A deep dive on NLP, and its use by Chase Hughes and other con artists and false gurus

Have you heard of neurolinguistic programming? Also known as NLP. Chances are you've probably heard about it. It's a quite popular thing. NLP is the conceptual framework behind Tony Robbins and a slew of other popular people in the motivational seminar world. There's a chance you may have wondered, what's the deal with this NLP stuff? Is it legitimate or is it? Are some parts of it legitimate and some parts not?

I myself have worked in the NLP world for 6 months in 2008. I worked for a fairly well-known NLP trainer. I took the job knowing that it would be a strange and interesting experience and would likely give me some good stories. It did result in me experiencing a lot of strange and interesting and just plain weird things. It also resulted in me going down the rabbit hole of what this whole NLP thing was. I wanted to understand this strange and often creepy world I suddenly found myself in. I'm Zach Elwood and this is the People Who Read People podcast. A podcast aimed at better understanding the people around us and better understanding ourselves.

A few weeks ago, I was invited on Chris Shelton's podcast, which is called Speaking of Cults. Chris is a former Scientologist. He was actually raised in that world and was in it for 25 years. Chris has a book titled Scientology A to Zenu. Now, for his podcast, he examines cult-like phenomena in various areas of society. Chris read and watched a few of my episodes exposing the con artist and wannabe guru Chase Hughes. Chase is a rather obvious charlatan who has told many easily disprovable lies and exaggerations about his career and experiences and has made and continues to make comically absurd claims about what's possible with hypnosis and mind control. I knew Chase was almost certainly a charlatan when I first heard him speak for like a minute on Jordan Harbinger's podcast. And yet, Chase has succeeded in getting on some popular shows and podcasts like Joe Rogan's and Diary of a CEO and Dr. Phil's online show and more. Chase has been promoted by some big names and gets millions of views. Over the past few months, he's been leading more into the spiritual, metaphysical, all-knowing guru realm with his content. And from the reports that people currently or formerly in his inner circle send me. And based on the fawning adoration you can find from various people online, Chase does seem to be establishing a cult-like following. My personal opinion based on various reports people have sent me is that we'll one day hear in the news some strange and troubling things about Chase Hughes. I don't think it will end well is what I'm saying.

So Chris wanted to talk to me about Chase Hughes and about Chase's neurolinguistic programming origins and more generally about the NLP world and what NLP is all about and how Chase's work ties into other NLP or NLP-adjacent trainers and faux gurus. We also talk about the good and the bad of NLP. I talk about some of the more positive things I saw in it. And some of those positive things help explain why people can report genuinely good experiences about going to those seminars and getting those types of trainings. Until Chris did this episode, as far as I know, I've been the only person to cover the con artistry and lies of Chase Hughes. You would think Dr. Phil and Joe Rogan and the popular Diary of a CEO podcast promoting an obvious liar and charlatan to millions of people would be bigger news worthy of at least one article somewhere. But I think the fact that no one else has covered this says a lot about where we are as a society. There's just so much and nonsense around us and so many people promoting so many dumb ideas that this stuff, as weird and surprising as it is, doesn't really even register. And of course, news organizations are in a tough spot these days. There's less money than ever for investigative journalism and there's just so much more important seeming things in the world of politics and such to cover. Chris and I at the end of our talk get on the topic of political polarization and how Joe Rogan's popularity and Chase's popularity relate to that topic.

So, this is a re-share of Chris's October 11th episode, which was titled Speaking of Cults, Chase Hughes, and the NLP Grift. If you like this talk, you might like Chris's podcast. Again, it's on YouTube and is titled Speaking of Cults. Okay, here's the episode. The Speaking of Cults podcast is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from it is at the user's own risk. The views, information, or opinions expressed by the host and guests are solely those of the individuals involved and do not constitute medical or other professional advice.

Have you ever watched a mesmerizing self-help seminar, read a book that promised to unlock the secrets of your mind, or seen an online ad for a course in covert persuasion? It's a multi-million dollar industry built on a single seductive promise that there's a hidden system to control your life, your success, and even the people around you. But what are the roots of that promise? It leads us back to the 1970s and the invention of neurolinguistic programming, NLP, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They claimed to have cracked the code of human excellence. But from the very beginning, it was a theory heavy on anecdote and light on real science. Despite being consistently debunked as pseudoscience, NLP became a perfect vehicle for entrepreneurs of influence. It created a playbook. A playbook that was masterfully used by Tony Robbins, who trained with the founders, repackaged their ideas into his own system, and built a billion-dollar empire on mass seminars and motivational entertainment. And that same playbook is being used today by a new generation of gurus. They've swapped the giant arenas for YouTube channels and online courses, but the core grift is the same. Selling the illusion of psychological expertise to a world hungry for easy answers.

One of these modern figures is Chase Hughes. He claims to be a best-selling author, but that description is so vague it doesn't mean anything. He's been featured on major media platforms and he sells high-priced trainings on what he calls behavioral analysis. He uses the slick language of a behavioral psychologist without seeming to have any professional experience or training to back it up. So when you pull on that thread, the entire tapestry unravels. His credentials appear to be manufactured. His past includes ventures into the world of pickup artistry. His so-called science is a remix of those same old debunked NLP principles lacking any of the peer-reviewed validation that real psychology demands. So, how does this decades-old grift keep evolving? How do figures like Hughes build their credibility? And who is most at risk of being exploited by their claims? Today, we're going to pull back the curtain on the entire industry. I'm speaking with Zach Elwood, the researcher who has been meticulously investigating Chase Hughes, exposing the lies, and tracing them right back to the well-established playbook of pseudoscientific entrepreneurship. This is a deep dive into how the legacy of NLP fuels modern manipulation and how we can learn to be more critical consumers. Now, here's Zach Elwood.

Okay. Hi, Zach. Welcome to my show and thank you very much for agreeing to be here with me today.

Hey Chris, honor to be here. Thank you. Yeah, I I um it's very funny to me how I have sort of dived into this today, how we've arrived here today, because for for a number of years, people have thrown at me the relationship between the CIA and Scientology. And there are you you probably don't even know or need to know. I mean there are just so many weird conspiracy theories in the ex-cult world about cults that people have been involved in and they start drawing comparisons between, you know, government and this and that and, you know, various things and and Scientology has been the subject of a great deal of conspiracy theories and it was always something that I sort of um dismiss out of hand because as you point out in your own videos and uh, you know, we both end up quoting Carl Sagan, right? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and no one ever really brings any real evidence. They just, you know, connect these dots of insinuation between the CIA and, you know, mind control and then, yo, well, groups like Scientology, they do mind control, so it all must be one big thing, right? And so this has been thrown at me a number of times. But but Chase Hughes is somebody out there who made a very specific claim about the connection between the CIA and Scientology and that's how he came into my space. I had never even heard of this guy and you know you see videos here and there and stuff like that but I never really paid a lot of attention and this claim comes along and I took him at his word that this is a behavioral expert kind maybe he, you know, the way he talks he infers he maybe worked for the CIA at one point or contracted with them or something. There's all these insinuations and I just kind of he's on Joe Rogan. He gets on these big podcasts. So, I figured this is a legit guy and he's just making this really sort of, you know, fantastical claim. And so, I took it apart and realized, no, he's not just somebody who knows what he's talking about making one false claim. He he's really lying through his teeth about this connection, banking on the fact that most people don't know enough about Scientology to debunk what he just said, but I do. So, I was like, wait a minute. And that opened the door to well who is this guy? And the more I looked into him, the more I found your work coming up because you have done some championship work debunking this guy. And I watched your videos on this and and and you know track the links and was like, "Oh my god, this is a whole other form of grift."

So, we're talking today because I have been skirting around the subject of neurolinguistic programming for years without ever really diving into it. And um and now I have this opportunity with you uh to do so and now comment on not only Chase Hughes but this entire sort of semi-industry that sort of sits I think adjacent to the manosphere really. you know, online and and sort of sells people this bill of goods about how easy it is to crack the code of human behavior and and sort of manipulation and covert control of people. And it all sort of feeds into this basket of I'm just trying to get a leg up by controlling and manipulating other people without them knowing I'm doing that. And that's this whole sort of Chase is one part of this whole industry of people going back to Tony Robbins and the neurolinguistic programming people. Uh and this goes all the way back to the you know late '70s and 1980s.

So ancient history in some people's minds but not. Yeah, the the EST there was the EST there was transformational seminars various sorts. Yeah. There were there were all those things started back in the Yeah. The '70s. Oh, '70s was a wild time for that stuff.

So, um, so, so, so now maybe so having introed all of that, right? So, let's start, let's start off with, uh, just a little bit of who you are and and how you came into this whole thing because that's how I came into this conversation today. What's your general background and uh, approach to how you ended up making videos debunking Chase Hughes?

Yeah, it's a twisted long and twisted road. Uh, windy road, I guess. Not twisted. Um, sounds bad. Yeah, twisted a little bit. A twisted road. Um, yeah. So, my my path to it was I used to play poker for a living. Um, that led to me writing some Poker Tells books, uh, how to read people. I've always been interested in psychology. Psychology. That was the one of the reasons I was interested in poker from a young age. Um, but then even apart from that uh well, yeah, there's two paths to it because the poker stuff led to me creating the general mainstream psychology and behavior podcast. So, that's one element of it. But then also back in 2008, uh back when, you know, the recession hit, I was having a hard time finding work and I went to I got a job working for this NLP uh seminar trainer guy for like 6 months. So, I got an inside uh view of this world, which to me I just found really fascinating. Uh I went down the rabbit hole of like, what the heck is this stuff? cuz I knew I almost didn't take the job cuz I knew it was going to be wacky. Uh but that's why I took that's why I ended up taking it. I was like, well, you know, I don't plan on doing it for a long time. There's not many jobs out there. I'll work for this guy for, you know, a few months and I get some good stories out of it. So, but yeah, and while I was there, I did a lot of research about what the heck are all these ideas? What's going on with this stuff? And I always wanted to write something, you know, longer form, like an article or maybe even a book about it, but it never got around to it. But then so the later when I had written my poker books and started doing my podcast uh that that led to me being more aware of this behavior and psychology grift going on just by studying, you know, what to do for my podcast. I was like who are all these what is all this stuff you know uh behavior panel uh Chase Hughes and various other people hypnotist kind of people. Um, so that led to me corresponding with, you know, actual legitimate behavior psychology researchers, including some people I've had on my podcast. And so I've kept in the loop about, you know, what they're saying about these guys and we correspond about them sometimes. And so that that kind of get makes me feel like I'm, you know, even even though I I'm just an amateur psychologist myself, you know, self-taught, um, it makes me feel good that I correspond with these people who know more about it and, you know, draw my attention to to specific things that are completely outlandish and absurd. So yeah, that's a that's a a long story short of how I got into doing this. And specifically for the Chase Hughes, I listened to him on a podcast briefly on Jordan Harbinger and I immediately like heard many red flags within like the first minute where I was like this is very strange. Like I don't I I got to look into this guy. So then like a few months later I finally looked into him and it was so much more grifty and con artisty than I ever imagined. Like I I just expected to find like exaggerations, but like I didn't expect to find the just the abundance of unethical behavior and li and just exaggerations about his, you know, uh career and his accomplishments on like every every facet of everything he'd done just full of, you know, exaggeration and lies. So, uh that was a doozy. That was really eye-opening. But it was also eye-opening seeing how nobody really pushes back on this stuff. Like in the world that he's in, like the behavior panel show that he's in and these various people that he associates with, nobody pushes back. Nobody nobody cares that you can look up and find the many things he's lied about. You know, see the ridiculous claims he's made on his website. Uh fact check them. You know, nobody seems to be interested in vetting, which explains why it's kind of a snowball effect. He basically has gotten famous, internet famous by appearing on podcasts. So he goes from one podcast to another and it keep he keeps leveling up because it eventually gets to where Joe Rogan's like, "Oh, he's been on Diary of a CEO podcast. He's been on these other podcasts. They must have vetted him. He must be legitimate." And they just I think they just invite him on without even vetting him because you can, you know, you can easily find my work drawing attention to as many lies and ridiculous things. Uh, but I think, you know, that that helps explain how easy it is to fool people these days because, you know, my my work is buried under the results of all the podcasts and stuff he's done. If you look for Chase Hughes, it's, you know, they it's easy to win the the SEO battles online and and if you win the SEO battles, the the the actual factchecking, you know, especially for more online famous people, uh, you know, the amount of stuff interviews he's done way outweighs like the factchecking stuff, right? So that help that helps explain like even in the internet age, you know, it' it's very easy to fool people and create a a false front of expertise basically.

