Brainwashing, Manipulation & Psyops Explained

Chris: Who are you? How do you describe what you do for work?

Chase Hughes: It's so hard. If I'm talking to somebody that's boring, I'll just tell them I teach psychology stuff. But if I want to get into it, I'll say I teach everything from brainwashing to interrogation, applied on yourself and other people. And most of what I do nowadays is train sales teams. Sales has gotten really addicted to this stuff. I've studied neuroscience for a long time and spent my life trying to figure out how the brain works and how to shift human behavior. Not just like to get someone to confess in an interrogation, but how do we modify our own behavior and what are the mechanics that make that possible?

Chris: Do you think we're living in the most psychologically manipulated era in human history?

Chase Hughes: Yes. Hands down. But I mean, you go to ancient Rome, some stuff would happen and they would say, "Hey, do the lion fighting thing with the guy. Let's distract everybody." So I don't think it's new. I think it's a lot more pervasive, though.

Chris: Is that because of technology, or is that because of a requirement for control? What's the motivation?

Chase Hughes: I think it's digital media. If you think about what is the number one fear of human beings -- every psychology class talks about it -- it's public speaking. But it's never really public speaking. It's "I don't want to be judged. I don't want to be ostracized," because in our brain that's 200,000 years old, getting kicked out of a tribe means I'm dead. Not going to have sex, I won't have babies, and I'm going to die. It's a mortal fear of dying.

But if you go back to the 1980s, if I did something stupid in high school or even as an adult, I have to worry about 30 or 40 people judging me and maybe kicking me out of a social group. Now, with social media, you've got to worry about 5 or 10 million. So the consequences of doing something wrong are unbelievably exponentially increased, which has made us a whole different society. This is the origin of the pandemic of loneliness that we're in right now, where everybody will agree we're at pandemic levels of loneliness, and nobody says "I'm lonely."

Chase Hughes: Have you ever studied the French philosopher Sartre? He had this play called Sartre's Hell, where three people are locked in a room, basically like this. It's a play. But the room's not totally locked. Every couple of hours the door opens and you can leave if you want to, and nobody leaves. They're all desperate to be seen a certain way by someone else.

One guy wants to be seen as a good person, so he asks a woman there, "Please tell me I'm a good person. Please." And she says, "Yeah, you're a good person." But he knows she doesn't mean it. So he stays. The door opens, nobody leaves, and they stay because they're waiting for confirmation from other people of who they are.

And in this world today, with how performative and artificial everybody has become, the reason that somebody can feel lonely in a room full of people is because no matter how many times your friends come over and say, "Oh Chris, you did a great job, we love you, you're a great guy," in the back of your mind, you know you're faking it and you know that none of them really like the real you. You get to the end of the day lonely in a room of 150 or 200 people because you know that none of them know you. You haven't ever really been seen by anybody.

So: increased fear of judgment because of social media equals increased performance, equals wearing a costume almost all the time, and nobody has ever seen you, nobody really knows you. Even if they claim to like you, in the back of your brain there's this little reminder that says, they don't like the real me. And nobody ever has. Nobody's ever seen me.

This is my opinion, but I think that's the root of the pandemic of loneliness we're in right now. We're more connected than ever and more performative than ever at the same time. So we can't really connect. Our brains are wired for a 120 or 130 person tribe, and when we go over that we have massive issues.

Chris: It's interesting that a lot of the time the person has been subsumed by the persona. The role that people are playing.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. But the persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise at best. And it feels like a pat on the back. Same as people don't love Chris Hemsworth, they love Thor. They don't love Russell Crowe, they love Gladiator. So how can you be surprised if you don't genuinely, existentially feel the connection with your pursuits and your successes and the people around you? You know that they're just applauding the role that you play as opposed to seeing who you are truly.

Chris: Have you seen the movie Pig with Nicholas Cage? You've got to watch it. Even just this one scene, about 5 minutes long. Nicholas Cage plays a guy who's just had enough and he stopped performing -- he doesn't care. He's not mean or anything. He just doesn't perform. And he goes to this restaurant, he's a famous chef and he's exiled. And this other chef is just pretending to be a certain type of person so his restaurant is more successful. And Nicholas Cage just basically says, "None of this is real. You're not real, which means they're not real, and none of this -- everything's fake. And you're going to wake up every day and there's going to be less of you and less of you until there's nothing left that you will ever recognize again."

And it's this massive awakening scene for this guy and it's beautiful. I think when people watch it, they assume, "Oh, I'm in the Nick Cage role." And maybe sometimes in our life we are, but I think in other times we need to be kind of shaken awake. Someone grabs our camera and changes the angle to look at a situation differently. I want to be woken up like that in every possible way. And I think that's what we all need.

Chris: Is brainwashing real? What's true and false about that?

Chase Hughes: Brainwashing is absolutely real. There's a four-step process and it spells out the word FEAR: Focus, Emotion, Agitation, and Repetition.

Starting with Focus -- this is me routinely breaking what you're predicting to be what's going to happen next, over and over in a massive amount. One or two times, this triggers the mammal brain. You're walking down a path in the woods and a stick breaks behind a tree. You're like, what was that? You're not worried about anything else. The fastest way to generate mammal focus is novelty. Some genuine thing happens that you didn't expect.

Then it's Emotion. There's an old hypnosis technique that became popular in the '50s. A guy named Dr. Milton Erickson popularized this thing called fractionation. They figured out that if you pull somebody down into hypnosis and then take them gently out of it, when you put them right back down, they go deeper every time. There's no such thing as literal depth in hypnosis. What they essentially mean is you'll have more GABA -- the safety neurotransmitter -- and a higher degree of theta wave brain state. If you keep going up and then back down, up and then back down, you're deeper and deeper in a hole every single time.

So if you look at your feed on whatever app you're thinking of right now, you scroll through, you're going to see stuff that kind of brings you back up but only for a second or two. Then it's fear and scarcity. Focus, then an authority figure telling you something threatening, making you fearful of judgment of a tribe, making you emotional, then bringing you back up, then back down in that cycle. Focus, authority, tribe, emotion. You'll see it in your feed, guaranteed.

Chase Hughes: And you don't even need to scroll for 5 minutes. You'll see it right away. And then it'll be like one little thing to kind of bring you up -- one of those videos where people are like, "Oh, we just found this baby deer on our porch one day, and we decided to bottle-feed him and raise him." And then it's a fast cut to where he's a giant deer sleeping in the kids' bed and he's like a family member now. It's a heartwarming video and I love watching those. But it feels great, and then bam, they pull you back down again into the cycle.

