I talk with an Army Psychological Operations soldier about what military psy-op work really involves—and how different the reality is from many people’s ideas about the nature of that work. We discuss his psy-op work in Afghanistan, why credibility and truth are usually much more persuasive and effective than deception, and fascinating historical operations involving surrender appeals, staged intelligence, and Vietnam’s eerie “ghost tapes.” We also explore the legal and ethical limits on influencing Americans, how social media has blurred those boundaries, how foreign influence campaigns exploit political polarization, and why “PSYOP” has become an all-purpose label for conspiracy theories. Finally, we examine the red flags that can help you identify self-proclaimed-but-deceptive military-persuasion experts (like Chase Hughes) who fabricate and exaggerate their credentials and experience to sell their psychology- and behavior-focused training and products.
Links to related resources and a transcript are below.
Episode links:
Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:
(transcripts are generated automatically and will contain errors)
Psy-op soldier clip: “You go to PSYOP training, it’s not gonna make you a mind reader. It’s not gonna make you a human lie detector. It’s not gonna make you an interrogator or a universal expert in human behavior… it’s not mind control. It’s not a secret superpower. Most real influence work is less cinematic than people… want to imagine. It’s about credibility, audience context, timing, and whether the message matches reality… The problem is that when serious people do not explain the field, the vacuum gets filled with conspiracy theorists, entertainers, and people selling secret military persuasion systems… And that hurts the public understanding.”
That was a clip from my talk with an Army PSYOP veteran named Pat. If you don’t already know, psy-op stands for psychological operations. To quote from the Army website, psy-op soldiers quote “use expert communication skills and unconventional tactics to support U.S. Army objectives.” unquote. Such work generally involves the strategic use of information, propaganda, or media to sway an enemy’s, adversary’s, or public’s state of mind.
In this episode, Pat will talk about what psy-op involves, stories from his psy-op work that he’s done in Afghanistan and other countries, and about some of the controversies and concerns around psy-op work. If you’re interested in how the military uses psychological tactics, including persuasion and including fear, to achieve their goals, you’ll find this an interesting talk. We also talk about some of the persistent myths and misunderstandings about what psy-op soldiers do, and how that relates to paranoid ideas and conspiracy theories. We talk about what Russia’s goals really might have been in creating political content in the lead-up to the 2016 election. We also talk about the origins of the word propaganda, and how it went from having a neutral association to a negative association. And we talk about why you don’t see Uncle Sam posters and similar posters any more, and how that ban stemmed from a ban on psychological operations targeting American citizens.
A little bit more background on Pat: he’s a retired U.S. Army non-commissioned officer and Psychological Operations veteran who served in tactical PSYOP units, including during Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan. After military retirement, he worked in maritime archaeology and remained active in PSYOP historical research and regimental affairs. He is also an officer in the Psychological Operations Regimental Association. Pat appears here on my podcast solely in his personal capacity and does not speak in any official capacity for any military or government department or agency.
Due to the nature of Pat’s work, we’re just using his first name here, so as to limit his exposure a bit.
As you might know if you’ve listened to the People Who Read People podcast before, you know that I’ve done some work exposing a con artist named Chase Hughes, and it was because of Chase Hughes that Pat initially reached out to me.
Some of Chase’s many lies include claims that he’s worked in various official, high-level capacities for the military on things like interrogation training and behavior analysis and psychological operations of various sorts, when his record shows that he was actually a Navy quartermaster, working on ship and equipment maintenance and logistics and such. Despite the egregiously obvious nature of Chase’s lies and exaggerated claims, he has appeared on some very popular shows, including appearing twice each on Diary of a CEO and Joe Rogan. These appearances on the shows of gullible, irresponsible show hosts have helped him gain millions of youtube followers, and who knows how many customers paying him money under false pretenses.
Chase has on multiple occasions claimed or implied that he’s been involved with military psy-op work. He uses this false authority to spread a lot of bad and illogical ideas on many topics. In many of his own videos and in many interviews, he spreads paranoia that many things around us might be psy-ops of various sorts; that hardly anything is real, that everything is manufactured.
clip from Shawn Ryan Show.
Shawn: “Charlie Kirk was just assassinated. Is that a psy-op? Is the Epstein shit a psy-op? Ukraine? China?”
Chase Hughes: “All psy-op”
Shawn: “everything”
One important point here is that Chase is using “psy-op” as a general catchall term; some shadowy group, somewhere, is creating a huge variety of false fronts and deceptive news items. He’s using it in a general conspiratorial way, not to refer to Army psy-op work. And that’s how a lot of people use the term psy-op these days; it’s just part of expressing a general paranoia about various unknown, shadowy forces controlling us. And toxic political polarization has really amplified such paranoia, across the board, across many political ideologies. And as I’ve written about in my work on political polarization, which you can learn about at american-anger.com; this goes both ways; political pessimism and contempt lead to more paranoia, and paranoia leads to more pessimism. Many people these days are pessimistic and paranoid, and this also helps Chase find an audience of fans; they see his paranoid views as legitimate, and become more likely to trust him.
Chase uses his false claims about having done Army psy-op work to bolster both his perceived authority and his conspiratorial claims. If one believes that he has seen the inner workings of what the military has done, and even helps train such operations, his false claims about all the deception around us become more believable. You’ll be more likely to pay for his psychology-related work, and maybe even for his increasingly culty guru-like teachings.
[clip from Chase Hughes’ youtube video: “I’m the guy who trains psy-ops and stuff to companies and stuff.”]
On his second appearance on Joe Rogan, in June of 2026, Chase said that he was going to Fort Bragg to train psy-op soldiers.
“In two days I’m going to Fort Bragg to train the US Army psy-ops division.”
Chase usually sticks to ambiguous language, the hallmark of frauds and con artists, so this was a fairly rare concrete and directly disprovable statement from him. But I think pathological liars like Chase really can’t help themselves; I think people like Chase, at some level, want to be caught and called out, which helps explain this kind of playing with self-destructive fire that is so common.
While I’m certain this statement is a lie, and obviously willing to go on record publicly saying that, obviously such things are hard to directly prove using official statements and records. I’ve put in a freedom of information request to the Army to get an official statement on this specific question, but I’ve been told getting an official statement is hard as it requires a good amount of research; for example, even if they know quickly he didn’t work with the psy-op division, they would want to check there wasn’t some one-off interaction or gig. When I submitted my request for Chase’s Navy record, that took six months and was I think a much simpler request, as that just involved pulling up a single record.
But anyway, Chase’s appearance on Rogan is what led to Pat reaching out to me. The psy-op world is a small one, you see, and false claims are quickly noticed. False claims bother people who do the actual work, for a multitude of reasons; for one thing, being associated with a bunch of lies and conspiratorial ideas makes them look bad. This is actually the third time an actual psy-op soldier has reached out to me about Chase’s false psy-op claims.
Pat and I talk about Chase toward the end of this talk, but I’ll include a summary of this that Pat sent me in an email: “No one I asked in the PSYOP professional and regimental circles I know recognized Hughes as a PSYOP professional or trainer. That is community knowledge, not an official Army records determination. A one-off private contact is theoretically possible, but that is materially different from officially training Army PSYOP or implying institutional endorsement.” End quote. Toward the end of the talk Pat talks about red flags for spotting people who are only pretending to have secret knowledge and elite credentials.
If you like this episode, you might also enjoy a previous episode where I talk to historian Stephen Kinzer about the government mind control program MK Ultra; we talk about what’s fact versus fiction and the many misunderstandings and myths about that program.
One cool thing I learned from talking to Pat was that my podcast had been recommended by an Army psy-op trainer to people taking his course. I might be talking to that psy-op trainer for the podcast in the future. When I asked that person about that, he told me that my podcast was included in what’s called a “commander’s reading list,” which is a list of resources the commander believes quote “would be great for their subordinates and their professional development.” end quote.
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast and things I’ve delved into, and if you want to encourage me to do it more often, please consider subscribing to it on youtube or your preferred podcast platform, consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts platform, and consider sending me a donation at buymeacoffee.com; my page there is at buymeacoffee.com/zachelwood. All those things are greatly appreciated!
Okay here’s the talk with Pat.
Hi, Pat. Thanks for joining me.
Pat: Hey, how you doing, brother?
Zach Elwood: Doing great. Yeah, thanks so much for, for taking the time for this.
Uh, I thought maybe we could start with… It’s probably hard to define it all ’cause, because I know PSYOP work involves so many different, um, aspects and, uh, over, especially over time. But do you have a, a… Like, what’s your favorite way to explain what the, the, the work involves?
Pat: If we’re speaking very broadly about PSYOP, the US Army PSYOP is about influencing, uh, foreign audiences in support of military objectives.
So, uh, e- essentially, we work for, or I worked for the commander to either, you know, get the behavior of the civilians in the area he’s gonna operate in, uh, adhere to what he wants, or the enemy. In World War II days, it even included allies. Uh, and you say, “Well, what do you mean by that?” Well, for civilians, we would typically…
I’d tell the boss, “Hey, I can move these guys off the battlefield. W- uh, what is your objective? Where are you going to go, and how do I move these civilians off the battlefield?” For example, if we said, “We’re gonna drop, uh, bombs on this target at this exact time,” we would drop leaflets on the civilian population say, “Hey, get the heck out of there.
This is what’s gonna happen at this exact time, and you need to move to save yourselves.” That would be an example of the civilian side. Enemy would be, like, a surrender appeal. Um, you would drop leaflets or you use television or radio to tell them y- you, for whatever reason, “Hey, here is the truth of, uh, your situation, and you can, you can surrender and save your life.”
So I guess, like, in practice, what is PSYOP? It means understanding the audience, you know, identifying that behavior you want to affect, and then developing the messages or actions that might influence that behavior. And then, as I said, you’re coordinating with the commander or your, your ally partners, and then you go back and you assess whether or not anything has changed.
And within, within those parameters, that’s, that’s everything under the sun that you, you, you have access to, to make that happen.
