I thought it’d be interesting to read a very dumb book from 1969 called “Face Reading: A Guide to How the Human Face Reveals Personality, Sexuality, Intelligence, Character, and More.” To be clear: this is a very bad book with no sense/logic to it, basically astrology-like, and I’m reading it just because I was curious what it said and thought some other people would find it interesting. I’m generally curious about the weird things people believe; also curious about some stereotypes that were present about such things in the 60s era. I thought it was an interesting relic and some other people might also think so.
I interrogate an 8-year-old about her belief in magical creatures, including: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, the Boogey Man, mermaids, gods and devils, and more. We also get on the subject of dreams and the nature of her mental imagery (e.g., aphantasia).
I didn’t share this episode on the audio podcast platforms; I put it up only on YouTube.
I saw that Chase Hughes, a serial liar who I’ve examined in the past for this podcast, was getting a lot of views for a video promoting the idea that the New Jersey drone sightings might be a government psy-op (psychological operation). So I made a YouTube video to try to educate people about a) the silliness and lies of Chase Hughes, and b) along the way to talk about the badness of reaching for paranoid conspiracy theories without strong evidence.
No matter who wins the election, we’ll likely see toxic political polarization get worse, at least for a time. To avoid us tearing ourselves apart, we need more Americans to see that we’re caught in a feedback loop of conflict. Each group’s contempt and fear provoke contempt and fear from the “other side,” in a self-reinforcing cycle. Political scientist Lee Drutman refers to this as the “doom loop.”
This is a reading of a piece I wrote for my Defusing American Anger Substack: that piece is here. If you think these ideas are important, or if you’re skeptical and want to learn more, check out my books at www.american-anger.com.
In a recent Fox News interview, Trump was asked whether he thought there would be chaos and violence if he won the election, and his response included mentioning that, if necessary, the military might be needed. Many framed this response as indicating that Trump would go after his political opponents using the military, leaving out the context that he was responding to a question about election-related violence. I discuss what this incident can teach us about our toxic political divides.
A transcript, post-release show notes, and resources related to this episode are farther down below.
Topics discussed include: Republican-side grievances and how incidents like this relate; how conflict leads us to filter things in more pessimistic and negative ways; the self-reinforcing nature of conflict; the reasons why people framed Trump’s statements the way they did; Trump’s “bloodbath” language and similar reactions to that; the ease with which we can be biased without even realizing it, and more.
I think there are areas of nuance here that result in people talking about different aspects of it and misunderstanding each other.
For example, a piece by Tangle News focused on the badness of Trump saying he might use the military on protesters. I see the badness of that as quite debatable as I think there are scenarios where that’d be a reasonable response. Also Trump did say “if necessary,” which leaves a lot of room for ambiguity. But in any case Tangle’s focus was different than mine; I focused on people leaving out the context of the question Trump was asked, and framing it as if he were talking about dealing with his political opponents generally. (Learn why I recommend Tangle.)
As I discuss in this episode, when making these points I’ll receive criticisms like, “Trump is unhinged and dangerous; it’s clear what he meant.” (You can see a response like this in these comments. ) But the fact that I and others can have very different interpretations of these moments shows that the meaning of such things is notobvious. And hopefully you can see that you can think Trump is horrible while also seeing how overly pessimistic framings are bad and unhelpful (and while also seeing how such things can actually help Trump).
Other resources mentioned in the episode are in the transcript below
TRANSCRIPT
This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding people better, and understanding ourselves better. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. Also on my site are entries for these episodes with related resources and transcripts and more.
In this episode, I’m going to discuss something in political news that bothered me a few days ago. I think it’s a good example of something quite specific and granular that tells us a lot about how our political divides work on a broader level.
If you do disagree with me, I’d ask you to keep in mind the broader point that disagreeing on these things is easy. Often for these contentious issues, disagreement on political views or disagreement about specific points becomes a reason for people to walk away from thinking about these ideas. But if you can see the meta-level point that it’s easy for us to see things in very different ways, that’s very much related to the points I make in this video.
In an October 14th interview on Fox News, Trump said some insulting and divisive things about liberals and Democrats, as he often does; He used the phrase the “enemy within” to talk about his political enemies, and discussed specific people, like Adam Schiff, who he saw as his enemies. During that talk, he was asked by the host, Maria Bartiroma, what he thought about the chances for violence after the election if he were to win. I’ll play that clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmmx1zQCQds:
Maria: Are you expecting chaos on election day?
Trump: No, I don’t – not from the side that votes for Trump.
Maria: But I’m just wondering if these outside agitators will start up on election day. Let’s say you win. I mean, let’s remember, you’ve got 50,000 Chinese nationals in this country in the last couple years, there are people on the terrorist watch list: 350 in the last couple years. You got, like you said, 13,000 murderers and 15 thousand rapists, um, what are you expecting? Joe biden says he doesn’t think it’s going to be a peaceful election day.
Trump: Well, he doesn’t have any idea what’s happening – he spends most of his day sleeping. Uh, I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people that have come in and are destroying our country – by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated – but I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of election day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within – we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think – and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.
Trump’s mention of using the military was then framed in extremely negative terms by many in the media; ways that seem extremely biased to me. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
Here’s a clip from New York Times’ The Daily podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/podcasts/the-daily/election-roundtable.html (4:30) Note that here they conflate together the “enemy within” language with the statement about the use of the military. Again, they don’t mention that there was a question about election-related violence that prompted the remark on the military. This show was the reason I started looking into this, because I was frankly pretty surprised by their framing and the lack of context given.
Now, to be clear here, I myself am very much anti-Trump – but I’m also someone who is concerned about what some far left people might do if Trump is elected. For the upcoming election, one of the paths to worst-case scenarios I see involves Trump winning followed by far left people doing bad things, which then leads to counter protestors doing bad things, and to escalating street violence, and then to Trump and others cracking down harshly on protestors, leading to more outrage and protests, and more crackdown, and so on. That’s one of the pathways that scares me.
So the idea that there may theoretically be a substantial amount of violence and the idea that it may theoretically be necessary to use the National Guard to break up protests isn’t an unreasonable idea to me.
Also we should note that Trump was prompted to answer here, so he had to say something, and note that he also did say, “if necessary.” This wasn’t a statement he produced out of the blue; when analyzing statements for meaning, we must differentiate between prompted speech and speech that one produced unprompted.
This statement from Trump about the theoretical use of military force, if you subtract all his usual “sick and bad people” type language surrounding it, struck me as quite banal, all things considered, and as the kind of thing that Kamala Harris might say, using different language, if asked about the possibility of far right violence if she won. From my point of view, this was a quite minor moment compared to some of the much more objectively bad things Trump said in this talk, including calling his political opponents the “enemy within” and other things. The thing is with Trump: there are just so many more clearly and unambiguously objectionable things to focus on, which makes it a strange decision by anti-Trump people to focus on the more subjective things he’s said.
Some people thought that Trump’s “enemy within” language showed that he was talking about more than just violent protestors, because that’s a term he used elsewhere to describe his political opponents in general. But that to me is not persuasive evidence; we know Trump likes to speak in extremely divisive and insulting and dehumanizing ways about his opponents. But granted that we know that, it’s not surprising that he would keep using the same phrase, the “enemy within” to describe his enemies as a whole, and that he’d fail to distinguish between the different types of his so-called “enemies.” We also know that Trump loves catchphrases; he often will go a while using the same phrase, because he just seems to get a kick out of using it. This is just to say that the claim that he was talking about his opponents in general as opposed to violent protestors specifically is not an objectively obvious or provable one; I think that it’s overly pessimistic.
At the very least, even if you disagree with me on that, maybe you’d agree that it would have been good and responsible journalism to mention that the statement about the military came after he was asked about potential election-related violence.
In my books on polarization, my main focus is on the self-reinforcing nature of conflict. When you take the worst-case interpretations of everything your adversaries say and do, you amplify the toxicity of the conflict. It’s entirely expected that these pessimistic takes and interpretations should happen, when we’re conflict; that’s what conflict does to us. Pessimism begets pessimism. People on both sides of the conflict see the other side in increasingly negative and pessimistic ways, and then filter everything through that lens, and so on.
If you care about reducing the toxicity of our divides, or even if you mainly are interested in accomplishing specifical political goals, you should care about how this cycle gets worse, and you should want to work against it.
And not only that: worst-case interpretations help build support for the “other side.” Our worst-case, pessimistic interpretations help those on the other side of the conflict construct their narratives where we are the bad guys. We’ll often view our own behaviors and statements as reactions to the other side’s badness, but they will see our criticisms and reactions as provocations and aggressions. For this specific incident, it’s easy to imagine how Republican-leaning voters view this: these are the incidents that confirm for them why they are right to distrust liberal-leaning mainstream media. I’ll say that even for me, these incidents are extremely disappointing and agitating; for one thing, it means that when I hear the latest outrage on the liberal side, in respected liberal outlets, I can no longer trust that things happened as they’re claimed to have happen; when I hear something that Trump or Republicans did that is supposedly worthy of outrage, I can’t trust the sources anymore, I have to go do my own research. This is what’s so frustrating about this, even apart from the fact that I see these things as amplifying conflict for no good reason.
If you’re curious to learn more about that, I have a talk with Yakov Hirsch in the backlog of episodes, where we talk about the importance of anti-Trump people having cognitive empathy for Trump and Trump supporters; for understanding why Republicans can perceive a huge, biased system aligned against them, and how that makes them feel and act. Again, in all of these areas, you can arrive at empathy and understanding for other people’s narratives without agreeing with their views. Contrary to what our instincts tell us, understanding does not equal agreeing.
No surprise this week to see the media critique and misread my exclusive interview with President Trump last weekend when he responded to my question about whether outside agitators would emerge to create chaos and election day should it appear that Trump was winning instead most media Outlets cut out my question entirely to suggest Trump wanted the military to take down his political enemies here’s a clip.
[Here she plays the clip from her interview…]
Following my interview Democrats and many mainstream media outlets constructed their own political narrative without including the full context of the Q&A about outside agitators on Election Day among the media Outlets that ran misleading headlines NPR Vanity Fair the part and many others and this is how the interview was covered on television:
Watch this in a Fox news interview the former president also suggested using the military to go after what he called the enemy from within on Election Day it comes as former president Trump is deploying increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against his rival and suggesting using the military against what he described as domestic enemies it we’re at the point where where he’s saying I’m going to use the National Guard and the military to take my political enemies out of the country talking about but I’m talking about
Donald Trump saying that he wants to use the National Guard in the military to go after the left that’s what he’s saying on the campaign Trail Trump this weekend stepping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric and suggesting he might use the military against quote radical left lunatics on Election Day.
Joining me now in this Sunday Morning Futures exclusive is Trump organization Executive Vice President and the son of the 45th president Eric Trump. Eric, great to see you thank you for being here your reaction.
Eric: Thanks Maria listen my reaction is very simple. I’ve lived this for 10 years Maria I mean it started with the dirty dossier where they made up the most Unthinkable things about my father then they went to
the Russia hoax and that hung over my father’s presidency for threeyear period of time then they tried to impeach him the first time then they went after Brett Kavanaugh then they tried to impeach him the second time then they raided his home they raided melania’s closet they raided you know Baron’s room then they tried to take him off the valley in Colorado then they tried to take him off the ballot in Maine then they weaponized every AG and DA in Atlanta in New York and in Washington DC to go after my father then you had you know Paige and stru and and Comey you had me getting 111 subpoenas you had
them ban him from Twitter ban him from Facebook ban him from Instagram the they I I mean where do you want me to stop and and that’s exactly what my father’s talking about that’s the enemy within.
I include this clip not because I agree with what Eric Trump says; in fact, I think Eric is someone that, like many people these days, has been deranged by conflict. He filters everything about the quote “other side” through the worst possible lens, and it’s a very distorted lens, in my opinion. He sees everyone on the quote “other side” as all being aligned against him, as all being part of a big plot; that is also what conflict does to us. He filters everything through a very pessimistic lens while being unable to empathize with the reasons why people view his father so negatively. Remember that Eric Trump is the person who said, about Trump’s political opponents, “I’ve never seen hatred like this. To me, they’re not even people.” He can’t see the big picture of the conflict; he is only focused on the badness of his opponents, as he sees it. And it’s easy for conflict to derange us; easier than we think. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/7/15755852/eric-trump-not-people-dehumanization
I include this clip to help people understand how incidents like this one fit into the broader narrative building that happens on the Republican side where Trump’s enemies are the undemocratic ones, willing to do and say whatever they can to make Trump look bad. Again, you don’t have to agree with that to understand why people feel that way, and to see why that can be a large factor in support for Trump. Grievance and anger are big factors in our politics; more so than most people want to believe, on either side.
Another prominent example of this dynamic was around Trump’s “bloodbath” comment, in which he made the statement that, if he lost, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” I’ll play that clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtE4Z0yWbPA
[PLAY CLIP]
As with the statement about use of the military, this specific phrase struck me when it happened and got media attention as a non-issue. Listening to Trump’s statement in context, it struck me as completely banal. The kind of thing that would pass unnoticed by most people if people besides Trump were to say it.
“If you actually watch and listen to the section, he was talking about the auto industry and tariffs,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Washington Post, adding that “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”
That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.
And yet, in this case, also, many smart and influential people, from academics to political leaders to pundits, ran with the most pessimistic interpretation possible.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have both repeated the claim that Trump’s “bloodbath” language was meant to predict or threaten violence if he lost.
“And now he says if he loses again, such a whiner that he is, that there could be a bloodbath.”
Here’s a clip from Kamala Harris from their debate in September: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYbTQ4MmqdY “Donald Trump the candidate has said in this election there will be a bloodbath.”
Tim Snyder, https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-bloodbath-candidate is the author of the best-selling book On Tyranny, in which he makes the case that Trump poses an authoritarian threat. Snyder framed it as obvious, in context, that Trump really did mean a physical and literal bloodbath. He made the case on his substack that one must put Trump’s statement into context. After laying out the context he saw, he wrote:
By now we have taken into account some important contexts: how Trump himself introduced his speech; the politics and mendacity of his coup attempt of 2021; and the history of fascist violence generally. All of this confirms that when Trump threatens a bloodbath he means a bloodbath.
Later he writes:
The people who say that the car context rescues Trump ignore the meaningful contexts: history, Trump, the opening of the rally, what he said in the speech generally. Focusing on the cars has the effect of casting away the fascist overture and rest of the speech, and all of the other contexts. Those who speciously insist that Trump had in mind an automotive bloodbath never mention that he had just celebrated criminals, repeated the big lie, dehumanized people, and followed fascist patterns.
This helps us see the explanation for why smart people, people who I think should know better, can justify overly pessimistic interpretations: They think that you must take into account all the context and look behind the surface level meaning. The arguments in that direction tend to sound like this: “We know how bad Trump really is and the many bad things he’s said before; we can’t give him the benefit of the doubt” and “Don’t be naive; we know what he was really thinking; he tries to speak in ambiguous ways so you can’t be sure exactly what he means but we know better.”
But this is all quite bad logic to me: these are justifications for taking the worst-case interpretations of things people say; they aren’t logical reasons why you should do that.
For one thing, reaching for the most pessimistic interpretations possible is what people on both sides of an extreme conflict will find themselves doing. This is what Trump and Republicans do to their opponents all the time. This is what conflict does to us. If we want to work against conflict, we must see it as important to not jump to pessimistic conclusions about everything around us. The truth is that in the course of speaking, all of us every day say things that could be taken in extremely pessimistic ways; there is no shortage of things to use to build pessimistic narratives. And if we do that for other people, they’ll be more inclined to do it for us.
The impulse to engage in mind-reading is one clue of this mindset; we see this from highly angry people on both sides of our divide; people who say things like “We know what’s in their hearts; we know what’s in their minds; we know the dark, dangerous things our opponents are thinking.”
For another thing, if your goal is to criticize Trump, there are just so many things Trump has said that are worthy of criticism and that don’t require reaching for subjective, ambiguous, and non-persuasive interpretations. If your goal is to persuade others of Trump’s badness, reaching for the most subjective and ambiguous examples of his behavior are a surefire way to drive people away from you and make them see your arguments and your concerns as silly. Think about it from a Trump voter’s perspective for a moment: when they see people overreacting about Trump’s “blood bath” language and his mention of using the military to quell unrest if necessary, they will find it easy to write off other liberal-side concerns about Trump. They will find it easy to think anti-Trump people are overreacting in general. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/elections/trump-promises-extreme-rhetoric.html
Another defense I hear is from people who agree that these aren’t good things, but who say: “But the problems are so much worse on the other side; why are you focused on this small stuff?” But hopefully by the time you’re done this video, you’ll have a better sense of why I find these things so important to talk about and to consider.
Pessimism and contempt beget more pessimism and contempt. For people who see liberal-leaning media acting in biased ways, they will also reach for pessimistic conclusions, like, “The media knows they’re lying; they’re purposefully lying to hurt Trump; this is all part of a big plot.”
But this is another overly pessimistic interpretation. The simple fact is that conflict produces bias and overly pessimistic views. Conflict diverges our narratives, making it harder for us to understand the narratives people on the quote “other side” have. In my book Defusing American Anger, I include a section on our polarized, divergent views of Trump, where I talk about how we can arrive at such divergent, entirely different views of the things Trump has said and done.
[Show diagram] When you see these dynamics clearly, you’ll have a better understanding of things that can be rather mystifying. For example, on a personal note, I’ll say that it’s rather mystifying to me how smart people in the liberal-leaning media can so often arrive at these extremely pessimistic and, to me, illogical, takes about Trump. Why are they focusing on these subjective and non-persuasive things, I wonder. In the same way, I am often perplexed by the very unreasonable and divisive framings of things in conservative-leaning news. It would be quite easy for me to reach conclusions like, “All the reporters and leaders I think are speaking in very divisive and biased ways are purposefully trying to deceive people.” It would be very easy to jump to extremely pessimistic conclusions about so many people. But because I’m someone who works against pessimism, I think it’s important to examine the underlying causes at work. Smart and compassionate people can arrive at views they believe are completely defensible and logical but that I and others see as extremely biased and misleading. Just as Timothy Snyder can defend his framing of Trump’s “bloodbath” comments by arguing it’s all about the context and putting the pieces together, others in various ways are doing the same thing. They are connecting the dots in various ways.
For example, for Trump’s military comments recently, some made the argument that it was clear, from the context of the rest of the aggressive and divisive interview, that Trump’s statement about using the military didn’t just apply to violent protestors; that in the context of him talking about the “enemy within” and talking specifically about Pelosi and Adam Schiff and such elsewhere in the talk, that it was clear that he was insinuating violence in general against his so-called enemies as a broad group. As I previously said, I don’t find this persuasive logic, as it requires deductions and assumptions, but I can understand how they got to that stance.
The truth is that we’re all making all sorts of deductions and assumptions every day. Our logic and our thinking are built on all sorts of assumptions and deductions. And what does conflict and polarization do to us? It makes what we focus on and the deductions we make more pessimistic, and more hysterical; it makes our thinking itself more team-based and unreasonable. As humans, we’re good at assembling stories; we’re good at assembling the pieces of the puzzle in all sorts of ways, and often the picture we put together will be overly dark and scary.
This is just to say: if you’re someone who is drawn to often thinking that people on the “other side” are always lying; that they can’t possibly believe the things they say they believe – I hope you consider that, more often than you think, those people really do believe what they say they believe. This is not to say there aren’t liars (because conflict makes people more willing to lie, too), but just to say that often our divergence in narratives will mean we’ll have a hard time distinguishing between true believers and liars.
TAPPER: He’s literally talking about, using the military against Democrats. I mean he’s literally talking…
JOHNSON: No, he’s not. No, no, he’s not, Jake.
TAPPER: Yes he is!
JOHNSON: No, he’s not. No. No, he’s talking about using the National Guard and the military to keep the peace in our streets.
I write about these dynamics in my book Defusing American Anger, which is written for all Americans and is currently only in ebook. My book How Contempt Destroys Democracy is written for a liberal and/or anti-Trump audience and is available in paperback as well as ebook. My work in this area has gotten some good reviews. For example, Kamy Akhavan, Executive Director of USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, called it “One of the better books on polarization” and said it contained a “great explanation of how polarization actually works.” Kirkus Reviews said it contained: “Compelling arguments, based on astute observations and backed by solid research.” Daniel F Stone, a polarization researcher and the author of the book Undue Hate, which I highly recommend, gave me a book review in which he said that I’m quote “one of the wisest voices on the topic of toxic polarization.”
I hope you found this of interest. If you did, please consider sharing on your social media; sharing my work is how you can encourage me to do more of it.
In the documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, filmmaker Cullen Hoback put forth the theory that developer Peter Todd was Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. In this episode, I talk to cryptocurrency expert Jeremy Clark about this theory, with a focus on the language and behavior of Peter Todd. We discuss: the 2010 forum post by Peter Todd that forms the backbone of Hoback’s theory; Peter’s behavior in the film when confronted, which many people saw as suspicious and strange; the difficulties of relying on nonverbal behavior for clues; and how simple, neat, and exciting stories can attract us.
Peter Todd watched this episode; links to his thoughts are below in the show notes. Also below is a transcript and resources related to this talk.
Several people (including Peter) misunderstood my point about the forum post language. My point, which I elaborated on at the end, was that I thought the language itself was unusual/rare, not the fact that he was correcting him. I would predict that if you were to study instances of people correcting other people’s points (even when correcting people rather bluntly or rudely), the phrase “to be specific” would be rare. That’s something that could be studied (could run an analysis of many forums/threads maybe). But again, even if I’m right (which I might not be), people do say unusual phrasings all the time, so it wouldn’t mean much on its own. It might become interesting if you could prove it was extremely rare, though.
Here’s Peter saying he thought his “to be specific” language was softening the tone of his correction
Here’s one person’s thoughts on why he thinks the forum post language supports the idea that Peter isn’t Satoshi. I include this as a way to emphasize that there are clearly many ways to interpret the totality of evidence.
Towards the end, it might have come across like I was saying that the filmmaker, Cullen Hoback, was being a bit conspiratorial with regards to ideas that Peter Todd may have worked for the CIA. To clarify that: I don’t think that’s what Hoback was doing; I think he was talking about theories that are out there as a way to get to his theory about Peter.
Zach Elwood: A few days ago, I got an email. It read:
Hi Zachary, HBO recently aired a documentary on Bitcoin titled Money Electric (covered in NYT, New Yorker, etc.). As you might know, Bitcoin was invented by an anonymous individual. The film ends with the filmmaker confronting the man he suspects, a developer named Peter Todd. A lot is being made of Peter’s body language and behavior, which is admittedly strange. The director keeps retweeting people saying they believe it is Peter because of his reaction. I would love to hear your take. The concrete evidence is very thin, so his reaction is a main piece of evidence.
That email came from a cryptocurrency expert named Jeremy Clark. This episode will mostly consist of a talk I had with Jeremy about this after I watched the Money Electric documentary based on his recommendation. Jeremy and I discuss a statement Peter Todd made on an early bitcoin forum, which is the primary piece of evidence in Hoback’s theory that Peter is Bitcoin’s creator. And we discuss Peter’s behavior when he was confronted by the film maker.
This is the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding people. You can learn more about it behavior-podcast.com. If you like my work, please hit subscribe and share it with others; that’s how you can encourage me to spend more time on these projects.
A few notes on this:
This episode will make the most sense if you’ve seen the Money Electric documentary first. I think you’ll be able to follow it either way, but it will probably just be the most enjoyable if you’ve watched the movie.
I want to emphasize that I went into this knowing almost nothing about bitcoin or theories about who Satoshi was. After Jeremy sent me the email, I watched the documentary, read a couple articles online, and jumped on a call with him. As you’ll notice, I am quite ignorant about these topics. But I thought this minimal research approach would work out because it gave me a chance to share reactions and thoughts that a lot of people probably had watching this, and gave Jeremy a chance to push back on and correct some of my more ignorant reactions.