What you'll notice after you see that fear video through the focus, authority, tribe, and emotion cycle, right at the end they're either going to bring you up, or show you an ad. I've never heard anybody talk about this before, but you can absolutely see it. And I'm not immune. Like I've bought stupid stuff on Instagram like anybody else. Knowing about this doesn't get you vaccinated against manipulation. I bought the dumbest stuff in the world on Instagram. It just means I'm a well-informed victim of this stuff.

But that's the core of brainwashing: Focus, Emotion -- that's the fractionation part of up and down. Then Agitation. This is doing something where the mammalian brain recognizes this is a different environment than it was expecting. Not a thing that's happening -- the landscape is changing. Oil prices are going up. There's a shortage of some critical resource.

And then Repetition. In a detainee environment, the massive focus is them being woken up in the middle of the night over and over by strobe lights and loud sounds, cold water. And the emotion -- the entire time you're sitting there in your prison cell, I've got every photo your family's ever posted on the internet playing on a slideshow projector on the wall. Focus, emotion, then agitation: something extremely disrupting to your ability to predict the future. Then repetition, and the cycle begins again.

That process creates a blank slate in people. That's the baseline formula of how brainwashing works. And that is exactly what social media is using.

Chris: Yes, but I think a lot of people think there's some dark conference table, dudes smoking cigars going, "How can we mess these people up?" I don't think it's that at all.

Chase Hughes: I think it's just an algorithm that's rewarding what creates the most revenue. Showing you an ad for shoes is way easier after you watch the little baby deer video, or after I make you think the water supply is being destabilized. I think it's just an algorithm. There are many other things where people are involved in manipulating the public. I don't think social media is doing that on purpose in that piece of it.

The piece that I do absolutely think is being done on purpose is: if you're on the left and you open your feed, you're going to be shown the dumbest, most extreme idiots on the other side they could possibly find. And if you're on the right, you're going to be seeing the exact same thing about people on the left. And at the deepest part of your mind, you cannot help but make a permanent judgment about reality: those people are crazy, all of them are crazy, I can't trust them, I can't listen to them.

This is a campaign I think is called engineered division. And if I can get people fighting horizontally, they're not going to look up. If I can get somebody destabilized and at odds with each other, your ability to think critically is reduced by like 50%. This is massive and they've shown this in many studies.

Just getting someone destabilized in that way where they're fighting each other, distrustful of their neighbors, makes them 10 times more easy to manipulate.

If you think of how our brain works -- if you're falling off a cliff, your arms and legs are going to flail all over the place. The first solid object that touches your body, you're going to instinctively grab onto it. Even if it's a thorn bush or barbed wire, you'll grab it.

So when a population is destabilized and something clear and logical is presented -- something like a prepackaged enemy -- you're 10 times more likely to accept it. Because it's clear, it's prepackaged, and it's easy to follow. And humans don't ever follow the best leader in a situation. They follow the most followable.

Chase Hughes: And there's a big difference between those things. Two Chinese intelligence officers wrote a paper on this. I think it's called Unrestricted Warfare. It's been translated into English. They use a hypothetical country that really looks like the United States. But they talk about asymmetric warfare and how they have to get them fighting each other, distrustful of each other. They destabilize the government from the inside because they can't win a terrestrial war with these people. And all of this is just written out there. You could probably buy the translated book on Amazon for like three or four bucks.

These are foreign state actors doing some of this stuff. We just had a former mayor of a city in California who was proven to be an operative for China. A mayor.

I think people are thinking there's some ancient rich family in the depths of some cave plotting the destruction of the world. I think it's just countries that hate each other and greedy, selfish companies. And maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but if you're watching the news and you don't hear nuance, you are being manipulated. They're giving you a message: here's the enemy, here's how to feel, and here's exactly what's happening. They'll never tell you how they're connected. They'll act like everything's a separate story.

I think there's an agenda. I'd be a fool to say I can understand or know the end game of any of this stuff.

Chris: What makes a leader followable?

Chase Hughes: Authority first -- the perception of authority. And we trust, in order, five things that make us trust another human being. First is confidence. The person doesn't have any reservations. They're talking clearly. They're speaking in a way I can clearly understand. They're not using academic language. Which is why most presidents -- the president who speaks at a lower grade level is, I think, about 35% more likely to win a debate.

Confidence and clarity. Next is discipline. We can see discipline on people -- self-control that comes through. Then leadership. For good or bad, cult leaders have all these qualities too. Gratitude and enjoyment -- being thankful for what's happening in the moment, emotionally stable, easy to follow.

But our brain's shortcut is: follow whoever is loudest, clearest, and has no hesitation in their behavior. Our brains are trained to look for micro-hesitations and automatically give us a gut feeling of "oh, I shouldn't trust that person." Micro-hesitations are the fastest way to destroy authority.

Chase Hughes: The process is to close down a machine, build pressure inside of it, and then decide where the pressure is going to release. It's a controlled release of pressure that's been building on purpose. And tracking pressure -- financial pressure, economic pressure, shipping and trade pressure -- is always more revealing from an intelligence perspective than tracking the money. The pressure has to have a release valve somewhere. And nine times out of ten there is a person or group of people choosing how and where the release valve is going to be.

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Chris: What's the outcome that those people want? The "they"?

Chase Hughes: Part of this is that social media algorithms have reverse-engineered the way human brains work because it's a very simple algorithm. And the fact that it's simple is why it's so effective. The best way to get the outcome you want is to just let it optimize for that outcome and reverse-engineer however it got there.

Chris: That's why we can complain all we want about the algorithms, but even the engineers don't know what's happening inside the black box of YouTube or TikTok. This is just recursive algorithms training themselves. The coolest thing I learned about this is from Stuart Russell, the guy who wrote the canonical AI textbook -- Human Compatible. He said there are two ways algorithms can become better at predicting what you click on. The first is serving you content more akin to what you want to press. But the other side is: I can nudge your preferences to make them easier to predict. So it's a bidirectional relationship. Not just better at working out what you want to click, but better at making you more predictable. That is really mind-blowing.

Chase Hughes: Dude, I've got to read this because that's spectacular. When I teach persuasion and influence, what I tell people is your first goal is being able to engineer and build the perfect client. Make the person the perfect recipient for what you need to give them. If I know the outcome is I need you to click on baby deer videos, I'm going to engineer that so that I'm not just starting to show them to you. I'm going to make you the perfect recipient before I start shifting your behavior.

The way I typically describe this is: most training in persuasion teaches you how to engineer outcomes because people are obsessed with the outcome. But I argue that if you're good, what you engineer are conditions. And if I can engineer the right conditions, I can get you to do anything. Anything.

Chase Hughes: As an example of how powerful conditions and context are -- I think it was in the 1940s, a stage hypnotist doing a comedy club thing puts 10 or 15 people on stage and eventually tells an off-duty police officer in the group that one person in the audience has a gun and is going to take you down. The officer -- who was carrying a real weapon -- fired into the crowd. A real gun. The cop was a good person, well-meaning, just wanted to go out with his wife for an evening. But context can dictate your behavior no matter what.