Absolutely. It's it's really this I mean people have asked me if L. Ron Hubbard would be able to pull off Scientology now with the internet and I have to say well yes of course he would because it's not because of how clever he is and it's not because the information wouldn't be there to find but because people just don't look. They literally just won't pick up the keyboard and type in the words and it would take you 60 seconds if you if you just typed in Chase Hughes debug unk or you know neurolinguistic programming debunk or reviews or fact check or anything. You could find this information. It's not hard to find. Now, you went above and beyond because you even pulled out, you know, Wayback Machine stuff to go back to his earlier websites and really dig up the stuff that he's been trying to cleanse from the internet, his old pickup artist days, and get a woman, you know, all over you in an hour, you know, back when he was. Did you ever find out what it was? I just just because I'm curious. Did you ever find out what it was he actually did in the military?

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. Multiple people have told me that he's um a quarter he was a quartermaster in the Navy. Uh which is basically like ship operations and maintenance kind of stuff. Right? I knew it was something like that. I knew it had to be something like that. There's no no evidence that he's and he and he's very careful these days to be very vague about his wording of it. He wants to imply that he did some intelligence or psychology related thing, right? So you got you really got to watch the ambiguous language, right? where like even including things like I've trained uh Navy Seals that could apply to like literally one Navy Seal that came to one of his like classes, right? Like that's ambiguous. You really got to watch the ambiguous language, right?

That's right. Oh, completely. And this is this is exactly how Hubbard grifted. I mean, it's the the con is the con is the con, right? It's all about telling what Hubbard even actually documented it in Scientology materials when he said, you tell an acceptable truth. You you tell the truth the person is is willing to accept rather than the actual facts. And so, you know, Hubbard flunks out of uh one of the first classes on atomic and molecular phenomena school at university, which he flunked out of entirely. They didn't even get through university. But then later on, I was a member of the first class on atomic and molecular, you know, fission. And he claims to be a nuclear physicist, a nuclear engineer in the 1950s when, you know, you'd have to dig up his class records. And who's going to do that in 1950 to fact check him, right? So, so they count on the laziness and the inability of people to go look and and back up their claims, right?

And to your point to your point too, and we'll probably we could talk about this more, but to your point about like it doesn't require any special skill. All it requires is the the the personality type to make extreme claims and extreme lies. And really, it comes down to just people mainly being gullible and not fact-checking, right? like it doesn't there's not many other explanations needed because it really it just it is obviously easy to fool people because most people just are are pretty gullible. A lot of people don't know about the subject matter and then also added on the top to the cult you know kind of aspect too. A lot of people just aren't doing well emotionally psychologically. So they're they may be like especially desiring these these things, you know, whether it's a cult or like mastery of some domain, you know, they you can easily fall prey to like really wanting to believe these things, which gets into the people that are especially needy and vulnerable who really want to go down they they want to go down this rabbit hole, right? for whatever reason.

Yeah. Her I I could not agree more. I I I could not agree with more with everything you just said. The way I've framed it has been for for a few years now is I have framed it as, you know, people need to people are going to fulfill or try to fulfill their emotional needs and that's what's driving their behavior. It's not about cognition and thinking the facts through and I'm going to line up my facts like dominoes and they're all going to lead me in this direction. That's not how we go through life. We we go through life trying to fulfill emotional needs. And a lot of people right now um, you know, in the last many decades we have seen from the '70s, '80s, '90s we can we can almost classify these decades by um the amount of desperation that people have felt over individual finances, job insecurity, wage inequality, familial or relationship difficulties. you know, a a growing population creating more and more anxiety and depression and and angst, you know, with with uh with various social factors. It's it's easy to see why people feel more pressure now or feel under the the weight of of of uncertainty and misunderstanding and not not having, you know, a stability in their life. Um, you know, jobs are are not exactly a dime a dozen and and people uh need to work. Um, you know, prices going up just up and up and up and up and and kids and mental instability. I mean, there's just this laundry list of things that people feel their lives are out of their control.

Yeah. Stressful. Yeah. Very stressful. And Exactly. It all adds up to stress. And so when people like L. Ron Hubbard or Tony Robbins or Chase Hughes, you know, or Joe Rogan as a spokesperson for these people, right, or platformer for these people, puts them up there and says, "These people know what they're talking about. They have answers. They have solutions." Well, people are hungry for easy answers and quick solutions to very difficult problems they have. And they don't particularly want to hear, "No, it's hard. No, behavior is hard. No, no, figuring things out is hard."

And so, it's easy to see why they reject us. They want confident. Yeah. They want confident wise men. You know, we want we want wise men. We're we're lacking in we are lacking in like people who espouse wisdom and, you know, gurus of real gurus of whatever sort. So, we you know, people desire that. Yeah.

Yeah. They do. They do. And it makes sense why they would go for it, right? We don't have to uh think of them as stupid idiots, you know?

Totally. Yeah. Emotional needs, right? So, I'm really curious. I, you know, that work you did, uh, I've read, of course, you know, you you said you were going to work for this guy who does NLP workshops and seminars, and yeah, you were going to have some stories, and you did. You definitely have some stories. What was uh well, first off, how would you from your direct experience and your research and studies since then, how would you describe NLP, neurolinguistic programming? You know, what it is and what it promises and what what what actually is it? What does it what do people learn when they're learning NLP?

Yeah, I think uh no matter how I approach summarizing that, I think there will be different legitimate views on it because it is such a wide area to try to summarize, which is part of the challenge. Like when people go to, you know, debunk it or or be skeptical about it, there's always somebody that that that's like that's not what NLP is. You're, you know, you're you're attacking a part of it that's not the full picture of NLP, right? So that's just to say it can be hard to summarize it because it is a sprawling thing, right? But you know by and large it's in it's a collection of I I view it as just the collection of ideas and uh thinking that arose around the title of NLP and that's like a hodgepodge of things like NLP started as you said with uh Bandler and Grinder Grinder I can't remember how he says his name but the two main guys back in the in the '70s and um it was mainly a way to well it started out as a way to like model uh exceptional people who had done exceptional uh therapy work for one thing but it was also related to just like high high practicality high uh efficiency and and uh mastery of various things but to some of their main focus was on these uh therapists that were known for getting really good results like um what's his name Milton um Erickson the uh right person known for. Yeah, and they they they they studied his like hypnotic approaches. Um, there's there's various other things in the in the mix too, but it it related a lot to uh modes of thinking like, you know, there's there's you know, one of the key ideas is like some people have modes of thinking more related to tactile things, some people have modes of thinking more related to uh, you know, visual or audio. Um, that's one of the key things. And then that ties into like the eye uh eye direction thing where you can get clues about what someone's thinking based on where they look. That's another area of it. And uh these were things and, you know, these were things that were not meant to be exploitative at least how they initially framed it. It was related to therapy and and helping people and such which is, you know, another reason people do go to these NLP events. It's not all exploitative people. people who legitimately they they they are seeking like, you know, help in their therapy practices or things like this or teaching or whatever it may be. So there's two elements to it. It's like you can have the more educational helping people aspect or you can have the like oh I want to get secrets that help me exploit people, you know. Um, so there was always there's always been uh those two sides of it where it's like oh by understanding other people uh understanding their patterns and and reading them and uh and being able to influence them because that's the other side of the coin. So it's like understanding, you know, how people are thinking based on these kind of ideas about how they use language, where they look, their their modes of thinking. The the other side of that is the is the how do I influence people with that knowledge I have. how do I use like language to influence them based on my knowledge of of how they're thinking, right? And it includes uh and over the years NLP has grown and changed because, you know, what was there in the beginning wasn't there later, it shifted, you know, based on how all these different NLP people did their training and their seminars uh, but a big part of it came to be, you know, that the seminars are what what is called transformational or experiential. They will keep you there many days, right? Like several days in a row and it's packed full of that activity, so you get very little sleep. So, it kind of has some, you know, and they do unusual psychology uh related exercises in there. Like, you know, one that I was present for was like staring into each other's eyes for a long time. So, it kind of creates these unusual feelings in people, which uh makes them theoretically more bonded to the experiment experience, you know, and uh makes people have these unusual experiences. So there's a slew of things in there which is why it's hard to define or, you know, precisely say what NLP is because for example like sometimes I'll, you know, if you talk about NLP uh the uh the claims about reading people based on the eye contact uh eye direction stuff, some people some NLP defenders will say like no that wasn't initially in, you know, Bandler and Grinder's work. They talked about, you know, it wasn't it was a clue but it wasn't that meaningful and it you So they'll they'll defend it by saying like well that wasn't in the original stuff and that's just some practitioners who are making grand claims etc etc. So that's just to give you a sense of like but people who try to defend it will often try to like nitpick things about uh that's not really NLP or NLP is more nuance than that. uh but by and large, you know, it's it's a it's a tough space to define but to me, you know, when you look at people who have done the work uh debunking or studying these NLP associated ideas, just by and large uh, you know, none of the NLP associated ideas hold up under scrutiny in scientific study or uh but then there there's I should say there's also the NLP trainers and practitioners do bring in various real and respected ideas too. So it's a in in the context of their training, you know, it can be a hodgepodge of like just completely ridiculous ideas that no legitimate, you know, researchers respect at all and, you know, other things that are more legitimate. So that that helps explain why it's so easy to or why it's it can be so persuasive be to people because you're bringing in a lot of good ideas, too. And and like that makes it hard to debunk too because people who take those trainings, they're like, "No, that was legitimate. I looked that up." And I'm like, "Yeah, there's legitimate things in the mix, but by and large, the NLP things have been thoroughly debunked and there's no evidence for them. There's, you know, evidence against a lot of it." So, just to say for people that are that really want to believe it or for people that have gone down the rabbit hole of like believing these are powerful ideas, there's all sorts of mechanisms that they use to defend it. Uh, and I've named a few of them, but um I hope that gives a a sense of the the sprawl of it and and what's involved though.

Absolutely. Thank you for all of that because it's um it is made complicated. It's made more complicated than it really is in an effort to disperse attention, I think, and try to keep the semblance of no no there's something here even if this doesn't quite or this doesn't quite there's something here. Right as this idea and it's this sort of eternal hope I think that we're trying to crack the code of, you know, some simple, you know, control panel or lever system or something to be able to manipulate or control ourselves and other people. Some people are coming into this, you know, looking at trying to solve their own problems, too. It's not just about, you know, you know, twirling their mustaches and.

Yeah. And to to your point, I'll throw in, you know, it's the main goal of these people that promote these ideas, like people like Chase Hughes. I mean, the main goal, whether it's NLP related or not, their goal is to communicate mastery that you need them to help unlock, right? Like they'll they'll use various tools at their disposal. It doesn't have to be NLP. It can be, you know, military intelligence or whatever other things are in the mix for people. But the main goal is to establish a sense that you really need this person's wisdom and their amazing insights, right? And uh I mean that explains why that explains why in the NLP world all the NL you know the NLP trainers will all have their various flavors and even trademark names of this stuff, right? Like so you know there there's a lot of use of the word neuro because it you know there's neurolinguistic programming but it also makes it sound like some sort of scientific thing, right? like I have my neuro strategies, my neuro methods, my neuro whatever it but but it also puts a a spin on it like a a personal spin like these are my trademarked ideas you have to come to me for, right? But and to your point too, it's we should recognize that a lot of these people really believe this stuff like the the NLP trainer that I worked for, he really believed that, you know, these were amazing things that he himself like had amazing control over over everybody in his orbit like he really believed that he is helping people. At least I think he did. So it's just to say the yeah these aren't like you say these aren't all like villainous people sitting around like just thinking about how to exploit and manipulate people. A lot of them truly believe, you know, like the NLP trainer I worked for, he would tell this story about like how he didn't believe he was really anything special till everybody started telling him he was and told him how great he was at doing the NLP stuff and he was like, "Oh, I must be a real genius at this stuff." You know? So that was kind of how he went down the the rabbit hole like so just to say yeah it's good to recognize, you know, have empathy even when we think people are wrong. And then some people are just clearly much more unethical on the unethical side but it's a it's a mix of people, right?

