourite Disney princess purely to get comfortable opening his mouth in a situation where nothing was riding on it. Chase took a nights-and-weekends job at a clothing shop in a Honolulu mall in his early 20s specifically because it was a low-stakes place to practise, and by his own account that is where he got the anxiety out of his system. Rosie has a daily practice she has not missed since 2019.
There is a second limit, and it is the one a notebook cannot fix. What you cannot see about yourself is often plainly visible to somebody sitting across from you. That is the whole reason the reading skill and the self-work get taught together and in that order rather than separately.
The version of this that starts with you rather than with anybody you are hoping to read is the NCI-1 Behavior Observer course, 6 hours, $252, the first level of the ladder every student here climbs.
One disqualifier before the questions, and it is the least manufactured line available on this page because every guest on it says a version of it. Most people who ask about this material want the reading skill, and the reading skill is downstream of the part nobody asks about. If what you want is a technique to use on somebody tomorrow, the first module will annoy you, and it is supposed to.
Frequently asked questions
What is NCI University?
NCI University is a behavioural training and certification institution founded by Chase Hughes, teaching profiling, influence and authority through a 4-level ladder. It runs from NCI-1 Behavior Observer, a 6-hour course at $252, up to a 12-month graduate programme with an application and an orientation call. NCI stands for Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence.
How do you start learning to read people?
Three moves, in order. Build a baseline, meaning how this specific person behaves when nothing much is happening. Read clusters rather than single cues, because one gesture on its own carries no information. Check context before you conclude anything, since a cold room and bad news both produce behaviour that looks like stress.
How long does it take to learn this?
The entry course runs 6 hours and you will be able to name what you are seeing by the end of it. Doing it live takes months. Nick Karvon’s first real result came about a week after a live course, inside an arc he describes as roughly 2 and a half years. Rosie Hayer describes about 6 years of work on herself.
Is any of this actually science?
Partly, and the limits matter more than the strengths. The Behavioral Table of Elements is Chase Hughes’s own organisation of a large body of published psychology, which is not the same thing as a validated instrument. The system reads probabilistically: clusters indicate likelihood. It does not detect lies. The Deception Rating Scale scores likelihood and never declares anyone a liar.
What is the difference between watching these conversations and taking the training?
These conversations are 4 people’s accounts of what happened to them, which is useful for deciding whether the source is credible and whether the idea fits how you think. The training is structured reps against real footage with someone qualified correcting what you cannot see about your own reading. Accounts inform. Reps build skill.
How would a manager or a negotiator use this?
A manager uses it to notice where a person’s behaviour shifts during a conversation, which tells them which topic to return to with 2 more questions. If a relaxed baseline changes on one line of a project update, ask again there. One caution, and it applies at every level: never act on a single reading. Confirm it or drop it.
Do you have to be naturally good with people for this to work?
No, and the evidence is on this page. Nick Karvon describes an internal meltdown on day one of his first live course, standing in a room of CEOs and lawyers thinking he did not belong there, and names 2 other students who got him through the first hours. He is now certified at the top of the ladder and coaches other people through it.
Who created the frameworks these conversations refer to?
Chase Hughes created almost all of them, including Six-Minute X-Ray, the Behavioral Table of Elements, the empathy test, the authority assessment and the emotional payoff concept. NCI University owns the certification ladder and the author construct. One exception, stated cleanly: the Identity Circuit Model is mine, and it is taught inside the graduate curriculum.
Is it ethical to learn to influence people?
Yes, on one condition, and Chase Hughes gives the condition as a test. If the person you are influencing could watch your whole plan from behind your own eyes, would they agree it was in their interest? My own position underneath that: the tool does not define the morality of the action. The intention and the action do.
Where should someone start?
Start with the Chase Hughes life story, because it is the fastest route to deciding whether you find the source credible, which is the question you actually have. Then read the methodology piece, which shows how he thinks rather than what he sells. If both land, the ethics conversation is the one that tells you what the material is for.
Is the NCI University podcast still running?
Four conversations were recorded and published, the most recent in June 2025, and there have been none since. There is no schedule and no announced return. If a fifth gets recorded, it will appear on this page. Everything already recorded stays up and stays free, and the archive works as a finished set.
Who has Merlin OBrecht interviewed?
Four guests, all inside NCI University. Chase Hughes, the founder, a 20-year US Navy veteran and the author of Six-Minute X-Ray. Kris Mullins, from marketing and movement-building, a Navy veteran and former Fortune 50 corporate detective. Nick Karvon, certified at NCI-4, on the coaching team and helping run NCI’s Avery department, who wrote Vanishing Parent. Rosie Hayer, 15 years in real estate, NCI-4 Author and now CEO of NCI Sales, on emotional state and enjoyment.
The conversations: all 4, and the 5 pages they produced
Read them in this order if you are new. It is the order that answers your questions in the sequence you are likely to have them, rather than the order they were recorded in.
- Who Chase Hughes is, and the 20 years before NCI. The full life story in order, from the report card nobody could save to the resume he shredded. Start here if your first question is whether the source is credible.
- What Chase Hughes actually teaches about reading behaviour. The methodology half of the same conversation: chasing layers, the manual he taught himself from, and why he says most influence training is 60 years out of date.
- The test Chase Hughes applies before using any of it. With Kris Mullins. The empathy test, what contempt is actually made of, and 4 questions you can run on yourself in 10 seconds.
- What composure did for one father in the hardest year of his life. With Nick Karvon. A year without seeing his daughter, the composure work that came before any technique, and a hug.
- Why hitting the number can feel like nothing. With Rosie Hayer. The 40 seconds of celebration after a target lands, the hot air balloon, and the practice she has not missed since 2019.
Four conversations produced 5 pages because the Chase Hughes interview answers 2 completely different questions, and one page trying to answer both would answer neither well. A fifth conversation would go at the end of this list.
Anyone deciding what to do with material like this runs into the same problem in the same order, and there is a sequence that works better than picking a video at random. It is written out, with the actual first steps and what each one costs, at where to start if you want to learn this properly. It assumes nothing and it will tell you honestly if the answer is that you should buy nothing yet.
Where to go from here
Every guest on this page describes the same order of operations, and the thing none of them could do from where they were standing is tell you how deep the pool goes. That part you find out by getting in.
If you want the skill rather than the accounts of it, the entry point is NCI-1 Behavior Observer. 6 hours, $252, the first level of the ladder, and the same one I started on.
If you would rather buy nothing today, do the free version of what every one of these guests describes. Pick one small thing, promise it to yourself, and do it tomorrow. Rosie built 6 years on that single move, and it is the only step on this page that costs nothing and still works.
