This is a follow up to my last episode, where I shared information I’d learned about the many lies of Chase Hughes, the self-described “#1 expert in behavior and influence.” Some of the fans of Chase Hughes and the show he’s on, The Behavior Panel, responded in angry, unreasonable ways, personally insulting me and downplaying the significance of Chase’s many deceptions. Some of the people who responded in these ways, from what I’ve been told, are also social media content moderators who work for Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel. In this episode, I examine these behaviors and talk about how this ties in with similar things, like people taking it personally when political leaders they like are criticized, or cult members taking criticisms of cult leaders personally, things like this. I talk about how this relates to how people respond when their sense of meaning is threatened. I read some of the more angry and emotional YouTube comments people sent me. I read some of the more angry and emotional YouTube comments people sent me.
A transcript is below.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
Last week I did an expose of Chase Hughes. Chase bills himself as the “#1 expert in behavior and influence” and is known by a lot of people for his work on the youtube show the Behavior Panel, for appearing on Dr. Phil, and more. But his background is full of obvious deceptions, both large and small; deceptions so bold and weird that, to me, they veer into the pathological when you consider how unlikely it would be for someone to expect to get away with such things. In this episode, I’ll give a quick synopsis of that work, and then talk about some of the angry responses I got from some fans of Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel. Their angry responses are interesting; they are good examples of how emotional and psychological investment in people or ideas can make people really resistant to seeing things clearly; we can feel a desire to lash out when our sense of meaning or our quote “team” is threatened.
Most of those angry comments came in the form of comments on my youtube video, so you might enjoy going to check those out. And I’m sure they’ll be some more on this video. This topic is the gift that keeps on giving. I think there’s a documentary to be made out of this, honestly. Lots of video material to use.
And, yes, I’ll be doing more episodes in the near future on these topics; specifically about the content of what Chase Hughes teaches and some of the things discussed on the Behavior Panel. There’s a lot of stuff to talk about there.
Also, I want to say that I’m getting over some sickness now. I worked way too hard on that video last weekend, working some late nights, and I’d gotten myself sick, so I just wanted to apologize if my voice and demeanor seem a bit rough.
When I made the last video about Chase, I also wrote a synopsis of the major points on the blog post for that episode. If you want to read that longer synopsis, go to behavior-podcast.com to find it. But I’ll quickly summarize the most important aspects of what I found and why it’s important.
Chase Hughes has a long history of deception, going back to 2007 when he was selling his RedShift vitamin supplements and claiming they were used by the armed forces in America and were internationally known. Using specific time range searches, we can see there’s basically no mention of that product online in that time period.
Only four years after deceptively promoting his vitamin supplements, in 2012, Chase set up his chasehughes.com site where he aimed to sell behavior and influence products and training.
Just as with his vitamin supplements and his earlier pick-up artist work, he claims to have all sorts of secret knowledge in terms of being able to read people in extremely improbable ways and even control people’s minds. For people who know anything about behavior and psychology, his claims are off-the-charts absurd. It’s obvious even Chase eventually realized they were absurd because he removed most of the more absurd claims off his sites as time went on and he got more real-world attention. Thank god for the Internet Archive, is all I can say; they run the Wayback Machine, which saves old versions of websites. They’re the true heroes in this; again, consider donating to them.
There’s a lot more, so much really that it’s hard to know how to briefly summarize it, but that’s the gist of it. His claims about the things he’s accomplished are smoke and mirrors.
And I have even more details about Chase now than I did when I made the video. For one thing, I found another site of his, ChaseHughesTraining.com which is no longer public but makes some claims about his service in the Navy and his military intelligence work that contradict other things he’s said and other things that people who have interacted with Chase have sent me. For example, one person told me that apparently Chase avoids telling fellow Navy people his military occupational speciality, AKA his MOS; and this is a pretty strange thing to avoid teling people. But I’ll save those details for a later day; none of this kind of avoidant and ambiguous behavior is that surprising if you read about his many deceptions. But if you worked with Chase in the Navy and know about the work he did, or if you’ve got any interesting story to share about Chase, and want to send me some information, use the contact form on my site behavior-podcast.com
So I thought it’d be interesting to read some of the negative comments I got from Chase Hughes fans.
