Transcript: Behavior Expert Chase Hughes on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #253)

So over the course of time, your ancestors, if they piss someone off in the tribe and they get judged by a lot of people in the tribe, they do something silly and they get some kind of judgment, they get excommunicated, they get exiled and kicked out of the tribe. This meant death.

Like A, they’re not going to have food and support anymore, water, all this other stuff that’s very important to life. But B, they can’t have sex anymore, they’re not attractive to a mate anymore and now their genes die. So now it’s not just death for me. It’s a full death of my genetic bloodline. It’s massive.

And we hear people all the time say, “Well, public speaking is the number one fear of people.” But speaking is never what people are afraid of. It’s the judgment, the potential for judgment. Somebody’s going to judge me, I’m going to get laughed at, I’m going to get kicked off the stage or something like that that is hardwired into our nervous system and it’s inside of the lower part of our brain.

And if I can target the non-human part of the brain, this mammalian mammal brain inside of our brain that governs your whole life, it’s the thing that keeps your heart beating. It’s the thing that if you say “I’m going to hold my breath until I die,” the reason that you can’t is that part of your brain’s in charge. It’s either going to make you breathe or knock your ass out.

Social Media and the 150-Person Limit

So this social fear, being afraid of what other people are going to think of me, became weaponized, hardcore weaponized, just in the last 15, 20 years with social media coming out. Our brains are wired to handle 120 people. And then social media becomes this placebo of connection.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean our brains are wired to handle 120 people? I mean we can… I think the Wall Street Journal just put something out very similar to this a couple days ago, saying that the human mind can only basically effectively handle 150 different relationships with people.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that what you’re… Is that where we’re going?

CHASE HUGHES: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: So it’s forge, foster and maintain. Can I forge a relationship, foster a new relationship with someone and then maintain it? So we’re limited to about 150. And social media comes on the scene. Somehow that’s triggering our need a little bit. It’s fulfilling some need. It’s like a placebo of social connection.

And what happens, like, we have this city where there’s a million people in a city and your brain can’t handle more than 150. What do we do? We go into apathy. We go into absolute apathy.

The Bystander Effect

And this is where you get things like psychologists studying something called the bystander effect. Somebody’s in public, they get stabbed or robbed or something. If there’s lots of people around, people don’t say anything and they don’t do anything because it’s a diffusion of responsibility.

And we care less and less and less every day. People are talking about all the stuff going on in Ukraine or whatever, but there’s murders four blocks from your house and people being murdered. So we have an apathy for people that are around us once the tribe gets above a certain number.

And what social media is doing… And I’m not here to stand on a box and demonize social media, and I don’t think anyone that created social media is setting out to do this, but what social media is doing with this placebo effect is it’s tricking our brains into feeling a little sense of connection, but we’re confusing attention for connection.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

The Loneliness Epidemic

CHASE HUGHES: And the second part of this is anybody watching the show right now on their iPad or whatever would agree that we are in a loneliness epidemic. The whole world, and we’re more connected than ever. But we are in this loneliness epidemic because what we’re getting is a placebo of social connection from social media, from all these apps and stuff like that.

So back to this tribe. There are four things that we briefly, or we went into in the audio series that you did with Ironclad. And this spells out the word FATE, because it is our fate.

The FATE Framework

And this is Focus, Authority, Tribe and Emotion. If I can hack your focus, social media. If I can make you think that someone’s an authority figure by they have more views, they have more subscribers, they have more whatever, they got the blue check mark, whatever it is, tribe.

If I can hack your feeling of tribe, then I can get you to do whatever I want you to do or I can get you to view norms as completely different because you’re in a new tribe, us versus them mentality.

And the emotional part, if you’re looking at your social media, I’m not going to say the name of any one of them. But I’m sure you’ve scrolled through social media before. You see four or five posts that are just engineered to piss you off. Oh yeah, engineered.

And then every once in a while you’ll see a little one of those videos where we’re like, “Oh, we had this baby eagle land on our front porch” and it shows the eagle and then it shows him bottle feeding it and then it shows him a little bigger and he’s grown up and he’s friends with him now. You get this little emotional kick and immediately when you scroll after one of those, you’ll see an ad.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit? Yeah. Why?

Fractionation and Emotional Manipulation

CHASE HUGHES: It’s… There’s a hypnosis phrase for this and in hypnosis they call this fractionation. If I can get your emotion to go up and then back down again, every time I take you back up just a little bit, just a tiny bit above water, the next time I pull you down, you’ll go deeper.

So in hypnosis I might put you under hypnosis and then just wake you up from the neck up or maybe have you open your eyes just a little bit. So I’ll pull you out of trance a little bit and then send you back down and pull you out and then send you back down. So it’s proven that we’ll go deeper and deeper and the same thing, same effect happens with social media and you’ll see that, you’ll see those spikes.

And I think anybody that has social media can start to become aware of this stuff. It’s pissing me off, pissing me off, pissing me off. And then that weird video that we’re watching social media alone on the couch at night sometime and then we randomly cry for some little rescued animal video or something and then we get an ad right afterwards.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting, interesting. And so this placebo effect, rewinding just a little bit. You’re saying that we are mistaking attention on social media for connection, for actual connection. And it’s serving as some type of placebo effect.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: To take the place of the connection.

Planning and Executing a Psyop

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. And I think that’s the root of what’s going on, why we have this loneliness collapse around our world right now. But if you go back to this fate model F A T E Focus, authority, tribe and emotion and you go watch an episode of like Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer, guy who trains dogs. He’s got some celebrity’s dog that like bites people when they come in the house or whatever.

What’s the first thing that Cesar Milan does? Establishes the dog’s focus. Second thing he does, establish authority by taking control over the dog’s space or by him owning a certain piece of space and not letting the dog come into this area. Third thing, tribe. Now we’re going to go on a walk. The owner’s going to come with us and the dog’s going to walk with me. We’re going to walk together. They will not walk in front of me. We’re going to walk together. Enforce the sense of tribe.

Soon as that’s done, going to pet the dog. I’m going to give the dog a treat. I’m going to tell him he did a great job. Maybe go watch a movie or something. Emotion. That’s a mammalian brain. And it’s the same whether you’re training or manipulating a human or a dolphin, a monkey or a dog. That’s that ancient system that’s wired into us.

And the scary part, what I think is scary is that there’s no firewall. Like we don’t, we can’t go download McAfee and put it in our head for making ourselves immune to this stuff. I’m as vulnerable as everybody else. Knowing about this stuff helps. And being able to see that like you’re scrolling through social media, you’re like, whoa, I just, I finally saw that thing. That helps because it kind of takes some power away from it.

But truly understanding that we are hardwired, this little system, the limbic system, mammalian brain in our head makes decisions about things way before we think we make decisions, and this is proven on MRI studies that the mammalian part of our brain has already made the decision before we even make the actual decision.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

CHASE HUGHES: So our decision making is also a placebo. It’s already been done in the lower part of the brain. So the lower part of the brain’s job is to make choices and decisions. The upper part of the brain, it’s called the neocortex, which is Latin for “new cover.” That thing’s job is to kind of take credit for making the decisions. But that’s also where our ego lives and what makes us different than other primates and why we get Einstein and Mozart.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting, interesting. Lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now. And it’s to the point where I don’t even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence. The division.

I partnered with this production company called Ironclad and we’re doing an eight part audio series on Psyops on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government would conduct a psyop on its own people. And I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it’s going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to scopshow.com, order it today, because you’re going to get a lot out of this.

Who’s pulling the strings? Who’s pulling them? How much of what we see today do you think is an engineered psyop?

CHASE HUGHES: Give me an example. I think what I mean would be.

Modern Psyops and Social Engineering

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, you know, this stuff really popped on my radar during COVID. So I guess we can start with COVID. You know, gosh, COVID, the, I mean, political violence, you know, that’s like the big one, right? Charlie Kirk was just assassinated. Some people think it was the left, some people think it was the right, some people think it was Israel, some people think it was trans. You know, at least that’s what it was at the beginning.

A lot of questions going on about this guy that supposedly shot him. Did he? I don’t know. You know what I mean?

CHASE HUGHES: I mean, super weird.

SHAWN RYAN: So I mean, is that a psyop? Is the Epstein sht a psyop? I mean, Ukraine, China, everything. Yes, every, it’s just, it’s to the fing point. I don’t believe anything that I.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s so bad now I don’t even know if I believe my own eyes.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, and that’s good that you’re starting to get that way. And I think so many people are waking up because they made it way too obvious during COVID, which is a good thing. I’m glad they did it because it woke up so many people where they started doing this crazier and crazier and crazier and people are like, whoa, that the government’s doing this. So I think that helped people wake up.

But what I meant was with an example, there are some things that people call a psyop, like this algorithm. Like, oh, the algorithm’s engineering your behavior. The algorithm’s job is to make you buy stuff and make you see ads, and that’s where money comes from and revenue. So the algorithm says after this and this type of thing, they tend, people tend to click this buy now button for this flannel shirt. Right. So since we do that, I’m going to start doing that more. And the algorithm continuously learns.

And I think there’s a tendency for a lot of people to think that a lot of this stuff is these dark forces sitting around a marble conference table at night smoking cigars, like planning this stuff. I think a lot of the stuff that we see online is the result of these algorithms doing what makes revenue. And I think it’s an EBITDA revenue focused algorithm.

But with the other stuff, if, when it comes to psyops, there’s a few ways to tell if something is a psyop. And number one, the most important thing for anybody to learn is that if an opinion has to be silenced for something to, for another idea to flourish, then you’re in a psyop, guaranteed.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ve seen a lot of that lately.

CHASE HUGHES: A ton.

SHAWN RYAN: A lot of that.

CHASE HUGHES: Dude. There were Harvard educated doctors banned from social media for openly speaking about stuff that’s now we’ve shown to be true. Harvard educated doctors. The dude who invented MRNA went on Rogan because he got kicked off of Twitter, I think. I don’t remember what it was. So there were, the moment you see someone being silenced and it’s an opinion from somebody who should have some kind of social authority, that’s a big deal. And that should be terrifying to you, to anybody that is witnessing that.

SHAWN RYAN: Seen a lot of that in the past couple of years too.

CHASE HUGHES: There’s been a ton.

SHAWN RYAN: A lot. Yeah.

The Power of Social Silencing

CHASE HUGHES: And the interesting thing is what that does with our social media. Kind of hacking that tribal part of our brain. If all of us were sitting here in a room and we see someone get pulled up in front of the whole crowd and then smacked out, smacked in the face, embarrassed, and then tossed out of the room. And we were, I was about to go up on stage and do that. I’m like, yeah, I’m going to be quiet now. I don’t want that to happen to me.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: So now we’re using that tribalism as I’m going to take this person and I’m going to make an example out of them to prevent everybody else from stepping up. I’m going to increase fear associated with being socially outcast.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, this happened to me when, we’ve always dealt with some, a little, not always. Ever since, you know, the new administration’s in, we haven’t really had any issues. But I mean, I remember we had Jim Caviezel on. It was during that, you know, Sound of Freedom movie came out. A lot of people hated that movie, right? Yeah, dude, they just, the episode just disappeared.

CHASE HUGHES: Your episode just got pulled down.

SHAWN RYAN: Like woke up one day, gone.

CHASE HUGHES: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: I think it’s because he talked about, which apparently is like a forbidden topic. Right? But yeah, just woke up, it was gone. We have re-uploaded. But this happens to everybody and not everybody. It happens to a lot of people.

CHASE HUGHES: To tell you how pervasive this is, the moment you mentioned that word in association with video being like deleted from YouTube, I was like, oh, Sean’s going to get our show kicked off the Internet.

SHAWN RYAN: No, I’m going to bleep that word.

CHASE HUGHES: Okay, good. But that was my first reaction was like, oh, no, we’re, I’m going to be outcast or some little piece is going to be outcast because of this. So I had that fear while you and I are talking about some people exploiting that fear. And I’m the guy, I’m the guy who teaches psyops and army psyops who do this for good reasons, hopefully, how to do a lot of this stuff. And I’m not immune to any of it.

The Anatomy of a Psyop

SHAWN RYAN: So can you kind of, you know, can you walk us through the planning and execution of a psyop from start to end?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So phase one is target data collection. So what I want to do is figure out the basic behaviors and beliefs of this person. So I want to see what their perception is and what context they find themselves in. So let me give you an example. Do you shower in the morning or at night?

SHAWN RYAN: Both.

CHASE HUGHES: You’re a two time a day guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Sometimes. All right, well, in the morning.

CHASE HUGHES: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: In the morning.

CHASE HUGHES: All right, so if it’s a morning shower, then I’ll say sometime within the next 24 hours you’re going to take all your clothes off.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

CHASE HUGHES: But you won’t do it on a podcast. And that’s because of context. So if I can figure out a way to make you shift the context in your mind, I can get you to do anything. Like you’re not going to take a gun right now and shoot me.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

CHASE HUGHES: But if the context was different and I was like running at you with a knife or something, then you would. So if I shift context, I can get desired behavior out of any human being.