Zach Elwood: You had sent me that website, Ed Rouse’s website, PsyWarrior. Yeah. And it, I think the way he put it was something like the, the usual military work is like, you know, direct engagement-
Pat: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm …
Zach Elwood: to achieve means, you know, actual combat. But the, the, the, the PSYOP element is, like, the indirect, uh-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: softer skill kind of things to accomplish those, uh, missions. Is that, is that another way to, to, to look at it?
Pat: Yeah. That, that’d be a good way to put it, and that, that is an excellent, excellent resource.
Uh, that, that was Ed Rouse and, um, Sergeant Major Herb Friedman.
Zach Elwood: A quick note here, that website that we’re discussing is at psywarrior.com. That’s P-S-Y warrior.com.
Pat: Excellent, excellent, excellent resource, and it… I think that really does paint a picture on What PSYOP really does, not so much what we’re rumored to do.
Zach Elwood: Would you like to talk about how you understand the PSYOP work to have maybe changed over time? Uh, and has it changed over time, or is it largely the same as when it wa- the department was created? How, how do you see that? Uh,
Pat: well, yeah, no, that’s a good question. Um, I, I’ll say the fundamentals of PSYOP have never changed.
Um, I… The guys like, uh, Dr. Paul Linebarger, they literally wrote the book on psychological operations or psychological warfare, uh, during and right after World War II. So the, the philosophy and the approach a- and the, uh, the underlying academics haven’t changed. The technology for reaching the audience has changed, though.
I guess social media would probably be… I’d say that would be the primary way it- it’s really changed.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, digital internet stuff.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: Yeah, and that gets into, like, the tricky legalese of it. If your listeners, uh, aren’t familiar with it, uh, check out the Smith-Mundt Act. That says that a psychological operations soldier of the US Department of Defense cannot legally PSYOP an American citizen
Zach Elwood: Right
Pat: That, that is by law.
Um, so if you, if you caught a PSYOP soldier, you know, operationally within the confines of your unit doing something to an American citizen, that’s a big no-no, like criminal investigation level stuff. But, uh, what, what happened was with this social media getting more complex, they had to look at the laws because now, um- Yeah,
Zach Elwood: anything can be viewed-
Pat: Right
by
Zach Elwood: anybody.
Pat: And suppose, uh, you know, and I’ll use made-up, uh, country names. I’m sure folks could probably, you know, figure things out. But if you had a country like for, I, I don’t know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll pick Sprocket Land for, for the heck of it. And you, you’re, you’re there, uh, uh, wherever you’re at, whether you’re in Utah or Maryland or, or Florida, and you pick it up.
They go, “Oh man, I’m getting PSYOP product.” I mean, well, we didn’t specifically ta- you weren’t the, the, the target audience for that.
Zach Elwood: You were, you were like a collateral, uh, psychological, uh, damage or something.
Pat: Yeah. And that, that’s the case where, uh, s- uh, technology has made them have to go back and review how they do these things.
Zach Elwood: Hmm.
Pat: And I’m not, and, and b- being that I’m out, I’m, so I’m retired these days, so I’m not as up on how the law has changed or not changed since.
Zach Elwood: Right. That sounds, yeah, that, that, that sounds complicated. Yeah, ’cause it’s like, what, what does it mean to target something? And if someone consumes it, are they theoretically considered to be targeted?
Or what, you know- Yeah … that’s a, that’s a tough, I could see-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: that’s a tough legal,
Pat: uh- And that’s, yeah. And that, that’s, and that’s of course why PSYOPers, you know, the, uh, in the, back when I was in that, you would have to confer with ja- So that is part of the process. Like you would make a product and you would have to go confer with the judge advocate to make sure that you, you and the c- everybody was legal eagle.
You, you definitely have to turn your brain power on when you do this, this kind, this line of work.
Zach Elwood: Do you wanna talk about the specific kinds of things that you did, uh, wh- when you were, uh, serving? Some specifics?
Pat: Sure. So I did, I did some, uh, some tours in Afghanistan. Uh, I did what was called the, uh, VSO program, uh, also VSP, uh, which was, uh, Village Stability Operations or Village Stability Platform.
It was a resurrection of something they had done in Vietnam that was actually very successful. The, the idea was that you would push the bad guy out of an area, and then you would bring in a special forces team, uh, known as an ODA, um, or, and a PSYOPS team and a civil affairs team, and they would work together within, uh, the village, uh, to improve the infrastructure and that sort of thing.
And when the next fighting season roll around, the enemy doesn’t have safe harbor and the people are able to step, ste- uh, step up for themselves, so to speak, a- and keep the enemy from destabilizing it. In, in that, uh, context, uh, you know, I would go out and get a feel for the population and what their grievances were, how they perceived American forces, how they perceived the national Afghan forces, how they perceived, uh, the Taliban, and then I would go back and work on plans.
Okay, how do we improve the, uh, US’s image in this area? What are things that we can affect and fix? And I would advise the ODA commander, “Hey, sir, you know, one thing is, uh, uh, they’re limited in information access.” Uh, so we had access to something called a tactical radio station And, uh, I, I think that’s what they were called.
I… It, my memory slips a little bit. It’s been, I guess, a decade plus since I’ve, I did that. But, uh, a tactical radio station is a, it, a two-man carry. You set it up, and essentially we take folks that, um, had no electricity, uh, no television, no radios, and we bring radio information to them. In that respect, we would, uh, we would give out, uh, pro-government messages.
We would, uh, we had a radio literacy program. We would give, uh, a program on farming to improve farming techniques, uh, sanitation stuff, and it would all be done in their language. So kind of think of me as a radio disc jockey out, out in the middle of nowhere. I, I was really proud of the, uh, radio literacy program.
Uh, so what, uh, we would do is we’d go out to the different villages where the radio covered. We would hand out these, uh, books made in our higher headquarters, and I, I think it was if the, the kids opened a book up and they tune in every night at, like, 6:00 or 7:00, whenever they finished dinner, they tune in, they, they follow along with the book, and if they s- were consistent for about a month, they would have a third-grade reading level.
Zach Elwood: Oh, wow. Hmm.
Pat: For your audience, uh, that the, the literacy rate, I think… Gosh, I used to know it, but it, it was in the 90 per- 90% of the country was illiterate.
Zach Elwood: Hmm.
Pat: Couldn’t read their own language, couldn’t read, well, any language. Uh, the only ones that really knew or had a higher literacy rating would’ve been the folks up in Kabul or the religious leaders-
Zach Elwood: Oh, right
Pat: uh, typically were, were, uh, literate.
Zach Elwood: Hmm.
Pat: Uh, so we would do things like that. And the Afghan people, they, they really seemed to like it. I was probably one of the safest guys on the team ’cause they knew if I got hurt, that was the end of the radio as far as they knew.
Zach Elwood: Hmm. That, that was kind of like a modern, uh, version of l- of the old, uh, older PSYOP operations, uh, in, in like World War II and Vietnam, where they would drop leaflets, um- Yeah
on, on, on people to, you know, get the message across of whatever sort. Now, now you’re using radio, you’re using other things.
Pat: Exactly. Yeah. Uh, you would use cell phone, you’d push out messaging and all that sort of thing. And it’s clever, too, with the radio literacy program, um, if you wanted to drop leaflets on them, then they could read them, you know, after you made them literate.
But, uh, they did use leaflet drops as well. I don’t know the effectiveness of the leaflet drops. I wasn’t involved in that portion of the war. But, uh, the, the VSO program was, in my opinion, very, very effective. It didn’t last very long. I think it was four years. Uh, there was some issues with it. It w- it is very hard on the American troops because you’re living out among the villagers and you’re essentially living in the same conditions as rural Afghans.
Um, so again, um, uh, mud brick houses, uh, exposure to the elements, that sort of thing, limited connectivity, especially in those days. But it was effective because we really did empower the, the Afghans. Uh, and that was a, that was a fun thing too, as a cyber you had to navigate the local politics because you had tribal issues.
And, uh, one of the things I had to do was, uh, recruit for the Afghan local police, which was a, I think it was a hamlet police force. The idea was you would give them police training. Uh, they essentially would be the defense perimeter or your defense perimeter against the bad guys, uh, when the bad guys would come back after the, after the, uh, the winter season.
So the summer season was the fighting season, uh, just because of the snow and all that things. They, they don’t travel much during the winter. From there, they would, uh, uh, be able to fight against the bad guys. But, uh, like I said, you had to navigate the tribal issues because some tribes would be supportive of the Afghan local police and then say, “Hey, that guy’s Taliban.”
And he wasn’t Taliban, he was from the other tribe, and he wants you to arrest him for them.
Zach Elwood: Oh, yeah, a lot of, lot of complex, uh, interactions and politics. Yeah.
Pat: Yeah. Uh, there was a private police force run by someone named Matulla Khan, which if there’s any listeners that are retired Green Berets, they know who that guy is.
And, uh, anytime he didn’t get paid, he’d pull his police force out of the area. So if we had this level of security, it went to this, and we couldn’t go outside of our own fortified space. Uh, and then that was an issue too. But I, I’d say the tribal stuff was the most interesting ’cause you would have complex issues going back centuries and centuries and centuries.
Zach Elwood: Hmm. Are there other, um, major types of operations that you worked on that you wanna mention?
Pat: Uh, one of the cooler things I, I would say I got to do was I got to do a, uh, a joint training exercise with, uh, the Thai Army. Got to go through an abbreviated Thai survival school where I had to eat a cobra and drink cobra’s blood.
And, and if guys have ever done that, you know, they, they, they’ve been through it too, I’m sure. Um, it’s kind of a thing that they do for American troops when we go out there. But it was an exchange and we would train them in, in tactics in PSYOP. But the, the really cool thing to me was, uh, with the Thai PSYOP forces was seeing that, uh, they were doing things that we used to do in the 1960s and ’70s in Vietnam that we stopped doing long ago.
Um, and I think that’s a shame. Like, they would put on full stage productions. Uh, so their PSYOPers actually had to, uh, uh, be trained actors in some cases. Uh, but that, that’s the, the, the two, the two that I, I really, uh, I, I can think of that were exciting, at least in my career, was the VSO missions and doing the Thailand, uh, joint, uh, training.
