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Unmasking Chase Hughes of the Behavior Panel: The lies of the “#1 expert in behavior & influence”

Chase Hughes refers to himself as the “#1 expert in behavior and influence.” A popular YouTube show that he’s on, the Behavioral Panel, gets millions of views. Dr. Phil has featured Chase on his show and called him the “best on the globe.” Chase’s company NCI University charges people thousands of dollars for their training and products.

And yet Chase’s career is built on a foundation of lies and exaggerations — not only in the behavior and psychology space, but also in other pursuits, including pick-up artistry and vitamin supplements. He makes many claims that just about every psychology expert would disagree with (for example, claims that he can teach people to hypnotize others and make them do things against their will). He has claimed since at least 2012 to be well known in the behavior and psychology space, despite there being almost no mention of him in the 2010s. This video, the first of at least a two-part series, examines his many deceptions and his many grandiose (and in some cases clearly absurd) claims. It establishes the extremely deceptive patterns that Chase Hughes has been practicing since 2007, when he wrote his pick-up artist book The Passport.

This episode includes research done by Zachary Elwood. A transcript with links to resources and a synopsis of major points are below.

The YouTube video is the preferred format to watch, as it includes a lot of visuals, but the audio-only version is decent, too.

A follow-up episode about how Chase’s work/approach relates to Neuro-Linguistic Programming is here.

Episode links:

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:

  • He implies 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?’” (this despite sometimes saying he got interested in behavior/influence due to his interest in picking up girls; his pick-up artist book came out in 2007). In event descriptions, he writes that it’s “the SAME class attended by advanced government operations personnel.”
    • There’s no evidence I’ve seen that his military experience is related to his behavior/influence work, or that he’s trained a government agency/dept in an official capacity.
    • After this episode came out, two people who said they knew Chase from the Navy told me that he was a Quarter Master.
  • He has apparently claimed to have some sort of Harvard education (including studying neuroscience there) and also possibly a Duke University education, but there’s no evidence for that that I’ve seen. And he seems to no longer mention that kind of education in his bio.
  • He 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 released a pick-up artist book in 2007. 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.
  • In 2007 and 2008, he was selling a 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 claims he has made about his psychology/behavior work. For example, they 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 clearly self-promotional posts on fitness forums. Two of the testimonials on that page seemed highly likely to be two men he thanks in his pick-up artist book.
  • Only 4 years after he was selling these vitamin supplements, 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 endeavor as well, 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 there is no evidence for that when looking for online resources at that time. There are almost no mentions of him by other people/sites at that time (and that internet-silence continues all the way up until the late 2010s).
    • 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.
    • Chase makes 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 would disagree 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 it is easily findable via the Wayback Machine, and I only looked at a small percentage of his site backups.
  • I’ll get into it more in another episode (not covered in this one) but Chase Hughes (like many faux experts in this space) relies on many debunked and non-researched concepts/ideas from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and other pseudo-scientific arenas. In addition, he also creates his own behavior/influence concepts; 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, large and small, about being well known and respected in various fields, with pretty much no evidence to show for it. Even just a few of these suspicious and irresponsible actions 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 easily falsiable claims that he’s made. The primary difficulty lies in wading through the huge quantity of over-the-top and often silly claims.
  • 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.

Transcript of this episode

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. 

[Post about their show being picked up for TV: https://www.instagram.com/scottrouse3/p/C20O1A2O5jr/

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.”

Here’s his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUBj_5pwQZaoXfBrEQQbADw where he refers to himself as the #1 Body Language Expert, a #1 Best-Selling Author, and a Behavioral Tactics Creator for Uncle Sam.

On this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TovxJfkRHNo we can see these other things he’s done: 

  • Named in 2020 top 40-under-40 CEO’s in America
  • 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 ]

Here’s an article in Entrepreneur Magazine about Chase: https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/behavior-science-expert-chase-hughes-trains-real-world/342717

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.”

On this page about his programs, https://www.chasehughes.com/programs he writes: 

  • “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.  

But what did Chase do in the military? In one bio on a podcast from 2017 (https://www.successpodcast.com/show-notes/2017/10/4/the-military-influence-training-that-maps-out-human-weakness-harnesses-confusion-and-triggers-obedience-in-others-with-chase-hughes) it reads, “Chase previously served in the US Navy as part of the correctional and prisoner management departments.”