Like, we're going to both get naked by the end of the day -- not together -- but we're going to get into a shower or a bath. And as we're standing in front of the shower, we're not like, "Oh, I don't know if I should." We just get naked. So context tells us what's allowed.

So if I can modify context, I can get you to do anything. It's a PCP formula: Perception, Context, Permission. I change your perception about what's going on. Then I say, "Since you're viewing this differently, it's actually this situation where people are trying to do X." Or I reframe this as someone being a complete threat. I've changed your perception of what's possible to do. Then the context says this person is a mortal threat. And if I shift category and context, that changes what you think you're allowed to do.

If you look at the Milgram experiment -- they proved that people will shock strangers to what they think is death in about 47 minutes, at a 70% rate. But they didn't have a script. There wasn't some magic sales script. It's just a dude in a lab coat. All they did is engineer the conditions that make it okay. The context made that shocking behavior permissible.

Chris: Who's the most effective behavioral manipulator you've ever seen operate in front of you?

Chase Hughes: I can't say names. The task I gave him was: go into this very social environment -- a band playing, like a bar or pub -- and I want you to have someone laid out on the floor, unconscious, in like 7 minutes. He did it within about 3 or 4 minutes.

I asked him, "What did you do?" He said, "Oh, I just told her I was a hypnotherapist and asked how she wanted to change her life. She was really excited about wanting more discipline, so I told her I would give her more discipline and it's really easy." He shifted the context to her being helped instead of controlled, and made it okay for her to be laying on the floor, just by shifting the context.

It's the same in interrogation rooms. There's a five-step protocol people use to make someone confess to a crime. And if you really examine the protocol, it's just a massive shift in context and perception.

Chris: What's the protocol?

Chase Hughes: It's: Socialize, Minimize, Rationalize, and Project -- followed by an alternative question at the end. "Is it this or this?"

So take smuggling arms as our example. The beginning is called the interview process, and the shift is called the confrontation. The confrontation is where you tell them you know they're not giving you the full story, but you don't do it in a way that hurts their ego. "Chris, I appreciate you, and I just want you to know I've been doing this a really long time. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's when I'm not getting the full story. And I don't think I'm getting the full story here."

Then Socialize: "I think at the end of the day, you did this because you're a good person. I've talked to a lot of bad people and I know you're not a bad person. And I think when people see all the steps that led up to you getting wrapped up in this, they're going to understand."

Then Minimize: "I don't think you're a bad guy. To be honest, I deal with bad people all the time who have done way worse stuff than this. It's not that big of a deal. Nobody's accusing you of being some mass murderer. This is not the same thing."

Then Rationalize: "I know you came from a poor village, I know you had a really tough background, and I know you're a good person. And I know your aunt has several hundred thousand dollars in medical bills that needed to be paid."

Now Project: "It's not your fault. I think anybody that was handed your conditions and your life would have probably made the same choices. And I know sometimes arms smuggling rings use threats and pressure to get someone into the unit. So if that happened to you, I just want you to know that's something I want to know about so I can confirm you didn't deliberately decide to do this."

And then the Alternative Question: "So Chris, what I'm really trying to find out here is: were you doing this just to make a bunch of money and go buy drugs and live in some other country, or were you really trying to help one of your family members? Because I've looked into you and it doesn't look like you're a bad person."

Chris: Both of them are admissions of guilt, though.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. We're just trying to find out the reason that this happened -- but yes, we're going for the admission of guilt. The first part of the interrogation has a long series of questions, and based on those responses, if they respond a certain way to each question, we move toward the confession methodology.

Those basic questions include things like the bait question: "Is there any reason whatsoever that one of the neighbors would have a Ring doorbell camera that shows your vehicle in that area?" Now you're confronted with a dilemma. If you say no and I pull out a video, now you're a liar and they probably know you did this. If you say yes, you're placing yourself at the scene. And someone who's innocent would be like, "Nope." Instantly, no hesitation. So that's one of those setup questions.

Another great one is the punishment question. It works on kids, it works on adults. Just a few words: "What do you think should happen to the person that did this?"

I'll give you my kids' example. When they were 7 and 8, I came home and found chocolate milk spilled on our white living room rug while they both played Xbox. I said, "All right, William, kitchen. Charlotte, dining room." Prisoner's dilemma.

I went to Charlotte first. "Charlotte, what do you think should happen to the person that did this?" She goes, "Spankings, grounded, no more Xbox, can't play with friends, no more sleepovers, can't eat in the living room anymore." It just goes on and on.

So I went to William. "Will, what do you think should happen to the person that did this?" And he goes, "Uh, maybe no more chocolate milk in the living room?" And there we go. I had my guy.

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Chris: So when it comes to building rapport, what are the techniques that elite negotiators use to create it quickly?

Chase Hughes: Number one is making an admission that other people might be embarrassed about -- having some kind of fault or being insecure about something. Just being honest and true, so it resonates. Just saying something that other people really wouldn't, and being honest about it, is one of the fastest ways to make trust start happening in a conversation. Because people are so fake that that is somehow rare now.

And that's why I think podcasts where there's a genuine person on there get more views than CNN. I think Rogan's got more views than CNN.

Another fast way to build rapport is to have ignorance and fascination about something that the other person prides themselves on knowing. If you wire podcast studios for a living, I'd be like, "God, that's always fascinated me. I don't think I could do that if I tried for a year. I'm just not inclined to it, but it's still fascinating."

But I actually think rapport is a little bit overrated. Having contagious confidence -- where your confidence is high enough that the other person feels confident too -- is so much more effective. And rapport is a byproduct of that. I always try to think: what is upstream of the thing that I want?

What we found over these years is that in an interrogation room or a business setting, what really matters is this level of confidence without any hierarchy or status. And the biggest mistake that most people make is: if I say the word confidence, you're going to think "more than who?" And that hierarchy thinking is the fastest way to collapse any kind of skill in human beings, because it pushes your awareness back behind your eyes. When your awareness is in front of your eyes, people can really feel that.

One metaphor: imagine you went into a big piano store and I smash down the middle C key hard.

Chase Hughes: It's going to send out that frequency through the entire store. And the C string on every other piano is going to start resonating like crazy. But only that string -- it's tuned to that frequency. Humans work almost exactly the same way. One of the phrases I teach: wherever you're speaking from is where you're going to speak to in other people. Where you speak from, you will speak to.

If we're in a conversation and I'm worried about hierarchy and status, I'm plucking that same chord in the person I'm speaking to. If I'm very confident -- not insecure-posturing confidence -- that's going to trigger confidence in the other person. True confidence is really contagious. And having enough confidence to share without viewing it through the lens of hierarchy and status is the fastest route to what people call charisma.

