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
A site called GlobalGurus.org has called Chase Hughes the “#1 expert in behavior and influence,” , and Chase displays that title on his own site. A YouTube show Chase is on, the Behavioral Panel, has more than 1 million subscribers and has gotten many millions of views. Dr. Phil has had Chase on his show and called him the “best on the globe.” Some popular podcasts (like Diary of a CEO and DRVN and Patrick Bet David) have featured Chase and have been seen by millions of people. Chase’s company NCI University charges people thousands of dollars for their training and products.
And yet it’s obvious that Chase Hughes’ claims to expertise are built on a foundation of immense lies and exaggerations — not only in the behavior and psychology space, but also in other pursuits, including pick-up artistry and shady vitamin supplement sales. He has claimed since at least 2012 to be well known and highly respected in the behavior and psychology space, despite there being almost no mention of him online in the 2010s. He has stated (but more often, vaguely implied) that he had a military career that involved high-level intel- and interrogation-related work, but there is no evidence for that; from what people have told me, his Navy career was apparently focused on ship maintenance and operation.
Since 2012 (only five years after his pick-up artist book came out), he has made absurd, laughable claims about being able to teach amazing mind control and brainwashing techniques. (One of his more funny claims was that he was teaching “beautiful women” how to be “psychological weapons.” But honestly, there are so many absurd and clearly false things he’s claimed, it’s honestly hard to choose what’s the most egregious.)
Despite the many obvious lies he’s told and the major holes in his claims about his experiences and expertise, Chase has succeeded in gaining a reputation of expertise online mainly due to appearing on a lot of podcasts, whose hosts seem to uncritically accept his claims. His involvement with the Behavior Panel show also bolstered perceptions that he must have some sort of real credentials.
This episode (the first of several) examines Chase’s many deceptions and his many grandiose (and in some cases simply absurd) claims. It establishes the highly deceptive and unethical behaviors Chase has been practicing since 2007, when he wrote his pick-up artist book The Passport.
A summary of the major points and a transcript are below.
A follow-up episode about how Chase’s work/strategy relates to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and that goes into more detail about his recent supplement sales is here.
The most pertinent information from my investigation is summarized here below. A transcript of the video is below that, which includes links to resources mentioned in the video.
Synopsis of analysis:
Chase released a pick-up artist book in 2007 titled The Passport. He spoke at the time as if he and the book were popular in the pick-up artist space but I could find no evidence of that. His book had only a single Amazon review in the first decade after its publication. It is no longer in print but you can read it here. The book is, in my opinion, silly and childish. His claiming he was well known in the pick-up artist space is part of a larger pattern of him claiming renown in many areas later.
In 2007 and 2008, he was selling and promoting his own vitamin supplement called “RedShift with Neuridium” (both words having trademark symbols). The claims made about it on the website (https://web.archive.org/web/20071125084359/http://www.redshiftlabs.com/10_reasons.asp) were obviously false and resembles grandiose and outlandish claims he later made about his psychology/behavior work. For example, it was claimed RedShift was used by all armed forces in America, that it had international recognition and media attention, that it contained an advanced, unique substance (Neuridium) that helped boost mental performance and mood, and more. The only mentions of the product I found from that time period were his website and a few deceptive, self-promotional posts on fitness forums. Two of the testimonials on that page seemed highly likely to be two friends he thanks in his pick-up artist book.
Around the same time, Chase was also making (in my opinion quite amateur-level) fighting technique videos under the Red Shift Labs name on YouTube. Here’s a 2008 video on choking someone. Here’s a video where he invites people to solve a fictional riddle of someone being kidnapped. Here’s a video on an allegedly lethal way to punch someone.
Only 4 years after he was hawking vitamin supplements, promoting his pick-up artist book, and making fighting strategy videos for YouTube, he set up his ChaseHughes.com website (https://web.archive.org/web/20120923030140/http://www.chasehughes.com/reading-people.html) aimed at selling behavior-reading and hypnosis/influence products. There are many clearly false things about this new project of his, similar to the overstated claims of the RedShift product:
For example, his bio in 2014 says that his work is well known and used by many agencies and people, and that he offers many different trainings and services (law enforcement, jury consultancy, military, more). But despite these claims of great renown there is no evidence for any of that online when searching that time period. There are almost no mentions of Chase by other people/sites at that time (and that internet-silence continues all the way up until the late 2010s, when he succeeds in getting some podcast interviews).
One of his first testimonials, in 2012, is from a Dan Allenby, of Intel, seeming to imply that this was a training Chase did for the company Intel. Dan was a Maintenance Technician at Intel in Oregon; an unlikely role to get behavior training. Also, one of the people who gave a review for Chase’s pick-up artist book was a Dan A., of Oregon. Also, both Dan Allenby and Chase were in the Navy. This seems to be a pattern for Chase: using deceptive reviews from friends early on to make his work seem more legitimate.
Chase had made many extraordinary claims, including that he can teach people to “literally see a person’s entire life and personality by a momentary glance.” He says that his “published works on cult victim deprogramming and neurology-based hypnosis have changed the way many forensic and psychiatric practitioners conduct business,” despite there not being any evidence I’ve seen for that. He says that “his behavioral analysis of political debates and televised crime testimonies have become the new benchmark for over 29 United States media outlets,” despite, again, there being hardly any mention of him online in the 2000s or 2010s.
He has written that his materials can fairly quickly give people complete control over others, which pretty much all experts in psychology don’t believe is possible. He writes that “Using the Ellipsis Manual gives an operator complete access to the psychological compromise of almost any human being they encounter” and that it “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.” “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.” He writes that “Ellipsis has the proven ability for trained practitioners to erase memories, and even create new ones.” You get the idea.
About this “Behavioral Table of the Elements,” he has a quote from a J. Thomas Preston, PhD that reads, “Quite possibly what will replace and outperform the polygraph.” But I can find no person by that name.
Chase has removed the more outlandish and absurd content (like this “Evergreen Girl” stuff) from his website in the last few years. But you can still find it via the Wayback Machine. I only looked at a small percentage of his site backups, so the weird and unethical things I mention here are only scratching the surface.
Chase has stated and implied that his military service is related in some way to his behavior and psychology work. For example, in 2021 he wrote: “After 20 years of teaching interrogation, persuasion, and ethical brainwashing to the top Intelligence agencies in the world… And years of observing elite, high-ranking government officials using my military security clearance…” On his current site he writes, “He developed the 6MX system for intelligence agencies, which is now the gold standard in Tradecraft.” He writes that he got interested in working in improving military intelligence when his friend was killed in 2000 on the USS Cole: “Luckily, I had top-secret security clearance in the military, which I used to figure out the answer to this question: ‘How can we make intelligence gathering more powerful?’”. In event descriptions, he writes that it’s “the SAME class attended by advanced government operations personnel.” In a 2024 video, he describes himself as a psy-op expert. Podcasts hosts have described him as a “brainwashing expert,” an “interrogation expert,” an expert in military intelligence, and more; Chase seems to try to insinuate this even when not saying it directly, and clearly is okay with them saying such things. And yet:
Chase did work for twenty years for the Navy but there is no evidence it was related in any serious way to intelligence work, interrogation work, psy-op work, brainwashing work, or anything psychology-related. If that evidence is out there, it is very hard to find and Chase has also been careful to not talk about it.
From what I can tell, and from what several people who know Chase has told me, Chase worked primarily on ships in the Navy. His last title was Quarter Master. One person told me Chase only attained the title of Chief quite late in his career.
Chase has claimed to be a 2020 “top CEO” and a 40-under-40 CEO but both of those were from low-quality pay-to-be-featured sites.
He has at times referenced being trained in neuroscience, and being Harvard-educated. Sometimes people who interview him still describe him as being a neuroscientist (for example, in this description, and here also). There’s no evidence Chase has been substantially trained in such things; I’ve heard a report that he might have taken one continuing education class from Harvard but even that isn’t clear. In any case, Chase no longer mentions such things in his bio from what I’ve seen.
Like many faux experts in this space, Chase Hughes relies on many debunked and disrespected concepts and ideas from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and other pseudo-scientific arenas (more on the relation of his work to NLP here). He also creates his own behavior/influence concepts and terms; this, coupled with his many deceptions, should make one question whether there’s any value at all in his unique ideas.
Long story short: Chase has made many claims about being well known and respected in various fields, including doing high-level military intel and interrogation-related work, with pretty much no evidence to show for it. Even just a few of these irresponsible and unethical behaviors from Chase should be sufficient to cast doubt on everything he says about his claimed expertise — but there’s simply an immense quantity of outlandish and obviously false claims he’s made.
It makes sense that he may eventually have gained some legitimate clients, after getting some recent attention (that is how these things often work). This can muddy the waters, as he is able to say, “See, I do have some legitimate clients; I do have trainings” but that rebuttal of course doesn’t address the deeper issues with his many claims. It seems evident that his past is full of deception, both about the claims of his experience and skills, and the claims of his renown.
If you’re curious to learn more about how it’s possible for people like Chase to get good reviews and testimonials despite the low quality of his work, see my follow-up episode. (But, long story short, it’s because it’s simply easy to fool people.)
Transcript of the episode
Zach Elwood: Hi there. This is 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. This will be the first of at least a 2-part series on Chase Hughes, who bills himself as quote the “#1 expert on behavior and influence” – and who many people believe to be such an expert. Chase has been on the Dr. Phil show; he’s on a YouTube show called the Behavior Panel, which has almost a million subscribers and gets millions of views; apparently this year their show has been picked up as a real TV show.
Impressive seeming stuff. But is everything what it seems here? Who is Chase Hughes? Is he really an expert? What has he actually done? What’s his background? In this video I’ll examine Chase’s background and how he came to be where he is now. In a future video we’ll talk more about the specific behavior-related concepts that Chase writes and talks about. I’ll try not to be too opinionated about Chase’s background; you can probably tell where I stand from the video title, of course, but my goal is to present the information to you in as neutral and unbiasing way as possible, so you can make up your own mind. Chase Hughes talks a lot about using verbal and nonverbal clues to understand what people are like; their traits, their patterns, what they’ll do in future. You could consider this video a similar exercise. Can you deduce what Chase Hughes is like from his past behaviors? Can you be a Sherlock Holmes of human behavior? Time to put your deductive skills to work.
Also just a quick note: this is a youtube video, and includes video of the things I talk about. If you’re listening to this on audio, the video will be a much better way to consume this. I’ll read and describe the things I’m sharing for audio purposes but the video will be much more engaging.
I also want to say: if you like this episode, please consider donating to The Internet Archive, who runs the Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/donate. This kind of work wouldn’t be possible without them doing backups of web pages; they provide a great free service. After doing the research you’ll see in this video, I donated $100 to them. So consider donating to them, and to me, too, if you want.
And I’d also say: This video gets more interesting the farther I go. It is a bit long, because i wanted it to be complete, and so it does start out a bit dry. But I think you’ll want to stick around to see where things lead. This rabbithole leads to all sorts of weird stuff, from deadly fighting techniques, to pick-up artist and seduction strategies, to weight-loss and mental-improvement vitamin supplements; it even includes beautiful women being turned into deadly psychological weapons! Amazing and shocking claims are made about all sorts of things! The secret information contained in this episode will probably change your life forever! You’ll be able to see through people like an X-ray after watching this video! Sorry, I got excited; that’s probably just Chase Hughes rubbing off on me; I’ve been looking at way too much of his content. In any case, I think you won’t be disappointed. Welcome to the Chase Hughes rabbithole — the Chase Hughes cinematic multiverse.
His claims and products
Let’s look at some of Chase’s claims to fame. On his site (chasehughes.com), he refers to himself as the “#1 expert in behavior and influence.”
Bestselling author of five books on human behavior
Member of The Behavior Panel
Featured in Entrepreneur Magazine as an Oracle Member
Creator of the world’s first behavior profiling tool
Creator of the TFCA cycle for violence prediction
Creator of the PEACE 4A Police De-escalation model
You can also see that Dr Phil has dubbed him the “best on the globe”. Here’s a quick clip from him being on Dr. Phil’s show in 2023: https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYcDuOM8Yq/
The Behavior Panel YouTube channel that Chase is involved in has almost 1 million followers. They describe the group like this: “They are the top body language and behavioral analysts in the world.” Here’s a clip from what seems to be the first Behavior Panel video: [clip from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKpjC8rwZW0&t=20m27s ]
The title is: “Behavior Science Expert Chase Hughes Trains Real-World Jason Bournes on How to Negotiate, Interrogate, and Read People for Extreme Persuasion.” About his background, in that article Chase says, “I served in the U.S. military for 20 years and have become a behavior science expert for intelligence work and now business. For the better part of 15 years, I have been developing world-first behavior skills courses and tactics for intelligence operations.” He also says, “ I’m a world leader in human behavior and influence.”
You get the idea. A lot of people are talking about Chase Hughes. Chase Hughes is so hot right now.
Let’s look at some of his products and trainings. There are a whole lot of them but let’s just look at a few. www.chasehughes.com
The Ops Manual: This is a $897 piece of content. About the Ops Manual it says: “The Ops Manual is the operatives Bible. There are thousands of training programs out there about human persuasion and behavior. But there’s only one opportunity to use them in a moment. This is why I’ve spent +20 years and $5.3M (government money) to learn, research, and develop the training you’ll get with The Ops Manual.”
Then we’ve got a resource that’s apparently the most popular on the site: the Op6 Bundle, which is selling for $1097. A little bit about this one from the site copy: “Learn how to become an operator with the ultimate training package. In addition to the Ops Manual you’ll get access to the FIVE courses where you’ll deep dive into topics ranging from Confidence and Elicitation to Deception Detection, Influence, & Authority.”
“WEAPONS-GRADE SKILLS TRAINING: Are you ready to upgrade your skillset and join the world’s most elite operatives in unlocking key secrets to human behavior and influence so you can positively impact yourself, your family and the people around you?”
Farther down below he writes: “Chase has spent decades of his life and tens of millions of dollars creating Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence and he’s going to give you a complimentary 40-minute introduction so you can understand what the best negotiators in the world use only about 10% of…”
One of the things he’s known for making is what he calls the Behavioral Table of Elements: https://www.chasehughes.com/btoetour Here’s an image of that. A very thorough and complex looking resource.
One of the things that stands out about Chase’s work, especially if you use the Wayback Machine to go back and study his past website versions, is the huge amounts of courses and materials he’s put out. I’ve shared just a small percentage of the many products that have appeared on his site.
So this is all very impressive seeming. Or maybe not. Again, i’m just presenting information. You’re the one who will decide what it all means. I’ll leave the opinions to you.
On this page of his site, he talks about something he calls his CuePrime training (https://www.chasehughes.com/abr), which he says quickly became an “international bestseller.” It also includes this snippet: “After 13 years of research, experimentation, training, and in-field study, Chase worked with the world’s leading experts and discovered one of his most famous quotes: ‘Results matter much more than credentials.’”
And that is a sentiment that Chase often repeats in his work: education and training and academic work don’t matter; what matters is getting results. I think we’d mostly all agree with that: getting results matters more than theoretical knowledge.
So what are Chase’s qualifications? What’s his experience? What results has he gotten?
Experience and education
Military experience
Chase refers to his military service a good amount. For example, on the home page of his site (chasehughes.com) it says in big letters “Chase Hughes retired from the US military in 2019. After a 20-year career, Chase now teaches interrogation, sales, influence, and persuasion.” The impression given by this and other things Chase has said is that his military service is related to his behavior and psychology work.
“So I started working in the correctional part of the military in detection faciltiies. And I initially got on as a counselor, and just talking to people, and starting to see that this stuff is working. I’m seeing interrogators come in and out. And it got to a point where that stuff, just for this one little facility, it became something that people started to use. And I thought, wow, I’m gonna figure out a way to package this up and I can replicate it to other people, because it started doing a lot of good. And that’s kind of how it came into the military.”
So he says he was a counselor of some sort in the Navy’s correctional department and that his techniques were being used in interrogations in that department in some way.
It’s been hard to find much details at all on the specifics of that; in his more recent interviews he’s given where he talks about his Navy service, he gives hardly any detail about how his military service ties into the products and services on his website. Maybe someone listening would have more knowledge about that.
But okay. Worst-case scenario, maybe his military service isn’t related at all to his behavior and psychology work; maybe he learned all this stuff on his own.
Harvard and Duke education
Chase apparently at one point claimed that he had a Harvard education. Someone on a Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/ygqwld/the_world_expert_in_brainwashing_not_so_much/) the user thegirlwho8herhat wrote that Chase’s LinkedIn page (quote) “at one point listed a degree in Psychology from Harvard University, which sounds impressive until I checked it and noticed that it was in fact a continuing education certificate [where] one’s name would be printed on a piece of paper for a small fee. Chase Hughes was never, in fact, enrolled at Harvard University for any degree program.” (end quote)
On a site called RocketReach, which is an aggregator of people’s information https://rocketreach.co/chase-hughes-email_19311808, it says that Chase was in a Harvard Business School Executive Education between 2007 and 2010. But those two references are pretty much the only references to Harvard Business School education I could find.
During that episode, Chase seems to imply he’s studied at Harvard and at Duke. I’ll play that. (3:08)
“I went to Harvard University for Neuroscience and Neuro-endocrinology. I’m again enrolled at Duke University for Medical Neuroscience.”
Regarding Chase’s mention of going to Duke University, I can find no mention of that elsewhere.
For what it’s worth, Chase doesn’t seem to mention anything prominently about a Harvard or Duke education on any of his current bios or other properties I’ve seen.
According to some bios online https://www.missourimilitaryacademy.org/news-details/~board/news/post/mma-hall-of-fame-chase-hughes-99 , Chase is a “Certified Master of Clinical Hypnotherapy from the International Certification Board of Clinical Hypnotherapy.” Another bio (https://natfluence.com/interview/chughes/) reads “He is internationally board certified by the Clinical Hypnotherapy Board.” From what I’ve read, pretty much anyone can get a certificate from these kinds of organizations by attending the trainings, which can range from 40 hours to several hundred hours. Considering the differing descriptions of these things and the different group names used it’s not clear to me what kind of training he has. He doesn’t seem to mention it prominently on his website these days, in any case.