Zach Elwood: Hmm. Yeah, I was, uh, you know, reading about PSYOP-related things l- last few days and, uh, for a lot of people, I think, I think there was a lot of what they think of when they think of PSYOP is More underhanded and, and devious things. A- and those things can obviously exist too, but-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: it seems like there’s a lot of, like, completely non-controversial things that the, uh, the psyop, uh, people do.
You know, for example, I was reading about basically explaining to a, an enemy force, like, “Hey, you’re, you’re gonna be destroyed,” and, and, and being very b- very truthful in that regard. Being like, “Hey, you’re surrounded, you’re vastly outnumbered.” Mm-hmm. Like, “Don’t start a conflict.” And also aspects of, like, in World War II, probably other places, dropping leaflets that explain to soldiers, like, “Look, you can give up and you’ll be treated very well.”
And th- these are, you know, these are real things that you’re explaining to help reduce the conflict, the, the, uh, toxicity or the violence of the-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: of the conflict. So just to say some of these things, and obviously there’s, there can be deceptive aspects of that too, but, like, trying to persuade instead of fight is a, to me a, can be a, uh, a very non-controversial aspect of the, of the psyop work.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Yeah,
Pat: that’s, that’s the thing with psyop is it’s, it’s, you know, I see all over online, “Be careful, it’s a psyop.” And I used to joke with my soldiers, “You know, they never say online, ‘Be careful, it’s a special forces.’ They always say, ‘Be careful, it’s a psyop.'” So it tells you who the, who’s really the, the scary ones of the force, right?
Um, but for psyop, it’s a very, like, most of the job is really, really mundane. There’s, like, cool stuff you occasionally get to do, but it’s, it’s girded into truth. Um, if you lie to the enemy, you can’t persuade them- Hmm … because, like, they, they, they’re gonna be able to prove that you lied eventually.
Zach Elwood: Right, it’s like interrogation.
So- It’s like, uh- Yeah … criminal interviews and interrogations. It’s like there’s, there can be r- a real counter, uh, a negative impact, um, blowback from, from lying to people and having them know that you lied- Right … and such, right?
Pat: It’s, it’s eventually gonna come out in the wash. And especially, you know, imagine if we dropped a leaflet, uh, before D-Day on the Germans that said, “Hey, we’re gonna beat you.
Uh, we’re gonna win. Surrender now. Go to the, I don’t know, go to the border of whatever the heck, Switzerland or something, and give yourself up.” I know they were neutral, but, uh, they wouldn’t do it because it’s not true. At that point before D-Day, it’s not true that the Germans are about to be defeated.
But once we take that beachhead, one of the cool things they did was, uh, they would, uh, I cannot remember the name of the newspaper at the moment. Uh, they would put it on equivalent of, uh, a printer sheet, uh, uh, your, your standard, uh, legal letterhead. Uh, they’d print out a newspaper, and it was a front and back, and it would give the Germans the news of the day, and it was accurate, it was truthful, and, uh, it would say, “Hey, we’re, you know, on this hill, and we just had this battle, and we defeated Rommel here, here, and here.”
And then the airplanes would drop a, uh, a surrender pass next. So they’d read the newspaper, then they would get a surrender pass that would say, um, “This is, this is a legal binding document. Give this to the first American soldiers you see.” A lot of work went into that. So the guys that did that leaflet that this, uh, both the newspaper and the, the, the surrender, uh, pass, if you will, and I, I, I forget the correct terminology at the moment for the surrender pass.
Th- they had to steeply study, uh, the German soldier psyche to figure out that that would work.
Zach Elwood: Hmm.
Pat: That’s the other thing about the cyber, you’re not just spitballing. They, they… And you can look at this historically. We deep dive on the, on that target audience, uh, to figure out how they perceive the world, what, what draws them in, what What do they deem most credible?
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Pat: And of course, they heard our airplanes gone, and we had the paratroopers seizing territory. And you might say, “Well, how, how did we figure out that leaflet to design it?” And you would have a bunch of cultural experts, would be one of them. Uh, the other one would be, um, if you had guys that were captured in Italy or North Africa, for example, uh, German soldiers there, you would have PSYOP interrogators.
And, and what I mean by that is they were, uh, they were interrogators in- assigned to the PSYOP forces, and their specialty was figuring out the, uh, the morale level of that German soldier. And then they would bring out, uh, prototypes of, uh, leaflets they were working on. Let’s, let’s say the surrender leaflet or the newspaper, and they’d show it to them and go, “What do you think of this?
Does this make sense to you?” Uh- Yeah … “Do you think this would guys-” Is this persuasive?
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: Yeah. Th- th- that’s the weird thing about, uh, a PSYOP too, is, is when in my old days, when, when I would, uh, you know, teach people this as a historian and that sort of thing, uh, PSYOP is a strange branch because it’s, it’s dealing with the preservation of life.
And what I mean by that is a, a PSYOPper is duty bound to preserve the life of his comrades, the life of the civilians, and paradoxically, the life of the enemy. Because if the enemy surrenders because of your PSYOP leaflets, what just happened? Like, we, we had a guy, uh, he was a, he was a, uh, commander in, uh, w- uh, was a captain in World War II, and, uh, he was the one, along with a, uh, OSS, uh, operative, that figured out how to wire loudspeakers to tanks.
Uh, when he first tested it out, he surr- he, they were attacking a city, and, uh, he was able to get 5,000 German soldiers to surrender with just one loudspeaker up here on the tank. Mm-hmm.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Pat: So, uh, imagine that you just saved 5,000 lives, and you extrapolate that, and the families recall, “Oh, the Americans aren’t so bad.
They don’t rape and pillage, uh, like the Soviets did.” Y- you know, I’m, I’m sure you’re devil, “Oh, what about this one time, Pat?” Well, that’s a minority amount.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, I mean, your, your point is assuming that- A military force, a government is, is acting, is true to their word for the most part. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s like you can, you can trust them to say, to, to not be overly deceptive and, and, a- and, uh, immoral in their actions.
It’s like y- you… The, the, the goal is to avoid military, uh, encounters and violence. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And in that regard, assuming they’re mostly doing it in above the board ways, that, that’s a non-controversial area of the… Even if we can talk about other areas that people would find fault with, that, that, that chunk of the work-
Pat: Right
Zach Elwood: seems to be a, a good thing, clearly a good thing to me. Yeah.
Pat: Yeah. Yeah. That, and that’s the bulk of the work. A- and I… Now, remember PSYOPS, you know, the force demands of them to influence enemy behavior. If they influence an enemy commander to do something that makes a mistake and, you know, they take out, I don’t know, a company worth of men, but it saves the other 5,000 ’cause now our guys can get in that position.
You drop the leaflets here and say, “Hey, we got this. You better surrender or you’re next.” Mm-hmm. You know, that’s another way they do it too.
Zach Elwood: Right.
Pat: Um, and that, that, that gets into, uh, the different colors of PSYOPS, which, which, you know-
Zach Elwood: Yeah. There’s broad… And, and that’s what I was- Yeah … I was gonna ask you about the, you know, getting into the more deceptive elements which can cause kind of blowback, whether it’s enemies or, or domestically, you know, perceptually.
It’s like one thing I was reading about, I don’t know if you have any takes on this, but I don’t even know if it’s proven, but I was reading about how- Mm-hmm … like the fall, taking down Saddam Hussein’s statue, you know, during the, uh-
Pat: Uh, the invasion in 2003?
Zach Elwood: Yeah, two, yeah, 2003- Was that it? Yeah … invasion of Iraq, and apparently there was some reports that that was, like, a manipulated thing to make it seem like the Iraqi citizens were taking it down when it was actually, you know, American troops taking it down.
I don’t know if you know anything about that, but that’s just an… And I don’t even know if it’s proven, uh, but-
Pat: Yeah, I, I don’t, I don’t have any, uh, personal knowledge to that. I… Now, as a historian, I could see where that could occur, but as, as a personal thing, I- Basically if it,
Zach Elwood: if it occurred, if it occurred, they were trying to affect, like, the morale of the, the, the citizenry and, and the troops
Pat: and stuff.
And they, and, you know, if it did occur, they would’ve had to use the Iraqis that were of that place. And I mean, it’s, it’s not unheard of that, that significant things are, uh, kinda Hollywooded up. So an example would be, uh, you can actually read this in, uh, General, um, Arthur McChrystal’s book, who Arthur McChrystal is the, uh, the uncle of Stanley, uh, General Stanley McChrystal.
He was the deputy PSYOP commander under General McClure, who is another famous PSYOP-er. And anyway, when they, they finished up in Italy, there’s a famous thing of, uh, uh, the Italian general surrendering and all that stuff to, uh, I can’t remember the commander off the top of my head. But, uh, that was all PSYOP guys did, staged it, did the production, uh, did the, uh, did the video, all that sort of thing.
Um, the videos you see of, like, the Italians, uh, picking up leaflets and taking them to wherever, that was all staged because how in the heck are you gonna have cameras on the Italians while the ground hasn’t been seized? And they’re, uh, oh yeah, they’re, you just have to… You know, when you, you apply logic to this, I’ll, I’ll put it to you this way.
If you apply common sense, you will see where PSYOP products exist- Mm … and where they don’t.
Zach: Mm.
Pat: Uh, that would be an example there, uh, historically speaking. Or, uh, do you remember when, um, the, the famous reel of General MacArthur and, uh, the Emperor of Japan?
Zach Elwood: Mm. No.
Pat: Uh, there’s that famous thing where I think it shows them and you see the height difference between the two.
Uh, it’s worth checking out. Anyway, that was a PSYOP production, and that, that was, uh, probably General Bonner Fellers, another famous PSYOP officer. Stop me if I get on these tangents. He’s a fascinating guy, um, because he was behind, or he was the one that made the argument to General MacArthur to preserve the Emperor of Japan.
Zach Elwood: Oh.
Pat: Uh, he, he was a cultural expert on Japan. Uh, he actually wrote a book called, I think it was Mind of the Japanese Soldier in the ’30s, and, uh, he actually predicted kamikaze pilots about 10 years before it happened.
Zach Elwood: Interesting.