Chris: What are the component parts of appearing confident to somebody?

Chase Hughes: What those articles and YouTube videos are really doing is studying the symptoms of confidence. If I wrap you in a heating blanket and squirt water in your nose, it does not give you COVID, but it gives you a couple of symptoms. It doesn't work in reverse. A lot of online trainers see somebody who's genuinely confident and they go, "What are they doing with their body? Standing up straight. Speaking from their diaphragm. Using hand gestures at about 36 inches wide." And then they train somebody who has social anxiety to do 36-inch hand gestures and they're going to look like an idiot. It's not going to look congruent.

Our culture is obsessed with symptoms in general. I want the Ferrari and the yacht but I don't want the bank account. I want the symptoms of being wealthy.

If you look at the cause of confidence, I think my definition is very different. I think confidence is two elements. Number one: a willingness to receive social injury. Number two: a generalized, fuzzy belief that things are going to work out okay.

Social injury is typically why people can't feel confident. And then there's permission -- I don't have permission to be like that here. If I make 50K a year, I'm not going to be confident walking into the Gucci store.

But if you're willing to receive social injury, you're totally fine with it. You have a generalized expectation that things are going to be okay. That is the first step to really feeling confident, and completely eliminating hierarchy and status from your mental framework forever. Because it's not related to how you and somebody else interact. It's within you. I feel like this is going to go okay. And if social rejection does come my way, I'm fine with it. It might hurt, but I'm okay. I'm happy to receive it.

Chris: What do you make of Trump's behavior? How do you analyze him as a communicator?

Chase Hughes: He's a fabulous communicator. I think he speaks at about a seventh grade level. A lot of good leaders speak at a low level -- Obama was seventh or eighth grade level as well. Because that makes them more followable. I think he's a communicator that is obviously self-serving, self-fulfilling. People call him a narcissist, which is a diagnostic term invented for insurance companies. But say whatever you want -- he is a great communicator. He gets the point across. He's very idiosyncratic. He does stuff other people don't do. He breaks from a lot of the norms.

But the communication is effective. Why? One, he's kind of loud, but number two, it's novelty. We talked about how novelty massively generates focus in human beings. And he's a novelty master. He's a magician of novelty. He's not the clearest communicator when it comes to long vision and plans, but he says things that are followable. He has ideas that are very easy to follow.

Chris: It's interesting to think about how distinctive someone's voice is. If you can do an impression of someone, that's probably a good indication they've got quite a distinctive voice. Can do an impression of Jordan Peterson quite easily. Very distinctive voice. Andrew Tate. Very distinctive voice. Russell Brand. Unnecessarily verbose and articulate, sort of meandering sentences. With Trump, punchy. Superfluous restatement of the past point with embellishment and a little bravado. Obama, staccato. Very sharp.

Chase Hughes: I think there's something to be said about a signature style. Most impressions aren't done to pay a compliment. But if someone can do an impression of you easily, you kind of own an area of verbal real estate. If you do a Trump, even a bad Trump impression, I know that's Trump. That's actually a good judge of how effective someone is as a rhetorician. How easily can someone do an impression of you? How far away from the way you speak can an impression get, and still have the listener understand who's being imitated?

Chris: This is why I need to get 11 Labs to give me my voice back. I'm on a crusade against 11 Labs. They stole my voice and now everyone's using it in ads.

Chase Hughes: They have a go-to British voice called Archer and it's been trained on me. It's got the same verbal ticks from the specific area in the northeast of the UK that I'm from. It's got glottal stops in certain words. It's got the "u" sounds, the bizarre little idiosyncrasies and phonetic idioms that I've got. At some point I'm going to shout at someone at 11 Labs. The CEO was in Qatar while I was there giving a speech. I'll go shout at the dude from 11 Labs and take some Qatar Airways flight discounts. Like deal or no deal.

[Audio clip plays of AI voice trained on Chris Williamson's voice, reading a piece about Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 -- Chris identifies the replication of his "th" sounds and slight lisp]

Chris: I've also got a slight lisp that I work against and it's got that too. It's a race between the AI to refine itself and me and my speech coach Miles to see who can get rid of the lisp first. The real version of me or the copy?

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Chris: You're talking there about building confidence, but I'm interested in what behaviors instantly reveal insecurity. You mentioned micro-hesitations as one. What are the behaviors that reveal insecurity?

Chase Hughes: Let's go mammalian and then human. The mammalian fear response or insecurity response is a reduced arm swing, incomplete movements. Like I'm going to reach for this, I stop, then kind of continue doing it, then stop -- the movements aren't completed. You'll see a lot of that. Reduced eye contact in a downward motion. And biggest of all, you're going to see the body moving or staying in areas that protect arteries.

This means you'll see a lot less of this. You'll see the humerus sit a little closer to the body so the brachial artery is protected. You'll see the shoulders a little higher in social situations. The head coming down a little bit, protecting the carotid arteries. You'll see the arms in front of their body -- sometimes called the fig leaf gesture, named by Allan Pease, because it's covering the genitals but also protecting the femoral arteries at the same time. Men are more likely to do that. Women are more likely to wrap a single arm around the abdomen while they're talking during periods of insecurity -- this is protecting the uterus area. These ideas were originally written about by Desmond Morris, who wrote The Naked Ape.

Chase Hughes: When you're looking at two people, what you really want to look at is which person needs something more from the other person, and which person is reacting to the other person.

The one thing I'm hesitant to reveal -- I teach this to a lot of venture capital people who get pitched a lot. The one thing I teach them to look for is what's called lip compression. We tend to do this at times when we are withholding a little bit of information, or withholding an emotion. Like imagine your friend started a new job and you ask, "Hey dude, how's the new job?" And he goes, "OH, IT'S GREAT." -- with the lips compressed right after. That lip compression is withholding.

So what I teach them: watch for the compression. The moment you see it, just rewind. What were they just talking about right before that?

Chase Hughes: It's our first way of withholding. It's our first way to hold in milk. Like a tongue jut -- after someone tells a lie, they sometimes do a tongue jut. This is our first no. It's a way to force a nipple out of the mouth. And these are theories of Desmond Morris. Our first way of withholding is pursing our lips. Our first no is pushing our tongue out.

There's a difference between a tongue sticking out really quick and a tongue licking the lips. A tongue licking the lips is called a hygienic gesture -- it's made to make somebody more attractive. A hygienic gesture might be sitting up a little straighter, pulling your shirt down, rubbing lint off, licking your lips. All those gestures made to look more attractive are things you want to look for before someone starts talking. If they know a topic is coming up and then you see hygienic gestures before they start talking on that topic, they're trying to stack the deck in their favor.