In another podcast, he goes into more detail: (https://podscripts.co/podcasts/creating-confidence-with-heather-monahan/how-to-read-people-like-a-secret-agent-with-intelligence-behavior-expert-chase-hughes-episode-89, 29.50): 

“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) 

The Missouri Military Academy, where Chase went to school, has a page about Chase. https://www.missourimilitaryacademy.org/news-details/~board/news/post/chase-hughes-99. The bio for Chase on that page states that you can see his qualifications on LinkedIn but the URL is broken. The non-working URL was linkedin.com/in/chasehughesofficial. It seems likely this was the LinkedIn page that allegedly contained a reference to him having some sort of Harvard education. 

In that same bio about him on that military academy’s site https://www.missourimilitaryacademy.org/news-details/~board/news/post/chase-hughes-99, it reads that he holds quote “certification in Government Leadership from Harvard Business School Executive Education.” 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. 

In 2023, Chase was on a podcast titled Easy Prey (https://www.easyprey.com/reading-and-understanding-behavior-with-chase-hughes). In the notes for that episode, the podcast host writes that Chase is quote “a Harvard educated neuroscientist.” 

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. 

Top CEO status

Chase has claimed to be a “top CEO”. In 2022, his website (https://web.archive.org/web/20220520193008/https://www.chasehughes.com/abr) includes this tidbit: “Named in 2020 top 40-under-40 CEO’s in America” 

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 URL of the CEOWeekly page that apparently used to show Chase Hughes as a top CEO is no longer working https://ceoweekly.com/the-top-20-ceos-of-2020/

In the bio of his on that military academy’s site (https://www.missourimilitaryacademy.org/news-details/~board/news/post/mma-hall-of-fame-chase-hughes-99) it reads that in 2020 Chase was quote “named a Top 40-under-40 CEO in America.” 

On his Facebook in 2020 (https://www.facebook.com/chasehughesofficial/photos/a.696174597149462/2918216808278552/?type=3) , Chase wrote the following “Honored to be featured alongside Mark Zuckerberg in LA Wire’s TOP 40 UNDER 40 for 2020! 🙌🏼”  

And he links to the URL https://lawire.com/40-under-40 

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

[Play clip from Glen Gary Glen Ross: Always Be Closing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO_t7GtXO6w&t=30s ] 

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. 

Here’s a post he made on a pick-up artist forum in 2008 (https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/cypruslair/owner-of-hawaii-lair-visiting-t406.html#google_vignette). 

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. 

[plays assorted clips, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L21uzdXve3I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXDWv7zlFwc , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBOsTfRp9I]

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: 

Fat burning energy boost… fog-lifting, razor sharp mental focus…explosive, long-lasting mood enhancement.

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.

Here’s the testimonials page (https://web.archive.org/web/20071125084430/http://www.redshiftlabs.com/testimonials.asp). I’ll read a few of these: 

“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. 

There’s a page titled 10 Reasons to Use it https://web.archive.org/web/20071125084359/http://www.redshiftlabs.com/10_reasons.asp. I’ll read just a few of these entries:

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. 

It goes on for a bit more.

On the Frequently Asked Questions page https://web.archive.org/web/20071125084359/http://www.redshiftlabs.com/10_reasons.asp , one entry reads:  

Do Navy SEALs really use it?

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.

[Insert Bourne Identity clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjrWOZby8s8&t=48s, ]

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. 

On a page titled “Lessons outline” https://web.archive.org/web/20120923030135/http://www.chasehughes.com/lesson-outlines.html we see assorted things he teaches. This includes: 

  • Top mistakes law enforcement officers make
  • Advanced detection of microexpressions
  • Deception detection 
  • 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. 

Let’s look at his site a year later, in 2013 (https://web.archive.org/web/20130615105009/http://www.chasehughes.com/the-people-reading-bible.html). At that time he was working on something he called The Human Codex, which he also refers to as the People-Reading Bible. He says this resource will allow you to do the following: 

  • 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.  

Let’s go to 2014 (https://web.archive.org/web/20141012191404/http://www.chasehughes.com). That’s when he initially put up his Behavioral Table of Elements. The home page at that time reads: 

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.  

Let’s read his bio page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141013072122/http://www.chasehughes.com/bio.html): 

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. 

This one letter link takes us to this page, (https://web.archive.org/web/20141013072319/http://www.chasehughes.com/what-if.html) which reads: 

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. 

On another page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141013072150/http://www.chasehughes.com/immersive-mental-reprogramming.html), it reads: 

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. 

THAT’S RIGHT. NOT ONE F*CKING PROGRAM.

Here’s a page from his 2014 site about how Chase can help you at the casino and with poker (https://web.archive.org/web/20141216150615/http://www.chasehughes.com/poker-and-casinos.html

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. 

Let’s go to Chase’s site a couple years later, in 2016. One page of his site has, in the URL, Dangerous-Girls (https://web.archive.org/web/20160115183948/http://www.ellipsisbehavior.com/dangerous-girls.html) and the title of the page is “Project evergreen, WOMEN TRAINED TO BECOME PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPONS.” It reads: 

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.”