As a just a weird example of this, there was a lawyer in Washington state who was arrested because he learned hypnosis and then started using hypnosis on these people in his office. And there’s a woman who’d been seeing this office, this lawyer, and he was hypnotizing her. And she noticed one day that her bra was misplaced, like kind of pushed to the side a little bit, and that he had like helped her redress or like put her clothes back on.

So she brought a recorder in there and figured out that this guy would put her under hypnosis and say, “And now you’re coming home, it’s the end of the day. You’re taking out your car keys and put them in that bowl. You walk to the bathroom, you turn that hot shower on.” And now the context has shifted.

So perception and context are the biggest target acquisition, target data acquisition there. So how do they see the world? And what is the context where my, the desired behavior that I want? What is the context where that behavior is automatic or natural? Does that make sense?

SHAWN RYAN: Kind of.

CHASE HUGHES: Okay, so first I want to get perception. So this is, how does this person see the world? And if I can modify your perception.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you figure out how that person sees the world?

CHASE HUGHES: So beliefs first, values, identity and tribalism. Okay, so like, what’s important to them? What’s important to the tribe versus the individual? Because those are always different things. And then in what context? So whatever the desired behavior that I want, what is the context that would make that desired behavior automatic?

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, let’s backtrack a little bit more. Yeah. So you’re looking for, you’re trying to figure out somebody’s perception of the world. So what is, when you are researching that and putting pen to paper, what does that look like? How do you start that? And what are you documenting?

Understanding Human Needs and Manipulation

CHASE HUGHES: I tend to look for individuals in society and where are most of them on this needs map. There are six needs. Those six needs are significance. I need to do something so I can feel the most significant person in the room. Acceptance. So this is more where it’s kind of a tribe of people. I pride myself on being part of a team.

So significance, acceptance, approval. And approval. Having a social need for approval is that friend that we all have that’s like, “Oh, I got that job interview tomorrow, and I know I’m going to suck at it. I suck at everything.” And just to get you to go be like, “No, no, it’s okay. You’re going to do fine. You did great last time. You’re tremendously confident. You’re overqualified.” So that’s kind of the approval type of person.

And the final three are intelligence, pity, and strength. So intelligence means I need to do something where other people are going to see me as intelligent. And then pity is like, they’re asking the question, like, do other people realize how bad I’ve had it or how much I’ve been through? And the strength and power person at the end is, can I behave in such a way where no one will ever challenge me? So I’m going to show every, a lot of posturing. Kind of like the false alpha male syndrome.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, a lot of that.

CHASE HUGHES: So if I, and the cool thing is, even in a conversation, one on one, you can spot someone’s needs, usually within a minute and a half. And if I know the person is, let’s call it an acceptance need person, I automatically know that their social fear is being outcast, being judged, or feeling some kind of social guilt.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit. So it’s one or the other of the stuff that you meant. Or could there be more?

CHASE HUGHES: You could have one of those with a secondary.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: So you typically have a primary and secondary.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: But if I know that you’re, if your need is being significant, I automatically understand that your deepest insecurities are about feeling small, insignificant, like you don’t matter to anybody and you have no impact.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, God.

CHASE HUGHES: So I know instantly, just by understanding you on this needs map, I know where your fears and your insecurities are better than probably your therapist that’s been working with you for a year, and it’s been a minute and a half in a conversation. So a cult recruiter could use this as easily as a psyop doing it on an entire group of people.

The Most Common Human Needs

SHAWN RYAN: Are there these traits that the majority of folks have? Needs.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So when I teach people this, and the system that I teach is called NCI, it’s neurocognitive intelligence. When I teach people this, I always default to significance and acceptance. You are important, people like you. Those two things are the most easy to sway a person’s behavior with.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: Because the two biggest fears are, I don’t matter. People don’t like me.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha, right?

Weaponizing Insecurities

CHASE HUGHES: So once you figure out the needs, then you have those insecurities, and then you want to figure out a plan to weaponize or leverage those insecurities. And we’ll typically do this in small ways, so kind of view it as a wedge. And the small things that we do matter a lot on the end.

And if I could go into nerd mode, I’m going to talk about a piece of research here. And Bob Cialdini, he wrote the book called Influence, and he wrote another book called Pre-Suasion. Fantastic books. He’s a research expert for influence, human influence.

They went around these, let me explain this to you. Let’s say we have two neighborhoods here, one neighborhood here, one here. They’re all the same demographics. They make the same amount of money. It’s middle class. And they go to one neighborhood, door to door, and they ask them, “Will you put this giant ugly a please drive safe sign out in your front yard?” And in this one neighborhood, 1% of people, give or take, says yes.

Then they go to this other neighborhood and they say, “Will you put this giant a sign out in your yard that says please drive safe?” In the other neighborhood, 89% of people said yes.

The only difference is in this other neighborhood, before they asked him to do the sign, they went around a week in advance and asked everybody one simple question. “Do you support safe driving?” And who’s going to say no? No, I don’t do that. Of course, everybody says yes. And the moment they say yes, they say, “I’m so glad. Thank you. The survey is finished. And would you mind placing this tiny sticker on a window that’s facing the street that says drive safe?” It’s like that big, like one of those little alarm company stickers, right?

So in this, what they did was, “Do you support safe driving?” So now I’ve got you to make a social commitment because there’s two of us standing here at your doorstep. So you’ve just told someone who you are as a human being. Next, now that you’ve said that, I asked you to do this and it’s not that big of a deal, but a week later, I come to your house and ask you to put this ugly sign in your yard, and you say yes because of this chain of commitments that I’ve got you to go through.

And it’s not just commitment. It’s me getting you to agree who you are as a person. So you kind of roll along with that identity.

Identity Agreements in Conversation

So at the beginning of our conversation, if I was an intelligence operator and I wanted to manipulate you, I might talk about my social anxiety when I was a kid. When I was like 19, I had crazy social anxiety. I didn’t, I felt like a fake everywhere I went. And, but if I started a conversation talking about that and then I was like, “Sean, how did you get to the point of being this open with other people?”

And the moment you answer my question, I’ve got you to agree to the next behavior that I need to get you to do this. Make sense how? So I’m starting to pull you out of the box. So I just got you to agree that you are, A, not closed off, your B, you’re going to talk about your past. So I’ve woven it into your identity in just this conversation.

I mean, if you talk someone into being open, they’re not going to live the rest of their life open, but you’ve got them to commit in this little conversation. So the moment I want to go a little outside the box or I want to start talking about intelligence or something like that, you’re more likely to do it because I’ve got you to make that first identity agreement about who you are as a human being just by asking you that.

Or I might complain about people who are really closed off. I might say, “You know, there’s so many people out there, they just live their lives in this little prison, worried about what other people think.” And people will nod their head just like that. And the moment you nod your head, you’re like, “Yep,” but what are you, what are you silently agreeing to? That’s not me. I’m not that. I’m not that person.

So we get these little identity agreements, and then you understand those needs, and you can leverage so much with human behavior. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, a tiny piece of this, but for a psyop plan to finish this incredibly long answer to your question is, I want to do data acquisition. Figure out needs which automatically give me insecurities and fears. And the moment that happens, figure out context, my desired context that makes the behavior I want out of you automatic or completely expected.

Psyops on Entire Populations

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. And, but this also happens on entire populations.

CHASE HUGHES: Oh, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And so you know, when you’re looking for a need, I mean, the entire population doesn’t have the same day. It sounds like the majority of people, you know, accept it in significance. But so how would you, what would differ when you are, when you’re doing a campaign against a foreign government.

CHASE HUGHES: If you’re doing it against the government, you’re still targeting the people, right? So targeting the people would mean that you’re getting them to make small agreements. So I’m not going to drop leaflets or do radio broadcasts or any of that kind of psyop stuff right away that say, “Hey, you need to convert to this side and adopt these new beliefs.”

The first one is like, and let me give you an intelligence example of this. There was a guy working in Guantanamo who almost got turned by one of the prisoners down there. And it all started with one of the prisoners asking him one question. That was the beginning. It was this one question.

Now he said, “Do you think America is perfect?” And that was the start. And it was a long chain after that. “Has America ever made mistakes? Has America ever hurt people that didn’t deserve it? Is that true? I was just reading in the library that America gave smallpox to the Native Americans.”

So it’s just this long trail. So you always think about these little steps. What are the steps to make this one thing feel natural? And when I was learning this, one of the guys who taught me said that, walked me through the scenario, and he said, “Imagine going on a date and you never shook this girl’s hand. You never helped her through a door, you never put your hand on her shoulder, nothing. You haven’t made any physical contact with her. And at the end of the night, you lean in and try to kiss her. And it feels weird, it feels off, it doesn’t feel right. It’s because nothing happened before that.”

So what we’re really doing and what we’re really seeing in today’s world is these small incremental steps to change human identity to some ultimate outcome. And the steps that we can see, if we kind of backwards analyze this, we’re seeing division and tribalism on unprecedented levels.

So if I’m left wing, or if I lean way left, even moderately to the left, and I go on social media and start scrolling my feedback, I’m going to see people on the right still on my feed. But the type of people that I see that are on the right are going to be the dumbest loudmouth morons that you could ever imagine just to piss me off.

If I’m a conservative, I’m going to go on there and see the dumbest idiots that you could ever imagine just to make me feel morally superior and make me feel intellectually superior for having chosen this path. And drive.

SHAWN RYAN: Drive a more intense hate.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, the.

SHAWN RYAN: To the, to the other side. Yeah.

From Idea to Identity

CHASE HUGHES: And we talked about, before we started filming, you and I talked about psychedelics and how it dissolves this feeling of separation. And it seems to be the opposite is what’s happening now. It’s just massive amounts of separation. How many times and from how many objects and groups can I get you to separate yourself from? It’s the opposite of, I mean, this, it is so divisive that I think we are seeing levels like, I think 20 years ago, 10 years ago, if you ask someone if somebody should be killed for their opinion or for having offensive opinions, I think 99.9% of people would say, “No, that’s ridiculous.”

But now it’s acceptable. And it’s only acceptable because the idea became identity. So it’s idea, then ideology and then identity. And this is the pathway you walk anyone down in a psyop. Idea, ideology, identity.

And we adopt an ideology like, “Oh, I agree with these beliefs. We need to pay people who can’t afford it. We need to do this program. We need to instill this one thing in the school,” whatever it is. So now I’m starting to adopt an ideology. And the moment that happens, now I have a little tribe of people that agree with me all over social media. And now it’s identity.

Because someone posts something that’s very political, but I believe in it so much that I post it. And now the first day, the first week that I start posting that content, now my identity changes. And just like in a conversation, when I said, “Sean, how did you get this open?” Or “Look at these other people that are really closed off?” That’s the exact same thing that’s happening on social media. It’s identity.

So it’s rewiring how I see myself, which means that I can take drastic measures to enforce it because it’s part of who I am. It’s not what I believe, it’s who I am as a person. And you imagine, like you’ve been an operator for a while. You viewing yourself as an operator is who you are as a person. That’s why you could do this and that’s why you did that. It wasn’t because, like, I have a lot of really good ideas in my head. I have, my training was great. It’s you. Your confidence was in yourself and not the ideas.

So the moment I get someone to place all of those ideas into identity, we take morality off the table and it’s getting worse.

The Biggest Divisions in Society

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, no kidding. What are, I mean, what are the biggest divisions that you see happening right now?

CHASE HUGHES: Well, obviously the left versus right is the biggest. And the one thing that I would want everyone in the world to hear, when it comes to all the shit we see on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, whatever it is, you have more in common with someone who voted for the other guy than the billionaire who is funding a lot of these ideas and ideologies that you’re seeing on social media. You have way more in common.

And you see these idiots on TV, whether they’re left or right, based on who you are in real life. And the algorithm is showing you the opposite right, the idiots on the other side, that’s not real. That’s a tiny percentage of the population, a tiny one.

I think if you go to like Walmart or Target and you’re standing in line and you see somebody that voted for the other person, they’re not an ahole, they’re not slapping you in the face. And we have so much in common with each other. We all want fair income. We all hate taxes. We all want our kids to be safe. We all want our kids to be well fed. We all want to be able to have fun and not pay too much taxes.

We have so much in common with those people. We have nothing in common with a lot of these elites who are kind of orchestrating a lot of the shit that we’re seeing on social media.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, 100% agree with that. Yeah, 100% agree with that.

Finding Common Ground

CHASE HUGHES: I’ve studied hypnosis for 25 years and I work with one on one clients. I work with Formula One athletes, I’ve worked with pro fighters, UFC champions, PGA golfers. The one thing that I’ve noticed when I’m working with all of these people is that the moment that we start understanding that everything, every time I’m looking at other person there, they are scared like I am, they’re lonely like I am.

And all of these things that we, that all of us hide from the rest of the world, I’m lonely. I’m scared things aren’t going to go right for me. I don’t know if things are going to work out. I have to hedge everything. Are my kids going to be okay? All the stuff we worry about, we have that in common with everybody.

And I know this is, so I don’t want this to turn into a Mr. Rogers episode, but we really got to come back and realize that we have to understand that we’ve got more in common with those people than the elites.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I think it’s definitely not going to be a Mr. Rogers episode. But, you know, I mean, so, you know, everybody hears the term, you know, divide and conquer. Divide and conquer. Divide and conquer. We’ve heard it several times, you know, all by design. Heard that several times.