One interesting thing about this episode to me is how my initial confidence in the film maker’s theory gave way, as Jeremy educated me, to more doubt and uncertainty. This meta-level point is something Jeremy and I talk about, too; how we can be drawn to stories that make us feel we’ve understood something, even when our understanding is quite wrong, or quite partial. We can be especially drawn to stories that are exciting, or stories that make us feel we’re in possession of some secret, special knowledge. I’m honestly a little bit embarrassed of some of the things I say towards the beginning of this talk with Jeremy, as in hindsight it seems obvious to me that of course many smart people have been pouring over this topic for many years, so it’s rather silly to think that this film maker or I would have amazing insights that others very close to this hadn’t already carefully considered by now.
To be specific, I’m embarrassed at my saying to Jeremy that I found the evidence quote “really persuasive,” because in hindsight my confidence was partially due to my immense ignorance in this area. Another thing I’m a bit embarrassed about was my initial excitement, after watching the documentary, at the idea of closely analyzing the language patterns found in Peter’s and Satoshi’s posts. As I talked to Jeremy I quickly realized that of course people have already looked into that in depth.
These points about the allure of exciting and simplistic stories is something I think about a lot in my work on political polarization-related topics. The truth is that we’re drawn to simplistic stories in all aspects of our lives; from stories about our politics and political groups, to stories about how the world in general works, to stories about our own personalities and personal lives. And simplistic stories are tempting and can draw us in, but simplistic stories come with prices, because they’re often quite inaccurate and misleading, and can even lead us down dangerous paths sometimes.
A little bit about my guest Jeremy Clark: he’s an Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His website is www.pulpspy.com that is “pulp” “spy” .com. Jeremy’s website bio says that he mostly works on quote “security and cryptography with real-world applications to finance and democracy.”
Okay, without further adieu here’s the talk with Jeremy Clark…
Zachary Elwood: Yeah. Hey, Jeremy. Yeah, thanks for showing me this story. It’s very interesting and I wonder do you want to start by giving your thoughts about whether Peter Todd is Satoshi and then I can give my thoughts, or do you want to do it that way?
Jeremy: Sure, happy to. Yeah, so this documentary came out from HBO and it pointed to someone called Peter Todd as potentially the person who invented Bitcoin. I know Peter; I’ve met him before at various events very long time ago. There’s even a picture with a bunch of people around a dinner table, and it’s in the film just for a split second. I am in that picture, but it frames me out. I wasn’t sitting close enough and it wanted to zoom in on Peter. But yeah, let me just say a high-level way of how I think about the question. So, I think of everyone sort of walking around with a needle that’s somewhere between 0% and 100% chance of being Satoshi. Right? And so Peter’s needle is definitely a lot higher than an average person that you’re going to pick off the street. He does have experience on the development side, he has a longstanding interest which you can see through forum posts and things like that on digital cash. He has developer experience, and so he ticks a lot of those boxes. The problem for me is that there’s probably, by my count, maybe 10,000 other people that would kind of tick those boxes as well. You also have a reverse causation where if you do a project like Bitcoin, you’re going to attract those people. Those are the people who are going to come. Right?
Zach: Right. So they’ll be involved with it early on and be around it. Yeah.
Jeremy: Exactly, exactly. So, the fact that you’re involved early isn’t necessarily evidence that you’re Satoshi. It just means that the project drew you into the spotlight. And then, of course, you’re going to have lots of people around the project that are very capable of creating it. What I would say is just that from what I saw of the film, it didn’t move the needle. Okay? I’m not saying he’s not Satoshi, I’m not saying he is.
Zach: Right, it wasn’t convincing.
Jeremy: Yeah, whatever his needle was at before, they brought forward a bunch of evidence and it didn’t change it.
Zach: Gotcha. Do you want me to talk about my thoughts now?
Jeremy: Yes, I’d love to hear them.
Zach: You had contacted me about behavior, which as I was telling you via email—and I’ve said many times on my podcast and such—I’m quite skeptical about drawing major conclusions from nonverbal behavior. I am much more a believer in statement analysis and analyzing statements, which is not about really behavior at that point, it’s just about analyzing and making logical deductions of what people say and the way they say it and the way they phrase things. So, yeah, what really stood out to me… I was skeptical going in because I read a little bit about it and I was like how much could this very clearly smart person give away—considering he hasn’t been a major suspect so far. So, I was skeptical. But I will say the thing that stood out to me was the forum post itself. And I’ll actually share the screen here because it probably helps us talk about it. One second. Let me just make sure I have that up.
Yeah, can you see my screen?
Jeremy: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah, so the part where they talk about this thing where Peter Todd’s account on an old Satoshi post in a forum, Peter Todd follows up with the post. It was apparently a minute and a half after Satoshi posted or something, or maybe it was an hour and a half. I can’t remember offhand.
Jeremy: Yes. Yeah, 90 minutes roughly.
Zach: Yeah, 90 minutes. Yeah. This, to me, really just stood out. I find this really persuasive evidence that Peter Todd is Satoshi because, I mean, he didn’t even get into the documentary but the language here. Of course, to be specific, that to me does not sound like something somebody responding to someone would say. Just thinking about how anybody would respond or how I would ever respond to somebody who is well-known in the community and is clearly extremely smart and you’re saying, “Of course, to be specific…” It’s like you’re clarifying something like it’s a continuing thought, which is what they say in the documentary, like this seems to be a continuing thought and he was logged into the wrong account, and he had only recently made the Peter Todd— Or Peter Todd only recently made his account on that forum, apparently, so it makes sense that he might have confused the accounts, that to me really stood out as like I really find that hard to explain other than Peter Todd being Satoshi. This is not to say I’m certain, but I do find this really persuasive evidence. So, this brings up other lines of questions for me.
Zach: Just a note that I edited out some of our talk here. I’d gotten confused by the fact that in the documentary the film maker had added ellipsis to both Satoshi’s and Peter’s posts. I had thought there was potentially some clue in the use of the ellipsis, but the ellipsis weren’t present in the original posts. This gets back to what I was saying in the intro: I was getting excited thinking, “what various clues might be present in the language?” when of course all this stuff has been poured over in excruciating detail already. Back to the talk.
I would wonder also to look at this specific post for Peter Todd, like the asterisks around exactly, I would wonder if Satoshi often did that. I would even look for the phrase ‘to be specific’ because there’s little minute things like that that if you can find people often using them, it can be a clue to whether it’s the same person.
But just alone the “of course, to be specific,” I’m just imagining putting yourself in Peter Todd’s position. He claims to have barely been in the Bitcoin space at that time—and that was the other thing that he mentioned in the documentary, the fact that he claims to have not really been that detailed about the thinking then—so for him to clarify Satoshi’s post of all people soon after Satoshi posted about a very minute technical detail is pretty strange. And then you added in that the surrounding things about like Peter Todd’s new account, the fact that both of them went silent on that board for really long after that at the same time, all these things… But even just this—leaving aside all these other things—just this post is so strange to me. T he language of ‘of course, to be specific,’ to me it sounds like someone clarifying their own language and not something you would ever say to a third party, especially somebody who’s much more respected. I don’t know. What do you think of that language choice there? Do you think I’m making too much of that?
Jeremy: Well, let me say a few things about everything. First off, in the film, they do show the long version of the post but then later on to sort of stylistically emphasize it, they kind of pull that thought closer to what it looks like he might be correcting from Satoshi. I would say you have to put yourself in a bit of a time machine here in 2010. Bitcoin, I don’t know what it’s worth and how much a Bitcoin is worth—probably less than a dollar or something like that. So, yes, Satoshi did invent the system and it’s attracting a lot of attention. But at the same time, it’s not the Bitcoin that we know today and Satoshi is not the Satoshi that we know today.
Zach: So people speak more informally to them and correct them… Disagree with him, correct them.
Jeremy: And for computer scientists especially, they tend to be very informal and sometimes a little hostile. And Peter Todd has a reputation for being a bit of a troll.
Zach: Right. Yeah, I get that, and those are reasons why I am far from certain. But I do just find this specific phrasing to be specific. And maybe that’d be something interesting to look into it. Like, has he used that language when correcting people in the past or in other places, and maybe it’s a Canadian thing or something? You know? These are reasons why I don’t drawing really firm conclusions. But I do just find the immediate follow-up and this specific phrasing like “To be specific,” I just can’t imagine myself ever saying ‘to be specific’ to somebody else. It’s possible, especially if you’re being—like you say—he’s rather troll-like and often corrects people. Right? So I can see where he’s almost like speaking for him like, “Well, you know, what you meant to say was this.” I could kind of see that. I just find that, combined with some of the other details, I do find quite strange. I don’t know if you want to respond to that more or…
Jeremy: I’ll just sort of dilute your confidence a little bit more. One person I did see on Twitter, I didn’t reconfirm this but I expect it’s probably true, they did look to see whether Satoshi ever put things in asterisks—like the word ‘exactly’— and never did.
Zach: Oh, nice. Okay. Well, that’s…
Jeremy: So, that was one thing. The other thing is—this is where I could actually contribute something because I kind of understand the conversation at a technical level—in the film, it was presented as a continuation of thought. Right? But I want to put the emphasis that this is a correction. Like, Satoshi said something wrong and this is a correction. And it’s not even… If I say correction, usually you fix it. You’re like, “Oh, you said this wrong, so this would be what would be right or this is what you could do instead.” And in this case, it’s like, “You’re wrong,” without the correction. Right? And so it seems weird that you would just be like… If you followed up and you saw that you said something wrong, you would probably actually correct it. Whereas this is just sort of like, “Oh yeah, that’s not right.”
Zach: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Are you saying if Satoshi had made a mistake, he would just correct it himself? As I was saying.
Jeremy: Yeah, he could edit the post as well. The problem is it leaves the issue hanging. Right? Satoshi says, “Oh, we could do it this way,” then Peter Todd comes along and says, “Oh, actually, basically you can’t do it that way.” But then what is the way that you do it? And so neither Satoshi nor Peter say like, “Well, what could you actually do?”
Zach: Got you.
Jeremy: And then one other thing I’ll pour a little more cold water on it. This is also something I haven’t confirmed, but Peter Todd himself said it, and a few people in the documentary. Right now, the post has Peter Todd’s name on it, on that post. And that’s because at some point he changed his screen name and we’re looking at the website as it exists today. But at the time that that post was made, he was using a pseudonym and the pseudonym wasn’t like, “This is my understanding from what was said,” it was that it wasn’t strongly tied to his identity. And so if it were a mistake and he realized it was a mistake-
Zach: He could have deleted it.
Jeremy: He could have deleted it and never posted with that again, not come along later and actually changed it to his real name.
Zach: True. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah.
Jeremy: Some people thought, well, maybe it wasn’t completely disconnected.
Zach: Maybe he felt he had to leave it there and it would be suspicious to delete it if there was something tying him to the account. He felt he couldn’t delete it theoretically.
Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, so it leaves you just with uncertainty. But that’s a bit more color around the issue.
Zach: I’m curious, is it unusual to you that his post was only an hour and a half later and quickly to the next one? I was looking back at the post before that and it seemed like they were regular people. The other thing, it was pretty late at night for what I assume was their time zone. It was like Satoshi’s post was at 12:00 and Peter’s was at 1:30 AM. I don’t know, that’s a little unusual too. But, obviously, computer people are late-night people. He’s young, so it doesn’t mean much in itself. Yeah.
Jeremy: Satoshi, actually, people have done analysis on when he posts. And so there is a sort of time spectrum. And late at night Eastern, we don’t know what time zone he was in either so we don’t know what it corresponds to. But if he were in Eastern Time zone, it sort of looks like someone that maybe worked during the day and worked on Bitcoin at night. And then Peter Todd, I guess was a student at the time and so he might have a similar one. If it had come 30 seconds later or a minute later, that would be very natural. But then you probably wouldn’t have the logout and the login to a new account either. Right?
Zach: Yeah, you make good points. You make good points throwing cold water on it, which is important. Yeah. Getting back to the idea that a lot of times in these cases, I see so many people just jumping on narratives about it is, or definitely it isn’t… But it’s good to be uncertain and to embrace uncertainty. I was curious, is it strange the documentary maker framed it as strange that Peter Todd said that he wasn’t really in the Bitcoin community that early or kind of downplayed his knowledge? Do you think it’s strange, knowing what you know about the technology, that he made such a correction or comment on Satoshi’s post back then when he wasn’t doing that otherwise?
Jeremy: Yeah. There was probably a greater conversation that got cut, so you don’t really know. If someone asked me like, “When did you get into Bitcoin?” It wasn’t like I woke up one day and I went from zero to a hundred. You sort of get involved and you maybe post things. That post would suggest that he understands a lot of the details. There’s a very technical detail called the UTXO, Unspent Transaction Output, and that whole post—the technical premise of that—is based on properly understanding that piece of Bitcoin. And that piece is one of the last pieces that people understand. I teach Bitcoin, so when I teach them or if I give a simple talk, I’ll simplify that model. I won’t go there because… So, it’s one of the last pieces that you would sort of learn. So yeah, at the time he made that post, he definitely understood the protocol quite well.
At the same time, I don’t know what he actually said in the documentary about when he got in. Adam Back was also present in the documentary, and that question also tried to frame that he also was sort of being elusive about how much he knew at certain times. So, I don’t know how much of that was meant for Adam as opposed to Peter or both of them.
Zach: Yeah, and to your point, I often don’t like documentaries because they often do have such bias and it’s such a short format so you often just find that it’s storytelling. Like, people are telling a story so they have to go through dozens of hours or more of footage and pick and choose what they want to show. That’s honestly why I find a lot of documentaries just really misleading when you actually learn what happened. There’s a lot more nuanced compared to what they’re trying to show. So I totally agree with you there. I would love to see the unedited footage, if you ever… And hopefully, you would think he would decide to release that because that’s theoretically more information for people to sift through. I don’t see why he wouldn’t. But yeah, there’s often a lot occluded in a documentary and that’s something you really have to be aware of when you’re watching these shows.
Jeremy: Agreed. Agreed. Peter also tweeted something. He said, “I met the filmmaker four times and it wasn’t obvious what his motive was until the very last meeting.”
Zach: Right. Okay, that’s a good segue into when it comes to the behavior—and I want to preface this by how I often say I find that all these so-called behavior experts, which I’ve talked about recently on my podcast, these people who try to claim you can get all these firm findings from all these different behavioral nonverbal things, I just find that people who claim that you can get a lot of stuff frequently out of nonverbal behavior are just bullshitting you, in my opinion. Behavior is very hard to interpret.
I thought at this point I could basically read the interaction that the film maker and Peter Todd had in the film. I would include the video but often including video means that YouTube will give you a copyright infraction. This interaction comes near the end of the movie, when the film maker gets Peter and his colleague Adam Back out for one more recording and confronts Peter. I want to emphasize again that, we don’t know how this interaction was edited. It’d be much better to see the original footage. I also want to point out that I might have some minor errors as some of the words were a bit unclear.
Here’s the transcript of the final confrontation:
Todd: Satoshi’s last post was like one week after I signed up for Bitcoin Talk, but …
Hoback: Right. And then you disappeared.
Todd: Yeah. Then I disappeared. (laughs)
Hoback: And Satoshi disappeared at the same time.
Todd: Yeah. I really should have paid more attention to Bitcoin early on but, you know, I had other stuff to do.
Hoback: You corrected Satoshi, but it kind of looks more like you were continuing a thought of Satoshi.
Todd: Well, Satoshi made a little brain fart on, like, how exactly transactions work. And I corrected him on that very boring thing.
Hoback: Why didn’t you delete the 2010 post?
Todd: Why would I?
Hoback: Well, I mean, cause it, it just makes you look like you had these deep insights into Bitcoin at the time and then –
Todd: Well, yeah, I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hoback: I mean, it’s sort of the last thing you’d expect Satoshi to say.
Todd: Ah, but that’s it. That’s like the meta level, right? Because I know you’d expect Satoshi Nakamoto to delete the post. You just said, why didn’t Satoshi Nakamoto delete the post?
Adam Back: The post that was corrected?
Hoback: Yeah, yeah, the correction post.
Todd: Right? But then I did the next level of meta. And then didn’t delete the post to throw off people like you.
Back: Yeah, I don’t know. You’re feeding him, like, footage that’s just gonna be…
Todd: Oh, it’s gonna be great.
Later on in the documentary it returns to their interview.
Hoback: So here’s what I think happened. Possibly.
Todd: Possibly.
Hoback: Okay. I think that John Dylan was created, so that you would have an excuse to make ReplaceByFee, a concept which you had envisioned years earlier, but you needed some kind of cover in order to make. And you also needed some cover for that 2010 post.
Todd: 2010 post. Yeah, because I was Satoshi?
Hoback: I mean, yeah. You know, you’re very concerned about all the privacy stuff, uh, so you reach out to your old buddy Adam Back, who said, we need to do something about this, but we need to pay the devs. But you can’t join Blockstream because it would look too, uh, suspicious. So, you don’t.
Todd: I will admit, you’re pretty creative. You come up with some crazy theories. It’s ludicrous. But, it’s the sort of theory someone who spends their time as a documentary journalist would come up with. So yeah, yeah, I’ll say of course I’m Satoshi, and I’m Craig Wright. And yes, I was definitely covering that little bit about, you know, fees to go pretend to be Satoshi. Or not Satoshi, one or the other.
Hoback: Well, why make up the whole John Dylan thing?
Todd: Well, like I said, I’m not John Dillon.
Hoback: Okay.
Todd: Sorry, I’m not John Dillon. I don’t know who that is. I’ll warn you, this is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary and a bunch of Bitcoiners watch it.
Hoback: Well, I don’t think they would be very happy with this conclusion. Because you’re pretty controversial within the community at this point.
Todd: No, I suspect a lot of them will be very happy if you go this route. Because it’s going to be like yet another example of journalists really missing the point in a way that’s very funny.
Hoback: What is the point?
Todd: The point is to make Bitcoin the global currency. And people like you being distracted by nonsense can potentially do good on that.
Zach: Back to the talk…
Zach: So let’s take specifically this example of clearly Peter was uncomfortable. But what does that really mean? It’s like if he’s innocent or guilty, he’s going to be uncomfortable in that spot basically suddenly being set up to be accused of this of this narrative on camera. Anybody would be uncomfortable. So, there’s that element. Then you have to add in the fact that Peter is kind of a troll and a contrarian, and he’s liked to play with the idea that he is Satoshi. So whether he’s innocent or guilty, we can understand why that makes results in a weird behavior dynamic where he’s kind of trying to have it both ways and kid around like, “Maybe I am,” but clearly he’s very uncomfortable by the idea. And you could see why he would be uncomfortable, even if he tries to make light of it. It’s like that’s theoretically a life-changing accusation to be thrown at suddenly. So he’s like even if he was innocent—I guess innocent’s not the word—if he wasn’t Satoshi, then you can see why he’d have all these conflicting ideas that would make him behave in unusual ways.
That’s just to say for this and for many spots where so-called behavior experts sometimes try to get a lot of information, it’s like this is a very complex dynamic and you can imagine all sorts of things running through his head at that moment that make him behave in uncomfortable strange ways that make him say strange things that you’d be like, “Why would he say that?” Right? And especially with this dynamic of people liking to say that they’re Satoshi, that clearly adds another level of weirdness to it. But I’m curious, what do you think of all that?
Jeremy: Actually, this is why I asked you because I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. I have no expertise in reading people or trying to figure out if someone’s bluffing or not. What I do know, though, is that the filmmaker was promoting his reaction as positive evidence that he was Satoshi so he tweeted some things to that effect or retweeted other people saying that he sort of talked a bit about… One thing I thought was good is he said in an early interview that he didn’t think the case could be solved just by internet facts. Like, “Everyone’s poured over everything you can learn online and so I’m going to go and meet people face to face and just see where it goes and I’ll get their reactions. And that’s what I can do sort of as a documentary filmmaker that a lot of other people wouldn’t do or couldn’t do.”
Zach: Yeah, I saw one tweet the filmmaker made where he was pointing to Todd looking at—what’s his name? His mentor.
Jeremy: Adam Back.
Zach: Adam Back. And making the point that Todd seemed to be looking at Back as if he was a father figure who he needed support from and that was evidence that he was looking to this guy who helped him maybe hide his identity and were looking to him for support. That’s not conclusive. That’s not any sort of evidence for anything, because like I said, there’s reasons for Peter to be uncomfortable and you would look to somebody else for support and be like, “What do you think of this stuff?” That, to me, doesn’t mean much.
Zach: A note here: I made a mistake; that tweet wasn’t from the filmmaker but was from someone else responding to the filmmaker. But the point remains that many people were reading into Peter’s behaviors in various ways…
Zach: So yeah, I think we have to be very careful with not seeing what we want to see. Clearly, the filmmaker was painting a narrative that he believes. So we have to be very careful to not see what he’s telling us to see and then read in our interpretations of like, “He seems uncomfortable. He said something weird. I’m going to use that as a reason to highly trust this story or this accusation.” Right? I just think that for all these reasons, we really need to work against our desire for certainty or our desire to believe a narrative that someone else has told us. I think in the political realm and our personal lives, there’s all these narratives that we can find ourselves embracing that have much more nuance behind them.
But we like a simple story and we’re going to embrace that and then we’re going to use that belief in that narrative to filter for reasons for why the behavior adds up and for some reasons to believe that narrative. So yeah, I didn’t see anything. I might add more thoughts later. I think one thing that was clear was Peter seemed quite defensive and didn’t seem to really directly defend himself very well, but then you add in the fact like on the other hand, he’s being accused suddenly, he’s probably not making his best in the moment. He’s clearly somebody that has liked to play with the idea that he could be Satoshi so he’s not really going to feel the need to defend himself that strongly because he doesn’t want to sound defensive too. So for all these reasons, whether he is Satoshi or not, you can understand different reasons for why he behaved the way he did. That was my takeaway from that interview scene. Yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s great. I love that analysis. I think it probably did catch him off guard.
Zach: Yeah, I think so. He seemed very uncomfortable. Yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah. And Adam back, too, there was an earlier scene where they were sitting on the bench and he kind of did the same thing with Adam Back and Adam Back was like, “Oh, I was hoping that you wouldn’t ask me about Satoshi, because I’m not.” It felt like they had sunk a lot of time together and then he was getting around to the Satoshi question, almost kind of sabotaging it at the end, and so I don’t know if that happened with Peter but based on his tweet of doing about four recording sessions before understanding that that’s what the film was about, it was probably just a surprise question.
Zach: Right, a purposeful ‘gotcha’ kind of moment to put him on the spot, which I think is pretty clearly what he was trying to do. Do you have any other thoughts on the whole thing? One thing I’m curious about is say it came out that Peter was definitely Satoshi or definitely not Satoshi if it was proven to be somebody else, would you be that surprised either way with what you know, or do you just have an uncertainty range of it could be, it could not be?
Jeremy: I think I would be a little surprised that it was him. I just feel like the personalities don’t match. Now, maybe if he’s pretending to be Satoshi, the theory of the film is that he wouldn’t be taken seriously because he was so young and so maybe he’s adopting this persona of sort of more mature and stately and those types of things. But their personalities really seem quite different. That would be the piece that would sort of surprise me. But everything else could fit. I mean, he has the technical capability. He’s smart enough to have done it. The fact that his age was so young also doesn’t… There’s lots of people that have invented things in computer science as teenagers that were quite remarkable. So, yeah. But anyways, I would be surprised to learn that it was. And he could prove it, if he was Satoshi, that’s a provable thing. Satoshi has these keys that more or less he knows. If Peter Todd somehow knew them and was able to use them, he at least got them from Satoshi or someone who knew Satoshi, whether he is Satoshi. But you can’t prove a negative, so you can’t prove that you’re not.
Zach: Unless somebody else was proven somehow to be him.
Jeremy: Yeah, sure.
Zach: Accounting for the personality differences in the posting styles, do you think that could be… I mean, theoretically, if Peter Todd was Satoshi, could it be a factor of Peter basically working with Adam or somebody else to finesse this public image like it could be a group effort would help explain differences, and then they would do their best to remove any identifying language markers and things like that?
Jeremy: Yeah. The group hypothesis for Satoshi’s loaded and a lot of people think it could have been a group. I think it’s too complicated. Satoshi stuck around for a year or a year plus answering questions, and the idea of having two people do that is too complicated in my mind and you don’t remember who answered what. And the person who was answering, they answered questions about every aspect of the system. So they knew, in a consistent voice, they knew the system inside and out. So the simplest explanation is just that it’s one person.