In that same Reddit post mentioned earlier, the user thegirlwho8herhat points out that: “Chase Hughes is who CEOweekly.com lists as #15 of 20 ‘Top CEOs of 2020’, which sounds impressive until you realize that CEOweekly is a pay-to-post website and that nearly everyone on the list besides Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are ‘consultants’ and ‘life coaches’ that no one has ever heard of and whose accomplishments and qualifications are, like Mr. Hughes, largely self declared. It’s an paid advertisement for credibility.”
The LA Wire link, like the CEOWeekly link, no longer works. LA Wire is also, like CEO Weekly, a place you can pay to get featured. Chase seems to have stopped referring to himself as a “Top CEO” of any sort in 2023, from what I could tell.
Pick-up artistry
If you want to understand someone, it often helps to look at how they got their start. Going back to someone’s origins can help you understand: What do they want? What do they seek? Often the things they want and seek will be aligned over time. Not always, of course. But beginnings can tell you a lot.
So how did Chase get his start in these areas? As Chase has talked about in some interviews, he initially got interested in behavior and manipulation through the world of pick-up artistry. Pick-up artists are men who seek to learn techniques for quickly seducing and sleeping with women.
In 2007 Chase wrote a pick-up artist book titled The Passport. https://archive.org/details/chase-hughes-the-passport/page/n1/mode/2up. Here’s that book. For context, this is five years before he sets up his chasehughes.com website that will have his behavior analysis and psychological influence products.
The Passport has only 3 reviews on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Passport-Chase-Hughes/dp/1432712829/). The book is no longer in print. Two of the reviews are recent, with people who learned about Chase via his recent fame; only one is back from 2007 when it was published. It reads “Years of weak kneed conversations, and insecurities all disappeared after reading just a few chapters. I wish I had read this 5 years ago. I now rock. Thanks, dude.” That review was written a month after the book was published. The review was written by an account named ‘Texas Builder’ and it is Texas Builder’s only review. Chase is from Texas. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my goal is not to bias you. I’m simply trying to include potentially pertinent information.
On GoodReads (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9243098-the-passport) a reviewer writes, “Even though the author tried to make sure that there’s almost no evidence for the existence of this book there are still ways to find a copy.”
Let’s go back to looking at the book. Here’s what the back cover reads:
Live above other men.
What if there were secret techniques to get any woman you wanted? You’re holding all of it…
Have your pick of women when you walk into a room
Get phone numbers in three minutes flat
Kiss gorgeous women within fifteen minutes
Get women chasing you today
Have women trying to impress YOU
Be the guy women leave their boyfriends for
Make everyone wonder if you are a celebrity
Never be put into the “friends” zone again
On the back cover under that is a very young-looking Chase Hughes with a big smile. Chase is, from what I can deduce, about 44 years old now, so he would have been about 27 when this book came out. I could be wrong on that by a few years. The picture, though, looks significantly younger than 27 to me; he looks like a high-school kid to me.
The bio reads, “Chase Hughes has been teaching and researching the art of attraction for six years. He resides in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he is stationed in the US Navy.” End-quote. Obviously a very short bio. I think there’s a lot this bio, in its brevity, tells us about Chase and his experiences in the Navy and in the behavior space, especially when you consider that he set up his ChaseHughes.com site selling behavior and influence products only 5 years later. But I’ll keep that to myself. This is not the time for personal opinion.
I’ll read a little bit from Chase Hughes’ book. I find this stuff very interesting.
Imagine…You take your first few steps into the bar. People stop what they are doing to look and wonder who you are. As you walk, women are looking you over, adjusting their hair and making sure you see them, guys are getting out of your way and you see the body language of the whole room begin to shift towards you. “Is he a celebrity or some-thing?”, you hear from across the bar. As a woman that would make most guys fall to their knees walks behind you, you grab her arm and she takes in a deep breath of excitement that she is able to talk to you. After two minutes, she’s bringing her friends to meet you, buying you drinks and touching you every time she laughs. Within ten minutes, you are kissing her. You tell her things are moving to fast and you’ll come find her later. As you say goodbyes, you walk straight up to the next group of women and repeat the exact same process.
It’s like this every. Single. Night. This book is the no-fluff reference guide for men. The simple five-step process you can use tonight: All first-time sexual experiences will revolve around the same basic steps:
REMEMBER: F.A.I.R.S. Focus – Grab attention and hold it. Attract -Build attraction by having high-status. Interact – use humor and stories to get her going. Resist – play the ‘we’re moving too fast’ game. Seduce – advance, advance, resist, repeat
And just a note here that when he wrote “You tell her things are moving to fast” the ‘too’ in ‘too fast’ is spelled wrong, spelled TO. An interesting detail, I thought, about the quality of the book.
I’d also add that Chase, in his later books and products, would also talk about them having “no fluff.”
Here’s a disclaimer from the beginning of the book. It reads:
“This book was written for entertainment purposes only. The contents of this book are not to be considered as legal, professional, or spiritual advice. This book is not intended to be read by anyone under the age of eighteen. The author assumes no responsibility for any result of reading this book. In fact, this book should not be read by ANYONE… ever.” end quote
This is pretty much the same disclaimer in other books of his; for example, this is almost verbatim the disclaimer from his Ellipsis Manual.
Here’s a diagram from the start of the book (page 10) meant to demonstrate what he calls the 5-2-6 Method. It’s a chart with several lines across it and a key explaining what various things mean. Similar to his later Behavioral Table of Elements, it’s pretty hard to understand at a glance what’s going on.
On page 87: “W – Willingness to accept her. Here you will tell her specific things you like about her that she’s never heard before. These will validate her experience with you. She does not want to feel like a slut, so this is why we are making sure she knows exactly why we like her. Kissing will happen here…. Nothing is more satisfying to women than the feeling of having earned a man’s affection. The watchword in WILLINGNESS is ‘validation.’ When you validate parking, you give it justification and reason. The same goes for your girl.”
This was an interesting section: Dealing with Other Guys (page 140). He writes: “If you aren’t sure if he’s with her, but he comes in the conversation and starts trying to make fun of you or tell you to go away, simply tell him there’s nothing to worry about because you are gay. The guy will believe you, but women are extremely intuitive and she will know you aren’t.”
This was all kind of interesting to me; I wouldn’t have predicted that acting gay when slightly threatened would be an Alpha Male Gentleman strategy. On the next page (page 142) he follows up with more thoughts on the advanced acting-gay strategy: “Don’t EVER be afraid or embarrassed to act gay or completely back out of a fight if your safety is at risk.” The word ‘EVER’ is in all caps, really emphasizing the need to be courageous enough to pretend to be gay when necessary.
Towards the end of the book, (page 160) Chase talks about relationship advice in the longer term. Here’s a section with the title “Dealing with her bitching”. Here’s a section titled “Keeping her hanging on” (163). On page 165, he writes, “Women are very simple to maintain and need only the slightest amount of maintenance. I don’t care if you think you have a high-maintenance woman, she’s not. With the right man, who knows his role in the relationship as a man, she can relax and be a natural woman.”
On the acknowledgements page, he thanks his wife. He also mentions a few friends of his, including Brian Mittenburg, who he refers to as Wingman. Another friend he mentions is Jonathan Cave, who he refers to as a True Alpha Male.
Now, to be clear: I’m not sharing this stuff because I’m trying to shame Chase for being into pick-up artistry. We all have our own opinions on that. And I’m not doing this because I think his pick-up artist endeavors, however seemingly immature, preclude him from later becoming an amazing behavior and influence expert. I include this stuff because I think it’s pertinent to our examination of Chase’s background; it’s pertinent to how he talks about his work and the things he claims he can do. Again, it’s up to you to think about what these claims tell us about Chase and his claimed expertise.
Brothers, Chase Hughes here. I am the owner and founder of the Hawaii lair and have just traveled through Singapore and Hong Kong and had the opportunity to party with their lairs. [a note here: lairs are the pick-up artist community’s word for pick-up artist hang-outs] Great people. I would love to sarge with anyone while I am there in Cyprus in a couple of weeks. [a note here: sarge means going out on the town to pick-up girls ] I have never been there and I am pretty excited to see it. I am trying to unite the lairs everywhere I go so that I can meet everyone. Everyone has been very hospitable.
About Me: I have been doing pickup for almost six years now and I have been teaching it for a little over three. I have given seminars with Jeffy, Tyler Durden, Jlaix and Mystery. I published a book on pickup last year and it has been doing well. I would be more than happy to sarge, have a few drinks or even bootcamp a few guys. I have tons of pickup material on thumb drives as well and would be willing to pass it on to anyone. I will also upload my e-book to the lair if you’d like. My Book: www.outskirtspress.com/thepassport. My site: www.themenspassport.com. My email is [HE GIVES A NAVY EMAIL]. I look very much forward to meeting all of you guys. Please email me if you’d like to meet up in a couple of weeks! Fraternally, Chase Hughes
Here’s a look at the wayback machine backup of his 2007 site TheMensPassport.com (https://web.archive.org/web/20070622233142/http://themenspassport.com/Home_Page.html). The site shows that he was using the name CK Hughes at that time. Near the top of the page it says “Create a girlfriend anywhere in about three minutes.” There are some testimonials.
One says: “This book will be passed down for generations,” by a Brian M. of St. Louis, Missouri. This name seems similar to the Brian Mittenburg he thanks in his book.
Another one says, “I never thought this was possible unless you were a celebrity!” from Dan A. of PBX Lair, Oregon. I think that maybe is supposed to be PDX, which is the airport code for Portland.
Despite claims that he was well known in the pick-up artist community, I couldn’t find evidence for that. His book on Amazon only had one review from back when it was released, and I couldn’t find any mentions of his work aside from things he’d written. But it’s of course possible he was well known in the pick-up artist world.
Fighting videos
What else was Chase into at that time? He also had a YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@RedshiftLabs for a company called RedShift Labs. On that channel he shared what was allegedly advanced fighting and covert ops-type knowledge. These were videos from around early 2008. There were 21 videos in all; the output didn’t seem to last very long. Let’s watch a few of those; I’ll just flip through a few so you can get the idea.
For what it’s worth, I couldn’t find anything online about an “omega strike” fighting technique so I assume it’s a term invented by Chase. I searched online for other references to Chase Hughes and fighting-related terms but this video channel was all I could find.
Vitamin supplements
So what other things did Chase Hughes’ company RedShift Labs get up to? Here’s his RedShift Labs website (redshiftlabs.com) from 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20071018043047/http://www.redshiftlabs.com/ It sells a product they call RedShift with Neuridium, with both words having a trademark symbol beside them. This product could apparently do a lot of things! Here’s a few things from the home page:
You’ll feel it within minutes: Your veins pump new life; your physical energy and mental focus soar to mind-blowing heights. Your brain is overloaded with electrifying positivity and determination
Redshift™ with Neuridium™ technology is designed to drastically uplift your mood and flood your mind with positive reinforcement, intense focus, faster reaction speed, and earth-shattering determination so that nothing stands in your way.
“Redshift gave me the unfair advantage I needed to stay focused and in great shape while I was deployed. I was amazed by the results in such a short time and am blown away by what Neuridium did for my mood.” Brian Mittenburg, U.S. Navy
If that name sounds familiar that’s because it was one of the friends Chase thanked at the back of his pick-up artist book. His wingman.
Another testimonial reads: “Redshift brought me to a whole new level. Everyone thought I had won the lottery or something on my first day and that was only the beginning. I am a changed man. Redshift has earned a permanent place in my cut cycle. I won’t go without it.” John Cave, U.S. Navy
If that name sounds familiar that’s because this was the “True Alpha Male” Chase thanked in his book.
And there are a few more testimonials on that page.
1. Redshift is used by Navy SEALs, Surgeons, U.S. Marshals, Personal Trainers, and college students for it’s ability to dramatically and immediately improve energy level,mental focus, reduce stress and enhance your mood.
2. We GUARANTEE immediate results. No need to use Redshift for months to get results.
3. Redshift has been featured in publications from Navy News to the Houston Chronicle and have gained international recognition to be the world’s best.
4. Redshift has been used by all branches of the United States Armed Forces. These intense environments have put Redshift to the ultimate test and has succeded every time.
5. Redshift is manufactured and tested in a state of the art facility that is independently inspected, verified and scientifically tested.
YES! Not only do SEALs use it, Redshift spans the spectrum of the U.S. Armed Forces and Government Agencies.
So what is this amazing Neuridium substance? I searched online for it and found nothing about it; it seems to be a term made up by the people who created Redshift. What I did find were several accounts on fitness forums talking about the Redshift product.
On a forum at freetrainers.com (https://www.freetrainers.com/forums/topic/has-anyone-tried-redshift-with-neuridium-41707), someone was talking about this product. The post is from a user named KFit, and it reads, “Hi, I was wondering if anyone has tried Redshift with Neuridium? I’m thinking of trying it but I like to get feedback before trying new supplements. I tried some that don’t mix well with my medication (Effexor XR). Yohimbe was the worst for me – almost ended up in the hospital so I tread carefully now before trying new stuff. Any information would be appreciated.”
The second post in that thread is from a user named Nutritionist281 in January of 2008 and it reads “have been on this stuff on and off for almost three weeks. I have recommended it to several clients and Ihave done a LOT of research on the stuff. My personal results have been tremendous. The mood and focus ingredients in the supplement are one of the only ones I’ve seen that dont counteract eachother. PS: TAKE WITH FOOD!!”
The third post is from a user who sarcastically writes, “Thank you for the outstanding endorsement with your first post.”
There were a few more posts promoting RedShift in other forums but you likely get the idea.
In another thread, on bodybuilding.com (https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=5286103&page=1), a user named kudzu writes “I just tried a new supplement called redshift with neuridium. I’ve never tried anything quite like it and I’ve tried LOTS of supplements.”
A few months after that, the second follow-up post on this thread is from an account named NewYorkFit who writes, “I have been using redshift…or neuridium, for two months now. It was made by two guys in the Special Forces and it was designed for COMBAT USE. Once civillians got wind of it, the market exploded…haha. My trainer was the one who showed it to me first…haha…credit to Jeff.”
A few months after that, the four post in the thread, a user wrote, “have any of you tried to order Redshift recently? I just heard about it, called the number on the website and got a recording that it was not valid (I also couldn’t find an order form on their website). Are they still in business. I’d appreciate any help with this. Thanks.”
About a year after that third post, a user named kristieg writes: “Hi. I am just now seeing your post. The owners of the company dissolved the company last year due to deployment. I was their assistant and had downgraded my VA services around the same time. Chase H., one of the owners, has recently turned the product over to me to sell as I see fit. I have about 500 bottles and will not be producing anymore and am not taking over for the company, simply selling the remaining product. If you are still interested, please contact me and I will sell this supplement to you at a reduced cost. It’s a great product and I’ve been using it for over a year now. I just don’t need 500 bottles of it :-). Thanks so much, Kristie G.”
And again, aside from the website and the few forum posts mentioned, I saw no evidence of Redshift or Neuridium being talked about by anyone; no sign that it was popular. But, again, I’m not here to bias your thinking. Maybe it was very popular. Maybe it really was used by all branches of the armed forces, by Navy Seals and U.S. Marshals. Maybe it really did gain international attention despite no one talking about it online. Maybe Chase Hughes really did have a state-of-the-art laboratory where he invented an amazing and unique compound called Neuridium that increases mental functionality and improves mood. Maybe this product really was extremely popular but the only reason Chase Hughes stopped selling it was because he had to ship out for his Navy deployment (I hate when that happens). If you’re interested in getting a bottle of Redshift, reach out to Kristie G; she might have a few more bottles left.
Early behavior and influence work
So all that stuff, the amazing supplement, the fighting videos, the pick-up artist stuff, was happening in 2007 and 2008. From what I can tell, the chasehughes.com website appeared first in 2012 — only four years after those accounts were promoting Redshift on fitness forums. Let’s take a tour of Chase’s 2012 website: https://web.archive.org/web/20120921233016/http://www.chasehughes.com/
The home page reads:
What if you could SEE the private thoughts of everyone you meet?
Welcome to the private world, that is always on public display.
Imagine sitting in a cafe with a friend. As your friend tells you about a jacket he just bought, you know he fibbed about the price a little. The waitress hands you your coffee and without a word, you KNOW that she is bulimic. You gaze at the couple across a few tables and you immediately see that she’s ready to leave him simply by looking at her feet, hands and eyes. You also notice by his hands that he’s been hiding years of financial debt from her and has no intention of telling her. The other couple, at a closer table, you know from a momentary glance that he is a chemical engineer and she is in real-estate. You’ve also noticed that while they are both married, they aren’t married to each other.
The man at the bar stool came in about 30 seconds ago and sat down. By looking at his clothing, his lips and eyes, and his left thumb, you tell your friend it’s time to go. “Why? We just got here!” He says.
He agrees when you tell him the man at the bar is about to rob the cafe with a gun.
On a page of his site titled Reading People (https://web.archive.org/web/20120923030140/http://www.chasehughes.com/reading-people.html), we see some pictures of index cards with behavioral notes on them. We also see an image of a car marked up with notes about it, like ‘clean inside, no clutter’, and ‘knows the car well; parked just over the curb’ and pointing to the sticker on the windshield, ‘oil change made on time’. It seems that Chase can also teach you how to read car tells, although honestly these reads seem a bit basic.
Advanced ‘mind games’ in interviewing and questioning
Unorthodox but legal Psychology loopholes
Introduction to Neuro Linguistic Interviewing
And quite a few more.
Here’s his testimonial page (https://web.archive.org/web/20120923030204/http://www.chasehughes.com/testimonials.html). One testimonial from David Gustafson of Texas reads, “This type of training is much too rare in law enforcement. The training my troopers received today put them years ahead of the others in the non-verbal skillset. This needs to be a standardized training for all law enforcement. Some of what we learned today may save one of our lives in the future.”