Yeah, but, you know, I mean, who. I guess what I’m asking is we are divided on so many things. It’s red versus blue. It’s black versus white. It’s Christian versus non Christian. It’s, I mean, it’s LGBTQ or not. It’s just, man, it’s everywhere. Everywhere you look, you can’t find anything that’s not division anymore. Race, religion, politics.

Maslow’s Hierarchy and Modern Division

CHASE HUGHES: I have a theory about this, if you’ll allow. If you’ll indulge me.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: Here. Are you familiar with Maslow’s pyramid? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

CHASE HUGHES: So it’s a hierarchy of what we need to kind of survive basically as humans. And there’s a few levels to it. The bottom is just survival. Above that is safety, and above that is love and belonging, and then it’s self esteem and then actualization, like, I’m living my purpose in life.

If we have a few of these pyramid levels met, we will always worry about the next one up. You with me so far?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: Okay. So we’ve got kind of the survival and safety method. Like, you’re not going to see debates about gender in a country where people are starving. It will never happen. You’re only going to see the next level that people are worried about on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

So if we have our survival met, our safety is met. The next thing up is social and belonging and that’s where we get that placebo. That’s where we get that little placebo. And the way, since we’re not fulfilling that, that gets to be something that occupies us. So we focus on what makes us different.

I have to isolate myself and I have to find a tribe of people who believe in this one small thing that I believe in. Now I’m going to try to divide myself as much as possible. When you have societies that are high up, that have the, all the belonging stuff handled, the next thing is esteem.

So if belonging feels like it’s met our self esteem and our definition of who I am as a person, that stuff has got to be conquered. That’s the next thing. And all that we’re seeing now is like, I have to identify with this one thing to increase my feeling of esteem. Even though the social part of that pyramid isn’t being met, we’re kind of jumping over it. And we can never get to the esteem part because social can no longer be fulfilled.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. Okay. Okay. What, why. What is the point of the division? I mean, it. I get it creates broken society. Nobody can agree on. Nobody gets along. People stand. Essentially a nation stands for nothing because it’s so f*ing divided. Totally understand that.

Who wants us divided and why? You know, at the beginning, you were talking about nine people at a marble round table. Do you think that’s what it is? Or is it Russia, China, anybody? You know, all these foreign actors? Maybe, maybe, maybe. I mean, obviously not just maybe. Obviously, you know. Yeah, not all foreign actors. Yeah, a lot of them coming from in CONUS. Yeah.

Who Benefits from Division?

CHASE HUGHES: I don’t have many theories when it comes to this, but I think there are some elites that have put some desired end goals out there to people that work for them or people that do their bidding. And I think this is just a byproduct of those end goals needing to be met.

Some of that’s military industrial complex, and some of that is another country wanting our economy to start kind of getting crippled a little bit. But I think that it’s multifaceted. And I think that anybody who comes up and says, oh, it’s this one guy, it’s this one guy at the World Economic Forum, or it’s this one guy who does this thing, I don’t think that’s the case.

I think a lot more of this is just a byproduct of companies needing money than people really understand. I think a lot of it is this just companies doing things and engineering outcomes where they can get money. It just so happens that this might be that the end.

But you hear people talk about the great reset and all that, which I’m no expert in any of those, like, international politics stuff, but that’s terrifying to me to hear people talk about that kind of stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Here we go again.

The End Goal of Division

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Chase, we’re back from the break. We’re getting ready to talk about, you know, what all the division, you know, we hear divide and conquer. We’ve gone through, you know, some of the division that we’re seeing. Why though? Why what, what’s the plan after all the division? Is it just a broken country?

CHASE HUGHES: I think it is. I think that’s the desired in state.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I think. I think it’s just a. Nobody’s going to come in here and occupy this and try to take over.

CHASE HUGHES: With operation American Freedom.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s so many guns. I mean it would be, it would make all the places that I’ve been to look like a complete joke.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, nobody, nobody could come in here and occupy. But you could disrupt it, turn us against each other and then, and then we have no relevance in the world. No influence, no relevance, nothing.

The KGB Playbook

CHASE HUGHES: There was a KGB guy. Do you remember this video is from the 90s, I think Yuri something Desmond off. Yeah. And he talked about that plan to destabilize and then replace education system with a different education system. Infiltrate college professors first and all of the big thinkers of the society. And this was the 90s. And he’s kind of describing the process we’re going through right now today. That was terrifying for me to watch, man.

But yeah, I think that’s the overall goal. And I think that the one thing that I’ve always, I would say the biggest transformation I’ve ever made in my life was psychedelics. Was like going through psychedelic therapy. And the one thing is like it’s not, it’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. And that is like one of the biggest lessons that I’ve ever gotten from anytime I’ve ever done psychedelics.

And I think that’s the approach that we’ve got to take with all of this like division and this rhetoric. And I think if you, if somebody tries out a social media fast and just for like 20 days, try it out and just don’t go on social media and it will change your life.

Because we’ve got stuff like TikTok now. You know what the kids in China see on TikTok?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: They’re.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re solving math equations and physics and.

CHASE HUGHES: How to stress educational. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Here it’s all tits, ass, booze, division, hate.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s. It’s porn, violence. Violence.

The TikTok Psyop and Modern Manipulation

CHASE HUGHES: And if that doesn’t tell you exactly what’s happening in the world, then you need to look somewhere else or you need to figure this out. If you look at, if China has control of TikTok or Chinese interests have control of TikTok and we’re seeing all that stuff and they’re seeing stuff that’s fantastic for them and beneficial to them as a society, that’s a psyop. It’s clear as day. It’s not some theory, it’s obvious. And it’s like right in our faces.

And it’s as much in our face as much as it was during COVID when we had people speaking from borrowed authority, that we need to trust the science. “Why aren’t you trusting the science, Sean? Put two masks on today.” All of that kind of stuff that we endured, it was just so, that’s why so many people woke up, because it was accidentally way too obvious. And I’m glad that it was.

Are We Done Waking Up?

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that there is, I mean, are we done with the waking up period? Do you know what I’m getting at? I mean, it’s, we’ve heard this for so long. “Oh, you need to wake up. You need to wake up. You’re asleep. You’re asleep at the wheel. You need to wake up. You don’t know what’s going on.”

I mean, I feel like so much shit has happened in the past four, five, eight years that in my opinion, the waking up was done a long time ago. I mean, do you think people are still waking up realizing they’ve been lied to, that can’t trust the government, you can’t trust the institutions, you can’t trust the mainstream media, you can’t trust much of anything these days?

Part of, I understand too. I mean, entire generations have just had their world flipped completely upside down because they had put so much trust in institutions and our government and media.

CHASE HUGHES: I think at a certain level, people like my parents, probably your parents, place a large amount of trust in the government and a large amount of trust in the news because that was the only source for so long and it just became habitual and became based in identity.

If you don’t trust what they’re saying, what the FDA is telling you, who are you going to trust? So I hear that from my dad and I think that’s woven into identity. But I think that I don’t think the waking up period is done at all. I think they’re going to go twice as hard. And I think within the next year, if we look at standard psyops, if the psyop isn’t working, there’s either a double down or B, stop. And I think they’re going to double down.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think they’re going to double down?

CHASE HUGHES: Oh, yes. And I think it’s going to happen in the next 12 months.

SHAWN RYAN: So why do you think it’s going to happen within the next 12 months?

CHASE HUGHES: There’s too many people waking up. When Elon bought Twitter and a lot of this stuff, there’s tons of misinformation and all that stuff all over social media. But I think that enabled so much data to come out that people are going to start saying just a little bit of a backpedal, just pump the brakes a little bit on my trust in institutions and things like that.

And I think it’s enough that more people are going to wake up. We’re going to have a lot more people in the next year because I think it’s going to get a lot more obvious.

The UFO/UAP Psyop

SHAWN RYAN: What are some of the psyops you see going on today? Let’s bring up the alien UFO, UAP. Is that a psyop? Do you think that’s a psyop?

CHASE HUGHES: I think…

SHAWN RYAN: Is that building a psyop? I mean, we’ve heard about Project Bluebeam. I think that’s the false flag alien invasion that’s supposedly coming. I’m not throwing it out there like some crazy conspiracy idea because at this point I’m like, shit, probably.

CHASE HUGHES: It would just make sense. When the New Jersey drones were happening, I think right before the election or whenever that was, that was insane. And I put a video out on that and how we are in the middle of a psyop. But it’s not the craft. I’m not sitting here saying these little Tic Tacs and all that stuff are a bunch of psyops.

The response to it, I think, is a psyop. You have this response, how we see people online responding to it. We see people going out on podcasts and stuff that have talking points from the government. And if you have someone that has talking points from the government, that’s a spokesperson, not a whistleblower. It’s very different.

And so if I’m sitting here and I say, “Well, I can’t say this, but I can tell you this one thing,” that’s government release of, that’s a controlled government release of information in my estimation. And so, yeah, I think the public perception management, which is the first step of psyops, if you remember, is perception and then context. Right.

That we’re managing the way that our perception of the UFO UAP thing is being managed is absolutely a psyop.

SHAWN RYAN: So they are creating the perception.

CHASE HUGHES: Yes, correct.

SHAWN RYAN: Creating the perception. And then they’re going to give us the next thing.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. You had a retired admiral, I think, here.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, Tim Gallaudet.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. A couple weeks ago, he was talking about that email that got deleted.

SHAWN RYAN: Wait a minute, different admiral.

CHASE HUGHES: He was the oceanography guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Tim Gallaudet. You probably saw a clip.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, I’m talking about an email that got deleted about the Tic Tac UFO thing that somehow got leaked. And I’ve seen so many people come out and say, “I’m allowed to say this and I’m not allowed to say that,” and that’s not what a whistleblower does. And I get it that there was a huge example made out of Snowden.

But I think that the way we’re, if our perception is being managed, then we are in a psyop, guaranteed. We’re in silence. All this started with a guy named Edward Bernays.

Edward Bernays and the Birth of Modern Propaganda

SHAWN RYAN: Edward Bernays.

CHASE HUGHES: Edward Bernays. He was the guy that invented the term PR and he changed the term from propaganda to public relations. He just changed the word propaganda. He was the guy. He’s the reason our butter or margarine got dyed yellow. He’s the reason that we think bacon is part of an American breakfast because the pork industry needed to sell more bacon.

He’s the reason the Department of War was changed to the Department of Defense. He’s the reason that women started smoking Virginia Slims back in the 70s when it was inappropriate for women to smoke. So he organized a parade called Torches of Freedom where women would go and smoke in the street and just say F you to everybody. And just, he changed it, changed the perception as this is a symbol of freedom and I’m going to smoke.

So he was the biggest propagandist in probably in the last four or five hundred years in the world. So he manipulated a lot of economic stuff. He had a lot to do with the United Fruit Company which is down in South America, which you may have heard of in Panama.

But this guy invented all of these processes to shape perception and change how people behave. And he was actually Sigmund Freud’s nephew and he wrote a lot about this propaganda stuff and his best selling book that he wrote about all of this is called “Crystallizing Public Opinion.”

And in this book he talks about getting, grabbing a hold of somebody’s focus, establishing some kind of authority. And I’m using my own words here, but it’s that same exact process. So if you think of that FATE model that we talked about, F-A-T-E: focus, authority, tribe and emotion, that’s our hardware.

There’s another set of influencing factors for the human side of the brain, the software part, but that controls our hardware and with everybody, we have all the same hardware, identical, almost identical hardware. And that’s all you need to take control of a human brain.

It’s like, can I establish the focus? Are they doing that with the UFOs? Did they harness our focus? Are there people of authority coming out? Is there a sense of tribe involved with that? There’s UFO communities, there’s the subreddits, but if I like a couple of UFO things on the Internet, I’m going to get fed crazy amounts of UFO stuff online.

And then there’s emotional stuff and then we have the emotional anticipation of some of these videos that says “John Smith is going live tonight at 7. He’s going to expose everything, new secrets you’ve never heard before.” And of course nothing happens. So if I can harness the power of FATE then I can control a total society.

Historical Psyops: The Education System

SHAWN RYAN: What’s some of the most successful psyops you’ve seen conducted that are complete now that you could maybe dive us in, you know, that we could dive into and you could explain from start to finish what the end product was?

CHASE HUGHES: Our school system was one of the biggest and how westernized systems of elementary, middle and high school were organized when the US was first getting started. This guy, I can’t remember his name but he was in charge of this stuff. So he is going to be the first head of the Department of Education, create this education system that’s going to be nationwide.

He goes and learns, he flies to Europe and learns from all these people who develop something called the Prussian education system, which in the Department of Education’s founding documents, which were some written by this guy, was “turn schools into factories that make good workers.” I’m paraphrasing that, but the word factories was there. Schools, just a factory to manufacture people for the workforce and people that are obedient and all of this.

So the Prussian education system was meant by, so that workers are manufactured and people didn’t question the king. That was the big thing. So if I have to get a whole country to adopt a system that’s probably not in your best interest, then I’ve got to do some work with PR. I’ve got to work with this Edward Bernays guy maybe, or I’ve got to do something to get people to adopt that belief.