That's right. That's exactly right. And it it's, you know, when I was a Scientologist, it was the same deal. I thought I had my my hand on the top of this, you know, this mastery of this of this technology as they called it that what enabled me to be able to help people to a degree that nothing else could. And and so sure, I'll sit for hours in a chair and stare at somebody else or have other people do that to each other. This this is right out of Scientology stuff. And you produce what's called the Gansfeld effect. You know, you get these hallucinations and you know, you can have auditory and visual hallucinations. You can have all kinds of trance induction, all kinds of crazy stuff happen just sitting staring at somebody else in the eyes. And it gets people feeling giddy and it gets them feeling nervous and it gets them all of flutter and you know, because they're sitting there having to focus their attention on another person in front of them which they don't normally do. And so it's a new novel effect. That's something I haven't felt before. So therefore the feelings I'm feeling must be special and new and different even though no literally almost everybody's going to feel that way. uh, you know, for understandable explainable reasons. But because we're gonna I've always said that that that one of the biggest superpowers or one of the powers that that these guys have is they're the first to arrive with an interpretation of this phenomena. So their interpretation is the one that's going to win. Right? If I tell you, you know, sit in this chair for 2 hours and stare at somebody else and don't blink and don't fidget and don't move around, don't don't get up, don't laugh, don't do anything. Don't let yourself get triggered. Just sit there and be there and just do it. And the person starts feeling like they're hallucinating, you know, seeing themselves from outside their body. And I go, "Yep, you popped out of your body. You're exterior. That proves you are an immortal spiritual being." Right? I've now made you into a Scientologist. Right. With the Gansfeld effect. Uh, it, you know, it's a psychological principle. But I can I can and I don't even know about it. I just know as a Scientologist. I didn't know about that till after I left, right? I just knew that if I could do that, right, here was my interpretation. And it's the interpretation of this phenomena that has so much power for people. And I and I will throw in there too uh I think an important part of this is, you know, I try to when I was working for this guy years ago, I my takeaway was that there are like I was saying, there are good ideas in the mix and uh for a lot of people that come to those seminars, that can be their first exposure to some of these psychology ideas. Like for example, you know, a big a big thing in the NLP world is reframing the meaning of experiences, right? Which is actually a very wise thing because you So we we can we have we do have the power to look at experiences in all sorts of different ways and getting over, you know, trauma and psychological emotional pain, you know, a big part of that is reframing the meaning of that, right? So that that that is a meaningful concept and they and, you know, the guy I worked for and NLP people in general, like uh Tony Robbins, you know, that's a big part of what he does. It's all about the reframing. It's an important concept and a lot of people that do go that go to these events, even if there's a lot of in the mix, they do come away with some ideas that they probably haven't considered before and could theoretically be life-changing. So, that's why I like I do like to be fair and say some people do get legitimate insights and important takeaways from these things. And that doesn't bother me. I think the the thing that's bad is the is when the per the trainer acts as if they're the person that you have to go for the for these things and then is charging like a ridiculous amount of money to, you know, do these trainings where it's like, you're not, you're not kicking that much knowledge where, you know, it's it's the it's the putting themselves on a pedestal where they're the they're the guru, is where the problem comes in. Not the, you know, and then it's also throwing in a bunch of, you know, bunch of that's theoretically harmful to people, too. But if it was just like the things that were, you know, like reframing or some of these legitimate things that they will cover in in their trainings, you know, that part's all well and good and I can and that's why I say it's understandable why you will have people that might be watching this who'll be like, I had a very meaningful good experience at one of these seminars and and and that's fine. I think that's totally legitimate and and uh I'm not saying that's not possible. So, I just want to throw that in there.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the like I said, it's the interpretation of the event and and what you're walking away with. If you're walking away, you know that that this proves something that it doesn't really prove, then, you know, there's a cognitive and and real world problem there. You you're walking around living a lie. And you might get taken for a lot of money, theoretically.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's Scientology in a nutshell right there. You know, they they sell you a lie right from the get-go. And if they can get you if they can get that hook and get that emotional commitment and then they'll start working on you and working on you and it's this, you know, gradual change over time and all that time you're giving them money hand over fist and and you're being taken for a ride, right? Because there's nothing at the end of this road that makes you a different person in any substantial or basic or fundamental way than the person who you were when you started. You're going to be the same person. You know, uh you're just going to have been lied to and put through the ringer a number of times and jumped through a number of hoops that you really didn't have to.

And that's and that's where I get a little that's where my blood boils is when people are are taken advantage of like that. um, you know, like I was so it's understandable. Yeah. I think motivated me for a long time to to dig this stuff up. Um, and yeah, NLP was an interest is interesting. The one other thing I want to say about the origin story of it, maybe you can confirm this. I'm not I don't know. Is that uh Bandler and Grinder Grinder Grinder? Uh yeah, I don't know how to pronounce those either. I've only read the man's name, but they were trying to do the scientific research peer-review process, do the standard research process back in the '70s with these ideas. And the ideas sound so cool that you kind of wish they were true. Wouldn't it be awesome if every time you were talking to someone and they look down and to the left, that means, oh, they're accessing their visual memory right now, right? And I can know that about them and that will tell me something about them that can assist me either therapeutically or can assist me to manipulate them or whatever. Wouldn't it be cool? You know, wouldn't it be cool if every time you meet somebody who talks like, "Oh, I see that. Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, I yeah, I can I can visualize that." If they're talking like that, that means they're a visual thinker. And so, if you use visual metaphor back at them, you can subtly manipulate them. Wouldn't that be awesome if it was simple? Right.

Totally. No, no, you're right. It's like that that I think that's the draw of a lot of ideas in general. It's like, wouldn't this would be so cool if if this thing was were true, right? And that's the the big draw. And uh yeah, the other interesting thing, there's all sorts of things to say about NLP, but, you know, going back to the origins of NLP, it came about at a time when there was all this like brain asymmetry and symmetry studies going on which very much influenced how NLP played out. and like the eye direction and, you know, modes of thought kind of thing which which is interesting but, you know, you go back and look at those studies, a lot of that stuff was just, you know, a it was like a lot of vague studies. A lot of the studies even that a lot of the studies that even found stuff, you know, couldn't be reproduced. So it was like but there was a lot of interest in in that stuff back then and and I think there was this kind of like the '60s and '70s were, you know, kind of this a lot of people were thinking like we're full, we're really going to unlock the secrets of the brain now that we've got these tools to study the brain, you know, closely with all the, you know, imaging uh things we have. And I think there was this kind of excitement about like we're really going to we're so close to figuring it out like, you know, we're going to know that somebody's using, you know, this part of the brain and it means they're this kind of personality or whatever. you know, there I think there was just a lot of excitement because it helps explain like when I went back and looked at all the research, there was all this like brain, you know, asymmetry and like, you know, what trying to figure out what kind of words people were using that this kind of stuff uh so there was that excitement which I think clearly didn't pan out um, you know, from that from that.

No, and that's exactly right is is people get excited about these ideas and unfortunately um to finish the thought was uh because because I think you're absolutely right I I think I think you're absolutely right about everything you just said there because this whole split brain studies and the, you know, all this stuff was really exciting stuff in the '70s and '80s and people really thought they were, you know, getting a grip on some things and sure enough, this is the path of progression and discovery that we need. And there are going to be alleys people go down that don't develop into something. But the mistake that Bandler and Grinder made and the and the thing that kind of upset me.

About those two was they went okay. Well, the peer review is showing that this stuff ain't really flying, like this isn't really universally true stuff. Well, we're so excited about it and we're so sure it's true, if I, if I remember this right. Okay, we're just going to take this directly to the public and we're, you know, the whole science thing. Yeah. You know, we're just going to go this direction. And so they just kind of shied the research trail and started doing seminars and workshops and stuff like that because that was the thing to do in the '70s and '80s. Arenas were being filled up by all kinds of people from Bill Gothur to, you know, Tony Robbins types. Yes.

And now it's online. Now it's, now it's the online community. You don't have, you know, you still have conventions and, you know, Grant Cardone out there who's also in this space, you know, from a Scientology grift angle. Um, you know, they'll fill up convention centers, but they're really, you know, online is where this stuff really, really thrives.

Yeah. So, um, so I just sort of see it as this progression of ideas. You're referring and you're what you were referring to earlier, I think, was the human potential movement that was, um, big through the '60s and '70s and and that's where, you know, you get, um, you know, which turns into Landmark Forum and, you know, that's where NLP comes in and and really kind of landed. Is it kind of landed into this human potential movement, but it was more of a social movement rather than a scientific movement by this point, and this is where the grift really came into play, I think.

Um, and so we, and so I think that's the origin story, or at least the fundamental sort of, you know, framework of the origin story of this stuff. So if we go through the greed is good '80s into the, you know, the the the grunge of the '90s and the internet coming into play. Now we have a whole new field for these people to play in, right? A whole new sandbox in the 2000s with social media taking off and these people able to make a name for themselves. You know, Bandler and Grinder are kind of names of the past now, but, you know, now we have our Chase Hughes and we still have Tony Robbins crawling around. Who else do you see in this space? If we want to name names or talk about types of people or types of grift, what, what else do you see emerging from what NLP has turned into?

Well, it's a good question. I, I, I actually haven't studied it that much. Like, I went down the Chase Hughes rabbit hole and that led me to see, you know, see a few other people in that area. I do, I do think there's, you know, his, you know, his compatriots on the behavior panel.

Right. Who are those people? They're, I mean, the fact that they, the fact alone that they uh chose to partner with Chase Hughes, I mean, I think tells you a lot about who they are. But according to them, they're the number one, four, the four best behavior experts in the world, you know, but don't ask them to come up with any qualifications for that. That's just what they call themselves, right? So there, there's all sorts of these guys who, you know, and there is a huge incentive to, you know, there's a lot of money involved in this stuff. It's like these guys get millions of views on YouTube and that translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?

Yeah. Big money.

Yeah. Big money for that. And so it's clear there's an incentive. So it's like, you know, but you watch these behavior panel shows and it's like they're just spouting a lot of like ambiguous, some some okay ideas, some uh mostly just bad and ambiguous and things could go other way, many different ways ideas, like, you know. And I've, there, there, I thought about doing a breakdown of like a specific video of theirs to show like just how ambiguous and uh kind of meaningless these ideas are. But you watch these shows and you're like, "Okay, they've said a lot of things about what could theoretically be, but what does it all mean in the end?" Like, it, you know, there, it's just a lot of kind of wishy-washy ideas, but and they'll also, you know, a lot of the the people that do this kind of work, they're more likely to have like opinion, uh, really high, uh, really confident opinions the more clear it is that someone was guilty or lied or whatever it is, right? So that's another element of this, like, yeah, it's very easy after the fact, like to know that, you know, for example, Chris Watts was a very guilty, uh, acted very guilty. That was the guy who killed his, you know, wife and uh, children, a well-known case that people examine his behavior. But that's just to say there's there can be situations where like, you know, you're not going too far out on a, uh, you know, a plank, a dangerous plank to be confident about somebody's opinion, uh, somebody's behaviors. Uh, but there's so there's a lot of these behavior people. Um, there's, you know, there's also like the hypnotists and influence kind of people, like the doing studying the Chase Hughes stuff led me to see that there was like NLP and hypnosis associated people that would like praise Chase Hughes and Chase Hughes would praise them. Like there was, it was kind of like this, there's this whole underworld where they like they never push back on each other's obvious flaws. They only just say these guys are amazing, right? Like nothing, nothing, uh, untoward to see about this, these people's, uh, you know, claims of of expertise. So there's a whole like ecosystem where they all drum each other up because it's, it's to their best interest. Like, it's not in the, that the behavior panel people know all about Chase Hughes's many lies and exaggerations and I've told them, you know, directly and they'll be like, "Oh, you're just jealous. You're just a hater." Blah, blah, blah. They don't, they don't care to actually address these things. And like people that will will write me being like, "I can't believe that these people won't address these obvious, you know, lies and unethical behaviors." And I'm like, well, if they did that, they would have to address many unethical things that they themselves have done and why they partner with Chase Hughes in the first place. So, they have, there's no incentive for these people who have, you know, in this ecosystem to to examine these things. But to your question about like specific people, I really, I wish I, I wish I had more time because it is kind of fun to, you know, make videos about the these guys. But yeah, it was kind of random that I went down the Chase Hughes rabbit hole. It was just such an egregious case. That was why I made several videos about it because I think even in this world, like he was a very egregious, uh, case about, you know, lying and exaggerating. Um, but yeah, there's, there is a, there, there's a large ecosystem. And then you have to kind of separate the, you know, we're just telling you to analyze, you know, we're claiming that we can analyze this behavior versus like, we're going to get you to influence and manipulate other people, you know, which Chase straddles both those those worlds, but it's a, they can be very separate worlds. Um, and yeah, I think that's kind of a, I don't, I don't know too much about the all the specific players these days.