The thing that’s interesting about these comments, to me, is the amount of emotion people have around this. These are good examples of how our emotions can twist and distort our perspectives. When we like someone, or when we’re invested in something, that can really prevent us from seeing things clearly. I think this basic psychological dynamic relates to so many things in our lives; from something as banal as how we may too readily excuse bad behaviors of our friends and family members; all the way to more darker versions of that dynamic, including extreme political polarization and tribalism and cult psychology.
Some of the extreme emotional responses and lashing out from Chase Hughes fans remind me of how fans of political leaders can lash out when those leaders are criticized, no matter how measured and reasonable the criticism is; just as it’s similar to how cult members can lash out at criticisms of the cult leaders even when the criticism is reasonable. And these things often have a personal dynamic; our bond to someone can make insults to them . That’s something I’ve thought a lot about in the political sphere in my work on polarization-related topics.
Then there’s the element of how investing our time and emotions into something can lead to us getting angry when the meaning of those things are threatened. I have a previous episode about threats to meaning; which was one of my favorite episodes; talking about how we can become destabilized when our sense of meaning is threatened, and how that can manifest in the form of lashing out, and seeking to punish those who threaten our narratives. If you’d built up a narrative where Chase’s ideas are a big part of your worldview, and especially if you’ve actually spent a good deal of money on Chase’s products, it’s easy to see how learning about his many deceptions would threaten your investments and narratives; it could make you feel like the rug had been pulled out from under you in a major way. This destabiliziation might make you seek to lash out to try to defend that meaning, those narratives. You might, as they say, seek to punish the messenger; and try to show why I’m the faulty one; how this is not a story about Chase but about me. And you’ll see a lot of that in the comments, with people insulting me, questioning my qualifications.
One interesting aspect of how this played out in the responses was a few people who tried to analyze my minor gestures and behaviors; these behavior analysis fans have embraced a faulty worldview where people’s minor, trivial gestures contain a lot of meaning; instead of focusing on important facts and thinking critically about those facts, they spend their time worrying about minor gestures, trying to use ambiguous behavioral ideas not to find the truth, but in service of filtering for minor things to help defend their existing worldviews and biases. Some of these behavior analysis fans have been taught to think that they’re in possession of some secret, powerful knowledge about behavior; and this is part of the appeal of this behavior analysis and psychological influence space — and just as in the case of cults, who also traffic in secret, powerful knowledge, people invested in those ideas don’t take kindly to that sense of meaning and power being threatened.
And again, to be clear, Chase Hughes fans; again, I’m not saying you’re in a cult, I’m just saying these sources of bias and cognitive dissonance are all around us, for so many things, big and small. I think as time goes by and more comes out, you’ll come around to seeing Chase Hughes the way he deserves to be seen – and when that day comes, maybe you’ll be willing to reach out to me to tell me how your views changed over time. I’m interested in how and why people change their minds. And I’ve already had a few people who started out angry at me and then, when they looked at the evidence, apologized to me a
Since releasing the video last week, I’ve also had some people who have been in the Chase Hughes and Behavior Panel circles reach out to me to volunteer information. Some of them described some toxic patterns in both the fan circles and also in the social media moderator circles; they described a cult-like, bullying atmoshpere where any criticism or disagreement was dealt with very harshly. One person said that the Behavior Panel moderators are closely connected to Chase Hughes. A couple people described the use of fake accounts to criticize and denigrate people like myself who criticized the Behavior Panel or Chase Hughes; for example, one person said that a Melissa Rundt, who left an insulting comment on my youtube video, was a social media content moderator for the Behavior Panel; another person formerly in that inner circle said that it was possible Melissa Rundt was a fake account actually run by someone who goes by “Sober Sadie” online. Another person said that some of the people involved might reach out to me pretending to be people with complaints about Chase Hughes, in order to gain my trust and deceive me or keep tabs on what I was doing; I was warned about several accounts specifically. I don’t know the truth about all these things, and honestly I don’t really care to know all the details. The relevant takeaway really is that there seems to be a toxic and cult-like dynamic going on in these circles.