And here's the thing: there is no behavior for deception. None. What we're measuring with behavior is A, stress, and B, changes. Someone says, "Oh, this person tapping their finger all the time means they're stressed, and that means they're lying." That's total nonsense. So if I just tap my finger all day long, what you need to look for is when I stop.

So the first thing you need to do -- and I could save you 15 years of studying body language -- is get good at detecting change. And then learn a few little facial things. This is the same as doing a polygraph. They have to get a baseline first.

Chase Hughes: Or if they've been talking about their kid that's missing on the news -- "He's great, he's great, he's great." And then all of a sudden when you ask, "How do you think he's doing?", they start using past tense words to describe a child they're claiming is currently alive. Those shifts in tense and language use are really important.

When it comes to behavior, there's none specifically for deception. You've got to look for change and context. If somebody's arms went into their torso: did it get colder? Did someone open a door? Context is really important. And then clusters. One behavior is not that much to go on. You want to look for a mountain of behaviors: breathing rate increased, pupil dilation, licked lips, started tapping a finger they hadn't before, language shifted, lost verbal fluency. We typically want to see a stack of many different things.

In body language, you deal in likelihood. It's like being a meteorologist. It's not, "Yes, it's definitely going to rain at 3:15 p.m. today." We're looking at: here's historical stuff, here's what's happening now, here's a likelihood something will happen.

Chris: Is there a reliable way that stress changes your behavior?

Chase Hughes: Yes. The most common thing: if it's real stress, the person's going to have a little dump of epinephrine -- adrenaline. And when the body says, "Whoa, there's too much adrenaline here, I need to burn some of this off," it's going to move. You'll see foot tapping, or some part of their body moving. Their body's burning off excess adrenaline because of the stress. So right when you see someone start burning off stress, the stress itself started like 10 to 15 seconds before that. And a lot of people do it through stiffness too -- from stillness to stiffness.

Chase Hughes: Protecting arteries is number one for insecurity. Brachial, carotid, femoral. And incomplete gestures -- someone makes a gesture, they don't complete it. It's self-doubt. Am I allowed to do this? Do I have permission? Is this going to make me look weird? How am I being perceived? It's a lot of people who are experiencing insecurity being fixated on self-perception.

If you're wanting to spot insecurity, watch for someone whose lips have been parted the whole time, and then all of a sudden they close and stay closed a little bit. That's another one. If we're really interested in something our lips part just a little bit. When we experience a little bit of stress, we'll have lip closure again.

Chris: There's something in the UK called chavs. Chavs are a bit like Hicks or rednecks -- sort of antisocial behavior. And there was a meme of someone saying, "The face that I make when I walk past a grandmother walking her small dog in the street to show her that I'm not a chav or a threat." I bet there's a German word to describe exactly that entire phrase.

Chase Hughes: Correct. Yeah. The Schadenfreude equivalent of whatever it is. One of my favorites is Zugrubna -- the frustration that migratory birds feel when they are prevented from migrating. Of course there's a word for that.

Chase Hughes: What are some of the reliable body language signals that people put across when they're not a threat? Oh, you'll see more open palms. Typically at navel height. This comes from my friend Mark Bowden, a body language expert. We have a show called The Behavior Panel on YouTube -- four body language nerds. Every week we take a video and break it down: police body cam, celebrity video, parents saying their kids are missing. We'll analyze it.

Mark Bowden has this thing called the truth plane, where when we make open-palmed gestures speaking to somebody at navel or belly button height -- it makes somebody more likely to trust what you're saying. I don't mean hands way up in the air -- Mark calls that the ecstatic plane. This is the truth plane down here. There are very rare occasions where your hands should be above your shoulders.

But the other non-threatening signals are smoothness of movement and: is the person performing or just being? One of the first things I look at when I meet a person is: are they in front of their eyes, or are they jammed back here wondering how they're being perceived? Are they present in what's going on?

Chris: What about early warning signs that somebody is a threat or may have aggression?

Chase Hughes: It's so hard to predict, especially if somebody's trying to hide it. I train law enforcement in some of these and it's still very hard to predict. We talked about four types: COPE -- Concealment, Oxygenation, Preparation, and Expenditure -- like they're trying to burn off energy.

In the Concealment aspect, right before some kind of violent action takes place, they'll break eye contact but keep you in peripheral vision for a prolonged period of time. And you'll see a dominant foot withdrawal. Even if they're not going to punch you, you're going to see broken eye contact and the dominant shoulder either starting to move away or the dominant foot going back. Then blading the body while getting prepared for an attack.

In America, what we teach the police is: no one can draw a weapon from concealment without making a 90-degree angle with their body. So if you're not seeing 90-degree angles, they can't draw a weapon.

Chase Hughes: One of my favorite insights about blading is from Robin Dunbar. His book Friends. Women talk perpendicular -- 180 degrees, feet to feet, straight on. Men talk at about 120 degrees. They blade -- more shoulder to shoulder.

And if you're a guy, try the next time you're talking to someone you don't know super well: rotate yourself around to 180 degrees and go straight on. You'll begin to feel a strange spider-crawling tickle, because typically the only time men would have squared up to each other was if they were about to fight. Especially if you're close, like 2 or 3 feet.

This is why they put bars or mirrors up in old West saloons. So men could talk to each other side by side, but still see each other in the mirror. And it reduced bar fights because they weren't facing each other head on.

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Chris: It's interesting the levels of intimacy that are opened up through not being straight on. There are certain styles of therapy done lying down with a therapist to your side. And there's a men's sheds initiative in Australia -- they were trying to get Australian men to talk about their mental health. And they got a 2x multiplier by putting men together to do something with their hands, working shoulder to shoulder. And before long they'd be talking about the fact that John's marriage is breaking down. The synopsis was: men relate shoulder to shoulder, women relate face to face.

Chase Hughes: There are two big sex differences in communication I'd highlight. Men will most often reach for the stomach during times of uncertainty -- just kind of scratching or adjusting. It's a pacifying behavior. And women during the same period of stress, since stress builds up heat and most women have long hair over their neck that traps heat back there, you'll see women reach back and lift the hair over their neck for just a second to ventilate that area. And they'll do it unconsciously.

Chase Hughes: Have you seen footage of Wade Wilson on the stand? This is the Deadpool killer -- a real case. Wade Wilson is also the real name of the character Deadpool. And there's a Netflix series called Worst X Ever with Wade Wilson as the first episode.