No, no, that's fine. I appreciate the the overview though, and especially the commentary about the ecosystem because I was going to bring that up and I'm glad you did. Um, because there is this sort of mutual supportive system that that goes on in this YouTube space or in this real world space because we are talking about people who are not just making videos on YouTube. They are going out and doing and getting paid quite well to go do business seminars and train recruiters, train negotiators, train, you know, MBA level people in how to do their jobs better. And these people, as business people, are relying on the expertise of Chase Hughes to be who he says he is because they're taking what he says and they're applying it in their day-to-day when they're doing negotiations and important work that is going to matter. And if they're taking nonsense and trying to use it in the real world, you're going to have the same effect or same reason or same consequences as if you were to take Scientology into your business. And what happens when people do that? Businesses collapse. That's what happens. There are, people lose their jobs over this stuff. There are, there are, this can be disastrous when you're trying to take, you know, ideas like, "Oh yes, I'm going to watch his eyes and I'm going to watch what direction they go in," you know, or "I'm going to use certain language in a certain way and I know I'm going to get this result." And it's easy in a training, it's easy in a training to find all the examples of how this is going to work until you hit the real world where the rubber meets the road and suddenly you're in front of somebody who ain't acting the way Chase said they would. Now, what are you going to do?

Yeah. I, I think.

The one interesting thing about that is that I think one of the not obvious harms of this stuff is is is related to that where a lot of people that watch like the behavior panel or take, you know, Chase Hughes's classes, they start thinking that they really can read people accurately. And mainly, it's just it, it just serves as a way to like amplify their own biases because basically what they'll do is, you know, and and I can show you, I can show you many examples of this where like behavior panel fans will be like looking at a video in like the Facebook group, the fan, the fan group of behavior panel and they'll be like, "I know she's lying based on this one random, you know, ambiguous thing." And like, so basically everyone's just using these like half-baked ideas they'll get from these people and and it's just another filter for making them feel confident to express what they want to believe. Anyway, so it's like, "I know she's a, you know, a horrible person. I, I know that, you know, this royalty member is a piece of work because I, you know, she did this one small behavior, right?" And then like, you know, like a lot of things, people will forget when they're wrong about something and a lot of the things are just like personality things anyway. They're like things they'll never know. So they're like, "I, that's that tells me she's being devious. I just don't like her now, you know, even more." Uh, so there's all the, it just makes people dumber, basically, because they've been their heads have been filled with all these like confident, like things that are just not possible to do in the real world, like get confident reads of people, whether they're lying or withholding information or what their state of mind is when they're telling you something, like, you know, these, it's just a pipe dream that you can do that confidently all the time. Like, sure, sometimes I have reads about stuff that I could back up with, you know, uh, a list of things, but it's like that's a very rare thing to be able to reach that level of confidence. And even, even the things you're highly confident about will be like, you know, not that confident. So, um, so it's just to say, yeah, these things are harmful in in multiple ways that are that are not really obvious. And I think that's, that's that's one of the the worst things is just putting all these bad ideas out there. And I think it even, you know, it plays into the political polarization sphere, too, where people are watching like videos that, uh, you know, that the behavior panel has analyzed of political people and they're like, "Oh, yeah, I know that that person's a a piece of work because they did XYZ." And it's like, it's just reinforcing what they wanted to believe anyway about various political figures and various, you know, celebrities. So, yeah, it's kind of an insidious kind of dumbing down of things, you know.

Gary, I, I could not agree more. I mean, you bring in confirmation bias and and you're nailing it. And it's, and it's, and it is a lot more of that than people are are are able to recognize in themselves. This is, this is why I'm always going on at a mad rate about, you know, look, if you really want to navigate life, uh, critical thinking and emotional intelligence are the are the tools you have to have in in the holsters on your, you know, that you're walking around with. You, you've, you've got to take these things to a high level for yourself, which means discipline and practice and using this stuff over and over and over. It's not just knowing a few logical fallacies or knowing a little bit about how people are emotionally driven. It's really understanding yourself and other people from these core ideas. And that's, that's where you'll understand the nuance and you'll see how much nuance there is. Like, for example, okay, you have written books about poker, uh, tells and and reading people that way, and I don't imagine for a second that you have some superpower that you can sit at a table with six strangers you've never met and be able to wipe the table with them because you're such a great person at poker tells.

Right.

Right. I imagine that that is, that's the first thing I'm thinking is, no, you're not, you don't have a superpower and you're not going to do that, and I don't have that expectation.

Right.

But there are so many poor schles out there who do.

And and it would be easy for you to use that expectation and feed that confirmation bias. Right. Right.

But I imagine it's not that way because of the nature of the work you do. So how would you describe.

About that.

Totally. And that, that, that's actually what makes me so frustrated about this stuff because it's like, I, I went out of my way to write in such a careful way about poker and then you, you know, it's like it's a game and uh, then you got these people making grand claims about real world stuff and, you know, and I'm just like, that, that bugs me. Yeah. Because to your point, it's like, yes, I, that's what people have said they liked about my books. Is one of the reasons they like my work is because I'm being very, I'm not saying I'm, I'm actually saying I, I say very specifically, even the best reader of tells, to my knowledge, is only using this maybe like, you know, a few times a session to like, and sometimes it's just swinging a decision that was, you know, very close and goes one way or the other. It's not like you're highly confident of it. It's like, you might go one way or another based on, you know, it's, it's the only information I have to to to act on. Uh, so yeah, I'm very careful to say, th this is a rare thing you may rely on. Uh, it's true that like less skilled players will have more obvious tells. You know, it's, it's true that the more skilled you are, the less likely you are to get a tell, a read from somebody. Uh, so I was always very careful to be very responsible how how I see it, which is like plays into why I'm so frustrated with these people. Basically, you know, just saying the most outlandish and extreme things about real world things that could impact real world, uh, scenarios, interrogations or interviews or whatever. Uh, so yeah, and and I will say too, like when people ask me, you know, what, what kind of behavior stuff, you know, real world behavior stuff do you recommend? I do think there's some very good work about verbal statement analysis, which I think is, you know, if you, if you're interested in reading people, focus on the verbal stuff because that's where people are actually trying to communicate to you, they're using their words, right? So like, I just do not, I, I would much recommend reading books like, um, "I Know You Are Lying" by, uh, Mark McCllish, who I've interviewed for my podcast, which is about analyzing statements because statements contain a lot of meaning and there's a lot of ways people will try to misdirect, direct your attention in statements and try to do various things with their statements. You can get so much more information out of that versus like trying to read non-verbal behavior because non-verbal behavior is quite hard to read, like other than like some very simple stuff like, "Oh, this person's nervous." But okay, what does nervous mean? Could be, you know, for many different reasons, right?

So, yeah, I'll throw that in there for people that like want to know what I find really valuable. And and that's, I wrote "Verbal Poker Tells," which was kind of like my take on, um, I was inspired by Mark McCll's book about statement analysis in like real world scenarios. So, I wrote a book that was analyzing statements that poker players make. And that was actually, like, I think that's, I'm not obviously, I'm biased, but I do think it's like one of the best poker books out there because it, I, I learned so much, uh, writing the book and researching it over like, you know, I, I worked full-time on it basically for almost eight months. It was like my big project and, uh, I learned a lot doing it. And just to say, there's a lot of information in people's statements, like people, because that's where they're trying to manipulate you, right? That's where they're, that's where they're trying to get you to do certain things. Uh, and you can find a lot of like information in there, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I love that because I, you know, what drove me crazy? What drove me absolutely mad? I was absolutely fascinated with it at first until I realized the limitations and how people were taking it and running and making such hyperbolic, exaggerated claims was microexpressions.

Yeah.

Oh my god. Oh, I just wanted to start shooting people. I want to, I want to, I actually have been wanting to do an episode on that because, yeah, I mean, that and Paul Ekman in general, like the, there's a lot of, I'll just say it's a lot of BS and exaggeration in the Ekman sphere. Yeah.

And I have a, I had a recent podcast where we talked about that. I had an interview with Tim Levine, who's a deception, uh, researcher, and we talked about, you know, a lot, a lot of people know that Ekman's stuff is like, a lot of it's not backed up by by science. But that kind of relates to the importance of the microexpressions, which, yeah, I still, I would like to do a deep dive on microexpressions because there's, there's a lot definitely a lot to say there. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. And it, and it, because you got to, you, you have to, you have got to bring in and appreciate cultural, language, geographical, um, ethnic, you know, there, there, there's so many foundational things that make us who we are and influence how we act and how we see the world. And, you know, one of the things that was most illuminating to me, uh, along in the path of learning that for myself, was learning how multilingual people, um, just to throw this out there as a, as a almost random fact, but it's so interesting, is how multilingual people actually switch how they think when they switch from one language to another. It's not just a matter of saying of translating the words in your head and then saying them. You actually switch into a different way of thinking. You talk to somebody who's multilingual, and they, they'll, you can talk about this with them. They'll, they'll tell you about it. You know, I, and I first ran into this with bilingual, trilingual people from, you know, Germany or France or or, uh, Belgium, and and ended up having very deep conversations about this, not just once. I, I've talked to a number of people about this because I found it so interesting. Like, what do you mean you think differently? And they go, "Oh, yeah, no, you, you, you, you're, it's almost like you have to bring in a whole different value system, not just words, but all these other concepts and ideas and and significances come into play when you're switching language mode." And I was like, "Really?" And they were like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah." And and and it, and it really, I was talking to a Canadian who, you know, who speaks Canadian French Canadian, and he was like, "Yeah, yeah, it's hard for me to translate this over into English because it's not just words, it's these other things."

Right.

You know, and.

The structure of the language. Yeah.

Which actually, that's an NLP, uh, I think they, they talked a lot about the structure of the language, which, you know, yeah, just to say there's some, there's some good ideas in the NLP. Uh, yeah.

Exactly. And and you, and you talking about how, you know, paying attention to people's language really tells you a lot more about who you're talking to. I could not agree more because, but only if you are paying attention to it from the point of view as far as I'm, as is my my take on it, is it tells it informs you how they see things.

Right.

In how they tell you about stuff.

Yeah. It's no more mysterious than like, yeah, there, you're getting a glimpse of their view of the world, right? It's just communication. It's just communication at the end of the day. Yeah. And and there can be exaggerated claims about what you can get from that, and there can be legitimate claims about what you might get from that. But, yeah, by and large, people are hard to read, I think. And and and I would say hard to influence unless they're like, you know, in certain moments when they're vulnerable or if they're emotionally vulnerable, right? Like a lot of the, a lot of the like cult and influence type stuff is like mainly relying on people that might be quite emotionally vulnerable. So it doesn't actually take that much to influence some people. Right.

That's right. That's right. Well, that's what cult recruitment is all about is if they are not in a vulnerable state, getting them into a vulnerable state. They can actually be pushed there.

Right. They don't just walk into the, you know, the Church of Scientology or, you know, the, you know, the forum workshop and are already like all torn up inside. You can push them there. And that's what that, for example, in Scientology, that's what that personality test is designed to do.

It confuses you a little bit. It, it, it gets you all stirred up on a bunch of stuff that is really kind of innocuous, weird questions, but they're not.

It, it stirs stuff up. And then, and then in that, in that kind of, not necessarily agitated. It's not even at that level. It's just, it's just stirring some things up.

It's, it's like, it's like the equivalent of staring in each other's eyes, but like, just a different, different form. Yeah.

That's right. It's just a little bit of confusion, a little bit of like, "Why am I answering these questions? What is this?" And then you sit down with somebody who's now presented to you as an authority figure, and I'm going to sit here and tell you about your scientific test that's all graphed out here, and you're going to tell me all about yourself. And now we're doing a warm reading rather than a full-on cold reading, like they do with, you know, when you walk into a psychic or something, you're getting a cold reading. Here, it's warm because you're feeding information to the test evaluator. And well, and they're, and they have a very specific set of goals in mind for that conversation. And and uh, getting you signed up is always at the end of it.

