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Con man Chase Hughes’ military record, with fraud-exposer Kent Clizbe

How does someone who makes wildly grandiose and clearly false claims about mind control, interrogation mastery, and secret military psychology operations gain more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers—and land appearances on shows like Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO—without anyone vetting his story? I’m joined by ex-CIA officer and fraud-exposer Kent Clizbe⁠. We take a hard look at Chase Hughes’ Navy record and compare it to his many lies, exaggerations, and ambiguous statements about his experiences and credentials. We dig into the specific stages of Chase’s military career, his claims of Harvard and Duke neuroscience education, his belief that we live in a simulation (and that psychedelics have helped see the code of that simulation), his pick-up artist background, and his grandiose — and just plain absurd — claims about his knowledge and abilities. If you’re interested in how cults of personality and false gurus work—and how even experienced professionals and major platforms can help these people on their rise to popularity—this deep dive into Hughes’ background and the psychology of modern con artistry is one you won’t want to miss.

Kent is also the author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment, in which he explains his view of how to check authenticity and veracity. That book also explains why using nonverbal behaviors for that work is a waste of time.

Episode links:

Resources mentioned in this episode or related to it:

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcripts are generated automatically and contain errors.)

Joe Rogan: Even if they exhibit all the behavior characteristics of someone who’s confident there’s gonna be something off. ’cause we have some way, some ancient way of detecting bullshit.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. We get those gut feelings.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. We know when something’s off. Someone’s a little full of it.

Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO: And who exactly have you worked with?

Chase Hughes: Lots of government agencies. Uh, notably I’ve worked with intelligence agencies. I’ve worked with the Psychological Operations Department, US Army, which is the Special Operations Command. I’ve trained a lot of the US Navy leaders nowadays.

Chase Hughes on Joe Rogan: A friend of mine was killed on USS coal during the, the terrorist attack in, in 2001.

I was like reading these intelligence reports afterward that said there’s failures on the ground. We didn’t develop assets in the country. We didn’t. Take the actions that we needed to take to, to get this intelligence. And I was like, man, they need this behavior stuff. So I got more and more obsessed with it and I started training people in the government, uh, probably around the age of 30 or so.

Merlin O’Brecht: Was there kind of a jump to getting deep into like the real deep end of professional behavior psychology in an applied way? As much? I know you can’t talk about the balance of it, but

Chase Hughes: I don’t think, for me it was ever in a hugely professional way.

Kent Clizbe: There’s nothing in his background in the military that has anything to do with mind control, brainwashing behavior.

This guy’s a conman. He makes claims that are total bullshit. He implies that he has background and expertise that he doesn’t have, but people fall for it.

Zach Elwood: Chase Hughes, if you’ve never heard of him, is a serial liar and con man who falsely claims to be an expert on everything from analyzing nonverbal behavior, to influencing and controlling people’s minds, to government psy-ops, to cult deprogramming. Despite his obviously absurd and false claims, he has succeeded in getting many gullible podcast hosts to interview and promote him, and this has included the popular podcasts Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO, and quite a few others. He currently has more than 1.5 million followers on youtube, and still regularly gets promoted by various podcasts. 

As you saw in the intro, he has stated, but more often these days just implies, that his psychology- and behavior- related work has something to do with the military — that during his 20 year Navy career he worked on some impressive operations involving psychology, behavior, interrogations, top-secret intel, and more.  

That’s what we’re going to look at in this episode: his military career. I’m going to be talking to Kent Clizbe, an ex-CIA officer who specializes in vetting and counterintelligence, and who is perhaps most known for his role in outing the fraud Wayne Simmons, a guy who appeared on Fox News for 13 years claiming to be a CIA operative and intel expert but who was, like Chase Hughes, a fraud. I recently had an episode of the podcast talking to Kent about his experience working to expose Wayne Simmons, and if you’re interested in frauds and con artists, I think you’d like that episode. 

Now, this video won’t be a neat summary of Chase’s many lies and unethical behaviors; if you want to see that summary, search online for ‘chase hughes many lies’ and look for the result located on my page behavior-podcast.com; it’s the first episode I released on Chase Hughes and on that page I’ve included a text summary of that research. When i’ve done some of these follow-up episodes, some people will complain ‘but you didn’t actually show why he’s a liar and a con man’. Look, i can’t continually restate all the evidence in every single episode; that is what the main web page I’ve got on Chase hughes is for; if you want to see the main evidence, go there. It’s a doozy. 

So in this talk with Kent, we’ll talk about: 

  • Chase’s Navy service record, which I got by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request
  • The specific stages of Chase’s Navy career
  • Chase’s use of ambiguous language when trying to imply his career was more impressive than it was
  • The brain issues Chase claims he suffers from
  • Chase’s claims of having neuroscience-related education from Harvard and Duke University
  • Chase’s belief that we live in a simulation, and that hallucinogenic drugs have allowed him to see behind the simulation
  • Chase’s early experiences as a pick-up artist
  • Chase’s pivotal experiences loitering outside of a girls’ Abercrombie and Fitch store at a mall in Hawaii  

Here’s a bit more about Kent Clizbe’s career from his website kentclizbe.com (his last name is spelled CLIZBE): 

Kent served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s, and as a contractor after 9/11.  He has worked in various capacities in intelligence positions in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.  His specialty is Counter-terrorism and Islamic Extremism. 

Kent has also worked Counter-intelligence, Counter-proliferation, Counter-narcotics, and other targets.  In addition to extensive liaison work with foreign intel services, he has worked in the US Intel Community in inter-agency, inter-governmental intelligence operations since 9/11.  He was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest civilian intelligence agency decoration for contractors, for his counter-terrorist operations in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.  His work in the Philippines was described in an article by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2007, “Jihadists in Paradise.” 

And again, Kent is also known for his work exposing the fraud Wayne Simmons, who appeared for years on Fox News and who fooled millions, but who Kent immediately, upon meeting him, suspected was a fraud. Watch my previous interview with Kent talking about his suspicions of Simmons and how Simmons eventually ended up being outed and arrested. 

Okay here’s the deep dive on Chase Hughes’ life story and military career with Kent Clizbe….

Kent Clizbe: So first let me say that this, this isn’t coming from just, uh, some, some guy who, who did it a couple years in the military and got out. I, I do have a background in the military. I’ve worked, I’ve spent five years enlisted in the Air Force.

I worked very closely with the Navy throughout that time. After I got out, I have worked in the DOD, well, that’s not the Department of War, but we used to call it the DOD Department of Defense. I worked in the Department of Defense and with the Department of Defense, including the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Uh, I have worked short or long-term assignments, uh, with the Army at the Special Forces, uh, training, uh, uh, JFK Training Center in Fort Bragg. I’ve done classes for the seals. In Little Creek where Hughes was stationed. I have, uh, spent a couple years working in the, um, defense Intelligence agency’s training program for the, the first tier of, uh, human intelligence officers.

I, I was an instructional designer and a subject matter expert in, in those courses, so I know a lot. I, I’ve been in the DOD, I’ve been in the military. I, I understand the lingo. I understand how to, uh, navigate when somebody makes a claim. I can, I can vet it. Not only that, but I’m also a vetter, I’m a professional vetter.

I, I, uh, look at various aspects of someone who makes claims about their career, their education, their background, and I know how to vet. Those claims and get to the truth. So this isn’t just somebody who came off the street and said, Hey, tell me what you, what you think about Hughes. Anyway, with that said, the data that we have is, it’s very interesting.

Hughes, I, I, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full, one of the, all the many videos he puts out except this one he put out the Chase Hughes life story, I think was the title of it. And it’s him sitting down and chatting with it looks like a guy, this guy must be his employee. Um, it’s

kind

Zach Elwood: of an acolyte.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah, acolyte. At least it’s a, a follower, a Chase Hughes,

Zach Elwood: yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Uh, cult member in some way or another. In, in the course of this interview, uh, the guy mentions, well, I, I’m just a roofer, but, uh. Yes.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. He has a roofing

Kent Clizbe: business.

Chase Hughes: I’m gonna be doing dirty work. I don’t wanna be doing this backbreaking, sunburn, sweat and kind of stuff.