Zach: Also, the kind of not professional-level coding would lend support that it was one person, probably. Right?
Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Satoshi wasn’t a superhero. He did something remarkable—like Bitcoin is a big technical achievement—but he wasn’t perfect across the board. His code wasn’t perfect. Even the idea, it was a unique combination of ideas, but it was existing ideas. It wasn’t invented completely from scratch. And so yeah, he’s not like a God-like figure.
Zach: Right. Two or more people would probably have resulted in better code and saw things that he wouldn’t have seen if he was one.
Jeremy: Yeah. But then you get into inconsistencies because like the one person that coded the one aspect, there’s a question about it. So that person has to answer that question and then the other person has to answer the other questions, and so you have this split personality that would emerge with all the emails and the forum posts and things like that. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a much simpler example. And the only reason that people want it to be a group is just because they think it’s too big for one person. But my suggestion is that it’s not too big for one person.
Zach: Yeah. Okay, getting into the realm of the vibe of the documentary, how do I know you’re not running interference for Peter Todd and you weren’t hired by… I’m just mostly kidding here. [chuckles] That’s kind of a humor… I thought that was a humorous way. Maybe you’re working for Peter Todd or maybe you’re working for the government, the CIA, you know? [chuckles]
Jeremy: Yeah, the whole CIA thing was interesting because there was no logic to it, but they kept coming back to it. Like, maybe Peter worked for CSIS—which is our CIA in Canada—and, oh, Satoshi was mad that Gavin Andresen went to the CIA and talked about Bitcoin. And then there was this other persona that was invented that was like a government agent. Oh, sorry, sorry, no one knows this John Dillon. So maybe Peter invented John Dillon or it was a real person. And so it was like he was kind of trying to paint this intelligence into Satoshi’s story and into Peter’s story, and then somehow you were supposed to just think that that somehow leads to evidence that Peter is Satoshi. But there’s no logic to it. It’s just association, right?
Zach: Right. Again, that’s what I didn’t like about the documentary and a lot of documentaries in general. I would have liked to see the things that we’re talking about in here more in the movie. Like, what are the arguments against this as opposed to just like, “I’m going to paint my narrative.” Right? Or at the very least, nod to the fact that there are a lot of ambiguities and uncertainties and tell people where to find those ambiguities and uncertainties at the end. I feel like that kind of approach to documentaries is much more responsible than like, “I have this narrative, and even though people can clearly disagree with me, I’m going to paint this picture of why you should believe my narrative.” Yeah, I would have much rather seen some of the arguments that we got into in this talk in the movie. Right? But there is this incentive to create the grand narrative for these documentaries because it’s like that gets attention and that gets people talking. So I think even if I don’t know what the filmmaker really believes, but even if he had a lot of doubts about his suppositions, there is an incentive for him to draw those conclusions in the documentary to get people talking and to spark debate and get attention and make money. I’m not saying that’s why he did it, but I’m just saying there are those incentives and I think we need to draw attention to those and draw attention to the uncertainty more.
Jeremy: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that was the one piece that was missing was some critical thought about it. And then the other piece which I think someone brought up on Twitter too is that he didn’t really go back and interview family and friends and people that would have known him at that time. And this is in contrast to some of these other Satoshi… This isn’t the first documentary to suggest the name for Satoshi. There’s probably been 10 newspaper articles. One of the most famous was Dorian Nakamoto. This was—was it Newsweek that did it? I have it written down here. Yeah. Sorry, it was Newsweek. I actually listened to a podcast recently with a reporter who reported that story. I was wondering if did she change her mind? Because nobody believes it. In fact, I think in this documentary, they make fun of it too. I might be misremembering that. And she does. She still sticks to her guns. One thing she said is, “I just talked to his family so much. I talked to the parents and the siblings and no one could really account for what he did and he was always very secretive about work.” I didn’t find the reasons conclusive, but at the same time, she put a lot of effort into trying to interview people and try and understand the context of where that person was at that particular time. I didn’t see any of that. Maybe it didn’t make it into the film, but it seemed like there was this confrontation. And they talked to Adam Back but they sort of got to Peter Todd via Adam Back, but they didn’t talk to anybody else who knew Peter or did any sort of investigation of what his life was like at that time.
Zach: Yeah, I would really like these documentaries to end with like, “Go to this URL to see resources and counter arguments.” Right? That would be a responsible thing. I mean, especially if you’re making accusations that are life-changing about people. Show people where to go to or show whether there’s some nuance and more information and do your own looking at it or whatever. But yeah, it disappoints me that more documentaries don’t do that.
Jeremy: And then to answer your early question, there is no way I can prove that I’m not running interference for Peter or anything like that, but I do have a pretty long history working in this space and you can see that I have lots of publications and books. I even talk a little bit about Satoshi and we wrote a textbook—or some colleagues at Princeton University wrote a textbook on Bitcoin and I wrote the forward to it and I talk a little bit at the end, and so this is a question that I’ve been interested in long before I ever met Peter Todd way before this documentary came out. So, yeah, that’s my defense.
Zach: And to be clear, I was kidding with that.
Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. I do want to thank you, Jeremy, because this is something that was interesting. I actually watched the end of the documentary twice because it was so interesting and it’s something I probably wouldn’t have looked at for a while if it wasn’t for you reaching out. So, I just want to thank you.
Jeremy: Yeah, pleasure. I thank you also for looking at it. I think you’re well-positioned to comment on, and particularly, the sort of behavioral stuff at the end.
Zach: Thanks, I appreciate it.
Zach: That was a talk I had with cryptocurrency expert Jeremy Clark.
A couple more thoughts about Peter Todd’s behavior in the movie: Some people were reading a lot into Peter’s meta-level stuff, like when he was like “If I were Satoshi, I’d know you’d think that so I’d do this.” To me, it’s entirely believable that someone like Peter would engage in this kind of meta-level bantering and would enjoy messing with people’s minds, no matter if he was Satoshi or not. So to me, that doesn’t mean much.
Another thing people focused on was Peter getting upset. I myself went back and forth as to whether this was meaningful or not. In the end, I don’t find it a meaningful thing either way. I find it easy to imagine Peter in either scenario, whether he was Satoshi or not Satoshi, reacting in either angry or calm ways. The truth is, as with a lot of behavior, it’s just so easy for people to go down different emotional paths.
Now clearly there’s a lot of uncertainty in all of this. But I will say that one thing I keep thinking about after that talk with Jeremy is that forum post by Peter Todd: Of course, to be specific, the inputs and outputs can’t exactly match.
The phrase “to be specific” seems to me to be something that someone says to clarify something they themselves have said. Imagine hearing someone say a sentence starting with “To be specific” and imagine the context. To me, it’s really only a phrase I’d imagine someone saying to clarify something they just said; or else clarifying someone with whom they work closely with, or something. It’s hard for me to imagine someone following up something someone else said with “to be specific.”
That coupled with the other assorted coincidences strikes me as quite strange.
But the fact that other people don’t seem to make much of that, from what I’ve seen, makes me wonder if I’m just really off base with my instinct about that language. Maybe it’s simply more of an understandable and normal use than I think it is. That’s totally possible. Sometimes my instincts are quite wrong. But it does make me curious if anyone’s done work to see how common that phrase is when used to correct or clarify another person’s speech. I would predict that specific usage is rather rare.
I also wondered how often Satoshi followed up his posts with another short thought, versus just editing his first post. If there were almost no instances of Satoshi following up a post with a short clarifying post, that would be meaningful to me.
Another interesting thing that we touched on was the use of the asterisks around “exactly.” The fact that apparently Satoshi never used asterisks around words is important; you’d think you’d find at least one use of that if Peter were Satoshi. If it’s definitely true that that was Peter’s original post, and it’s known that it wasn’t edited in some way (for example, Peter adding the apostrophes shortly after posting to add a red herring), AND it’s known that Satoshi didn’t use asterisks around words in that way, that all seems like it almost completely absolves Peter for this evidence. If I wanted to show that this accusation wasn’t credible, that’d be what I would focus on. And it’s likely someone has already done this; again, I am not educated in this space and speaking very much as a noobie and speaking very much off the cuff.
In defending himself in more detail in an interview in Pravda, Peter says the following:
That claim specifically is especially ridiculous. He’s referring to this post. [and he links to it]
The thing is, that’s the second post I made with that account, and at the time, the account handle was set to a pseudonym.
If I had actually made that mistake, why on earth would I keep using that account rather than just discarding it and creating a new one? Why on earth would I change the account name to my legal name a few years later? It makes zero sense, and I think Cullen knows this.
End quote.
Peter’s defense here isn’t very solid, though. For one thing, if Peter knew his pseudonym account could be tied to his real name by internet researchers, he would be incentivized to embrace the account as his own. If he ignored it or stopped using it entirely, that would be incriminating, so he’d have an incentive to lean into it being his as a way to show he had nothing to hide. This is just to say that it’s not a really solid defense, unless there was a way to prove that his old pseudonym account had zero way to be connected to his name.
But again, as stated, I think this dynamic with Peter is rather unusual and not directly comparable to crime-related accusations. We know Peter may not, at heart, truly care about removing all beliefs that he is Satoshi. There are obvious positive incentives for not removing all doubt; Peter gets noticed, he gets fame. There are downsides, too, but just to say there are also many upsides. Also, Peter may simply believe, as he says, that it’s silly to focus on such things; he may not care about mounting a strong defense. Just to emphasize that the unusual dynamics and incentives in this case make it very different from a case where someone has every incentive to prove their innocence.
Again, in all of this, I’m not making any confident guesses. I am only just dipping my toe in these waters. I realize that, as an amateur in this area, I’m very much at risk of reading too much into what might be small pieces of evidence. But I thought some people would be interested in seeing some of the back and forths and thoughts I and Jeremy had about this.
Thanks again, Jeremy Clark, for reaching out with this idea.
On the Nextdoor app, a fake account succeeded in getting some personal info from me before I realized they were a scammer. I discuss how that scam went down, share an audio call I had with the scammer, and give some tips for spotting online scammer behaviors and traits. These tips are focused on online marketplace scams but should be applicable for a lot of online scammers in general.
Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, hosted by me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at understanding people better; the things people do and the things people say. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you like my work, please hit subscribe and share episodes you like with your friends; that’s how you can show your appreciation for my work and encourage me to do more.
I was trying to sell some rollerblades on Nextdoor and a fake Nextdoor account succeeded in getting a few pieces of personal information from me: all in all, they got my name, my physical address, and my phone number. They tried to get my email address but I wised up at that point. Scammers can use this personal information in various ways; they can sign up for an assortment of things in your name, including credit cards or government benefits; or they might just sell your personal info on the black market to other more specialized scammers.
So I wanted to make a video that examines this phishing attempt and then gives you some pointers for how you can quickly spot such scams on your own before sending information to them or worse.
Just a note that if you’re listening to this on audio, it includes video on YouTube so that might be a better way to consume this one.
So first I’ll do a quick description of my interactions with this person and you can see what red flags stand out to you. Then afterwards I’ll talk about what I saw as the red flags.
On Nextdoor I had put up some women’s roller blades for sale for $40 and immediately got a response from an account in the neighborhood named James Harry. Our convo on the app went like this:
James Harry writes: Hi, is this still available?
Me: yeah
Him: Alright I’m currently at work now text me on my number so we can text each other much better +1 (332) 284-7946
Without thinking about it, I texted him. This was our text convo:
Me: Hi there. I had the roller blades.
Within a minute he replies: Ok… Where are you located for pick up?
Me: (I give him my address)
Him: Oh, ok. Actually I’m not available in town right now but could tell my brother to help me pick it up with his truck! If don’t mind and for the payment I’ll be willing send the payment through Zelle if that ok.
Me: Sure. And no rush, I’ll hold them for you
Him: When will you be available for the pickup…? He can pickup anytime before 7pm tomorrow.
Me: Any time is fine
Him: What’s your Zelle payment so I can add you as a new recipient and send from my business account?
(So this is when I first stopped to pause and realized that he was really rushing this so I got suspicious and assumed he was just phishing for my email address. I texted back): I’ll wait until you pick them up first then you can pay. What do you think of that?
Him: Ok no problem
At this point i was a bit curious what he’d do next so I asked: When could I expect your brother?
At this point he called me. I’ll play that conversation:
[Audio recording]
Him: Uh, I was just thinking maybe I could just pay you now so my brother can come over tomorrow by 12 to pick it up. Is that okay with you?
Me: Oh, sorry. You said your brother’s gonna come over?
Him: Yeah
Me: Yeah. Anytime.
Him: Okay, so you got Zelle right?
Me: Oh, you want to pay me via Zelle?
Him: Sure. I got Zelle to my Bank of America.
Me: I was gonna wait until your brother picked it up.
Him: Okay, no problem then.
Me: So when do you think he’s showing up?
Him: By 12 tomorrow.
Me: Well, if you could pinpoint it to a better time, that’d be great.
Him: What time are you gonna be available?
Me: I’ll be here, so you just let me know when he’s gonna show up.
Him: Okay. I’m gonna call you. Because I’m out of town for business. That’s why I can’t pick it up myself.
An hour later I texted him the following: Hey dawg, any news on that? I got someone willing to pay me $85 who’s ready now. Any thoughts on that? If you can do $90 maybe we can Zelle now.
Basically I was just curious if he’d jump on the Zelle opportunity even though him going up to $90 for the rollerblades, up from $40, would be a bit absurd. At this point, a few hours later, he hasn’t replied.
It’s a pretty common phishing attempt; this stuff is pretty common on online marketplaces, whether it’s Nextdoor, Facebook Marketplace, or Craiglist. When selling things online, I regularly interact with accounts I think are fake; when I see some of the more obvious red flags I just ignore their messages, and that’ll be the main way these tips will help you: if you get a sense someone is fake, you can just ignore their messages. Or else, if you’re not really sure, you might just take a more cautious approach; like telling them you can meet them somewhere and do the payment then. When you see signs of a scam, you can just decide to back off entirely or approach things more cautiously.
So let’s go into detail about a few of the red flags that stood out to me, and these are red flags that are common in many online scams. Just as with the art of reading poker tells, there’s a lot of power in seeing multiple indicators pointing the same way. None of the red flags I’ll mention, on their own, are surefire signs an account is fake or scammy, but when you start to see two or three or four, then you can start to get real confident in your read.
Speed/rush of reply and interactions:
When I put up the roller blades for sale, he sent a message immediately about them. The speed of reply on such platforms is often related to them trying to get maximum return on their investment before their account gets shut down. They’re trying to work as fast as possible.
It’s also true that real people on these apps tend to take a while to reply, in general. People are quite busy and it’s quite rare in my experience that someone replies immediately. It can happen of course, but again, these are just clues you can piece together.
Then, a day later, when I texted him, he replied immediately via text, also. Honestly the quick reply on Nextdoor should have clued me in, but the quick reply on Nextdoor coupled with the immediate reply via text really should have set off my radar.
An empty, new, or generic-seeming account
Something I usually check first but didn’t in this case is the person’s account. The account for this person was completely blank. No posts, no information, no picture. Often on Nextdoor people put something about themselves or have had a few posts. So the account being blank and empty is one sign.
Another clue here is the generic name: James Harry. Just two common American names strung together.
Depending on the platform, there are all sorts of clues to fake accounts. For example, on Facebook, one clue is that there can sometimes be a name in the URL that’s very different from the displayed name.
Nextdoor apparently still requires people to verify their in-person address before they can create an account, so I’m not exactly sure how all these fake accounts get on there. But there’s a lot on there. Whatever they’re doing isn’t enough; just as Facebook’s policies aren’t enough to prevent a bunch of fake accounts.
Long story short: Before starting to do a transaction with someone online, it’s worth it, at the very least, to check out their account and see what you see.
Switching communication methods
When I replied on Nextdoor, he replied two minutes later and said he wanted to switch to texting. He said “Alright I’m currently at work now text me on my number so we can text each other much better”
This should have been another obvious clue to me; it’s related to the rushing aspect of this; he really seems in a hurry to get these $40 used roller blades. But switching channels is mainly about getting more personal info from me; by getting me to text him, he gets my phone number. Now clearly this isn’t a big sign by itself, as often you’ll switch methods of communication to text if you’re closer to a deal. But the fact that this happened so early on in the sales process, and also that he wants to switch to texting even though he clearly is able to respond to me fine via Nextdoor; again, he replied to me within two minutes. All in all, just various clues adding up to be fishy.
Unusual language choices
Often these scamming accounts are in developing countries, like various countries in Africa, or in the Philippines, or in Thailand. This means the language they use is often awkward and stilted in various ways. But even more valuable sometimes is just people using unusually detailed language in a way that is abnormal.
Let’s look at some of the language in the texts he sent me.
For one thing, he referred to the skates as “it,” which is a kind of unusual language choice. He writes “I could tell my brother to help me pick it up with his truck!” Most people would refer to the skates as “them” in the plural. Also, he mentions that his brother will use a truck; that’s also an unusual bit of detail, in that obviously you don’t need a truck to transport roller skates.
These choices are likely due to the scammer having a templated boilerplate response that he just copies and pastes in as a multi-purpose response.
Another weirdness is when he wrote this: “ What’s your Zelle payment so I can add you as a new recipient and send from my business account?”
There’s a formal aspect to this language: “add you as a new recipient” and the inclusion of “business account.”
Now the weirdness here is likely related to bad English skills and also just using some of the Zelle app terminology without knowing it sounds weird. But some of this seems a bit related to what happens in interrogations when guilty people give way too much information about things, and elaborate on things, in a way that innocent people are unlikely to do. Innocent people will tend to just answer things straightforwardly, with minimal words, whereas for some sensitive questions, people who are guilty or who have something to hide can feel compelled to include all sorts of extraneous details; for example, the fact that this guy wants me to know he’s sending this from his “business account”.
I’m a big fan of statement analysis; deducing things based on the words and phrasings people use. One of my more popular episodes was one of my first ones; a talk I had with Mark McClish about analyzing written and verbal statements. (And an interesting trivia maybe: McClish’s book I Know You Are Lying was the inspiration for me writing my book Verbal Poker Tells, which of my three poker tells books is the one I’m most proud of.)
Use of Zelle
I’m usually pretty good about quickly spotting these tells. But in this case, there were a few factors that lowered my guard. For one, I’d been doing quite a few sales online in the past few weeks, so I was used to going back and forth with people via various channels and platforms. Another thing was that I was working online and so was distracted; and that’s how a lot of these things happen; our guard is lowered for a moment, so we give someone some info or click a suspicious link.
In this case, my suspicions would have usually been tripped at his bare Nextdoor account but in this case I only got suspicious when he was rushing to pay and wanted to send his payment via Zelle. That’s not a common app to use for payment, at least in my experience. I’ve used it with a few people I know but have seldom been asked to use it. I’d assume that he wants to use Zelle because your Zelle is associated with an email address, so that’s another piece of personal info they can get; versus using Venmo, which can just be a handle name.
And another red flag to me was again just the time pressure thing; he’s clearly in a hurry to get this minor deal done, and wants to pay me immediately, whereas most people will just pay when they show up. So that combined with the Zelle thing was when it finally tripped my sensors.
Again, I want to emphasize that none of these things on their own are highly reliable tells. But they can be clues to take things more slowly and be more cautious.
Hopefully this was helpful to you. I’m going to share this video with my Nextdoor community and maybe you can do the same.
If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy checking out some episodes in the People Who Read People back catalog related to investigations and crime. You can find episode compilations at behavior-podcast.com.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test is used by many organizations and consultants, but it’s been criticized by many as pseudo-science that’s unhelpful, and even harmful. I talk to Randy Stein, who has researched the Myers Briggs and personality tests in general. Transcript is below.
Topics discussed include: the reasons people object to the Myers Briggs test; the downsides of personality tests that group people into boxes (as opposed to using a spectrum-like approach); the Forer effect, where people often believe that vague descriptions apply to them; the downsides of labeling ourselves and others; how the complexity of a question can wrongly seem like deepness; how Myers-Briggs relates to the more scientifically respected “Big Five” personality traits. We also talk about Randy’s research on political polarization, showing how we can be drawn to being the opposite of a disliked group.
Zach Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding people. You can learn more about it, and see my most popular episodes, at behavior-podcast.com. If you like this show, please hit subscribe on the platform you’re listening on. That’s one way you can show your support for what I do.
Have you ever taken the Myers Briggs personality test? This is also sometimes referred to as the 16 Personalities Test; because it categorizes people into one of 16 personality types.
I first became acquainted with the Myers Briggs in my mid twenties, when I had a job as a video producer at Comcast Cable in Savannah Georgia. They did a team-building activity where we all took the Myers Briggs test and then talked about that and other psychological stuff. I remember thinking that the questions were quite vague and ambiguous, and I could easily imagine answering them differently depending on how I interpreted them or how I was feeling that day. I also remember thinking the 16 personality categories it lumped people into seemed quite vague, also. All in all, it felt like a non productive exercise to me.
Over the years I would occasionally hear people talk about the Myers Briggs in work-related situations. Recently I started thinking again about personality tests, and so I wanted to talk to someone who’d researched and written about the downsides and weaknesses of Myers Briggs.
This led me to the social psychologist Randy Stein, who’d worked on a couple papers about Myers Briggs. One paper of his went into several granular reasons for why the Myers Briggs fails from a scientific basis and also just from a practical benefit angle. It also talked about why, despite its rather obvious failings and downsides, people and companies think it’s useful and promote it.
If you’ve ever wondered, “Why do some people dislike the Myers Briggs so much?”, or maybe “Even if the Myers Briggs isn’t scientifically respected, can’t it still be helpful in some way?”, I think you’ll enjoy this talk. Just a note that this talk is on youtube and includes video; I’ll also put some chapter markers to different topics we discuss in the youtube video description.
Also, if you have had experiences, positive or negative, with Myers Briggs or other personality tests like the Enneagram, or other ones, please leave some comments on YouTube.
Randy has also worked on some interesting research related to political polarization; towards the end we talk a bit about his research on that, which was related to how, when we dislike an out-group, we can be drawn to resisting the ideas of people in that group; basically conflict can serve to create an anti-conformity dynamic with an outgroup.
Randy Stein teaches at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California.
Okay here’s the talk with Randy Stein.
Hey, Randy, thanks for coming on the show.
Randy Stein: Sure, great to be here.
Zach: Maybe we can start with your overall impressions of the overall thoughts on the Myers-Briggs test. And maybe a good way to enter that would be if you were a business—if you were in charge of a business—would you use Myers-Briggs at the business, and why or why not?
Randy: Yeah. To take your question literally, if I were in charge, it would be a hard no, although I’m not always the one in charge. I think probably if I can encapsulate everything wrong with Myers-Briggs—and there’s still a lot of different ways you could approach talking about what’s wrong with it—in a nutshell, I would say there’s no such thing as customer service science. And by that, I mean Myers-Briggs is at the very least science-presenting, right? They have this thing that appears to be like a scientific personality test. They have a manual that is written somewhat in the style of an academic paper, there’s result sections that have factor analyses and all sorts of statistics that you would write up if you’re an academic studying personality, they have something resembling a theory behind it. So, they are at the very least science presenting.
But when I say there’s no such thing as customer service science, they’re science presenting but in the end, they are a profit-driven company that depends on keeping customers happy. And if it is at all ever the case that they face a conflict between ‘Should we do what’s scientifically accurate, or should we do what will sell us more stuff?’ it is, of course, the case that they will go with whatever sells us more stuff. And their customers, as with most people in the world, are not necessarily experts in scientific academic psychology so, of course, those things are going to come up all the time. And again, they’re going to make the concessions every time. I think that’s where all of the issues derive from that. Right? Plenty of people who have had all sorts of issues, it’s not ‘How are we going to fix this?’ It’s ‘How can we sweep this under the rug or reframe it in some way?’ And there’s all sorts of issues and we can go into them.