Oh, quick, quick, quick aside. You might find this interesting. Like, back in, it was probably like 2006, I was in Vancouver, BC, I think it was, when I went to a Scientology place and just did a test for fun. You know, I wasn't, I was just doing it for fun. I wanted to get the, the experience. And then like 15 years later, my parents, they, I don't remember even giving them my information. I don't think I would have written it down, but then like 15 years later, my parents got something from the Church of Scientology addressed to me, and I was like, "I don't." Yeah. So, just to say, yeah, they keep track of people. Yeah.

Oh, that never. Let me say this again to the audience out there in case it's the first time you're at my channel. Never give Scientology your personal contact information because they will skip trace you for the rest of your life. They will follow you no matter where you go and send you information and mailings and keep up with that. It, they, they got nothing else to do all day, I tell you.

Uh, it's wild. Yeah. Never give them your address. I, I don't know any other organization that is as dedicated to tracking and sending you mailings as the Church of Scientology.

Very passionate.

Very passionate. Yeah. So, um, okay, now let's get back to that. So.

Sorry to, sorry to distract you.

No, no, no, no. You're, you're, you're awesome. I'm the one who who gets all derailed all the time. Um, okay, what else could we say about this? Yeah, I'm calling it, you know, sort of there, there's an entrepreneurship of influence. I mentioned in the intro. There's, you know, there's this sort of dark psychology space that is sort of created. I see it sort of graphically as as if you have this kind of, you know, the ecosphere of the internet, podcast world, or the pod world, uh, or the influencer world, you have different areas or sections of this. And Rogan, of course, is is a huge influence in this space just through sheer numbers. And and and around him, he's created this thing that we sort of call this manosphere, right? And and and and the dark areas of this manosphere involve, you know, the the the men for equal rights people, right? The men's rights movement, the incel folks. And then you get these influence folks, these people who are, "Oh yeah, we're going to sell you the tricks to not having to be the victim of society and women and your job and women and, you know, and your life and women and, you know, it's always all about, you know, being victimized by women, right?" So, so there's this whole little space there and then there's these people who are grifting on that space. That's how I see it. That's how I kind of model it in my head is like, there's this sphere or section or slice of the internet where these guys kind of live. How do you see it or how do you think about it is that?

Yeah. Um, I think it's, uh, I mean, it's hard for me to break it down exactly that clean, but I know, I know you're just speaking generally too, but yeah, I think I think what happens is because I've, I've done a good amount of work on political polarization, too.

Mhm.

Um, and the thing that strikes me is there, there is this, you know, for Joe Rogan in this kind of sphere of things, it's kind of like they're attracted to anything that's kind of like anti-, you know, liberal mainstream associated, right? So it's like.

You, even, even Chase, like if you had somebody that just questioned some major thing that, you know, was some liberal view associated mainstream thing, they would get invited on the show because it's attractive to kind of like knock holes in this, uh, the liberal mainstream, you know, uh, network of ideas. And I, and I see Chase playing, you know, that this is an aspect of Chase Hughes and some other people where, you know, he, one of the things he does is spreads these ideas that like the government is running these complex sciops on people. Like he spreads these completely nonsense ideas and he he uses his fake, you know, his fake, uh, military intelligence, the the idea that he, the perception or the the implication that he was involved in military intelligence. He helps sell these really paranoid conspiracy theories about like, "Hey, I think the government's doing these these wacky wild things," and, you know, playing psychological games on the public. So that's part of it too, because Joe Rogan's kind of tied and at that level, I don't even see it necessarily as, you know, political related because there is this love of like conspiracy theories in general. You know, conspiracy theories are popular on the right and the left, just different can be different kinds. And, you know, regardless of who we think is worse, it's just a very popular thing. And so, you have Joe Rogan especially is drawn to these like more conspiracy-minded things like coverups. And, you know, that's one of the reasons he wanted to talk to, uh, Chase Hughes, because Chase Hughes did a video, they got really popular about the New Jersey drones being government scops, military scops.

Oh, did he?

Yeah. I was just completely nonsense. I made a, I made a video.

Of course he did. You can't disprove it.

Exactly. That's the great thing about all these conspiracy theories. You can spout off about them and no one's ever going to disprove you. And even if they somehow did, like there'd still be, you know, there's there's plenty of room for for for doubt even when you, your, your worldview is completely.

Disproven. So that's the great thing about the conspiracy theories. And Joe Rogan loves a lot of these weird, you know, magical thinking conspiracy theories, you know. Um, so I think that, you know, there is this like, the thing I see too is like political polarization has resulted in a lot of people just viewing it, viewing the act of debunking or skepticism itself as a liberal associated thing, right? Like I think that's a, that's something I haven't really seen discussed, but I've experienced this personally when I go into something that's completely not political related, like, you know, debunking Chase Hughes, for example, examining his lies and exaggerations. I've seen people respond as if I'm talking about political things. Which I think is a clue to how many people are like, "Oh, you're trying to cancel him. That's a liberal thing." Right? So, even the act of criticism itself has become for some people politically polarized.

Yeah. Which, which for, for a lot of people means that their doors are more wide open to absurd beliefs because they, they've gotten to the point where people trying to tell them that they're being, you know, lied to by somebody with a long history of lies, like even that out of a political context, they now associate with political, you know, views, right? So, I think that helps us explain why people in like Joe Rogan's listenership are they have their minds wide open to absorb a lot of wacky and ridiculous ideas because the the methods for for adequately debunking them, those people are getting them to be skeptical of them are now themselves in doubt. So you've just, you know, and that's not to say like, I, I, I think we've, you know, many people can behave in team-based ways for their team and such and and be be more open to ideas than they should be, but I do think like people like Rogan and people in that sphere have really helped, you know, amplify that because like, why wouldn't Joe Rogan have vetted Chase Hughes? Why didn't he care that he had this long string of like easily disprovable claims about his expertise and his unethical, his various unethical behaviors? It's like, to at some level, Joe Rogan himself thinks like that, like debunking people is like, you know, maybe we got to give everybody a fair listen to, right? That's kind of like a lot of people's ideas, like just hear them out. It's like, well, why do you want to listen to somebody somebody who's has a long rap sheet of telling obvious lies and exaggerations about themselves? Like, there's plenty of people to listen to. So, I'm all, I'm all for being open-minded, but there's risks and bad things that come when you're just give everybody a platform, right? So, but yeah, I think that I think that helps explain why some people are just like, "No, you're trying to cancel him. Canceling is bad." Uh, you know, so.

No, you're, you're making a great point. You're so spot on with that. There's a, there's a tradition that has actually developed in the United States specifically around the feeding of disinformation to a hungry public and it goes back to the '80s with the, uh, the creation of CNN, the 24-hour news cycle and Oprah Winfrey, um, who, you know, there was the talk show format, the daily talk show format. And, you know, I can't speak to the '70s because the '70s had talk shows and variety shows, but in, but they became more informational in format in the '80s. And, you know, Donahue flips over into Oprah, you know, and she comes out of this tradition and then she platforms people just like everything you just said about Joe Rogan applies completely to Oprah. When she platforms Dr. Oz and, you know, Mr. Phil and these other people, right? I won't even call him Dr. Phil because that guy.

And, and Dr. Phil had on Chase and promoted him.

And, exactly. Right. It's the continuation of this, you know, this ecosphere survives because these grifters grift on each other and feed each other and the and the lack of vetting for them in their world, the the lack of vetting is a feature, not a bug, because it allows them to bring in exactly as you described. Well, let's just hear him out. Let's just hear what he has to say. Well, when you're presenting that information as an irresponsible educator, um, which I use the term very loosely, but it applies. When you, when you're an irresponsible educator or you have no real moral foundations on whether objective truth is important or not, then you force that off on millions of people who are not bringing their critical thinking skills. And you are Oprah or Rogan, who by the sheer fact of having a big audience has created authority for yourself, you're biasing a bunch of people to accept. You're not just giving it a fair shake. You're feeding it to people with your authority. And this is where Oprah really has so much to answer for and so does Rogan.

Yeah.

You know, because of the irresponsibility of their of their position. Yeah. Um, and I think too, so much of this just depends on people that are hungry for content, too. It's like they're desperate to fill the empty airwaves, right? So they're like,

"How can I continue to get clicks? I have to keep bringing on some kind of sensational people to keep my audience up and get the clicks going. Oh, this this guy talks about brainwashing and military scops. I'll bring him on. Who cares if it's a little, uh, you know, sketchy and maybe he's been debunked? He's still, you know, let's hear him out. Maybe he's got some, you know, he's got some interesting ideas to listen to and, you know, and I'll get a lot of clicks out of it at the same time."

So.

Exactly. And before it was clicks, it was Nielsen ratings and views and it's all about those advertiser money. Um, it's sad that we live in a consumer-driven world where this is how content is determined because it's entirely possible that, you know, and of course many, many times to give a fair shake, Oprah and Rogan have brought on completely legitimate people and had very interesting conversations with them and shared all kinds of stuff. But as you mentioned, you know, controversy is what really sells and and impacts on people. This, this is not new thinking. I understand, but it's just part of the conversation, so I kind of have to put it there. Not to mention, I get so jacked about it.

Yeah. No, it's just a new, it's new. It's new format. It's new media. Yeah. It's.

That's right. And so much media. That's the thing. It's there's just so much content now. Yeah.

That's right. There were two other things I wanted to to to throw your way here, um, that I thought you might have interesting takes on. First is I think that there is something that we sort of, um, we talk about reasons and motivations for people accepting pseudoscience and nonsense and running with it, and they're all legit, right? You know, the the the attention economy, give it to me now, short attention span theater. I, I have these problems. I don't have a lot of time to research. So, you know, so give it to me quick and hopefully that will, you know, turn my life around or give me some tools or whatever. And and if it's NLP, great. If it's Scientology, great. Whatever it is, I don't care. I just want it to work. And so, we understand why people would feed into that. But there's another thing going on which you mentioned with the divisiveness and that is an underlying sentiment of massive levels of distrust in our institutions. Um, and this has been a generational evolution, I think. Uh, and I look at it strictly through an American lens. We, I think the same could be applied. Uh, I think the same, you know, template could be applied to Britain or to Europe or to China or to any other country, Australia, certainly, where the governments have let them down over and over and over again. Political figures have taken too much advantage. There have been scandals. There have been this, there's been that. There have been systemic injustices that have been talked about. Um, you know, this, this whole woke thing is literally comes out of the recognition of systemic injustice. That's where it comes from. And and the idea that that's not a true thing is ludicrous to any serious person. But the whole anti-woke thing, you know, you bring the culture wars into this to try to fight it. But really, what we're talking about is distrust. And when people distrust educational institutions, academic institutions, government institutions, they go alt. They go looking for answers somewhere else that they can trust.

Mhm.

And this grift and this whole grift community, I think, exists because of that distrust. What do you think about that?

Yeah. Well, um, yeah. And I, and I, to not to promote my book, but if people are interested in what I write about polarization, you can look at my website, american-anger.com, because I.

Yeah. Distrust and I would say contempt for each other. You know, there's.

I, I think there's a lot of real things to be upset about in society. Yeah.

And there's also just a natural dynamic that happens where, you know, polarization, toxic conflict makes people, you know, hate the other side more than they should. And they not just hate them, but also become more afraid of them, become more pessimistic about what they are doing, you know. So, I think there's all these levels of like, yes, there and there's many real things to build grievances on because it's very easy to build all sorts of narratives depending on what you focus on, right? Like, you can build all sorts of narratives. So, we, we, we go through this toxic conflict thing where we're building more and more pessimistic views of each other, which makes us more scared, more, uh, more angry, more contemptuous. We filter everything through those new views and we find more evidence for our existing contempt and anger. Uh, so, yeah, I do think there's this process by which there's a fracturing, you know, that happens to any highly polarized nation where there comes to be like two, two, you know, institutions or systems of like content and, um, even like, you know, school schools or content creation or schools of thought or, uh, media, you know, obviously media, but, um, yeah, I do think that the fracturing and the and the distrust and the contempt all lead who, you know, when you're when you're more polarized or or when you're more angry and, uh, you know, polarized in the sense of political narratives in general, like leaving aside, you know, which side is worse or these kinds of things, that it just becomes more easy when you're when you're in a highly emotional state, you're concerned, you're you're angry, you're you're scared, it becomes easier to consume things that tie into that angry narrative and lead you down the rabbit hole of getting even angrier and more scared. So, I think there's all these things that work at at work that relate to these channels of dumb, basically dumb content, right? And.