One testimonial comes from Dan Allenby, of Intel. He says “Our team had no idea what was coming. An innovative, captivating and genuine speaker; Chase has all of us feeling like mind-readers now. Thanks!”
I looked up Daniel Allenby https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-allenby-36475028/ and saw that he worked at Intel in Oregon during that time as a ‘Maintenance Technician’. I was curious why Intel would have someone like Chase training a Maintenance Technician in reading behavior. When I reached out to Dan Allenby about that, he seemed hesitant to give me any details and said “I can’t recall the exact testimonial you’re asking about, that was quite some time ago for me!” When I showed him his testimonial, he didn’t give me any more information and suggested I ask Chase about it.
Another interesting detail here: one of the people who gave Chase a testimonial for his pick-up artist book was a Dan A. from Oregon. It seems possible that Dan A. is Dan Allenby, who worked at Intel, which is outside Portland, Oregon. Dan also says in his LinkedIn profile that he was in the Navy, which is another connection they share.
There’s a testimonial from an anonymous person from the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, with a picture of a sign showing that Chase Hughes was doing a training there. And that’s Cleveland, Texas, not Ohio.
All the people on this page, the ones named, seemed like real people to me on a quick search with the exception of one name. That testimonial reads “Chase was unorthodox, outside the box and the most captivating speaker I’ve heard to date. His insight and delivery changed all of us. We attended the two-day advanced course and learned more than most CIA interrogators, I’m sure. Many thanks, Hughes.” and that quote comes from Abdul Al-Romaizan, President of Nasheed Investments, Saudi Arabia. I searched for this name and the company name but couldn’t find anything.
Also, at this time, using Google to search for mentions in the 2012 time frame, I found almost no mention of Chase Hughes apart from his website. I didn’t see any references to trainings he was doing, or behavior-related work he was doing. They might be out there but I couldn’t find them easily.
LITERALLY see a person’s entire life and personality by a momentary glance
Identify wrinkles in a person’s shirt
Accurately read EVERY body language gesture
Know intimate secrets simply by observing how objects are placed in a room
IMMEDIATELY spot insecurity, doubt, neediness, fear, lonliness and deception
Detect lies with amazing accuracy
Immediately identify what tattoos mean
Spot criminals long before a crime
See meaning behind scratches on fingernails and picked-cuticles
Interview with more skill than a CIA interrogator
Break down a person’s ENTIRE life by the contents of their car
Look at a person’s shoes and be able to ACCURATELY describe their daily habits and lifestyle
Look at a person’s legs and immediately know if they are trusting or suspicious
And 6,104 other amazing techniques just like these
I have to say in that list, the least exciting skill to me was identifying wrinkles in a person’s shirt. I’m surprised he’d put that at the number two spot. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to be able to read shirt wrinkle tells; I just would have put it farther down the list.
Have you ever wondered how the people-reading gurus on TV are able to completely profile a person’s life by a single shoelace or a parting of the lips? What if you could do the same thing WITHOUT 10 years of research? With the most innovative and ground-breaking people-reading and behavior profiling technology in human history, the power to profile behavior even better than the pros, can be in your hands today. Chase Hughes has given us a method that puts the user far ahead of Sherlock Holmes and the CIA alike.
Chase Hughes, a native of Houston, Texas, has been involved with nonverbal research and innovation for nearly 12 years. The author of three books and reference volumes and over 13 articles covering topics from cult brainwashing to the use of clandestine hypnosis techniques in interrogations.
Currently on active duty in the United States Navy; he has been teaching, researching and coaching in body language, nonverbal communication and deception detection during his entire career. His published works on cult victim deprogramming and neurology-based hypnosis have changed the way many forensic and psychiatric practitioners conduct business.
Chase now lives in Little Creek, Virginia and has worked with training and coaching interrogators, HR teams and law enforcement. His behavioral analysis of political debates and televised crime testimonies have become the new benchmark for over 29 United States media outlets.
The Behavioral Table of Elements was originally developed in 2011 and was made public in 2013. It is being employed by government and corporate agencies nationwide, including the US government and FBI. The Behavioral Table continues to evolve as an organic structure and has proven extremely effective both as a training, and an analysis tool.
The Ellipsis System is available only to specific clients and garnered its first media attention in 2012. Chase’s system has trademarked the term ‘pre-havior’ and the P7 system relies heavily on this concept.
The Weaponized Communication Manual has gained a lot of media attention. The new manual, to be released in early 2015, contains the most advanced and comprehensive training and reference system in the world. The book focuses on the use of advanced psychology tactics, interrogation methods, profiling and exploiting human weakness and using neurology-based hypnosis to engineer human behavior.
As a recognized jury consultant, Chase has become a specialist in training legal teams to recognize and analyze body signals; from the way a shoe is laced to the inadvertent parting of the lips during questioning.
Most of Chase’s work is done at no charge while he is still in the US Navy.
I want to repeat that when I used Google to examine results during that time period, I could find no relevant mention of him in the 2012-2014 time range about being a known expert at behavior analysis. He mentions that his analysis methods became quote “the new benchmark for over 29 United States media outlets” but I could find no evidence of that. Now again, I should say it’s entirely possible that he had massive success and national fame for his behavior analysis work while not being mentioned at all on the internet; maybe it was a purposeful attempt to keep a low profile. I don’t know. I’m just presenting information; you be the judge.
There’s a Covert Psychology page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141012081856/http://www.chasehughes.com/covert-psychology.html). On that page it reads “BY FAR, THE MOST ADDICTING EXPERIENCE YOU WILL EVER HAVE”. The top of the page cycles through various images of official looking books. One is titled “Ellipsis: Operator Manual to the Human Mind” One is titled “Activating Psychological Submission”. Some of them have official-looking logos in the corner that read ‘Black Ops Program’.
One part of the page reads, “The Ellipsis Manual contains WORLD-FIRST information available no where else on planet Earth.”
It goes on:
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
Farther down it says:
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. This is most assuredly a life-changing experience that will continue to grow with you forever. The feeling that comes with knowing your words will work like covert instruments of psychological control is an incredible and powerful feeling.
Farther down it reads “THIS IS A WEAPON. The Ellipsis Manual can be used to commit crimes, cause injury and even death. It is as much a weapon as an assault rifle. You absolutely WILL go through a background check to order this book as a civilian. As an added bonus, your name and social security number will be watermarked across the pages of the printed copy you receive as well.”
It also reads “The process, from start to finish, of creating an alter-ego are included, along with the covert methods of installing personality traits of the ‘alter’ and developing complete psychological submission from even the MOST resistant subjects.”
One section says “AND ANYONE YOU MEET… IS A CONVERSATION AWAY FROM DRASTICALLY MODIFIED BEHAVIOR”
Accompanying that text is an image of a woman dressed in a bridal dress smiling and wielding a chainsaw with blood splattered on her.
On a Behavioral Profiling page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141012081840/http://www.chasehughes.com/behavior-profiling.html), it talks about Chase’s Behavioral Table of Elements. It has a quote that reads “Quite possibly what will replace and outperform the polygraph.” from a J. Thomas Preston, PhD. I searched for that name and couldn’t find anyone who seemed a likely match to have said such a thing. But again, it’s entirely possible there’s a J. Thomas Preston out there who’s a big fan of Chase’s Behavioral Table of the Elements.
The page reads: “As an analysis tool, for the first time in world history, an interaction can be mathematically broken down into accurate and universally understood gestures, behaviors, deception and vocal indicators.”
It also says “Official U.S. Government edition available now for pre-release to public”
Farther down, it says “$19.95 until pre-release ends. Government Table will increase to $246.81 upon public release.”
In the 2014 time range, there are quite a few links to pages from single letters. These are hard to see; it’s like little Easter Eggs sprinkled across his site.
There are extremely unusual loop-holes in our minds that allow FULL CONTROL. There are exactly 31 loopholes in the human brain that allow full neurological compromise. Neurological Compromise means that a subject will disregard laws, safety and moral judgment in order to follow directions and complete tasks they believe are their idea. More hidden links are here on the site somewhere… for the curious and inclined.
ELLIPSIS has the proven ability for trained practitioners to erase memories, and even create new ones. Why should this program be any different than any other “mind control” or “covert hypnosis” program? Ellipsis is proven . . . and NO OTHER PROGRAM IN THE WORLD HAS FEATURED THE TECHNIQUES WITHIN ELLIPSIS.
He says he’ll help you create “ENGINEERED OUTCOMES IN POKER”, and that his advanced manipulation techniques are quote “now available in the casino.” He says you can quote “modify the behavior of your opponents, increase their nonverbal gestures, and magnify the nervousness of anyone at the table”. He says you can “Establishing trust in less than one minute with any opponent.”
At the bottom of that page he has trainings listed. For example, it reads:
HOLLYWOOD: JANUARY 16-18
LAS VEGAS: JANUARY 23-26, FEBRUARY 6-8 (CELEBRITY INVITATIONAL)
GULFPORT, MS: MARCH 6-8
But there are no details about where these trainings are exactly or links to learn more. As I stated, I could find no information via google for that time period about trainings Chase was doing.
Every year, we take one beautiful young woman, and teach her the most dangerous, covert and powerful psychological warfare methods on planet earth. The results are always astonishing. . .and fun. Our goal was originally to teach the most dangerous techniques to the nicest young ladies we could find. These girls learn covert hypnosis, interrogation, psychological thought control methods, behavior profiling, lie-detection and a whole lot more.
As the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ jokes started coming in, the program simply became an annual thing. The program continues to this day and each of the graduates have become ACTUAL psychological weapons. They have the ability to heal, defend, protect and repair people. However, they also have the ability to control, manipulate and engineer behavior. Our vetting program started in March, 2011 and we found Joanna. She had amazing social intelligence and a perfectly conscientious mental state. As Joanna was the first ‘WEAPON’ we created, and the first civilian graduate of the program, she get’s the benefit of having gone through the toughest (most beneficial) training.
This research project continues with new students and we continuously ‘monitor’ the progress of the young ‘femme fatales’ as they grow up. All of the Evergreen girls have been thoroughly screened and have proven to be extremely conscientious, caring and invested in the betterment of humanity.
Farther down on the page it reads:
MEET AMANDA . . . the 2015 evergreen girl. After 39 interviews, we found Amanda. Listen to her interview below. She is fun, charismatic, smart, humble, responsible and beautiful…the perfect weapon. She met with Chase at a local Starbucks for her interview and absolutely nailed the position. Amanda is originally from Illinois and now lives in Virginia Beach, VA. She is majoring in Marine Biology and loves animals…she may change her major to psychology…we didn’t make her. She’s about to learn the darkest and most closely guarded secrets of covert psychology…
There are several SoundCloud audio talks with her but they’ve all been deleted.
Farther down the page it reads: “Past Evergreen Girls, Level 7: Angela Byers (#3) Houston, TX, Sam Houston State University (Accounting Major) Graduated:November, 2014.”
Another one reads: “Joanna B. (the first weapon) College Station, TX, Texas A&M University. Joanna graduated Ellipsis in March, 2012.”
ONE GIRL WILL HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME. WTF IS EVERGREEN?
The project was originally thought of in a conversation when we began training a female from Texas. Her name is Joanna. As her training progressed, the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ jokes started to fly. We took that and ran with it, and now there are three awesome, and scarily powerful girls roaming the Earth. The entire program will take place in Virginia Beach, VA. So you must live here and have a plan to stay for the duration of the training. The Evergreen training consists of one-on-one training with Chase Hughes.
It also reads “You do not have to pay anything, and all we ask is that you have a few hours a week and that you are comfortable being recorded in audio.”
It reads “Reminder: The moral use of Ellipsis disclaimer and waiver of liability is required to be signed annually by all clients. If your log-in is not functioning, this is the likely reason. Contact Natalie in support to receive a copy.”
From the word Natalie there’s a link to an email address: [email protected]. Going to LinkedIn, we can find a Natalie Morris LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-morris-97789511b), that says she’s an Executive Assistant at Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories. She has 3 followers and no posts.
A search for Natalie Morris and Ellipsis turns up this Pinterest board https://www.pinterest.com/morris2573/. With a picture of a woman and the URL ellipsisbehavior.com in her bio. One of her posts (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/385620786820049363) is a promotion for Chase’s “dangerous women” program. It reads, “Women training to be modern day sirens. Dangerous ‘black-ops’ psychology training is being conducted. Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories is training a fleet of girls to become psychological weapons” and then links to his site.
Well, that’s bringing us near the end of our journey. I hope you’ve enjoyed learned about Chase Hughes, a man who seems to have elite powers in just about everything: seducing women in minutes, punching people to death quickly, controlling people and getting them to do immoral acts against their will; turning beautiful women into advanced psychological weapons; crafting advanced supplements in secret laboratories. And, from what I can tell, he seems entirely self-taught, making his knowledge even more impressive. A modern Renaissance man.
But I want to know: what do you think about Chase Hughes? Maybe you could leave a comment in the youtube comments with your read on things. What subtle clues were you able to spot? What advanced deductions did you put together?
“When doing regression work with Ellipsis methods, you can strategically let loose the smell of mothballs during conversations about people’s memories of their grandparents’ homes or their childhood memories of other people who spoiled them. Ellipsis research has proved this to be about 70% effective in activating stronger and more emotional memories in subjects. Operators can carry a small sandwich bag in the field to open it inside of a pocket, during regressive conversational work.”
I’d be curious if you would trust Chase when he says he’s conducted such research. I’d ask you: Would you have 100% trust that Chase Hughes has in fact done extensive mothball regression research?
Do you think Chase can teach you to read people within seconds and hypnotize them without them knowing? Do you think if Chase and I met before I made this video he would’ve been able to hypnotize me into not making this video? Would he have been able to control me like The Manchurian Candidate? Is it possible he might activate one of his Evergreen Girls to come after me for making this video? I don’t know; these are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night.
Leave a comment and let me know what you think. And share this video with people interested in body language and reading behavior; let’s get some more opinions on this. Maybe we can all figure this puzzle out together.
Maybe you’re a Chase Hughes fan and you’re angry at me, and wondering who the hell I am to criticize such a respected “expert.” Well, to that I’d say: it shouldn’t really matter who I am; what matters is who Chase Hughes is; this is a video anyone could have made; this has very little to do with me. But since you asked (or since I imagined you asked), I’ll oblige: I started this podcast of mine, People Who Read People, as an offshoot of my poker tells work. I played poker for a living for about 3.5 years and that led to me writing some books on poker behavior, aka poker tells, which many poker players, both recreational and serious professional players, have liked a lot. If you go to my site www.readingpokertells.com you’ll see some reviews. I do think I’ve written the best books about poker tells, and that’s something I say only after hearing many people I respect say that. I’ll also say that what I’ve never done is exaggerate my background and experience; I’ve always been honest about the stakes I’ve played and what games I’ve played. I’ve always been honest about not being an expert at poker strategy but just very interested in understanding poker behavior. I’ve also been very honest about the limits of using tells; they are a small part of playing strong live poker; they won’t turn a bad poker player into a winning player.
For what it’s worth, I did send an email to Chase Hughes on August 28th telling him I was going to be doing an episode on these topics but I didn’t get a response.
I’ll also add that all my research for this episode was quite basic; all this stuff anyone can find without much effort. I’m not a highly skilled researcher and honestly didn’t even try that hard. Which begs the question: what else is out there? What stuff from Chase’s early years has been deleted, or what’s still out there that might be a bit harder to find? How many other Evergreen Girls are out there?
Some of you may still be wondering: “But what about Chase’s ideas? The concepts he shared. Even if he was hawking vitamin supplements of dubious merit, maybe he has actually learned a lot. Maybe he really does know what he’s talking about. What about his work with this Behavior Panel show? Aren’t those ideas credible? A lot of people watch that show. Chase has been promoted by Dr. Phil, for Christ’s sake; is nothing real or sacred in this world?”
Calm down, it’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.
On the next episode, we’ll get into those topics. We’ll talk about the ideas that Chase has written about in his books and on his website and talked about in his videos. We’ll talk about deception detection, mind control, neurolinguistic programming, hypnosis, and more.
I might not get that episode out for a little while so in the meantime, if you liked this episode, go to my website behavior-podcast.com and check out some of the best-of compilations of episodes. I’ve got many episodes about reading and understanding and predicting human behavior in all sorts of arenas, if you’re into that topic.
I talk to a professional astrologist named Ophira Edut. I myself don’t believe in astrology but I was interested in asking her questions I’ve wanted to ask about astrology — and the meta-level topic of people’s belief in astrology. Topics include: why she believes in astrology; how her beliefs in that relate to other beliefs (like Reiki or other metaphysical ideas); people’s negative views about astrology (including the view that astrology is a gateway to other bad ideas); if some pregnant women try to time births to get specific astrological signs; the importance of engaging respectfully with people we disagree with; and more.
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, hosted by me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
In this episode, I talk to a professional astrologist named Ophira Edut (e-DOOT). To be clear upfront: I don’t believe in astrology, and this isn’t the type of thing I’d usually cover for my podcast, but this was a chance for me to ask some questions that I’ve always wanted to ask about astrology – and, more interesting to me, people’s belief in astrology; why they believe it, what those beliefs are like, how they relate to other beliefs. I think whether you are into astrology or whether you’re completely skeptical of astrology, you’ll like this episode; it’s one of the stranger and more unique episodes I’ve done but, for that reason I think it’s one of the more interesting.
I’ll give you a quick backstory on how this talk came about. I often get publicists reaching out to me asking me if I’d interview the people they’re promoting. Someone doing publicity for Ophira reached out to me and asked if I’d be up for talking to her about astrology. I say no to pretty much all these requests, as most of them aren’t really connected with my interests or the theme of the show. But this one did pique my interests. Here’s what I wrote to the publicist:
I’d be interested in talking to them only if they were interested in having a tough (but always respectful) conversation where I ask them questions like “What would you say are the best arguments that astrology is really a thing to people who believe it’s all bullshit?”