But back to your question. If it were me, I would say, “What is it we’re trying to get out of here? Do we even want to avoid personality tests?” But it’s not me. And to the question of if it’s someone else’s business, the reason why a Myers-Briggs consultant would be hired is because you’re trying to tell some story about making your employees come together. Right? We could talk about management consulting, but it’s often implicit like they’re there for symbolism.
Zach: Right, it’s a way to build team unity or give a nod to team unity. That kind of thing.
Randy: Right. Yeah. So, it’s entirely possible that even if there is zero value to the Myers-Briggs test itself—which I think if I were going to round it to a number, it would probably be zero. If you have a consultant who is skilled at getting people to talk, on that level, sure, there could be value. I would say there’s probably still some… It’s not great to have employees or anyone else believing things about themselves that aren’t true.
Zach: Or other people. Yeah.
Randy: Right. Or even if you don’t have a consultant, can you just give your employees the Myers-Briggs test? Or, like the company I used to work at, make up your own Myers-Briggs test because the official one costs money? Will that get them talking? Sure. And that could be beneficial in some way.
Zach: Right, just talking about it.
Randy: Right. So if you’re purely at the level of, ‘We need to tell a story. We need to show our bosses that we did something to help our employees come together,’ yeah, it could do that. But that’s really more like we’re trying to save it and justify it rather than starting with, “What is this thing? Does it actually do what they say it is?”
Zach: Yeah. It kind of reminds me I was talking to somebody about astrology and they were saying similarly, you could imagine benefits from just talking about astrology in the sense of it can help somebody become more aware of how people are different like there could be some benefits and you could theoretically see that even as you think astrology is complete bullshit, but it’s like a separate thing from whether the thing itself is valid or… Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. At the very least, totally irrespective of any scientific validity, it takes you on a ride.
Zach: Right, you think about things.
Randy: Right. It gets you thinking about things. Yeah.
Zach: Right, which doesn’t take much. You can think about a very low bar. Many things get you to think about things and can make you think about helpful things. But yeah, so maybe that’s a good way into… I mean, one of the things that surprised me—I can’t actually remember offhand if it was in your paper, which I really liked, or if it was in another paper, I’m pretty sure it was in your paper— about the fact that I didn’t know that you could just choose what personality type you want to have. Is that true about the Myers-Briggs?
Randy: Yeah, essentially. About five years ago, I wrote a paper with a colleague of mine, Alex Swan, where we basically tried to take all the publicly available information that we could at the time on Myers-Briggs and evaluate it as if it is a scientific theory, which, again, they present themselves as such. And one of the things we did was if you’re evaluating a theory, which is something that’s not traditionally taught in undergraduate education, but we basically took that kind of approach and said one of the things that should be true of a good scientific theory is there shouldn’t be internal contradictions. It shouldn’t say that both X and not X are true. And we found that if you look at the Myers-Briggs manual, which as far as I know, was written in the late ’90s and is still the manual that they go by today, as far as I know, what they say is you take the assessment and at the end it gives you your type, right? And what they say is if it feels wrong or if you feel like there’s some other type that you associate with, you can just take that. And that’s it. So number one, that’s a great example of customer service science-
Zach: Give the people what they want. Yeah.
Randy: Yeah, that’s literally on the nose. They have this giant manual—hundreds of pages about all the statistics behind, supposedly, that it’s a reliable test—even though other people think it’s not. But they’ve spilled a lot of ink, at least, saying that it is. But if you don’t like what it says, you can just change it. The other part of that, which I think is maybe even more telling, to get back to the idea that a theory shouldn’t have contradictions, what they say in their official copy and on their website or at least at the time I looked at their website earlier today—it looks like they kind of backed off this—but what they say is everybody has a true type. There’s this thing inside of you, I guess presumably inside your brain, that represents the true essence of who you are. And then presumably, the assessment reveals it for you. Right? So the contradiction is if they are allowing you to essentially choose your own type, which is basically like if you’re allowed to say, “No, I don’t like the result. I’m going to go with this one instead of that one,” is true type hidden or not?
Zach: Yeah, how much do we know our own true type?
Randy: Yeah! Because if I have the freedom just to say, “Okay, this thing said I’m an INFP but I want to be an INFJ,” and then they say, “Okay, well, that is the real you,” is it hidden or is it just what I think it is? So, those are the kinds of things that we look for. When you start thinking in terms of that evaluating as if it is a legitimate theory, a lot of things start falling apart.
Zach: Yeah, I think that also relates to the limits of self-knowledge and also how much you’re expressing your preferences on those things versus what you really like. Because when I’ve taken those kinds of tests, it’s like I can imagine people choosing what they want to be like versus how they really express in the world. You know?
Randy: Yeah, and that’s an interesting way that they sort of box themselves into a corner. Which, again, from a customer service perspective, doesn’t really matter. But if we’re talking about is this an actual personality assessment, it matters quite a bit. Which is the type, technically—according to their definition—is about your preferences. Not your actual behavior. The questions on the assessment, I would say, if you look at it, kind of mixes it both but they kind of feel like they’re more about the behavior. And, again, that adds some ambiguity because you could have the actions of an introvert but the preferences of an extrovert. Right? You might say okay, if you ask me,
“Do I tend to talk at parties?”
“No.”
But I feel like deep within me it’s an extrovert way to come out, right? And this is not a scientific theory issue because, with a scientific theory, you’re supposed to have clear predictions. But if the questions are about preferences and the preferences may or may not match behavior, it’s like you’re saying there is a real me. Which is it? Is it my preference or is it my behavior? They just say there’s preferences. But why? You could easily make the case that, well, anybody could think anything about themselves. Your behavior is what really matters and is more reflective of the real you. And they just kind of slide to that entirely, right? Again, from a customer service perspective, that dichotomy, if anything, draws people a little bit deeper into it because you get to think about the differences between my preferences and my actions. But it means the assessment itself doesn’t really say much because there’s that lack of clarity there.
Zach: I’ve also read criticisms of these kinds of things that use firm boxes or boundaries versus a more spectrum approach where it’s like you could have somebody that’s theoretically right around that line and they’re very similar, but for one reason or another, now they’re in completely different boxes, which I thought was a pretty good criticism.
Randy: Yeah. This is a very classic one. And again, this might be my favorite issue of how they just kind of ignored it- not ignored it, but sidestepped it and sort of pulled the rug over it. So, if you take a site class—a social site class or a personality site class—a day one kind of thing is for the most part, everything exists on a spectrum rather than being in boxes. Meaning most personality attributes are traits rather than discrete states, right? Like with introversion versus extroversion, for example, most people are not hard one or the other. Most people fall in the middle. Which is most things in life. Most things in life are normally distributed like that. So this is by definition a problem for sorting people into boxes. And even with the Myers-Briggs assessment, a classic criticism was even with the assessment that they put out, you get a range. You don’t get scores that are concentrated on polls, you get a range of people concentrated towards the middle. So the way they get around that—and again, this is in their manual if you’re reading it as a social scientist, it’s like, “Why are they saying this out loud?” But if you’re reading it as, “Oh, they’re just trying to make people happy,” then it makes perfect sense. What they say in the manual is they just changed the way that it’s scored so that you can’t really score in the middle.
So basically the way this is supposed to work is you have a theory and you test it. If the test makes it seem like the theory isn’t correct, you give up on it or you change the theory. What they did is, “Well, we have this theory that people are sorted into types. We collect the data on it. It doesn’t seem like that’s true. Let’s keep the theory and just change how we score it.” Which is totally backwards. Like, it’s good evidence that people don’t actually sort themselves into types, but we’re still going to keep on doing that anyway and just change the scoring so that that helps do that.
Zach: Got you. Yep. So, am I correct in thinking the Forer effect has a lot to do with this? When it comes to people who say they find a lot of value in these and other personality tests like the Enneagram, when it comes to people who say, “Oh, I really correspond with that,” is the Forer effect related to that in your opinion? And can you talk a little bit about what that is?
Randy: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there’s 16 types and they sound different. Right? Extrovert sounds different than introvert, which the intuition feels different from… What’s it? Analysis?
Zach: Analytic or something.
Randy: Yeah. They sound different, but they have definite descriptions of each of the types. If you read them, they do tend to be worded fairly vaguely. And they tend to have sentences along the lines of it’s describing intuition. It’s like, you tend to be someone who… Like, what is currently going on in the present, do you think about how it applies to the future? And, of course, everyone’s going to say yes to that because you’re just describing how the human mind works.
Zach: Like, “Yes, I’m human.” [chuckles]
Randy: Yes. [laughs] Right. So yeah, they might sound different but when you actually read the descriptions, I think you can reasonably make the case that whatever type it assigns you to at the end, you’re going to be able to see it in yourself. Which is what the Forer effect is, right? If you give people vague statements like, “Hey, sometimes I feel like being outgoing, sometimes I don’t,” people will tend to read that as accurate—which is true because it is true to most people—but they’ll also tend to see it as like, “Oh, something deep has been revealed about me.” Which really it hasn’t because it’s not a very specific statement.
Zach: Right. Which is the same way that they say psychic stuff or astrology stuff works on the Forer effect because we’re… Or con artistry in general kind of works on the same principle where it’s like we think somebody knows something about us based on some vague statements. Right?
Randy: Right.
Zach: Well, and the thing that strikes me there is I can imagine just taking a few hours and creating my own personality test off the top of my head. And as long as I hit upon some of the major points which most people think of like introversion and extroversion, being more analytical versus being more intuitive, or these kinds of broad tendencies, I just feel like if I just created my own off the top of my head and I gave it to people, people will be like, “Oh, that’s really smart. I can really see myself in that.” Which I think gets to how easy these things are to strike chords with people. You know?
Randy: Yeah. One of the things that Myers-Briggs uses to give off the appearance of validity is the most commonly used personality assessment in academic psychology, this thing called The Big Five. And a couple of the dimensions of Myers-Briggs do correlate with a couple of dimensions of The Big Five. The most obvious one is… One of the dimensions of Big Five is extroversion, which does correlate with the MBTI extroversion versus introversion dimension. It’s nice that they do that. But kind of to your point, I feel like most people given a basic definition of extroversion versus introversion, which I think most of us have, could come up with something that would correlate with one of the official measures of The Big Five. I mean, that’s good for them that it correlates somewhat with The Big Five-
Zach: But it doesn’t mean much. [crosstalk] That’s a pretty low bar because most people wouldn’t think of those basic aspects too.
Randy: Yeah. It’s almost a bit of a cell phone because you’re saying we’re legitimizing ourselves by saying, “We correlate with The Big Five a bit, so just use that.” Especially given like that so you can just take that for free. I guess there’s all sorts of bootleg versions, but the official one costs like 60 bucks for an individual to take. Why bother going through that when there’s better options for free?
Zach: Yeah. Another thing that you’ve worked on is the idea that when you tell people something kind of complex and difficult to understand, that they’re more likely to think it was meaningful. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Randy: Yeah, this was like an offshoot of our work on the Myers-Briggs. So, about… Oh, this must have been seven or eight years ago. The BuzzFeed YouTube channel posted a video where some of their employees took the Myers-Briggs test and what I thought was really interesting about that is one of the guys in the video, for the BuzzFeed fans, it was the guy who went on to be Eugene in The Try Guys, if you know The Try Guys. I mean, his name is Eugene so he was Eugene throughout the whole thing, but he was later one of the Try Guys. So they’re taking the Myers-Briggs assessment and Eugene says at one point, “I’m surprising myself with my answers to these questions,” as if to say, “And this makes me really interested to see my result.” Right? Like, “I’m feeling myself going through thinking about myself as I’m answering these questions, so I’m interested in the result.” I thought it was kind of interesting because he was picking up… If you look at the Myers-Briggs assessment questions, if you know a bit about designing these kinds of scales, they’re actually not all that great. Some of them are actually pretty confusing. They ask you to choose between words that aren’t really opposites and you can choose one or the other. Difficult questions in these kinds of assessments is actually bad. You don’t want people wondering what you’re trying to say.
Zach: Yeah, because that’s more room for ambiguity and misinterpretations.
Randy: It’s more room for ambiguity. Right. You want people interpreting things about the same way, right? The Big Five items tend to be much more straightforward. It’s just like, “Hey, do you… I seldom feel blue. I insult people. I don’t talk a lot…” They’re much more straightforward. So I thought what was interesting was he’s picking up on that difficulty, which should be a bad thing, and include that like maybe there’s something wrong with this assessment. But he was flipping around as like, “No, no, no. This is a sign that’s really getting at something.”
Zach: That’s deep!
Randy: Yeah. Yeah. So we did a bunch of studies based on that premise and we used—we didn’t use the official Myers-Briggs, we used a competitor to it that’s called the KTS, Keirsey Temperament Sorter—and we made up our own assessments that were like BuzzFeed quizzes where it’s like, “Which color describes you the most?” And what we found was the more difficult we made the questions… We did that basically by adding ambiguity. So, a low ambiguity question is, “What color of car do you prefer? Green or blue?” A high ambiguity question, which actually we took from a BuzzFeed quiz, was, “Which color between green and blue best describes Tuesday?”
Zach: It’s almost like a Zen Koan approach to it. Like, the more Koan it is, the more deep they might seem.
Randy: Yeah. I think the intuition is the more unrelated to personality the question seems, the better it must be. But, of course, it’s the opposite. That’s what we found. The harder we made the questions, even if we made them nonsense, people would pick up on the difficulty and they would associate that difficulty with depth. Meaning the harder it is, the more I think this is getting at the real me. Right? Which, again, if you know how to design these things, is the total opposite. The more ambiguous it is, the more noise that you’re getting. You’re not really reading much of anything. So yeah, at least some of the experience of taking the Myers-Briggs assessment is picking up on that ambiguity and thinking that, “Oh, because I’m not really sure what the answer is here, it must really be getting at something really deep down inside.”
Zach: It makes you think I’m exploring some unknown parts of myself or something. It has that appearance or can feel like that.
Randy: Yeah. Which, to go back to your first question, that kind of thing as a conversation starter, sure. Right? Like, if I asked you, “Hey, which do you think is more you? Breakfast or lunch?” Even when I raised that question to myself, I feel myself starting to think about it.
Zach: It’s like a good party game or a date kickoff or something.
Randy: It’s a good way to start talking about like, “Hey, what kind of food do you like? Or what’s your daily routine like?” You might eventually get to something meaningful. But that initial question is not a good personality assessment question on its own.
Zach: That’s what strikes me about these things, too, when I’ve taken them. And then just in surveys in general, I see so many badly designed questions where I see so much room for ambiguity and different interpretations and I’m like… That’s always what strikes me as somebody who’s a writer and interested in that. I just always see so much room for ambiguity and I’m like, “I could totally imagine interpreting this question in a totally different way,” which gets to your point about ambiguity and such things.
Randy: Yeah. I design these kinds of things all the time and do experiments all the time. It’s hard to write a question that has no ambiguity.
Zach: Yeah, even impossible. But you can get less or more. Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. But to lean into it is not what you want to be doing.
Zach: Right. Maybe let’s talk about the downsides of this. Because I think a lot of people are like, “Well, if it helps you have better conversations, if it helps you have those conversations and think about things more, it can be valuable.” But I think, to me, the major downside I see is thinking in terms of labels, whether it’s labels of ourselves or labels of other people, I just see so much harm in labeling ourselves or labeling other people as opposed to trying to analyze what the context is and giving people and yourself room for getting outside these boundaries that we assign. And that to me is what bugs me about these kinds of tests because I don’t think of myself in terms of labels, I don’t think of other people in terms of labels. People can change in major ways and such. Do you have things to add to that and what bugs you the most?
Randy: Yeah. So, the labeling is a problem for a couple of reasons, and one is as we discussed. If you’re artificially putting people into boxes when really everything is on a spectrum, the label might just be wrong. Period. But also there’s this illusion of explanation. And by that, I mean in personality psychology, there’s this longstanding debate over ‘Is personality causal?’ If I call you an introvert, have I said something about what causes your behavior or have I just described it right? Are you quiet at parties because you’re an introvert, or when I call you an introvert, am I just describing that you tend to be quiet at parties?
Zach: And that introversion could be caused by many different factors underneath, but present in similar ways.
Randy: Yeah. There’s a great example that [inaudible 00:30:21] is like, when we say a car is reliable, when we talk about the reliability of a car—so that means a few things. It means it tends to turn on, the brakes work, the gas pedal works… But there is no one thing in the car where we say, “There is the reliability.” Reliability is an end description, it’s not a causal force. And a personality, it could be the same thing. We might have this illusion of, oh, when I’m calling someone extroverted or open-minded or whatever else, I’ve explained who they are. But now I’ve just condensed it into a single word, which is useful maybe, but I haven’t necessarily explained anything.
Zach: Yeah. And then there’s the aspect of, you know, say you label yourself as an introvert and then you’re more likely to… You know, some people will use that as an excuse to not push the boundaries of what they’re capable of and they’ll be like, “Well, that’s just who I am.” It can be a crutch for certain types of those labels that we give to ourselves. That’s what strikes me about some of these things where it’s like, “Well, I just won’t try to do those things because I know that I’m like this,” where it’s like maybe you’re not like that and you’re bounding yourself in. Also, the way I’ve seen people talk about it used in the workplace and such where it’s like, “I’m going to approach them for these reasons,” where it’s like maybe you’re not giving them enough credit, maybe you should just think about how you would feel in their shoes. It can be a little limiting in terms of thinking about full complexity with people, I feel like.
Randy: Yeah. And, again, if you take what the Myers-Briggs manual says super literally, it’s hard to escape that conclusion. Right? It’s revealed the real you, so how much can you really fight it?
Zach: And they say—correct me if I’m wrong—but do they say you basically don’t change, or do they say you can change the Myers-Briggs?
Randy: Yeah, they say… I definitely see something like if you’ve taken the assessment earlier in life, you don’t need to take it later.
Zach: Oh, really?
Randy: Yeah.
Zach: Because I’ve also seen people say that you can take it over time, and based on just how you’re feeling, you’ll get different results too. [crosstalk]
Randy: Yeah. Right. One of the classic problems with it is… So, a personality is supposed to be reliable. Meaning if I take it on Monday and I take it on Friday, I should get the same results. Folks who have looked into this say that with Myers-Briggs, that that doesn’t work that way. They say it does. It’s kind of hard to know what’s real and what’s not on that. But either way, they do at least imply that it’s supposed to be stable over time. If it’s a true type that you’re born with, it would be weird to be like, “Okay, but by the way, it changes when you’re 50 or whatever.”
Zach: Yeah. I wonder if they get into it as a way to defend it where they’re like, “Well, if you had actually tried a little bit harder when you took it, you would have got your true type. But you’re not taking it seriously enough so it keeps changing when you take it.” You know? Something like this where it’s like they’ll put the blame on somebody for not really trying hard enough to take it. I don’t know. But I would imagine that’s maybe a strategy. And I did happen to notice after I looked at your work on personality tests, I happened to notice that you’d also worked on some political polarization-related things that interested me because I’ve worked on that myself. I’ve actually been working on that kind of thing full-time over the last year. But yeah, you had a paper that talked about the tendency for people to resist the opinions of groups that they morally oppose or dislike. Can you talk a little bit about that research? The thing that interested me there as somebody who thinks a lot about polarization and how we come to these divergent opposed narratives is—and I talk about this in my polarization books about how we can be drawn to being unlike people that we dislike, the groups that we dislike, which kind of has this polarizing force for all of these issues and beliefs that get aligned on either side. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your research there and how you view that kind of pressure to not be like them or something.
Randy: Yeah. The finding there was basically we have this instinctive, automatic, I guess you could say almost repulsion to the views of people that we morally dislike. Even for things that don’t matter, like if we hear what their favorite ice cream flavor is.
Zach: Minor things. Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. To go into it a little bit more, the prevailing opinion in social psychology at the time was people are intuitively cooperative. For evolutionary reasons, we tend to go along with one another and that’s kind of helped us with teamwork and helped us help the species survive. When you put people under time pressure and when people are playing games where they can either cooperate or compete with one another, if you put them under time pressure, they tend to be more cooperative rather than more competitive. So I thought okay, maybe. But what if it’s people who you morally despise? Will that intuitive cooperation still be there? So basically I did a couple of studies where I trained people to understand their automatic reactions. In psychology, there’s this thing called the Stroop test where you see a word on the screen and you have to say the color that the ink is printed in. So if it’s the word red printed in red, it’s really easy. If it’s the word red printed in green, and you have to say green, that takes you like a second because you have to suppress the urge to say red. So basically I put people on the Stroop test and said, “Do you feel that? That’s this thing called action and it’s you fighting your instincts.” Then this other thing where I gave people a bunch of preferences, like, “Hey, what’s your favorite ice cream, chocolate or vanilla?” That kind of a thing. And I said, “Oh, by the way, this was before the 2016 election. Oh, by the way, Trump supporters prefer chocolate.” Right? And then I asked people, “Tell me what your favorite is again.”
And it turned out that when you morally disagreed with the group—so if I tell you Trump supporters prefer chocolate and this is 2016, you’re a Hillary supporter, basically, people feel the automatic urge to now say the opposite, even though I’m just asking them to say their own thing again. That was kind of the point there. People, maybe in general, are intuitively cooperative. But if it’s a group that we don’t like, it’s intuitively the opposite. We feel that automatic pressure to distance ourselves, like you said, even for things that don’t really matter.
Zach: That’s a great one. I mean, it’s actually really interesting because I had been looking for research like this. I’d seen some other ones, but not as direct as yours. And I was actually trying to… I put some things like that in my book, but it’s funny that I just happened to contact you from the Myers-Briggs thing and you’ve worked on something that I was actually looking for in that research and I couldn’t find it before. Thanks for coming on, Randy. This was an interesting conversation, and thanks for your work and your time.
Randy: Yeah, my pleasure.
Zach: That was a talk with the social psychologist, Randy Stein, who teaches at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona
If after hearing this, you wonder, “If I shouldn’t do the Myers Briggs and want to learn about personality, what should I do”, Randy recommended that, instead of getting into personality tests, maybe take a class about psychology, or find a short intro to psychology type of syllabus online. In other words, consider if you really need a personality test of any sort and instead maybe just learn about some basic psychological teachings.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to it, and please let me know what you thought of it in the YouTube comments, if you would. If you have ideas for future show topics, please let me know that, too.
This episode includes part of a poker tells webinar that I, Zach Elwood, did with Terry Wood, owner of PokerRailbird.com. I’m the author of three respected books on poker tells, including Exploiting Poker Tells and Verbal Poker Tells. My first book, Reading Poker Tells, has been translated into eight languages. You can learn more about my poker tells work at readingpokertells.com. Topics discussed: two important categories of poker tells; some specific examples of poker tells (including eye contact tells and how people move their eyes after betting); how tells vary when you go from lower stakes to higher stakes, and more.
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it and browse the most popular episodes at behavior-podcast.com.
This podcast initially came about due to me having written some well known books on reading tells in poker, and those books were a result of me playing poker for a living back between 2003 to 2007. My first book, Reading Poker Tells, released in 2012, got many positive reviews from both amateur and professional-level poker players, which led to it selling a lot of copies and it being translated into eight languages. It also led to me writing two follow-up books, Verbal Poker Tells, which is the book I’m most proud of, and Exploiting Poker Tells, which summarized my thoughts at that time on poker tells, non-verbal and verbal, and which I think will be my final book. You can learn more about my poker tells work, and read reviews, at readingpokertells.com.
The success of my poker tells books and video series got me thinking about ways to branch out into more mainstream, non-poker-related areas. From a young age, I’ve always been interested in psychology and behavior — that was the main reason for my initial interest in poker — and so that’s what led to the decision to do a general psychology and behavior podcast. This background might make the title of this podcast make more sense: People Who Read People; it was a play on the song People Who Need People, and it also pointed at my intention to talk to a lot of people who read people in various ways; whether that’s reading tells in poker or in other games, or in other specific domains, or whether it was just understanding people’s psychological motivations.
This episode will be a portion a webinar I did recently with Terry Wood, who’s the creator of the poker education and community website PokerRailbird, that’s pokerrailbird.com. It will be me talking about a few of the most reliable and useful types of tells in poker, and about the art of reading tells in general. If you’re interested in behavior but not a poker player I think you’ll still find this interesting, as some of the tells and dynamics discussed apply to non-poker, real world scenarios. You might just find it interesting to hear about reading behavior in a realm that you’re not familiar with.