Pat: Um-
Zach Elwood: Oh …
Pat: just because he understood the, uh, uh, the mind, the mentality of the Japanese military at the time.
Uh, but anyway, he was able to cons- uh, uh, uh, convince MacArthur to, uh, not bring the emperor up for war crimes. Not saying that the emperor did anything like that, but there has been some research that says some of his relatives could have been. Um, I’ve never seen anything that really pinned them down, but they had seen what was going on in Nuremberg and said, uh, they, they made a, a, a distinct choice that, that the emperor is too important to the m- the Japanese people, that we have to, we have to keep him if we’re going to, uh, rebuild this nation- Right
for, for the Japanese people. And
Zach Elwood: minimize the conflict post-war and all that. Yeah.
Pat: Yeah. ‘Cause there, there’s a lot, a lot in that, that war that gets glossed over, especially when the Japanese nation was Concerned with us, but they were absolutely terrified of the communists taking hold in Japan after the war.
Zach Elwood: Mm.
Pat: Um, so I’m sure that had to be part of the, uh, uh, the equation o- of, of when, when they decided to keep the emperor.
Zach Elwood: Uh, yeah. It’s like, obviously the, what, what has been done in PSYOP, uh, work is tremendously varied and there can be things that are more clearly controversial than other things to- Yeah … to put it s-
Pat: Yeah
Zach Elwood: to put it, uh, lightly. But it seems like the, the more deceptive an, an act is, the more likely it is to be perceived by someone as, like, underhanded and wrong and such.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Which helps explain, like, this spectrum of things in the, in the PSYOP area, and clearly some things are, are gonna be deceptive. That’s kind of, like, the nature of the work that’s done.
But it does seem like, yeah, speaking of the blowback that’s possible, it’s like … And it seems like some of the things that have been done in the past, it’s like maybe they were effective, maybe they weren’t, but regardless, maybe sometimes there’s a blowback in terms of perception of the, of the, of the organization and, like, maybe it could even sometimes hurt their, you know, cause a- and actually hurt their- Right
mission long term, even, even if it achieves, achieves some short-term success- Yeah … or something.
Pat: Yeah, and actually on a, on, on that piece, have you heard of Operation Mincemeat? So Operation Mincemeat, I believe it was British PSYOP that came up. I, I could be wrong and someone will like, “Ah, that was the S- British SOE, Pat.
They had nothing to do with it.” But the, uh, the British SOE and the Americans, uh, they essentially, they found a, uh, a homeless person’s, uh, corpse and, uh, I don’t know how they got … I, sometimes you don’t ask questions on these things, you know. Well, yeah, no, they, you get them from the, the, the, the, the farm down the street type of thing, you know.
Anyway, um, they dressed him, I think it was in like an admiralty’s, British Admiralty’s clothes, and they put plans on him for a landing. They, they made it appear like, uh, a U-boat had hit his ship and he washed ashore, and the Germans believed he really was part of the British Admiralty, and he had these orders in his pocket, and it actually affected their decision-making process.
Zach Elwood: Right.
Pat: Um, and it’s not to say that that’s the silver bullet that makes them do it. It’s a, an amalgamation of a lot of different stuff nested on each other. Um- Right. It’s just a way to
Zach Elwood: distract from the-
Pat: Right.
Zach Elwood: One of many
Pat: ways- Right … to try to
Zach Elwood: distract. Yeah.
Pat: Um, a- and it just goes to show, um, you got some really clever people that have been in this line of work historically to, to think up something.
I would never come up with anything like that.
Zach Elwood: But that’s a good example. It’s like … ‘Cause I, I wouldn’t, I don’t, I don’t think many people would find that, like- immoral, you know? It’s like-
Pat: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm …
Zach Elwood: because, you know, i- at some sense all’s fair in, in war kind of aspect or at le- or at least a lot of th- a lot of things in terms of deception, uh- Yeah
are fair. I think it’s like, yeah, that’s an interesting, because it’s like most people I don’t think would find that, like, wrong in some sense, but they might find, like, fooling people into thinking the Iraqi citizens were tearing down Saddam when they weren’t. It’s like there, there’s a weird spectrum of- Yeah
operations where the, where people can find certain things, you know, beyond, beyond what they should be doing and certain other things not- Yeah … you know? Uh-
Pat: And, and it all depends because it, it might be a condition where, like, let’s, to, to your point with the Iraq statue thing, I, you, you know, me, I’m sitting here thinking about this stuff in a historic tense.
If you had the team or whoever was down there say, “Hey, you guys know you can, you can tear that statue down if you want to.” And they go, “We can?” “Yeah, go ahead.”
Zach Elwood: Encourage
Pat: them,
Zach Elwood: yeah.
Pat: Um, encourage them. That’s a little different than, like, st- and, you know, that could’ve been another thing to happen. Uh, and then that gets into was that deceptive if you, if you just encouraged them to do something they kinda already wanted to do- Right
but didn’t know they were allowed to do it?
Zach Elwood: Right. It almost seems like, yeah, it, it’s almost like there’s this spectrum too of, like, the more it involves citizens and not the, not the combatants, it’s like people will find the involvement of citizens more controversial too- Yeah … or something, right? Um.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: And it, yeah, and it’s an interesting, uh, it, it’s an interesting point, uh- I know that the PSYOPers were with the Marines, uh, during that invasion, but I don’t know where else they could’ve been besides that. Like, you can go look up, uh, their, like the awards and honors of 9th Battalion, it’ll actually place where they were.
I don’t even know that any of our guys were even in Baghdad yet. I’m not saying that that’s not the case, it’s just me as a PSYOP historian, I’m, I’m going through my brain to think, uh, who could’ve done that or, or who
Zach Elwood: was, uh- And who, and who know, and who knows? It’s like, to your point, it, it’s, it’s like not, not everything is like an official PSYOP.
It could’ve been something like off the cuff where s- people just did it without like any sort of like, uh, real- Yeah … you know, approval or maybe it wasn’t even related to PSYOP if it, if it happened, you know. So just to say, it’s like, I mean, it, the world’s a big place and like I, I feel like sometimes people, throughout time, people are making all sorts of decisions, like we’re not gonna agree with all sorts of things that people do over time, and it’s like to, to try to castigate like an entire section based on, uh, and I’m not say, even saying that many people would even have, a lot of people wouldn’t even have found that that controversial.
But I do think there’s this thing of like, you know, clearly America and the various divisions- Yeah … of, of things, it’s a big service area, so there’s gonna be various things that people disagree with at certain points in time, yeah.
Pat: And, and I, and I think too, I think on, on your point with the statue thing is people like to extrapolate that to say, “Well, that means that it was staged, that, that the people really didn’t want the Americans there at all.”
And that, and that in itself is just not true either. There was, I would say-
Zach Elwood: Well, that get, that, that gets into the, the blowback aspect because by, i- if they did- Yeah … if they did manipulate that, it almost, the blow- the blowback is then like people perceiving it as like, “Oh, nobody wanted the Americans to be there,” right?
Like, that, that’s, yeah, that’s kind of the, the opposite blowback kind of effect. Just to note that I cut out some theoretical and subjective discussion about the Iraq War that Pat requested me to cut out. I also wanna add that regarding that Saddam Hussein statue toppling, I don’t actually know much about it, whether it was actually a deceptive PSYOP, whether official or unofficial.
It was just a theory I happened to read about when doing research for this episode. But regardless of whether it was or was not an official PSYOP, it still seemed worth talking about as a theoretical example and about how people can react to such things. Okay, back to the talk. Clearly many people use the word psyop in, like, this way that has nothing to do with, you know, army psyop work.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: And so many people just use the term to kind of refer to, like, anything that they think where some group is, you know, underhandedly, deceptively doing something. And in many cases it’s a very vague kind of conspiracy-esque kind of thing where, like, somebody’s doing a psyop somewhere on us. We don’t- Yeah.
we don’t really know what’s going on. It’s just kind of a way to, a blanket term to capture things. But, but I’m curious how, yeah, how, how have you seen- Yeah … the, the word used? I, I
Pat: saw, I saw that gentleman, uh, who’s the Navy SEAL guy that has the show? Uh-
Zach Elwood: It’s not like Shawn Ryan or somebody, is it?
Pat: Sh- it was Shawn Ryan.
It was Shawn Ryan. Um, that guy, I don’t… He’s… Nobody from my community knows him. He’s never had a PSYOP’er on. Um- I mean,
Zach Elwood: yeah, he’s had- He
Pat: presented-
Zach Elwood: He’s, he’s had Chase Hughes on, which should tell you a lot about the quality of his, uh… I mean, I, yeah, I knew Chase Hughes was a, was a fraud within like a few minutes of listening to him, and Shawn Ryan invites him on to, uh, you know, pick his brain. And that tells you everything you need to know about Shawn Ryan, in my opinion.
Pat: And, and yeah, there are PSYOP’ers, uh, veteran PSYOP’ers who are willing to go on, on, uh, Mr. Ryan’s show and talk about it. Um, and I guess it d- it doesn’t sell butts in seats or eyeballs, if you will. Y- you know, uh, ’cause I think he presented, like, They Live, which I do love that movie.
Uh, and he shows himself as, as, uh, Roddy Piper’s character walking through the town, and, you know, he’s got the, the money that has… He puts the sunglasses on and says, “This is your God,” and all that sort of stuff. And he made us out like we’re boogeymen. And, uh, like I said, most of this job is very mundane.
It’s, it’s getting civilians out of danger. Um, it’s encouraging the support for government. It’s advising, uh, uh, allies’ news services to report truthfully and that sort of thing. And, and obviously we try to paint whatever allied government we’re with in a good light a- and that sort of thing. But I, I would say, like, the things like the PSYOP is not, it’s, it’s…
PSYOP is not gonna… You go to PSYOP training, it’s not gonna make you a mind reader. Uh, it’s not gonna make you a human lie detector. It’s not gonna make you a clinical psychologist. It’s not gonna make you an interrogator or a, uh, a, a, a universal expert in human behavior, right? Uh, I, I, I would say, I say, like, a cre- a credential has, has boundaries, right?
Uh, honest people tell you where those boundaries are.