So this system was made, standing up in the morning was the first thing we do every day. “I pledge allegiance to the flag” every day. And then we sit down, we were told what to do, where to sit. We don’t really do a lot of creative thinking. Can you memorize this and can you spit it back out? Can I teach you this one thing? Can you spit it back out?

Let me teach you geometry so you can cut wood or so that you can square off a corner when you become a kitchen remodeling guy, whatever that is. That the adoption, the way that our country adopted that is one of the most successful psyops ever. And I mean you eat pretty healthy, I would imagine. And do you eat based on the food pyramid?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

The Milgram Experiment and Obedience to Authority

CHASE HUGHES: We get like nine loaves of bread a day or whatever it tells you to eat. No, that’s another great example of that where it’s still standing, it’s still there. And we know that it’s not the right way to do it and we know that different people need different diets. But there’s still a food pyramid there. And that was from Edward Bernays again, who kind of invented that.

So all of these programs that we consider parts of our everyday life and we consider like, oh, that’s an American tradition. A lot of those were originated through some kind of psyop. So when it comes to like, am I in a psyop? We have to define that term a little more narrowly because if you’re watching an infomercial, you’re in a psyop.

So everything’s trying to influence your behavior to buy something or do this. But I would say when it comes to commercials and stuff, those are all psyops. And all advertising in Western society has two goals. Number one is make you feel like you’re not enough yet. And number two is to make you compare yourself to other people. And if it does that well enough, then you’ll go get it.

And if a commercial can take control of all of your factors on the fate model, then it’ll get you to take action every single time. And just to give you an example, have you heard of the Milgram experiment?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

CHASE HUGHES: So this happened in Yale. I’ll give you the short version, 1962, I think. World War II is over. These Nazis are on trial in Nuremberg. And they’re asked, why did you do what you did? And they’re saying, I was just following orders.

So this guy at Yale, Dr. Stanley Milgram, runs this experiment. Will people just follow orders? So let’s say you volunteer for this experiment. You respond to an ad in the paper saying that says, we’ll give you a free baloney sandwich lunch voucher or whatever at the cafeteria and 20 bucks. So you show up and it says, we’re doing a study on learning and the effects of punishment on learning. So you think, I don’t know about this.

SHAWN RYAN: Is this the shock therapy? The shock thing?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Go ahead, go ahead.

CHASE HUGHES: So they’ve essentially got a guy in the room right beside you, strapped up to a machine that’s going to shock him. And they sit you down in a machine, and your job is to read off some words. And when he gets a question wrong, you shock his a. And then you move the shocker up, shock him. Higher voltage for every wrong answer, you keep moving it up.

And at the end of this little shocking machine, it says, “450v xxx danger severe shock.” Two thirds of the way through this shocking thing, the guy in the other room, you can hear him screaming. You can hear him yelling when you shock him because the thing’s painful. He’s an actor. He’s not ever getting shocked.

But two thirds of the way through, he stops and he says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want out of here. I have a heart condition. I don’t want to do this anymore.” And you look back at the guy running the thing in the lab coat. The guy in the lab coat says, “It’s important that you keep going. The experiment has to continue. The experiment requires that you continue.”

And you keep going and around the 400, 350 volt mark. The guy in the other room stops making all sound and stops responding to questions. He’s not even answering the questions anymore. You turn around to the guy in the lab coat, the guy in the lab coat says, “Any non answer must be treated as an incorrect answer. Please continue. Keep going.”

And then these people would get to the end, this 450 volts, and they’d shock and be like, well, that’s it, you know, we reached the end. The guy in the lab coat says, “Please continue until you’ve read all of the questions on the quiz.” So this guy they think might be dead in the other room, they’re just keeping going at this 450v in the other room.

So before the experiment started, these psychologists, psychiatrists got together and formed a hypothesis and they said, who’s going to go all the way? And they said, 0.8% or 0.08% of people will go all the way. 67% of people went all the way.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy s*.

CHASE HUGHES: And they redid the experiment. They said, oh, well, there’s an inherent belief of safety because it’s in a college. They’ve done it in apartment buildings and basements and office buildings with college educated people, high school educated people, all income levels, about 67% of people.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think that is?

Authority and Novelty: The Psychology Behind Compliance

CHASE HUGHES: It’s two factors. It’s, number one, our inherent obedience to authority or perceived authority. Guy’s in a lab coat, I’m at this thing, the guy’s in charge, the guy’s tall, whatever it is, if we perceive authority, that will kind of overrule us.

If you go back to our tribe days, if I disobeyed my tribal leader, that means no food, no sex and no kids, no DNA. Survival. That’s a big deal.

Second, and one that they didn’t talk about, this is my theory, is novelty. So when something breaks from what we expect to happen. So you’ve done a s*load of podcasts in here, but if this wall started opening up and there was a, this was a garage door and you didn’t know it until just now, you would freak out. No matter how much I kept talking, you would keep looking at that, right? Because it’s brand new and it’s unexpected.

So when things happen that are new and unexpected, all of our focus is generated, which is the first part of the fate model. Anything new generates focus. So for our tribal ancestors, this is when they’re walking past a bush every day and one day, there’s a big stick that snaps behind that bush. All of their focus goes onto this unexpected new information.

So in the Milgram experiment, this is a person responding to an ad they’ve never responded to, driving to a building they’ve never been in, in a situation they’ve never been in, meeting people they’ve never met, sitting in front of the shocking machine they’ve never seen before. Every single aspect of it was brand new, which maintained a ton of focus.

So focus is, you can manufacture focus with novelty. Anything unexpected kind of breaks you out of your script and tells your brain to say, whoa, I’m not able to predict what’s happening next. I need to pay attention. So we have a little script for driving our car, and the moment something unusual happens, all of our focus kind of drifts back. This is when we can drive past our exit or stop sign or whatever.

So I think that one thing that Milgram experiment does is it shows us how rapidly we can be compromised. And people, and this is in 25 to 40 minutes. You’ll kill a stranger. The average, the majority of people will kill a stranger in under 45 minutes. And 250 volts is enough to kill somebody, depending on amps and other stuff. That was a hundred percent of people. A hundred percent.

SHAWN RYAN: That was a hundred percent of people.

CHASE HUGHES: Went up to 250. Yeah. Which is terrifying. But it shows us that we’re all running the same hardware and it’s easy to hack. And the more we’re aware of what’s happening around us. And this is probably leading me in a certain direction. Why am I feeling this way? The more aware we can be of that stuff, we can be a little bit more in control. We’re never fully in control because we don’t have the antivirus stuff in our head.

Recognizing the Signs of a Psyop

SHAWN RYAN: What are the others? I mean, what would some of the other signs be? That you are in the midst, you know, of a psyop. I mean, first thing you said was people being silenced. Yeah, I think that’s a big one. What are some of the other signs?

CHASE HUGHES: Brand new and unexpected things happening. Like the drones in New Jersey. Right. So let’s go back to the fate model. Focus. So is something new and weird happening that’s capturing my focus? Are there celebrities tweeting about it and people that are high up in the government talking about it? There’s authority.

Am I seeing large groups of people start talking about this one thing, or am I being made to think that a lot of people think a certain way? There’s tribe. And then am I getting called to action and getting installed with this new identity that makes me feel intellectually or morally superior? And there’s the emotion.

So is that little fate model, is that being targeted somehow? And most of my income comes from jury selection and consulting on trials and stuff like that. And the one thing that I teach attorneys is if you want to persuade an entire jury, the only thing that you’ve got to do is capture their focus, have more authority than the other attorney, foster a sense of tribalism and us versus them.

And when you say the word “us,” you get the jury to think of you and them as one unit, and then get some kind of emotion in there during your closing arguments or during one of the depositions, and you’ll win the case. I have a 200% money back guarantee when I do trial consulting.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow.

CHASE HUGHES: And it’s easy to do if you just know how to trigger all those responses in the human brain. It’s not hard to hack.

Unwitting Participants in Psyops

SHAWN RYAN: How many people that are involved, I mean, how many people involved in a psyop do you think actually realize they’re involved? So, you know, you had mentioned, you know, UAP encounter. Are there celebrities talking about it, tweeting about it, posting about it, other government officials talking about it, posts about it, tweeting about it, doing interviews about it?

I mean, yeah, if you throw a UAP up right now, everybody’s going to tweet. Everybody’s going to tweet about it, everybody’s going to post about it, everybody’s going to talk about it.

CHASE HUGHES: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, those people don’t know they’re a part of it, but it’s going, I mean, whoever’s, whoever, you know, if it is a psyop, I mean, you know, everybody’s going to…

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Going to do it. I mean, just for example, by the time this comes out, this Shield AI’s episode will be out already. They’re releasing this. They’re basically releasing the future of air warfare. They brought a model here. It was a really f*ing big model. It was in the front yard. Looked like a damn UAP.

It’s not supposed to be out until 21st of October. They unveil it, I tell them, I’m like, hey, you might want to put a tarp over this thing, because we’re out in the boonies. And if anybody thinks this is a UAP, you know, it’ll make you go viral. But that’s really going to make you go viral in the way that, in the way that you don’t want to be.

CHASE HUGHES: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: You know what I mean? And so that could create, that could have created, you know what I mean? A frenzy of, oh, there’s a UAP out in middle Tennessee. You see what I’m saying? And nobody would have, or I could have done that on purpose. And everybody that’s posting about it, you know…

CHASE HUGHES: Especially if you posted it because that would trigger the authority. Right. And then because the tribe’s going to be there because it’s a weird thing. It’ll generate a little bit of focus in tribe. But then you get involved and you say, yeah, I was there and I saw it. So now there’s authority in there.

The only thing missing is that emotion. Then we get into the tribalized part of everything. I believe it. This guy doesn’t. He’s a plant. You know what I mean? So we see so many of those things that we get to a point of apathy at a certain time.

So I think, I can’t remember who wrote the book, but it was called “The Death of Outrage.” To where we get exposed to so much content designed to inflame our mental state that outrage starts dying and going away. And that’s the point we’re at right now. That we need an extreme amount of novelty in order to spike that wave.

It’s got to be higher than normal because there’s so much novelty and bizarre s* that people are exposed to on a regular basis that the spike has to go higher. So look for the high spikes is the biggest thing to really look for.

Recent High Spikes: The Charlie Kirk Assassination

SHAWN RYAN: High spikes recently. Charlie Kirk assassination. Yeah. You know, I think there are a lot of potential psyops around that. Or maybe truth. I don’t think we’ll ever really find out. Yeah, but I mean, what do you think about that? Did you see anything?

CHASE HUGHES: There’s some psyops going around. All kinds. That was probably a way to control information or send a message to somebody.

SHAWN RYAN: Not…

Political Violence and Social Media Manipulation

CHASE HUGHES: I don’t know much about the whole situation, but I’ve seen people online that are digging into it and it looks really messed up. Like there are some crazy details that even I would maybe consider myself an operator. And there’s no way anybody I’ve ever met could take a rifle apart that fast. That takes time.

There’s a lot of threads on barrels like that and a lot of threads on suppressors and extended barrels that would take a whole lot of time. There’s a whole lot of weird details. What about you?

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a lot of weird details. I mean, I think I don’t think the entrance wound looks like an entrance wound at all. Do you? It looked a f*ing exit one.

CHASE HUGHES: It looked like it bounced off of a plate right here. It looked like there was a ceramic plate right here. I don’t, I only saw this when it happened. I haven’t dug into it.

SHAWN RYAN: But there’s a theory that the microphone is what did it. Have you heard about that?

CHASE HUGHES: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you heard? Yeah, there’s a theory that there were some type of explosives and maybe some type of a projectile planted on the microphone. Whoa. That’s supposed, you know, that’s maybe. I don’t, these are all theories. You know, this is stuff that I’m seeing.

But yeah, there’s a lot of weird going on around about it, but you know what I mean, is the, are they, are the conspiracy theories a psyop? I mean, you see what I mean? It’s to create a certain narrative.

CHASE HUGHES: I mean, who knows?

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t f*ing know. I don’t even know where to look anymore. I mean, the mainstream isn’t going to, they’re not going to go against whatever the government wants to push out, you know, and then on the other side, you’ve got everybody and that’s diving into the different scenarios.

But I mean, they’re getting huge numbers talking about it, and so can I put all the confidence into that? I don’t f*ing know where to look.

The Psyop Aspect of Division

CHASE HUGHES: I did a video about it on my YouTube channel, and the whole video was about the psyop aspect of it. Not the assassination itself, but how the assassination is the result of this division and this massive push outside of this midline ground of being exposed to these people in politics on either side. And I think there’s a lot of psyops there.

But I think the one thing that people need to realize is if I go into a Best Buy right now to go get a laptop and let’s say I get a Windows unit, and they’re like, oh, you want, do you want this antivirus thing? And I was like, no, I can’t. My computer can’t get viruses. I am more vulnerable, thinking that I’m immune than somebody who understands how easy it is to hack into a human being and actually pays attention during their day.