In a later episode, I want to talk about how I see reading poker tells as relating to deception detection and situations like interrogations and such. A lot of people mistakenly think that reading poker tells is about detecting lies, but it’s not. In fact, some people might be surprised to find out that I don’t think you can reliably use nonverbal behavior to detect deception; if you’d like more information about that, I recommend listening to a previous episode where I talk with Tim Levine about the difficulty of using nonverbal behavior to detect deception and about what the research tells us on that front. But long story short; reading people well in poker is not about detecting lies but about detecting relaxation and anxiety, or detecting focus or lack of focus in specific situations, things like this. These things give you clues about someone’s state of mind and emotions; which in a game like poker, where players are often in very emotionally polarized states, can be valuable. But that is not what is referred to as deception detection in the behavior arena; it’s just observing people’s states and deducing someone’s likely hand strength in certain situations based on those states. Put another way: a bluff is not the same thing as a lie. And someone leaking signs of relaxation when they’re betting a strong hand also has nothing to do with lying. But I’ll delve more into that in a future episode.
Just a heads up that this episode is on YouTube and includes video so you might enjoy watching it there. If you’re a poker player, Terry said he plans on doing more of these free webinars in the future so if you’re interested in that, you can sign up for his email list on his site PokerRailbird.com.
And if you want the complete talk, which goes into more detail, including about my background and what led me to deciding to write my first book on poker tells, that’s on my site behavior-podcast.com; just look for the entry for this episode there. Also want to apologize about my audio in this; I keep forgetting that the Apple mic I wear sometimes rubs against my shirt, so unfortunately I have some mic noise in there.
Okay here’s the talk with Terry Wood of PokerRailbird.com.
This is my third episode about Chase Hughes, the self-titled “#1 expert in behavior and influence.” My first episode about him examined his early deceptions and exaggerations, and his involvement in pick-up artistry and vitamin supplement sales. In this one, I talk about how Chase’s work relates to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and NLP-related hypnosis. Long story short: Chase has used the NLP trainer template but repackaged it with a military/secret-agent/MK-Ultra-type spin. I examine the connections between NLP and Chase’s content. I also attempt to explain why Chase (and people like him) can acquire good reviews and fans, despite so much of it being obviously silly and also expensive. I also examine Chase’s recent promoting of supplements sold by a chiropractor. And I talk about the various people who’ve promoted Chase, from influential podcasters to Dr. Phil to his fellow Behavior Panel members, and why there seems to be such a lack of interest in these people examining his background and claims.
A later episode will focus on behavior analysis and the Behavior Panel. This episode is focused squarely on NLP/hypnosis.
There’s a transcript below with links to the resources referenced in this episode.
Various topics discussed in this video: how Chase’s concepts relate to NLP; what NLP is and why people attend those seminars; my own personal experiences working for an NLP trainer; how NLP seminars relate to other experiential/transformational multi-day seminars; good/neutral aspects of NLP/hypnosis/influence type content and training; the many influential people who’ve promoted Chase; why these things can impress people despite being so obviously silly and strange; what a hypnosis expert had to say about Chase’s stuff; why behavior-analysis and influence/hypnosis-type offerings lend themselves to exaggerated claims; and more.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
Recently I did an expose of Chase Hughes, the self-described “#1 expert in behavior and influence.” https://www.chasehughes.com/ That video was by far the most popular episode I’ve done. The two videos I put out about Chase have gotten more than 35,000 total views on YouTube. The popularity of this topic isn’t surprising: Chase is pretty well known due to his involvement with the Behavior Panel show, which has almost a million followers on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@TheBehaviorPanel). Chase himself has about 175,000 followers on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@chasehughesofficial/featured) . Chase has been on Dr. Phil’s show and promoted by Dr. Phil and his media company Merit Street Media (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtxCYFbwMrU).
In this episode, I want to give my thoughts on the nature of Chase Hughes’ grandiose claims and large deceptions in the influence and mind-control and hypnosis areas. I want to talk about how Chase’s stuff ties into the work and the bullshit of other people in the arena of neuro-linguistic programming, also known as NLP.
Because Chase Hughes isn’t an anomoly. What he does, the grandiose and clearly false claims he makes, ties into all sorts of similar things that various gurus and life coaches and business coaches and NLP trainers do. There are a lot of people out there looking for answers, looking for help — and a lot of people also looking for shortcuts to power and success and influence. And many of those people are easily fooled by people who claim to have authority and success; they’re willing to trust people who seem like experts; especially when these people have been promoted by other people who seem successful and who seem like experts themselves. Some of these people looking for success and secret knowledge are willing to pay a lot of money. (https://www.facebook.com/chasehughesofficial/videos/chase-hughes-training-events/302561086081605 )
People pay Chase large amounts of money
To give you a sense of what’s at stake in these areas; the harms being done… One person wrote and thanked me for my work exposing Chase. They said that they were thinking about paying Chase $20,000 for his quote “graduate course” and saw my video just in time. Another person who said they used to be Chase’s inner circle told me one person had paid Chase $100,000 to spend a week training with him. One person who met Chase in Las Vegas told me Chase was doing so-called “performance hypnosis” on a well known MMA fighter there. These are just reports; I can’t vouch for them entirely, but for a few reasons I judged the people telling me these things as both having inside information and as being truthful.
Many people wonder, “If this stuff is so illegitimate, why haven’t people talked about it before this?” or maybe wonder, “His books have good reviews and people seem to like his stuff; why is that?”
So I’ll also get into the reasons why people like Chase are able to deceive people over the long term; why they’re able to get good reviews, things like that. As part of that inquiry, we’ll also get into the various influential podcasters and coaches and NLP trainers and behavior “experts” and assorted personalities who have promoted Chase over the last few years; because all these people, wittingly or unwittingly, help create the veneer of respectability that has allowed Chase to escape scrutiny for this long. It takes a village to raise a guru.
A focus on NLP/hypnosis, not behavior analysis
Also I want to say that this video will be specifically about the mind-control and hypnosis and NLP-type content and training that Chase has promoted. This won’t get much into the behavioral analysis areas; it won’t get much into the Behavior Panel, for example. These things are related, and some connections do come up in this episode, but later I’ll do a separate episode focused specifically on the pop-behavior-analysis topic.
And also, to clarify further, when I talk about hypnosis in this video, i’m not talking about all forms of hypnosis. The hypnosis discussed in this episode is specifically about the people who claim to be able to teach you hypnotic influence techniques to make you more powerful and successful in various ways; the kind of stuff that Chase Hughes offers, basically, which ties into neuro-linguistic programming. This isn’t meant to be about the more one-on-one therapy-related forms of hypnosis, which are more legitimate. In all honesty I don’t know much about hypnosis therapy; a lot of that could be quite scammy and suspect, too. I mainly want to make clear that my talking about scammy hypnosis stuff in this video is definitely not meant to denigrate all hypnosis practices.
Some have asked, “Isn’t this normal marketing exaggeration?”
And again, if you want a summary of what I found about Chase, go to my site behavior-podcast.com and look for the first Chase Hughes episode. I’ve had some people reach out to me asking questions like, “Didn’t Chase just exaggerate his credentials a bit in a “fake it til you make it” type way? What’s the big deal about that?” or questions like “But Chase has a lot of fans; doesn’t that mean he’s legit now even if he lied a lot in the past?”. Some of these people who ask these questions maybe didn’t make it all the way through the video, which is understandable as it was an hour long, so if you have questions like that, check out the summary on my site.
But long story short, no, this goes way beyond normal marketing exaggeration. The things Chase has said include inaccurate and fraudulent claims about major aspects of his experience and credentials. Long story short; throughout the 2010s, Chase lied about having all sorts of fame and renown across many areas and industries; yet it’s quite clear he had no renown or respect, there were basically no mentions of him online until the late 2010s, when he started getting on some podcasts; these were podcast hosts who didn’t look into his background and just trusted he was who he said he was. Those appearances created a seeming veneer of respectability online for people who searched his named after that. So in snowball fashion, little by little, with more and more podcast appearances, his online presence started to seem more legitimate, at least for people who weren’t willing to take even a few minutes to vet him.
Personally I think there are relatively few people who’ve reached Chase’s level of fame who have lied in such major ways about their credentials. Most people who deceive in such ways are much more subtle and careful about it. The only really surprising thing in all of this is why no one seems to have talked about this stuff until now.
Also, aside from his claimed credentials and experiences, the things he has claimed he can do are just simply absurd to anyone who knows about psychology and behavior. But let’s get more into that now.
Chase’s absurd claims about controlling people
Let’s review a few things Chase has said about his abilities to control people.
The CIA programmers experiments ranging from programming sexual slaves to creating hypnotic assassins, even involving teenage girls
The methods they used were elementary at best
The Ellipsis Manual contains WORLD-FIRST information available no where else on planet Earth
A person CAN be hypnotized against their will
A person can and will perform extremely violent and anti-social acts under hypnosis, without their consent or knowledge and will disregard safety, morals and law
Using the Ellipsis Manual gives an operator complete access to the psychological compromise of almost any human being they encounter
The Ellipsis Manual teaches operators a world-first set of methods ranging from covert creation of multiple personality disorder to developing mental slavery scenarios, wherein a subject will disregard all beliefs
He goes on to write:
From profiling human weaknesses and a full section detailing how to see fears and insecurities of anyone you will ever meet, the book details step-by-step instructions on exploiting these human traits to allow more pronounced control and behavioral engineering.
His website makes all sorts of grandiose claims over the years, but that should give you a sense of what’s involved. And, as Chase has gotten more attention on podcasts over the last few years, he has scrubbed these more ridiculous claims from his website, but you can still find them via the Internet Archive.
Still, his more absurd claims are still out there now in various forms. For example, the following comes from his Ellipsis Manual:
Establishing and Maintaining Control of Thought, Behavior, and Emotion
In section 2, you will learn to take your profiling and people-reading skills (which are now above the level of an FBI interrogator) and apply them in tandem with the most advanced psychological-control techniques in the world.
A little later he writes: After learning about the human social-profiling methods, you will be given the master key to the human mind…
And he writes, “Imagine your subjects standing at the wheels of their own large ships. The steering wheel is in their hands, their ships seeming to move just as they want them to. In reality, you actually have control of the rudders, not the wheel. The wheel only provides the semblance of control to your subjects; you control the movement.
What do experts say about hypnosis
Now, almost no one with serious knowledge of psychology and hypnosis thinks such things are possible. Scholars of hypnosis consistently say there is not a way to hypnotize people and control them and make them do things against their will. You can search a little about that online if you’re curious to learn more abou that.
Hypnotized individuals retain control over their actions and can resist hypnotic suggestions.
Hypnosis should not be misconstrued as a “special state” but is more accurately a set of procedures used to modulate awareness, perception, and cognition.
Despite widespread belief, the ability to administer hypnotic methods does not require special skills beyond those required for basic social interactions and clinical procedures.
We must keep in mind that: Big, grandiose claims require major evidence.
But let’s say there was a way to gain full control of someone’s mind. Presumably it’d be something quite complex and take a while. But Chase has claimed he can do such things in a short time, in normal everyday environments.https://web.archive.org/web/20141012081856/http://www.chasehughes.com/covert-psychology.html On his site in 2014 (and later) it said that “A subject can be controlled for behavioral engineering within as little as three minutes. A deliberately-induced multiple personality (dissociative personality) can be created in less than an hour.” He even says he can teach you how to do this stuff quickly; that page reads “From the first day, you will be able to read the thoughts of people you interact with, and you will eventually learn to control them as well.”
In short, his claims are absurd.
Thoughts from Martin Taylor, hypnosis expert
I reached out to Martin Taylor, who is a hypnosis expert (http://www.hypnotism.co.uk/). A couple people recommended that I talk to him about these things, because he’s someone who knows a lot about overstated claims of hypnosis and influence. I might interview him in future in more detail about these things. Martin does a show that he calls “hypnotism without hypnosis.” At these shows, he tells an audience the intellectual, psychological reasons for why hypnosis works, and then proceeds to influence audience members in similar ways found at hypnosis shows, without all the usual hypnosis spiel bullshit. He’s said to have been an inspiration for Derren Brown’s magic act.
When I sent Chase’s website and other work to Martin, he was recovering from being sick so didn’t have much time to look at it, and the first thing he wrote, “It’s so bad I’d like to have spent more time on it.” He went on to say, “Part of me suspects that the whole site was written and designed by some AI program: ‘ChatGPT, build me a flashy website designed to plug, as dramatically and aggressively as possible, a new psychological technique which promises the world but delivers nothing. No evidence or hard facts are necessary.’ Why, for an “international bestselling author”, does he have no Wikipedia page? Why has he not made any entries *at all* on his blog pages? But assuming it is meant to be taken seriously, I’ve had a look through his site, and looked at excerpts from his books (and their reviews) on Amazon. He seems to have distilled snake-oil into a form purer than any hitherto known. I mean, obviously, you can’t say it’s crap without seeing some demonstrations, but then, like all shysters, he doesn’t offer any. With NCI he appears to be trying to re-invent NLP. ‘Neuro-linguistic Programming’ doesn’t mean very much, but ‘Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence’ means even less. And of course, Hughes provides no indication of what it actually *is*, although he is full of what it does and can be used for” (and here he references the mission from Chase’s website, which reads ‘to forcefully push the boundaries of what’s possible with human behavior to protect national interests”).
Martin then writes, “As Hughes himself says: ‘Some want an edge. Some want the unfair advantage. Some just want a superpower. In the end, however, what we all want is choice.’ My choice is to call out this bullshit for what it is.”
I debated not even going into much detail about the level of bullshit in Chase’s content, just because I think to almost everyone the bullshit nature of this stuff is quite apparent. It can feel like explaining the obvious; It can feel a bit like explaining why water is wet. But considering the pretty extensive fan base Chase has acquired, and considering how many other similar people are out there making similar claims, I thought it was worth taking a deep dive.
Bullshit in Chase’s book, The Ellipsis Manual
As Martin mentions, one of the clues to the bullshit nature of Chase’s claims is the lack of real-world examples and demonstrations. If Chase really had all the experiences he claimed to have, doing all this amazing work for the military or in any industry, influencing and manipulating and brainwashing people, you’d think he’d have some interesting examples to reference. Let’s take his book, The Ellipsis Manual; it has no interesting or high-stakes examples of him or anyone using these skills. The examples he gives in his book are completely mundane and boring examples, like low stakes examples of getting slight clues from talking to someone in a store, talking to salespeople, things like this. He hints at how the various ideas can be combined in various ways to achieve major influence, but never even describes what that might look like in practice.
Major claims require major evidence, but there’s just not anything there in turns of how one would actually influence someone in a major way, let alone gain control of them. There’s nothing there. The lack of granular examples and demonstrations is, on its own, a valuable clue when trying to do your own research into such people.
In my opinion, Chase’s Ellipsis Manual is complete nonsense, full of half-baked and random and ambiguous ideas and practices that Chase has gathered from reading all sorts of other NLP and hypnosis and brainwashing materials, from the real to the unverified to the conspiracy-minded. This book is basically similar to Chase’s pick-up artist book, which was an amateur-ish compilation of random tidbits of ideas of dubious value and overstated importance, which Chase claimed would allow you to, within a few minutes, kiss and hook up with women. To be a good bullshit artist, you have to do some work; and Chase clearly reads a lot and takes a lot of notes. His Ellipsis Manual, and his other resources, are simply compilations of an assortment of ideas, some decent and good, some completely bad and silly.
How can Chase’s books (and other work) get good reviews?
But here’s the thing that gets some people and throws them for a loop: Chase’s book has 4.5 average rating on Amazon and more than 1,000 people have rated it (https://www.amazon.com/Ellipsis-Manual-analysis-engineering-behavior/dp/0692819908). How can that be? Simply put: People are easily impressed. All it takes to impress people sometimes is to give them a lot of ideas and to seem like an expert.
I can say that I’ve seen this in my poker tells work. A significant number of people who leave me positive reviews for my poker tells books aren’t good judges of what makes good information in that space; they are very low stakes and recreational players. The reviews that matter are those from people who are serious poker players; who have played for a living and know how to tell good information from bad. This is just to say: we must keep in mind that people who don’t know much about an area can be easy to impress.
Also, the nature of Chase’s overstated and often silly claims are that they preselect for more gullible people; I myself would look at the book description for the Ellipsis Manual and see many red flags, meaning I’d immediately be unlikely to buy it. For example, I know that controlling people in the way that Chase describes is not possible, and his grandiose claims would make me think “This guy is a charlatan.” But the people who follow through and actually purchase the book are more gullible and credulous (just as is the case for people who follow through and purchase Chase’s trainings). I don’t say this in a derogatory way; not everyone has read that much about psychology and behavior to know what’s possible in these areas. Not everyone has had the experiences in the NLP and hypnosis space that I’ve had. Many people will think, understandably, something like, “If this guy weren’t selling legitimate information, there’d be more negative reviews, and there’d be people criticizing him online.”
Unlike the glowing marketing “reviews” and the exaggerated reviews on here, it’s full of empty promises to teach you something that never materializes…. Although the behavior table is unique, the rest is practically copied from other body language books, neuro-linguistic processing, and cheesy hypnosis claims. If anything, I learned to sell a lie by making false claims with bits of other people’s legitimate work, and dragging out a message with the promise that it all comes together if you only practice and put in the effort. Basic sleazy salesman tactics.
Another reviewer writes:
This book feels like something more suited to the back of MAD Magazine next to the X-ray glasses than on anyone’s shelf.
Another person writes:
The book spends an awful lot of time telling you that you are now better than 99% of the world, whilst constantly telling you that you’ll learn such-and-such a technique in the following chapters. Only for the book to later say that you’ve now learned it.
What is NLP?
So let’s talk about NLP; neuro-linguistic programming, which is the template for Chase’s content and approach. As Martin Taylor said, Chase quote “appears to be trying to re-invent NLP.”
There’s a lot to say about NLP and going into detail about it would make this video very long. If you’re curious to learn more in depth about NLP I’d say go read the Wikipedia about it and search for terms like “NLP debunked” and “is NLP legit?” It’s quite a rabbithole and I recommend it; if you learn about this stuff, you’ll see these ideas pop up all over the place in various forms, so it’s a good way to be able to debunk related ideas. I’ll just go through some NLP basics, and some experiences I myself had during my time working for an NLP trainer named Steve Linder. Here’s his website here; he offered a course in something he called NeuroStrategies (https://www.strategicbrain.com/). Here’s his Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SteveLinderTrainer/ where he refers to himself as quote “one of the top personal and organizational performance strategists in the world.” I worked for him for six months; this was shortly after the 2008 economic crash, when jobs were scarce. From the beginning of reading about NLP, I thought it was mostly bullshit, but I thought the job would be an interesting experience. And it sure was.
Linder came from the Tony Robbins universe. Tony Robbins is essentially an NLP trainer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEKd0ImzTc ); Robbins doesn’t use that term much, I think, but it’s all the same kinds of tactics. Various people repackage the ideas in various ways and use their own terms and trademarked brand names. For example, Steve Linder used “neurostrategies,” which he trademarked. Chase uses the brand Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence. You’ll see the word “neuro” a lot in the mix; not only is it tied to the the “neuro-linguistic programming” roots, it sounds impressive; like something science-based; something intelligent.
Some of these people branch off into other areas to train people on. For example, Steve Linder also taught investing; he had something he called DMAS: Dynamic Market Analysis System: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-XXTjZrgKo. He claimed he could help people be successful at stock investing using his special system.
Linder had been an attendee and fan of Tony Robbins; eventually he learned enough to branch out on his own and start teaching his own courses, so he became a sort of satellite, one of many satellites in the Tony Robbins world. A lot of these people share the same sets of attendees; people pay thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars to come to these events; many attend these events frequently. For many it’s a way of life; it’s a circle of friends. Some people volunteer for free for the trainers in order to attend for free or for cheaper. It’s a whole scene.
Why do people attend the NLP and NLP-adjacent seminars and trainings? There are a few reasons but if I had to boil them down it’d be:
People want to learn to influence and manipulate others: they want to be powerful. NLP claims to teach people short cuts to influencing people. (https://www.nlp-techniques.org/influence/) This helps explain why some business people and entrepreneur types get into it. Some trainers in these NLP and NLP-adjacent areas really lean into the darker aspect of the benefits. (And I’d argue that’s what Chase Hughes has done; he’s taken the general NLP playbook and simply put a more military and espionage theme to it; repackaging NLP concepts and other concepts into a fake “top secret” government type offering.)
Some people who attend NLP and NLP-adjacent seminars want to learn how to connect better with others. (https://transformationacademy.com/2023/05/nlp-coaching-a-life-coachs-comprehensive-guide )Some of the people who attend these things are life and business coaches and trainers and counselors of various sorts. Just to say there can be nicer, more compassionate motivations in the mix, not just power and influence.
Some people attend for the “transformational” aspects of these events, the life-changing aspects, which I’ll talk more about in a bit. Live NLP seminars fall into a class of other transformational seminars, like EST and Landmark Forum, and many others. (https://www.qttransformation.com/nlp-training-course/) You’re not just gaining practical strategies and tips, there’s also the chance to become a completely new and improved and wiser person.
Added to those motivations I think are some people who simply like the community (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kathleen-la-valle-351692172_pure-nlp-activity-7217169771023233024-RCf9/). I can say that based on first hand experience, some of the people who would regularly attend these things, especially the ones who worked for these people for free, seemed quite lonely to me. There was a summer camp kind of vibe; they felt close and connected to each other. I think this is a big draw for many.
How NLP relates to hypnosis
So what kind of stuff do Steve Linder and others in the NLP space teach in these multi-day seminars? I’ll review a few of the main things that stood out.
NLP is predicated on hypnosis concepts. The so-called father of NLP is someone called Milton Erickson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_H._Erickson), a therapist who used hypnotic strategies to achieve results that were allegedly very impressive (though apparently some people question that claim). Steve Linder would jokingly refer to Erickson as “Uncle Milty” as he was such a beloved figure in the NLP world. NLP and NLP-adjacent trainers claim they have hypnotic abilities; this is where these things overlap with the hypnosis training world, which is quite similar in many aspects. There are many NLP and hypnosis trainers who have little to no real experience or training and who make a lot of grandiose claims about their skills and abilities.
Steve Linder often talked about putting people into trances. For example, a few days after I started working for him, he was talking to me about some strange bullshit-y stuff that I couldn’t follow so I had a bit of a blank expression on my face, and he said, “Oh I put you into a trance there; that happens sometimes.” Feeling completely normal, I awkwardly was like, “No, I don’t think so.” and he said something like, “Yeah, it happened. It’s no problem; it happens a lot, you’ll find out.”
He said stuff like this a lot. He had, in my opinion, basically drank own kool aid. He really believed he had amazing control over people. One claim he liked to repeat was that he was able to raise or lower the temperature in a room full of seminar attendees by using cold or heat-related words in hypnotic ways.
He also believed his writing was extremely powerful. He liked to talk about how his marketing copy and sales scripts used advanced language tactics and strategies that weren’t obvious to the untrained eye, but that were extremely effective at manipulating people and getting sales. I’ve always been a writer and to me, they read like just typical over-the-top sales copy; I didn’t think they were anything special.
NLP involves influence using language and behavior patterns
One of the main ways NLP people believe they exert control over people is via the power of language. They claim that by using specific words and phrases that tug at psychological and subconscious underpinnings of people’s thoughts, that you can influence people in all sorts of ways. One core NLP concept has been that different people have different preferred representational systems; for example, that some people used a lot of vision-related words and phrases, like “I see what you mean” and this showed that they were vision-dominant and therefore you could influence them using vision-related language. Or someone might be hearing-dominant so you could use phrases like “I hear you” to influence them. But there’s no evidence for this; many studies have debunked it. To quote from one site about NLP debunking: “After reviewing 63 papers, Heap (1988) concluded that the claims made by NLP authors about representational systems had been empirically tested and found unsatisfactory.” (And that’s just one of the many ways in which NLP concepts have been debunked.) Nevertheless you’ll still hear people repeat these things as if they’re gospel.
