Chase Hughes is an expert in influence, persuasion, and human behavior. He is the author of several books, including "The Behavior Ops Manual" and "The Ellipsis Manual." https://nci.university Save $20 on your first subscription of AG1 at drinkag1.com/joerogan 50% off your first box at thefarmersdog.com/rogan! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What health challenges has Chase Hughes faced?
I thought it would be good for you because we're talking about mind fucks. Cheshire Cat's a little bit of a mind fuck. In the simulation. Yeah, for sure. So you were just telling me that you had a brain disease. And what did you do to fix it? What was it, first of all?
It's temporal lobe epilepsy with mesial temporal sclerosis. And when did you develop this? We don't know, but I started having seizures like a few years ago. And everybody in my family knows I'm a neuroscientist. I'd say with a lowercase n, not a Ph.D. neuroscientist. But you studied neuroscience. Yeah. I had postgrad at Harvard and Duke.
But they assumed, you know, Chase has studied all this stuff. He's going to know if he's having seizures. But these seizures come with amnesia. So I didn't remember that I was having any of them. And this was like three years ago. I had retired from the military and then started having these seizures. So then I found a neurologist.
The drug that they gave me, the number one side effect was seizures. From this pharmaceutical company. So I kind of looked around and I found this guy. He's a functional medicine guy. And he got me on methylene blue to start off. And I know Mel Gibson was on here talking about it. And that instantly stopped everything. And some other stuff. It was a fabric dye, right? Yeah, in 1890. How weird.
Chapter 2: How did methylene blue affect Chase Hughes' health?
Who the fuck drank it first? Yeah.
Who's that guy? Make blue jeans out of that? Huh. I wonder what it tastes like.
Yeah. What if I drink it every day if it affects my health? It tastes like chewing an aspen. I'd take it. Okay. Yeah. I'd take it every day as well.
Yeah, RFK Jr. told me about it.
Yeah, man, it's fantastic. And so this guy's injecting, in 1890, injects these rats with it and then does an autopsy on these things. And their brain, the brainstem, every single nerve is blue. So he discovered this methylene blue has an affinity for neuronal tissue. So he says, well, it's sucking into neurons. What's it doing?
So we could talk about, if you want to, but how it's working and working in the body. So he started putting it in humans. And we found out it's an MAOI, which is just— Monoamine oxide inhibitor. Yeah. Yeah. Which helps with depression and anxiety and all kinds of life stress and stuff.
Does it cause side effects if you're taking any drug that you shouldn't take with an MAOI?
There are some studies that have been recalled that said you can't take it with SSRIs because you could develop serotonin syndrome.
Right.
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Chapter 3: What led Chase Hughes into studying human behavior?
Yeah.
And if you have that – I shouldn't say causes you, but it's one of those ones where if you get hit in the head a lot, it's not a good thing to have. Right.
And then I did 20 years in the military. So being around explosions and all kinds of gunfire and all that kind of stuff, they said this probably caused some kind of concussive syndrome.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a real issue, right? People think of concussions only as like you getting hit, but it's not. It's any kind of jolting to your body. My friend Mark Gordon works with a lot of soldiers and people with traumatic brain injuries, and he says you can get it from jet skiing, which is really crazy. Wow, just the bounce? Hard bouncing, the jostling.
I feel like people who really love jet skiing and do it all the time, they start getting a little bit of CTE.
That makes sense. Our brain is floating. It's neutrally buoyant inside of liquid, so that makes sense. It's just smashing around inside your skull.
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Chapter 4: How can persuasion techniques be used for good?
I'm still obsessed with that field of study.
So were you trained to train people? Like how did you go about starting to train people? What was it based on?
It was me. The first group of people I trained was a car dealership just to see if I could do it. I said I'm going to go in there and do it for free. And then I started training people in the military. And these are U.S. Navy and other branches. And I'm training them in like these – I got obsessed with this interrogation stuff and –
how the brain works and and i got mostly got obsessed with if i'm an intelligence officer my job is to convince somebody to do something that's not in their best interest like i need to convince you to spy for your own country and give us intelligence or if i'm an interrogator i need to convince you to confess to a crime so i spent time hanging out with people that do cult recruiting out in california there's like official people
Like human resources for cult recruiting? Yeah. What do you mean? Do cults hire them? No, I think they join the cult and the cult says, oh, this guy's really charismatic. Or he was, I think half of these dudes were like ex-club promoters. That makes sense. They got that vibe, you know, like, I wish you'd come by tonight. Right.
And I spent time in San Bernardino with a couple of people, three or four people, three people. that talked people, women, into doing adult films, like young girls that were 19, 20 years old, just starting college. And I talked and I asked them, what are the methods that you use? What are the steps that you follow?
And I watched several of these interactions and then spent time with interrogators and people who do like timeshare sales and stuff like that, which I don't know if you've ever been at a timeshare sales.
No, I have not.
They're hardcore. So I spent time with all these people and I wanted to figure out what are the elements that make somebody willing to do something that is maybe not in their best interest. And that transformed everything for me. And then I said, we could use all of this stuff
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Chapter 5: What is the Milgram experiment and its implications?