It doesn’t mean you need to be paranoid or anything like that. It just, you need to know when is my focus being captured? When am I being shown authority? When am I being kind of grounded in tribalism and what is my emotion being triggered or set off by something? And if you’ve got that, that’s the closest thing to kind of antivirus that we got.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting, interesting. What did you, what were you talking about in the video about Charlie Kirk’s assassination?

CHASE HUGHES: It wasn’t about Kirk.

SHAWN RYAN: It was about the violence, the political violence as a result of the psyops.

Urban Apathy and the Bystander Effect

CHASE HUGHES: And the result is that you’ve heard of the bystander effect before that. Cities, if we have apathy for everyone around us because our brains cannot pay attention to a city of 3 million people, we can’t care about everybody. That’s why you get closer to cities. People drive like aholes because they don’t care.

You go in the country and everybody’s nice to each other because we depend on our reputation. In a city you don’t, you will never see those people again. So in many ways, being around that many people can start to create some little bits of human apathy where I don’t have any empathy to other people anymore.

I can’t have empathy for everyone. If I live in Dallas or Chicago, that’s too much. My life would be, I would be suffering depression. Every day there’s somebody getting stabbed. There’s a car accident that happened last night. You can’t have it. But in a city, it’s just so overwhelming that I think we are getting to a point of showing these little tiny bits of sociopathy around a lot of these cities.

SHAWN RYAN: And this is sociopathy.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, just somebody becoming a sociopath.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: Becoming immune to feeling any kind of empathy for other people. This happened in New York in the 60s. There was a woman named Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed 30 something times over the course of several minutes and screamed. And there were somewhere around 35 witnesses.

And the police weren’t called because everybody thought someone else might call the police. I don’t know what it is. Somebody else is going to handle it. And they went back into their house and she died on the street. And maybe somebody called the police a little later or something.

But this happens in these large cities. I’m not saying go live in the woods and start a farmer’s Amish market somewhere. I’m saying you have to be aware that a lot of what’s happening now is we’re seeing people celebrating the death of a public figure. That’s sociopathy. That is the beginning of the complete loss of empathy for other people because of just weaponized identity and weaponized cognitive dissonance.

Media Manipulation and Desensitization

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think this was all done on purpose? I mean, so, you know, we see tweets, news people talking about this, you know, especially with the Kirk assassination of it. It’s a lot of people are saying this is the result of, you know, this guy’s a Nazi, this guy’s a fascist. This guy’s, you know, is that what it stems from? Or is it the desensitization, whatever.

I mean, the week before that, right, we saw, we saw the black guy in the subway stab a Ukrainian girl, what, three or four times in the neck. Yeah. Super graphic. I mean, yeah, that’s, this is what I’m talking about with the algorithm cage too. I mean, that happened. Every post I saw was that over and over and over.

And I’ve seen some pretty gruesome st throughout my career, but I don’t want to continue seeing that stuff a week later, Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck. You know, every single post for days was that. You know, and so you have, you have, you know, this is the end of democracy. This is, this guy’s a Nazi, this guy’s a fascist. This is, you know what I mean? You have all of that people just dumping gas on the flame that way.

And then on the other fact, you know, you have the, and you fing see it. I mean, not one person on the damn subway train, at least not on the video, stood up and did a damn thing about it. You know, you had Daniel Penny fing choked that guy out in New York City. He’s the only one that acted. I mean, time and time again, this is.

CHASE HUGHES: And he suffered a social consequence for it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You know, and you see, I mean, this is another thing that happens to me on X all the time. You know, you see these street fights or police, what, just some type of an altercation, some type of violence. And if you actually watch, if you click on it, even if you don’t click on it, just sits on you. Slow the scroll down and you’re like, oh, what happens, dude?

The next thing, it’s just all people getting the st beat out of them, people getting jumped. Black people beating up white people, white people beating up black people. It stirs it up. You look at one thing of people looting a store in California. The next thing you know, the next 20 posts are f*ing people.

And then you start to think like, holy st, this demographic of people, this is all the fk they do. They just loot things up and creates that division. So I guess what I’m asking is this, is it all by design or is this, is this a byproduct of just, is this just happening naturally? Is it by design or is it happening naturally? And this is just a byproduct of it.

The Four-Step Confession Protocol

CHASE HUGHES: I think with the algorithm it’s a byproduct and I think it’s happening by design from media and I think it’s maybe desired by a lot of people. And I wasn’t going to talk about this at all, but there’s a protocol to get somebody to confess to a crime and it’s a four step protocol. And when I teach interrogation, this is the way that we teach it.

And it’s also the way that you can get someone to do something that’s not in their best interest. So I studied this for a long time. All the ways you can use hypnosis or conversations or movement or having authority, all these little things that we can do to make someone do something that’s not in their best interest.

So we train an intelligence officer, he’s got to go talk somebody into, you know, turning over secrets or something where he could face the death penalty or he could face jail time for doing what he’s going to do. So the way that you get someone to confess to a crime, and this is, I promise this is going to relate back to what you’re talking about is socialize, minimize, rationalize and project.

So those four things, if I socialize the issue first. So let me give you the crime example and then I’ll unpack it into social media. In a crime example, let’s say I’m talking to you and you’re charged with robbing a store. You took a thousand dollars from a 7-Eleven somewhere.

So socializing would be, you know, Sean, I think once people understand who you are and what you’re going through in your life, that what you did is going to make perfect sense to everybody and people are going to understand. Minimize is next. And I’m a detective here and I talk to people who take millions of dollars all the time. I talk to murderers and homicide victims, I talk to families of homicide victims.

What we’re talking about here isn’t a big deal. What you did is not a big deal. You made a mistake and I just don’t want you to think it’s a big deal. I talk to people who do this all the time and they get over it. And it’s something people get through very quickly. It’s not a big deal.

Rationalize is the next step. So we did socialize, minimize. Now we have rationalize and the rationalized part, depending on what it is, I’ll rationalize the crime. Sometimes you blame the victim, depending on what crime it is.

SHAWN RYAN: But.

CHASE HUGHES: I know you were working at that 7-Eleven. I’ve looked at the pay. He’s paying you guys jack st. He’s not taking care of you guys. And I know you have an aunt that is in the hospital and her chemotherapy bills are piling up. And I think that you did this for the right reason.

And then project. And at the end of the day, this isn’t your fault. You reacted in a way that a human reacts in a situation that you were in. And anybody would have done what you would have done. So that’s how you get a confession. So that’s the little process to get a confession there.

And when we look at social media, am I seeing crime socialized and shared rampantly as if it’s like good content? So I’m seeing a socialize. I’m seeing a minimize. It’s not a big deal. I’m seeing a rationalize. I’m seeing a lot of rationalizing going on. So socialize. People are going to understand. Everybody gets it, everybody agrees with you.

Minimize, it’s not a big deal. Rationalize, it makes total sense. And then project. It’s not your fault. And that interrogation formula to get someone to do something that’s not in their best interest is what we’re seeing on social media exactly what you were talking about.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn. And you so, and you think that social media is just, it’s byproduct of the algorithm. I think mainstream media, this is all done. It is on purpose, it is by design.

CHASE HUGHES: I do. And it’s so effective. And it’s not just let me divide everybody. It’s also, how do we sell these cowboy boots for this ad that’s going to come up from this one company? It’s also that. So I have to get you down this rabbit hole far enough that you’re not going to click off.

But then I also have to isolate you away from things that are going to piss you off enough to where you’re going to leave the app. And I have to kind of navigate that little road there. And I am a victim. The watch that I’m wearing right now is from an Instagram ad. So I’m not immune to any of this stuff.

But you’re seeing so much of that stuff, it’s socialize, rationalize, minimize, and project. It’s not your fault. And that is a recipe for something that’s not in your best interest. And it’s.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think, do you think we’re going to see an uptick in political violence? A lot of people think that was a turning point.

# Wrapping Up Psychological Operations

CHASE HUGHES: I do think that’s going to happen because we’re not seeing a lot of people coming toward the middle. Maybe there’s something happening that I’m not seeing. I’m not on social media. I mean, I have social media accounts and stuff, but I’m not on there. It’s not on my phone, it’s not on my iPad, and I have to log into the website if I want to do it.

But I’m definitely thinking that everything that we’re seeing right now is made to set something up. And this did not look like an amateur. I will say that you’re an operator. You’ve spent some time over there doing this stuff that didn’t look like an amateur, did any of that stuff. So it looked like, it looks like there’s something’s being set up.

But if you go back on that formula, the way that an infomercial works is to socialize the product to you, to minimize the cost and minimize how big of a deal it is to make the purchase, to rationalize how to make that purchase and say that it’s only three easy payments of $19.99 or whatever it is, and then project like most people don’t own this, and the only reason they don’t own it is because they didn’t know about it before.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s take a quick break.

Manipulation Tactics and Bot Farms

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Chase, we’re back from the break. I want to get into some hypnosis stuff with you, but I’d like to kind of wrap up the psyops stuff right off the before we dive into that here real quick.

So, you know, there was a couple things just left on the outline I wanted to hit. One was manipulation tactics foreign governments used to make normal people do violent things. I mean, can you elaborate on that a little bit? Would this go into bot farms and stuff like that as well?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So the goal of a bot farm is to inflate tribe and authority. And it could be focus. If something is novel or unique enough, so a bot farm can do that. And that’s like, let’s say there’s something massively unique or different or interesting, then it’s so pervasive that a few authority figures or celebrities retweet it or repost it somewhere.

And then there’s so many accounts that it has the appearance of looking like other people in my tribe are liking this and it’s normalized to these other people in my tribe. So it must be popular. Therefore, without me, there’s no logic to this. Our brain’s not logically going through these steps. We automatically accept things that we think the tribe is accepting, which is how these weird, stupid ideas spread so quickly because we have the illusion of lots of people doing this one behavior.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, okay. What are some things they would project to get people to do violent things? I mean, anything outside of what we’ve already talked about, about division and, you know, lying with a certain tribe and all of that kind of stuff.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So if I wanted you, let’s say I want to weaponize Sean, I’m going to show you videos of bad, bad group of people doing really, really bad things all the time. And the more I can show that to you, you’re building up hatred and all this other stuff.

But what am I really shifting? What’s the second step of psyops that we talked about is shifting context. The only time that you’ll really want to kill someone is if you’ve never killed anybody before. Let’s say John that works at H&R Block, like, we need to weaponize that guy. He has to be in a situation where he thinks he is preventing death or violence.

And if I can shift that context into a violence scenario, your brain is already put into a place of this is a context where violence is acceptable and normal.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, God.

CHASE HUGHES: Okay, so it’s perception, then context, and then you, that’s, it’s a PCP model. It’s what we teach in NCI. You shift perception, then context, and then it equals permission. Perception, context, and permission.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: Those three things.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Learn a lot of stuff here. What is the neuroscience behind psyop?

The Neuroscience of Psychological Operations

CHASE HUGHES: It is, the actual neuroscience is that it’s weaponizing part of our brain that’s looking around to see what everyone else is doing and to see if I should change. There’s a part of our brain called the locus coeruleus. This is how we detect facial expressions in other people and whether or not, you know, in a grocery store, whether someone’s going to punch you or try to offer you a coupon or something.

But this is our sensor for is everything going as planned? Is everything going as it should right now? And the moment that stuff goes off, then we have novelty. So our brain says, whoop, there’s something new. I need to focus on that.

So that little focusing part of our brain is called the reticular formation, and that’s the part that’s active. Like when you’re, if you’re buying a white Toyota Tundra and you look at them on the Internet for a month, and then you finally buy a white Toyota Tundra, you’re going to see them everywhere. Because your brain, since you’ve been looking at it, says, oh, the human thinks that this is important. So I’m going to search for it everywhere I go. So that’s our brain’s little focusing mechanism.

SHAWN RYAN: Is there a way to shut that off?

CHASE HUGHES: No. I would say definitively no. So if I have told the mammalian part of my brain over and over again that this one thing is important, then the brain will just look for it everywhere. Like, there’s no, it’s not like everyone went out and bought a Tundra at the same time as you. It’s that you told your reticular formation or reticular activating system that that thing was important.

And the brain said, okay, Sean’s looking at this one thing. I’m going to search for it. I’m going to find it everywhere. Which also means that at the end of the day, you may, maybe somebody comes home and they’re like, hey, I saw 17 other tundras on the road just on my way home from work. It’s insane. I didn’t realize everybody had one.

But you’ll never be able to tell somebody how many Toyota Corollas you saw on the road because your brain wasn’t searching for them. So a lot of times our experience of the world is not really reality. Our experience is what our reticular formation thinks is important and what it’s searching for and it will just kind of delete everything else. So our definition of the world is our definition of the reticular formation priorities.

SHAWN RYAN: Very interesting, very interesting. Can you explain the connection between cults in brainwashing techniques?

Cults and Brainwashing: The FEAR Formula

CHASE HUGHES: Oh yeah. So brainwashing follows a four step formula and that is it spells out the word fear. So we had fate earlier, now we have fear and that’s focus, emotion, agitation and repetition.

So I’m going to gain your focus with tons of new novel stuff. I’m going to get you in and take you through this quiz or this personality quiz. I’m going to get you in and take you to this candlelight ceremony that’s kind of soft and kind.