I mean, you are a roofer, you know the

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: You know the, the labor. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: He is a roofer. And, uh, you know, here he is interviewing Chase Hughes about brainwashing or whatever the heck it is. Hughes is claiming to be. Um, but he’s very, uh, obsequious to Hughes. He’s very, you can tell that he worships him.

Merlin O’Brecht: I’ve seen Chase on so many different podcasts where people are kind of talking about the books that he is written and all of the things that he is done, or his models of influence.

But I’ve never seen anyone talk about Chase’s life story yet.

Kent Clizbe: And in the interview, Hughes gives his entire, pretty much life story. But out of that, you, you can get a sequential. Overview of, of Hughes career from the time he joined the Navy when he was 17, to the time he got out the same time. Uh, Zach, you got, uh, I guess through a foia uh, freedom of information, you got Hughes’s DD two 14.

The DD two 14 is the military. It’s like a transcript. It’s like your, um, a a a university transcript. It, it tells everything that you did in, in the military. It, it’s everything. A transcript of your military experience. It was great. So I’ve got the DD two four. Hughes is DD two 14 and his Hughes My Life story.

So that’s what this, this analysis is based on is those two things. What, what I was looking at in doing this vetting is. This guy has made, and, and I don’t have quotes, uh, exactly of what his claims are, but generally speaking, he, he has made claims that he was, he has some sort of special military intelligence experience training, uh, that, that has given him a background to be the world’s greatest behavioral expert.

Again, whatever his claim is, he is, he’s claimed to be a mind reader. He is claimed to be a brainwasher, multiple claims. Yeah. Many things, but all of that, all of his claims are explicitly or implicitly based on hi his, his having been some kind of special operator, some kind of military intelligence. Uh, high speed load, drag, double, not something.

Zach Elwood: I got a few quotes here that he’s had on his website over the years, you know, because after 20 years of teaching my unique system and those top intelligence agencies in the world, uh, you know, luckily I had top secret CL security clearance in the military, which I used to figure out the answer to this question.

How can we make intelligence gathering more powerful? With over 30,000 hours of infield practice and training, I perfected the skill of per persuasion and influence. That’s just a small snippet, but he, he often says that he or implies that he’s been involved in these various, you know, military related things, training, you know, agencies of organizations, uh, you know, about these amazing things.

Anyway, that we can go on for a while about that,

Kent Clizbe: but, but can carry on. Yeah, that’s a good one because that’s kind of classic Hughes there from what, what I have seen is you notice in those quotes that you just, uh, read, he, he never says I was a. CIA case officer. Right. He never says I was a Delta Force operator.

Zach Elwood: Right. Ambiguous.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. The only, the only claim that he makes there really is I had a top secret security clearance and that gave me, I think that he probably did ev although it does not, uh, uh, DD two 14 does not cover, I, I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. So I’m guessing that in his career, and, and we’ll go over exactly what his, uh, uh, assignments and positions were, that in one of those, he had to get a security clearance.

Zach Elwood: Right. It, it, it, but it seems, it seems quite non, uh, impressive to be able to get one, like he’s dealing with, uh, ship operations and navigations and stuff, but it doesn’t seem that crazy that he would. Have a top secret security clearance, right?

Kent Clizbe: So that, that’s the key is that there’s many jobs in the military that require a security clearance,

Zach Elwood: right?

Kent Clizbe: May, he may have had top secret, he may have just had secret, but getting a security clearance doesn’t give you access to intelligence stuff unless your job is an intelligence related job. So having a security clearance means nothing. Once you have the security clearance. Classified information is totally based on need to know if your job is driving a boat.

You have no need to know anything about human intelligence, trade craft, or about, uh, influence or mind reading. You’re driving a fricking boat. Definitely the plans. About what’s gonna happen with your unit are gonna be classified. There might be a classified, some kind of classified equipment on the, on, on your boat, probably some kind of communications equipment.

So to, to have access to that, uh, classified communications equipment, you need to have a security clearance. So, in other words, you got a, a guy who’s a boat driver and he’s got a security clearance because he turns on this, uh, uh, a radio that encrypts the communications, for example. You gotta have a security clearance to work that, that radio.

So with that, let’s, let’s talk about his jobs. This is according to both he and, and his, his life story video is kind of surprised me because he gave it straight.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: He, I think he told, he told the truth in this life story. Yeah.

Zach Elwood: He knows that now that he’s got all the attention on, I mean, this is pretty common for con artists, you know, they exaggerate and lie a lot early, but when they get a lot of attention on them, they’d have to start twisting the narrative because they know that the facts are out there.

So then they have to start trying to fit the previous lies into like, the new narrative. ’cause he, he knows it would, you know, for example, he knows that we’ve examined him. He knows that it’s only, it was only a matter of time before, you know, somebody got a service record, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s like he’s gotta try to manage the perceptions and try to, you know, and you can see him doing that with that video.

That’s the whole point of that video, I think is to say like, Hey, everybody’s calling me a liar. Uh, you know, uh, I have to try to manage the perceptions and, and fit my supposed expertise into the realm of what, what really happened. Right.

Kent Clizbe: And we’ll talk about that in a second. Uh, let’s, let’s go over his.

Uh, what, what he actually did. So he, he went in the Navy as a, just a basic semen and semen, uh, in the Navy are, if you think of them, they’re the guys who are deck swabbing. They’re the ones polishing the brass on the, on the railings, cleaning the deck, emptying the, the porta-potties. They’re, they’re a laborer.

They’re a manual laborer with no skills, nothing. He did that for three years, uh, dur. At the end of those three years, he became a, a signalman where they, they use flags to, to communicate between ships. At the end of the, those three years, he got qualified in that, and then they did away with that, and they must have gone to electronic communications.

So his, his first, uh, qualified job flag waver, they did away with. In the Navy, generally speaking, especially for unqualified people like him, and, and generally for mo, almost all sailors, you do a rotation a few years out on a ship, a few years on shore, a few years out on a ship, a few years on shore, two, three, whatever.

Um, so he, his first three years he was on ship, uh, a ship or a couple ships. His shore assignment after those three years was, he was a jail guard.

Chase Hughes: Uh, at, at this time I get stationed at a detainee facility, right as this is happening and on and off. Um, working with the ES for three straight years.

Kent Clizbe: You’re, uh, be sure the jail doors are locked.

Be sure the guys, the prisoners haven’t hanged themselves.

Zach Elwood: One thing he said in there, this kind of, I mean, he, he works in various. Exaggerated claims that relate to the behavior influence. So one thing he said in there that was, and they’re all ambiguous, and, uh, so he says, I developed this one little protocol that a person could use in a detainee situation, and it got adopted by the Department of Defense.

And he acts as if that was like some big thing. But, you know, again, it’s ambiguous. Did did that really happen? Was it just a tiny little vein? You know, who, who knows what it was, but he, he tries to act as if that was like one of the things that led him down the behavior influence thing where, you know, he just, he just tries to exaggerate the importance of these various things in his career and in a very ambiguous way.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But again, he, he is a, he is a jail guard. So your, your protocol that you developed is probably, hey, uh, if somebody, uh, says they’re gonna hurt themselves. Don’t give him a fork and a knife. Give him a spoon. You know something? Yeah. Could been something like that

Zach Elwood: if he

Kent Clizbe: even developed a protocol.

Prisoners.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: It’s not how to read their minds or, you know, I, I came up with a, a, a protocol to read their minds or, uh, whatever the hell his claims are.

Zach Elwood: He’s, he’s keeping it ambiguous for a reason. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Uh, after being a jail guard for three and a half years, he, uh, got an assignment as a quartermaster, uh, on a ship.

Quartermaster’s job is related to navigation. They do various duties, various tasks related to getting the ship from one place to another. First two, or quartermaster might be. In charge of being sure all the maps are in the right, are in the right place in the library or running to get a map when the navigator needs, uh, needs a map.

So, so a ship, the navigator is generally speaking, gonna be an officer that, an officer is someone who has a college degree. Maybe they went to Annapolis, the Naval Academy, maybe they were in ROTC, uh, went to a a civilian university and then did, did naval training afterwards. But they’re gonna be a college educated officer and they’re, and then they go through a navigation school, uh, to become qualified as a navigator.