I think this stuff is nonsense but I am interested in why people believe this stuff and think it would be interesting to engage in a way that is all too rare: talking openly and honestly about that and doing that in a respectul way (related to my work on reducing toxic political polarization, which I’d tie the convo into).
It could be quite unique!
To my surprise, Ophira was into the idea, and I do want to say that I respect her for coming on to talk openly and honestly about her beliefs despite my obviously not very inviting email and my skepticism. I think not a lot of people are willing to do that for many things they believe, so I do respect that.
A 2022 yougov survey found that quote “a little more than one-quarter of Americans (27%) – including 37% of adults under 30 – say that they believe in astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets influences people’s lives. About half of Americans (51%) say they don’t believe in astrology and 22% are unsure. Younger American adults are more likely to say they believe in astrology than older Americans are.” end quote. And surveys have found support in astrology going up significantly in the past few years.
I’m going to read verbatim the full, unedited bio of Ophira that the publicist sent me:
About Ophira Edut:
Ophira Edut is one of the most sought-after astrologers and intuitive advisors of our times. As the longtime resident astrologer for ELLE and the author of over 20 books, she is a private advisor to a roster of CEOs, celebrities, global leaders and successful entrepreneurs.
Ophira has spoken at universities, conferences and events for the past 20 years, delivering keynotes and live interactive workshops. Her productivity training has been presented to entrepreneurs and executives at companies including Nike and Saks Fifth Avenue, and at event spaces such as Luminary NYC, 92Y, Soho House and Barcelona’s Joan Miro Museum.
On television, Ophira has appeared as a guest expert for Bravo, MTV, Good Morning America, and the Today Show, and created the first streaming reality TV dating show based on astrology, Cosmic Love (Amazon Prime Video, 2022).
Ophira’s book, The Astrology Advantage, to be published by Simon and Schuster in August 2024, introduces The AstroTwins’ revolutionary IAM System, which simplifies the birth chart into three archetypes: Innovator, Authority and Maven. Her work on the subject of “spiritual technology” as an essential tool for business success has been featured in Fast Company and at leadership conferences around the world, including the Milken Global Conference (2024) and the WIN (Women in Negotiation) Summit.
In this episode, I talk again about fake behavior expert Jack Brown, whose pseudoscientific behavior analysis work I devoted a past episode to. Jack Brown got some recent attention in a Raw Story article for an analysis he wrote about how Trump’s body language at a press conference showed that Trump was lying.
Topics discussed include: the silliness of Brown’s work and why it’s silly; tips for recognizing fake behavior experts; how this stuff connects to toxic political polarization; a reading of Brown’s recent analysis with comments.
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about human behavior and psychology. You can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
Occasionally on this podcast I’ve talked about fake behavior experts. I had a whole episode about Dr. Jack Brown, an ophthalmologist who transformed himself into a body language expert, or at least a pretend version of one – he plays one on the internet, like a lot of people do these days. There’s a lot of money in pretending you can confidently decode behavior – that you are some reader of souls.
I hadn’t thought about him for a little while but yesterday I got an email from an anonymous account, a Jack Brown fan, expressing anger at me for my criticisms of Brown. This got me curious to see what he was up to, and I saw that he had just gotten a lot of attention due to being featured in an article on RawStory.com titled “’Trump is lying’: Expert finds ‘deception’ in ‘crucial segment’ of ex-president’s speech.” It was full of Jack Brown’s usual nonsense; confidently saying this minor behavior means this, this other minor, ambiguous behavior means that. His usual bit.
Raw Story is a very low quality news site, so it’s not surprising they’d be willing to run with information from such a silly source; I first became familiar with how bad their articles were when I saw them back in 2021 write a piece about a video that many people believed showed a black man being racially harassed, but which was pretty obviously fake, at least to me, and was a few days after they wrote that piece shown conclusively to be staged.
In this episode I wanted to read Jack Brown’s analysis, as it’s interesting to see how much bullshit he’s spreading.
If you haven’t already listened to it, I’d recommend checking out the episode focusing on Jack Brown, as it gives a good rundown on why his stuff is so silly, and why it’s so harmful. You might also enjoy a previous talk I had with Tim Levine, who talks about why it’s so difficult to find reliable indicators of deception.
Here’s a few pointers for how you can stay skeptical when it comes to so-called behavior experts:
One of the main ways you can tell a behavior bullshitter is that they speak as if the small non-verbal things they find are highly reliable. Any behavior expert worth their salt will tell you, “This behavior makes x a bit more likely but it’s far from reliable.” What Jack Brown is akin to someone promoting a lie detector reading as a fact; saying “this means that; I know this conclusively.” Having highly certain takes about behavior is a major clue that you’re dealing with a bullshitter.
Also, any behavior expert worth their salt will do some due diligence explaining where their ideas come from, whether it’s from studies or something else. Jack Brown doesn’t interest himself in that at all. He spouts off all sorts of silly ideas and doesn’t tell you where they come from. Some of these ideas I’ve never heard of and can find nothing about online – and some of which I’ve asked real behavior academics about and they’ve never heard of either. And this is purposeful; because there is no legitimate science or research behind most of the stuff Jack Brown says. It’s akin to the random assortment of ideas in a neuro-linguistic programming course. For example, in this Trump analysis one, he talks about having a confident read based on how Trump points his index finger. When I emailed a behavior academic about this, he emailed me back, “Trump’s lying because of his index finger? This guy is getting worse.”
Another thing behavior bullshitters do is they like to make confident pronouncements, but only about things where they won’t be held to account if they’re wrong. For example, it’s common for Jack Brown, and other behavior bullshitters, to talk about theoretical things that we’ll never know the truth for; for example, like whether Trump really dislikes or likes Nikki Haley. It’s also easy to make a confident prediction for a situation where the truth is almost certainly known (for example, a suspected killer’s interview footage when it’s pretty universally believed they’re guilty). They’re smart in sticking to ambiguous or near-certain things because that’s safer.
And Jack Brown is also interesting because his popularity is related to toxic political polarization. Our fear and anger and contempt, these various negative emotions that polarization leads so many of us to have, makes us overly gullible when it comes to information that aligns with our biases and narratives. Jack Brown creates a lot of content where he claims to expose the dastardly nature of Trump and other Republicans, and this gets him a lot of attention from people who already believe those things. That’s what so sad and irresponsible about Brown’s work; he’s just amplifying their contempt and rage in a pseudoscientific way. Some of his stuff is just extremely irresponsible; for example, his claims that his behavioral analysis of Trump’s pupils show that Trump is likely a drug addict, or his claims to have analyzed the January 6th pipe bombing suspect footage and thinks it’s likely to be Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In my books on polarization, I talk about how extreme polarization gives more power to the more polarized and polarizing. Jack Brown is a good example of that, just as I think Trump is. People who are willing to act in highly insulting, demeaning ways towards the “other side” get more attention, and gain more power, which all helps create a self-reinforcing cycle of polarization.
I also talk about how I think the focus on misinformation is often quite faulty and wrong. Toxic polarization is the root cause of our misinformation problem; our contempt and fear lead to increased demand for wrong information. Liberals with contempt and fear towards Republicans are more likely to fall for Jack Brown’s misleading silliness, because it aligns with their emotions and narratives.
When it comes to Raw Story’s decision to publish Jack Brown’s thoughts, we can see it as similar to their decision to publish the story about the racial harassment video, which later turned out to be fake. Both are catering to the demands of a liberal audience; they know that giving them what they want to see, things that support what they already believe, will get clicks. This is why I think all the efforts and money put into combatting misinformation have been, for the most part, a waste. Where there is great demand for misinformation, someone will be creating it.
If you’re liberal and wonder something like: but who cares about this? We know Trump is a liar, so who cares about the random thoughts of Jack Brown? I think you should care because these are the kinds of things that amplify our divides and help create the very things you’re upset by. Trump voters see many people believing this stuff and spreading it and think “These liberals mock us for being anti-science but look at the nonsense they believe.” We should all care about bullshit and bad, biased information; we should all try to push back on it where and when we find it, even when it’s on quote “our side.” Because these things seem to be getting worse; our fear and animosity has led to many people simply not being critical, not caring about the quality of their information. People turn a blind eye to bad things on quote “their side” because they think it doesn’t matter compared to the other, bigger things. But these are the instincts that push us further into division, and further into extreme, divergent narratives.
Okay I’m going to read Jack Brown’s piece on his Substack, which is titled Body Language and Behavior Analysis No. 4760: Donald Trump’s re Nikki Haley at Bedminster ‘Press Conference’.
I’m recording this on video and am going to screenshare this, so if you want to watch that, it’ll be on my YouTube. I’m not going to get into debunking everything he says; again, if you want to read more specific debunking, check out the first Jack Brown piece. I’m more just interesting in documenting this nonsense; I think people with any sort of behavioral knowledge will find it amusing and entertaining, just to see the wackiness he’s spreading. His piece analyzes a 7 second clip of Trump speaking.
On index finger: just a quick note here from me, Zach: I’m not sure what Jack Brown is talking about here. This is more outlandish than a lot of the stuff he writes. I think he’s prone to just making up his own patterns and meanings. He’s done nothing but gained a large audience from all his bullshit so far; he probably thinks why stop; let’s keep going.
On tongue jut: the tongue jut thing is known for being a thing, but again, like most behaviors, to act as if you can be anywhere near certain about what it means is silly.
I searched online for “predatory tongue jut” and the only person I saw using it was Jack Brown.
Okay that was Jack Brown’s piece that got a lot of attention recently. One practical thing you can do to combat this stuff is, if you see people sharing takes from Jack Brown online, or a similar behavior bullshitter, share this episode or my last episode about Jack Brown with them, and urge them to be more skeptical about such things. Urge them to consider how such things are helping create the toxic, polarized landscape that gives more strength to polarized and unreasonable leaders and political activists.
I may not work on the podcast much in the near future; I might stop entirely. This short episode includes some updates about how the podcast has been going and how my polarization-related work and books has been going.
A talk with psychologist and magician Anthony Barnhart focused on how magicians misdirect attention and manipulate an audience. Other topics include: the role blinking can play in misdirections; acts that claim to use psychology and behavior-manipulation to achieve magic-like effects (e.g., Derren Brown’s act); neuro-linguistic programming (NLP); a magic show Tony was impressed by recently and why he was impressed, and more.
(Note that transcripts are not perfect and may contain errors.)
Zach: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people better – and also understanding ourselves beter. You can learn more about it, and sign up for a premium ad-free subscription, at www.PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
In this episode I talk with psychologist and magician Tony Barnhart. Our main focus in this talk is how magicians misdirect attention and manipulate their audience, with a focus on some behavioral aspects of misdirection that Tony has studied. Other topics include: Neuro-linguistic Programming (known as NLP), psychics, Derren Brown and similar acts that claim to use psychology and behavior-reading to achieve amazing feats; a magic show Tony was impressed by and why he was impressed, and more.
If you want some resources related to the stuff we talk about, you can find that at the entry for this episode on my site PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
And just a heads up that you can find transcripts for almost all my episodes on that site, too.
A little bit more about Tony, which I’ve taken from his website anthonybarnhart.com :
He’s an Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He’s also a part-time professional magician with over 30 years of performing experience. His research trajectory changed in 2010 with the publication of the book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions, in which he was featured as a consultant and teacher on the science of stage magic.
The scientific interest that the book garnered motivated Tony to shift his focus toward the interface of science and magic. Magicians are informal cognitive scientists with their own hypotheses about the mind. Tony’s work on the science of magic has been featured in Science News For Students as well as in national and international television appearances and documentaries. Most recently, his work was featured in an episode of The Nature of Things, Canada’s long-running science program.
Okay here’s the talk with Tony Barnhart:
Zachary Elwood: Okay, here’s the talk with Tony Barnhart.
Hi Tony, thanks for joining me.
Anthony Barnhart: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to chat.
Zach: Yeah, I appreciate it. Maybe we could start with… I know this is probably a big question, but maybe a quick summary of what drives your interest in the intersection of magic and science. How do you find yourself working in that area?
Anthony: Sure. Yeah, before I was a psychologist, I was a professional magician. I started performing when I was seven, I was doing paid gigs by my tween years and paid for college doing magic shows. So, I always had that interest. And I think magic is what drew me towards psychology in the first place. Magicians are kind of informal cognitive scientists. They have to have hypotheses about how the mind works in order to come up with ways to deceive the mind. And so there are lots of magicians who are sort of psychological hobbyists who try to read the literature and keep up with some research. I was a psychology major as an undergraduate from the very start, but I thought I wanted to be a clinician as most undergraduate psychology majors do. In fact, the best thing that ever happened to me was not getting into grad school for clinical psych my first year out of undergraduate. It made me sort of rethink my priorities a little bit. And I thought back to the work that I had done with the cognitive psychologist who worked at my undergraduate institution. I’d worked in his lab for years, he’d been the first person to sort of foster my thinking about the psychological basis of magic, I gave some of my first talks on the topic while I was an undergraduate. Thinking back on those experiences reminded me just how rich they were and how much I enjoyed thinking about magic in this way. I ended up applying to graduate school in cognitive psychology, which is an experimental type of psychology. It’s not clinical at all. I know nothing about helping people, but I can design a mean experiment. Cognitive psychologists study the building blocks of thought. So, language and memory and attention and perception, all that jazz.
So I went to graduate school to be a language researcher. Even though I’d done this thinking about magic as an undergraduate, I didn’t at that time see a basis for making magic my shtick as an experimental psychologist. But while I was in graduate school doing work on language, I started seeing other psychologists and neuroscientists publishing research that either used magic as a tool in the laboratory for studying attention and perception, or that examined hypotheses from the world of magic that had not been empirically tested to see whether they could contribute to a more formal understanding of the mind. And I thought, “There’s really nothing special about me to study language, right? I don’t have a leg up on anybody, I can read the literature just like anybody else and come up with some hypotheses, but I have all of this training as a magician that I could immediately put to use to give myself a leg up in this new burgeoning research program on the science of magic. And so I started looking at who the movers and shakers were in this new field and I realized that a couple of them were just down the road from me at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. I was a graduate student at Arizona State. This was Steve Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, who were neuroscientists by training. They were not magicians, but they’d started to take an interest in magic and had published one big review piece about magic.
And so I reached out to them and told them who I was and what I was up to, and we struck up a long-term collaboration. At that point, they were noodling the idea of writing a popular science book on the neuroscience of magic so I became their magic consultant. I was their magic teacher, I built an act for them to audition for the Magic Castle, and I had some pieces… I contributed some ideas for the book. And the interest that that book garnered from not just the public, but from the scientific community, showed me that there’s meat on the bone here. There’s real work that can be done. There can be an entire career built upon the seed of an idea of studying the methods of magicians. I guess that’s the long story of how I got to where I’m at now. As a psychologist now, about a third of what I do in the laboratory is still the sort of language research, and now two-thirds of my output is in the domain of the science of magic.
Zach: Yeah. It seems like, obviously, attention and misdirection are a big part of magic. Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the ways that magicians misdirect people’s attention or draw their attention to other things? And am I right in saying that that’s a big part of magic?
Anthony: Absolutely. I think that was the foot in the door for psychologists to begin looking at magic. What were some of the techniques that magicians were using to choreograph their audience’s attention so that they can be more readily deceived? There is scads of thinking on this in the magic community, but one of the points that falls out of all this discussion is that misdirection isn’t just distraction. If you know that your attention has been distracted and then you see something that you didn’t expect, well, there’s no magic there because you know you just weren’t attending at the right time or the right place. So, misdirection is really about direction. It’s about directing the audience’s attention to something that feels relevant and feels important. You have to give them something meaningful to attend to while you’re engaging in your shenanigans elsewhere as a magician. Magicians have this huge toolbox of cues that they can use to control an audience’s attention. Probably the greatest tool in their arsenal is social attention cues and social gaze cues. Magicians know that the audience is likely to be attending where they’re looking. So the magicians make sure that their gaze is directed toward exactly what they want their audience to be attending to. We as humans have this strong urge to gaze-follow, and it’s been suggested that this is really one of the things that evolution endowed us with. We got these big whites of our eyes. There are no other species of monkeys that have big whites of their eyes, and monkeys and chimpanzees do not gaze-follow the same way that even newborn babies tend to. It’s remarkable. That’s the strongest tool in the magician’s arsenal.
So if I’m doing a dumb little trick like making a coin vanish by only pretending to transfer it from one hand to the other, well, my gaze, my eyes should follow where the audience presumes that coin to be or where I want the audience to presume that coin to be. If I do that sleight of hand and then I direct my gaze toward the dirty hand, the trick falls apart immediately. And it’s not just gaze, right? There are other social cues that are readily used by magicians.
Zach: Yeah, real quick. I was wondering if have there been any studies, informal or otherwise, where they show a magic trick but take away the magician’s head and it doesn’t work as well-
Anthony: Yes. Yep, there’s been a lot of that. One of the oldest tricks in the book is called the vanishing ball illusion. In that trick, the magician throws a little ball in the air a couple of times and on the third throw, the ball vanishes in midair. Well, the magician has just retained the ball in his hand. He feigned throwing the ball in the air. But the audience has this strong experience that the ball has vanished in midair that they saw the ball leave the magician’s hand and it vanished in midair. Well, there’s been a lot of research trying to figure out what causes this illusion. And some of the earliest work used the technique that you’re articulating. They took away the social gaze cues from the performer to see if people were still susceptible to the illusion. And they still were susceptible to the illusion, just not quite as much.
Zach: Right, there’s multiple factors. Yeah.
Anthony: Yep. That’s one of the complexities of doing this research. Magic tricks and the experience of magic tricks never have just one cause. Magicians are piling deceptive techniques, one on top of the other, to increase their odds of deception. So there’s been a lot of work on that weird little trick.
Zach: Yeah, and you were going to go on. What are some other major ways of distraction— or misdirection, I should say? Obviously, verbal is one. I’m sure there’s many others, as you said.