Zach Elwood: I was gonna say, I, I mean, I could be wrong about Shawn Ryan and, and also about Chase Hughes, but… Well, I know I’m not wrong about Chase Hughes. But, uh- When, when, uh, like when they… I, I believe when they are talking about PSYOPs, like, they’re not even necessarily talking about, you know, Army PSYOP division.
They’re, they’re, they’re talking about, like, even though Chase Hughes also claims to, you know, be involved in the Army PSYOP- Yeah … but, but I think they’re, they’re mostly speaking about it in this vague way that’s like some shadowy group in control somewhere- Some shadowy- Well, because, you know- … government
when Chase Hughes was on the Shawn Ryan podcast, that episode, like, Shawn Ryan says something like, “What about, uh, Epstein? What about, uh, Ukraine? What about China?” And they basically say, like, “They’re all a PSYOP.”
Shawn Ryan: Charlie Kirk was just assassinated. Is that a PSYOP? Is the Epstein shit a PSYOP? I mean Ukraine, China
Chase Hughes: All Psy-op
Shawn Ryan: Everything
Zach Elwood: That just gives you a sense of like, so they’re- Yeah, they-
they’re basically just assigning like some shadowy force is trying to manipulate the, us in some way. But it’s like, it’s very vague. It’s just, it’s just paranoid because it’s like, what exa- who exactly are you saying is, is creating all of this myriad of-
Pat: Right …
Zach Elwood: narratives,
Pat: right? And the i-
Zach Elwood: Like, yeah
Pat: And of course, the irony is if, if you study the PSY Warrior, uh, website, and like I said, the excellent website for anyone to study the history of the branch or, or force, um, PSYOP has to fight for its life to exist after every war.
Um, World War I, uh, the, the psychologic subsection gets shut down. Um, World War II happens and they gotta jump through their butt to find the experts from the first war. Um, and thank goodness they found them, ’cause the Germans, man, you wanna talk about a psychological warfare force, they had, had it in the, in the, in the ’20s and ’30s.
And so then you have World War II, the force expands, uh, then the force shrinks again. Uh, not to, not to the extent that it was before World War II. Korea kicks off. Did you know that in, uh, Korea, the first action of the war against North Koreans was a PSYOP mission? Within hours of them coming over the parallel and attacking the South Koreans, they got leaflets dropped on them.
Zach Elwood: Hmm. Interesting.
Pat: Um, with it, with, yeah, very, it- it- it an interesting thing, uh, there. And then of course, uh, after the war, uh, it gets shut down again. Um, or nearly shut down, and then they think, then Vietnam gets hot and they go, “Oh my God, we need PSYOP forces.” And then they bring them back, and then Vietnam ends.
And then, uh, uh, the, uh, the Church committee hearings happen, and then of course they overreact, they shut PSYOP down completely again. Then Grenada happens, that’s a disaster for PSYOP. Then we have Panama, which is crazy successful for PSYOP. Uh, ’91 is probably the high watermark of PSYOP. Then it starts ticking down again, then it expands again, then ticks down again.
So there’s… It, it’s, it’s hard because you can’t, you can’t put a serial number on it and you can’t count influence.
Zach Elwood: Hmm. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like marketing or communication in general. It’s hard to des- it’s hard to get the metrics for how it’s
Pat: w- we’re actually working. Exactly.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: Exactly. It’s, it’s, it’s like the quote that Saturn years ago, “I know it when I see it,” type of thing.
Uh, and that, you make, raise a good point. So your good PSYOPers typ- typically, uh, or historically, it’s an amalgamation of folks from psychology, from marketing, uh, that can do data analytics, uh, can do anthropology, uh, linguists, um, graphics artists, graphic designers, designers, uh, folks that understand radio, radio theory, all that sort of thing.
Um, it’s a hodgepodge of all these people coming together. And you can imagine, um, how, how hard it is to herd that group of cats. But, uh, a lot of our guys can go get jobs in Madison Avenue coming out or Hollywood.
Zach Elwood: Right. It’s about persuasion. It’s a lot of the
Pat: same-
Zach Elwood: Yeah. It’s, uh-
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: I mean, the thing that strikes me is there’s just so much, uh, paranoia these days about such a wide-
Pat: Yeah
Zach Elwood: range of things. And like, I think people, a big part of this is like people are just fundamentally paranoid about any attempt at persuasion at some level. Like, I mean, assuming it’s something that they don’t like, right? So let’s… I’ll give you a specific example. It’s like, and Chase Hughes traffics in this a lot, where it’s like things that people don’t like the government trying to persuade them of, you know, gets lumped in with, with, uh, PSYOPs.
But it’s al- it’s also to like completely banal Whether you like it or not, it’s also, it’s completely banal and expected that a government or any large group will try to persuade people, it- whether it’s its citizens or expl- you know, and we’re not talking about PSYOP operations here. Yeah. We’re t- we’re just talking about like a government’s gonna, for example, like, uh, uh, whether you agree with it or not, it, it’s not a, uh, crazy conspiracy that they tried to persuade people to, you know, for example, uh, had like anti-smoking campaigns or, uh, you know, wear seatbelt campaigns or take the vaccine- Mm-hmm
campaigns. Like again, you can disagree with it or not, but it’s like-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: it’s not, it’s not, it’s not like, it, it’s completely expected that they’ll try to persuade people to, to achieve their, whatever the, the goal is. Like you… But it’s like, for some people it’s like if they see things they don’t like, don’t agree with, if they s- if they see any type of persuasion campaign, they’ll be like lump it in with some really horrible thing happening, right?
Pat: S- something nefari- something nefarious. A- and yeah, and I mean, they’re just doing what the government i- is charged to do and protect American people and that sort of thing. And now you can- However they view it, yeah. Right. And you, and you know, they’re human beings like any of us. But I, I will say just having been served in PSYOP and, and a veteran of it and all that, you’re gonna have a hard time doing nefarious things in the job, um, that are illegal or ethically and morally repugnant because, uh, there’s too many people that will do the right thing.
Zach Elwood: Right, there’s so many people in the loop, and I, and I think that gets back to the, the paranoid, overly paranoid views is, like, this view that people can cover up all these things. I think it’s actually, the record shows that it’s actually very hard to cover up things because usually there’s so many people in the loop that, that so many things will-
Pat: Right
Zach Elwood: come
Pat: out,
Zach Elwood: you know?
Pat: E- e- especially in this day and age with the technology. Yeah. Now, I mean, there are some rabbit holes that I’m willing to go down on stuff from ages ago that, that I certainly think, um, there’s, there’s weirdness there, and I don’t know-
Zach Elwood: Sure …
Pat: how to take it. And I,
Zach Elwood: I don’t mean to say that there’s no conspiracies- No, yeah, yeah
or, or plots. Yeah. There’s clearly people plotting all the time, but I, I guess my point is, like, this view that, like, w- they’re, we’re surrounded by all sorts of secret plots. I think the record shows- Yeah … that that’s very, very unlikely.
Pat: At, at that scale, I, I’m willing to always give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re, they’re t- they’re trying to do the best that they can.
And some people, you know, they don’t get up to the bar of whatever position they’re in and, and maybe they, they don’t make the grade. And maybe, I, I forget what the line is, but don’t d- uh, uh, don’t tie to conspiracy what, that which can be explained with incompetence.
Zach Elwood: Right, exactly. You know? And- Not, yeah, not, it’s not malice usually, it’s, it’s just incompetence or inefficiency, whatever it is.
Yeah, yeah. I was curious to get your take on this. It seems like, I mean, A, you’ve got all the technology which makes it easier than ever to expose things. You can more easily record things, emails, audio recordings, surveillance, all these kinds of things. You can easily set up things to release information after, if you get killed or whatever it is.
So it’s like there, there’s all this informational stuff that makes the bigger plots harder to achieve. But I would also, I’m als- I also think that the, uh The more political polarization also creates this more chaotic field, playing field where it’s like, say some government agency was trying to do something secret, all it takes is like one person to really be against that, um, that, that what they’re doing and find it immoral and bad to leak that.
Right. And like polarization creates this thing where it’s like more and more people easily get on other sides of whatever it is because they associate it with political stances. So it, it becomes this more volatile mix of like, you’re even, even more likely than decades ago to have somebody on the team being like, you know, “Fuck these, fuck this group basically.”
Yeah. “I’m gonna mess them up,” basically.
Pat: Right. Yeah, yeah. And of course, and then you, you have to, like I, I was talking about earlier, you gotta be wondering about, um, the adversary’s motivation. Are they faming, fanning the flames of the polarization? Because the more, um, destabilized we are, what can we not do?
We can’t affect the, the space that the, the adversary operates in, right? Um, so that, that’s a, that’s another take to it too, it is, um, I, I would tell your audience, always, uh, be mindful of the media you consume. Um, I, I did this as an archeologist when I got out, but, uh, and did research, but also when I was a PSYOPer, um- I always tried to avoid consuming stuff that I agreed with.
Especially now with the algorithms, uh, like for YouTube and that sort of thing, it has you dialed in. It knows what you wanna see and it, it, it will do things that you already agree with or that are in your, um, basically, uh, things that are in your bailiwick, I guess is a better way to put it. Yeah,
Zach Elwood: it sends you down a, a emphas- it emphasizes what you agree with and sends you down a deeper rabbit hole for that
Pat: stuff.
Right.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: And it act- and it’ll condition you to radical- radicalize you over time-
Zach Elwood: Yeah …
Pat: and before you know it. And so that’s why I always encourage, like listen to opposing voices and don’t, don’t dehumanize anybody. Um, that was something I did as a PSYOP. I never dehumanized anybody, uh, in the, in the nations.
I, I looked at them like they’re a human being that has a right to exist. A- and how, how do I, uh, affect the mission so that they can ultimately live in peace and all that sort of thing. W- uh, for you, honestly, I would say always, always, uh, consume information. Just be mindful o- of what you’re consuming ’cause everybody’s got something to sell you.