Um, we've been focusing on specific ones, but I think there's there's channels of like, you know, far-left thought, I'll call it, or, you know, liberal associated thought, where people can behave in very emotional and and team-based ways too. So I think, you know, and regardless of which side, you know, any viewer perceives at worse as worse, I think it's important to see like the human element of that where like emotions lead us to be more, uh, more dumb in in some sense, you know, in a basic sense of the word, to to go down these rabbit holes where we go through confirmation bias of various sorts and we, we seek out things that align with our, our views, you know, so, yeah, I don't know.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. You know, which side is is always worse?

The other side.

That's right. That's right. It's 100% true, 100% of the time.

Yeah. I like to speak very carefully because I, I, I've written these polarization books and trying to convince everyone of the importance of the idea. So I always like to try to work in, you know, depolarized framings of the problem. Right. So.

Abs, and I appreciate that because I, I want to do the exact same thing. I brought up the the woke thing as as an example of where it came from, but believe me when I tell you that, you know, during summer 2020, I was quite agitated with the left and a lot of the nonsense going on.

Uh.

I was in Portland, so I.

Oh, you were in Portland? Oh, man.

So, I, I lived there at the time, so I, yeah, had a bird's eye or a close view of.

Things. It made me understand. It made me. It gave me a better sense of what conservatives were angry about for one minute.

That's right. That's right.

I think that distrust thing is something that's generational. I, I think it's been around long enough and I, and I, and specifically since, uh, since we have brought up the m, the the, um, you know, government conspiracies and stuff, that I think it's worth commenting on this separately, uh, or or in a little bit more detail, which is that people have very good reasons to have this distrust. I, I don't want to paint a picture here that there's all these delusional people and if they would just put their faith back in the institutions, everything would be great. I really don't want to paint with such a simplistic brush. And so I, so I was, so I have to use my words here and say, let's be clear that, you know, from the '60s forward, '50s forward, if we go back to McCarthyism, we have tons of reasons, a laundry list of reasons to to validly and openly distrust our government.

From McCarthyism to, you know, the JFK assassinations, to the Martin Luther King investigations and what the FBI was getting up to fighting the civil rights movement in the '60s. The FBI was a little terrorist organization during the '60s when it came to fighting the civil rights movement. Let's just call it what it was. The J. Edgar Hoover was a was a nut. And he ran this little terrorist group with federal funding, and it was horrible what they, what, what happened then. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the the cultural revolution, the stagnation,

MK Ultra stuff.

And then that, and then that, then MK Ultra gets revealed. And that's of course 100% in my world. And MK Ultra is a horror show of civil liberty violations and human rights violations perpetuated on American soil by an institution, the CIA, that has no mandate to operate in America in any way, shape, or form. And yet we're doing human experimentations on unwitting citizens, uh, in lots of places, in lots of ways. So many ways we don't even know because they literally destroyed all the records rather than fess up to the congressional investigations that revealed all of this. The only reason we know what happened in MK Ultra is because they literally kept the receipts.

It's the invoices and receipts that we have that tell us what they did. That's all we got.

And that is so scary, and the reveals of it were so scary. And then we have, you know, SI op, um, SI investigations actually carried out. They really did it. They really looked into whether remote viewing was a thing. They, they, they, they experimented on some Scientologists, but they had their, you know, the Ingo Swan, they had his cooperation. My point is that society has had some points of degradation, and the government hasn't been there. I mean, Nixon, Vietnam, I mean, holy cow, right? All these things. Then government deregulation in the 80s, neoliberal economic policies creating wealth inequality. There's a lot of reasons for that distrust to exist that are 100% valid. So, that I believe is what feeds the validity of that. The fact that you can't argue with those events feeds the idea, well, if the CIA is willing to engage in human experimentation on American citizens on American soil, well, then surely they might develop mind control techniques using Scientology.

Right. Right. You know, it's like there's a bad leap of logic there where it's like, it's like I, I see that a lot where where I'll talk about something and they're like, "Well, this other thing happened, so like this is plausible." I'm like, "Sure, theoretically it's plausible, but what evidence do you have?" Like, there's many things that are plausible, but...

That's right. And I do think it's important. Yeah. It's like it's important to recognize two things can be true. Like, there's many reasons to have, you know, to view the government or or or or to come up with any narrative about any human endeavor that's very negative, 'cause like any human endeavor is, uh, in general, are filled with all sorts of horrible things, right? So it's very easy to be pessimistic and, uh, distrustful of all sorts of things, I think. But then you have to recognize too, like, it's also possible to be like, way too pessimistic and distrustful where you're not, you know, you're you're leaping to conclusions that don't have, you know, good validity to them. And I think, I think, I think it's important, but that's a very hard line to thread where you can acknowledge both things and see that, like, you know, sometimes we'll be led down overly pessimistic and dark things, especially when it comes to like a perceived enemy like them. They're this, this, this shadowy group is behind something, right? It's, it's all, it's all them, the these evil people, right? That I think that's where you get led down these these very bad, uh, paths that are that are dangerous and even self-destructive.

Yeah, absolutely. And I, I really, really believe that while we can talk about logical fallacies and good critical thinking and even emotional intelligence and the individual factors that drive people, if we don't acknowledge that these truths are out there, that that the government has done horrible things, that has that has created a massive level of distrust in the citizenry, and they have good reason to be looking for the truth. And there are things people want to believe, as we've talked about, you know, simple answers to complex questions like human behavior, or how can I hire the right person at my job, or how do I negotiate this deal? These are complicated processes, and people want the cheat code. They want to get right to the hack and get right to the thing, right? And and this is where these grifters really find their sweet spot is in these gray areas where things are a little nebulous, things are a little, well, it's, it's a little wishy-washy. You have plausible, you know, it's plausible. It's pl, I mean, it's plausible the CIA took Hubbard's material and put it in their interrogation manual. It's not really, but not until you know all the facts, is it does it become implausible?

Right. It's possible. And then that's right. And so people...

Reading on that. Yeah.

That's right. But I believe it's that I believe that that sentiment of distrust is so built in and so strong in our nation now that it has been the thing that has kind of emotionally opened the door to that to create that gray area that these guys live in. And if it wasn't that, it would be something else. I mean, if you know, it's not like conmen are not always going to be around.

But it's just worth talking about.

It's a self-re... Yeah, I do see a lot of this stuff as like self-reinforcing cycles. You know, it, um, they all these things are are related. They, they, they feed into each other. You know, you, you, you, you start to hate the other side more. You're more paranoid about them. You're more likely to be believe conspiracy theories, which in turn makes you more angry and scared of them, etc., etc., you know? It's like...

Yeah. Yeah. Because once you find out the CIA has done stuff in America, you're kind of like, well, they'll just do anything, won't they?

Yeah. You know, and and I got to admit, I, I got big chips on my shoulder about that because, you know...

Yeah. There's like you say, it's it's important to be able to recognize horrible things have happened and then also still try to demand, um, high, high bar for believing, uh, things currently.

Right.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's a tough one. It's a tough one. It's that...

EP the Epstein stuff definitely didn't, didn't that's not that's not helping any, uh, conspiracy thinking, you know?

Not at all. Because because you understand, and it was actually really quite something for me, even myself, to hit up against that because of course I, I know the entire history of QAnon and and the 4chan roots of it and all of that stuff, and yet, and you go, yeah, that's all, you know, kids making up stories, and it's nonsense, and it's this, and it's that. But then you realize, no, wait a minute, there there is a straight of pedophiles, you know, there is something going on here, but is it this, you know, government-wide thing? Of course not.

I don't... That's a, that's a perfect example where people will be like, "Something bad is going on here." And I'll use that as a reason to believe like the whole Smores board of bad stuff, right?

That's right. That's right. And before they know it, they're down the flat earth rabbit hole. I mean, it, you know, and and and at the end of the day, it's all Lucifer. So, um, which is fascinating, by the way, on flat earth, that's where it all goes to Satanist.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's 90% but about 95% religiously driven.

Gez, I didn't even know that.

Yeah. Speaking of, um, there was another thing I wanted to bring up that I thought I almost fell out of my chair when I learned this, and so I had to bring this up with you or to you. Um, Chase Hughes suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy.

Um, do you want me to comment on that?

Well, the reason I bring it up is very specific, and and I don't know that you're going to be familiar with this, which I think you're going to love hearing this. Okay. So, temporal lobe epilepsy is the most common form of epilepsy that's out there. It is a complicated subject, and I am not a medical professional. So, I am not commenting on this to say with certainty that this is what's going on with Chase. But he has admitted openly and made videos and in fact grifted off of the fact that he's got TLE, you know, this brain damage, and he makes this whole video and is selling this, you know, some kind of blue supplement or something.

Um...

Blue.

Yeah. Which really kind of just, of course he did. But here's the thing about TLE that I think you might, that I don't know if you know. We, I've done two podcasts in the past with, uh, with a man Dr. Uvalar, who has forwarded a theory that L. Ron Hubbard suffered from temporal epilepsy.

And in fact, it is a, it is a growing thought in the, in, in certain people in the ex-cult space, myself, John, at, um, you've all, and others, that TLE, uh, and epilepsy has for a long, long, long time, way preceding my lifetime, been called the religious disease. There's a, there's a religious component of extreme religious belief that tends to accompany certain forms or instances of epilepsy. And L. Ron Hubbard certainly had religious megalomania as part of his feature set. But there's a sub-thing I wanted to talk to you about, which I didn't know if you knew about, connected to TLE, which is called Gwin syndrome, and it's a group of behavioral phenomena evident in some people with TLE. Not everybody who has TLE has suffers Gwin syndrome, but it's an interesting thing to look at when looking for motivation or why would these guys be acting the way they're acting.

Um, because it, in, it, Gwin syndrome brings a certain phenomena into play that are just interesting. You just go, really, that could be why he's that way.

And it doesn't justify any con. It doesn't make it okay.

It's just interesting. Gwin syndrome brings about certain phenomena. Five primary changes. Hypergraphia, which is writing a lot, like a lot, a lot. You, you, you express yourself in a lot of words. Uh, you write a lot. L. Ron Hubbard is one of the most prolific authors to have ever lived. Hypergraphia is, is what we call that. I almost fell out of my chair when I downloaded Chase's Ellipsus manual and saw that it was 1,400 pages long. I was like, "Holy man. I, I knew you had this book put together, but Jesus, that's a big book. That's Madame Blavatsky style writing. That's huge. That's L. Ron Hubbard style writing. That's hypergraphia." I went, "Huh?" Right. So, when I learn TLE and I see that and I go, "Oh, that's interesting." And there's another aspect of it, which I wanted to ask you about in your deep dives on Chase. Hyper-religiosity. Some individuals may exhibit hyper-religiosity. It doesn't have to be there, but I'm wondering if it is characterized by increased, usually intense, religious feelings and philosophical interests and partial epilepsy. Patients experience frequent auras in, uh, and they get these when they experience a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure. It doesn't look like a grand mal seizure. They're not flopping around on the ground. They go off into some other place.

Kind of looks like they skipped for a minute or something, but to them, they might have gone off to some place and been there for a year.

Yeah. Yeah.

Kind of spiritual or religious experience, or a metaphysical if they're not religious, they may equate it to a metaphysical kind of experience.

Yeah. I don't know if Chase has ever discussed anything like that, but it can, it can create extreme atheism as well as extreme religiosity, but it's, it's around that area of thinking. There's grandiose,

Very exaggerated thinking.

Right? Well, yeah, I think he is into that. Like he, he's doing a lot of, uh, you know, spiritual kind of like, you know, uh, talking about psychedelics and stuff too, uh, talking about spiritual stuff. But I will say, like, I, I haven't, I haven't watched a lot of his, you know, content. I, I watched specific things he's made. I will say too, like, the guy has lied so much about so many things. Like, I would have to be shown a respected doctor's paperwork to believe he has that disease. And you could have that disease. I'm not saying he does or does not. I'm just saying when someone has lied about so many things.

I, I don't... And there's also is an element of more narcissistic people claiming, uh, thinking being more hypochondriac in nature. So...

Fair enough.

I just think, yeah, he could, I'm not saying he doesn't, to be clear. Uh, you know, uh, I'm just saying when somebody has said as many lies as you said, it's good to take things with a big grain of salt until you can prove it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Fortunately, you know, he is someone who could get brain scans and we could prove that.

Yeah.