Then an emotion happens. Now we have love bombing. Or now you have to go through some trial or tribulations, some initiation.

Then agitation. Now I have to disrupt patterns in your life. So if you normally do one thing, I’m going to tell you to do something different in your life. You’re going to have to come in here every other day. So I’m going to agitate your schedule. I might agitate your social circle and say you need to disconnect from all those friends.

So I’m going to do something to make your brain, it’s novelty, just like what we’ve been talking about. So I’m going to inject as much novelty in your life as possible to agitate your brain so that it’s brand new. I can rewire your brain because of that agitation.

And then the final step of brainwashing is repetition. So it’s working the same way that you would brainwash anybody. It’s the exact same way that cults work. Gain the focus, get them into an emotional state. And we talked about this at the very beginning of the show. That fractionation state, up and down, up and down and they go down a little deeper every single time, which is very similar to hypnosis.

And then I get the agitation. I’m going to disrupt your life. So like if you want to change your life, somebody out there, like, I’m going to set goals, I’m going to make a million dollars this month or, you know, whatever the goal is, I need to get that to myself. I’m going to brainwash myself using the exact same formula so it’s not like it’s a bad formula.

I’m going to harness my focus and where it goes through. I’m going to target all the emotions that I need to get. I’m going to get pumped and motivated and all these things. I’m going to get negatively motivated away from what I don’t want.

I’m going to agitate my life to tell my brain that something is very different as much as possible. Maybe I’ll paint a room differently. Maybe I’ll rearrange the furniture. Maybe I’ll buy a new car. Maybe I’ll shift my wardrobe around. Maybe I’ll brush my teeth with my left hand. Remember to do all kinds of things to agitate my brain so it knows that something is different.

And then repetition so I can change my life that way for the good or for bad.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Makes sense. When you, you do hypnosis too?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Why did you get into hypnosis?

MK Ultra and Hypnosis

CHASE HUGHES: It seemed cool. That’s like, there’s a guy in the UK, his name is Darren Brown, maybe, I don’t know if you’ve seen videos of, but he was on Rogan and he did this stuff that looked like magic to me. And I wanted to learn it, but I got obsessed with what is it that makes people do things that are not in their best interest?

And I read about people committing crimes using hypnosis. And like there was a story in Russia where this lady would go up to someone and then after about 60 seconds, she would ask them to hand over their wallet and their watch and all the money in their pocket and they would just willingly hand it over. And she would say, okay, and you’re just fine. You were walking that way. And they would walk off and they would report to the police, like, I don’t know what happened. She asked for those things, so I just handed them over. And then I was really confused.

So that was fascinating to me. I wanted to learn how to do it. But it also, you can do all kinds of amazing positive things for somebody with hypnosis. You can get somebody out of an eating disorder or out of depression or all kinds of stuff, make them quit smoking or quit drinking.

So hypnosis is just a cool thing that we go into naturally and we’re trance machines. All of us go into and out of trance or what trance is, which we can dig into if you want, but it’s essentially our theta wave brain function about 7 Hz cycles per second of brain waves. And that means our brain is hyperplastic, hyper suggestible.

And that’s why, like, from age 0 to 7, we’re in that theta brainwave state almost exclusively. Which is why, like, when you’re a kid, you can learn four or five languages and like, yeah, I know all those. It wasn’t stressful, it wasn’t hard. You can learn Russian and Spanish and Swahili all at the same time.

So that theta wave state is what you’re accessing in hypnosis. And we go into and out of it two or three times a day, naturally. And that’s all really hypnosis is. And we could dig into whatever you want, but hypnosis is a lot of fun. And what got me into it was like, I thought it would be bad. I thought it would make me cool.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, you were just talking about the trance. And if we want to dive into it, we can go deeper. Let’s do it. What is that?

Understanding Trance States

CHASE HUGHES: So trance is a mixture of three big things. So it’s an increase in suggestibility, an increase in your level of focus, like how much I can take your attention and kind of pull it all down into one little place. And it’s an increase in your dissociation.

So this is when I’m kind of separating from my body a little bit in my mind and not, I’m not like doing out of body experiences, but I’m getting to a place where your mind and your body are two different things. I’m going to relax your body. And we know that once you’re in that state, a lot of changes, mental changes become way easier.

So you could use it to save someone’s life. Which I did on a Delta Airlines flight. There’s a guy that was going to hurt himself and he was jacked. Huge dude. Like, scary. Like, I knew that he would probably kill me, and I hypnotized him in the front of the plane and he had the rest of the flight was absolutely fine. And Delta gave me, I think, a thousand points for that as a thank you. Nice.

So you can use it for all kinds of stuff. And from a neuroscience perspective, there’s two big things happening with hypnosis. The first is your brain floods with this chemical called GABA, which is gamma aminobutyric acid. And it’s our inhibitory neurotransmitter. It’s the one neurotransmitter, the biggest neurotransmitter in the brain that calms everything down. Let’s just chill. Brings your heart rate down, relaxes your body, relaxes your mind and like what you’re focusing on.

And the second is this other chemical called Homo vanillic acid, which they’ve only been able to detect recently through spinal fluid under hypnosis, which increases in the brain. And those things allow your brain to become really plastic.

So if you have a good hypnotist, then a person can actually help you. And this is proven by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association. It’s a proven method of treatment for a lot of stuff. But not everybody’s easily hypnotizable. So people have varying levels of suggestibility.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, what’s the process like to hypnotize somebody?

The Hypnosis Process

CHASE HUGHES: It’s pretty straightforward. We’ll fix your mind on something, dispel the rumors and myths that people get like, you’re not going to be deaf, you’re not in a coma, you’re going to hear my voice the whole time. You’re not going to get stuck. You can’t get stuck in hypnosis. And this is not something I do professionally, hardly ever.

But you talk to them in such a way that their focus is there. You’re telling them to focus on something. You help them relax their body. And this full body relaxation where you hear someone say like your shoulders are falling and face is relaxing and all this, if your body starts relaxing, we start releasing a little bit more GABA in our brain and you just kind of count down 10 to 1 and helping somebody go into trance and you just kind of say sleep.

And that expectation of trance is what really sends someone into a deliberate trance instead of a random trance that we go into naturally. And once they’re in there, then you can do the suggestions like, you know, every time you reach for a cigarette, you’re going to be nauseous or whatever a hypnotist might say.

The only clients I really work with with hypnosis is, and this is kind of fascinating, I work one on one with people every once in a while a few times a year where we will do a full on simulation including having a medical doctor there of a gastric band surgery to where they go through the entire experience of having that surgery done.

They can feel that band being placed on the stomach, they go through the surgery in their mind and then they actually wear a bandage for a couple weeks after. And they get about 80% of the results of 80, 85% of results of what a gastric band surgery?

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CHASE HUGHES: Dead serious.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

CHASE HUGHES: So this has been used for several things like that. And just a few months ago, the first brain surgery, open brain surgery, was done with no anesthetic and only hypnosis.

SHAWN RYAN: What? Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: And they’ve been using it as anesthesia for a hundred years, almost. For dental, you can have teeth removed and they’ve done limb amputations where the person couldn’t feel any pain. It is pretty powerful stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you know when they’ve arrived at it?

Recognizing Hypnotic States

CHASE HUGHES: I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a perfect indicator unless the person you’re doing it with is wearing an EEG, like a brain scan machine. But you see their breathing shift. You’ll see most of us breathe from our chest. You know, when we’re in conversation with people, you’ll see it shift down into the belly.

You’ll see even if their eyes are closed, you’ll see the eyes kind of look up. Like, if you try to look at the center of your head from behind, you’ll see the eyes kind of move in that direction, kind of roll upward. There’s a few indicators that we look for, and those are the big ones.

But the thing is that somebody might say, oh, I tried hypnosis a few years ago to quit smoking, and it didn’t work. Or I don’t think hypnosis works. But if you went down to Tijuana and got facial surgery by some drunk doctor, you’re not going to say surgery doesn’t work. You’re going to say, I saw a bad surgeon. Right?

So who you see when it comes to hypnosis makes a huge difference. And whether or not they’re like, with my clients, we do neurotransmitter analysis, we do blood work and all that 60 days prior to the appointment. So everything is kind of balanced and going well before it even starts.

SHAWN RYAN: So what is it that happened when you say whatever you said, you know, if you eat whatever thing, you’re going to become nauseous afterwards. I mean, that is, I mean, that is, that’s in there.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s in there deep. But we’re setting up, it’s not just me saying those words. We’re setting their brain up to receive that data in a very specific file in their file cabinet. So I want the really important file, not the, hey, this is something some dude said. I want them to pull that big, important file out.

And there’s some phrases and words we use to get that file drawer opened and pull that file up for things that are permanent and things that are important and get the old file out and put that new one in there. But you make it really vivid too.

So like, if someone’s under hypnosis, you can have them change their body temperature. You can have them alter their heart rate, you can have them not bleed. There’s YouTube videos on this where they pull people’s skin up and shoved a needle through there and told them not to bleed on that hand. You can have them change the body temperature of one hand versus another from blood flow.

And this is proven, this is peer reviewed research. So it is a really powerful tool. But it can be obviously weaponized like anything that’s powerful and awesome. Like, you got an M4 up here and that thing could be a tool for good, it could be a tool for bad.

MK Ultra and Government Mind Control Programs

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, you know this, this makes MK Ultra pop in my mind. Yeah, I mean it sounds kind of similar there.

CHASE HUGHES: Did a lot of that stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, I know a lot about MK Ultra.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s hear about it.

CHASE HUGHES: There is, well, the background to it is the government was freaking out that there were guys in the Korean War saying America’s bad. I renounce my citizenship. I hate America. Korea. Yay Korea. Boo America kind of videos. And they’re like, what? There’s some technology because these are patriotic Americans being told to do all this stuff.

So there was a start of what I would refer to as a mental arms race. And the Soviets were also doing this stuff too. And this is where you had weird stuff going on. We had like start Project Stargate, like the men who stare at goats movie and remote viewing and all this other stuff was going on.

Then they started MK Ultra which involved a lot of former Nazi scientists and involved a lot of LSD and dosing people with massive, massive doses of LSD and ruining a lot of people’s lives in the process. But it was an attempt initially to find some kind of a truth serum.

And actually the Navy participated in the biggest one which was called Project Chatter, which is a sub project of MK Ultra. And with this, this guy, he’s a professor at, it’s in Hamilton, New York. I can’t remember the name of the Colgate University. His name is Dr. George Estabrooks.

And he and J. Edgar Hoover are collaborating on a plan to use hypnosis to capture and hypnotize a German Submarine captain and give him alter identities and send him back to his fleet in Germany and have him torpedo the entire German fleet inside the harbor. And this was a legit plan.

And I have access to the documents that survived the destruction order. And it was called Super Spy. And do you do show notes like the PDF in the comment or PDF in the description thing? I would have sent it to you so people can download it, but.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, we’ll do it, we’ll do it. Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: Done it before.

SHAWN RYAN: I thought you’d been every. Okay, we’ll do it.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, so I’ll send it to you. So people can actually look at these because they’re not public record.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

Creating a Manchurian Candidate

CHASE HUGHES: I went to this guy’s house, talked to a family member. These were like old stuff that survived the CIA’s destruction order of all of this stuff. But it got weird. I mean, these guys had lots of power. This was called the OSS, which as you know pretty well back then, we’ve got this guy running the show. His name’s Wild Bill Donovan. And his instructions to the lead guys in every unit was to make merry hell when it came to MK Ultra.

And they did this one project called Project Midnight Climax. Have you heard of this? They took prostitutes in San Francisco. And these women would lure these men back to the hotel and drug them with LSD, like high dose LSD. And on the other side of a two-way mirror, these scientists would be back there writing down God knows what, because that’s all we really know about the whole program.

But they were also experimenting with aerosol LSD. Like can we disperse it into a crowd? Can we disperse it over a city? What does it do in water supplies and just some insane stuff. But they discovered this way to create a Manchurian candidate. And this is a lot of where some of these ideas came from.

And this guy, George Estabrooks perfected, or back then had it perfected this system to create a Manchurian candidate to where he could create an alter ego inside of an army officer. One of them was the normal officer and they called him Jones A. And there was a Jones B. And we could send this guy through enemy lines doing whatever. Jones A is a normal army officer. Jones B is carrying these vital classified secrets, radio frequencies, you know, whatever it is. I made that last part of the frequency part of who knows what he’s carrying.

So if Jones A gets captured, Jones B doesn’t activate until he hears a very specific hypnotic phrase or hypnotic command under hypnosis. And they do that on the other side of the line. So they developed this stuff way back when. And one of the doctors working on this whole project was named Dr. Jolyon West, who may have been involved with the Sirhan Sirhan situation and Bobby Kennedy, which is a whole other rabbit hole. But it looks like Sirhan Sirhan to me. I’m 100% convinced that he was programmed to do that.