And, uh, uh, I, I, I remember reading a story about a guy that I, I think he was radicalized, I can’t remember to what specifically, on YouTube, and then, uh, he realized it and then he started watching the other, the ulterior thing, and they flipped him, and then he was radicalized for the other side.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: Um-
Zach Elwood: You gotta watch out on this, uh…
I mean, I, I started, I had a episode on this podcast where I st- I talked about, I watched a couple kinda conspiracy… I, I guess I paused too long on the wrong videos on Instagram.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: And then, like, my feed was filled with, like, schizophrenic conspiracy theory stuff. It like, that’s all it took, yeah. I have, I’ve basically talked to nobody about this idea.
I was curious to get your opinion on it. I thought that the, like, the Russian, uh, attempts to meddle in the 2016 election, so for example, you know, it, it was known that they created these various, you know, social media posts and they were also creating media for, for both sides of, you know, bo- both sides of the equation.
Like, they had, like, a, um- Uh, you know, a bl- a Black Lives Matter kind of, uh- Yeah, yeah … content they were creating. But the, but, you know, lots of research, I talked about this in my polarization books, lots of research showed that that was, like, a drop in the bucket, you know? And, and, and, and it’s a mistake to think that that had a big influence.
But the thing that struck me about it was, like, I think the, I think the goal was not to shift the election, ’cause I don’t think they thought that they even had that capability, and they didn’t even make that much content. I think the goal was to undermine people’s confidence in the election, because what they did was create a dynamic where no matter what gr- what, what, no matter which group won, the other group would doubt the elections more.
Right. Which w- was, is basically undermining our stability- Yeah … and our creating more incentives for destabilization. And, and they’re,
Pat: yeah, and they’re sowing chaos. I mean-
Zach Elwood: Yeah, they’re sowing chaos and, and doubt. And, like, that’s, to me, that was the real operation. But people would, people were interpreting as, as, like, well, they were either gonna influence the election, they were trying to influence the election.
But I’m like, there’s something deeper where they’re, the, they’re, they’re, they’re- Yeah … undermining the whole, you know, they’re creating discord, yeah.
Pat: Right, right, right. And the, uh, it’s interesting to bring that up. So I cannot remember the name of the organization. It was disestablished in the early 1990s, but that was essentially your force that protected the United States from enemy propaganda.
Um, it, it was a, it was a something of information. I, I, I’m sorry that I can’t recall the name at the moment. Um, you know, Americans have always been skeptical of, uh, influence organizations, uh, at, at a national level. And, uh, they’re, they’re… Certainly I can see why, because there’s always a danger that they could be politicized and, uh, weaponized.
I was actually concerned when they had, um, the organizations during World War I. Um, then the same thing happened during World War II. They had the Office of War Information, which PsyOp fell under the European theater, and then there was a domestic wing of it. So, um, if you guys ever wondered why you don’t see, like, Uncle Sam posters and, like, save money for war bonds and all that, that’s because of the Smith-Mundt Act.
Um- Oh … because those were PsyOp products. Um, but they were aimed domestically. But once the Smith-Mundt Act came into effect, they stopped doing it. And you might say, “Well, why, why did they come up with the Smith-Mundt Act?” Well, I believe it was, like, 1947, uh, 1948 timeframe. No, I’m sorry, I’ll back up. That’s, I think, when Smith-Mundt Act started to occur.
The nucleus of it occurred in, uh, ’45. So What was happening was we were doing daylight, uh, bombing raids on Germany, in German-held territory, ’cause we basically held the skies for the most part. One of the reasons why was primarily to send a PSYOP message to the Germans, “You’re toast. You can’t even defend your own airspace anymore.
We control your skies totally.” And the other one was they found that more civilians were being killed at nighttime, so they moved to daytime raids, uh, to mitigate civilian deaths. So anyway, the Office of War Information produced a product, uh, that it showed in, in movie theaters across the country, um, because senators wanted to go back to nighttime raids for whatever reason.
And in this movie theaters, they’d say to the American viewer, uh, you know, “Here is the value of daytime raids. Go tell your senator that you want to continue daytime raids.” And so there you would say, “Who’s the target? The American people’s the target.” No, the senators were the target. The American in the movie theater was the, uh, method, right?
Zach Elwood: Right. The pressure point. Yeah.
Pat: Right. So then the American people then tell the senators, “We want daytime bombing raids,” and the senators freaked out, and then that led to the Smith-Mundt Act.
Zach Elwood: Oh,
Pat: interesting.
Zach Elwood: Um- Yeah.
Pat: Yeah. Yeah. So I- Interesting … I, I looked it up. I was… The, the, the, the organization I was thinking of was the United States Information Agency.
During the Cold War, uh, it handled public diplomacy and information programs aimed at foreign audiences. It’s abolished in ’99, and many of its, uh, many of its actions were folded into the, uh, framework of the State Department. That’s exactly what happened to the OWI after World War II. It was folded into the State Department, then it kind of, it kind of died on the vine.
So, um, essentially we d- d- you know, I can’t speak to now whether it does or doesn’t, but, uh, in a fairly recent historical context, it doesn’t have a method for protecting the American people from enemy propaganda.
Zach Elwood: Hmm.
Pat: Like, I, I mean, you, you could go right now on Twitter and you would be, uh, inundated with it.
You could go on Facebook, you would be inundated with it. Um, I, I’m trying to think of a good example o- o- of something recently happening that, that would’ve been-
Zach Elwood: Yeah, but to your point, you’re, you’re basically saying, like, in order to combat that, you would kind of need to create your own
propaganda of some sort, which maybe is why we don’t have good, um… There’s not really much in the way of protection ’cause it, protecting against it would get into creating your own-
Pat: Right, right …
Zach Elwood: persuasion or something, or
Pat: And, and, uh, and, and in this day and age it’s, it’s a bit difficult. And I guess I, they, maybe I should probably back up and, and, and explain maybe where, where propaganda the word comes from.
So, uh, propaganda, uh, originally comes from, uh, the Roman Catholic Church. Uh, it, I believe it was during the Counter-Reformation, they would hand out the books. Uh, it was a, uh, a Latin word. I, I think it’s along the lines of to spread the truth or spread the word Uh, or basically to inform. Um, that went into, uh, World War I where they termed us as propaganda units.
Um, after World War I, propaganda be- took on a negative connotation. It meant deceptive marketing and that sort of thing, and all the boogeyman stuff we know it to be. And, uh, that’s when we changed the name to psychological warfare in World War II. Then during Vietnam, we determined psychological warfare wasn’t the right term because it mitigated us to combat.
Um, psychological operations said, “Well, no, we don’t just do things against the bad guy. We help civilian populace. We, we tell them, you know, uh, wash your hands. Don’t, don’t go to the bathroom in your fields. Uh, uh, here’s the medical cap.” Uh, actually to this da- well, not so much now, uh, PSYOP used to help when hurricanes would hit the United States because we would be the gap fillers because you, you couldn’t access the news anymore.
So we would tell you, “Okay, this is where the, uh, resupply area is, uh, to get your goods,” you know, your food and water and that sort of thing, or crowd control. You know, they were down in the Haiti earthquakes, uh, helping there. So there, there is benevolent stuff they do. It’s just not enemy-focused. Uh, and then of course they went to, uh, MISO after that- Right
which was very unpopular. Um-
Zach Elwood: M-I-S-O.
Pat: Yeah, military information support operations. And I was actually p- part of the wheel that got that turned off. I, I didn’t like it immediately, um, because I, I think we weren’t being truthful. Like we were still doing PSYOP. We just changed it to MISO. Uh, MISO was the more digestible term.
Don, uh, uh, uh, uh, Secretary Rumsfeld preferred MISO. Uh, the Brits actually tried it before us. It was wildly unpopular and they went back ’cause then the Brit- the British people said, “Why are you deceiving us about what you are? I can clearly see you’re still doing PSYOP stuff.” Um-
Zach Elwood: It’s interesting that there’s this branding.
You know, it, it seems like any, no matter what the word was, there’s always gonna be some branding issue. But like it, yeah, like o- obviously propaganda took on a negative term. Uh, and then like s- psychological operations took on a negative turn. I, I imagine that has something to do with like the past of like the MKUltra, you know, associations and this like underhanded kind of association.
So it, it, it would inevitably take on like a negative connotation. So then they were like, “Maybe we should change it again.”
Pat: And, and then of c- uh, of course the, the, like stuff like MKUltra, that had nothing to do with US Army PSYOP- Right, it had nothing to do … at all. That was a whole- Yeah … different… Now, I, I mind it to your, to your audience, I’m, I’m being specific to, uh, you know, Army PSYOP.
I have no idea what the other Elements in the craft would be, would, uh, do, uh, in a mo- I know historically I, I can talk about it. Um, like, uh, the OSS had morale operations, um, which, which Army PSYOP is descended from that, uh, from a, uh, spiritual concept, not lineage-wise, ’cause it, it was a civilian thing. Uh, OSS is what gave birth to the, uh, uh, s- oh gosh, uh, the, I think it was the CIDG or something.
I, I can’t remember. And then that later became the Central Intelligence Agency. Uh, and then of course you have, um, other government organizations that have things, did Would resemble PSYOP to some degree. So for example, um, your hostage negotiation teams, um, very much resemble some of the things that, uh, tactical PSYOP teams do, like tactical call-outs on loudspeakers, um, where you’re trying to convince the bad guy to come out of the building.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, standoff situations.
Pat: Yeah. Exactly. A- and you could, you can see the line where, oh, that’s just like a hostage negotiation thing. Well, so yeah, there’s a lot of, lot of the same stuff applies to it, you know? But, but, uh, I was trying to think of like a, a, a modern, uh, example, uh, of where they, where the bad guys interfere with us.
You’d have like, I think, like there was a report from the Department of Justice about, uh, Russian doppelganger fake news sites where they made themselves look legitimate, and they used like fake profiles and AI-generated content as it… I, uh, Department of Justice has a good write-up on it. You know, it, and that’s classic, uh, enemy and a bad guy deception.
They m- they make the source look local, familiar, or journalistic so that, that you, the audience, e- evaluates it differently. In the elections, uh, the enemy was, uh, doing different influences, influence actors to, again, make, make, make the American people lose faith in the system, essentially. Um, I think, do you remember the robo?
There was a, there was an AI, uh, robocall of President Biden that was spreading back in 2024. Hmm.