I have wondered about Werner Erhard, the the founder of EST, as someone who may also, you know, suffer from this condition. It's once you see it, you start thinking, huh, you know, it's, it's thought Edgar Allan Poe may have suffered from this condition. Certainly John the Baptist is his big, you know, moment on the road, you know, with the light and everything. It's kind of like, well, maybe.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's possible. Yeah.

Yeah. There's, it certainly is interesting to, to, to have it as a, as a potential explanation for what would cause someone to be this way.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it can be very hard to understand, um, some people's way of being because even just on a, you know, even just on the level, like it seems like a very stressful way to live to me, but, you know, that's a, u, it's an interesting way to, to live. And, um, yeah, it's, it's very hard for me to understand a lot of people these days.

It's hard. It is hard. And it's, and it's hard to get your head around the fact that someone can grift and yet believe in their grift.

Yes. You know, and yet I'll have put out there that I think I, I'm thinking, I'm wondering aloud when I say stuff like this. This is still a forming sort of theory, I guess you could say. I, if I dare call it that. Um, knowing what I know about my own experience and and the experience of so many other people in the Church of Scientology and other cult ex-cult members that I've interviewed over the years, the power of belief and determination to enact those beliefs to make a better world can look so much like narcissism, because you're so determined and you're so sure you're right. And you're, and you're willing to adopt an ends justify the means mentality to achieve your goals, that it can look like a narcissistic, self-centered, megalomaniac expression, but you're really just so much on a crusade.

Right?

You know, that from the outside, it can look like that. And I'm not, and I'm not, again, this is not an effort on my part to mitigate responsibility, explain it away. You know, I, I did horrible things when I was in Scientology. I'm not a narcissist, but I was certainly a determined crusader.

Yeah. No, I think that's an important...

Yeah. No, I think that's an important distinction. When I interviewed somebody from my podcast about, uh, psychopathy, we got on the topic of how there can be, you know, there, there's so much simplistic thinking in a lot of these realms where it's like, yeah, if you're a true, if you really believe something and you're a true believer in a crusader, you are going to act in ways that seem, you know, that seem or are sociopathic or narcissistic. You know, there can, there can be many factors involved in bad behavior in general. But yeah, I think there is, there's too often a tendency to just be like, "Oh, they're a narcissist. They're a sociopath." Whatever it is.

Yeah.

That's right. And given the different forms of narcissism, I mean, maybe it could be classified as a kind of narcissism because you do also have benign narcissistic behavior. And you, there's various categories and boxes that people are creating for this to try to, and at the end of the day, these are just words to try to explain behavior. But it's, um, I find it interesting. So I wanted to throw it at you and see what you thought about those things and, and that there's...

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah. No, I think it's, yeah. I mean, a big part of my podcast work is examining some things that people approach with too simplistic, you know, a lens and trying to see that there can be many factors at work. And, you know, that just because somebody behaves badly doesn't make them necessarily just, you know, a narcissist or a psychopath or whatever. You know, uh, see, trying to see the nuance and not just like embracing our simplistic labels because they make us feel good is, I think, is is important and related to what, what we're talking about too.

Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. What do you, what are your take, and you know, you've written books on this now. You've certainly done some wonderful podcast articles, podcasts, and articles. Um, you really go out of your way to get it all written out too, and stuff, which I really appreciate. It's, it's really wonderful diving into your stuff. I need, I need, I need to really present the Chase Hughes stuff specifically because I got so many people coming to me being like, "Hey, you're just, you're just angry. You're just jealous." So, I was like, I need to really put this in a really easy to summarize thing, which I don't think I still don't think it could isn't the best form, but hopefully, I, I think most people read it and thank me. You know, that's by, and you know, 90% plus of people, uh, know what's going on when they read, you know, the summary of of Chase Hughes. But I still get people being like, "That's just a bunch of things. That's just a, he was just doing a fake it till you make it approach. That's just normal stuff." I'm like, "Um, if you think that's normal, like I just, I, I wouldn't want to trust you with any business or personal decisions, but, you know, no accounting for ethics."

No. No, there isn't. And it's really, it's, it's a, that distrust factor, I think, really messes with people's morality and a willingness to compromise morality, you know.

Yeah. There's, there's a lot of suspending of judgment if you know, if somebody is pursu, if you like somebody, you know, there's a lot of like, you know, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt kind of stuff.

Yeah.

That's right. Fundamental attribution error reigns supreme. Uh, you know, that, that I, I'll give myself a pass where I'll judge others more harshly kind of kind of, uh, fallacy, right? It's, it's just lives so large in this, in this space. Do you, beyond what we've discussed, are there other factors at play, do you think, behind the, the, the motivation of people to, to lift up the these folks like like Chase Hughes?

Um, I'm sure there are, but I feel like we've touched on some of the major ones, the basic stuff. Yeah.

I think, I think, uh, you know, distrusting or wanting to knock the establishment or or some or some disliked, you know, group or system is is a big part. And then you've got the wanting to get clicks and attention part of it. Um, yeah, I think those are those are some of the two major ones. Yeah. Yeah. Two of the two of the major ones for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so, too. I, I, I, I'll bring, I'll throw one other thing into the mix and then maybe we can move toward wrapping up. I, I, I have, I've loved having this talk with you today. Has been really nice. Thank you.

Me, too. Yeah. Thank you for...

Doing this.

Um, I, I, I was impressed by, uh, a podcast I saw when I was doing, you know, the, the thing in Scientology that they have that bypasses a lot of the need for watching people's eyes and paying attention to their body language and stuff is they have this E-meter.

Right?

And this thing is famous, right? Or infamous. And it is really just one-third of a lie detector, and that's it. That's all it is. It's just measuring skin resistance. And I've done, in doing all the research that I did, and it took me way longer than it should have, but I, I really wanted to be thorough, um, to debunk it. I did a whole video debunking this thing, uh, for, you know, that I hope ex-Scientologists at least will watch 'cause they're the most vested in believing that this thing works. Even after they leave Scientology, they still think it works. And there's the, the, the amount of indoctrination in Scientology around this device and the round of mythic lore surrounding it is incredible. It's, it's not a minor part of Scientology. So it bypasses the need for a lot of this, you know, more microexpression-tuned psychology, right? Because you just have the meter and the and the needle goes and there it is. And okay, tell me what you just thought of 'cause you're clearly got an answer to this question I just asked you 'cause it reacted. You know, that's about the simplicity of how it works there. And I watched a, um, CIA, I think it was a CI or FBI, uh, uh, polygraph operator talk on a podcast. She'd been retired now. She does it in the business world or whatever. And she spoke much, much, much more intelligently about the efficacy of this device, the, the, of the polygraph, not the, she wasn't talking about the meter, but about the polygraph in general, and how you would actually use it in the real world versus what you see on Morbidovich or what you see on, you know, TV or whatever, uh, with the sensationalistic, you know, we put your fiance on a lie detector and guess what, you know, you're, that, that's, that's never, I guess I'm bringing this up to demonstrate that, um, she spoke with so much nuance.

Mhm.

You get a reaction to something. All you know there's a reaction.

Mhm.

You do not know in any way, shape, or form, as a polygraph operator, why it reacted the way that it did. And to assume you do would be a mistake.

Right. And this is a pro-level, did it for decades person doing that work, right? And that's where I think we get a recognition that it's that we can move past the pseudoscience a little bit when we have somebody able to talk with nuance that way with like, hey, look, it's not, there are no certain answers here. This is a window. This is an opportunity for me to get this person to talk. Maybe there's something to expose, or maybe they just had, you know, a stomach ache right now, right? I, I don't know yet.

Mhm.

But people just want that know-it-all, you know, like they just want that fast thing, right? That's where the nuance disappears.

Yeah. The desire for certainty. Yeah. I think, um, I, I, I long ago, I years ago, I had an idea for a book that would just be about how the desire for certainty, you know, is like our core human, uh, weakness and problem, you know, because it lead, we just, the existential, you know, angst and anxiety of living in an uncertain world where, you know, it's hard to find meaning, and we doubt the meanings of things, and we are always searching for meaning. It's like we're always looking for things that we can grasp onto that are that are certain that we know, right? And that's like, I, I just think that's such a base level, like thing that explains so much bad human behavior, you know, malignant behavior, malicious, psych, psychopathic behavior, narcissistic behavior. It's like we really crave the certainty about ourselves in the world. And so we are drawn to these, grasping onto these things that give us some sense of solidity and that we, that we're, you know, maybe that we're above other people, or that we know better than other people, or that we have the secret that other people don't, or that we've finally latched onto the meaning that will make sense of this crazy world, you know. So, um, yeah, I do think so much of that comes down to like, we really, we really want to know things because it is comforting to know things.

Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, after you've, after all the stuff you've read and studied this, because you've done deep dives just like I have on this stuff for years now, what's, what's your basic takeaway about people reading? If you were going to sort of summarize it or put it into some easy to understand principles?

Well, I think, um, hard to sum up, but I, I think, uh, like I said, the, I think the verbal stuff is so much more, uh, verbal statements, you know, statement analysis is so much more important than, uh, and meaningful and reliable than than, uh, studying, uh, non-verbal, you know, body language. Um, I do think there are things you can pick out. I mean, I think that one of my big things, which I have been meaning to make a podcast about, is the difference between more formal environments like games and sports and, you know, more open-ended things like real-world situations like interrogations or interviews or, you know, that when you get into situations where there's a more formal thing going on where say there's a very clear dynamic where like you want to win this poker hand, and there's certain things you must do in the poker hand in the context of that poker hand, and there's certain feelings that often arise that are very polarized, right? It's like you're either, you, you know, you're bluffing, or you know you're going to win, often, you know, um, or near certainly know you're going to win. Uh, so there's very polarized ranges of emotion that, and, and you're doing a very specific activity that that does not map over at all to like an interrogation or an interview or real-world scenarios where you could be having a range of different motivations, a range of different emotions, and you're not nearly in this polarized state where you're like bluffing or not bluffing. So that's just to say the, the context matters a lot for these kinds of things. And that's helps explain why, you know, I wrote books about poker tells and I believe you can find a lot of information there, and yet I'm extremely skeptical about people that claim you can get all this information out of real-world situations. Right? So the context, I think, and the environment is very important for figuring out if you can deduce, um, reliable or reliable information from behavior of of whatever sort. So I think that's very important, and, you know, a lot of people are confused by that. They're like, oh, you wrote books on poker tells, you have to be into all this other stuff that people are, you know, claiming you can get from stuff. I'm like, "No, like in most real-world situations, I find it very hard to know what people are are thinking or what their goals are." Other than like, a lot of, there's a lot of obvious stuff that goes on, right? Like, you know, in poker, in any game, just as in the real world, sometimes there's very bad players, right? Like you can, you can sometimes get a sense, like watching an interrogation, you can tell, you know, like somebody's like a very unskilled criminal and they're giving a lot of information away by how they act or, you know, how they behave or how they speak. Uh, you're like, "This guy's clearly guilty." Like, there's clearly like unskilled and skilled practitioners. But when it comes to like most real-world scenarios, it's very hard to get reliable information about what somebody's thinking because people are just good at deceiving you, right? They're, they're good at, they're most people are pretty good at distracting you from what they don't want to tell you, or, uh, you know, most people are pretty good at acting nonchalant when they're actually nervous. You know, mo, most people are pretty good at these things. So to, to think that you could easily get, you know, reliable information, like clear-cut information about like what somebody's telling you in an interview, uh, or, you know, a political speech or whatever it may be. It's like, it's, it's quite hard, uh, you know, other than the, the, but that is to say that there's still a lot of information you can get, but most of it's in like the words that people use, right? Like a politician is asked a question and they deflect from it, and they clearly don't want to answer it. Why, why don't they want to answer? That could be for many reasons, right? We don't know if it's because they're have something to hide, or they're uncomfortable, they want to talk about something else. But a lot of the things that we can deduce are like quite surface-level things that a lot of people just deduce every day about other people, right? So, a, a lot of the most meaningful stuff is just like due to critical thinking about like, what is this person trying to do? And like, to delve into all this like wishy-washy body language stuff is like missing the abundance of information we have about people that's right there on the surface that we could be like, well, why didn't he answer that question when he was asked? Or or why did he use this language to, why did he use this ambiguous language to describe something when he could have used more specific language? Or why did he not directly deny his involvement? Why did he use ambiguous language to, to, to deny it? There's all this stuff that we could be actually using our intellect to examine that's much more reliable than, uh, you know, where somebody was looking when they spoke, or if they looked a little nervous, you know, like, who, I'm nervous most of the time. I would get, you know, I get interviewed in any, any situation like, what does it, what does it mean, you know? Uh, so, yeah, that's kind of my rough summary.