So that's one of the things they did. They replicated the experiment on college campuses. People are highly suggestible. They're young. They're still trying to figure out who they are. And it's a lot more suggestible. And this is – if you think of the way that social media manipulates our brain, it falsifies tribal agreement and it makes us say A. Right.
So we're willing to ignore everything that we see because we're seeing a tribe – say that something else is happening. So it'll override our brain. And if there's one thing, like if you just, one thing that matters a lot is that our brains are not capable of overcoming this technology. We don't have a firewall. And technology has outpaced our brain's ability to adapt to it.
So I can falsify a tribe around you that says, oh, this is all happening right now. And Dr. Phil, you and I both are friends with Dr. Phil, calls this the tyranny of the fringe, where this fringe pretends to be a group of a million people when it's just a small group that gets over a lot of attention. It's really inflated. So it looks like it's more popular than it actually is.
And if your identity is already there, then that automatically makes sense and we'll ignore just basic facts. And it's not about the right or the left. It's both of those sides have been doing this stuff for a long time. But if I can get you to think that most of your tribal members agree to X. then most people, like 90% of people will say, okay, X is true.
Well, especially with social media, right? Because obviously it would be something that's a little bit more complex than the size of a line, but you're so easily manipulated because it's not really just people that are responding. It's a lot of bots.
Yeah.
And you're seeing that more and more lately. Yeah. I was watching this video today and somebody pointed out after the video, look how many bots have retweeted this video. And it was astounding. So it's like, oh, there's a narrative that someone's trying to push because of this selectively edited video.
Yeah.
Like, wow. Well, you're a dragon believer.
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Chapter 6: How does hypnotherapy relate to creating alter egos?
Yeah. So the novelty right away is I'm going to approach you and say something or ask you a question that you've never been asked before. And there's no possible way that your brain could have gotten ready for that scenario. And it could be something ridiculously stupid. It'd be like, hey, did you see these guys fighting outside here last week?
Or you're walking up and you say, hey, I'm going to ask you three questions, but you only have 12 seconds to answer. No one's ever said something like that.
OK, so you're just getting them out of their comfort zone, getting them into like, whoa, what's going on?
Yeah, we're breaking a pattern. So we're all running on patterns all the time. The moment a pattern is broken, we have tremendous focus. So focus is the first step to hacking the mammalian brain. Authority is next. And authority is like if you look at the Milgram experiment. Have you heard of this?
Oh, my God.
Have you gone deep on it? Not really. I mean, but explain it to people so they know what you're talking about.
Jamie, can we bring up a picture of the box, the shocking box from this experiment?
Essentially, they told people that they had to keep shocking people, and then they did it to the point where they thought the person on the other side was actually dead, and they kept shocking.
Yeah. What year was this? 1962, 1962 at Yale University. This is a variation of the experiment. Just go to the third one. Right there. So that's Stanley Milgram standing over that machine right there. So you'll notice on the bottom right it says danger severe shock right there. Yeah. So you're essentially told the guy's on the other side of a drywall wall.
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Chapter 7: What role did hypnosis play in Mike Tyson's career?
Chapter 8: How did Charles Manson use persuasion and control?
And they're all like, well, we have a good script. We've got this piece of paper right here that's really great. We spent $10 million developing the sales script. I'm like, give the script to somebody out here with social anxiety and have them get on the phone. They're going to bomb. They'll be the worst freaking salesman out there because the script is meaningless.
But everybody puts so much value in these words. It's who you are first, then what you say. And people just ignore the first part. I mean if you think of – if I go off on a small rant here, I could tell a question bubble in your head. No, go ahead. There's too many times people obsess over symptoms instead of causes. So you go on LinkedIn or whatever and it says how to be confident.
Here are the 15 ways to be confident. Here's the 12 things that confident people do. They have great posture. They make good eye contact. There's a firm handshake. They use your name. They pat you on the shoulder, all this kind of shit. Those are symptoms. of being confident. It's not confidence. So our culture today is obsessed with symptoms of things. Let me get symptoms of wealth.
I'm going to get this Porsche. I'm going to get this yacht. I'm going to get this plane. Post it all over Instagram and show people that I have these symptoms. So what we're really looking at is like when I'm trying to – somebody is trying to learn sales. Let me teach you the symptoms of what a good salesperson has instead of the cause of what makes them a good salesperson.
That makes sense. So in order for someone to truly be confident, they have to take all those steps to make – do you want some coffee? No.
Actually, yeah.
OK. You want it in the crazy cup or a regular one? I'll take the crazy cup. The crazy cup is a little hard to drink out of. Is it? Yeah.
I'll switch. I don't want to dirty that one up.
No, don't worry about it. So they have to have all those ducks in a row. If they don't, people are going to sense it. They're going to know, even if they exhibit all the behavior characteristics of someone who's confident, there's going to be something off because we have some way, some ancient way of detecting bullshit in ourselves.
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