Anthony: Those social cues include body tension. The hand that’s holding the coin should be more tense than the hand that’s presumably not holding a coin. Audiences are sensitive to subtle variability in tension and their attention is even captured by unexpected tension— tension that doesn’t make sense. And body posture, right? Our posture tells other people what we are attending to or what we find to be important in the environment around us. The thing you mentioned, of course, language. Language is a powerful tool of misdirection. The narrative structures of magic effectively tell the audience what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant. If I want to be sure that the audience’s attention is localized to a certain spot at a certain time, I tell them to look there. Right? If I spread out the deck, I say, “Look, your card isn’t in the deck!” Right? People follow those directions really well and that allows me to get away with all manner of shenanigans elsewhere.
But perhaps more interestingly for you, humor is a powerful tool of misdirection that a lot of magic theorists have talked about. Magicians have this intuition that the moment an audience understands the punchline of a joke, they’re briefly blinded to the world around them. This has not been tested in the laboratory. There are no published works looking at humor as a tool of misdirection or helping us understand why humor might be an effective tool of misdirection. There are a couple of dominant hypotheses out there waiting to be tested.
Zach: It’s like a brief overwhelm, that kind of thing?
Anthony: Yeah. One group of researchers thinks it’s all about the emotional content of humor, that there’s something about the mirthfulness of humor that leads to a general relaxation of attention. I think there’s something much more interesting going on. I think humor taxes your short-term memory or your working memory if you will. Working memory is where you’re holding content you’re currently processing or making sense of or trying to organize. And think about how a joke might impact your working memory. Jokes have a setup. They have a punchline. The setup creates an expectation, the punchline doesn’t match that expectation. So the only way to make sense of a punchline is to travel back in time and reinterpret that setup in light of this new constraint. That’s a working memory task. You have to manipulate the language that you’re holding in your working memory to try to resolve the ambiguity in this new way. And so my hypothesis is that this process of organizing and rearranging working memory requires attention, attention focused inward toward these memory processes. And attention is sort of a limited resource. So in order to focus more attention inward, that has to come from somewhere. So I think it’s usurping attentional resources from the world so that you can focus them inward. We’re working on a series of experiments testing that hypothesis right now.
Zach: It would help explain why humor is so often used by stage magicians. I would imagine there’s some element, too, of humor just making magicians more likable so you are less likely to want to prove them wrong.
Anthony: Absolutely. Yeah, I think the first minutes of a magician’s show are really important because the magician has to establish some kind of rapport with that audience, especially if they’re going to be engaging in a lot of these social misdirection tools. Who are you more likely to gaze follow, your friend or some stranger on the street? Your friend. So a magician wants to establish this rapport so that all of these tools will become more powerful so that they can more effectively control their audience’s attention.
Zach: Yeah, it seems like even for the more serious dark magicians, there’s still a subtle element of humor and they’re like, “I know I seem really mysterious and dark, but there’s still elements of rapport building.” Yeah, I thought about that a bit. Like the Criss Angels or David Blanks, there’s still this element of humor in the mix there or self-awareness of like, “This is a funny act I’m putting on,” kind of thing.
Anthony: That’s right. And the places where you don’t need that rapport would be big stage illusions that really aren’t contingent on manipulating the visual attention of the audience.
Zach: Right. That can be very different than close-up magic.
Anthony: Yeah, it’s like the mechanism or the box does the work there. You don’t need to distract. You don’t need any of that. And so if you are a performer who wants to play it serious and maybe not work so much on this rapport building, you’re going to succeed in grand illusions.
Zach: One thing I’ve wondered is… I think it might’ve been in your work I was reading recently, or maybe something else where you read about people looking the unexpected way or the unintended way during a magic act and seeing a little bit more than they should have and seeing how it was done. But I’m curious, it seems like that seldom happens for good magicians. And I’m wondering, does it happen more than I think and maybe we just don’t hear about it because most people aren’t seeing those things? Or are good magicians just so skilled that very few people look the wrong way?
Anthony: Yeah, I think it’s the latter. I think skilled magicians have thought enough about the narrative structure of their performance that the entire audience is locked into it. There’s a lot of psychological research on how audiences control their attention when watching films. If you monitor people’s eye movements while they watch a really great movie, everybody’s looking at exactly the same spots at exactly the same times because they’re using the narrative to predict where the action is going to occur, where they need to be looking to extract meaningful content in the moment. And so a good magician is doing the same thing as a film director, trying to choreograph the actions so that audiences are making predictions about what’s relevant and irrelevant and guiding their attention accordingly. Yeah.
So if audience members are engaged with the narrative, then they should all be looking at roughly the same spots. Even, in fact, blinking at the same time.
Zach: Right. I want to talk more about that because I know you’ve done some work on that. I was going to keep going unless you wanted to add more there.
Anthony: Sure. In those instances where a person has seen something or has looked at the wrong spot at the right time or whatever, that’s probably an instance where their attention has lapsed, where they have failed to track the narrative for a moment. They got distracted by their own thoughts or something like that and so then they weren’t influenced by the techniques of the magicians to be misdirected.
Zach: Yeah, I can see your point. It’s like a good director and a good magician and probably other performers have to have a really good sense of how their things appear to the audience. That’s what makes them good, is understanding and predicting how people will react to it.
Anthony: Yeah, that’s right.
Zach: I saw you’d researched how magicians might use other modes like, say, verbal language to aid in misdirection, like, say, physical misdirection. At least that’s what I was understanding. Could you explain a little bit more about how that works?
Anthony: Yeah. When discussing misdirection, magicians will often use the term offbeat. For example, if you tell a joke and you want to get away with some piece of sleight of hand, you’ll align that sleight of hand with the punchline of the joke. They’ll call that moment the offbeat. It’s a moment when the audience’s attention seems to be reduced or focused inward or whatever. While I was still a graduate student, I started taking a deeper look at what magicians really mean by offbeats. They describe lots of different ways to create offbeats, and I wondered if these different techniques are all calling upon the same psychological mechanisms or if they’re different techniques that we’re using the same name for. So, yeah, a joke was one of the things that magicians will do. A climax in the magic can serve as an offbeat. If you reveal that something has vanished from somewhere, in that moment, the audience is relatively blinded to things around them and you can use that moment, the revelation, to get away with sleight of hand that sets you up for the next phase of the trick. Those seem to be related, right? Those seem to be about this working memory stuff. When you see that something has vanished, what do you do? Well, you probably try to work backwards to figure out where it went. You probably try to access things that are in your working memory to reconstruct what the magician could have done to get to this place.
But there was one other technique that magicians called an offbeat that seemed different to me. They will create a rhythm, either through music or through speech, and they will align their deceptive action on the literal offbeat of the rhythm. So if you think about downbeats and upbeats in music, they would align their sleight of hand with the upbeat. There are a handful of magic tricks that seem to exploit this phenomenon and I, for my doctoral dissertation, decided to explore the mechanisms behind that flavor of offbeat. Psychology at that time was familiar with what’s known as attentional entrainment, that when there’s a rhythmic event in the environment, our attention aligns itself with that rhythm so that you have heightened sensitivity at moments when important things are happening and you can kind of rest in between. It was a known phenomenon.
But what magicians seemed to be doing that was unknown to psychology was they were using auditory stimuli to influence visual awareness. This was happening across sensory systems. They were using music to impact visual awareness. And that really had not been studied when I started doing my dissertation work.
So in my dissertation work, I decided to distill this down to the simplest case of trying to detect a subtle visual event like the appearance of a dot on a computer screen while people listen to a very simple rhythmic tone which is played at a consistent clip. And some participants had to monitor the tones for an oddball, like a tone that didn’t match all the others, just so we knew that they were paying attention to them. And we manipulated the onset of this dot relative to the rhythm that they were being exposed to. Sometimes the dot could appear on the beat, sometimes it could appear shifted off of the beat. And we found that people’s accuracy and reaction time to report this dot were impacted by its alignment with the rhythm. If the dot happened off the beat, they were slower and less accurate to detect it than if it appeared on the beat. This was the first time to demonstrate that the mere presence of an auditory rhythm could impact visual awareness. And we showed that the effect happened even if people didn’t have to focus on the tones at all. If they were just present, the mere presence of this rhythm impacted participants’ visual awareness. This is really an example of how you can take an idea from magic and pull all the magic out of it to test its validity in psychology.
Zach: So in concrete examples, magicians might be doing something rhythmically language-wise or maybe rhythmically physically, and that kind of entrains the audience’s attention. And then when they do things in between those times, they’re more likely to have people miss it. Right?
Anthony: There was an anecdotal account that I heard while I was working on this. I could never track it down to any particular individual, but there was this story that I heard repeatedly of a stage illusionist who was complaining that his audience kept catching him activating this mechanism with his foot while he was performing. They would see it. They kept catching him. And somebody asked him, “There’s music playing while you’re doing this?” He’s like, “Yeah.”
“Are you moving with the music?” And he said, “Yeah.”
“Are you hitting the button on the beat?” He said, “Yeah!”
So they encouraged him to press the button, hit the trap off the beat, and people no longer caught him doing the dirty work.
Zach: Well, that’s a perfect example. But you said it was anecdotal, you couldn’t track down the details.
Anthony: I could not find a source for that.
Zach: It’s a good representation of the concept.
Anthony: Yeah. There are some visual magic tricks that do really seem to exploit this phenomenon that wouldn’t play very well in a podcast, I think. [laughs]
Zach: I can imagine. This is related to when you mentioned magicians blinking and getting people to basically entrain the blinking so they’ll blink at the best moments to miss things. That’s related to that.
Anthony: Yeah. This is one of those places where people who claim expertise in lie detection or body language get it wrong. Lots of people claim that heightened blink rates are a cue to lying. But that’s not the way it works. In fact, you tend to blink less in moments when you’re engaging in deceptive action because deception is cognitively complex. You have to maintain the truth and the lie and make sure the lie is consistent in order to be a good deceiver. And so all the attention that goes to maintaining that reduces your blink rate. After a lie is over or after a deception, you see this rebound in blink rates where there’s a bunch of blinking after it’s over. It turns out audiences that are watching a magic show use the blinking of the performer to gauge when there is nothing important happening. So, their blinks tend to synchronize with the blinks of a performer. Richard Weissman over in the UK did an experiment using a magic trick performed by Teller of Penn & Teller and looked at the blink behavior of participants watching this video, and the participants in the video tended to be blinking their eyes in the moments when Teller was engaged in deceptive action because the narrative and perhaps his own blink rates were telling the audience, “This is a moment to relax, there’s nothing important happening right here. “And if you look at blinking behavior of people who are watching a speaker who’s telling a story, their blinks synchronize with that speaker. There’s quite a bit of work on this now. They’re using the the speaker’s blinking as a proxy metric of when they can relax or when there’s not meaningful information to be captured.
Zach: It relates to what we started talking about about how the human beings eyes are so communicative and seem like they’re set up that way. Right? We have a lot of white space and it’s almost like we can communicate anxiety. You can imagine back in the day when early humans were scared. Seeing someone’s eyes widened about something communicates a lot. So I can see that as related where it’s like when someone’s eyes are not blinking, it makes us a little bit more anxious and more aware. It kind of relates to cats. They say cats, too. Cats communicate relaxation and friendliness by doing long slow blinks at each other, which is kind of related, which is something I use. When I want to befriend a cat, me and other people do long slow blinks to basically set the cats at ease, which I think works for mammals in general maybe. Because we can accidentally communicate our anxiety to people by having wider unblinking eyes. But yeah, it just makes me think of all that and how the blinking makes us think, “Oh, there’s nothing much going on here or something.” They’re relaxed blinking.
Anthony: I don’t know if it’s true but I feel like I’ve heard that Anthony Hopkins made sure that he he never blinked while he was on screen playing Hannibal Lecter because was so off-putting.
Zach: It was. Yeah. But now that you mentioned that, yeah, when I think of him, I just think of him staring with wide open eyes and unblinking strangely. Yeah, that’s a good example. I don’t know if you had any more to say about that but I was going to ask you about the work you’ve done about how magicians might self-deceive themselves when it comes to blinking and missing things.
Anthony: Uh-huh. You’d like me to talk about that now?
Zach: Sure. Yeah.
Anthony: Sure. A few years ago, we set out on this really strange project: Looking at blinking behaviors in performing magicians. The reason that we explored this is that it seemed like it could be a very clear-cut instance of self-deception. There were anecdotal accounts of magicians, who when rehearsing their sleight of hand in front of a mirror, would blink their eyes the moment they carried out a piece of sleight of hand, thereby editing any evidence of that deception out of their consciousness. They were removing any evidence that they were no good at the sleight of hand. It seemed like it could be a very clear-cut instance of self-deception. And looking at the literature on self-deception, we became keenly aware that the evidence for self-deception sucks. That there are very few clear examples of a person both knowing the truth and pushing that truth outside of their conscious awareness. By definition, self-deception requires knowledge of the truth that lives in the unconscious mind and that isn’t available to consciousness. And so we thought about this anecdote and we thought, “Can we produce this phenomenon in the lab? Can we produce self-deceptive blinking? And can we push it around with some other manipulations?”
So we recruited a handful of magicians with varying levels of experience and expertise and we gave them one week to learn this complicated series of sleight of hand moves with coins. We gave them one week to learn this thing. Some of the pieces of sleight of hand were common pieces of sleight of hand that probably all the magicians had had experience with, some of them were weird things that we kind of created for the experiment that they would have no familiarity with. And then we brought them into the lab and we had them perform this routine four times. Twice in front of a mirror so it emulated a rehearsal setting– they had full visual feedback– and twice just in front of a camera, so emulating more of a performance environment with none of that visual feedback. Then we moved to the the really labor-intensive process of coding frame by frame in all of these videos, whether the magician’s eyes were open or closed, and whether that frame happened in the bounds of a piece of sleight of hand or outside of those boundaries. We expected that these magicians would be more apt to blink while they were carrying out sleight of hand than when not and we expected that that blinking behavior would increase when they were in a rehearsal setting when they had this visual feedback. That should be the situation that produces this behavior, compared to the performance setting where they have none of that visual feedback.
Well, we found that indeed these magician participants were more apt to blink while they were engaged in deceptive action than when not. But that tendency was heightened in the performance setting compared to rehearsal setting. So, to the extent that magicians are blinking when they’re carrying out deceptive action, it’s not in service of self-deception because they’re doing it in moments when they aren’t capturing visual information from the world around them. It was exactly opposite to our predictions. This made us think about this work from Richard Weissman that showed that audience members blinking tends to align with moments of deceptive action and teller’s act. And there’s research literature showing that audience members entrain their blinking to that of a speaker. And we hypothesize— this is after-the-fact hypothesizing, we cannot verify this— but we think that perhaps these non-conscious blinking behaviors by the magicians are really meant to communicate relaxation to the audience to encourage the audience members to blink at these moments when the magicians are engaging in deceptive action.
Zach: That would presumably be not even something consciously the performers are doing, it’s just something instinctual they’re doing.
Anthony: Yeah. Yes, humans are unaware of when they’re blinking and they’re mostly unaware of what their eyes are pointed at at any moment in time. Yeah, so this would all be non-conscious. And none of the magicians who participated had awareness that it was an experiment about blinking. [laughs]
Zach: Right, they weren’t even thinking about that or wouldn’t describe it in that way. That’s interesting. Yeah.
Anthony: Yeah, we also did find that this blinking behavior increases when the participants are engaged in complicated unfamiliar sleight of hand compared to the really familiar easy stuff. That was a prediction that came from the self-deception hypothesis. So that was borne out but still, that tendency was heightened in performance compared to rehearsal. It’s very strange.
Zach: Huh, interesting. To switch topics, when it comes to magicians reading the behavior of audience members in service of their tricks, for example in mentalist-type acts, I’m not sure how often that actually happens versus having the appearance of reading audience members’ behavior, but just certain things come to mind in that realm.
Anthony: Yeah, that has become a really popular cover story for mentalists. That they’re using body language and social cues to read minds effectively. Any time a magician claims they’re reading a spectator’s body language, they definitely aren’t. [chuckles] While there are certainly some consistent relationships between behavior and mental processes, there are lots of individual differences that make these cues almost useless. So, magicians cannot rely very heavily on any of these pieces of body language. It’s just become a sexy cover story for traditional mentalism and traditional magic.
Zach: Yeah. I was just reading that New York article about Derren Brown from a few years ago where he talked about how in the modern world where everybody is obviously more skeptical about real magic, it becomes a more sexier interesting thing to talk about how we might be manipulating people’s minds and easier to understand or theoretically more plausible ways that make you think, “Hey, maybe this could be possible,” as opposed to just rejecting magic entirely.
Anthony: Yeah. Yep, it has a little bit of plausibility that makes it just really sticky as an idea. Derren Brown was really the dude who popularized this style of magic, and also, a friend of mine from Phoenix named Kent Knepper was among the first to use these deeply psychological cover stories for rather traditional magic. And so I have a love-hate relationship with this style of magic, right? [laughs] It can be beautiful, it can be compelling, audiences love it, but it is antithetical to the ethical code that I have to live up to. Using those cover stories- those believable cover stories- for traditional magic spreads misinformation about what is and isn’t possible with psychology. And so a lot of these mentalists and magicians take issue with people who claim to have legitimate psychic abilities. Even Derren Brown has spent a lot of time debunking pseudo-psychics, showing that they’re charlatans who are using magic tricks to fleece the masses
Zach: But he’s doing a similar thing.