And these are ideas that Chase Hughes has repeated in many places. For example, there are many NLP concepts in his Ellipsis Manual. He writes in there (page 134):
The word choices of subjects reveal the sensory inputs they are using to process information, and these word choices will provide, over time, a map of how they process information and through which senses they prefer to receive that same information. In neurolinguistic programming, the sensory systems play an important role in the structuring of language, increasing its impact on subjects’ subconscious minds.
Another NLP idea is the idea that looking in different directions, like down and to the right, or up and to the left, reveals something important about what a person is thinking. NLP proponents often claim to be able to tell that a person is accessing either memories or imagination based on eye quadrant direction; in other words, they can tell if they’re lying or not. Like the representational systems stuff, there is no scientific evidence for this. Nevertheless these claims have made their way out into the world in various forms; there have even been police and security personnel who’ve gotten this kind of training, despite it being known for a long time it has no validity.
What does research say about NLP?
One study from 2012 by Wiseman was titled “The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming”. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3394779/ They wrote about doing three studies on the eye direction idea and finding no supporting evidence for NLP claims.
What is the modern psychological view of NLP? Researchers and qualified psychologists are mostly damning about NLP. In a 2019 paper published in International Coaching Psychology Review, a group of experts wrote that: “there are many critics of NLP who view NLP as variably a pseudoscience, pop psychology or even a cult, with no evidence base for its effectiveness.”
Based on their own investigations of 90 articles that they found on the topic of NLP, they concluded: “In summary, there are no empirical studies that offer evidence for the effectiveness of coaching based solely on NLP tools and techniques.”
That’s important. They did not find that there were only a few scientific studies supporting NLP. They found no papers – zero, zilch, not one.
Eye direction tells
When it comes to the NLP eye direction ideas, Chase has also shared those, although I think in the last few years he’s been careful in how he talks about them. For example, here’s a clip of him on a podcast talking about this:
“Sort of… Eye accessing is.. Don’t get me started on that… Greg and I disagree on some things. The eye accessing cues were a great start; it’s not that they were trying to bullshit the world. They’ve added to it and added to it. So it’s not that it’s been disproven; it’s that it’s been improved.
So Chase’s stance is that these ideas haven’t been debunked, they’ve just been improved. I haven’t seen Chase talk about how they’ve been improved, though; in what way have they been improved? Have they been improved or is it just a good strategy to say such things, because acknowledging their obvious weakness and lack of supporting evidence would be too harmful to people who promote these and similar ideas?
And these eye direction ideas are shared by others in the pop-behavior-analysis space.
I often see people in these spaces repeating these kinds of things, in different forms. One pseudo-behavior-expert I’ve talked about in past episodes, Jack Brown, often repeats the eye direction stuff. In one tweet, he says “It’s important to differentiate between two kinds of guilt – when one feels remorseful (ergo remorse-guilt) and when one knows they are probably going to be caught and suffer consequences (culpability-guilt) – both are characterized with glances toward one’s right lower quadrant.” https://www.readingpokertells.com/2021/08/dr-jack-brown-a-so-called-behavior-expert-is-a-fraud/
Here’s a clip of Greg Hartley, who, like Chase, is a member of the show The Behavior Panel, talking about using eye direction to get a read on someone:
She breaks eye contact, and I wish the camera were better but I’m almost certain she broke eye contact down left but she broke eye contact left for sure, in this down left any time you’re having a conversation with self and you’re thinking about how to navigate words and what you should say next you’ll find people’s eyes drift down to their left so you when you’re talking to someone, and they ask you a hard question that you need to put in perspective you are going to drift down into your left now. There can be deviation it can be hard way over here it can be somewhere in here but it’s almost always that. I’ve interrogated a lot of people and i’ve never seen a deviation from that one. Now i don’t believe in a lot of absolutes as. you guys all know that’s one i do follow that the downright eye movement for emotion.
Could there be some truth to eye direction tells? Sure; many things could be true. I believe there are many behavioral patterns that are used by practitioners that haven’t been researched yet. But one would think that someone would have found something by now, especially if these patterns are as reliable as so many in these spaces have claimed; and especially considering people have been talking about these ideas for decades now. But no, nothing has been found. But these ideas sure make for an exciting story – and also, importantly, they tell a story that’s hard to quickly debunk on one’s own.
And Chase has shared many supposedly unique observations that are related to NLP concepts. Here’s one where he talks about something he calls Gestural Hemispheric Tendency, and how it can be used to influence people.
[Paraphrased transcrip] And I asked Eric “what’s the worst traffic you’ve been in” and then with his left hand he’s explaining “people piled up as far as you can see.” And then I asked him about his vacation and he starts using his right hand, “we had a great hand.” That’s really easy to spot; ask someone a question about something bad and you already know their negative side. So the way to exploit GHT is a little bit complex but, if I know Eric gestures that way, I’m gonna move this way at the end of our conversation when i’m asking you to do something.
I’d ask you, just based on common sense and things in your own life, how much impact do you believe such things would have on you? Do you think such things could influence you in a big way? Or do you think they sound like something likely to be a very minor thing, if it’s a thing at all?
NLP and gaining rapport
Another fundamental aspect of NLP is gaining rapport with people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7LYTROORY0) . They use things like mirroring someone’s body language and gestures, just as they try to mirror the way a person talks. This is where some of this stuff overlaps with pickup artist and public speaking and confidence training type materials; trying to gain rapport with people to be more likeable and influential. And some of those things have some validity — for example, having your arms crossed can come across as standoffish to people; body language can matter a lot; but a lot of the ideas are just overstated. Do you really think in a high-stakes situation, like a business negotiation or when you’re making a major purchase, that another person mirroring your body language and mirroring your manners of speech is going to have a big effect? Do you really believe that someone who uses these tactics can influence you into doing something really against your own wishes or judgment? But that’s what these people would have you believe; that these are powerful manipulations. They also can be aware of how silly this can sound, so they’ll say things like, “These things become really powerful when you use a lot of them together.” That can help overcome people’s rational objections; they’ll think, “Okay, you really need to work at this stuff and combine all the stuff and then you’ll have a big effect.” And then when they are never able to do it, they just assume, “I guess I didn’t practice hard enough.”
Chase: Repackaging NLP ideas in a military/spycraft theme
My overall take on Chase and his body of “work” is that he’s used the general NLP guru playbook, but has repackaged it in a rather unique military/MK-ultra/espionage sort of package. And this is what a lot of NLP people do; they repackage the basic ideas in various ways, making it seem like they’ve got some unique concepts and special knowledge. Because if you knew they were just repackaging a bunch of old ideas, you wouldn’t be willing to pay them a lot of money. You can imagine repackaging NLP ideas in all sorts of ways; another way to package them would be in a pick-up artist context. There are many ways to package these behavior and influence ideas and aim them at specific audiences.
I think there are likely others doing similar things to what Chase has done: packaging these NLP ideas in a military type package. I don’t know of any offhand. I just imagine it’s a thing.
One of the people who reached out to me recently was a former fan of Chase Hughes who had spent more than $1,000 on his content. He said he had a lot of knowledge about NLP and described Chase’s expensive content as quote “mostly repackaged NLP from the 70s.”
NLP, strange “transformational” experiences, and love bombing
Another thing that happens at these NLP seminars is that they engage in some psychologically unusual activities meant to produce strange feelings. For example, at Steve Linder’s events, they did an activity that involved participants staring into each others’ eyes for several minutes. If you’ve ever done that, it can produce some weird feelings. It’s not something people are used to doing. So activities like that, that pull you out of your normal frames of reference and functioning, and combined with the right kinds of framings about the amazingness of your experience, can really mess with people’s minds. There were people crying after doing that activity and people saying it was life changing; people hugging and saying they felt so close to people, this kind of stuff. And a lot of transformational seminars do similar things meant to make you have a life-changing, transformational moment, a big shift of whatever sort. And it works. Many people walk away feeling like their life has undergone a wild transformation; when those transformational feelings fade in a few weeks or months, they might start thinking, “Maybe I need to pay another few grand for another seminar.” These things can be addictive.
At such experiential and transformation-type events, these kinds of activities can culminate in what is called “love bombing.” (https://www.nlpcourses.com/cult-of-nlp-is-neuro-linguistic-programming-nlp-a-cult/) The group members exchange all sorts of messages of love and closeness. For many people, especially the more socially isolated and lonely attendees, this can be an amazing and special and addictive experience. Love bombing is a technique known to be used by cults, too; part of an overall strategy for forming tight bonds and attachments quickly.
Some good and okay things about NLP
Now to be completely fair to NLP and transformational seminars; I’ll say that there are some valid and interesting and useful ideas in the mix.
One important NLP concept is the power of quote “reframing” things. Basically a fancy word for assigning new narratives and stories and perspectives to things. NLP is a lot about the power of language; it’s a lot about the power of story telling. And I myself know that those things are hugely important. Changing the stories we tell ourselves are obviously hugely important; more than I think most people know. We’ve probably all had experiences where we had a painful event and memory in our life and, thanks to either therapy or just natural progression, we slowly learned to look at that event in a different framing, so it’s not as hurtful and emotionally painful to us. We “reframe” the meaning. This idea also relates to the power of positive thinking, or what’s sometimes called “growth mindset.” These can all be good and helpful ideas.
And there are other good ideas taught by NLP and transformational seminar people. For example, they teach some valid and respected and legitimate principles of psychology and behavior. If there were zero good ideas at all in the mix, these people would find it a lot harder to find and retain customers. There needs to be some legitimate stuff in there. It’s like Chase Hughe’s book The Ellipsis Manual: there’s some good and decent ideas in the mix (which also happen to be the ideas that aren’t his own) but also in the mix there’s a lot of bullshit and nonsense.
And the inclusion of real and meaningful stuff is what allows people who consume the work of Chase Hughes to say, “Hey, he’s referencing some real studies and papers; he’s not completely full of shit, like you say.” But again, I’m not saying he’s completely full of shit; it’s just a very high percentage. A dangerous percentage. Let’s just say if Chase were a hot dog, the FDA wouldn’t allow people to consume him.
One of Chase’s more expensive offerings are related to building confidence (https://www.chasehughes.com/programs) . The same dynamics would apply there; just by being told some rather simple and good things, and just by the effort of trying to become more confident, I have no doubt Chase’s students got value out of such things. And also, I think it’s clear that Chase is someone who knows a lot about confidence… A Chase Hughes customer wrote me to thank me for my work exposing Chase and also told me about their positive experiences with his content. They wrote “The ‘confidence reboot’ program helped me a lot in a very short amount of time. Just after 4weeks into it, I was even able to assert myself against my mother-in-law, I managed a regular daily routine, and my mood improved.” End quote. Again, my stance is not that people can’t get anything out of the things offered by NLP trainers and people like Chase; clearly they can and do. And then there’s also a lot to say about the placebo effect; the placebo effect is real and powerful, and can go a long way to explaining positive experiences.
Even for the stranger activities at transformational seminars, like getting everyone to stare into each others’ eyes, or other activities; those can be interesting and mind-shifting activities. Some of the people who attend these kinds of trainings are people who are pretty buttoned up and straight-and-narrow type people. Especially for those types of people, some of the weirder activities can have a similar effect to taking hallucinogenics; these activities can break normal routines and thought patterns. These can have beneficial and world-view expanding effects – but that also means that, for some of the more psychologically vulnerable people, these events and experiences can mess with their minds; some will have panic attacks or other mental disturbances. So again, yes, I do understand why people have good experiences and want to keep giving these people money and time. I don’t think all this stuff is bad.
But a lot depends on the context; a lot depends on how deceptive the practitioner is, and how exploitative and manipulative they are, and how many bad, unhelpful ideas are in the mix, and so on. And for many of the people who work in this realm, the focus seems to be largely on exploiting and manipulating people; on persuading people that the practitioners have special powers; on persuading people to keep coming back to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. Now that isn’t everyone in this space; for one thing, as I said, I think some people, including Steve Linder, really did believe they were changing people’s lives for the better – but I’m just saying I think it’s clearly a common pattern.
Chase’s foreword in an NLP/hypnosis book
One of the ways these various NLP people gain traction and popularity is via other people in those spaces promoting them. There are incentives for people in these spaces to promote each other, in a tit-for-tat way. When multiple people in these spaces are giving each other testimonials and praise, it can help create a veneer of respectability and authority and expertise.
This book delivers powerful lessons in NLP and Life Coaching, with applications to hypnotherapy practice that were hard-won and time-tested. Your ability to produce change in others will always come down to the factors that the academic community ignores: Your skill level. You’re holding this book because you understand that, and Dr. Nongard is about to deliver on massive skale.
This is another theme of NLP trainers and people like Chase Hughes; the reason their work isn’t respected by academics and researchers is because researchers aren’t studying the right people. If academics knew to study the right, most skilled people, they’d be able to see how much this stuff works.
But again, this begs the question: if you were someone like Chase Hughes or another hypnotist or NLP trainer who believed they had massive insights on how to quickly influence and manipulate people, even against their will, wouldn’t you want to research that? Wouldn’t you feel compelled to involve researchers and the academic community? But I think it’s rather clear why they don’t, and why they instead merely downplay the fact that their grandiose claims aren’t supported by research.
Here’s a snippet from that NLP book, where the author, Richard Nongard, praises Chase Hughes.
Many of you have read Chase Hughes’ book titled The Ellipsis Manual. How do I know this? Because it is the best-selling book in hypnotherapy and the best-selling book on body language and is one of the best-selling books in law enforcement. It is a fantastic book written by a military intelligence specialist, Chase Hughes, who shares his twenty-plus years of experience in studying body language and interrogations, and leadership, and a range of diverse yet related topics. Chase shares some ideas that can help us to develop rapport back to the classic NLP idea.
In Nongard’s book he praises Chase many times; there are several more references to Chase using fawning language. I think Nongard genuinely believes Chase has done amazing work. And there’s a valuable lesson here, too: the people who hawk this kind of bullshit are themselves quite gullible. In many cases, they really are falling for this stuff as much as any of their customers are.
I don’t think that’s true for Chase himself; I think his deceptions are on the unusually high end of deception and manipulation. But I think a lot of people in this space, like Steve Linder, and likely this Nongard person, are being fooled as much as they are fooling others. Peddlers of bullshit are often vociferous consumers of bullshit.
Why do so many people believe this stuff?
Let’s get more into why it seems to easy for people to believe this stuff. The answer to that question involves some aspects that relate to behavior analysis. For any set of data where there’s a lot of noise and variance and things are hard to interpret, it will be easy for people to see what we want. The more high-variance and obscure the data is, the more our biases and emotions will play a role in our interpretation.
For example, let’s take the influence area: we all influence other people every day. We’re constantly influencing others with our words, our tone, our gestures, our subtle body language, all sorts of things. This means it can be easy to make people think that they have been taught to have above-average influence over others. It’s a subjective and noisy arena. And because so much of influence comes down to confidence; believing you have more influence can make you have more influence. Just ask Chase Hughes; the confidence to lie so much and to do it so confidently, has allowed him to influence many people. This isn’t rocket science; believing you’re good at influencing people, and having some confidence, will help you influence them.
And, importantly; this can even help you fool yourself. You may consume Chase’s products (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_RQDvlwFX8) and try some of the ideas out in the real world and be like, “Hey, I’m influencing people.” But are you influencing them more than you were before? Or are you just trying harder now at connecting and being social and so it can seem like you’re having more success?
These are hard to define areas, and the ambiguity is part of what makes it easy to con people in these areas. And then there’s the whole aspect of: what if I think I’m influencing people but I’m only influencing the most gullible people, those who are easily influenced, while the smarter and more aware people think I’m just acting over-the-top and strange? Just to say, things can be deceiving when it comes to rapport and influence building.
And these points apply to analyzing behavior, too. Behavior is extremely complex; specific behaviors can have all sorts of explanations. Someone who seems anxious in an interrogation or interview setting may be anxious because they’re guilty or anxious because they’re innocent and just stressed out at the situation, or anxious because they have a stomach ache, or some other unknown reason.
Behavior is complex and high-variance; and when things are complex, it’s easy to persuade others, and even persuade ourselves, that we have above-average powers. It’s easy to persuade ourselves that we are noticing important and meaningful things — and this becomes especially the case when we have information that biases our judgment. When we, for example, already know that there is good evidence that someone is guilty and lying, or whatever information we have.
Another factor in the influence and behavior-reading areas is that we seldom get immediate feedback about our reads and abilities. For example, when you seek to influence someone, and you succeed, you’ll seldom know what the factors were. Maybe they were just being nice to you; maybe they were just being nice to get out of talking to you. Maybe they did what you wanted because they were weak and easily influenced. Maybe they did what you wanted because it was just a good deal for them.
It can be the same with reading behaviors: when someone guesses what a behavior indicates, we aren’t often going to know for sure what the truth was. We’ll seldom get immediate and direct feedback on our guesses. These aspects of these softer skills of human psychology and behavior mean it’s easy for us to see what we want. I’d compare this to reading poker tells; if you watch a live stream of poker with the hole cards shown on a delay after the hand is over, you’ll get immediate feedback on whether your guesses were right or wrong about people’s behavior. This kind of immediate feedback doesn’t exist for real world interrogations and interviews. We may sometimes know later that someone wasn’t telling the truth, but that can still leave a lot of unknowns about the exact factors behind a specific behavior..
A note about behavior analysis and separating bullshit from reality
And I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that there’s no benefit or skill to reading behavior; I think there is. I’m someone who has written books about poker tells, after all, and I also think I’m above average at spotting indicators of deception and obfuscation in interrogation scenarios – and furthermore I’d say that some of those clues and patterns aren’t even technically about deception detection but just reads based on levels of comfort and looseness; reads based on common patterns of interaction that guilty or innocent people have, which aren’t even directly connected to spotting lies. (If you’re interested in deception detection, you should check out a previous episode of mine where I talk to Tim Levine about the difficulties in using behavior to spot lies: https://behavior-podcast.com/questioning-if-body-language-is-useful-for-detecting-lies-with-tim-levine ).
What I am saying is that the behavioral areas are a lot more complex and high-variance than a lot of people claim, and that, similar to hypnosis and NLP, that complexity and ambiguity makes it easy for people to believe they’ve gained a lot of skill when they haven’t. Just as beginner-level poker players often have an inflated sense of their ability to read tells. They remember the times they were right but downplay and forget the times they were wrong.
The placebo effect plays a role
Another factor that helps explain why many will express satisfaction with such products and trainings is the placebo effect. Let’s say you were an MMA fighter who hired Chase to give you so-called performance hypnosis. Simply believing that Chase has amazing powers can make you believe he’s done something amazing to you; you can feel changed by that. The placebo effect is another contributing reason why people like Chase can get good reviews from people he’s worked with. In fact, that is part of what is taught in NLP and hypnosis trainings; that seeming to be an authority will help you influence people.
Another factor in this is that if people don’t get good results, they’ll assume it’s their fault for not working hard enough or not doing something right. For example, in Chase’s case, there’s probably some people who see other people being happy with Chase’s work and they think, “The problem must just be me, so I shouldn’t say anything; I don’t want to look like a fool in being the only person who didn’t get anything out of this.” I’ve had a couple people write to me about reading Chase’s Ellipsis Manual who said things like, “I always thought it was rather vague and impractical but I figured I just needed to really practice the skills, but I never did.”
These things are complex. There are multiple reasons why someone can get away with claiming, for a long period of time, that they have amazing abilities they don’t have. The perception of authority can go a long way. The emperor can go a long time without anyone mentioning that he’s naked.
The harms/damages in NLP/hypnosis deception and exaggeration
Deceptions in the NLP and hypnosis areas can have serious harms; this isn’t all just fun and games. There’s obviously the financial harms; people losing thousands or tens of thousands or even 100s of thousands of dollars. There are the psychological problems; you can google about transformational seminars and people having psychological issues stemming from their experiences.
One story that stood out from my six months in the NLP world was this: Steve Linder was hired by a guy in the Portland, Oregon area to examine his hand tremor. He thought that Steve Linder’s hypnosis might cure him of it. Linder asked the guy if his hand tremor happened when he slept and the guy said No, only when he was awake; Linder said this was proof that the hand tremor was psychological and could be cured by hypnosis. I talked to a doctor about this and she said this was bullshit; that Linder didn’t know what he was talking about; that the guy could have a serious condition that needs medical assistance. I accompanied Linder when he went to this guy’s house and did some hypnosis stuff to him. I never heard what came of that as I quit not long after; I emailed that guy a few weeks after I quit to enquire about his health but I never heard back. But just think about that for a moment; Linder was telling this guy this tremor was all in his head, that he didn’t need real medical attention for his problem. Think about how badly that might go for a guy with a serious medical problem.
Chase promoting supplements
Chase Hughes has now returned to hyping vitamin supplements of dubious quality; he’s returned to his RedShift roots. He’s been promoting products from a chiropractor named John Lieurance, who Chase refers to as Dr. John. Here’s a clip from the instagram of Dr. John, showing him treating Chase:
Dr. John runs a health and wellness supplement site at www.MitoZen.com . Here’s an image from Chase’s youtube showing him promoting an affiliate link for Mitozen.
Here’s a wayback machine look at Dr. John’s Mitozen website from 2021 (https://web.archive.org/web/20210225002626/https://www.mitozen.com/?v=f0aa03aaca95) : it reads “We use only the Finest Ingredients and Most Advanced Delivery Systems”. The word ‘systems’ is spelled with an apostrophe s. The home page features a rather silly looking Dr. John in a white coat, a stethoscope slung around his neck, holding what I think is meant to be a large, colorful mitochondria. Dr. John is all about the mitochondria, from what I’ve seen.
Underneath that it reads, “Three unique and powerful brands that are guaranteed to impress scientists, physicians and even the educated layman, GlutaGenic™, Advanced Biome Corp™ and NeuroDiol™ are all scientifically designed to be the most advanced healthcare technology in the industry.”
I searched for this “glutagenic” name and found a 2020 letter from the FTC telling Lieurance to stop saying his products could help treat covid, due to that being against the law.
Some examples of the claims on your website that establish the intended use of your products and
misleadingly represent them as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19 include: (and here it quotes from the Glutagenic site:) Glutagenic™’s Viral Protection Kit is being introduced due to the recent Cornona [sic] Virus
outbreak . . . a great prevention strategy to utilize”…
Another example the FTC includes is this copy from his site: “Ways to prevent coronavirus . . . use GlutaStat Nasal Spray 2-3 times a day and at the end of the day nebulize GlutaStat.”
And there are quite a few other examples they include from Lieurance’s site.
One Mitozen product Chase has been hyping is Methylene Blue. On the notes for a recent youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4tXqcXeHHM ), Chase wrote, “Nine months ago, my brain was falling apart—I was having up to 9 seizures a day and didn’t even recognize my own family at times. Diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, I was losing hope until I discovered something that changed everything: methylene blue. This blue dye from the 1800s, combined with melatonin and psychedelic therapy, helped me reverse my brain damage and regain my life. In this video, I’ll share how these powerful molecules transformed my brain health, stopped my seizures, and might even help someone you know. You’ll learn about the science behind mitochondria, how brain damage can be healed, and why traditional medicine may not always have the answers.”
Another product he’s apparently been hyping from MitoZen is something called Sandman-Sol (Sandman dash S.O.L.). Someone emailed me that these were quote “expensive melatonin suppositories at 200 times the daily dose” and that Chase was promoting these to his inner circle (and to be clear here, when I say ‘inner circle’ that refers to his fan base; it’s not a slang term for his anus…. sorry, that was a suppository joke; it didn’t land very well and I apologize for that) https://www.mitozen.com/product/sandman-sol/
Do these things work? I don’t know. Does Chase believe these things work? I have no clue. I saw that Methylene Blue did seem to have some legitimacy for epilepsy treatments, although I didn’t see anything about it having a major benefit. I also found sites explaining that Methylene Blue can have serious side effects (https://www.drugs.com/sfx/methylene-blue-side-effects.html) , including dizziness, rapid heartbeat, unusual bleeding and bruising, and vomiting, which likely explains why it’s not a commonly prescribed substance. But regardless of the efficacy of this substance or the melatonin suppositories, the important part is to notice a pattern in these things. Chase used to deceptively market his own vitamin supplements, which he called Redshift with Neuridium, claiming it had amazing and unique properties and that it was internationally known and used by Navy SEALs and other armed forces personnel, amongst other clearly untrue claims. Now he’s hyping several substances with the help of a chiropractor wellness guy. Are the products good quality? Do they have beneficial properties? Are they overpriced? I don’t know the answers to these things. I’m just examining a pattern.