And I’ll also say that all this isn’t surprising to me; Chase Hughes comes from the Neuro Linguistic Programming world, a lot of the dumb influence and manipulation ideas he’s spread in his books and resources are from the NLP world. And I’ve had experiences with that world before. Back in 2008 I worked for 6 months for an NLP seminar guy. I never was a believer in NLP stuff; there are a few okay ideas in the mix, but mainly it’s a lot of bullshit and exaggerated claims. I took that job mainly because I thought it would make for some interesting stories. And it sure did. I could talk for a while about those experiences, and I may do that in future. But long story short, I saw a lot of the same narcissistic and deceptive and immoral behaviors, both from the NLP seminar guy and the people in his circle. They were able to justify these bad behaviors because, in their minds, they were, so to speak, doing such amazingly good things; they saw their quote “mission”, which is really what the NLP trainer called it, as so important that they were justified in doing whatever benefited that mission.
This is the same dynamic that reigns in any group who feels at war with the world, whether political or religious or whatever ; they convince themselves that the ends justify the means. This is how they’re able to keep seeing themselves as the “good guys” even as they engage in insults and character assasination and lies. Another interesting aspect to all that: the people in these manipulation-centric worlds think they’re much smarter than they are; Because they’ve drank the kool aid of believing that their gurus and they themselves have amazing people reading abilities and amazing powers of influence and manipulation, they aren’t able to see that their machinations and strategies are childish and silly; They don’t see that all the psychological trickery and complex fake-spy bullshit in the world can obscure people doing obviously bad and deceptive and bullshit-y things. Sorry, guys, Chase Hughes isn’t going to magically Jason Bourne himself out of this scrape. You’re not secret covert operatives. This ain’t the movies. It’s not Scoobie Doo. I’m sure it’s fun and all but time to face the music.
And I’d fully expect that some of these people are digging into my past to try to find something to discredit me; even if just to hurt me, even if doing that doesn’t matter at all to helping Chase Hughes’ credibility and public image. And if someone listening to this is trying to do that, let me save you some time; you won’t be able to find stuff in my past to hurt me; unlike Chase, most people don’t go around deceiving people. So you can just skip ahead to making stuff up about me; I’m trying to save you some time.
Another interesting thing about the Chase Hughes and Behavior Panel fans and moderators: they are almost entirely women. For example, when I was perusing one of Chase Hughes’ recent posts on Facebook that had hundreds of comments, about 95% of the responses were from women. Pretty much all of the accounts marked ‘top fan’ on Facebook were women. And I think this relates to the true crime audience demographic and also to the celebrity gossip demographic; a lot of the people who follow the Behavior Panel and Chase Hughes are into true crime stuff, and it’s known that’s made up primarily of women; a lot of the fans also seem to be into celebrity gossip (for example, I saw one fan of theirs frequently asking for more analysis of people in the royal family); and that demographic also skews highly female. This demographic aspect of the fan base can also help explain some of the youtube comments I got that talk about how charismatic Chase is, and even some that reference his attractiveness. Just to say; there’s some interesting dynamics going on here.
Okay so I’ll read some of these comments. Again, this is a youtube video so I’ll be sharing the video of this as I scroll through them. So the video might be more entertaining if you’re listening on audio. What patterns do you notice in these angry and defensive comments? What behavioral cues stand out to you? What deductions can you make about the people leaving them? Leave your comments about these comments
[READS VARIOUS NEGATIVE AND INSULTING COMMENTS; SEE YOUTUBE VIDEO]
Well, that was fun. Hit the subscribe button on my youtube channel to stay in the loop about all breaking news related to Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, jealous hater Zachary Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com
Music by Small Skies.