Yeah, that actually brings to mind one other thing. Um, which was, I'm a little disturbed by this, and maybe you can comment on it more than more than I know about the proclivity or the, the sort of the fact that not only are corporate negotiators or recruiters getting involved in this stuff, but so is law enforcement, and has been for quite some time, looking for ways to read people, to understand people, to get answers out of people. I think there are very few people in this world more motivated to try to learn all the hacks and shortcuts to the human mind than law enforcement. And I'm talking about police, I'm talking about, you know, FBI, all of it, right? And we hear endless stories about behavior analysis and behavior profiling, um, which the FBI was incredibly reluctant to get into back in the day because, you know, just, you know, uh, assuming people were evil and the criminal mind, as Jed Garoover liked to talk about, was a very popular meme back before behavioral analysis and understanding people became a thing. Um, so now they are readily adopting Chase Hughes stuff, you know, like that they'll, they'll go to these seminars and and workshops and learn this stuff too. Am I right? Am I off base with this? This is my understanding of what's going on.

Well, uh, I don't really, I think it's hard to say like how many people are into this stuff, right?

Mhm.

Because it's not clear to me like how many people are paying Chase Hughes for his guidance, right? Like...

Um, so I think it's important to, you know, keep in mind that...

It's hard to say who's using this really. Uh, I think one time Chase said, Chase said recently, he, he was asked that question about who comes to his, you know, who, who gets his one-on-one training or or in-person training kind of stuff. And he said something like, I think it was like business people and, uh, therapists or something. It, I don't, I'm not even sure he mentioned law enforcement or anything like that.

Oh, he had, maybe I just read...

I mean, he, he, he definitely mentions, he definitely says that they use him.

He definitely says that, but when he was asked specifically about who comes to his trainings, kind of question. So, it just made me think like...

There's a, there's a doubt about who, who exactly is coming and how many of them, right? Like, we don't have, in, we don't have insight into into that really. Uh, but to your point, you know, I do think, uh, law enforcement has become better, you know, in the sense that they've, they've had a lot of, there's been a lot of negative articles about them using, you know, uh, debunked or untrustworthy process behavior reading processes. So they, some, some departments have faced pushback for using these kind of like wishy-washy behavior reading, uh, processes. So I think there, on the plus side, I think there, there can be at least for the like more, you know, established reputable kind of places, there's more, I think there's more cognizance of like, we, we don't want to get bad press by like embracing some training. I, I do think it more often happens that individuals are are going off and getting the training on their own, right? Because they've...

They've thought like, "Oh, this, this could be cool."

Um, but yeah, as far as like, I haven't really seen, you know, evidence recently of of of law enforcement embracing these ideas at like a department kind of level, but I could be wrong. I haven't, I haven't delved into it. Um, yeah.

Yeah. No, I haven't seen it at the department level either. I've just been concerned because all the way going back to the satanic panic days, the grifters who were pushing satanic cells and cults exist in every town and they're they're hiding in every barn and don't you know, right? And I saw so much media of sheriffs and county, you know, and state and city level troopers all the way back to then. And I'm not, I'm not just drawing connecting those dots, but from that time forward, I've seen these, you know, pseudopsychological methodologies, you could say, sort of insinuate themselves in and out of these law enforcement agencies over the years.

And I've always kind of bookmarked it a little bit like, oh, that's that's not right. That's not good. There's there's there's plenty of, there's plenty of...

Yeah, there's plenty of evidence and write-ups about departments using the NLP kind of ideas, you know, like the eye direction and and these kinds of things. And also like there's...

Yeah, there's some other behavioral wishy-washy stuff that's been covered from time to time. Uh, but yeah, I think it, it is a problem. I think, uh, I, I think it's, I, I definitely cannot say how big a problem it is these days. Uh, but I do think, yeah, it's, I, I think the other nice thing, uh, positive thing too, is, and I've covered this a little bit in one of my episodes where it's like, I, I think as long as like, there's all sorts of theoretical ideas people can learn, right? Like that that have, you know, low to high meaning or or proof. I, I think, I think that's not, it's not necessarily a problem for for officers, you know, if we're talking about individual officers to go off and learn this stuff. Not department level. I, I think it, in practice, it's not as big a problem as it might be because I think, a, in practice, how it happens is like they're just compiling a lot of theoretical ideas, and in practice, it doesn't actually play out to be meaningful because they really, they still have to like get evidence for pursuing someone as a suspect. So, like, if it plays a role at all, it's, it's, it's usually in like these minor things, like, like how often do they have a suspect where they, you know, how often are are cops pursuing a suspect that they don't have like actual evidence on, right? So, I, I think it, it usually doesn't play out where they're like accusing them based on a body language thing that like, I know you did it, you know? I don't think it plays out like that. I think it's more just like for the people that embrace it, it's like, I think it could play out that way, don't get me wrong, but I think for a lot of people, it's like they're, they're just perusing all these ideas and then like, it, it actually doesn't really play a role because most of the people who learn that stuff just know it's like, could be true. It could be reliable, but they don't have much, you know, it's not like they have like high confidence and they're going to base like some important police decision on it. So that's, that's just to say, like, some things could be bad, but I also think the way it plays out in practice, even even for people that believe a lot of weird stuff, it doesn't actually play that big a role when it comes down to the actual procedures they follow.

Yeah.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, I wanted to bring it up as a point because...

No.

It's, it's, it's in, it's a series of individuals in our country. There's only so many thousands of police officers, and yet those people hold an inordinate amount of power in their hands, and literally the power of life and death. And so their split-second decisions or how they interpret the world matters in a significant way to all of our general health and well-being. And so this is why when stories of cop abuse come up, they're so incendiary because we've put so much power in those people. And they, they're the ones who get to walk around openly with guns, and we don't even look twice. Right.

Yeah. And...

And I, I definitely don't want to downplay it. It's like, like I said before, I think that's the insidious harm of a lot of this stuff because a lot of people will use it to just, basically engage in confirmation bias where they're like, "Oh, I saw him look this way. Now I know, you know, now I know he's he's guilty." So, I mean, I, to say, I, I do think that that is a danger for a lot of these wishy-washy ideas of various sorts where they're some cops may just be like, "Oh, now I'm extra certain in my read that they're guilty." Right. That ex because that's going to make them double down on extracting a forced confession, for example.

Yeah. Or abuse. Yeah. A forced confession. Yeah. Various ways. Yeah. V various ways of abusing someone who shouldn't be like, Yeah. Roughly interrogated or...

That's right. That's right.

It's, it's a thing. I, I just, I just think, um, on the plus side, I think I think, uh, it may not be, it may not play out as often. There might be a reason you don't often hear about the behavioral stuff playing a role in these things.

Yeah.

Fair enough. No, no, you're absolutely right. And I, and I don't want to overstate the case. I, I really just wanted to bring the subject up because I have concerns, and yes, I'm the first to admit that some of those concerns are, um, from ignorance. And I, and I own that, um, because I don't know exactly precisely the training programs of of all the cops. They, they have lots of them. But when these grifters get into those spaces, and they do that, that I have no question about that.

They're not helping the situation at all. Right. And that's just something that people don't think about too much because we talk almost exclusively about the public, the general public who fall or the vulnerable and emotionally vulnerable public, or the senior citizens, or the religious extremists. And we kind of categorize these victims as, you know, sort of in these different groups that that are not cops. We, we think of the authority figures as kind of above this, and, you know, they would never fall for this, and oh no, they're just as human, and please understand that they definitely fall for it.

Yeah. For sure. No, they, they definitely, uh, Yeah, it would be, it would be good to know. I think the one interesting thing about Chase is like, the one official thing I could find him involved in, like a depart, at a department level, was like some small, like, it was like something to do with some like small naval, uh, legal or law enforcement thing, but that was like the only thing I could find where somebody had embraced him at some department level. And even then, it wasn't even clear what he did. It was just like somebody mentioned him as if like he had maybe come to some event. So, yeah, just to say, it's, it's hard to get an insight into like...

Where these people are getting their their hooks into various places.

Yeah.

That's right. It comes up in weird surprising ways, and you, and you're, and you're sometimes you're really shocked at at at where stuff happens. I'm, I, I, just to just to put the cherry on top of this, and we can wrap it up. Um, there was a, um, there was some movie, and in Adam Driver was in it. It was about the, um, enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA or that the military were using at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and various places. And of course, I am rapidly against any form of of what so-called enhanced interrogation, meaning torture. Um, that, that it is the euphemism. They acknowledge it as such. This has been a subject of congressional hearings. And in fact, the report that some of these congressional, uh, investigators got, they made this movie about. And the, and the, and the, the, the torture methodology, you could say, that they were adopting was coming from a couple private contractors. It wasn't even developed internally. It was they hired out for it, and these guys came in and said, "Oh yeah, here's what you do. Dutt, dut, and here's all these, then they had this whole array of procedures that were guaranteed to extract information from people," and and this was torture. And so, um, so even there, you know, these, who are these private contractors? Well, a couple of idiots, that's obviously who they were. And and they sold, you know, this bill of goods that we can extract the goods from people if we hurt them enough in enough creative, interesting ways. And that's just not, and we now know that doesn't work either.

Mhm.

Even down to the, even down to beating on people, and you still can't be sure they're telling you the truth, right? Which was the classic problem. I, I thought of it because we, when we're talking about the police, the third degree used to be official police policy until human rights activists put a stop to it, and then psychological warfare became the way to extract information from criminals or potential criminals. And that's why this has so much appeal in that world, I think. So, just like I said, it's not my main line, but it's just something I want to pursue.

Yeah. I know it's good to be, Yeah. We, you definitely want to be skeptical about the ideas that are getting in these institutions and divisions of various sorts.

Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Now, getting back to you because I want to wrap this up, and I want to, um, give you a chance to talk some more because I'm, I'm dominating this conversation. Um...

What, what other, what other things do you, or are you going to be looking into? Now, you've mentioned a few things you want to do some podcasts on. Uh, where, where are you going with your work now? Because you're, you're so adjacent to so much of what I do, and I'm, I'm just, I'm absolutely, I, I just love your work. So I just want to know...

Yeah. I want to, I want to connect people with you and what you're doing.

Oh, thank, it means a lot. I mean, I don't, I don't get that many people telling me that, so it definitely means a lot. Um, yeah, I, uh, well, I, I just recently moved to New York and started a new relationship and a new job, so I, I don't have that much free time these days, you know. Uh...

I want more.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. And and the podcast obviously takes some, some effort. Uh, so I'm kind of struggling with that. Um, I don't know what's going to happen with that 'cause yeah, it's, it's hard to juggle all the things I got going on right now.

All right.

Uh, but yeah, I don't have any, I don't have any firm plans. Um, but if you're, if you're curious, you can follow my podcast at behavior-podcast.com if anyone's curious about that. But yeah, sorry, I don't have any specific plans right now. Just struggling, struggling to get by and, you know, figure out what to do with myself.

I hear you. I'm in the same boat. Um, this is, this is what I love to do, but it's hard to do it. Um, so thank you very much for coming on my show, Zach. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it. It's honored to be asked.

Yeah, you, like I said, you do good work. Uh, behaviorpodcast.com. Link is in the description section below, folks. So, you can check that out down there. Uh, and if you're listening to this on an audio-only podcast version, the link is also in the description section for this podcast today. So, um, you can check out, uh, his podcast and his YouTube channel, and I encourage you to do so. Um, it's just the kind of stuff I like watching, you know, a methodical, uh, systematic, deep dive into nonsense and let's take it apart and and and some wonderful look at, you know, like I try to do, like deep dives with professionals, like let's really talk about this, let's talk about hypnotism, let's talk about neuroscience, let's talk about...

Behavioral analysis. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Lie detector. I got a polygraph one on there. Yeah.

Ah, yeah. Love it. All this stuff. So, um, it's complicated, folks. Sorry. Didn't make the rules. It's just how it is. It's, it's not, it's not easy to understand. Um, but boy, is it fun. Okay, on that happy note, thank you very much for coming around and watching us babble on at a mad rate about all of this. Very much appreciate your viewership and support out there. And, uh, hope that I will see you again next week. Bye-bye.