Zach Elwood: Uh,
Pat: so that, that, the FCC report at, uh, but, uh, people in New Hampshire were getting AI-generated robocalls impersonating President Biden and telling them not to vote in a primary.
Zach Elwood: Oh, interesting.
Pat: Yeah. Um, so yeah, the FCC did, did, did something on that.
And that, that’s just like open source. You can read news about it. Uh, if, if you, you can imagine it, uh, there’s, there’s just a tremendous amount of inundation on the, on the World Wide Web, if you will, uh, from enemy, enemy sources.
Zach Elwood: Well, that, that, that’s kind of interesting with the, um, you know, I do th- I do think getting back to that idea of like a lot of plots will be outed, it’s hard to keep secret plots.
I think, you know, places like Russia, maybe, I’m sure other countries, the, I think, I think a lot of, some of their operations, they know that their, that information will get out there, so you have to choose psychological operations that even if, you know, they’re gonna be successful whether the information gets out there about what they’re doing or not, right?
So like, for example, like creating, sowing discord about our election security and, uh, you know, who won and that there might have been a foreign per, uh, inf- influence in the elections, it’s like it doesn’t matter if the information about their operation gets out, like that’s gonna be successful because their, their goal is to sow discord out.
Right. They- Right? Yeah. So it’s like y- they have, a good operation takes into account that the information about the operation might get out and it won’t really make a difference because they’ll still achieve the, the main goal, right?
Pat: Yeah. Yeah. A- and, and a good example, and this isn’t new, uh, the Soviets actually did something to the effect back in the, uh, Nixon-Kennedy election, believe it or not.
Uh, they preferred, uh, Kennedy Um, and they were running influence ops to get Kennedy elected. Um, I, I can’t remember… I can’t pull the specifics now, uh, because they, they were terrified of Nixon. And of course, you know, uh, uh, President Kennedy eventually, you know, he stepped up to the plate when, when it, it, it was time and the Russians were testing him.
Uh, but that, that they believed that he would be a pushover. So- Right.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. ‘
Pat: Cause Nixon was more of a hawk. Yeah. So- Right. Right. Yeah. And, and so they, they never stopped doing that stuff. Uh- Right … I would just say certainly, I mean, it would be arrogant to presume our enemies don’t have an interest in our election processes and, uh, a- and would attempt to do anything that, that, that causes the most chaos internally to us.
And they might even hypothetically use pundits, uh, American pundits to do it, you know? Uh, especially if they’re paying them and, and say, “Hey, here’s your talking points.” You know? Um, I’m not saying that that’s the case now. That, that would be something in a historic context.
Zach Elwood: It… Yeah. I, I think the point, uh, ’cause some people think I’m, like, too optimistic and it’s like, about, about, you know, the lack of, uh, how plots are hard to pull off and le- you know, pr- pretty rare to pull off.
But it’s like, I, I think, I think to, to me it’s about being skeptical of all, all sorts of things. Well, yeah, you should be. It’s like… Yeah. All, all sorts of things could be true, uh, about people, uh, attempting to deceive you. It’s also true that, like, we live in a very polarized time where people are, are in various bubbles of thought, so you have to be skeptical about all sorts of things, you know?
Right.
Pat: Yeah. And remember, remember what we, we talked about earlier. The primary thesis of PSYOP is it deals in the truth, right? If you, if you lie, it’s gonna come out of the wash. I know it’s a, it’s a Third Rail subject, but let’s take the Vietnam War, for example. They, they were only able to sell that w- the, the narrative started to fall apart because the reality on the ground was not matching what was on the nightly news, right?
Zach Elwood: Right.
Pat: Um, i- if you recall, uh, they would call, uh… It was like the official report from public affairs back during the Vietnam War. They called it the 5:00 Follies, because they would tell you that everything in Vietnam is going great, and it, it, it wasn’t. So e- e- eventually, if you are skeptical on everything, um, y- you know, and you search for the truth and, and the evidence of the thing, uh, uh, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll detect a PSYOP every time, I would say.
If the adversary or anybody, whoever’s doing it, um, a- as long as you, you look for the facts on the ground about it, um, where- wherever it may lie. Um, and there’s no, there’s no magic mind control where I, I sit there with you and hypnotize you or, or put subliminal messages in your mind. You would… You actually condition yourself by, by what media you intake every day.
Zach Elwood: I don’t know if you wanna say anything about, uh, Chase Hughes or, you know, I can, we, you don’t have to say anything about it now, I can just add it to the intro, but do you wanna talk about some people that, like him, who, uh, basically are putting out some, uh, false ideas
Pat: about the- Yeah. So, yeah, he’s a, he’s an interesting gentleman.
Uh, I, I had never heard of him. Uh, I, I saw, like, a clip of him on, I think it was Joe Rogan’s show, and he talked about going down to train the Psyop divisions at Fort Bragg. And I was thinking to myself, “I have never heard of this guy,” and I’m a member of the Psyop Association. Um, I started asking the team there, “Hey, have any of you guys heard of this guy?”
And then I asked some other friends of mine. You know, I’ve been around the community 20 years. Nobody heard of this guy. And I was like, “Oh, that, that sends off a red flare.” And then I, I started listening to some of the stuff he was saying, and I was like, you know, I, I’ve … He’s a, he’s a fellow veteran and I won’t, I won’t denigrate his military service or, or, uh, uh- Yeah.
He’s a Navy,
Zach Elwood: uh, quartermaster-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: uh, was his main thing, yeah. A-
Pat: and, and you know, and I, I think i- uh, whatever you did in the military, you’re inte- what you do is integral to the national defense of this country and you should be proud of it, no matter what, what job you do. Um, now I, I … He’s trying to make a living, I get it.
Um, but I, I … It upset me a bit that, that he was kind of y- Uh, I don’t know. I don’t wanna say bringing shade on the PSYOP regiment, but, uh, if that’s the best way to put it, uh, because there, there’s some stuff that he teaches, and I know you deep dived on it, that I’m like, “Ah, that doesn’t… That kinda like sounds like pseudoscience.
I don’t know about this.” Um- Well,
Zach Elwood: yeah, the, the fundamental, like people have pointed out more, more, uh, observ- observing people i- in, in the comments of, of his and my w- my videos on that, people are like, he claims, you know, it, it, it fundamentally at a, at a very basic level doesn’t make sense that he’s both claiming to teach, uh, these amazing top secret PSYOP or other intel methods.
It doesn’t make sense that like A, he would be able to do that, and especially doesn’t make sense if he’s claiming to do that work currently with the-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: with the military. Like they wouldn’t l- people wouldn’t let him like give out these amazing… And he, and he’s also, uh, you know, claiming or at least implying that like maybe like the New Jersey drones were a PSYOP by the-
military, the government. It’s like you, you think somebody that like is claiming to, uh, currently or, or even in the past do this amazing undercover top secret stuff with the military is gonna tell the public about like, you know, while claiming to be in good standing with that military is gonna tell the, a- and imply that these various things are PSYOPs happening around us by the military?
It’s like none, none of, none of it really makes sense at a basic, uh, logic level. Then you f- add in all the like clear lies and exaggerations he’s told. But anyway, I, yeah, I would… He, I think he, I think he really, uh, misstepped stating that he had a specific, that he, that he was heading to Fort Bragg and- Right.
‘Cause- … obviously I’m waiting to get the official word from, uh, Fort Bragg on that- Mm-hmm … and hopefully they get back to me. But I would- Yeah … bet a large chunk of my, uh, n- net worth that he, he has- Yeah … had nothing official to do with, uh, PSYOPs.
Pat: Yeah, yeah. And, and, and that, and that’s to say, you know, you know, could someone give like a one-off talk to individual service members without everybody in the community knowing?
Sure, that, that could be. Um, that’s theoretically possible. But that’s very different from saying you were training Army PSYOP or implying institutional endorsement. Uh, like- Like, the, the most, the more official expansive the claim, the easier it should be to substantiate. And, uh- Yeah … and, and I just, I have trouble, trouble buying it.
Um, he certainly, he, he has something to sell. Uh, you know, and that, that’s how he makes his… I think he has, like, a university or something of the, of that, that matter. Yeah,
Zach Elwood: NCI, uh, neuro-
Pat: Yeah …
Zach Elwood: whatever, univer- intelligence. Yeah. I
Pat: can’t remember what
Zach Elwood: it stands
Pat: for. And-
Zach Elwood: But, uh, yeah …
Pat: yeah. A- a- a- and, you know, the questions I would ask him, like, if you ever got the opportunity or if anybody watching, you know, ask him what unit, what date, what authority.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, specifics. Yeah.
Pat: Uh, was it a contract, a guest lecture, a private event, a course? Who invited him, right? Um-
Zach Elwood: Yeah. The, the, the, the am- the ambiguous language is a big clue because he and other people who want to deceive use very ambiguous language. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he had something where he was actually going to Fort Bragg, but he was meeting up with a client, like somebody who hired him, who, like, had some Psyop, uh, army past.
Yeah. And so he could phrase it in the sense of like, “I’m going to Fort Bragg to train some Psyops,” or s- you know, some ambiguous usage of it. It’s like, that, and that’s what he does a lot. It’s like- And that, and that’s- … implies something that- Right … has some more mundane thing, right?
Pat: Yeah, that way, that, that way if you call him on, “Well, I never said that.
You interpreted it that way.”
Zach Elwood: Yeah, you would… Yeah, exactly. You know? It’s- Like, “I didn’t say I was gonna actually go-” Yeah … “onto the base and train
Pat: anybody officially.” Yeah.
Zach Elwood: I’m go- “What do you mean?” Yeah.
Pat: I meant down in Fayetteville. And, you know- Yeah … a- and, and so w- and ’cause it’s a small community, uh, we’ve got certain things that, you know, certain lingo that, that tips us off.
So he said Psyop, Psyops divisions. Well, there, there is no Psyop divisions. There hasn’t been since 1945. Um, it, and I don’t even know if they called it it then. Um- A- actually, yes, they did. They had a, a, a psychological warfare division. Um, but we, we’re not organi- or I should say, when I was in, and so far as I know currently, they’re not organized that way.