The quarter masters are like assistants to the nav. The officer navigator, they take care of all of the admin and. Kind of grunt jobs related to getting the ship from one place to another. So his net, his duty after being a jail guard, he was a quartermaster on a ship. He tells a story that the navigator officer was a Coast Guard officer doing a rotation to the Navy.

The, uh, military branches will do that. They’ll send people, send an army officer to do time with the Marines, send a naval officer to do time with the army. In this case, it was a Coast Guard navigator on a rotation with the Navy. According to Hughes, because she was Coast Guard, she didn’t know the Navy systems.

Therefore, he was, he did the job. Is what? That that’s his claim. My guess there is he’s puffing himself up a bit. Yeah. This is one of the points where he’s a little bit exaggerating.

Zach Elwood: I was kind of gonna, I was gonna throw in there too. He also has this thing where he says he was working on these ships and various equipments, pieces of equipment, and he said the Navy had like no standard operating procedures.

I had to create these procedures myself, do it all myself. I’m like, really? All these expensive things. They had no SOPs. You know, I, I, I found that also, you know, he, he, he works in these various things that I think are ambiguous exaggerations that would be hard to fact check. Right. But it makes him sound more important maybe than he was.

Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. That, that example is from a couple, a couple assignments after where we’re at now. Oh, yeah. I’m

Zach Elwood: jumping ahead, sorry. Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: yeah, yeah. So he was, uh, on, on a ship for, I, I, not really sure. I don’t remember, but I don’t think he, he lies about it. I don’t, I, I think that his claims. Of that time as quartermaster on a ship are matched by his DD two 14 experience.

Uh, after that he got an assignment as a recruiter, a Navy recruiter, uh, in Texas. I wanna say it was somewhere out right outside of Dallas, uh, but somewhere in Texas. And he did that for I think three or four years.

Chase Hughes: And I transitioned from there to back to Houston, Texas, where I was a Navy recruiter for a little while.

And this is like the type of dude that goes into your high school and like hands out little key chains and t-shirts and stuff like that.

Merlin O’Brecht: So now that’s, this is May, this, this is in your off ship time, I’m guessing, right?

Chase Hughes: It’s after that five year period? Yeah. Yeah. I was in a town called Cleveland, Texas, so I’m going into high schools, talking kids into going to the Navy, and, uh, did well in recruiting.

Kent Clizbe: A recruiter is just a salesman. Their training. They, they have a, a very intensive military recruiters go through an intensive training course. It, it is the, I don’t know what to, what kind of civilian equivalent. It’s, it’s, it’s sales. The training is hardcore sales. Sales and recruiting go through. Kind of phases of what the fashionable sales approach is.

So probably depending on what, when you went through recruiting training, you went through, uh, one or more different sales theories and practical approaches. And a lot of people don’t make it as recruiters. They, they flunk out of the training because just like a lot of people don’t make it as salespeople because, uh, generally speaking, you gotta be a fast talker and you gotta be a bullshitter, right?

And there are horror stories of people, people’s re recruiters lying to them. ’cause recruiters, just like salespeople have quotas and they gotta make that quota. And if you don’t make the quota, then you get beat up.

Zach Elwood: We should, uh, Kent, real quick, let’s throw in that, um, you know, he wrote, uh, chase wrote his, um, pickup artist book it, at least it was published in 2007, which means he probably was in the pickup scene for, you know, a couple years before that, or at least a year.

So I’m thinking, you know, based on my timeline, ’cause I think he entered the Navy at, in 99, 19 99, and then took eight or nine years to get to the recruiter job or whatever it was. I think he, so he was in the pickup artist scene before. He got into recruiting, which I think helps explain, like he was already into that space of like, I’m seducing women at clubs kind of space.

He liked that, you know, influence and, uh, reading people’s stuff from the pickup artist scene. So I think, but I think it dovetails with him being interested in recruiting or, or finding it, finding a map over to it or something

Kent Clizbe: that, that’s great. That’s, that’s a perfect insight, I think. Um, let, let’s get on the record his, um, his experience and then we’ll go back to Yeah, sorry.

Plug in.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, keep

Kent Clizbe: going. No, no, no. I, I just, it’s great. ’cause, ’cause what I’ve done here on my notes is I’ve got these exact same kind of things. I’ve got him, uh, plugged in on the side.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Cool. Let’s, yeah. Keep

Zach Elwood: going with

Kent Clizbe: the career. Let’s get on the record.

Zach Elwood: Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: yeah. Get, get the career and then we’ll go back and say, well his, he was, he was doing pickup bullshit when he was

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Okay. Makes sense.

Zach Elwood: Okay. Keep going.

Kent Clizbe: So, so he, he was a recruiter for three or four years, I think. After that, he got a job, got an assignment at Little Creek, Virginia, uh, in a Surface platoon. So Little Creek is, it’s a, a huge sprawling naval facility in and around Norfolk, Virginia. Uh, Norfolk, Virginia is the, um, is the headquarters of, I wanna say the seventh fleet.

I don’t remember. It’s the whatever fleet services, the Atlantic. Um, all the ships are based out of Norfolk, Virginia, and then they have little auxiliary bases around the Norfolk Naval Base. And one of ’em is, uh, special forces, uh, uh, base and I’m pretty sure it’s Little Creek, the Special forces, the, the, in the Navy, the special forces of the seals, even though they’re in the Navy.

They have all manner of various equipment. Special forces’ job is to be a quick reaction, all purpose sort of instrument to do classified covert kind of operations. And the seals are trained in intelligence collection as well as weapons combat. And then they’ll have various equipment, they’ll have, uh, land vehicles, airborne kind of, they have helicopters and planes and they’ll have all kinds of different boats.

The special forces have all of this equipment. They don’t take care of the equipment. They’re, they’re operating, they’re going out and doing stuff, and they, when they need a boat or they need a a, a a a a tank or they need a helicopter, they, they have groups that are in charge of, they’re taking care of their boats, their helicopters.

They’re, they’re Humvees. What Hughes was doing was taking, he was one in one of these groups that was taking care of probably special forces stuff. He, he never says that. It’s interesting. I, I would think that he would, uh, he, he would try to make a claim about being connected if he was, but, so probably he wasn’t.

I

Zach Elwood: think we can assume if there was something impressive, uh, related to combat psychology influence, he would be very specific about it. So anytime he’s not specific about it, we can read a lot into that. Right.

Kent Clizbe: So, so he was, he was in Little Creek where the, there’s seals around there. Probably he wasn’t working with the seals, but he says he was, he was in charge of a surface platoon.

So by now he is a non-commissioned officer. He makes a big deal about it. You know, they, in the Navy they call non-commissioned officers. Uh, petty officers and he made Chief Petty officer. It’s like the, the ranks, enlisted ranks are E one through E nine, and the, the top, um, the, the top three in the Navy, E seven, E eight, E nine are chief petty officers.

Uh, EE five and E six are petty officers. So when you make E seven, you become a chief and the Navy is very tradition bound and they have different uniforms for, uh, different color, uh, for, for chiefs E seven, E eight, and E nine. Uh, and, and they have different, I, I guess on ships and on shore, they have, uh, chief dining facilities in the military, in the Navy, uh, you become, it’s, it’s special.

In the real world, it ain’t so special. You know, you’re just, you, you’ve been a welder for 15 years and now you’re, you get a lot of jobs because you’re good. You’ve had a lot of experience and you’ve been around. He makes a big deal. Oh, being chief, you know, oh, they have a ceremony and oh, the military has ceremonies.

When you go take a, take a crap and wipe your butt, right, you know, it’s, uh, no big deal.

Chase Hughes: They have 390 something applicants ba and they, all of your record goes up there. The day you j from the day you join the Navy, every time anyone’s ever evaluated you, every time you’ve been counseled, you’ve been written up, uh, you got in trouble.

Everything is there. And their job is to like, bring all this stuff up on the screen, kind of like, let’s rank and stack them. Oh, this guy beats that guy. You have to do this with 400 people until they have like this list of like top 10 have tons. Crazy. So it’s like

Merlin O’Brecht: a. Super selection process. Yeah, I like that.