Here’s some more details about the Evergreen program (https://web.archive.org/web/20150713020952/http://www.ellipsisbehavior.com/evergreen-information.html): 

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.”

[Play clip from True Lies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFL7dHHpC2U&t=40s

Here’s another page (https://web.archive.org/web/20141012073507/http://www.chasehughes.com/ellipsis-documents.html) that’s titled ‘Document Vault’. 

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.

Doing a reverse image search of Natalie Morris’s profile pic, I found that the woman’s image is a stock photo https://www.istockphoto.com/br/foto/linda-mulher-loira-gm92956499-1932569 

Conclusion

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?  

After learning all these things, I’d be curious to know how much you would trust Chase Hughes. For example, let’s say you went to Chase’s site in 2019, and saw this schedule of his events: https://web.archive.org/web/20191020181902/https://www.chasehughes.com/  

Where it reads things like:

  • November 11-14: Gatlinburg, TN – Private Event (Law Enforcement Only)
  • December 1-3: Huntsville, AL – Tactical Behavior Science (Law Enforcement Only)
  • December 6-14: Germany – Private Client Group 

Would you trust that those were real events? Would you trust that those trainings actually happened? Or would you have doubts? 

Or let’s say you were reading Chase’s book The Ellipsis Manual (https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B06X9FY51S&ref_=kwl_kr_iv_rec_1, page 167) and you see the following paragraph: 

“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.  

Thanks for watching and please hit Subscribe.

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podcast

A skeptical talk with an astrologer

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.

Episode links:


TRANSCRIPT OF INTRODUCTION

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.

Okay here’s the talk with Ophira Edut…

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podcast

Behavior expert says Trump lied at press conference

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.

A transcript is below.

Episode links:

Related resources:

TRANSCRIPT

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. 

[I read Jack Brown’s analysis with following comments:]

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. 

Okay thanks for listening.

Categories
podcast

Updates about my podcast and polarization work success and failures

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.

Episode links:

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podcast

How magicians misdirect attention and manipulate audiences, with Anthony Barnhart

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.

Transcript is below.

Episode links:

Resources related to or mentioned in this talk:

TRANSCRIPT

(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.

Anthony: Thanks, this was a lot of fun.

Categories
podcast

Tackling objections to political depolarization

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.

Episode links:

TRANSCRIPT

(Note that the transcript may contain errors.)

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.

Zach: Thanks, Vanessa.

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podcast

How minor language choices can affect and manipulate us, with Liz Stokoe

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.

Episode links:

For more information about this episode and a transcript, see the original episode.

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Why are lie detectors used if they don’t work?, with Leonard Saxe

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.

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podcast

Indicators a 2020 video showing racist harassment was staged

This episode examines a video from 2020 that seemed to show a black person being harassed by a racist white woman. The video was shared by the celebrity gossip personality Perez Hilton, and was then picked up by several low-quality news sites, like RawStory.com and DailyDot.com. But the video was staged; it was done as a joke, for reasons unknown. This episode examines the reasons why I confidently believed the video was staged after watching it for only a few seconds.

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The strangeness of our existence and how that relates to existential psychology

This episode is a piece of mine about how an awareness of life’s strangeness might impact us, both positively and negatively, and how that might relate to existential psychology concepts. Topics include: how an awareness of life’s strangeness might be seen to be a core existential stressor (like the fear of death, or fear of isolation); how this might relate to religious/spiritual experience; how this might relate to traumatic experience and PTSD; how being aware of life’s strangeness might make one more likely to embrace nonsensical, low-evidence beliefs of various sorts; how this might relate to mental illness (including psychosis and delusion).

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Related resources:

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Psychological aspects in running a restaurant and waiting tables, with Robin Dibble

A talk with Robin Dibble, an experienced Albuquerque-area restaurant professional who’s worked in every aspect of the business, from waiting tables, to cooking, to managing restaurants and night clubs. Topics include: psychological strategies servers use to get more tips; how menu design can affect what people order; reading customer satisfaction as a restaurant manager; the factors in deciding to cut someone off from drinking; lighting and acoustics considerations when designing a comfortable space.

This is a reshare of a 2019 talk. For more details about this episode, see the original post.

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podcast

Two former congresspeople, a Democrat and a Republican, talk about toxic polarization

I talk to former members of the House of Representatives Luke Messer (Republican) and Elizabeth Esty (Democrat). We talk about: political polarization; their experiences being in congress during such a highly polarized period of time; their ideas for reducing toxic polarization, and more.

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