Anthony: He’s doing a similar thing with these psychological cover stories, maybe even the same thing. He’s encouraging false beliefs about the world around us through these kinds of performances. What’s perhaps even worse is that even if you include a disclaimer, the disclaimer has no impact on the takeaway that people get from the show. There has now been science on this. My colleague, Gustav Kuhn from Plymouth University in the UK, has done a series of experiments where he’s presented people with a mentalism act that looked like psychic behavior or psychic phenomenon, and he included a series of different disclaimers. Like, a disclaimer that says, “This is a magician who is simulating psychic ability,” or introducing them as a legitimate psychic. Afterwards, if he surveys people’s beliefs about what they’ve seen, people believe that they’ve witnessed psychic ability, regardless of whether there was a disclaimer or not. So Derren Brown, for years, has opened his TV shows with this disclaimer that’s a little bit ambiguous. It’s like, “I’m using magic and body language and linguistics and all this stuff. I’m not a psychic.” But to the extent that that disclaimer is meant to control the beliefs and the takeaway message of the audience, it’s not doing it. So, I’ve got deep ethical concerns about misrepresenting magic as something more.
Zach: Yeah, I can see it from different angles where it’s like, “Hey, what Derren Brown does is pretty cool,” but I can see your point too. Because I’ve done episodes and written about these behavior bullshit people who… I did a past episode on this specific guy, Jack Brown, but there’s plenty of these people who do basically the same thing. But they’re actually deceiving themselves in a lot of cases. Jack Brown really thinks he can read people exactly and tell you, like, “I saw this slight gesture in the Bill Gates interview and I think it means all these over-the-top things,” which to me— And I’ve written about how harmful this is, this kind of stuff. People believe these things and they go out and it basically just allows them to use their biases and service of whatever they want to use them for—
Anthony: That’s right.
Zach: “I think I can read this person because I saw them do this slight thing, and so I believe that they have the motivations I think they have because I…” You know, it’s just all this confirmation bias. Giving people these dangerous stupid ideas, basically. So I can definitely see your concern.
Anthony: My colleague, Ray Hyman, who really did some of the earliest science of magic work back in the ’80s, when he was an undergraduate, took up palm reading because he could meet girls with it. It seemed like a really effective way to meet girls. He went into it just thinking it’s just fun, and then he started convincing himself that there’s something to it. The feedback he would get from these people whose palms he would read at parties blew him away. And he told one of his psychology professors about it while he was an undergraduate and they said, “Hey, try this. Next time you’re reading a palm, tell them the opposite of what you think the palm is saying.” And he did it, and it worked just as well. We’re so susceptible to that kind of confirmation bias, finding evidence that supports our beliefs and ignoring evidence that disconfirms our beliefs.
Zach: Yeah, speaking of the self-deception aspects, I’m actually going to be interviewing an astrology author— which I didn’t expect to do, because I was like, “Well, I don’t believe in it. So if you’re willing to have a really tough conversation…” So that’ll be an interesting one because I get to ask some questions about, like, “Why do you believe these things?” But anyway…
Anthony: Well, I can’t wait to hear it.
Zach: That’ll be an interesting one. I didn’t think he’d say yes. But yeah, I do think it’s interesting how we can fool ourselves with these things. Because I used to actually work for a neurolinguistic programming seminar guy, somebody who was in the Anthony Robbins circle, and I only took the job because I was like, “This will be very interesting.” It was back in the financial crisis of 2008 so I was like, “Okay, I’ll do this for a little while.” But it was very interesting because part of his backstory was basically like, “People kept telling me how good I was at these amazing psychological and mental feats. I was skeptical at first, but eventually, I believed.” He told me once, “I just put you into a trance there, didn’t I?” And I was like, “No, I don’t think so.”
Anthony: [laughs] Ouch.
Zach: But he really did believe that he had these powers to put people in trances. He would say things like, “I can raise the temperature of the room just by saying certain words.” He thought he had this control over people. But it’s just interesting how people… I don’t think it happens in the magic space because people are obviously more aware.
Anthony: It absolutely does.
Zach: Oh, really?
Anthony: Subsets of the magic community really glommed on to NLP when it became big. They read Bandler and Grinder and they have tried to apply these things to their performances. In fact, a name I’ve dropped already, Kent Knepper out of Phoenix, was one of the first to do this. And I don’t believe that Kenton believes that NLP is doing it, but he’s not totally open with other magicians about this skepticism. I don’t actually know what Kenton believes.
Zach: People keep things close to the vest for various reasons.
Anthony: He put out a series of originally, I believe, audio tapes called Wonder Words that were magic inspired by NLP and that attempted to harness the power of NLP. It’s out there, and lots of magicians to this day claim that they are using NLP to enhance their deceptions.
Zach: And I will say I think there are a few good ideas in NLP because NLP is just a bundle of a bunch of random… Some of the ideas are better than others, some of the ideas have validity. And if it wasn’t a little bit of validity, nobody would listen to it. It’s just like a bundle of tricks, some of them are completely nonsense, and some of them are like, “Okay, well, that makes some sense.”
Anthony: A magician’s need to heighten his or her deceptions really opens the door to superstition. Right? Magicians have these things they call subtleties, just little things that they pile on top of each other to enhance a deception. Like with the coin thing, right? The tension thing was a subtlety, and gaze would be a subtlety, and all these things would be subtleties. But magicians don’t have the capacity to test whether one of those subtleties has an impact. They’re not doing a reductive experiment to independently examine the impact of each one of these subtleties. That’s a recipe for us engaging in behaviors that we think have some impact when they really don’t. It’s a recipe for superstitious behavior, and I think there’s probably a lot of that within the magic community, and a lot of that with this NLP stuff.
Zach: And I imagine in general, for any competitive-performance-based thing, there’s benefits to making yourself think you have more power than you do. There’s definitely incentives to overstate your own mystique or power in your own mind just so that you feel more confident and such. So I can see how there’s a dangerous edge there where if you get too far into the self-deception, it becomes a liability. But maybe a little dose of that can be good for you.
Anthony: Magicians talk about magician’s guilt; the knowledge that you’re engaging in deceptive action can lead to some tells and some weird behaviors– the guilty behaviors. So, confidence is a way to get beyond those. Right? If you’re just confident that it’s all going to work, you’re not going to use any of those tells.
Zach: Interesting. Yeah, I haven’t heard about that. That’s an interesting one. Yeah, guilt and worry are not good things for performing.
Anthony: That’s right.
Zach: Yeah. When you watch magic shows, do you generally have a sense of what’s going on? Are there any shows you’ve seen recently where you’re like, “I have no idea how they did that?” And if so, what were those shows?
Anthony: I mean, there are only a handful of methods in magic that just get reapplied in unique ways to create new effects. Once you’ve got training in these things, you can see through a lot of stuff. But I’ve really changed my perspective on magic in the last decade, and I’m really highly motivated to see magic and perform magic that’s narrative-driven, that’s telling a story, that’s about building a relationship with the audience. I’m less concerned with the actual tricks that are happening, and more in how they’re happening, how they’re being presented. And so because I apply that lens to magic now, I get fooled all the time. Because I am really keyed into the narrative and really keyed into the storyline, and so I’m pretty easily misdirected because of it.
Zach: Makes it more fun.
Anthony: It makes it more fun. A few years ago, there was an Off-Broadway show called In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio, and they filmed a documentary version of this that’s available on Hulu called In & Of Itself, and I really believe that it changed the game on what magic can be. It’s not presented as a magic show. I don’t think it’s ever pitched as a magic show, but it is. It’s a series of six or something magic effects. It was directed by Frank Oz, a one-man show with this Derek DelGaudio, and I think it changed the game for magic because it was one of the first magic shows that elicited a full range of emotions. It wasn’t just a comedy show. I cried at times watching it, I laughed, I experienced awe, and it built a relationship between this one performer and a large audience. I believe that the audience members left that show with a weird sense of community for having experienced this thing together. There are some things in that show that fool my pants off, but it’s really beautiful and people should seek it out. And I think it sort of renewed magicians’ interest in having a throughline of action in their shows, actually building a character, actually having a theme for a show, having deeper ideas for their magic… I think it’s changed things. That’s the kind of magic that I’m now really, really interested in.
Zach: No, that sounds cool. I’m definitely going to check that out.
Anthony: But I will say I also have ethical concerns with that show. There is one piece in the show where he gets a spectator from the audience— I don’t want to spoil this because it’s really beautiful and really ethically dubious.
Zach: Spoiler alert for anybody watching, maybe.
Anthony: I think I won’t give spoilers.
Zach: Okay.
Anthony: Obviously, the person that’s coming up from the audience doesn’t know what they’re consenting to. They don’t know what’s going to happen when they get up on stage. And while they’re up there, he creates this deeply unique emotional experience for this person on stage that they did not expect to have and that’s really just for them that the audience doesn’t really get to witness, but they see this person break down because of this emotional response to this magic that they’ve experienced. And I think, as a researcher, I have to get informed consent from people. They have to know what they’re consenting to before they participate in one of my experiments. They have to know what they’re going to be asked to do, what’s expected of them, what they can expect to feel during this event. And I understand theater doesn’t require the same kind of consent process, but I think it makes me feel icky to have this person put in this really precarious emotional position in front of an audience of 500 people without consent, without them knowing that this is going to happen.
Zach: Yeah, it’s like when comedians insult you. A comedian made me feel awkward and bad the other night and I was like, “Hey, why do they always do that?” It kind of reminded me of that. Well, this has been great. I did want to ask you real quick. I know we’re coming up on time, but did you want to talk for a couple of minutes about why you’re interested in analyzing handwritten language?
Anthony: Oh! Yeah, that was what I went to grad school to do in the first place. That was part of the language work that I did in grad school and it was inspired by this big asymmetry in the research literature. Everything we know about reading is based on research using typewritten words. Like the simplest case of reading, nobody had done anything exploring how the processes of reading might change when the input is messy and ambiguous and incomplete and in a style of handwriting you’ve not ever seen before. How are people able to look at handwritten words from someone whose handwriting they’ve never seen before and find the signal within the noise to know what those words are? That’s what inspired this. And in the spoken language research area, those researchers would never consider using an artificial voice for their stimuli. Their stimuli are always naturally produced human speech. So why in the reading domain, are we not also looking at naturally produced human stimuli? That’s where that came from. Of course, when people hear that I do handwriting research, they assume I’m studying graphology– reading people’s personalities through the style of their handwriting, which, of course, is nonsense. But because people assume this about me so much…
Zach: Because it’s connected to the magic kind of.
Anthony: It kind of is. Yeah.
Zach: That’s how people see it, or something. Yeah.
Anthony: A student and I have just completed a new meta-analysis of graphology because there hasn’t been one since 1992 and yet people are still making hiring decisions using input from… [crosstalk] Not in the United States very much. Still in Europe, a lot in Asia. And so just for funsies, our student and I did a meta-analysis that we’re going to try to get published pretty soon.
Zach: Oh, that’s interesting.
Anthony: Spoiler alert, there’s still no solid evidence the graphology works. [laughs]
Zach: I’m shocked. Yeah, I can see why you’re interested in the handwritten words. It’s like there’s some archetypes of symbols that we have that allow us to easily recognize things. Is that what makes it interesting to you? Because we have these internal rough, amorphous ideas of—
Anthony: Yeah. Yes, they’re fuzzy. These templates are very fuzzy to allow for a lot of variability.
Zach: Same with spoken language, we have chunks of amorphous templates or something. Yeah.
Anthony: I’ve got a hypothesis that I want to come up with a good way to test in regards to handwriting that I think is very cute. [chuckles] If you’re looking at pictures of celebrities and identifying the celebrities, you’re faster to identify a celebrity when given a caricature of that celebrity than when given a real picture of that celebrity. Why? Because the distinctive features of that celebrity are exaggerated in a caricature, so it’s easy to recognize them. And so I’ve often wondered, there are some flourishes in our handwriting. Right? The tails on Ys, they get this big flourish. There’s some pieces of handwriting that get exaggerated. And I wonder if that exaggeration is actually for the reader if we are magnifying those distinctive features of the words to make it easier on the reader. I haven’t tested it, I’d love to, but it feels oddly related to all this other stuff that I’m up to.
Zach: Has anyone studied why doctors’ handwriting is so bad? [Tony laughs] If it is so bad, I know I hear that a lot but…
Anthony: Not that I know of, but I suspect it’s a speed-accuracy trade-off. Right? [laughs]
Zach: I don’t know if it’s true, but you often hear that cliché.
Anthony: Yeah, that’s right.
Zach: All right. Well, this has been great, Tony. I appreciate it. It was very interesting, and thanks for taking the time.
Media bias specialist Vanessa Otero, founder of Ad Fontes Media, talks to me (Zach Elwood) about my books aimed at reducing toxic political polarization in America. Topics discussed include: common objections to and skepticism about this work (for example, views that those working on depolarization are “helping the bad guys”; why overcoming objections is so important; how conflict makes people behave in ways that amplify the toxicity of the conflict (often without knowing it); our distorted views of each other; how our contempt can help create the very things we’re upset about; and more.
Zachary Elwood: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at improving understanding of human behavior; you can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
As you may know, I work on reducing toxic political polarization. I’ve been working full time on this problem for the past 9 months or so, and part-time on it for years before that. I recently released a book aimed at a liberal audience about the problem of polarization; it was titled How Contempt Destroys Democracy, with the subtitle An American Liberal’s Guide to Toxic Polarization. A Kirkus Reviews review said that it makes quote “compelling arguments, based on astute observations and backed by solid research” end quote.
As you probably know, there are a lot of objections to this work; a lot of skepticism about this work. I and others doing this work are regularly insulted by both conservatives and liberals; I regularly see pessimistic and paranoid messages where people think I and others in this space are secretly working for the quote “other side,” or that I or others have a secret liberal or a conservative agenda. More commonly, people just call us stupid and naive.
Many of the objections and skepticisms are based on misunderstandings of various sorts; misunderstandings about what the “other side” really wants and what they’re like; misunderstandings about what the goals of reducing toxic polarization really are; and more.
In my book I have a section toward the beginning that talks about common objections. I’ll read a little bit from that section:
Objection #1: The word “polarization” implies a both-sides problem but liberals don’t contribute to this problem in a significant way. Our problem is simply that the “other side” has become so wrong and dangerous.
Objection #2: It’s morally correct to be polarized when you’re fighting bad, dangerous people (for example, like Trump).
Objection #3: Trying to reduce people’s animosity at Trump and Trump voters helps Trumpism. We need our animosity to defeat them.
Objection #4: If you’re trying to reduce polarization, you’re wrongly and naively valuing civility and unity more than morality and justice.
These objections are phrased in liberal-leaning language but there are similar objections from the right; they use different language and terms but the underlying objection is the same: the core underlying objection is “they’re bad and we’re good, so it’s naive to ask us to reduce our animosity toward them”
And I do understand these objections; Before I got into this work, I would’ve had a lot of the same kinds of objections. Trump is just so bad, my thinking would’ve go, so we need to shame these people and make them see the light of day. Or I might have thought that people seeking to reduce animosity did have some secret, underhanded agenda. These are stressful times, so I do get the objections and why rational people have them.
It’s my hope people who are skeptical about this work are willing to listen to resources like this, or similar ones, like my book. No matter your political views, we can probably agree that America is in a tough spot right now, with our divides: it’s a situation that I think requires more people to carefully consider our situation: how we got here, and how we might get out.
If you like this episode, I hope you share it with others who may have some of the objections we address. One of the big themes in my polarization books is that it’s very important that we spread the word throughout society and help overcome all these various objections to this work that reside in so many people’s minds. Sharing this talk is one easy way you can help with that.
This is a talk I had with Vanessa Otero, for her audience. Vanessa is the founder of Ad Fontes Media, which is a media bias analysis company. You can learn more about it at AdFontesMedia.com; that’s AD FONTES media. You may have seen her media bias charts making the rounds; she’s gotten a lot of respect for that work. If you’re curious about that work, I interviewed her for my podcast a few months ago; we talked about her interest in reducing polarization and how she saw her media bias analysis as relating to that goal.
I think Vanessa asks some very good questions and structures the talk very well. It’s the best talk I think I’ve given on this topic — which is why I put it on the home page of my polarization website: american-anger.com.
Also want to say: if you’re listening to this via audio, this talk was done via a video call, so if you want to see that, you can find it on the People Who Read People youtube channel.
Okay here’s the talk I had with Vanessa Otero…
Vanessa Otero: Welcome, and thank you everyone for joining. I’m really excited to have Zachary Elwood here with me today. Zachary is a really thoughtful and wise writer about the issue of polarization. Those of you who saw our email to register for this, which is all of you, have seen the images of his books, Defusing American Anger, and his most recent one, How Contempt Destroys Democracy. The reason I was so drawn to Zachary’s books is because there’s so many overlaps between what we do at Ad Fontes Media and the way that Zachary approaches the concept of polarization. I’m going to jump right into the good stuff.
I want to talk about objections. Objections to even framing the issues that we face in our country politically as an issue of polarization. Because I’ve run into this so much with promoting our work at Ad Fontes. One of the reasons we put out the media bias chart is so folks can see how different other sides’ media is for the purposes of understanding others’ media consumption and for purposes of understanding why we’re so polarized. The thing I always get as a response is, “Well, it’s not that we’re polarized. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the other side is just wrong. And if they would just simply be right and agree with me, we wouldn’t be so polarized.” I know you get that a lot yourself. What do you say to folks who frame that objection that way?
Zachary Elwood: Yeah. First, I just wanted to throw in, thanks so much for having me on. It’s a big honor and I’m always humbled when people want to talk to me about it, because I haven’t been in this space that long and I mainly see my efforts as trying to draw attention to other people’s ideas and research and stuff in a more accessible and easy to understand way. It always means a lot when people think I did a good job. So, thanks for that. Yeah, the objections. There’s quite a few objections but I think the core objection boils down to that, you know, “The other side is just bad.” Right? And there’s various forms of that, that that can take on the right and the left. It can be phrased in different ways. But I think the core thing it misses is what Daniel Stone called our undue hate. It’s our exaggerated ideas and worst-case interpretations of what drives the other side or our political opponents. It’s the worst-case interpretations of so many things they do, and often it’s just not seeing that what drives them largely is the fear of the more extreme people on our side and these kinds of things.