Chase Hughes: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So what the, the chiefs do, generally speaking, is they’re managers think about it like a, not, they’re not officers. They’re, they’re non-commissioned officers, but they’re managers. So now he’s from, from his positions after this are all in, in management. So even though his, uh, he, his unit is doing, taking care of Humvees and radios and underwater UAVs, robots that go underwater, he’s not qualified in any of that stuff.

He’s the one that’s sitting back in the office and when somebody says, Hey, I need a, uh, underwater UAV, he. He checks his, his records and says, oh, okay, well number 79 43 is gonna be available next week. And then he tells an underling, go get number 79 43 and give it to these operators. He, he throws out all of the terms, uh, and the things that he was dealing with, but had, he has no training in these.

He didn’t do any training. Uh, at this time. He did do, I think a one week, uh, they call it expeditionary. There’s a specific name for it. Expeditionary Combat Training, something like that. It’s every single Navy personnel who go, who went into the, uh, the, the, the combat zones back then back in the Global War on Terror.

So you’re talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf. Persian Gulf, the Red Sea. If you’re going to any of those places, you’re gonna be in harm’s way. And that’s what this course, it’s a one, I think it’s a one week course, expeditionary Combat training. Everybody who went there, who went to these potential danger zones, did this, this course, this course is not teaching somebody to be a, uh, a, a trained killer, not teaching somebody to read minds.

The course is, if you get shot in the leg, put a tourniquet on it. Here’s what a tourniquet looks like. If the siren goes off, that means there’s missiles coming in. When the siren goes off, get into a bunker. It’s, that’s the level of training this expeditionary combat that, uh, he’s been, that, that he did. So as part of, of this unit that he was in, in Little Creek, I think he did that expeditionary train, uh, combat training.

His next assignment after that in Little Creek was in the Harbor Master Office. The Harbor Master is in charge of, think about it as a parking lot attendant and, and slash uh, logistics guy. When boats are, or ships are coming in, or small boats comes in, the harbor master says, okay, you go to, uh, pier 14.

You know, it’s like making a reservation at a, at a hotel. You got a slot on Pier 14 for six months, you need to go to Pier 73 A, and then they’re in charge of being sure that. Uh, the, the, the harbor is secure, clean, that they have access to water and food. So that was his, his next role there. His next role was, he was in a unit that did coastal river boats.

So he was in, he was assigned to a unit there, again, as, as a petty officer, as a manager. He’s not trained to, to, to be, to combat training. He’s not the one going out in combat. He’s taking care of these boats in some way. He probably, uh, learned to drive the boat, but I, I don’t think I see that on his DD two 14 may, I don’t know, maybe being a quartermaster qualifies you to, uh, to drive a, a small boat like this.

Chase Hughes: Then I went even more into the hardcore combat side of the military. Wouldn’t this thing called CRS four, coastal River Squadron four, working under CRG to Coastal River, Marine Group two. And if you’ve seen the movies at like the Vietnam movies where the dudes on like the boat, little tiny river boat and they’re like all dudes on there.

Yeah. All blackout face paint and like submachine guns and stuff. And like they jump off the boat, do jump warfare and stuff like that, get back on the boat. That’s the unit. So that’s where our unit got its starts. The riverine operations, uh, got started in, uh, Vietnam where they were, they were called brown water, navy, both Big Navy’s, blue water.

It we’re what they prefer us as the brown water, the dirty little rivers and stuff like that. Yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: When, so at this point you started doing combat training, I’m guessing? Yeah. Or right. Or when you were in, when, what was the first time you started doing the combat training? Is it when you’re in the underwater robot?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Before going to that, I went to. Ex expeditionary and I think advanced combat school in Gulfport, Mississippi on the way to this new command,

Merlin O’Brecht: if that makes sense.

Kent Clizbe: In that interview, uh, the, the roofing guy asked him, so, uh, was this the first of your many combat deployments, sir?

Merlin O’Brecht: Is this around when your first combat deployment is, or did is, do you have a combat deployment before that?

Chase Hughes: Uh, I wouldn’t call any of my deployments a combat deployment.

Merlin O’Brecht: Okay.

Chase Hughes: Uh, with the stuff that dudes go through, I, I would not say any of mine had been combat deployments.

Kent Clizbe: I, I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe it. Uh, because in, in all of his other stuff, it seems like he’s talking about, I, I know one I saw, yeah.

I was a black beret.

Chase Hughes: When you’re working intelligence operations, you get to this point where you’re like, any day. It might be the last day if we don’t do something drastic, right? In a World Day

Morgan Nelson: today, I sit down with an ex Black Beret, special forces interrogation expert.

Chase Hughes: We go through some serious, crazy training, and it’s the most stressful thing you can imagine.

We should not be seen, we should be forgotten the next day.

Morgan Nelson: This guy spent over 20 years on a secret ship doing very secret things, learning how to interrogate people from all around the world to literally get them to give up. Secrets of intelligence

Chase Hughes: we’re about to teach you is called the Omega Punch strike.

It is possibly lethal and very dangerous.

Kent Clizbe: So here on, on this one, he says, no, none of my deployments were combat deployments. Okay? So in this unit, in this small boat unit, he was deployed to the Gulf, uh, which means probably they was, he was working out of like Bach, rain or uh, Qatar. There’s huge, huge naval base, uh, in Qatar.

So he, he was deployed with, with his boats out there, and, uh, it looks like he, he was a driver of one of these boats. And then he tells the story in this, in the video about going out on a boat into the Gulf and getting out to, pretty far out. And he started to have chest pains. They had to, uh, had to abort the training or whatever it is they were doing.

Came back and he went to see the doctor. And for the next one and a half years, he was seeing doctors. I, I don’t think he mentions what he, what he was doing in those, in that time, what his job was probably, uh, in, in my experience in the military, when somebody is sick like this has some kind of, some kind of medical problem.

You’re in a, they, they, they have various names for it, but it’s a, like a, a casual unit, which means you’re sitting around waiting for your processing to be done. Uh, whatever the processing is, guys are getting kicked out. Guys who are, who failed schools, guys who, uh, what whatever. They have issues that need, uh, processing and the, the bureaucracy in the military, it is not instantaneous.

It takes a long time. So evidently he was in limbo for a year and a half. In the, in the video he talks about, oh, I became close friends with my doctor. Okay, cool. Then he was discharged. He, according to him, he was discharged after a year and a half. He doesn’t mention what the discharge was. He doesn’t mention.

That year and a half, there could, there could be a lot of stuff going on, although he seems to be pretty, uh, pretty honest. Uh, there could be, there’s a lot of stuff that might have been going on in that time. Could be a, he got, he had a medical discharge. I don’t know. Could be a, other than honorable, could be honorable.

Discharge, don’t know. A actually looking as DD two 14, I think I’m, I’m almost positive that it’s a, uh, uh, either they blocked it out or it was honorable. I don’t, I have to check that, but there’s no, he doesn’t say what his discharge was. And that’s the end of his military career. That’s it. Mm-hmm. That’s what he did.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Nothing to do with spies. Behavior, intelligence, brainwashing, mind reading.

Zach Elwood: Right. And this and this video of his, I mean, it seems like a way for him to try to get ahead or maybe a little late in the game, but to try to say. Yeah, my career really did have nothing, you know, I admit it. My career really did have nothing to do with psychology and behavior really.

Although he tries to work in little story, ambiguous stories about how it might have, but then he does this, you know, the thing that really stands out, I don’t know if you wanted to talk about this, is the guy tries to ask him like, well, how did you get into these things? And it’s really ambiguous. Like he almost says almost nothing about like, you know, how did you become an, an expert, a supposed expert on these things?

He’s like, yeah, I basically studied in my free time and I talked to a lot of experts and I, I, you know, he, he, he drops these ambiguous stories about like seeing through the matrix when he was talking to some guy in Hawaii about, like, I had empathy for him instead of. Treating Hi. Seeing him as some sort of enemy.

I saw it was like I was seeing through the matrix, and it was like, he, he, he makes these stories that sound very exciting about, like, stuff that just sounds rather mundane that he doesn’t, se doesn’t sound that impressive. You know, it, it was interesting for just how little actual things he talked about in terms of why should anyone view him as some sort of expert in these things.

Right? So that’s kind of an amazing cell phone. I think that, I think it relates to him and his accolades being so in the weeds and narcissistic that they think this sounds impressive to people, but I think most people would be able to be like, well, what exactly have you done? You know, there’s not much there that you, that you talk about.