No, it’s not hard to do. I mean, look at the Milgram experiment. 40 minutes, kill a stranger, and they didn’t use hypnosis. There was no cool sales tactic or script that they had to follow. Everybody’s concerned with what do I say? What are the exact words I need to say? It’s, can you trigger the FATE model: Focus, Authority, Tribe and Emotion. And if you get that, you get compliance. And if you get that plus hypnosis, then you can create the Manchurian Candidate. And it’s not that hard to do. You don’t need a bunch of advanced training to get that done. And I’ve studied that for a long time.

Therapeutic Applications of Alter Egos

So when I work with one-on-one clients who need a breakthrough or something like that, I’ll use the exact same method to create an alter ego in a person that maybe doesn’t eat 6 pounds of cheesecake every day. So you could take the exact same thing and put it in someone else that benefits them and acts as maybe a drill sergeant or a disciplinarian.

And the reason that I started doing this or got interested in it, there are case studies and reports of people with dissociative identity disorder. So like two personalities or multiple personalities inside of a person, where one of them has a medically diagnosable condition and the other one does not.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

CHASE HUGHES: No. This is proven. One of them could be cortically blind, or one could have color blindness. One of them could have some kind of a diabetic condition. There were several conditions where these other personalities would have allergies, even skin allergies, and rashes in response to cat hair.

And just upon reading this, I’m thinking, well, could I make someone with severe depression have an alter ego that doesn’t have the depression? And we know that neurons that fire together wire together. So over the course of six months, if they keep doing this, can they kind of rewire their brain if this alter keeps taking over? Of course. I didn’t know. I played with it for a really long time.

And man, our brains are fascinating and how fast they can change and adapt. And if you’ve got a good person working with you, you can get a lot done. But I think the only other way to really alter mental plasticity that fast would be psychedelics. This was like ketamine or a DMT or something like that.

The MK Ultra Process

SHAWN RYAN: So how would they do it with MK Ultra? Would they, they are in the middle of the journey, you know, that the psychedelic kicks in and then they, is it a hypnosis? I mean, because the way it’s described is they’re injecting thoughts, right?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So it probably, there was never a recipe. My estimation is that it was a microdose of LSD because you, as you know in psychedelics language loses more and more meaning the more psychedelics you do. So I was thinking as a microdose of LSD, massive amounts of hypnosis to where the person’s hyper responsive to that person’s voice.

So when I see clients, they listen to my MP3 audio thing. That’s hypnosis to just help them go to sleep every night. So by the time they show up and see me in person, their brain is hyper responsive to my voice and it’s a lot easier.

And then during that process, in my estimation, they used real trauma like oxygen deprivation or something like that to create a traumatic brain response inside of the limbic system of our brain which makes us dissociate. And during this process of dissociation is when they put that second dissociated person or part of them, or I don’t know how the words to say, but they’re dissociated.

So while they’re dissociated they hypnotize them and then kind of create that alter ego. Tell them how they activate, tell them when they come up and when they, what their personality is, what they like to do. You’re here to protect the host. So if I did this to you, Sean B’s job would be to protect Sean A. Does that make sense?

SHAWN RYAN: Kind of a little bit. I mean I don’t understand how person B comes out though. You know, I mean how is that determined?

Understanding Dissociation

CHASE HUGHES: Person B comes out through dissociation. So that’s where we get the name dissociative identity disorder. So when a person is going through some kind of traumatic event, you’ll talk to somebody. I think you had someone on your show who mentioned this who goes through trauma, and they just kind of exit their body temporarily or exit this one globe of consciousness into this other piece.

And when they shift over to this other piece, you can separately create this piece and give them an identity, give them a name. And if I can make something real in your head, then I can create it in reality for you. Which is why a lot of these cases of dissociative identity disorder were created by the psychiatrists in the 70s and 80s and the 90s because, and this is called iatrogenic dissociative identity disorder.

So if you came to me, I keep using you as the example, but there’s nobody else here. If you came to me and I was a psychiatrist and we were working together, you said, well, I have this thing going on in my life, and it’s X and Y and Z. And all I did was start talking about two different parts of you. And I say, it seems like there’s a part of you that wants to eat the right thing, but there’s also a part of you that wants to overeat. They were like, yeah.

And then I go into five or six other examples in your life. Is this like this in social situations? Is there a part of you that wants to hide and there’s a part of you that wants to socialize? Yeah. So I go into all these parts, and then I would say, you know what? I’d like you to take a questionnaire. And this questionnaire is maybe 17 questions. And a lot of these people made it up on the spot, these little questionnaires.

And if I tell you that you scored high in dissociative identity, I’d say this person, this other part of you, has their own thoughts, their own behaviors, their own life. And I think a lot of your issues are from not addressing this other part of you that wants to do these other things. And they’re probably here to keep you safe.

So just really quick, just between you and I, if that other part of you had a name, what would you want to name that other part? And you say, Stephen. And I’m like, all right, so I’d like to talk to Stephen now. So within the course of one session, I have a conversation with Sean, I have a conversation with Stephen, and by the third or fourth session, you are fully living your life as if there are two people in your head.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve got to be kidding.

CHASE HUGHES: Because what happens there, there’s a lot of novelty focus, a lot of authority, because there’s a guy in a lab coat or a guy in the psychology sweater vest, holding the clipboard there, taking you through a lot of this stuff. The authority and your expectation is what sets the stage for this to become a reality. So you can accidentally get dissociative identity from a provider.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

CHASE HUGHES: And this is very well documented.

The Purpose of MK Ultra

SHAWN RYAN: And so what was the point of MK Ultra?

CHASE HUGHES: Who knows? I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t know?

CHASE HUGHES: I think the initial aim was to figure out the perfect truth serum, which they thought LSD was some miracle for truth serum. And they were testing sodium amytal, which is another drug that’s pretty well known as a good truth serum. And they were trying to figure out, can we really brainwash people? Can we create Manchurian candidates? Can we split people’s personalities?

There was so much that it was just wild. It was the Wild West. So just looking at what they did, nobody would ever be able to know what the ultimate aim was.

SHAWN RYAN: So how would they get personality B to trigger on demand? But if they were going to have a Manchurian candidate or, you know, an assassin or, you know, any bad actors, I mean, how would they trigger personality B to carry out whatever the mission is?

Triggering the Alternate Personality

CHASE HUGHES: It’s pretty simple. A lot of repetition. So if I continually deprive you of oxygen and then afterwards, every time you dissociate them, say, now I’m talking to Sean B. And what’s your number one goal? You want to protect Sean A.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

CHASE HUGHES: And the number one way to do that is to go do this one thing in this place. That’s the way to protect. Is that your goal? Is that what you want to do?

SHAWN RYAN: Good.

The Mechanics of Mind Control

CHASE HUGHES: And every time you come out, I might set up some kind of a trigger. Once you hear these words, then you have permission to come out and do exactly what you want to do. And it’s very easy. It’s just setting up the expectation and then rehearsal. That’s all hypnosis really is.

But when you do it with this Manchurian Candidate stuff, it’s trauma, expectation, and then repetition. It’s not hard. I mean, without any of that trauma, any of that programming, no LSD, strangers will kill another stranger in 40 minutes at a rate of 67%.

So people think there’s some advanced, crazy technique that you have to master to do a lot of this stuff. It’s a lot simpler than most people think.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s not that advanced.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s not.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that’s scary.

CHASE HUGHES: It is terrifying.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that program’s still going on?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, we’re swimming in it inside of our phone every day.

AI and the Future of Psychological Operations

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. What I mean, so what is… We’re kind of wrapping up the interview now, Chase. But I’m just, you know, with a lot of the things that are coming out today, AI voice manipulation. I mean, you see a lot of these AI videos that are coming out. They don’t look fake, you know? They don’t look fake.

I mean, now they have these programs that will… I mean, you feed it 30 seconds of your voice and it’ll replicate it perfectly.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Minus, you know, maybe some highs and lows and just how you talk as a person. Raise your voice, lower your voice, but it’ll even start picking that up.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: If you give it enough time. So, I mean, what are your fears for… What do you think? Psyops. How are they going to develop it?

CHASE HUGHES: Can copy your voice. I didn’t know it could do that.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah, they can copy your voice.

CHASE HUGHES: So I could listen to a romance novel that’s narrated by you?

SHAWN RYAN: You could.

CHASE HUGHES: I might try that.

SHAWN RYAN: These guys are already doing it to my boys, no doubt.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

The Return to Authenticity

CHASE HUGHES: So I think at the end of the day, with all this AI, it’s going to do exactly what we’ve already done. We are in a world where we’ve got our friend Joe Rogan. He’s got more views than almost all of the media, because that’s contrived, it’s narrative driven, and it’s artificial, and people are right now just starving for something more real.

And I think over time, AI is going to become so pervasive that all we’re going to do is crave something real again. We’re going to get back, we’re going to get into a place of being extremely distrustful of digital assets and digital media in general.

And I think that that distrust of digital media will drive us back to a place of craving some kind of risk, reality and actual human connection. Yeah. So I think that it may be the thing that pushes us backward toward where we need to be reconnecting.

And I’m not saying it’s going to drive that change and change the world, but I’m saying it’s going to create that desire for sure, it’s going to create that desire for reality because we’ve already got it and we’re already seeing the world’s reaction to shows like this.

The content that you put out, it’s not heavily edited. There’s not some narrative being cast and all that stuff. It’s super real, and people are already starting to crave that stuff. And I think this is just going to push it even further.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, that’s good to hear. That’s good to hear. I was expecting something a lot darker than that, to be honest.

CHASE HUGHES: I brought you a present, by the way.

SHAWN RYAN: All right. Oh, I got you a little something too. I forgot all kinds of… At this interview I was getting… This is the…

CHASE HUGHES: Pop that thing open and I got one for your team as well. So this is my newest book. There’s a paperback of it on Amazon. But it is every dangerous thing you ever wanted to know about reading people and all that kind of stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Behavior Ops. This is your newest book?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, Behavior Ops manual.

SHAWN RYAN: And thank you.

CHASE HUGHES: That spiral on that thing, we’ve only got 90 of the spiral versions left. The paperback is on Amazon. But you know Lisa Bilyeu now, Tom Bilyeu from Impact Theory.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah. Okay.

CHASE HUGHES: So his wife, I was on her show with her and she wore that thing as a bracelet. Her whole arm fit inside of that spiral.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I actually had a couple things. One, gummy bears. Every guest gets the Vigilance League Gummy Bears. Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states.

CHASE HUGHES: Let’s try one right now.

SHAWN RYAN: Let me know what you think.

CHASE HUGHES: These are normal gummy bears.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re normal. It’s just candy. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t know.

CHASE HUGHES: And they’re good. Not bad, huh? Actually good.

Manchurian Candidates and Modern Threats

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. And then… Yeah, I usually do this at the beginning, but I’ve got a little ahead of myself. This is from… So we have a Patreon account, subscription account. And one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

This is from Stephen Casey. With the proliferation of assassination attempts in the past several years, are you at all concerned about the possibility of Manchurian Candidate type scenarios? Is science that far off from being a reality?

CHASE HUGHES: Which science? I think the Manchurian Candidate stuff has been going on for a while. And here’s the one thing no one ever talks about. A lot of people talk about this guy’s got the skills. This guy did this programming.

I think 80% of the hard work in doing that stuff is target selection and who you’re going to pick to do that programming so that their backstory and all that stuff lines up with the agenda that the person has at the end of the day.

And it is very possible. And I say this as a person who’s studied probably more than anyone in the world. The one thing I’ll say, I might know more than anybody in the world about is this kind of alter ego programming stuff. And I will say that, yes, I’m worried about it. What was his name? John.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s Stephen Casey.

CHASE HUGHES: All right, so for Stephen. Yes, I’m worried about it and I don’t know if there’s a way that we can really do anything about it. Sadly being weaponized. So the science is there and the science to hack the brain is only getting better.

And it’s going to be a new world very soon. And if AI keeps going, we’re going to start this process of craving something real. Which is what we’re… If you look at the trends on what people are following, the YouTube channels that are creating more real content, I just last week hit a million subscribers on my channel.

SHAWN RYAN: Congratulations.

CHASE HUGHES: Thank you. People are craving stuff that’s not narrative based. It’s not feeding you a bunch of… And people are just talking normally. I don’t think we’re going to go the other way. I hope we… I hope.

SHAWN RYAN: I hope not. I’ve been hearing and talking about the human connection for several years. And I hope you’re right. I hope it comes back to that because people are not talking.

Simulation Theory and Ancient Wisdom

CHASE HUGHES: I think there will be a portion of society that chooses to put on that advanced VR experience, like Neuralink. Well, I think way in the future where you can’t distinguish that from reality.

But it’s also… If you look at everything, how everything is a microcosm of the big thing, our DNA looks like the galaxy and our eyes look like a star and all this kind of stuff. We, when we were on a break last, we talked about salvia and how a dude did salvia and lived a 30 year life and had kids and stuff and came back.

I’ve read that probably two years ago. I’ve read about this guy that haunts me to this day because what if that’s just the next level and we’re in that now. I know the headset hasn’t come up.

SHAWN RYAN: I think about that too.

CHASE HUGHES: I do all the time.