A closer look at Chase’s sales/manipulation funnel
The person who contacted me who had spent more than $1,000 on Chase’s products sent me the following, describing Chase’s sales funnel and strategy. I’ve edited it a bit.
Following standard cult dynamics, the first step is to isolate you in an app. This app was formerly called ABR and is now NCI, which stands for Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence.
Once he has you isolated, there are weekly Friday Night Lives, where Chase pitches his audience his products. The first product he pitches is the “Confidence Reboot,” which is aimed at persuading people they need his work improving their confidence. After that it’s 20+ hours of deep hypnosis using binaural rhythms.
During these events, people can act very strange. In one case, after being banned from the group, a person ended up in the emergency room due to panic attacks.
The next upsell is the Ops manual or the Op6 bundle, each of which move you into a more isolated community–then later he pushes the $20k program.
Within the app, Chase’s volunteers use Chase’s profile to sell you products–it’s basically a profile mask that any of his salespeople can use. They use very hard sales tactics and emotional manipulation.
That was the end of that message.
Many “guru” followers are emotionally vulnerable
Regarding the mention of panic attacks and emotional disturbance..
One must remember that courses and products that claim to teach people how to be more successful and more influential can attract people who feel vulnerable and weak – and who are quite susceptible to influence. Some may have undue and unhealthy respect for authority figures, making them especially vulnerable. This kind of thing can create a feedback cycle where people like Chase can start to really believe they are very powerful; he may think something like, “Look at how much effect I have on these people,” while the people in his circle can think, “Wow, look how much effect he has on me, and other people.” These are the kinds of dynamics present in all sorts of cult-like dynamics. Some of the techniques Chase and similar “gurus” use can really mess with these people’s minds — not because they’re powerful or special techniques, but simply because the people involved in these groups are so vulnerable.
Responses from other NLP/hypnosis gurus
I wanted to include a couple interesting exchanges I had with some people in the NLP/hypnosis spheres. I thought these interactions I had with them regarding Chase Hughes were educational, for showing how little they cared about these deceptions.
Traci’s response is interesting. I’ll include it here. She writes:
First- chase is not the self titled # 1. He’s ranked #1 by global gurus.org.
Are you telling me that I’m a hoax for being #3 on the list?
What is your purpose for putting so much effort into tearing someone down?
Traci’s first sentence is referring to the title of my episode, where I refer to Chase as the ‘self-titled #1 expert in behavior and influence.’ As Traci points out, she and Chase are both featured on a site called globalgurus.org, under the category of ‘Body language’: https://globalgurus.org/body-language-gurus-top-30/ Chase is #1, and Traci is #3.
Now I’ve never heard of the site globalgurus.org, but because they list Chase Hughes as the #1 expert, I think it’s quite clear that their rankings don’t mean anything. The interesting thing here is that Traci views my information about Chase as an attack on her, which is a strange deduction, as it’s not related, or at least it shouldn’t be related. But one can see why she’d perceive it as an attack; she apparently is quite worried that her credentials might be in question if Chase’s credentials are in question. My observation that Chase has lied about his credentials I think threatens the fragile house of cards on which her and many others have built their claims to expertise and authority. That is stressful; protecting her reputation seems to be the primary thing on her mind.
Now, to be clear, I know next to nothing about Traci Brown, but her reaction to my email says a lot about who she is and what she values. I think an ethical and responsible person, someone interested in truth, would simply be curious and wonder things like, “What did you find about Chase? Are these findings true? Should I tell other people interested in behavior analysis about these findings?”
Another hypnosis person I contacted was named Jonathan Royle, as Jonathan had had Chase on his show four years before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnVBavT4PQI . Here’s Jonathan’s website where you can see he offers various courses https://jonathanroyle.sellfy.store/ , including an “THE ELITE HYPNOTHERAPY & NLP HYPNOSIS BOOTCAMP” for 997 pounds, and a “COVERT HYPNOSIS & CONVERSATIONAL HYPNOTISM COURSE” for 597 pounds. Something called “THE MILLIONAIRE BLUE-PRINT = The Lazy Person’s Way To Get Rich” for $397. Here’s a $25 book by Royle titled “Seance Secrets, Ghost Hunting Tricks & Paranormal Investigation Techniques” “https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Hunting-Paranormal-Investigation-Techniques/dp/1540567877
Royle wrote me the following. I’ve edited this, pulling a few sentences that were separated together into one place:
Anyhow pretty much EVERYTHING Chase Claims is possible with Hypnosis, Influence & Persuasion is indeed possible.
Ultimately he has promoted himself well and has positioned himself well so is skilled in Marketing and such which after all is Persuasion.
It does seem highly likely that he has at least distorted and/or amplified his background experiences, tuition etc and yes indeed that should be called out…
But it’s also true to say where we are now today in 2024 he was sold tons of books and courses, got tons of great feedback and has most certainly run sold out live courses (as I know some people who’ve attended them here in London, England)
To start with, I think Jonathan is wrong that everything Chase Hughes claims with hypnosis and influence is possible. And I think most psychology and hypnosis experts (real experts, not just stage magicians) would agree with me. Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Again, for people interested in stage hypnosis and how it works, I’d recommend checking out Martin Taylor http://www.hypnotism.co.uk/about-hypnosis.html, who I might talk to in future about this topic. You might also like a previous episode where I talk with the magician and psychologist Tony Barnhart (https://behavior-podcast.com/how-magicians-misdirect-attention-and-manipulate-audiences-with-anthony-barnhart ); one thing we talk about is Derren Brown, who uses magic tricks to make it seem like he’s having impressive influence on people. Some people wrongly think that Derren Brown is actually reading people’s minds and influencing them in powerful ways, but it’s just a magic show.
But getting back to Royle’s email response to me; the interesting thing about it to me is that he just doesn’t seem that interested in Chase’s many major lies. He clearly doesn’t see that as important news. He says that because Chase has gotten some good reviews and has some clients, that therefore that’s evidence that he’s doing something right and has some legitimate claim to authority in these areas. He also says that because Chase has done well in marketing, that’s an indicator that he is good at persuasion and influence. But hopefully, for reasons I’ve already discussed in this video, you’ll see that none of that is evidence of anything. Anyone can get fans and get good reviews and get clients. Lots of scammers and fraudulent people have been quite popular. It’s simply easy to impress people.
Look at people like Belle Gibson, the successful health and wellness influencer who it came out had faked cancer and other diseases. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a12489212/belle-gibson-wellness-blogger-lied-about-cancer-fined/ Or look at the succession of people highlighted by the account Baller Busters (https://www.instagram.com/ballerbusters/), who falsely claim all sorts of success and wealth and expertise and who have many fans and clients who attend their trainings and buy their products. Again, it’s easy to fool people.
Royle’s downplaying of Chase’s lies echos the points that quite a few Chase Hughes’ fans and defenders have made in my youtube comments. They’ll say similar things, “Chase has fans and good reviews, therefore even if he used to be deceptive, it doesn’t matter; he clearly must have some skills and credibility, right?”
I would say that Royle’s rather lackluster and unexcited response to learning about Chase’s lies is similar to Traci Brown’s. There seems to be an incentive both have to avoid examining what the Chase Hughes story might tell us about their line of work. There’s a self-serving incentive to downplay the significance of the news, because to draw attention to the Chase Hughes story might indirectly hurt their own reputations.
Various “experts” and podcasters who’ve promoted Chase
And these dynamics I think apply for many of the influential people who have promoted Chase Hughes to their audience. For example, there’s Robin Dreeke, who calls himself a “Global Behavioral Expert and FBI Master Spy Recruiter.” https://www.robindreeke.com/ . His talk with Chase in 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl0lkN0BkYU) has gotten more than 14,000 views on youtube. 5 months ago, in 2024, he shared another clip of Chase Hughes, which got a couple thousand views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H26mXR_jqM. Will he notify his audience about Chase’s many lies? Or will the same dynamics apply? Will he be afraid of how Chase’s lies reflect on him? After all, he claims to be an expert at behavior and crime; for him to call attention to Chase’s lies would make people wonder why he’d so easily believe and promote someone with so many obvious red flags; I mean, Chase is a person I myself would never have had on my podcast; I would have looked into him for five minutes and concluded, “This guy is shady as hell”.
Then there’s the Easy Prey podcast, hosted by Chris Parker. He did a podcast talk with Chase Hughes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0sTbFYbyW4 in 2023 that’s gotten 61,000 views. Ironically that’s a podcast about avoiding being exploited and harmed by others. Will Chris Parker be responsible enough to update his audience about this news, to ensure they aren’t exploited by Chase? Or are there too many incentives to ignore this and carry on as usual?
Then there’s a show called Social Engineer LLC, which, like Easy Prey, is ostensibly a show about helping protect people from being exploited and harmed by criminals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj7kD-56_vs Their video with Chase from 2019 has about 10,000 views on youtube.
Here’s a guy named Leon Hendrix, who has a shown called DRVN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A44MGp-In4w His video from just a few days ago promoted Chase as quote “the US Government’s brainwashing and interrogation expert training the intelligence agencies, a neuroscientist, and the world’s #1 human behavior expert.” Right now that video more than 230,000 views, and is going up as I speak. His video featuring Chase from July of this year has more than 1.7 million views. Leon Hendrix is a major promoter of Chase Hughes. Leon is also promoting Mitozen’s Methylene Blue product; he writes on his youtube video description: “Use Code “LEON” for 5% off”.
That’s just a few of the many people who’ve interviewed Chase Hughes and promoted him as an expert to their audience. How much does gullibility play a role? How much does a desperation for content and clicks play a role? How much does greed play a role? I’m sure the role these factors play vary for different people.
And, for what it’s worth, I reached out to all of these podcasters who have promoted Chase Hughes; the ones I’ve mentioned and a few more. Almost nobody got back to me. A couple of the people I mentioned I had exchanges with and they didn’t seem interested in updating their audiences. For a couple of them, I left comments on some of their youtube videos that were later erased. In short, no one I’ve reached out to has expressed any interest in notifying their audiences about this, although maybe some are planning to.
Then there’s the Behavior Panel members themselves. They are supposedly behavior experts, they are people who claim they can help you spot and avoid bullshit and detect deception – but they’ve worked closely with this guy for years. With every episode they put out now, with every minute that passes where they give Chase Hughes a platform, they are helping him find a large audience. What does all this tell you about the quality of their work? What does it tell you about their dedication to accurate and responsible information? How long have they known about this stuff?
And then there’s Dr. Phil. A guy who has an audience of millions, and who, presumably, has the financial resources to vet people and exercise some due diligence. He has promoted Chase to his audience, and called Chase the quote “best on the globe.” How many of the people who have paid Chase thousands of dollars, or who may do that in future, will have Dr. Phil to thank for that? I emailed Dr. Phil’s media company, Merit Street Media, about this, and haven’t heard anything back.
Disappointing stuff, to say the least. But that’s apparently the world we live in: a world where clicks and views and attention seem to matter the most to many people. Where accuracy and vetting and looking out for your audience takes a back seat.
Concluding thoughts
At the end of the day, it’s up to you what you’ll do with this information. People are free to purchase and cosume whatever materials and products they want, no matter how much bullshit I and others think they might contain. My goal with all of this is to shed some light on some major deceptions in these spaces — to help people ask a few more questions before spending a lot of money, or even before giving someone respect and time and attention.
Life is short; I think it’s a good thing to try to avoid filling your mind with nonsense.
There are just so many smart and respectable and ethical people in the world, doing great and interesting work, and so it’s disappointing that it seems so often people pay the most attention to those who overstate and deceive. A lot of my work over the years is about getting people to be more skeptical and less gullible, whether that’s online or elsewhere. We’re just surrounded by so much bullshit these days; the internet has really amplified the bullshit. While I’m on the subject, I’d like to promote the work of Brian Dunning, who runs the Skeptoid podcast; if you enjoyed this episode, I think you’d like his work. https://skeptoid.com/ He’s also got a substack I recommend: https://briandunning.substack.com/. He’s done some impressive work examining exaggerations and inaccuracies for all sorts of topics.
I think we make the world a better place by calling out bullshit and deception, and helping people realize when they’re being fooled and misled. I think we rise by helping people think critically and make better decisions.
Many surveys and headlines recently claim there is a large percentage of Americans who support political violence. Some estimates have been around 25% – but some have gone as high as 40%! This is very scary. But researchers like my guest Sean Westwood have shown that many people are massively overstating the problem. This overstatement is leading to hysterical and unhelpful framings and debates. Worst of all, these exaggerated fears can even contribute to a self-reinforcing cycle… a self-fulfilling prophecy. Topics discussed include: what the faulty surveys and studies are missing; how bad survey design (ambiguous questions, or leading questions) can lead to faulty estimates; what more accurate survey results tell us; how exaggerated fears can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy; and why people embrace and promote overly pessimistic narratives.
Zachary Elwood: Hi there. This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a show aimed at better understanding human behavior. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you want to support me in my endeavors, please subscribe to this show and please share it with others.
This podcast also sometimes veers into the political realm, due to my interest in conflict and polarization dynamics. All the topics I cover for this podcast are connected by my interest in psychology and why people do the things they do. You can learn more about my polarization-related work at american-anger.com.
If you’re an American, there’s a good chance you have a good amount of fear about political violence. You may have heard in the news some really scary things; for example, that a large percentage of Americans support political violence.
But what if I told you that this problem has been massively overstated by the media and many political leaders and pundits? What if I told you that there are people who research support for political violence and are, like I am, very frustrated with this overstatement. One concern is that the large overstatement of these things can ramp up fear and animosity, and, in various ways, contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To be clear, in this episode neither me or my guest are saying there’s no reason to be concerned about political violence. Obviously we’ve seen politically motivated violence in this country, and we’ve seen it on the rise. Also, even a small number of people who support political violence can have a big effect. And there are all sorts of ways these dynamics can spiral in unknown ways. I myself have concerns about political violence and how it might escalate in some scenarios. But it’s very important, as my guest and I will talk about in this video, to talk realistically about the problem; to not overstate the problem. There are real costs to overstating the problem.
I think this is a very important topic — and one that is, rather strangely, hardly discussed — which I think is related to how polarization leads many of us to overly focus on the negative — which in turn can drive us deeper into conflict and toxicity. I hope you give this episode a watch, and I hope you share it with people who you think are overstating the problem.
In this video, we’ll also discuss the reasons why this problem is so often overstated; for example, one reason is simply bad survey design: ambiguous, unclear questions — and even leading questions. We also get on the topic of how support for political violence changed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump.
But first, let’s look at some of the ways this problem has been talked about in the media and from political leaders. And if you want the resources I and my guest mention in this episode, go to the entry for this episode on my site behavior-podcast.com.
Here’s a headline from Politico in 2020: “Americans Increasingly Believe Violence is Justified if the Other Side Wins” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-violence-424157 One snippet from that piece: “Among Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican, 1 in 3 now believe that violence could be justified to advance their parties’ political goals”
Here’s a Guardian piece from 2022: “One in five US adults condone ‘justified’ political violence, mega-survey finds” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/one-in-five-us-adults-condone-political-violence-survey . One snippet from that reads, “Most alarmingly, 7.1% said that they would be willing to kill a person to advance an important political goal. The UC Davis team points out that, extrapolated to US society at large, that is the equivalent of 18 million Americans.”
It all sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? Combine these various survey results with real-world political violence in America and it can paint an even darker picture. It can seem the logical decision to be very worried.
My guest is Sean Westwood, who has researched many aspects of our toxic polarization, including people’s support for political violence. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab (which you can learn more about at polarizationresearchlab.org). Sean’s primary area of research is political behavior and public opinion.
Okay here’s the talk with Sean Westwood…
Hi, Sean. Thanks for coming on.
Sean: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk with you.
Zach: Yeah. It goes without saying that I think your work is very important and your time is valuable, so I very much appreciate you joining me.
Sean: I think it’s such an important topic for us to take seriously, that any time we can dedicate to it is well worth the effort.
Zach: Awesome. Thank you. Let’s start with a simple question and then we can get into more nuance and detail. Do you think in America there’s an overstated fear of political violence?
Sean: I think that there is a dramatic overstatement in the threat that political violence poses to our country and the extent to which Americans actually support political violence. There are two things that I would say. The first is that the definition of political violence has become very fuzzy. It’s not just violence committed because of partisanship or because of partisan affiliation, it’s much looser. It’s violence related to race or gender or other forms of identity. And surely, those are inherently political. There’s certainly a political component to all of those kinds of violence, but it’s very different from an assassination attempt on a political leader. So if we’re trying to cure political violence in the more narrow sense, we want to target those who are willing to attack members of the other party or those who are willing to support those who might attack members of the other party. But if we’re to take a larger view of political violence, it might be that we’re misdirecting resources.
So if we want to stop hate crimes against Asians, or if we want to stop hate crimes against African-Americans, calling those incidents political violence kind of lumps those acts in with assassination attempts and maybe misdirects us to focus on the partisan component, and not the institutional racism or not the other factors that are driving race-based crime. So I fear not only that we’re overstating the problem, but that we’re expanding the label to a point where we’re kind of absorbing and perhaps co-opting other really important divides in society.
Zach: Yeah, that’s something I hadn’t even tried to focus on for this episode. That’s an interesting point. The main thing I was going to focus on for this was going to be the many surveys and survey interpretations that have been shared pretty prominently in the mainstream media and by leaders and activists that state there’s high support amongst Americans for political violence. For example, we often see in the 20% to 30% framing, but also even 40% sometimes in some framings of Americans who have support for political violence. But considering the work that you’ve done and some other work by, for example, I think it’s a Democracy Fund and then another survey study that I just saw come out recently, those show that it’s more like 3%. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the discrepancy there and how you see that discrepancy.
Sean: Yeah. I think we have to just be very careful when interacting with any kind of polling result that doesn’t seem to match reality. Day to day, we don’t see much political violence. But if we’re to believe that nearly half of the country or a quarter of the country supports partisan violence, it’s really hard to reconcile that with what we’re observing. So I think that that’s the first real source of concern that I have with these results. But the second is if you actually look at the questions, they’re almost designed in a way to inflate the proportion of Americans who say that they might support partisan violence. I’ll give you a couple of examples. When we try to measure partisan violence, we try to use very concrete examples. So we’re describing an individual who has committed a crime, we describe what that crime is, and then we ask individuals do they support or oppose what that individual did. So, it’s very clear in the respondent’s mind what they’re being asked to evaluate. But some of the more alarmist work leaves that information out of the question. Instead of describing a specific event, a specific scenario, or a specific act of violence, they ask more general questions: Would you be okay with your party committing violence if your party lost in 2024, for example? Well, if you think about that question, what does that mean?
“What does it mean for your party to commit violence?”
For some individuals, that might mean going and storming the Capitol. For others, it might mean saying nasty things on Twitter, it might mean going to protests and really vocally attacking the other side. So by not defining violence, you’re allowing individuals to use their own imagination when they’re answering that question. And it turns out that if you use that very vague question and you ask a very simple follow-up: You said that you supported violence—if someone says they supported violence—what kind of violence do you support? It’s the case that almost 80% will say that they support something that isn’t actually violence. Right? They’ll say that they support the examples I just gave. So, saying something nasty on Twitter or even more importantly, they’ll say, “Well, now that I think about it, I don’t think I support partisan violence.”
Zach: [chuckles] Right. They’re venting like the… They call that expressive response or something like that.
Sean: Yeah, it’s expressive responding. They’re mad and they want to show that they’re mad, and one way to do that is to signal and answering a question that they’re upset with one side and they’re loyal to the other. But the other thing that’s going on with these questions is that a lot of them are not structured in a way that gets around people who aren’t paying attention on surveys. So if you ask a question and the response scale or the way that you would answer that question ranges from ‘never’ to ‘always’ and if someone’s just randomly clicking through the questionnaire, if only one option indicates you don’t support violence and three options indicate that you do support violence, just randomly clicking is going to inflate the amount of violence that we researchers are going to measure. Because three of the four options indicate violence, so you have a 75% chance of indicating support for violence if you’re randomly clicking. So it’s partially due to the lack of detail and it’s partially due to just really bad methodological choices by some of these researchers. But to be fair, some of those researchers have corrected that last problem and that does lead to much smaller estimates of support for partisan violence. Though, I still think the lack of specificity is in inflating their estimates.
So, that takes us from a world where someone’s saying 40% or 20% down to a world where they’re saying that the actual support level is around 10%. Which I still think is too high, but it’s much more reasonable and potentially more credible.
Zach: And I think you found— specifically your work— what was the percentage range you found? And do you think that’s pretty accurate when you factor in expressive responding and all that?
Sean: Yeah, so we’ve been doing this now for almost two years, actually just slightly longer than two years with a thousand survey interviews per week. And we’re able to very precisely estimate support for political violence at around two percentage points.
Now when I say that, it seems small, right? Two percent, that’s not something that we should be hugely concerned about. But I think it’s really important to contextualize that. So I’m not saying that nobody supports partisan violence. I’m not saying that partisan violence is impossible or that there aren’t individuals who are out there willing to destabilize or who are willing to destabilize our country. What I’m saying is that it’s not the kind of problem where we want to run massive PSAs during the Super Bowl trying to reach everyone. Right? It’s the kind of problem where we need to identify who these people are and introduce very narrowly tailored and specific interventions aimed at those groups. So it’s not a problem the country is facing, it’s a problem that a small but reasonably large proportion of the country is facing.
Zach: Yeah. I think it’s important, too, because some people listening to this might think we’re downplaying fears of political violence, which I myself am concerned about those things, especially as they can escalate in unforeseen ways, too. But I think the important thing to me is trying to get a realistic and not overstated sense of the problem because having an overstated sense of the problem can lead to its own forms of escalation and escalate fears and animosity and all these kinds of things.
Sean: I think something else that’s really important to point out is that the kinds of people who are going to commit acts of political violence are probably not the kind of people who are going to be completing these surveys in the first place. Right? If you’re someone who’s suffering a mental health crisis and you’re going to go out and attempt to assassinate the president, you’re in all likelihood probably not the kind of person that’s going to be completing surveys. So when we’re looking at these measures, we’re probably not capturing data from those who intend to actually commit violence themselves, we’re capturing data on those who would approve of someone else engaged in an act of partisan violence. Which, also, I think really helps to contextualize how bad the problem is. So we don’t have 2% of the country that would be willing to go out themselves and shoot a politician or attack someone from the other side, we have 2% of the country that would say, “You know what? I get it. That was okay.” Right? That they went out or that someone else went out and did that on behalf of their party. We certainly don’t want to be in a world where that is a common attitude, but it is important to note that this doesn’t mean that we have eight million Americans who are willing to go out and incite violence in the streets, which is really important in suggesting that this isn’t a group that’s going to begin the next civil war. This is a group that’s going to sit to the side and say, “Well, maybe I would understand if some people did something terrible.”
Zach: Right. And as people like Thomas Zeitzoff have pointed out—I interviewed him for my podcast—it’s like we focus too much on these unlikely things and not enough on more legal and other ways that democracy can be eroded or whatever the concerns are.
Sean: I think that’s exactly right. I think his work is some of the most credible in the space of partisan violence. I think what he does is very important. He tries to contextualize the threat in the US versus the threat in other countries, and the extent to which we as Americans should be alarmed, which I think he and I would both agree is the case where we should be alarmed. But the threat of political violence in this country relative to other less stable democracies, it’s just not comparable.
Zach: I’m curious, as someone who works so closely on this, are you often frustrated with the mainstream media framings of this? Because I just so often see framings of this kind of thing, even from people I expect a lot more from, where they just take these 30% or 40% percent numbers and repeat them, which I think is so unhelpful and shows an unwillingness to kind of dig into the nuance. Are you often frustrated by this?