So I think it boils down to the exaggerated fear and contempt and animosity that we have for each other, and seeing that we can vehemently strongly disagree with each other without bringing in all of this overstated contempt and fear and such. And when those things enter the equation, they drive the conflict cycle and end up creating the very things that we’re scared of and upset by. Right? And that’s what I focus on a lot, is the way that those negative emotions about each other aren’t just about emotions, that those things actually skew people’s beliefs and help create the more extreme and divisive and hardened and non-negotiable stances that people have because a lot of that stuff is driven by fear, and anger, and animosity, and such.
Vanessa: I find that when I invite folks to create a greater understanding of folks on the other side, that’s viewed as sometimes a non-starter. I posted a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn, there was a– I don’t even remember what big political event it was, but… Oh, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. You know, big news story, everybody’s covering it. And I invited folks to take 30 minutes or an hour, if they could stand it, to watch the cable news from the side they disagree with most for the purposes of understanding that other people’s media consumption is really different. And I got a lot of visceral, “No! I’m not going to do that.” And it seemed to come from a couple of things. One, fear that I was trying to encourage them to adopt the other side’s views. There was a lot of resistance to that. So when you talk about having a lot of contempt for the other side and just being so resistant to that, I think that’s one aspect of it. But two, people didn’t realize I was asking them not to change their opinions. I was asking them merely to understand what other people are viewing. I was not saying please abandon all your beliefs and believe somebody else’s beliefs, but people thought that I was asking them that. So, get into that kind of contempt. Please, do.
Zach: Yeah, I think that’s a key part of this thing because we have a hard time distinguishing between a call to understand and empathize with other people and agree with those people, right? Like so often in my books, I’m making cases for how you can understand someone else’s view and see the better versions of it. And I think so often we easily conflate that as like I’m defending that view or I have that view. But for so many things we could go through, I feel like I understand by and large what drives a lot of the narratives on both sides of the political aisle. It doesn’t mean I agree with any particular stance necessarily, it just means I think there’s an important thing there about trying our best to understand those better points, as opposed to so often our instinct when we’re in conflict is to assume the worst about everything that happens, right? Any rhetoric or any behavior conflict makes us jump to the worst interpretations. I think we need more people to try to understand the better reasons, you know, what they call the steelman kind of things. I think a lot of times those things are pretty banal and easy to understand if we try. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah. Why is it important to understand other people’s, like you said, steelman, as opposed to strawman? Talk about– for those who might not be familiar– what’s a steelman kind of argument?
Zach: Yeah, the steelman and the strawman thing. The steelman refers to thinking about the better, strongest versions of our opponent’s arguments versus the strawman is the weakest versions, or in practice, it’s just the most pessimistic versions of what the other side thinks. But I think for people who say why is that important— like if I’m still going to end up disagreeing with them, why is it important? And I think it’s important for the reasons just stated because if we see the deranging nature of toxic conflict and how it drives people to more extreme and more divisive behaviors, it creates support for more divisive and more extreme and non-negotiable leaders and ideas. If we can see that, then we can see the value of trying to engage— for our own sake and even for our own political goals sake— for trying to engage in more respectful and more honest and true ways, as opposed to the more pessimistic and worst case possible imagining ways of engaging. And that’s another thing I emphasize in my book. Because I try to make an argument to politically passionate people for why they should want to embrace these ideas, which I think is hugely important for getting— as many of us are politically passionate people— for getting people to embrace these ideas, even for their own sake, and not just for the sake of being nice or something. Right?
Vanessa: Right, let’s dive into that. That relates to one of the questions that we have. The last part of the question is, “Liberals need to agree that the conservative side is right. It’s a conservative invitation, it challenges that the next revolution will be bloodless if the liberals allow it. That’s paraphrased from something that Kevin Roberts, the leader of Heritage Foundation, said on an interview in reference to Project 2025. Do liberals need to agree that the conservative side is right? Is that what you’re calling for?
Zach: No, not at all. No, that’s not what I or anyone else in this space is calling for.
Vanessa: Or conversely, that conservatives need to agree that liberals are right.
Zach: No. See, that is a common misunderstanding. Yeah. But I think it’s related to the idea… I guess it’s related to the misunderstanding of what this work is about. There’s so many misunderstandings about this work. For example, an organization— Starts With Us— that I work with, we often see the criticism, “Oh, you’re working with the other side. You’re with the bad guys.” We get that from people on the Left and the right, which I think is kind of the fundamental nature of what conflict does to us. And in any conflict, people trying to resolve the conflict are seen as the enemy or traitors or what have you. I would say it’s just a fundamental misunderstanding because, like I said, we’re trying to get people not to avoid disagreement. You know, there’s going to be strong disagreement, even strong moral judgment, or even anger. There’s nothing wrong with anger. But it’s being willing to examine what really drives your political opponents. It doesn’t mean you can’t judge specific leaders or specific people on the other side that you see as divisive, as extreme, whatever it may be. But it’s trying to understand what drives the support for those people. If you think the people on the other side are supporting more extreme people, it’s being curious about what are the underlying dynamics of the conflict. Obviously, these things are really hard to talk about in an off-the-cuff way, but that’s the things that I and other people try to get across in our work is seeing the underlying pieces of the conflict and how that bubbles up to more extreme people, statements, behaviors, and what have you. And if you can see how that dynamic works, then you’d be interested in tamping down the unnecessary and unreasonable amounts of contempt and fear in these kinds of things. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah, you talk really specifically about contempt, and you talk early in your book about how contempt and anger are different things. You didn’t say contempt and anger. You can be angry and you can disagree about a position really strongly and want to convince somebody about why you disagree and why you’re correct, you know? But contempt and how contempt destroys democracy is that it’s about contempt being a thing that undermines you trying to achieve your aims. There’s so many places we can go with this, but let’s move to a concept that you spend a good amount of time on in your book. You’ve alluded to it a little bit already, but outgroup homogeneity. What is it?
Zach: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when you asked that question. Because it’s like I’m angry a lot. Many people are angry about specific things a lot, right? I might be angry at things Trump has done or angry at various things, but I think it’s very important to distinguish between our feelings, our views of specific people– say it’s Trump, Biden, whoever– and our views of our fellow citizens who are willing to support those people or those ideas or whatever. Because even though I’m very open that I think Trump is a bad and even dangerous leader, but I can still understand what drives rational and good people to support him. That is a key distinction. But your point about the outgroup homogeneity thing… The outgroup homogeneity effect is in research when they show that in conflict or in a situation where there’s an in-group and an outgroup, we have the tendency to view the outgroup as basically being all the same. Which means, in practice, we often view them as being like their worst members. Right? And you can find examples like this all over social media very easily. You open up Twitter, you’ll see it. It’s like all Republicans are racist and fascist and authoritarian, all Liberals want to kill babies after birth or whatever the extreme Antifa communists, groomers, what have you. So there’s just this tendency to see the other side in simplistic ways while at the same time seeing our own group as very complex and human and often much more divided than the other group which seems like a monolith. Right?
Which makes the other side even more scary because we see everything they do is connecting to other things and it’s this huge, scary group. Right?
Vanessa: You bring up some quotes in your book from both Democrats and Republicans saying, “Aargh, if we could…” Democrats saying, “Oh, if we could only get our stuff together like the Republicans where they just agree with each other and they’re all in lockstep…” and then basically Republicans saying the exact same thing about Democrats.
Zach: Right. Yeah, that’s an interesting phenomenon too. When I first encountered that, I was surprised because this Republican pundit told me behind the scenes off the record. She’s like, “The Democrats are just so aligned. The liberals are so aligned. I just wish we could be like them.” When I shared that with liberal people, they’re like, “What is she talking about? It’s obviously the reverse.” But that’s what the homogeneity effect and similar group dynamics do to us. They make the other side seem this completely aligned monolith who’s all trying to accomplish the same thing. But to get back to your point, I think it’s important to distinguish our anger at certain people or ideas we think are wrong or harmful from our understanding of why people are willing to support those ideas. And those can be quite different. For example, some people vote for Trump just because. They may not even like him. They may even think he’s quite bad, but they see it as a lesser of two evil things and they’re scared of what they see as extreme or dangerous behaviors on the Left. And so the group of Trump voters or the group of Biden voters are not monolithic, there’s all different spectrum of different concerns and reasons. Sometimes it’s just one issue. Some people are just one-issue voters and they’re like, “I’m just voting because I believe X on this very important issue.” Right?
So I think it’s important to see that nuance about groups in general, about our own group, about another group, and I think that helps explain the distinction between anger and contempt too because contempt really plays a role when it is applied to an entire large swath of people. That’s when it really becomes dangerous. It’s one thing to have anger or contempt for a few specific people or something, but it really becomes toxic when it spreads to whole entire groups. And then it impacts how politicians and pundits and journalists or whoever talk about these things and they create more between-group animosity in the way they talk and so on and so on.
Vanessa: The folks that are on this webinar are familiar with Ad Fontes Media and should have quite a bit of familiarity with distinguishing levels of things. On our very chart itself, it skews Left and Right— strong Left and right hyper-partisan, left and right most extreme. It’s not just one side is all one thing and one side is all another thing. But we do that a lot with the outgroup homogeneity effect. And it’s really exacerbated in our entrenched two-party political system as polarization has grown. Because as you mentioned, our distribution of the kind of beliefs people hold in the United States is… Sorry, I’m conscious of my hands and the blurriness here. It’s bimodal, you know? Like Left and Right, there’s a lot of folks that will— in that middle, if you think about the chart, that line between strong Left and hyper-partisan Left, and strong Right and hyper-partisan Right, there are a lot of folks that hold those views. And then in the middle, I don’t think it’s another mode or I don’t think it’s another spike, but I think there’s a big group here. It’s not all the way down. It’s not like there’s zero people that are in the middle. Only there’s a ton of people right in the middle, but I think if you added up all these people right here, it would be a fairly large mound in the middle. But most people are not dead in the middle on a lot of issues because there isn’t necessarily a flat middle on issues, you know? With guns or abortion, tending to land as a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right is common as is landing strongly to the Left and strongly to the Right. So if you’re landing closer to one side than the other, because we’re so polarized, if you’re on the right, you’re closer to Trump. If you’re on the Left, you’re closer to Biden. You don’t have a middle choice in the United States. Your vote is one or the other essentially.
It’s really rough for people who feel like they have nuanced views and then they get categorized in that outgroup homogeneity effect. If they just lean a little left or lean a little right, and if they lean a little right and they’re called… Or even if they’re strong Right and are called racist, fascist, destroyers of democracy, or Antifa communist groomers, then that’s clearly incorrect. They can’t believe the other side because they know that to not be true of themselves.
Zach: And it drives them farther into that path of polarization. On both sides, it is understandably angering to be told what you believe based on things that you don’t think are applicable to be told, “You are X, Y, Z.” It can just be very deranging in ways that I think we’re only in the beginning stage of understanding how deranging these various insults that are thrown around can be. I think we’ll look back one day and have a better understanding of just how much… And there’s plenty of research showing how insults… There’s one study from back in the ’60s maybe that was like, you know, insulting people has a boomerang effect of making you double down on the things you’re being insulted for and these kinds of things. There’s just all this human psychology at work that drives us deeper into channels.
Vanessa: Talk about that vicious cycle of more contempt causing the very problem that you are fighting against.
Zach: Yeah, that was a big thing I wanted to focus on for the book because I think it helps make a scalable argument to people, no matter their political views of why they should care about these things. Many people have written about the cycle of conflict, how it’s… Well, one person– can’t remember his name offhand– but he wrote about the mutual radicalization process of conflict. Both sides become increasingly fearful of each other and the actions that one group may make in defensive ways to what they see as defensive ways to the other side is perceived as the provocations and aggressions to the other side and vice versa. So things just keep going in this vicious cycle. And I think the thing that’s important there is our emotions, our fear, and our anger can distort our beliefs. For example, no matter what you believe about election distrust or election denial, I think everybody would agree that toxic polarization leads to more and more people distrusting elections. And no matter if you think one side is worse than the other or what have you, it’s a natural progression to find reasons to say that election is unfair. That’s an outcome of high suspicion, high anger, et cetera, et cetera. Again, even if we think specific people have done bad things on that front, the underlying dynamic is there and the emotions are there. That’s just an example of how our emotions can really derange our thinking on all sorts of things; on issues, on stances on specific events, stances on issues. There’s so many factors there, but I think one factor is when we see the bad guys as believing something. Nobody wants to be like the bad guys, so we kind of subconsciously can find our stances shifting in an opposite direction. It’s like, “Well, if Trump voters believe this, then I don’t want to be like them and I want to make a stand against that. So, maybe my beliefs will shift a little bit more to the Left and vice versa on the other side.” There’s all these various psychological reasons why we can find ourselves drifting to the edges on stances.
That’s why I think it’s important to notice that the more contemptuously we engage with each other, we’re contributing to that dynamic. And it’s entirely possible– like I emphasize in my book to politically passionate people– it’s entirely possible to embrace these ideas while pursuing whatever political goals you want. And I would say embracing these ideas actually helps you because it means you’re trying to speak in more persuasive ways that speak to a broader range of people. You’re not alienating people. So I think it’s very important to see that these are not… I think a lot of people’s instinct about this work is that political passion or political activism is mutually exclusive with depolarization ideas. And I think that’s just completely wrong. To me, those two things are aligned and depolarization ideas help political persuasion and political activism. But I think our instincts when in conflict lead us to see that as completely opposed, right? Because we feel like, “Well, we have to make our contempt known. That’s how we’ll beat the bad guys.” Right? But in my mind and in many people’s mind, that’s actually what creates the very pushback you’re working against because nobody wants to be told they’re pieces of shit, basically. It helps build the cycle of conflict.
Vanessa: Yeah. We dance around the subject a little bit around language, around calling people certain names, but it’s a really key component about persuasion and contempt. I view it as a hierarchy of… There’s a hierarchy of verbal persuasion. Ideally, you’d use lots of facts to… If you’re going to make an argument, you’d use as many facts as possible to make that argument and your conclusion that you’re supporting really strong. The fewer facts you use and the more conclusions you use, the more easily it’s categorized as opinion. But on our very chart, there’s a couple of sections. There’s the opinion section, and above that is an analysis section, and above that is fact reporting sections. The difference between that fact reporting analysis and opinion is truly the density of facts to conclusions. But then there’s this line, and below that, we call it our problematic section but it contains a lot of things. There’s a lot of reasons that things are not merely opinion, they’re problematic. But the biggest thing is dehumanization, insults, and vilifying language. And I really want to dive into those distinctions because what we mean by dehumanizing language is language that specifically calls out somebody for being not human. Like they’re animals, they’re monsters, they’re less than human, they’re aliens. They’re not even people. Insults is a little bit more straightforward. Vilifying. Words that have vil, like V-I-L is a root word, they’re evil or they’re villains. Those particular words are really strong and they’re on the lower end of the persuasion hierarchy. But people use them for a couple of reasons.
One, it’s easier. It’s just easier to name-call than to make a really factually supported argument, especially in 240 characters. And people get a lot of pats on the back and engagement and thumbs up from their side for calling people ‘the orange Satan’ or something. I literally got that in an email when I was promoting this webinar. Yeah, talk about contempt, how that plays a role.
Zach: Yeah, totally. There’s so many of these things, as I write out in the books. There’s so many of these things that just have this self-reinforcing aspect. And it’s like the more polarized a society becomes, the more incentives there are to be polarizing. The more polarized a society becomes, the more power is granted to more polarizing people in polarizing language. And I think that’s part of seeing the need to tone down the contempt, too, is because the system is such that it rewards more polarizing behavior. But yeah, I think there’s so many… I actually had a good interview on my podcast with Karina Korostelina who wrote a book about the role of insults in international or national conflicts and such. And that was a good talk. One of her points or one of the things that stood out to me about that talk was I’m a big believer that the internet and social media is a big amplifier of these things because when you think about the internet, the internet is a place where it’s easy to store and retrieve all sorts of insults. There’s insults everywhere. It’s easy to make insults, it’s easy to have our insults viewed, right? So you can think of the internet as basically an insult creation and amplification place. And all the insults from the past don’t fade from my memory, they’re all there for us to dredge up at a moment’s notice. I’m a big believer in that.
When it comes to the dehumanizing language, I think often there’s these shades of it too. There’s some less direct things. For example, I was thinking today about the whole real American’s language on the Right. That’s an indirectly dehumanizing thing because you’re basically saying, “Well, you’re not real Americans. You’re almost like not real people because you don’t believe what we believe.” That’s just one example. I could pull others. You see lots of things on the Left and the Right. But I think there’s all these shades of things that are, you know? I think we often think of dehumanizing literally like saying you’re not a human or you’re a cockroach or whatever, but there’s all these shades of things that are insulting up to dehumanizing and I think that all plays a role. Including, I would say— I actually wanted to write a piece about this where there’s… Another way we can be dehumanizing or at least insulting is treating others’ narratives in the worst possible way, as if saying the reason you vote for Trump is for the worst possible reasons. That is a, if not dehumanizing, is a very insulting and demeaning thing depending on how it’s phrased. But just to say when we disrespect each other’s narratives and treat their narratives as basically entirely malicious or entirely founded on horrible things, that can have a very insulting and understandably anger-producing reaction.
Vanessa: Yeah. An example you talk about in your book is saying the reason Trump voters vote for Trump is because they’re racist. And you gave a counterexample of like, “Here’s examples of other reasons folks would vote for Trump.” Can you talk about that example?
Zach: Yeah. Well, one key way to see that it’s not just about racism, if anyone needs to hear that, is those kinds of narratives don’t help explain why racial minority support for Trump has increased substantially between 2016 and 2020. And if anybody wants to look into that, I wrote about it in my book, of course, but Musa al-Gharbi has a great paper called “Race and the Race for the White House” which really kind of breaks down some of those most pessimistic narratives on that front or most pessimistic interpretations of research and those kinds of things. But maybe you had mentioned a specific example, I’m not sure.