Kent Clizbe: Actually, I, I don’t think so, Zach. I don’t think most people do, especially the, his followers.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. From what I’ve seen, they don’t, if they don’t have a, a, a background in the military or bureaucracy. This all sounds so high speed, low drag. This all sounds so exciting. And, and as you said, he, he, he doesn’t make any claims that I was a spy for the Defense Intelligence Agency, but there is so much in his, uh, outside of this Chase Hughes life story, video conversation, other places, claims that he’s made.

Marc the Beginning host: Right.

Kent Clizbe: So what I, I got a note here. Uh, his, his roofer lackey, who’s questioning him at the end of this, of, of Hughes’s giving his recitation of his military career. The poor dude, the poor lackey is like, uh, uh, you know, did, did I miss something?

Merlin O’Brecht: Was there kind of a jump? To getting deep into like the real deep end of professional behavior psychology in an applied way as much.

I know you can’t talk about that much of it, but

Chase Hughes: I don’t think, for me it was ever in a hugely professional way. Um, I was developing curriculum for a long time.

Kent Clizbe: The, the, the poor lackey, we expected to have all kinds of. War stories about, yeah. When they dropped me into Afghanistan, behind the lines, I was in charge of the unit that brainwashed, uh, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Nothing, he doesn’t make any of those claims. So the lackey’s confused.

Zach Elwood: I like also setting, setting ’em up, uh, you know, lowering the expectations. I know you can’t talk about much of it, you know,

he,

Kent Clizbe: well, well, it’s, it’s not, I, I think that is not necessarily lowering the expectations. It’s giving him the, the lackey is assuming because he was so high speed, low drag.

Mm-hmm. He was so deep undercover. Therefore, he can’t talk about it. That’s, that’s what I hear in that question is he’s assuming that Hughes was so, uh, secret, but so he does give them that out. And Hughes response, well, I was never in that in a hugely professional way. I was developing curriculums for a long time.

He doesn’t say what kind of curriculums. It’s pretty clear the curriculums were like, how to turn on a radio, uh, how to lock the cell door, you know, developing curriculums doesn’t make you an expert in, in brainwashing. And

Zach Elwood: that’s when he mentions

Kent Clizbe: the

Zach Elwood: protocol. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Then he says,

Chase Hughes: but the first time that it, like it really meant something is I developed this one little protocol that a person could use in a detainee situation and it got adopted by the Department of Defense.

And it was like, wow. Like it was my first time where I was like, I am, I needed that external validation to feel like this is something that’s worth pursuing. Like I am worth, uh, continuing down this path. So I need to keep doing it. And I was probably 35, I was three years away from retirement at the time.

Kent Clizbe: So when he was three years away from retirement, according to his DD two 14 and his life story, he, uh, was, was doing boats. He was, uh, in the, uh, coastal riverine boats. What’s he doing with the detainee situation? Maybe he’s doing it on his own, but regardless, a protocol in a detainee situation, that’s the ambiguous language.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: And what, what I read that is as is not, I came up with the newest way to brainwash detainees. It’s, I’ve, I came up with, uh, put the handcuffs behind their backs instead of in front of their. Their body. Well that’s what a, a protocol in a detainee situation is.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And then, then, then he, and he speaks really ambiguously right after that.

He kinda like yada yadas over a bunch of stuff.

Chase Hughes: I did a lot of training and stuff like that along the way, like teaching people and walking people, mentoring people through the process. And there were Intel guys and uh, there were is dudes at Intel Specialist guys.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: That was really rewarding ’cause they got that.

And every time I would train one of these guys that went through all these intelligence schools universally, they would say, this is 10 times better than our school. And I thought at the, I think the first few times I heard it, I was like, wow, thank you. But in the back of my mind I was like, they’re lying to make me feel good.

That was exactly what went on my head. They’re lying to me so I feel better about myself. Uh, it took a while for me to kind of have the enough self worth. To say like, wow, these things are really gonna change a lot of people. They’re gonna change a lot of lives.

Zach Elwood: He kind of just yada yadas over, you know, his amazing abilities or knowledge.

And he is like, then I decided I needed to train people on this stuff and my wife encouraged me and I got into it.

Chase Hughes: As I’m retiring, I’m, I’m living with my girlfriend who’s now my wife, she’s actually in the next room and I had a resume typed up and I, I was applying to be a guy working in the shipyard, fitting people’s faces with PPE and safety gear.

Let’s just not say it. Just could

Merlin O’Brecht: the grade chase hug, you know?

Chase Hughes: Yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: I know you’re just a normal guy at the end of the day too, but a lot of people look up to you and, and, uh, I certainly do and it’s incredible to me the depth of your knowledge that’s built, uh, into my mind. It’s actually a really interesting story, uh, because it just kind of goes to show.

Like, for me anyways, it makes me feel like, dang. Well, if Chase was feeling like he was about to go just fit masks in the Navy shipyard at one point in his life and really thought that he, that it would what he was gonna do, yeah, maybe some roofer from Canada could be more than a roofer from Canada as well, you know,

Zach Elwood: but also, you know, it’s, it’s all ambiguous.

There’s not a lot, hardly any details. Uh, but then it’s also, it also, this also just conflicts with his own records on his website and his website, chase hughes.com, which I covered in my first video. And, and, and the entry for that about it as many lies. He, he started that website in 2012. He was immediately claiming to be an expert in reading people, in influencing people.

He, he claimed even like, I think it was as early as like 2014, to be an internationally recognized, uh, person in the behavior and influence space. He had the, this like fake quote about his. You know, uh, his behavior, uh, table of elements. He had, uh, claims that like his stuff was being used by agencies, that it was being used by media, uh, organizations worldwide and such.

So his, his, uh, claims in this, even in this ambiguous way that he kind of veered into being some sort of expert later in his career, completely conflict with him. Try claiming from an early time period to be an amazing, internationally recognized expert in these things. Right?

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. Yeah. He’s, his, his big problem is he’s here, he is coming clean in this life story, but he’s still got all of his past, uh, past claims on the record.

So, to wrap up that interview, the, the poor roofing lack, he says again, he’s, he’s confused, he says.

Merlin O’Brecht: What about, uh, any of, any other studies or anything else about that I’m missing that we wanna cover about the human behavior stuff at your time in the military?

Chase Hughes: No, I think we’ve kind of, we’ve at least kind of glossed over the biggest pieces.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah, for sure. Okay. Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: he, he was expecting this to be a, a big, long explanation of how Hughes had become such an expert, and Hughes says, Nope, we covered it. So now let’s go back to when he was. A, a, a jail guard, I guess he was stationed in Hawaii. He tells a story in this life story that he was studying psychology and body language and reading Jung and uh, I had a, a US government manual, unidentified, he doesn’t say what it is.

I’m guessing he got it off of, uh, off the internet. You know, there’s a lot of like 1950s CIA stuff.

Zach Elwood: He also speaks as if it was amazing that you can’t find the government manual on Amazon, and he’s like, you to this day, you can’t find it on Amazon. The guy’s like, wow. I’m like, that’s like the least amazing thing ever.

It’s like if I, there’s many government manuals you can’t find on Amazon. It’s strange.

Chase Hughes: I was reading these psychology books. I’m reading Carl Jung and profiling books and stuff like that. It was FBI profiling manual that I got a hold of. It was a government manual that you couldn’t even find on Amazon.

To this day, you can’t find on Amazon.

Merlin O’Brecht: Well.

Chase Hughes: I’m reading through all these things and kind of piecing all this stuff together, like a schizophrenic with the yarn, you know, that goes Yeah, I do how to do newspaper. There’s

Merlin O’Brecht: that internet of the guy with

all

Chase Hughes: this. Oh yeah. Pets. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what my brain was like.

Little stuff. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Here he, he’s a jail guard and he’s studying psychology body language on his own. EE evidently. ’cause there, there’s no indication he ever went to college. I don’t think he ever mentions any academic studies. Um, he, he, he went to a military high school and I think he pretty much, he had some kind of issue when he was in, in high school and he, he had to join the military, I think.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. He said he was a horrible student. He said he was getting horrible grades, I assume maybe some behavioral issues, maybe. I mean, he comes from a wealthy family. He, people have told me, people have told me he comes from a wealthy family. And then I saw him talk about it in his, um, life story. He says it was a.