[Video clip plays -- family victim impact statement at sentencing hearing, then defendant Wade Wilson briefly speaks]

Chase Hughes: So right before he was talking, you saw the lip licking -- that's the hygienic gesture to improve his appearance there. He's trying to maintain some kind of control in the situation. He probably thrives on a lot of autonomy and just knowing that he's kind of self-governing. You didn't see him blinking at all during that process. One of the interesting things about blinking is -- and I don't usually talk about body language on podcasts anymore, I usually talk about DMT and all that kind of stuff, but --

Chris: That's episode two.

Chase Hughes: Blinking is one of the most reliable body language indicators ever studied. And it's cool because we spend our time looking at people's eyes throughout conversation. The average blinks per minute of human beings in conversation is around 15, give or take.

Chase Hughes: If we are in a situation that is stressful, without even noticing it, our blink rate can go up to like 85 or 90. And we don't even notice that our blinking has changed. It's insane. But what happens when our body gets focused in on something important, and we're watching a movie that's super interesting, our blink rate -- without noticing -- can go down to like two. So stress increases how often we blink, and it's not relaxation that lowers it -- it's focus.

So if you see these psychopaths doing interviews like Manson, and their eyes are open the whole time, not blinking at all -- that's focus, not relaxation. Those are very different things.

Chris: Like when I watched Interstellar -- my favorite movie of all time.

Chase Hughes: Mine too. I probably blinked three or four times. And it's a three and a half hour movie. I own a prop from that movie -- the Tesseract, actually built by Kip Thorne. I'll send you a picture.

Chris: Interstellar came out just before I went on Love Island, that reality TV show. When you're on it, someone's listening to your mic 24 hours a day -- 8-hour shifts, three people cycling. I came out after 3 weeks and these two guys came up to me. They said, "Chris, we've been listening to you 8 hours a day for the last 3 weeks. What was the name of that book about the physics of Interstellar?" -- referring to the real science book by Kip Thorne. The one time I had an actually interesting conversation, these guys were still listening.

Chase Hughes: The fact that we have this insight into how other people behave through their eyes is great, but to be a good detector of body language you need to not only be doing your own part of the communication, but also doing the detecting at the same time. So it's twice as hard. That's why I teach people to just do one or two things at a time. If you're an everyday person, you only need about three or four things to look for.

When I'm watching somebody's blink rate, I'm not sitting there going, "Chris's blink rate is now 33, noted." It's just every once in a while I'll check in on that. And if you're a good conversationalist, your goal should be: can I lower our blink rate? If I'm interesting to you, my goal should be watching your blink rate go down over time. But if you're in sales and you mention the APR or the terms and you see blink rate go up -- now it's a signal worth noting.

Chris: What are the biggest misconceptions we have about reading others -- the falsehoods, the lies about human behavior?

Chase Hughes: Number one is that there's one behavior that means one thing all the time. There are very few exceptions. When you hear "this means somebody's being deceptive because they scratch their nose" -- I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions. And I think another is certainty. You'll hear body language experts say "this person is absolutely lying" because they did this and that at the same time. I feel irresponsible ever saying that. My eyeballs are more accurate than a polygraph? That seems silly. It's a likelihood game. And I think we should be honest that it's a likelihood game. No matter how good you are, I don't think any behavior expert in the world can reliably spot a psychopath.

Even though there's training on how to do that kind of stuff. Why? The signals are hidden. They have spent a lifetime honing composure and deceiving with their face, expressions, breathing -- most of the time unconsciously. And presumably that would be so idiosyncratic for that one person anyway. Where did that psychopathy come from? What are their patterns? What have been their tells? And what have been their compensations for their tells that now result in this behavior?

Chase Hughes: And you know what? Jared, can you search on YouTube "Danny Trejo Manson"? So this is a clip from The Pardon. Danny Trejo, the Hollywood actor with the massive chest tattoo.

Chris: Oh yeah, Machete. Isn't he like a really nice guy in real life?

Chase Hughes: Sickest dude. Yeah. I had a great conversation with him a few years ago.

[Video clip -- Danny Trejo speaking about meeting Charles Manson in county jail]

Danny Trejo (clip): "So you met Charles Manson in county jail. But let me tell you, Charlie wasn't the guy that you saw on the TV specials. He was like 5'4", 5'5". Little scrawny. He was poor, kind of like a bum, really. He had a string for a belt -- he tied his pants with a string cuz he couldn't afford a belt. Some of the prisoners were going to take advantage of him. And we found out that he could hypnotize you. So we let him sleep in front of our cell to make sure that nobody'd hurt him. And he got us loaded on weed. He got two of us loaded on heroin. One guy just woke up. Afterwards I asked him, 'How come you couldn't do him?' And he said, 'Did you ever get loaded on heroin?' 'No.' 'Well, your mind doesn't know how to work.' Your mind doesn't know how to react. So if I tell you to do something while you're hypnotized and you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it, you'll just wake up."

Chase Hughes: So yeah, he hypnotized Danny Trejo and his two cellmates. But one of the dudes hadn't done heroin before. Danny goes on to say that when you do heroin, apparently you throw up. And Danny and the other guy that had done it threw up. And the dude that hadn't done it didn't.

Yeah, this is a real thing. I'm a hypnotist -- that was just part of learning all of this brain stuff. I went to many different hypnosis schools and trainings. I don't think you could do it with mushrooms or LSD because it's such a massively immersive brain experience. But alcohol, you could get someone drunk very easily on hypnosis. Heroin, maybe, because you're kind of creating some of that euphoria.

Initially you want to create the negative conditions of the thing first, so your body believes it's possible. Your brain is easier at connecting or making bad things happen anyway. It's way easier for your brain to default to negative. This is why your ancestors would always confuse a bear for a rock and not a rock for a bear. So you get the negative thing first and then your brain's like, "Wow, this is really easy." Then you say, "This time you're not going to have this negative thing, but you have all the other positive benefits of this."

There was a guy in the 1980s -- I think it was Marshall Silver -- and there was a program called Drug of Choice where you could order an audio tape. If you've ever done a particular drug before, it would kind of recreate that experience. I've never tried it, but it absolutely is possible.

Chris: Going back to the deception-detecting stuff: what's the best way to get the truth out of someone quickly? Normal conversation between you and someone you think is being deceptive. It's cordial.

Chase Hughes: Socialize, Minimize, Rationalize, and Project. "Chris, look, I think everybody's going to understand if something happened. I promise you it's not a big deal to me." That's Minimize. "And it makes perfect sense. Everything lined up the way it did. It's not a big deal. And frankly, it wasn't your fault. These people kind of put this in front of you, or this thing happened, or you downloaded that app and you didn't know what it was.

Chase Hughes: And I think everything's completely fine. But the one thing that's always been important to you and me is our friendship. And I don't want to lose that." And then hopefully, you ask the question again at the end.