Vanessa: Yeah. You talked about, you know, it doesn’t account for somebody who just may be a low engagement or a low-information voter, maybe a younger voter who hasn’t really given a lot of thought about the history of racism in our country or whatever.
Zach: Right. Yeah. I think the nature of conflict makes many people reach for these really elaborate, as I see them, explanations that delve into the past to help explain why racism or segregation or whatever it may be played a role in forming the bad ideas of Republicans. Or on the Left, some Conservatives will paint these elaborate pictures about the dark Marxist underpinnings of far Left thought and such. The thing is we’re such good storytellers. Humans are just such good storytellers. We can easily create these very convincing and persuasive arguments about the long history of the badness of our opponents, right? And they’re creeping inclinations or malicious motives and tie it into past things. But at the end of the day, the nature of polarization and conflict is you could easily place someone down in the middle of that polarized situation who knew nothing about any of that past stuff, and they would be like, “Oh, well, I see arguments for why this makes more sense or I’m more afraid of these things over here,” and they would start to go on one polarized track or another, right? It doesn’t require a lot of these elaborate— which I find are often just our ways in practice of trying to build excuses for why the other side is so bad. We’re drawn to those narratives because it makes us feel like we understand their badness. But I think oftentimes we’re just fooling ourselves because it is tempting for us to feel like we understand this huge complex thing and we understand the bad guys. But I think we’re just drawn to very simplistic narratives that make us feel good and make us feel superior in our contempt and such.
Vanessa: Yeah, that’s excellent. I feel bad that I’m letting all these questions build up and people have a lot of questions. Thank you for your engagement. We’re only going to take the questions through the Q&A, we’re not going to… So if you’ve got your hand raised, please type in your question in the Q&A. We have a couple of related questions so I’ll read the first one that addresses this.
How do I talk with someone who holds me and my views in contempt?
Zach: Yeah, that’s obviously a tough one because I think at some level you have to question whether that’s even worth it if someone’s engaging with you in that way. But then sometimes you have to, right? You feel like you have to in some situations. I have a few thoughts on that in the book at the very end, but I think one of the things that stands out to me is especially if your conversation is being viewed by other people, say it’s on social media or say it’s in a public context where say you’re a politician interacting with someone who you feel is contemptuous towards you. I think it’s very important to keep in mind the other people that are listening and observing that because the dynamic that often happens is people get stuck in this mutual insult back and forth, which if we’re talking about publicly viewed things, it just has the impact of driving away the people and further polarizing the people that are watching because they’re just going to filter for the insulting things that they find in that interaction that offend them and their group.
So I think it’s very important to keep in mind how can I talk in a persuasive way, not necessarily to this person who’s disrespecting me or treating me with the intent, but how can I speak in ways that are persuasive to people that may be listening that may actually care to be reached or care to have a more nuanced view or have their minds shifted. And I think otherwise, if it’s a private conversation, you’d probably just be best to walk away. But I think about that in terms of all of these online and public interactions that happen where someone’s saying, “They’re treating me with contempt, I’m going to return fire with fire.” And I just think that’s often just falling into the trap of the hate-bait kind of trap where we just get caught. And then the animosity becomes the focus as opposed to talking about the actual issues. I will say also I’ve interacted, you know, I’ve done my fair share of going into very polarized places like really angry pro-Trump groups, for example, where I had some pretty nuanced conversations just by refusing to return fire with fire and being vulnerable too and being like, “Hey, you made a good point there for X, Y, Z, but here’s why I think what I think.” I’ve even had people apologize where they were like, “Sorry, I came off so mean at first, but I’ve been having a tough time in my life.” That kind of stuff happens, especially online where online we’re often talking to people who we don’t know what they’re going through and their online interactions bring out the worst in people and so on and so on. It’s a very tough thing to do, obviously, but I think taking the patient or the more neutral approach and vulnerable approach often is the stronger… It’s a harder thing, but I think it takes strength and I think it pays off a lot of times.
Vanessa: I have the exact same experience. Refusing to insult, refusing to go to that level, and even refusing to respond to the anger, it’s tough. Especially when you identify a disagreement. And we’re sort of primed to when somebody responds to us on social media, you’re like, “What are they saying against me?” And you sort of view it as an attack or something you have to rebut, but it’s not always. Sometimes it’s a legitimate point if you can slow down and listen to it and refuse it. It’s harder when somebody starts out with an insult or some anger or some contempt towards you. But it really does diffuse it when you say, “Okay, yeah, I hear that you…” Repeat back their concern and explain it using your own words, non-insulting words. And it really tones down the rhetoric. I had a great exchange… I do this all the time on social media and I know you do it all the time on social media. I see it. The tough part is you don’t get as many pats on the back from people who agree with you than you do if you’re doubling down on the insults. That gets a lot more engagement. Social media just wires us to be like, “Ooh, if I say this thing and a bunch of people like it, that means it’s right.” I kind of like to go into the echo chamber threads where people are like, “Yeah, high five. I agree with you.” And I’m like, “Actually, this is harmful.”
Zach: I used to get so many more shares when I would put out really good zingers of people, but I don’t really do that anymore.
Vanessa: Well, yeah. I wanted you to share about that. How did you… You weren’t always the high-minded, above-insults personality on social media that you are today. Tell us about pre-2016.
Zach: Yeah, don’t go through my old tweets, please. You’ll find some doozies. But yeah, I talk about that in the books about my path of when Trump got elected, I was insulting Trump voters and putting all these righteous screeds online. Then I started getting curious about conflict dynamics and started thinking maybe I’m part of the problem. And then that got me curious about well, what are the angry narratives that people on both sides have and how did they form and how did polarization increase over the last few decades? So yeah, that was kind of my journey into it. I even had instances of insulting and driving away people I knew that I was close to and these kinds of things.
Vanessa: Yeah. Let’s pick away at some of these questions. We’ve got so many great ones. Thank you all. Yeah, do you think that extreme polarization causes less politically engaged citizens, more or less in the middle to further separate themselves from the process?
Zach: It’s complex, I think. I think it results in some people tuning out because they’re exhausted. Some people have called it an exhausted mindset of being exhausted with the fighting and the animosity, especially for people that can’t identify as much with a Left or Right label, which I think there’s a lot of people with the increasing polarization can make people tune out and just not care, which I think is also for politically passionate people. That’s another reason you should not like high contempt and toxic polarization because it does make a lot of people tune out and makes them less susceptible to listen to your stances on things you care about. But I’d also say, obviously at the same time, it creates a lot of people who are hyper-tuned in. Right? And I agreed with Ezra Klein’s synopsis at the end of his book where we pay way too much attention to things we can’t control like national politics where it’s almost like creating a magnifying glass of everyone’s attention and focusing on these things that they can’t change and can’t really affect and that they’re really angry about also. I think that helps explain a lot of the impotent rage a lot of people feel on such things. I liked his recommendation of focusing on more local issues, things you can actually change, things you’re passionate about.
And also just questioning. I feel like a lot of us, especially obviously the more online people spend a lot of time just venting online. How many hours are people spending on those things? I feel like a lot of people think that that’s actually accomplishing something but I think we should question, “Is that accomplishing something, or is a lot of that stuff just building the contempt and animosity and helping create some of the dynamics that we’re upset by?” So I think it’s helpful to question how we spend our time and consider if I am passionate and if I am angry about things, can I devote my time and effort to something that’s more constructive and useful in my community or something like that? Things that I can actually feel good about and feel good that I’m actually doing something concrete.
Vanessa: Yeah, like civic engagement, especially on the local politics level. Or even engaging with people one-to-one. I have a few questions about one of the topics, which is, you allude to a difference between online conversations and in-person conversations. And I think approaching those requires different sets. There’s different circumstances that attend each one of them and different approaches that can work. We spend so much of our time at Ad Fontes with our analysts left, right, and center in pods with each other writing articles. Each of them will spend two hours at a time with people from their political opposites discussing political things. And they can do so without contempt, not just because of training and practice and an internal commitment to it, which are really important.
Zach: Not just because they’re getting paid.
Vanessa: Yeah, exactly. Whenever we put out a call for analysts, we get a lot of applications. It’s truly fun. We do feel like we’re doing something. I was really frustrated before I had this company trying to have a conversation online with people on Facebook. I’m like, I’m in this one conversation, it is so much work to get somebody to tamp down the level and get them to agree on some facts, and then have a persuasive argument. Meanwhile, millions of memes are just floating around and I’m like, “What difference am I making?” It was very frustrating. And so when you feel like you are actually doing something about it, it relieves a lot of that angst, first of all. And I think a lot of the relief of the angst is likelier to come in these offline conversations, these in-person conversations. So it gets to one of these common questions that you can have in person, which is: How do you have a discussion with somebody where you don’t agree on basic facts?
Zach: Yeah, that’s obviously tough. And first, I just want to throw out I’m a huge fan of your work and also other people like Isaac Saul’s Tangle News. I think you and Isaac and other people have been examples of people trying to do something concrete to tackle these issues so I just want to say I think that’s great. I think part of the solution is just getting more people to do these various projects and endeavors of various sorts to tackle it.
Yeah, not agreeing on basic facts is obviously really hard, which is in some sense a big part of our divergent narratives in the first place, like polarization results in us not agreeing on a lot of basic facts because our narratives are so divergent. Obviously, there’s only so much you can do in those spots, but I do think getting back to the idea that even if you can’t agree on some basic facts, can you try to understand how they’ve come to those views? And even if you can’t convince them on specific facts, if you’re trying to persuade them trying to have a nuanced argument, can you at least help them see— if you can understand their view, maybe you can help them see what your concerns are. I think a big part of that is even just understanding the basic underlying things that they’re concerned about, whether it’s… And often they may have real things, not just fake things that those concerns are based on. Usually, for the most part, people’s concerns are not entirely built on false things, even though we often see them as we’ll focus on like, “Well, they must be idiots. They believe X, Y, Z, that is false.” But a lot of times they have other things that are real in those areas that their concerns are built on. So I think focusing as much as you can on the things that you can agree with or can understand about their concerns, and not so much on if you can’t convince them on X, Y, Z specific facts or something. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah. I can think of a couple of examples on the Left and the Right that maybe have different factual underpinnings and understand things. Let me give you an example. People on the Right raising concerns about immigration, like too many immigrants coming across the Southern border and crimes committed by those immigrants. I’ll find that folks on the Left will tend to dismiss those concerns, even though there are some factual underpinnings. The disagreement on the extent of the problem often has a lot to do with the media sources you consume and how much you think it is a problem. MSNBC versus Fox News will present different statistics to users that might be true, but will– to MSNBC viewers– it just might not seem like that big of a problem. Whereas to Fox viewers, it seems like a much of a big problem. And to get to an ultimate like, “All right, you and I, we decided to talk about this issue of immigration and we agree exactly this many immigrants came over and this many crimes or whatever,” it’s really hard to get to. A flip side example is Democrats talking about women being in danger and their lives being in danger because of a lack of access to abortions, and telling stories of women who had medical emergencies or died because of them. That’s the same thing where folks on the Right might dismiss that like, “Ah, it doesn’t really happen that much.” Because again, the same kind of factual underpinnings of the rate at which it happens or whatever, it’s sort of hard to like, “All right, we’re going to go sit down, we’re going to go do a bunch of research together from factual sources and find out the exact number.” Finding the underlying concern there and acknowledging somebody else has a valid concern. Don’t just dismiss because you don’t think it happens that much on one side or the other. Dismissing those facts can be as big of a problem as not agreeing on the facts.
Zach: Yeah. No, I think that’s a hugely important point. And actually, that’s probably the thing I would emphasize more in my book if I was going to go back. The fact that it’s just so easy for humans to build entirely different narratives of harm, like who’s doing harm, right? For example, the immigration crime thing. Right? Clearly, some illegal immigrants do commit crime or even murder. Right? That can be scary. That can build a logical defensible narrative in the same way that to make an analogy, the Left is angry about shootings and killings by police, even as Conservatives might think in context, that’s not as big a deal as you’re making it out to be. So just to say, we can build all sorts of narratives depending… Because harm is harm, right? If we perceive harm, even if it’s a little bit of harm, we can say this is too much harm. The idea of what harm is normal and expected is entirely subjective depending on, oftentimes, where our attention is drawn and sometimes even where our allegiances are and what we pay attention to, et cetera. I just think it’s very important to see that perceptions of harm can be very subjective. And like you’re saying, it’s very good to– for people that want to tone down the contempt– it’s acknowledging like, yes, it’s possible for Liberals to see the perspective that even a few too many crimes or murders is too much if we believe that those people shouldn’t have been in the country in the first place. That’s how they frame it. And each side has their narratives of why harm is excessive or why it’s okay in context. I think that’s very important to see. And it’s getting to that central idea, which I quoted from Kevin Dorst who’s done some good work in examining the rational ways that we can reach polarized perspectives. I think we have a tendency to be like, “Look at how stupid these people’s perspectives are.” But if we care about reducing contempt, it’s worth examining the very rational ways that we can pick and choose information to build these narratives. And those narratives, even if we disagree with them, we can see the shreds of rationality in there.
Vanessa: I am going to take one voice question. So, Joy Thomas, if you want to get ready. You’ve been patiently waiting with your hand up, but I just want to be cognizant if there’s any issues like getting your question into the chat. I know we’re not always going to get that question, but I’m going to allow you to talk here in a second if you’re there. Joy, you want to go ahead and say your question? [silence] I might’ve left her on mute for too long. [chuckles] All right, you’d have to unmute, Joy. [silence] All right.
Zach: I think she’s unmuted.
Vanessa: Oh, there you are. Joy? [silence] We can’t hear you. All right. Sorry, I tried. All right. Anne also had her hand up, so I’m going to… Anne, you put in the chat that you’re a part of Braver Angels, a great organization. Zach and I are both familiar with it. You want to share?
Anne: Yes, I just want to give a plug to Braver Angels. I want to start off by saying I never go on social media. Just for the reasons that you all have said, I can’t find anything that makes me feel good there. I prefer a face-to-face discussion. We have a small group– I’m from Longmont, Colorado– we have a small group of eight people. One of the rules is that the group has to be balanced, so there are four Reds and four Blues who come. And we give time, we give dedicated time to each person to express their beliefs about whatever topic we’ve chosen. Actually, our topic in a couple of weeks is Project 2025. So, everybody’s encouraged to read it, find something in there that touches them, and just bring it forward. Not to defend it, not to put it down, just to bring it forward. And then each of us has a chance to comment on that. After we make a comment, then that’s limited to– I think I’m going to do four minutes– then there’ll be two minutes of questions from everybody else. So it’s safe, there are guardrails on the conversation, and I find it very helpful.
Zach: I think getting involved in Braver Angels or checking out what Starts With Us is doing, or even to pitch my own stuff, buying and promoting my books if you like my books, I think there’s all these different ways but I think checking out Braver Angels, I love what they do. I was going to throw all that stuff in there for people who wanted to know more about what concrete things they could do.
Vanessa: Yeah, that’s excellent, Anne. Yeah, let’s talk about things we can actually do. I’m going to turn to that. One of the big takeaways I’ve gotten from doing this kind of work and engaging with folks is that the kind of work that we’re doing is not widespread. And it’s hard to scale the conversations where there’s these rules of engagement. You know, not everybody is an analyst for Ad Fontes Media and has these really respectful conversations. A lot of times it’s like you’re going out in the wild, especially with these online conversations, you can feel like you’re getting beat up and you’re the only person that’s trying to talk in a sane way. So yes, let me give the big plug for your books. They’re excellent— How Contempt Destroys Democracy and Defusing American Anger on Zach Elwood’s website. You can Google it. They’re really easy to find, good reads, and they specifically have a lot of links to other books and academic work in this field. What else do you want to add to close this out?
Zach: Yeah. I think to me, there’s often a debate about whether making systemic changes are the most important things to reduce toxic polarization or cultural change, you know, convincing more people of the importance of this. And I focused on convincing the cultural change aspect because I think we just need more and more people talking about it and more and more demand for it if we’re going to change something bigger. Because I just think sometimes the systemic change talk avoids the fact that we are so polarized that probably making systemic changes would be really hard. So I think we just need more demand amongst the population for these things, which is kind of what I focus on. And I think we need, not to say we just need my book, but I think we need more resources that are persuasive to convince people of the importance of this work. That’s what I focused on with my book. I’m trying to make something that’s short but persuasive and that people can share with other people. Whether it’s my book or other resources, I just think we need more people to spread the word and to have those tough conversations, and even to say, “I know that you’re politically passionate, but here’s why I think you should care about these ideas and not see them as something opposed to your ideas.” But yeah, I think just spreading the word is important. And hopefully, if we did spark some curiosity about these ideas for people that were previously skeptical, I just hope that they’ll look into it a little bit more and answer some of the objections. Yeah.
Vanessa: I think the crux of this work is really summed up in a Martin Luther Jr. King quote that somebody dropped in the chat about how hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. That’s exactly the point here. So, thank you so much for joining. The hour flew by. I really love talking about this with you. Thank you for your work, thank you for joining us today, and thank you everyone online. We’ll see you next time.
This is a reshare of a talk I had in January 2022 with Liz Stokoe, who studies conversation analysis (CA) and who’s the author of the book “Talk: The Science of Conversation.” Stokoe studies how language choices can impact us and change our behavior, often without us being aware of that. Topics include: the more surprising and interesting things Stokoe has found in her work; the popularity of the very wrong “most communication is non-verbal” concept; the practical use of CA work in persuading people to do things; why Stokoe analyzes scripts from comedy shows (like Friends) in her work; perceptions that men and women talk differently; ideas about building rapport.
A talk with psychologist Leonard Saxe, who is known for, amongst other things, his research into lie detectors (also known as polygraphs). Topics discussed include: why polygraphs and other forms of deception detection are unreliable; the use of polygraphs as a tool to extract information and confessions; the Richard Ames case, which involved a high-level CIA employee spying for the Soviet Union and beating a polygraph when questioned; a story where someone’s life was ruined due to cops trusting polygraph evidence far too much; and more.