It’s very, you know, privileged, uh, upbringing. So it’s an interesting, uh, yeah, something, something was going on with that, uh, military school. And then, yeah, he, uh,

Chase Hughes: it was a, a very country club existence. It was like, let’s go to the golf course, let’s go to tennis lessons, let’s go to the country club, summer camp and swimming pool and all that.

Throughout the summers, going through middle school, like around fourth, fifth grade, I started getting like D’s and everything. Everything was like a D.

Merlin O’Brecht: What do you think was happening there?

Chase Hughes: I think I just lost interest in school. Like, I, it wasn’t fun. Uh, I don’t know. Something changed in my brain.

Kent Clizbe: Rich kids who get in trouble, uh, being sent to military school is a very common.

Kind of, uh, way to grow up. So that’s what happened to him. He was, I guess, a rich kid who got in trouble sent to military school and, but anyway, what, what I’m getting to here is academics. He, he’s never, never made a claim and I’ve never seen any kind of indication that he is ever been to college.

Zach Elwood: I, I don’t know if you wanna mention, he does in his life story video, talk about his, um, signed up for Harvard postgraduate level and, uh, duke University, uh, opening at Duke University, something in medical neuroscience.

He makes these claims that he did some, some sort of classes after his, or, or near the end of his, uh, Navy career. But it’s also very vague. And he used to claim that he had, apparently used to claim that he had like an Harvard degree on his LinkedIn, but then deleted it. Like people mentioned that years ago as like him claiming he had some sort of Harvard degree.

So anyway, just to say he’s, he’s made these claims and I, I kind of feel like the. Probably the truth of the matter is with those is he found some like really minimal, you know, week or couple week long class that you could take from Harvard and Duke to bolster his resume, like the easiest thing you could possibly find that was associated with those schools.

I have a feeling maybe he did that. Maybe he didn’t even do that. I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s not really clear what he did.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. So, so there, there are, uh, a lot of, um, uh, Harvard or Duke or any university does conferences, does, uh, professional training, something like that. It may, it may just be a conference, but you, you sign up and, uh, enroll and maybe you pay a, pay a fee and you are now a.

Graduate of Harvard’s history seminar. You know, once you get that, then you can say, well, I’m a Harvard graduate. I don’t see any indication. He has an undergraduate degree and he never claims to I a graduate degree. Ain’t gonna happen. But unless you got an undergraduate degree.

Zach Elwood: Actually I’m just reading this now, Ken, it’s kind of interesting.

I’ll, I noticed how ambiguous this language is. Like he says this

Merlin O’Brecht: And what about neuroscience, like endocrinology? When did you first start getting interested in all that? Because it seems it’s kind of different. Right.

Chase Hughes: I signed up for this Harvard, uh, postgraduate level, so like a master’s level, uh, certification in neuroscience and neuroendocrinology.

And right as I started learning that is when I discovered my brain. These like neuroscience neurological disorder, like at the same time. Really? Yeah. Damns. And so, like at the moment, I, that’s when I started classes. Like I still had, I only had 18, 20 pages in my little notebook drawn out and taking notes and stuff.

Little, couple sketches of neurons and stuff like that in there,

Merlin O’Brecht: right?

Chase Hughes: Uh, but the moment that diagnosis came down, I was more interested in that kind of learning that I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted to lo, I wanted to know more about my condition than any neurologist that I would ever see. And I spent four and a half years studying and studying and studying and ensuring that, like, I, I wanna know more than anybody in the world about what’s going on in my brain.

And that may or may not be true, probably not true. There’s probably lots of people that know a lot, but I wanted to be, feel like I had a hand on the steering wheel of what was gonna happen to my brain. It’s gonna happen. Uh, so like me becoming a good student. I don’t think that’s what that was. I think it was desperation.

The moment I finished with Harvard, there was a course opening up at Duke University.

Zach Elwood: He doesn’t, he never says he finished it. He says, I signed up for it. And then later, yeah, right. And then later he says, the moment I finished with Harvard, there was a course opening up at Duke University. He never says what he got at Harvard.

He never says he even finished it. He says he signed up for it. Yeah. So yeah, there’s a lot of ambiguous stuff there. What’s he say about Duke? He says,

Chase Hughes: there was a course opening up at Duke University at Duke University Medical School, and this was in medical neuroscience. And I was like, I need to take that.

And it was relatively cheap compared to all the other universities out there.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: And this is another postgraduate certification in medical neuroscience and neuroimaging and neuroradiology and. I started that same exact thing, just nonstop every day, five, 10 hours a day. Still you nonstop.

Kent Clizbe: You know, this may have been that one and a half years when he was on medical casual status.

Zach Elwood: He does mention the medical, he mentions his medical issues at the same time, you know, he’s, he talks about his medical issues. Uh, so I mean, reading this, he doesn’t, from what I can see, he doesn’t talk about any actual finishing, finishing anything. He doesn’t talk about what the classes really were, and he, but he does also talk about his own medical issues about like, having all these memory and brain problems and such.

We don’t need to get into all that stuff, but just to say, getting back to when people say a lot of ambiguous things, you should pay attention. You know, getting, getting to what really works in interrogation and interview scenarios. You know, when somebody is speaking very ambiguously about things, that’s a, that’s a red flag that you want, you want to dig into, right.

Kent Clizbe: Yep. So, um, back to him being, when he was at the jail guard, uh, he was studying psychology and body language reading j and a US government manual. Again, as you say, it’s all ambiguous and he’s probably doing these kind of things. He means he was probably on the internet going, huh, that’s interesting. And that’s what he, you know, he spins that as I was studying psychology.

So he went, this, this is a, uh, the anecdote he tells his, the, the poor lackey interviewer.

Chase Hughes: And I, I remember going out to Waikiki Beach and Honolulu and this guy, like everybody else, was like, really afraid of this guy. And for the first time in my lung, uh, something clicked in my head and like, like I went from brain to heart.

Instantly something shifted where I was like, there’s a voice in my head was like, oh my God, he’s scared. He’s just fearful. And I felt empathy, uh, instead of like, I’m calling him a douche bag or which I would’ve done. Right, a hundred percent would’ve done. Um, but I felt this like surge of empathy. Like I can see the matrix.

Like I was, I felt like it was neo,

Merlin O’Brecht: right?

Chase Hughes: I can, no one else could see what IMC, like that’s kind of what Neo is, you know? That’s Yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah. He sees behind the code.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. So that was the biggest one for me. And then I started moaning the, the really deep, hardcore persuasion level stuff. And the first time I ever used that on a person, um, it worked so well that my far rate was probably at like 180 or 200.

I was like, I’m gonna go to prison. Like, I just felt like I was breaking the rules of reality. Like, like reality shouldn’t work this way. I

Kent Clizbe: felt like I was neo in the matrix. When I heard him say that, I said, you know what, this dude sounds like he was taking drugs. There’s, there’s drugs like, uh, I think it’s called MDMA or MDA, the party drug.

It’s what those Yeah, ec when when they go to raves. Yeah. They take that and it, um, it makes you love everybody. You, it, it’s like an empathy drug. It makes you feel like, oh, that poor guy. Oh, I understand him. That’s what this, it’s like he’s describing a, a, an experience on MDMA or something like that.

That’s what I thought when I heard that.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Well, it sounded to me like just pure, kind of narcissism, like over, over, over exaggerating the importance of fairly minor thing. It’s like what you mean empathy made you feel like you were neo in the matrix? Like I don’t, he, but he, but he often talks about, I mean, he, even today.

A big part of his spiel these days is talking about how we’re in a simulation and how drugs have helped him. Various hallucinogenics have helped him see the matrix. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: There you go. See, that’s it. I may, I, I didn’t, I didn’t know that, but Oh, didn’t know that. When

Chase Hughes: he says this, this is going to rip a hole in your brain that you cannot plug.

It’s going to permanently change the way that you see stuff. There’s so many symbols and signs that human beings are experiencing a simulation of reality.

Merlin O’Brecht: Have you seen the DMT experiment with the laser?