Chris: At each stage I'm trying to think about what I'm trying to hold on to. And I think part of it feels like treading water and someone throwing you a lifeline -- so that you're not alone with the discomfort and the loss. The confusion of trying to hold this thing together. Someone sees why I did this thing. And it's not that big of a deal anyway, if I am to admit it. But that they're with me. I think a lot of it is: I'm not going to have to bear this burden alone anymore.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, those are the four big reasons your brain resists telling the truth. People won't understand. This is a huge deal. It doesn't make sense why I did this. And it's all my fault. So I just want to alleviate those four things.

Chris: Why can't people relax? What's the truth about emotional debt? I've heard you talk about this.

Chase Hughes: Dude, this is a big one. I think this goes back to what we talked about in the very beginning with people carrying around shame, and everybody thinks they're the only one. If we're really honest with ourselves -- we walk around every day concealing shame, because there are a lot of institutions around today that have made shame into an institution. Like social enforcement through shame.

And everyone thinks it's just them. "If I start becoming real, everyone's going to leave me. I'm going to be abandoned by my friends, outcast and judged. I have to keep hiding this." And everyone thinks it's just them.

The cool thing is that it's literally 100% of people. Every single human being is out there carrying the exact same stuff as you. And they all think it's just them. That's saddening, but I think it's beautiful at the same time -- that we really do share a lot more in common, especially with the things we hide from each other, than most of us would be willing to admit.

So, when we encounter emotional debt -- this is typically when I'm a little kid: what are the patterns I had to develop to earn friends and keep friends, to feel safe, or to attain some kind of social reward like appreciation or love? If something in my childhood made one of those three things happen -- friends, safety, and rewards -- then the brain says, "Oh, this worked. I'm going to make an app out of this." So your brain makes an app and says, "I know exactly how to produce this thing, I'm going to run that app all the time."

For the first couple years, it's an app you're consciously clicking on in social situations. By the time you're about 12 or 13, that's solidified in your behavior. And then fast forward, you've got a 34-year-old woman working in an office who had to kiss some bully's ass in middle school, and that's all she does as an adult.

So we carry all these little childhood things without knowing it -- like a loaded childhood backpack. It's gone from being an app to being source code. And we carry it into adulthood without knowing. And that is emotional debt.

Chase Hughes: Every time we're not dealing with a lot of that stuff directly, every time we hide it from someone else, we're withdrawing from an account and kind of overdrafting everything in our life. Concealment is one of the most cognitively exhausting things that there is when it comes to human behavior. Concealment is more mentally taxing than doing calculus. Just trying to act like you've got your stuff together in a social situation -- faking it hard -- is harder than calculus to our brains.

I mean, a lot of us are paying this emotional debt. And I think that's it. It's like the costume is heavy. The costumes we're wearing are getting heavier and heavier because we keep adding stuff on. And a lot of us by the time we hit 18 or 19 years old are like a decorator crab.

Do you know what a decorator crab is? So these crabs will go around their whole life and find stuff on the beach and glue it onto their shells somehow. Protection, ornament, maybe distraction. I don't know why they do it. So they just stick little barnacles and stuff all over their body. And we're kind of like this. We go through life and we're like, "That guy did this one thing to protect himself, I'm going to stick that on." So we're walking around with all of this stuff on us that's not us at all. It's not me.

And then we go back to that thing we originally talked about. Like, I have to go my whole life knowing that no one's ever known me. And that sucks. And that's emotional debt.

Chris: How do you advise people to process emotions so that it doesn't keep getting deposited into the account?

Chase Hughes: I think physicality is the best. There's a guy -- Dr. David Berceli -- who discovered this thing called Trauma Release Exercise. Or there's something called neurogenic tremors. All mammals naturally discharge trauma through involuntary shaking movements after threat events. Humans suppress this mechanism for social reasons.

If you watch a polar bear get tranquilized -- it's like a paralytic tranquilizer -- the polar bear is laid out on the ground but conscious. Imagine how terrifying that is. So this polar bear goes through trauma, and what is the first thing that happens as the anesthesia starts wearing off? Its body goes into these convulsions and shaking movements and big breaths, and it's all completely autonomic. Squirrels do the same thing. Zebras. Robert Sapolsky wrote a book about a lot of this -- Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Nature doesn't suppress healing mechanisms. But they figured out that humans suppress this tremor mechanism.

Chase Hughes: He's not teaching you a technique -- he's just helping you find the switch in your body that you've been suppressing your entire life. And we had to do it after a deployment. I did 20 years in the military, did a bunch of deployments. But one deployment we came back and it was rough.

Chase Hughes: We had to go through this trauma release exercise -- under a different brand name than Dr. Berceli's -- but it was maybe the most profound emotional transformation I've ever made in my life, other than psychedelics. It's unbelievable. And it's your body -- it knows how to do it. Every mammal on earth does this automatically. And it is life-changing and it's free. Go on YouTube and learn how to do it.

And during this woman's presentation to us when we got back from the deployment, she says, "Raise your hand if you've ever seen a depressed squirrel." Like a zebra doesn't get bit by a croc and go back to its tribe like, "Guys, had a rough day. I need to curl up under that tree for like nine days and people need to bring me food." That doesn't happen. They're somehow over stuff a lot quicker than we are. Even though we make more meaning about the situation than the zebras do.

Chris: How do you come to think about the role of shame in people's lives?

Chase Hughes: I think shame has been institutionalized on purpose by many different places. And we learn as little kids that if I feel shame about something, I need to conceal it. I've learned a new part of me that I can wall off and I don't need to show anybody.

Shame doesn't make you a good person. And I think a lot of people think that if I feel ashamed about something, that makes me moral. It doesn't. It just ruins your life.

Chris: Interesting thing from Rob Henderson -- something he read about: someone's guilt seems to be proportional to their perceived likelihood of being caught.

Chase Hughes: Wait. Someone's guilt -- the amount of guilt you feel -- tends to be proportional to how likely you perceive it that you're going to be caught for whatever you're guilty about.

Chris: Isn't that fascinating? Your level of guilt for something that you know you can't be caught for is so much less. I was thinking about this with the Epstein files, the day those came out. We saw a lot of people get real quiet while they were waiting to see what was released.

And in some ways, the concealment tax being paid. You know your name's in there. You know there are investigations and releases happening. And you don't need karma to deliver spiritual justice. All that is is someone repeating their patterns and behaviors enough times until reality finally gives them what they deserve. Most people end up getting what they deserve.

Chase Hughes: That sense a lot of people have of, "How is nobody cottoning on to this thing about this person?" What someone is doing is basically stacking the deck against themselves, but presuming that you've got a relatively functioning conscience, that concealment burden is going to start stacking up and stacking up, especially if you know that there's an investigation coming and people are getting closer and the guilt is escalating.

So yeah, some people are bad people who make it to the end of their life without having been rumbled. But the only way they did that was basically through luck. Most people end up getting what they deserve.