Um, also saying the word PSYOPs with the S on the end, we don’t say that. In fact, the only ones that say it is the Green Berets when they’re trying to antagonize us, ’cause we have a, we have a, we have a rivalry, uh, going back to 1952. So modern PSYOP, Army PSYOP and Special Forces started together at the Psychological Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg in 1952.
Um, it was later renamed Special Warfare, and it was renamed John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. Um, uh, but a, a brotherly rivalry. Um, so that’s another inside English thing there. Um, but once I heard- Yeah, if you, you- Yeah.
Zach Elwood: They, they, they will just say, “I’m, I do PSYOP.” Is that how, how they would phrase it?
Or what’s the n-
Pat: Yeah, they would say, “I do PSYOP,” or, “I’m a former PSYOPper.” Um, if they’re- I see. Yeah. Okay … if, if they’re, if they’re like a really old-time guy, they might say, “I was a PSYWAR guy,” or, or, uh- Mm. I see … or PSYWARrior. Um, yeah, they, th- that’s, that’s usually a, a big tell-off. Um, and then, uh, I’m kinda like, do I wanna say how they’re or- the units are organized?
‘Cause then he’s gonna correct himself and start saying it that way. Yeah,
Zach Elwood: no, we don’t need to, yeah,
Pat: get into all that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I won’t do that. Yeah. Uh, but I, I, I’ll say, you know, the reason why, why does this matter? You know, people, people representing that they’re somehow affiliated with, with the regiment or the associate veterans and all that is, uh, it matters ’cause PSYOP is already misunderstood.
You know, when people market fantasy versions of military persuasion, it damages public understanding of the field and reflects on the people who actually served in this regiment. It also misleads civilians who are paying, uh, who are paying money or giving trust based on implied military credibility. A- and, you know, uh, I, I don’t know much about his business, but if he’s saying that he was a PSYOPper and he’s, he’s making money through whatever he teaches or sells, that’s very, that’s very wrong.
That would, that would be like if, uh, I taught a survival school and said I was a former Green Beret. That’s just, that’s ethically unsound. Um- Yeah. You know, uh, a- as, as far as like red flags, you know, for let’s say, say there’s just some ways that, “I’m a PSYOP expert, and I’ll teach you, you know, how to read people in less than five minutes.”
Um, you should watch red flags, uh, secret credentials, uh, elite access, uh, unverified training claims, universal promises, uh, theatrical certainty, and, uh, claims that one system lets you read, control, or manipulate anyone.
Zach Elwood: Right. Yeah. Be very skeptical of, like, grand claims about anything. Yeah.
Pat: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Pat: Um, you know, uh, or another way to frame it is, like, real expertise, real expertise usually gets Uh, more careful as it gets deeper.
Uh, fake expertise often gets more absolute. Mm. Um, you know, a- and it, it’s, it’s kinda like my time as a, as a maritime archeologist. Like, if you came up with me with a theory of something, I would never say, “No, that’s ridiculous.” I’d go, “Well, okay, well, where, where’s the science take you on that? What’s your evidence?”
You know? I wouldn’t outright say, “You’re wrong.” I would say, uh, “Well, yeah, let me… Give me your evidence and I’ll take a look.” And then I would say, “Well, the preponderance of evidence says this and yours says this, so I gotta…” Uh, Carl Sagan said– what did he say about claims? Like, uh, uh, it’s like great claims require great evidence or something to that effect.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, no, extraordinary claims, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And some extraordinary claims could be true, but you wanna, you wanna d- start out doubting them, yeah.
Pat: Yeah. Yeah. And, and like I said, uh, y- I, I could talk to you forever. I, I know I glossed over a lot of stuff.
I like talking psyops history, too. Like, um, there’s really cool stuff like, uh, Vietnam War. Uh, have you ever heard of the ghost tapes?
Zach Elwood: No
Pat: Okay, so the ghost tapes were, uh, I believe it was like ’66, ’67. Um, the, uh, cybers in Vietnam realized that, uh, certain Vietnamese tribes had different superstitions. And one of the superstitions was that if their loved one, say a Viet Cong, uh, died in the jungle, their soul would be cursed to wander the jungle forever ’cause they’re away from their family.
Or they’re, they’re, those days they’re very family-oriented. So the Psyopers, and this is a time when, uh, reel-to-reel tape, all that’s still pretty rare. They got this disjointed tape, uh, and they made it sound like a Vietnamese man that’s trapped in hell. And, uh, they had the echo and all that stuff, and he’s like, “Please help me.
I’ve died in the jungle. Where’s my family?” And, and all this sort of thing. And they would have kind of spooky Halloween stuff going on in the background. And initially, it absolutely terrified the Viet Cong and, and Vietnam, North Vietnamese Army. It was so bad that according to legend, uh, they had to take headphones and place them on the South Vietnamese soldiers ’cause they forgot to do it and the guys defected.
It was effective, but in typical army fashion, the army finds, you know, you hit the green button and the thing works, they push it over and over again. And PSYOP is a game of finesse. So, um, that would be, like, where you, you, you could go into the, you know, we’re playing tricks a bit. Um, but again, what were we doing there?
If we got the Viet, the, the, the Viet Cong to surrender, we didn’t have to kill them. Right. If they went back to their family, a, an infantry platoon doesn’t shoot them. Right. You know? So we’re, we’re mitigating death. Um, but yeah, you can actually go on YouTube and look up, uh, Vietnam, uh, Vietnam ghost tapes, and it should come up.
And then there was like a Omleto or something. I, I, uh, I think it’s called Omleto, uh, ghost tapes. And it, they did like a short horror movie, which, uh, Sergeant Major Herb Friedman, a PSYOP warrior, helped make. It’s, it’s, it’s really well done. Uh, so you have stuff like that. Um- Yeah … you have, uh- So many,
Zach Elwood: yeah, so many interesting things to talk about.
Uh, I know it’s a wide space. Yeah.
Pat: Y- yeah. I, I mean, you could go back to, uh, PSYOP is in the Bible. PSYOP is in the ancient Greek stories. Of course, folks are probably excited about the Odyssey’s coming out. Um, that’s an early example of psychological warfare or operations with the Trojan Horse, right?
Zach Elwood: Right.
Pat: I mean- Uh, Odysseus had to have the foreknowledge of what were the religious customs of the Trojans and then use that, uh, to, or weaponize that against themselves. Uh, in, in the Bible you have Gideon and, um, how, uh, he used his, uh, concealed his forces, uh, with, uh, uh, torches and clay pots and I think they broke something and they made their numbers appear bigger than they really were, right?
Zach: Mm.
Pat: Um, so that it goes back to that. It goes back to Genghis Khan and his heralds. Like today we think Genghis Khan is one of the worst Worst guys ever, right? Or, or, you know, legendary warlord. And he would get people to surrender before his army even got there. Um, he would send heralds out, which would spread the rumor of his greatness and the ferocity of things he did, right?
And they would highlight the things he really did do and magnify it. And, uh, he would make his numbers look larger than they really were. He would connect, uh, I think it was like a rake or something to the tails of his, his men’s horses to create the clouds, which makes it look like, well- Oh … if I thought that was 50 horses, now I think there’s 100 horses out
Zach Elwood: here.
Pat: Yeah. You know?
Zach Elwood: Messing with the… Yeah, messing with your opponent’s mind has been a part of all throughout human history, yeah.
Pat: Right. It’s, it’s, it’s an old art, and if you look at the old articles on PSYOP, they, they talk about these things when they were explaining what it was that, that, that, uh, uh, PSYOP does.
It’s ultimately, it’s, it’s a force multiplier. Um, believe me, they, they do not have the wasta to do mind control. That’s, that’s just, that’s just not a thing. Uh, I, I’m not saying that that’s not something that like cults and sort of stuff, that they do- Sure … mind con- certainly they do. Yeah. I mean, um, but- It’s just
Zach Elwood: part of persuasion, yeah.
And, uh, and for people curious, I have a whole episode on like digging into the MKUltra thing if you’re curious, if people are curious about the brainwashing and the mind control aspect, yeah. This has been great, Pat. Uh, I, I wanna thank you for coming on and, and thank you for your service.
Pat: Y- yeah. Well, thank you, sir.
And, and thank you for, for, for giving me your time, and I hope, you know, more of, of the craft comes on. There, there’s guys way more interesting that did way cooler stuff than I ever got to do that, that I, I’m sure would like to be on. And I guess like I, I’d say probably in closing, like, uh, the, the main thing I’d, I’d want people to take away is that PSYOP’s a real profession with a real history, real limits, and real ethical and legal boundaries.
Um, it’s, uh, it’s not mind control. It’s not a secret superpower. Uh, most real influence work is less cinematic than people, you know, they wanna imagine. Um, it’s about credibility, audience context, uh, timing, um, and whether the message re- matches reality. And I’d say the problem is that when serious people do not explain the field, the vacuum gets filled with conspiracy theorists, entertainers, and people selling secret military, uh, persis- persuasion systems that…
And that hurts the public understanding Uh, I think it also reflects unfairly on the people who actually serve in the regiment and did the work, um, who in my, my, my book are some of the most intelligent folks in the United States military a- and some of the most ethically sound. Uh, so like I guess I, to wrap it up, I, I’d say my, my advice to listeners is simple.
When someone trades on military intelligence, PSYOP interrogation or spec ops credibility, ask for the specifics. What unit, what role, what dates, what training, what evidence? What exactly are they claiming? Real expertise has boundaries. Honest people will tell you who, where those boundaries are.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Great tip. Get specific.
Pat: Yeah. A- and, uh, I’m all about like preserving the, the actual history and the professional reality of the job, right? And not make it sound mysterious. You know, I’d ra- I’d rather make it less mysterious and more accurate and harder for people to exploit. Uh, I, I, I th- so I, I thank you.
I, I do thank you for your time.
Zach Elwood: That was a talk with Pat, a former Army PSYOP soldier. I’m Zach Ellwood, and this has been the People Who Read People podcast. You can learn more about this show at behavior-podcast.com. Please consider subscribing and sharing this on social media. Thanks.