Marc the Beginning host: I have seen it on Instagram and I heard you and Danny talking about it. So you’ve done it.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, I saw it on Instagram and flew Danny to my house right away.

Marc the Beginning host: Like, break this down for people because it got shared amongst my group. And it’s like, what the fuck?

Chase Hughes: Exactly. And that’s the only question you’re still gonna have after you see it.

Marc the Beginning host: It doesn’t answer any questions. It just invites a lot more.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Nothing else. There’s code. Absolutely. There is code.

Marc the Beginning host: So the code’s not like spinning there.

It’s like it’s literally like kind of written out static.

Chase Hughes: It’s static. I can move the laser up and down and see all of the letters, but it’s like three dimensional. So I can get close to the wall, I can look down inside of the laser that way, and I can look up in the laser that way.

Kent Clizbe: When he says this, I hear that’s somebody who has been on psychedelic drugs.

Oh, he is done a lot of, he’s done a lot

Zach Elwood: of drugs. He, he, he encourages

Kent Clizbe: this there. Well, there, it’s right there. Yeah. So that’s the explanation. He, he’s in Hawaii as a jail guard. What a fricking horrible job. I cannot imagine being a jail guard. What a sucky job. But you’re in paradise. So what these, the, uh, Navy guys do is they party all the time.

I mean, I, I, I, I’ve been with many Navy guys when they’re on shore, they drink nonstop. Guys I knew in the Navy weren’t doing drugs, but I’m sure that there were, there. There’s a, a party culture, and that’s what this sounds like, a party culture. This was his introduction to psychedelics. He took. Some kind of drug and it made him feel empathetic and it changed his life.

That’s what Well, you’re, that’s what he’s describing here.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I mean, we’re speculating here to be clear, but that’s your, that’s your guess.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. It’s total speculation. But I’m, I’m telling you, I, I, I, this is, this is not just, uh, total blue sky. I, well, we, I’ve been, I’ve been in the drug culture when I was a kid.

I, I know a lot about it and, uh, when you, when, when somebody says this, and then later on they talk about that, how psychedelics have changed their life.

Zach Elwood: Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: there it is right there. Well, we should, he just said it should,

Zach Elwood: it might be a

Kent Clizbe: good everyth shifted a voice in my head.

Zach Elwood: It might, it might be a good time to throw in too that, you know, the pickup artist stuff.

He, he released his, uh, passport book in like 2007, which means he was probably in the pickup artist kind of seen for a couple years or so. And so he, he was traveling around, uh, you know, seducing women and including with his navy friends, like some of the people he mentions in his, in his book, you know, giving him testimonials in his passport, uh, book, you know, you could do the research and find that they were navy people, so the speculation might fit in with that party kind of lifestyle, going to clubs and, and such too.

But I think, you know, it’s interesting too, the pickups part of stuff.

Kent Clizbe: He goes, yeah, it’s just speculation, you know? I mean, it does, he doesn’t say I was taking drugs and this happened.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: But he, he says something shifted a voice in my head. I felt like I was neo in the matrix. He’s describing a psychedelic experience.

That’s what it feels like to take psychedelics. He goes on to say, now I was into the hardcore persuasion stuff this first time. It worked so well. I thought I’m going to prison. I’m breaking the rules of reality. Wait, wait, what? What? Rules of reality. Only the only way you’d say that is if you’re taking drugs.

And then what does he say? It was addicting. Dude. Drugs are addicting to live in a reality that others don’t live in. How do you get into a reality others don’t live in? You drop acid.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I mean, you

Kent Clizbe: take MDMA

Zach Elwood: or it was like a narcissistic or it was like a psychotic break. Who knows? You know, but there’s some, it’s also just interesting for like, him

Kent Clizbe: drugs.

I, I would, my, yeah, we

Zach Elwood: don’t,

Kent Clizbe: my educated assessment is, yeah, I, this is a, a, a drug. He, he, he had life changing experiences taking some kind of, or multiple kinds of drugs. And now he goes on to say, well, this isn’t hyperbole, this is legit shit. I now, I tried to use my new skills and I was very successful. I was the king of the detainee facility.

I had all the tricks,

Chase Hughes: but it’s, it’s addicting because you get, you live in a re a layer of reality that other people don’t live in. And that’s not even, I’m not, that’s not hyperbole. That’s. Legit shit like aren’t you’re seeing stuff nobody else is gonna see.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: So that is, it gets so addictive because every time you get better at it and you start seeing this next layer and next layer, you can’t stop chasing layers because every time you’re like, there’s gotta be something even more than this and more.

So that’s been the en entire past 30 years of my life is what’s the next layer? What’s the next level?

Merlin O’Brecht: Like a never ending onion, I think. Ever use that pineapple.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, it’s true. And that’s, uh, I’m probably 29 or so, 28 at this point. 25.

Merlin O’Brecht: When we, when you first got obsessed with bi language, human behavior.

Chase Hughes: 19.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah. That was, so that was, so that was still at the very beginning of the journey.

Chase Hughes: Oh yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: So then, and that was still when you were doing the deckhand work.

Chase Hughes: Yep.

Merlin O’Brecht: And so when you start doing the detaining job, whatever you’re doing there, you’ve already now got a fascination in psychology. You’ve already got some pretty key skills in terms of understanding human beings and human behavior and even understanding influence a little bit.

So you’re probably starting to, I would imagine, look at everything that’s going on as the depend situation from a lens that maybe most people aren’t.

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. And I’m trying to use those things as much as I can. And they were very successful. Extremely successful. And they’re not even the level of NCI one, like our, the primary course of ncis.

Wow. It’s not even that level. And it was like, you are the king of this detaining facility. You’ve got all of these tricks and tactics and stuff, and they were just so basic. Wow.

Kent Clizbe: What, what is the hell are you talking

Zach Elwood: about?

Kent Clizbe: Yeah.

Zach Elwood: It’s, and and again, all this stuff is so ambiguous. He’s like, I saw through the Matrix I was doing amazing things, but he is, it is like, what were you doing?

What was so amazing? It, nothing you’ve described sounds impressive. It just sounds like psychotic or drug induced or something. Yeah. It,

Kent Clizbe: it’s, it’s a dude on drugs. So then, then in, in this, the only experience that he shares in this, uh, in, in the life story is his, his interviewer. Ask him, can, can you share any experience, uh, about, you know, be your behavioral expertise or give mind control?

Zach Elwood: Give us something.

Kent Clizbe: Give us something. He goes, well, um, I’ll tell you one story.

Chase Hughes: So in, uh, Kauai, there’s a mall, like a big outdoor mall. It’s called Ala one Mall. Yeah, it’s huge. It’s, it’s beautiful. It, in this mall, there were two separate Abercrombie and Fitch stores.

Merlin O’Brecht: Okay,

Chase Hughes: there’s a men’s store and a women’s store, right?

Uh, I 20 something years old, young kid go and get a night job at nights and weekends working at the Women’s Abercrombie store. Uh, and that is where I practice a lot of this behavior stuff and behavior profiling and, and influence and persuasion stuff. And that was where I kind of got a lot of like the anxiety that anybody, when they start learning, especially that the influence stuff, they start learning some of these methods and they’re like, well, I won’t say that out loud, but like, right.

I, I need to be in a really, really low stake situation. That’s the place where I got all of that out of my system. Uh, so it was the perfect probing ground for me anyway. And I loved doing that. Even if we’re, you know, like standing shirtless of. Front of the store during the holidays or whatever. Uh, we, I could still, there was someone there.

There’s always someone there and they’re, they’re paid to just stand there. You know, it was, it was the perfect scenario for me to start working on some of this stuff and just kind of piecing some of these pieces together that I’ve been wondering about.

Kent Clizbe: And that’s it. That’s it. He, he, he doesn’t say, he doesn’t say, you know, exactly what he was doing.

He doesn’t say what the results were. It’s just, and, and now I, I didn’t know about, uh, the, the timeline of the pickup bullshit, but obviously that’s what he’s describing here. He was going to pick up girls in this Abercrombie and Fitch Women’s store, and it worked. Whatever it is. He was doing work and he decides that it’s behavior profiling, influence, persuasion, and I guess, I guess you could call it that, you know, the pickup artist is kinda bullshit.