Chris: My mentor used to call that: that person's safe is full. Like they've locked up a whole lot of stuff and it's just ready to bust open. And they're easier to get to confess, they're easier to deal with, because their safe is so full. Concealment burden is high. Level of ambient emotional stress also high. And the need to release that pressure. The release valve thing.

Chris: How does what we've spoken about to do with shame and childhood patterns relate to the trauma triangle?

Chase Hughes: I think it might be. I don't know. I don't think we know very much about consciousness and all that. There are so many people with so much certainty that I would be embarrassed showing that level of certainty about how the brain works. I studied neuroscience for 9 years. We have zero clue how the brain works. We don't know where memories are stored. We don't even know what they're made of. And they're doing all these experiments now showing that consciousness might be non-local.

Chris: I think you've had a few people on. Panpsychists. Yeah. And Rupert Sheldrake is one of these guys.

Chase Hughes: Friend of the show? Dude, I love that guy so much. Morphic resonance is such a cool idea, man. Like the Danny Trejo thing is a good example of that, but that's story-based. Stories stick with you. If you hear about a famous cult leader and a famous movie actor being in jail together with a rope around his waist getting loaded on heroin through hypnosis -- I'll forget my children's names before I forget that. On my deathbed.

But the Sheldrake thing -- dogs are able to detect when their owners are coming home even when they alter the vehicle, the time, and the mode of transport.

Chris: Did you ever learn about the birds dunking their heads into glass milk bottles? So there was a type of bird in the UK before World War II. And the glass milk bottles that the milkman would put out on everyone's front doorstep -- birds had realized they could pierce the foil lid and stick their beaks in and drink the top layer of the milk. And a lot of the time people would arrive at the front doorstep and see an upended bird.

And then during World War II, all of that stopped because of the Battle of Britain and the blackout -- no milk deliveries. So for generations of birds, this behavior had stopped. And then when milk deliveries came back, Rupert's researchers did a statistical analysis: as soon as the milkman began doing it again, immediately a generation of birds that had never seen a milkman or milk bottles started doing it straight away.

And you've seen this stuff where they teach mice to solve a maze in LA and mice in New York are able to solve the maze more quickly.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. It's insane. There's a 10-year-old boy in Japan who was the first in the world -- and this is recently, maybe this year -- to prove that a butterfly retains the memory of its ancestors. And a butterfly's memory also survives caterpillar metamorphosis. Because it's fully liquidized during the chrysalis phase. And the memory goes through not just generations, but goes through the entire transformation.

Chris: How did the 10-year-old boy prove it?

Chase Hughes: Lavender. So when they're caterpillars, he gives them a tiny little shock. But the boy was so kind that he shocked himself on his own arm first, so he could feel it too, because he didn't want to give the caterpillars too much. He exposes them to lavender and a shock at the same time, over and over and over -- three times a day, maybe, per caterpillar. He considered them as friends.

Chris: And then when they become butterflies, he builds this tube that's a Y shape, so they fly down and they've got this fork in the road with sugar water at the end of both, and one of them has a little cotton ball with lavender on it. And he proved that these butterflies, whose caterpillar form he had trained, went straight away from the lavender because they had it associated with negative memory. And their offspring did the exact same thing.

Chase Hughes: Have you read Federico Faggin's work? It's kind of an argument against materialist reductionism. Basically: imagine you're trying to understand music. You go to the Philharmonic, and all the instruments are out there. You say, let's chop this cello into 6,000 pieces and study it for 10 years under a microscope. And we understand music zero. We've broken everything down into its tiny little parts.

And then somebody says, "We've had a massive breakthrough. We found the sheet music at the front of the orchestra." And then the lead scientist says, "Good. Cut it up. Put it under the microscope." And then they're like, "The sheet music makes the music, so of course we can put it under the microscope. But I don't know why, but this music looks like paper. It doesn't look like music." So the argument is: if we keep just breaking things down into elements, we're missing the substance of what's really there.

Chris: You familiar with Daniel Schmachtenberger? He's been on the show twice now and he's got a great talk on emergence. He's got this idea that there can be combinations of things that allow properties to emerge that individually do not. And the inverse of this -- which I first heard from him but then Naval reused -- was that human beings locally reverse entropy. Locally. The entire universe aiming toward entropy, and we locally reverse it for a brief time. The battle is ours, but the war is always going to be theirs.

Chase Hughes: I love that idea. I love the idea that we locally reverse entropy. It's really cool.

Chris: And it's beautiful. It's like somebody studying DMT and saying, "Oh yeah, it activates the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor." Like, "Yeah, yeah, that's what's made our ancestors see the exact same thing for 4,500 years. That's what creates the entities." It's silly to think that we can really comprehend everything. We can't even define or understand consciousness. And we're like, "Oh yeah, it's a receptor agonist."

I just think there's way too much certainty about this stuff. We need more scientists just finishing a few sentences with "as far as we know." I think science would advance a lot faster because it's dogmatic at this point.

Chase Hughes: I want to talk about the DMT stuff. I feel like there's a million things we haven't gotten into, but let's bring this one in to land here because this has been really fascinating. What's this new show where you told your team if we don't get death threats within the first 6 months, we're not doing our job?

Chris: So the origin of this is: I took an Adderall one morning. And then I got distracted doing some work and thought, "Oh, I didn't take an Adderall." And I took another one. Which I've never done. And I also do a little daily microdose. All that mixed together and I was just sitting there at my desk going through emails and I was like, "You know what? I need to start a TV station." And I did.

I was like, "I could beat Fox. I could beat mainstream news." So we built and own a television studio now and have a daily news show that's about to start coming out. It's called Station 1 on YouTube. We have one or two videos out but we're going to start daily news.

And every day you'll get the news, but you'll also get how everything that you're being shown as different stories are actually connected. All the psyops layers with actual receipts and evidence for every single thing of how the news is being used to frame a narrative. All of that will be made public. And then every single day on the news, we'll tell you: in the next 72 hours, here's what to look out for. If you see these three words in a bill that Congress passes at 2:00 a.m., you need to watch out for this. If this oil company invests in this one thing in the next four days, you need to watch out for this.

We follow the format of the President's Daily Brief from the director of the CIA. And that's the daily news -- it's like the President's daily brief, exact format. I think it's going to be good. I think people are going to like it and there's no narrative. There's no left and right politics, which doesn't really exist.

Chris: Thank you. Chase Hughes, ladies and gentlemen. Chase, you're an awesome man. I'm looking forward to speaking to you next time.

Chase Hughes: Me too. Thanks, Chris. All right. See you next time, everyone.

Chris: Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are. Deeply. It thinks you're going to like this one even more. Go on. Press it.