Sean: Yeah, I’m quite frustrated by it. I think the problem is that if you’re a journalist and you are telling a story, more alarmist numbers make a more compelling story. And to no fault of their own, journalists aren’t trained to adjudicate the scholarly debates and the methodological concerns that I think plague measures of partisan violence. So if they see a credible institution providing what they think is a credible estimate, I think there’s every incentive to go with the more alarmist statistic over the less alarmist statistic. Especially if you’re in a universe where there was a January 6th or an assassination attempt of Donald Trump. There does seem to, I think, be some internal validation of these more alarmist scores coming from really newsworthy events. I don’t think that there’s any malice, I don’t think that there’s any ill intent, I just think that we’re in a world where negative stories get more attention. And the best way to tell a negative story is to provide an alarming statistic. If you don’t have the training to adjudicate those alarming statistics, I don’t think there’s much that could change.
Zach: On top of that, it might go without saying, but aside from the incentives, people can be biased to believe these things more. Their fears and concerns make them more likely to say, “Oh, that sounds credible to me, this framing of the problem,” which I think is fundamental to how conflict and polarization works. We’re filtering for things we find credible or more likely to believe.
Sean: Absolutely. I think a big problem is that those in the media who study or who report on partisanship and polarization are deeply embedded in our political landscape. And I think that they forget that the average American isn’t. So to them, it seems credible that partisan discord is deteriorated and partisan tensions are inflamed, and partisanship has really become the center of conflict in this country. But to an average American who’s not really paying attention to what’s happening in D.C. or who’s not following Donald Trump on Twitter or Truth Social, their experience with violence in this country is just very, very different. So when a reporter who’s deeply embedded in a political context is trying to understand a news article, they’re doing it from a very different perspective from the kind of people who would actually go out and commit an act of violence.
Zach: I wanted to dig a little bit more into the survey design and language choices because I find that pretty interesting. One of the recent surveys that was used to show high support for political violence, especially amongst Republicans, when I looked at that more closely, I found that the question was basically asking—and I’ll quote from it—it says, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” So, they were using the patriots’ language in there, which felt very biasing to me in the sense that, of course, Conservative people who respond more to patriot language would be more likely to agree with that statement, just as if you use some Left-leaning language, you might get Left-leaning people more likely to agree with it. I’m curious, do you think is that an example of how language can bias these things?
Sean: So, that question seems to be designed to get people to indicate that they support violence. And it may serve a purpose in identifying how easy it is to prompt someone to admit that they support violence, but it could also measure just how willing people are to comply with what the researcher has in mind. If you see that question, I think it’s clear that the researcher is signaling that they want someone to say that they support violence, and there’s a real risk that a respondent will try to comply. Well, they’re saying that true patriots should support violence. I myself consider myself to be a true patriot, therefore, I’m going to say that I support violence.
Zach: Right, it’s a bit leading. Yeah.
Sean: It’s a bit leading. You can’t extrapolate from that exactly how individuals are responding, but I just don’t think that that’s going to get you a meaningful, unbiased estimate of support for partisan violence. It’s going to give you a biased estimate and it’s going to give you an estimate that is going to be, I think, larger than reality would support.
Zach: Kind of related to that, another question I saw in an earlier survey from a few years ago, which I think that survey was used to get the 30% number that I saw repeated a lot, one of the questions in there was, “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?” And the answers were justified, never justified, or no opinion. And the thing that stuck to me was I think the correct answer is actually it is it could be justified. Right? You can imagine scenarios where it could be justified, which I think shows the ambiguity there, but also the fact that as we become more polarized, more people are thinking about worst-case scenarios which would make people more likely to say it was justified because they’re thinking about worst case scenarios more. And so just to say it seems like taking the worst-case interpretation of that that we have more and more people supporting political violence is missing that nuance of other interpretations for that data. Right?
Sean: Yeah, I think that’s exactly why you have to be very specific in asking a question on a survey. So in answering that question, I think you could reasonably say, “Well, slavery was awful. We engaged in political violence to end slavery. So sure, yes, I think violence could be justified.” There are also going to be individuals, though, who are going to put in their own vision of what could or could not motivate violence. And we’ll just never know. We’ll never understand what people had in their minds when they were answering that question. Which makes it really hard to try to compare across individuals. So is it okay to say that partisan violence is sometimes justified? Yeah. I mean, we fought a civil war, we fought a revolutionary war. There was a lot of violence during the civil rights movement which was probably righteous. So it’s not clear that that question is going to give you the kind of answer that you want. What would be more helpful, perhaps, is to say ‘if your party loses an election’ or if your party is less able to vote because of decisions made by the State. Or if your party is facing specific threats. Because then you’re asking a question that everyone is processing in exactly the same way.
Zach: One thing I see, too, with regards to one-off events, let’s say the assassination attempt of Trump, I think that people also can use those events in service of these really pessimistic narratives, too. For example, I think a lot of people use that event as framing that as a manifestation or culmination of our divides. But it’s also true that you can just have mentally unwell people who, even in a very undivided country or very unified country, still try to assassinate people. So it’s just to say clearly our divides make those things more likely. But to draw the most pessimistic conclusions about one-off events seems to me kind of similar like taking worst-case interpretations. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.
Sean: I think that’s exactly right. It’s also really important to remember that in the US, when political violence happens, we all hear about it. Right? It’s something that enters the public consciousness because it’s so rare. If we’re to look at a less stable country—I’m picking India or Pakistan, for example, where political kidnappings, assassination attempts, assaults are occurring on such a frequent basis that a singular event doesn’t redefine how the country thinks about partisan violence—if we’re to compare that world of just ever-present violence with what’s happening in the US, it seems like we’re over learning from specific events. We’re over-learning from things that occur very, very rarely. So it’d be one thing if there was an assassination attempt each week where we’re actually observing clear and consistent threats to the system from violence, but it’s another if we see an assassination attempt once a year or every couple of years. It doesn’t mean that those assassination attempts are any better, it just means that we perhaps might see a major event that’s getting a massive amount of news coverage and think that things are worse than perhaps they are.
Zach: Mm-hmm. One second, let me look at my notes here. One thing some people might be curious about is finding differences between the political groups and their support for political violence. Do you have anything to say about those findings?
Sean: It’s also the case that most Democrats and most Republicans reject partisan violence. The difference between the two parties is trivial. The average American, regardless of partisan affiliation, rejects partisan violence. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t meaningful differences in our country. Young people are much more likely to support partisan violence than older people. Those who are MAGA Republicans are much more likely to support violence than traditional or non-MAGA Republicans. And it is the case that there are meaningful differences on income and level of education. So the biggest difference between those who support violence and those who do not support violence is not partisanship—which is important—but it does suggest that there are other social factors that we need to consider when trying to identify ways to reduce the threat that partisan violence presents.
Zach: And I realize this might be getting into pure opinion and not things you’ve researched, but would you be willing to share any thoughts you have on are there methods or approaches we can use to reduce political violence that people across the board might agree with no matter their political party?
Sean: Yeah. I think the fundamental problem is that the techniques that we currently have are very fleeting in their effects. So, we can reduce support for partisan violence over the short term with massively expensive interventions. But we haven’t identified a single mechanism or a single technique that can lower the risk or lower the tolerance that Americans might have for violence over a long time horizon. Which is frustrating on the one hand because it says that there isn’t a ready cure, but perhaps it’s comforting on the other hand because it shows that there are things that we can do. It’s not a hopeless endeavor. I think the bigger problem, though, with these designs is that they’re meant to be administered to the entirety of the country. There’s not the kind of triage that I think is necessary. You wouldn’t try to— when you’re dealing with a pandemic, for example— you wouldn’t want to provide interventions to those who are not sick. Right? You wouldn’t want to give a hospital bed to someone who isn’t sick. And I think the same idea applies here. If someone has already rejected violence, perhaps they’re not the kind of person that you want to target with interventions, you need to be more narrowly focused. Now, that then also gets to a problem of reach. If the people who are most likely to commit partisan violence are extremists who are outside of the mainstream media or are mentally ill who may not necessarily be reachable through traditional approaches, how do we identify those groups and how do we reach those groups? And I don’t have a satisfying answer to that. But I think that’s something that we need to keep in mind when we are not only designing these interventions, but describing how effective they might be.
Zach: And this is another probably just pure opinion kind of thing but something I’ve been curious about. Personally, I think that COVID and the COVID responses of being locked down, the existential psychological stresses resulting from COVID played a role in people being more likely to take violent or militant actions, both in the case of January 6th and also George Floyd-related protests. But I’m curious, do you have any thoughts you want to share on that area?
Sean: Yeah, I don’t think I have any data that would either support or refute that claim.
Zach: Yeah, I haven’t seen many people talk about it, which to me is kind of surprising because to me, it seems like people sitting at home a lot and being more online and having more free time and also feeling like the future is uncertain would make them more likely to engage in risky behaviors. But yeah, I’ve barely seen anybody talk about that.
Sean: I mean, I think it’s a thought exercise and there’s a lot of credibility or potential credibility there. I just don’t know if we have the data that we would want or need in order to really determine if that was or was not a contributing factor.
Zach: Yeah, it’s a tough one. I mean, the more ambiguous the theory is, it’s harder to study. Yeah. I’m curious, do you have anything that we haven’t touched on that you think is really relevant that you want to throw in here?
Sean: I think the most important thing I would say is that political violence doesn’t necessarily prompt more political violence. The data that we have on the Trump assassination suggests exactly the opposite. After the attempt was made in the immediate aftermath, Republicans did not become more tolerant of violence. They became less tolerant of violence. And there was no indication that there was going to be an increase in support for retaliatory action. Democrats also reported no increase in support for partisan violence. So, Republicans became significantly less supportive of partisan violence and Democrats remained about the same. So we should certainly be worried that partisan violence could lead to a vicious cycle of escalation, but it doesn’t appear that that’s inherently the case. It doesn’t appear as if a major event is inherently going to raise the stakes or raise tensions to the point that further events will occur or follow along.
Zach: Yeah. To share my personal worries, I can imagine scenarios where it’s like no matter which person gets elected, I can imagine scenarios where protesters come out, and then counter-protesters come out and there’s kind of this escalating street violence which could lead to martial law declarations or who knows what. That’s like my worst-case scenario and I don’t know how those things would play out. And I know it’s really speculative, so feel free not to share. But if you have anything you want to share about your thoughts, feel free.
Sean: What’s really terrifying to me is that individuals who are at the extremes and individuals who might be willing to commit political violence are seeing news reports saying that 40% of the country is with them or 20% of the country is with them. And that might motivate them to think that they have much greater support than they actually do, and go out and actually do something terribly destructive. And if we’re in a period of upheaval after the election and these kind of panic narratives continue to emerge and these overestimates of partisan violence continue to permeate through the media, I do worry that there’s a potential that they could almost become self-fulfilling prophecies. Right?
Zach: Right. Yeah, that’s scary. There’s so many people on the Left and on the Right I see using this fear of civil war kind of framing, and I just find that so irresponsible with the more certain ones. I mean, not to say that they can’t be concerned about such things, but there’s a lot of overly certain framings, which I just find that like you said, it can it can help contribute to the very things that people are concerned about to overstate those narratives.
Sean: There is a very prominent book that suggests that America is on the brink of a civil war by Barbara Walters.
Zach: Was it by Stephen Marche? Oh, Barbara Walter. Okay.
Sean: If you read the book, it’s more or less opinion. Right? It’s her opinion on where the country is headed.
Zach: There was one by Stephen Marche, too, that Canadian writer, which I found kind of funny because he doesn’t even live here. But, yeah.
Sean: I think it’s valuable to have these perspectives, but I think the danger is when you present your interpretation or your opinion of the state of American democracy as a fact where we end up perhaps being unhelpful to the state of democracy and the state of political tension. So I think that if we’re to truly think about the risk of a civil war from a rational perspective, there’s very little evidence to suggest that’s going to happen. There have been a number of incidents where people have tried to militarize against the government in Michigan and on January 6th, but those didn’t lead to coordinated uprisings across the countries. Those were isolated events. So we don’t have any evidence to suggest that there is a coordination system in place that could facilitate the kind of guerrilla warfare that would occur in a civil war. The kinds of people who support partisan violence are just too isolated. They’re not networked, they’re not connected, they’re not in the kinds of paramilitary circles that would be necessary for a full-scale national conflict. It could certainly happen in isolated locations. You can imagine militant groups in Montana, for example, Idaho, Nevada, or Oregon being able to do something locally, but the notion that we’re going to have a national civil war really needs a lot of data. There really needs to be a lot of data to support that claim and I think it just isn’t there.
Zach: Well, this has been great. Thanks a lot, Sean. Your work is very important and thanks for coming on and sharing your perspectives
This is a follow up to my last episode, where I shared information I’d learned about the many lies of Chase Hughes, the self-described “#1 expert in behavior and influence.” Some of the fans of Chase Hughes and the show he’s on, The Behavior Panel, responded in angry, unreasonable ways, personally insulting me and downplaying the significance of Chase’s many deceptions. Some of the people who responded in these ways, from what I’ve been told, are also social media content moderators who work for Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel. In this episode, I examine these behaviors and talk about how this ties in with similar things, like people taking it personally when political leaders they like are criticized, or cult members taking criticisms of cult leaders personally, things like this. I talk about how this relates to how people respond when their sense of meaning is threatened. I read some of the more angry and emotional YouTube comments people sent me. I read some of the more angry and emotional YouTube comments people sent me.
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
Last week I did an expose of Chase Hughes. Chase bills himself as the “#1 expert in behavior and influence” and is known by a lot of people for his work on the youtube show the Behavior Panel, for appearing on Dr. Phil, and more. But his background is full of obvious deceptions, both large and small; deceptions so bold and weird that, to me, they veer into the pathological when you consider how unlikely it would be for someone to expect to get away with such things. In this episode, I’ll give a quick synopsis of that work, and then talk about some of the angry responses I got from some fans of Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel. Their angry responses are interesting; they are good examples of how emotional and psychological investment in people or ideas can make people really resistant to seeing things clearly; we can feel a desire to lash out when our sense of meaning or our quote “team” is threatened.
Most of those angry comments came in the form of comments on my youtube video, so you might enjoy going to check those out. And I’m sure they’ll be some more on this video. This topic is the gift that keeps on giving. I think there’s a documentary to be made out of this, honestly. Lots of video material to use.
And, yes, I’ll be doing more episodes in the near future on these topics; specifically about the content of what Chase Hughes teaches and some of the things discussed on the Behavior Panel. There’s a lot of stuff to talk about there.
Also, I want to say that I’m getting over some sickness now. I worked way too hard on that video last weekend, working some late nights, and I’d gotten myself sick, so I just wanted to apologize if my voice and demeanor seem a bit rough.
When I made the last video about Chase, I also wrote a synopsis of the major points on the blog post for that episode. If you want to read that longer synopsis, go to behavior-podcast.com to find it. But I’ll quickly summarize the most important aspects of what I found and why it’s important.
Chase Hughes has a long history of deception, going back to 2007 when he was selling his RedShift vitamin supplements and claiming they were used by the armed forces in America and were internationally known. Using specific time range searches, we can see there’s basically no mention of that product online in that time period.
Only four years after deceptively promoting his vitamin supplements, in 2012, Chase set up his chasehughes.com site where he aimed to sell behavior and influence products and training.
Just as with his vitamin supplements and his earlier pick-up artist work, he claims to have all sorts of secret knowledge in terms of being able to read people in extremely improbable ways and even control people’s minds. For people who know anything about behavior and psychology, his claims are off-the-charts absurd. It’s obvious even Chase eventually realized they were absurd because he removed most of the more absurd claims off his sites as time went on and he got more real-world attention. Thank god for the Internet Archive, is all I can say; they run the Wayback Machine, which saves old versions of websites. They’re the true heroes in this; again, consider donating to them.
There’s a lot more, so much really that it’s hard to know how to briefly summarize it, but that’s the gist of it. His claims about the things he’s accomplished are smoke and mirrors.
And I have even more details about Chase now than I did when I made the video. For one thing, I found another site of his, ChaseHughesTraining.com which is no longer public but makes some claims about his service in the Navy and his military intelligence work that contradict other things he’s said and other things that people who have interacted with Chase have sent me. For example, one person told me that apparently Chase avoids telling fellow Navy people his military occupational speciality, AKA his MOS; and this is a pretty strange thing to avoid teling people. But I’ll save those details for a later day; none of this kind of avoidant and ambiguous behavior is that surprising if you read about his many deceptions. But if you worked with Chase in the Navy and know about the work he did, or if you’ve got any interesting story to share about Chase, and want to send me some information, use the contact form on my site behavior-podcast.com
So I thought it’d be interesting to read some of the negative comments I got from Chase Hughes fans.
The thing that’s interesting about these comments, to me, is the amount of emotion people have around this. These are good examples of how our emotions can twist and distort our perspectives. When we like someone, or when we’re invested in something, that can really prevent us from seeing things clearly. I think this basic psychological dynamic relates to so many things in our lives; from something as banal as how we may too readily excuse bad behaviors of our friends and family members; all the way to more darker versions of that dynamic, including extreme political polarization and tribalism and cult psychology.
Some of the extreme emotional responses and lashing out from Chase Hughes fans remind me of how fans of political leaders can lash out when those leaders are criticized, no matter how measured and reasonable the criticism is; just as it’s similar to how cult members can lash out at criticisms of the cult leaders even when the criticism is reasonable. And these things often have a personal dynamic; our bond to someone can make insults to them . That’s something I’ve thought a lot about in the political sphere in my work on polarization-related topics.
Then there’s the element of how investing our time and emotions into something can lead to us getting angry when the meaning of those things are threatened. I have a previous episode about threats to meaning; which was one of my favorite episodes; talking about how we can become destabilized when our sense of meaning is threatened, and how that can manifest in the form of lashing out, and seeking to punish those who threaten our narratives. If you’d built up a narrative where Chase’s ideas are a big part of your worldview, and especially if you’ve actually spent a good deal of money on Chase’s products, it’s easy to see how learning about his many deceptions would threaten your investments and narratives; it could make you feel like the rug had been pulled out from under you in a major way. This destabiliziation might make you seek to lash out to try to defend that meaning, those narratives. You might, as they say, seek to punish the messenger; and try to show why I’m the faulty one; how this is not a story about Chase but about me. And you’ll see a lot of that in the comments, with people insulting me, questioning my qualifications.
One interesting aspect of how this played out in the responses was a few people who tried to analyze my minor gestures and behaviors; these behavior analysis fans have embraced a faulty worldview where people’s minor, trivial gestures contain a lot of meaning; instead of focusing on important facts and thinking critically about those facts, they spend their time worrying about minor gestures, trying to use ambiguous behavioral ideas not to find the truth, but in service of filtering for minor things to help defend their existing worldviews and biases. Some of these behavior analysis fans have been taught to think that they’re in possession of some secret, powerful knowledge about behavior; and this is part of the appeal of this behavior analysis and psychological influence space — and just as in the case of cults, who also traffic in secret, powerful knowledge, people invested in those ideas don’t take kindly to that sense of meaning and power being threatened.
And again, to be clear, Chase Hughes fans; again, I’m not saying you’re in a cult, I’m just saying these sources of bias and cognitive dissonance are all around us, for so many things, big and small. I think as time goes by and more comes out, you’ll come around to seeing Chase Hughes the way he deserves to be seen – and when that day comes, maybe you’ll be willing to reach out to me to tell me how your views changed over time. I’m interested in how and why people change their minds. And I’ve already had a few people who started out angry at me and then, when they looked at the evidence, apologized to me a
Since releasing the video last week, I’ve also had some people who have been in the Chase Hughes and Behavior Panel circles reach out to me to volunteer information. Some of them described some toxic patterns in both the fan circles and also in the social media moderator circles; they described a cult-like, bullying atmoshpere where any criticism or disagreement was dealt with very harshly. One person said that the Behavior Panel moderators are closely connected to Chase Hughes. A couple people described the use of fake accounts to criticize and denigrate people like myself who criticized the Behavior Panel or Chase Hughes; for example, one person said that a Melissa Rundt, who left an insulting comment on my youtube video, was a social media content moderator for the Behavior Panel; another person formerly in that inner circle said that it was possible Melissa Rundt was a fake account actually run by someone who goes by “Sober Sadie” online. Another person said that some of the people involved might reach out to me pretending to be people with complaints about Chase Hughes, in order to gain my trust and deceive me or keep tabs on what I was doing; I was warned about several accounts specifically. I don’t know the truth about all these things, and honestly I don’t really care to know all the details. The relevant takeaway really is that there seems to be a toxic and cult-like dynamic going on in these circles.
And I’ll also say that all this isn’t surprising to me; Chase Hughes comes from the Neuro Linguistic Programming world, a lot of the dumb influence and manipulation ideas he’s spread in his books and resources are from the NLP world. And I’ve had experiences with that world before. Back in 2008 I worked for 6 months for an NLP seminar guy. I never was a believer in NLP stuff; there are a few okay ideas in the mix, but mainly it’s a lot of bullshit and exaggerated claims. I took that job mainly because I thought it would make for some interesting stories. And it sure did. I could talk for a while about those experiences, and I may do that in future. But long story short, I saw a lot of the same narcissistic and deceptive and immoral behaviors, both from the NLP seminar guy and the people in his circle. They were able to justify these bad behaviors because, in their minds, they were, so to speak, doing such amazingly good things; they saw their quote “mission”, which is really what the NLP trainer called it, as so important that they were justified in doing whatever benefited that mission.
This is the same dynamic that reigns in any group who feels at war with the world, whether political or religious or whatever ; they convince themselves that the ends justify the means. This is how they’re able to keep seeing themselves as the “good guys” even as they engage in insults and character assasination and lies. Another interesting aspect to all that: the people in these manipulation-centric worlds think they’re much smarter than they are; Because they’ve drank the kool aid of believing that their gurus and they themselves have amazing people reading abilities and amazing powers of influence and manipulation, they aren’t able to see that their machinations and strategies are childish and silly; They don’t see that all the psychological trickery and complex fake-spy bullshit in the world can obscure people doing obviously bad and deceptive and bullshit-y things. Sorry, guys, Chase Hughes isn’t going to magically Jason Bourne himself out of this scrape. You’re not secret covert operatives. This ain’t the movies. It’s not Scoobie Doo. I’m sure it’s fun and all but time to face the music.
And I’d fully expect that some of these people are digging into my past to try to find something to discredit me; even if just to hurt me, even if doing that doesn’t matter at all to helping Chase Hughes’ credibility and public image. And if someone listening to this is trying to do that, let me save you some time; you won’t be able to find stuff in my past to hurt me; unlike Chase, most people don’t go around deceiving people. So you can just skip ahead to making stuff up about me; I’m trying to save you some time.
Another interesting thing about the Chase Hughes and Behavior Panel fans and moderators: they are almost entirely women. For example, when I was perusing one of Chase Hughes’ recent posts on Facebook that had hundreds of comments, about 95% of the responses were from women. Pretty much all of the accounts marked ‘top fan’ on Facebook were women. And I think this relates to the true crime audience demographic and also to the celebrity gossip demographic; a lot of the people who follow the Behavior Panel and Chase Hughes are into true crime stuff, and it’s known that’s made up primarily of women; a lot of the fans also seem to be into celebrity gossip (for example, I saw one fan of theirs frequently asking for more analysis of people in the royal family); and that demographic also skews highly female. This demographic aspect of the fan base can also help explain some of the youtube comments I got that talk about how charismatic Chase is, and even some that reference his attractiveness. Just to say; there’s some interesting dynamics going on here.
Okay so I’ll read some of these comments. Again, this is a youtube video so I’ll be sharing the video of this as I scroll through them. So the video might be more entertaining if you’re listening on audio. What patterns do you notice in these angry and defensive comments? What behavioral cues stand out to you? What deductions can you make about the people leaving them? Leave your comments about these comments
[READS VARIOUS NEGATIVE AND INSULTING COMMENTS; SEE YOUTUBE VIDEO]
Well, that was fun. Hit the subscribe button on my youtube channel to stay in the loop about all breaking news related to Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, jealous hater Zachary Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com