Uh, but that, that’s it. That in his life story, that this is his only be, besides the one, the guy, the big guy on the beach when he had a surge of empathy and it changed his life. And he went to Abercrombie and Fitch women’s store. That’s, and did something.

Zach Elwood: That was an

Kent Clizbe: amazing story. Yeah, that’s, that was a perfect proving ground for him.

So that’s, that’s Chase Hughes, uh, life and how, nothing, there’s nothing in it to the, he has no expertise. Uh, developed externally. He has no job related training. There’s nothing in his background in the military that has anything to do with mind control, brainwashing behavior any more than any other jail guard has, is, is a behavior expert.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I mean, it’s nice of him to put out the information to help us, you know, support what we already knew, to put out his own information on that. Um, and then, you know, there were, we’re not even getting into the many ridiculous things. He still claims about his abilities to mind read and brainwash people in a few seconds, like he talked about on Joe Rogan.

Chase Hughes: I, I mean, I may the number one guy in the country on the mind control stuff. There are step-by-step programs they have for creating a mentor candidate.

Joe Rogan: Okay. Like, what’s step one? How do you know when you can get a guy to be a mentor and candidate?

Zach Elwood: Stuff that’s clearly. Completely fantasy, and we’re not even getting into him selling vitamin supplements and claiming these vitamin supplements were used by the armed forces and, you know, just bullshit.

Just the amount of, immense amount of bullshit he spread and continues to spread about all sorts of things. So it’s like he can try to manage this thing, you know, try to put out his own version of it and speak in ambiguous ways. But I mean, the only people he is fooling are people that are already kind of, kind of got down the Chase hug fan rabbit hole at this point.

Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: I, I, I gave up a long time ago trying to analyze why people fall for Con Men, because this guy’s a con man.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: He’s, he’s full of shit. He makes claims that are total bullshit. He implies that he has background and expertise that he doesn’t have, but people fall for it. Yeah. And, and I study cons. I study scams.

I got scammed when I, a couple times when I was young. And you know, I’ve, I’ve been kind, so I know that people get conned for different reasons, but everybody’s different. And I gave up trying to figure out why people fall for the con. All I can do is, is provide a glimpse at reality, uh, of, of the conman.

Here’s what his claims are, here’s the actual background of this guy. Here’s my professional assessment of where his claims come from. And then you gotta use that yourself. If you’re a potential victim, you gotta use this information I’m providing you to make your own decision. Am I gonna give this guy $10,000 to go eat peyote mushrooms and chant in Mexico and change my life?

Or am I gonna. Do something productive of my life. It’s up to you. I don’t know why people fall for this.

Zach Elwood: I mean, the un the unfortunate thing is a lot of the people that get into this are vulnerable people. Like I’ve shared with you some messages that came to me, people thinking that my site was Chase Hughes, very emotionally, psychologically, vulnerable people, several people.

And then I’ve heard people have sent me stories about their family members or, or friends who are emotionally vulnerable and been kind of treating, uh, chase. I mean, chase clearly wants to become some sort of guru, uh, cult leader personality. Now he’s doing all these videos about how we live in a simulation and you can control it and, you know, that just all this kind of stuff you would see from a, you know, a wild cult leader.

So the sad thing is a lot of people that get drawn into this are just emotionally vulnerable and they’re the most at risk for like, spending way too much and having their minds warped and yeah, it’s, it’s sad. Really. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: And that’s who. Con men are looking for, they’re looking for a weak point. Mm-hmm.

And you just, you throw out enough stuff to enough people and you’ll find the, the weak points there.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So good. You’re doing a great job, Zach. I sure hope that, uh, that people will hear this and take heed and avoid this conman.

Zach Elwood: So that was really only scratching the surface of Chase Hughes Origins and his rise to fame.

We didn’t even get into the tale of how he came to work with the Behavior Panel, the show that was the main factor in his rise to online popularity whose members teamed with him, despite his many obvious red flags in a video, the Behavior Panel released talking about their origins, Mark Bowden had admitted to wanting to partner with Chase, despite there being almost nothing about Chase online.

And again, despite Chase climbing for years on his website to be well known and famous for his work.

Mark Bowden: Well, I didn’t know Chase at the time because Chase wasn’t kind of out there at the time. You were still I

Chase Hughes: was active duty

Mark Bowden: You were still active duty at the, at the time. So nobody knew that you were, you were around at at the time.

Um. When the guy who was buying his dinner had had said, you guys should get together. I kind of searched around the internet and I found a video of you and I found a video of you you’d gone to, I think it was Colgate. Was it Colgate?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Colgate University.

Mark Bowden: Colgate University. And you were coming out of Colgate University and you’d been doing some research there, um, into

Chase Hughes: MK Ultra.

Mark Bowden: Yeah. And, and you were talking about the cubic feet of documents that you, you’d, you’d been through and you were saying some names of some people that I recognize and not everybody would really recognize. Yeah. And you were talking about their documents in Cubic feet. And I instantly went

Chase Hughes: 36.

Mark Bowden: Oh, this guy is, um, is serious.

Like this is a serious person.

Zach Elwood: So Mark can’t find anything about this guy who claims to be a behavior and psychology expert, but what the hell Chase looked like he was doing smart stuff. After all, clearly only true intellectuals are able to talk about the volume of documents. This, I think, says a lot about Mark Bowden and about the Behavior Panel in general.

They are, like Chase, unethical and irresponsible. They clearly don’t care about the truth about body, language and behavior, just as they clearly don’t care about partnering with and promoting a con artist. It also says a lot that when I tried to bring this to the attention of the behavior panel members back in 2024, when I first released my first Chase Hughes episode, I was insulted by Mark Bowden several times on LinkedIn who accused me of just trying to promote myself.

The other members only ignored me as I expected them to in the first place. I think Mark Bowden lashing out at me is perhaps a sign that he has some internal conflict and guilt about his initial decision to partner with Chase Hughes and help him achieve popularity and exploit vulnerable people. Now, apparently the YouTube money train is rolling and it’s just too good to get off.

Sad stuff. In a future video, I might step through that behavior panel origin video and do what they do. See if I can find a few interesting clues and tidbits in their statements and behavior.

I’ll leave you with a clip from an interview that Chase Hughes did in January of 2022 with Theresa Carpenter, who has a military focused podcast and who actually knew Chase a bit during the Navy.

I think it might give some psychological insight into the immense fear that motivates Chase and other grandiose serial liars like him. Or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it’s just another story, another distraction, another lie.

Theresa Carpenter: And then as you were transitioning out of the Navy, you started this path into entrepreneurship.

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Chase Hughes: I did. I wanted to, I had a moment that, uh, changed my life when I was a young kid in the military and I was like. I had to be 19 years old. And when you’re 19, you’re, you know, you’re in the Navy, a master chief is like the god, God Yes. Of the, of the entire ship.

Marc the Beginning host: Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes: And like flawless Oh yeah. Doesn’t make mistakes. Uh, mostly because they did, they do set a pretty good example. They do. And so we had a master chief on, uh, on the ship when I was young. He retired and two weeks later, uh, you know, I assumed he’s gonna go, I’m young, right. So I’m thinking he’s gonna go be the CEO of like Southwest Airlines.

Right. Or like, he’s gonna go like, run the country somehow. Right. Because he’s, he’s a master chief and two weeks later I see him organizing CDs in Circuit City.

Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes: Back when we had Circuit City.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Chase Hughes: And he was wearing a Navy veteran like ball cap and. I didn’t go up to him because I was kind of embarrassed for him.

I’m sure he had plenty of money, like tons to do.

Theresa Carpenter: Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes: Um, but I lost sleep over that. I literally lost sleep and I was terrified most of my career that the Navy would be the best thing that I had ever done. And then once I got out, then my days, you know mm-hmm. Would be over, like my life would. Right.

You know, my biggest achievements were behind me at that point. Right. And that was my biggest fear. So I started like 10 years before I left the Navy, I started building this stuff and I was obsessed with human behavior. So I just started doing as much as I possibly could to manufacture content and do as much I wanted to outwork every psychology researcher in the United States, and I wanted to do more research than anybody and figure things out that hadn’t been figured out before.

Theresa Carpenter: And you did that.

Zach Elwood: Music by small skies.