SHAWN RYAN: What if this is a… Yeah. What if this is a simulation? What if none of this is actually real?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I don’t even know where to go from there. But I do think about that a lot more than I should.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah, I do too.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think? Do you think we’re in a false reality?

CHASE HUGHES: I think this is a simulation.

SHAWN RYAN: You do?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You think this is a simulation, but…

CHASE HUGHES: I don’t think it’s computer. This is what I mean. When our ancestors were around, the universe was made of fire and different elements of fire. Because that’s…

SHAWN RYAN: You think I’m here right now?

CHASE HUGHES: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: You do?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t think this is only in your… A projection of your reality?

CHASE HUGHES: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you ever thought that?

CHASE HUGHES: No. But if you look at the Industrial Revolution, the universe was a machine. If you look at the electrical revolution, when we started inventing electricity, the universe was all energy. And then you look at now when we’re in the age of computers and the universe is a computer.

So we’re just using very limited, you know, just our small, narrow perspective to make sense of something that’s incomprehensible. And when people say we could not be in a simulation because the computer would be the size of the solar system or whatever… How naive for us to say that they use computers or we use computers or whatever this is, that we have some understanding of it because we’re here and we’re one of the youngest species on the planet.

So I think there’s not enough scientists out there who say… Who don’t use the words, “as far as we know.” I think there’s too few scientists who don’t admit that we haven’t got it all figured out.

SHAWN RYAN: Now, why do you think we’re in a simulation that’s not in a computer simulation?

CHASE HUGHES: Well, so first I would say if you look at the people who’ve done psychedelics and all of those lessons, why do they all learn the same lessons? Why are they all getting taught the same kind of thing mostly?

SHAWN RYAN: What would you say those lessons are other than everything is one? That’s what comes to my mind.

The Hermetic Principles and Quantum Physics

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. If we go back to psychedelics, the most ancient spiritual text ever written, I think, was the Hermetic Principles. And this first principle of hermeticism was “all is mind.” The universe is mental. And this is 3,500 years BC they’re writing this stuff.

And the second principle is “as above, so below.” And man, they had some stuff figured out back then. And I think it’s a… Maybe a simulation in that what we think is real is probably not real.

The separation between atoms makes everything 99.999% empty space. We’re just emptiness. And there’s so many things. Every new discovery of quantum physics and quantum mechanics is proving one of these ancient wisdom principles. Right?

Every new thing that we figure out, this quantum entanglement or quantum tunneling or this double slit experiment.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s quantum tunneling?

CHASE HUGHES: Quantum tunneling is where a particle can appear at another location.

SHAWN RYAN: I haven’t heard of this one.

CHASE HUGHES: And you’ve heard of quantum entanglement?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I’ve heard of quantum entanglement.

CHASE HUGHES: I understand quantum tunneling almost none.

Quantum Entanglement Explained

SHAWN RYAN: So quantum entangling for the audience is basically if you split an atom in half, correct me if I’m wrong, right? You split an atom in half, put, you know, A side over here, you put B side over here. It doesn’t matter what the difference is. You could have one on f*ing Pluto and the other one on the sun. And if you put a frequency on one, it will mimic the exact same frequency. No matter. It could be a centimeter away from it, it could be a galaxy away from it.

CHASE HUGHES: Instantly.

SHAWN RYAN: It will mimic what side A is doing or side B is doing.

CHASE HUGHES: So somehow information travels that distance instantly. No need to use light or anything like that.

SHAWN RYAN: They are not, they do not appear to be connected, but no matter what the distance is, they will mimic each other. Yeah, that’s quantum entanglement.

The Limits of Human Understanding

CHASE HUGHES: And the double slit experiment says that matter isn’t really matter until we observe it and look at it. I’m dumbing that down and turning it into a post-it note, but essentially says something like that, which is like, look at Minecraft. My kids played Minecraft growing up and they would fly through the Minecraft game and the mountains wouldn’t materialize into the TV until they got closer and closer to them. And then you’d see them pop up.

And reality works the same way, which is unbelievable. And I think we need to acknowledge how little we know. I’ve studied neuroscience for 12 years now, and we don’t even know where memories are stored. We don’t know. We don’t know how they’re made. We don’t know what consciousness is. We have no clue of anything about consciousness.

We know so little about the brain. There’s probably 70% of the brain, like the anatomical structure of the brain, we’re not really sure how they work or what they do. So it’s okay. I think it should be more okay for a lot of people to admit that we’re in our infancy of understanding reality to begin with.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I don’t know, I think a lot about this all the time.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s like, I obsess.

SHAWN RYAN: Any of this real? Are you here? This is room here? Yes, Real. Is any of this real?

CHASE HUGHES: Well, that goes back to the first principle of hermeticism. The all is mind mental. And I think that that’s pretty damn true of a lot of the things that we see on psychedelics. A lot of the big revelations that people have. And I think a lot of it is like, don’t take everything so seriously that you get on mushrooms that you get from any kind of journey like that.

It’s like, stop. Stop pretending like it’s not a game. Like it’s just a game. And it’s just, look at the Bible. The number one most repeating phrase in the Bible is “do not fear.” 365 times.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know that either.

CHASE HUGHES: “Do not fear” or “be not afraid.” Like kind of variations on that theme. 365 times. Most common phrase in the Bible.

Quantum Tunneling and Ancient Theories

SHAWN RYAN: What was quantum tunneling? We know we did. We didn’t cover that.

CHASE HUGHES: I don’t know a lot about it, but I know that quantum tunneling proved or went back to the second principle of hermeticism, which was “as above, so below.” But quantum tunneling is basically like creating some little wormhole.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Somebody else that answers, like manipulation of space and space time or something.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. I’m going to have to dig into that one.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s worth a watch. I feel like I’m underprepared for you to ask me that.

SHAWN RYAN: I was. I know, talking about anything quantum, but I am curious. You had mentioned that, you know, these discoveries in the quantum realm are proving ancient theories. Correct. What are some of those theories that have been proven correct?

CHASE HUGHES: The ancient theories?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

CHASE HUGHES: Like the all is mind. So when it comes to consciousness as we know it, there’s a couple of lead or amazing guys that are doing research right now. Rupert Sheldrake is one of them. Federico Faggin. Man, I wish you would get those guys on the show.

SHAWN RYAN: You have contact with them?

Consciousness Beyond the Brain

CHASE HUGHES: I will get you in contact with them. Yeah, but he wrote a book called “Irreducible” and it’s talking about our obsession with materialism. So let’s say, like, if you wanted to understand why a Chopin classical piece makes you cry or makes people cry, you say, okay, we’re going to figure out why this makes people cry.

So we’re going to go to the symphony hall, we’re going to take all of these instruments, chop them into 5 billion pieces, and one at a time put all the pieces of these instruments under a microscope. I’m going to zoom in on the wood, I’m going to zoom in on the strings. And then, oh, somebody. It’s like, oh, shoot, there’s music over here with notes written on it. And I’m like, all right, cut the paper up. Cut that piece of paper up and put the paper under the microscope so we can figure out music. Let’s zoom into a piece of paper.

So we’re obsessing over material things and we’re ignoring things that are harder to prove and we can’t. You cannot do a lab test to see why music works or why love starts happening. And it’s not just neurochemical. So we’re really just, our modern day is obsessed with materialism and reductionism. So, like, let me take this violin down to one shred of wood. Let me take this entire symphony on a paper and look at one molecule under a microscope.

These guys talk a lot about this stuff, man, and it is so profound and beautiful. And the current theory of consciousness right now is that consciousness does not occur in the brain. And I think this was proven a couple months ago or we had a step towards it a couple months ago. I can’t remember the study, but he talks about it.

Federico Faggin talks about this and Rupert Sheldrake that consciousness is something that comes from outside of our head. And our brain acts like a filter for consciousness. So that when we do things like psychedelics, it’s really muting and turning down that filter consciousness.

SHAWN RYAN: They talk about this?

CHASE HUGHES: Oh yeah, big time.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

CHASE HUGHES: I want you to get them on just so I can personally watch the episode.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll do everything I can to get them on. That sounds fascinating.

The Laser Code Phenomenon

You know, on another subject, I mean, on the break we were talking about some laser with, and I’ve heard this too. Yeah, well, I’ll just let you do it. But basically it was lasers with ones and zeros visibly inside of the laser.

CHASE HUGHES: So let me just set this up. So if you bought like a DeWalt laser level at Home Depot and it paints that line across the wall and then you put something in front of the laser to kind of diffuse it. So you take it from being a really thin laser line and then spread that sucker out so it’s like 6 inches wide, big fat line of laser on the wall.

And then you get somebody that’s on DMT or psychedelics, any, almost any psychedelic. I think when you look at that, you can see, number one, you can…

SHAWN RYAN: See through the wall, you can see through the wall.

CHASE HUGHES: You can see through the wall where…

SHAWN RYAN: The laser is or just through the wall?

CHASE HUGHES: Right where the laser is. You can see through the wall. You can even put it on your arm. And the code changes on your arm. If your arm gets in front of where the wall is, the code is completely different.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you sh… What?

CHASE HUGHES: I didn’t believe this. So this was viral on TikTok. Someone stole the TikTok video and reposted it on their X account. I saw this guy. His name is Danny Goler, and he’s one of my good friends. If you want to have him on.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m listening.

CHASE HUGHES: I’ll put you guys in touch. So I see this video and I’m watching the behavior of the people, observing everything to see if they’re lying. Because I’m a behavioral expert. I’m looking for deception and lies and all this stuff all the time. They were all truthful.

So I called my assistant. I said, get this guy wherever he is, fly him to my house or fly him where we can meet up somewhere. I want to try this out. So we flew to a place. We wound up flying to a place where DMT is not illegal. And shine this thing on the wall. And I’ve never done DMT before until this day.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

CHASE HUGHES: Oh, my God. That’s a whole other three hour podcast. But while you are in the DMT state, you get close to the wall and you can see code that looks kind of like alien writing. Like you’d see and then some that look like kanji, Japanese characters.

But the thing is, when you’re hallucinating something, like, sometimes hallucinations change and warp and modify a little bit. This is permanent, solid. So, like, and if you move your head, the code stays in the same place. And if you move the laser on the wall, like, you take the laser level and scoot it up, different code reveals itself as the laser is moving.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

CHASE HUGHES: Then you get two or three people lined up and they all see the same thing. And I have looked into this quite a bit because I thought, this, there’s no way this could be true. But the first time I saw it, I wept. I wept. There’s a video of me watching it on YouTube and it was just, you’re seeing something, but you’re left with no answers.

Like, the only thing you have coming out of that is, like, what the hell did I just see? You know, it doesn’t give you any more knowledge about anything. But the big thing is, why are we seeing code and where is it coming from. And what is it made of?

SHAWN RYAN: But.

CHASE HUGHES: And why. Why does everyone see the same exact characters if they’re all looking at the same place?

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that is crazy.

CHASE HUGHES: It is bizarre. And if you put your arm in front of it, the code completely changes, but only right where your arm is.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you make, do you have any theories on this?

CHASE HUGHES: None.

SHAWN RYAN: Nothing.

CHASE HUGHES: Once you see it, like your ability to think that you have figured out is gone. It’s gone. There is, I have no explanation for what the hell it is, but it’s fascinating.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

CHASE HUGHES: And I think this is going to, within our lifetime if Danny keeps going with this research, we’re going to have a big breakthrough and consciousness understanding of, like, what the hell it is. But it’s, man, it’s beautiful and makes you feel stupid, man, at the same time.

The Intravenous DMT Experience

SHAWN RYAN: Well, do you, can I mention what you’re getting ready to do or do you want to just, you want to, we’re keeping that.

CHASE HUGHES: No, you can. Yeah, I’m going to make a video about it. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: All right. So you’re doing the intravenous psychedelic experience that I guess, you know, apparently basically almost nobody has done.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And going to do some super deep work, man. I would, no, I would love to get you back here and just talk about what that experience was like, what you learned, what you saw, what you felt.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you do it again?

CHASE HUGHES: If you want to send one of your dudes down there just to get B roll for that episode, then we can do it, man. Okay, so it’s four to five hours of NN DMT and they’re essentially following kind of a slow drip protocol of how you would get anesthesia in an operating room.

So they took these general anesthesia procedures, applied it to DMT to maintain a DMT experience for that long, and then 5-MeO-DMT through a vape during that experience as well. And I don’t know how it’s going to be, but I’m going to be doing that soon, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, you know, we just talked about MK Ultra. I mean, do you, do you have any fear of any thoughts, anything being injected into your mind, your consciousness when doing an intravenous type experience?

CHASE HUGHES: You mean from someone speaking in the room or anybody. I know. I know these people.

SHAWN RYAN: You do?

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. Okay, we’ve got, we’re getting to know each other right now. And yeah, that would be horrifying because if you’re doing DMT, you really got to trust the other person in the room with you, that they know what they’re doing.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah, that’s why I’m asking.

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Because I’ve had the same opportunity offered and I just, I was like, I just, I don’t, can’t do it. I don’t.

CHASE HUGHES: There’s no trust that anxiety. There’s an anxiety spike when you first ingest DMT. However you do it, there’s kind of an anxiety spike because you have to like pop out of your body and you have to kind of surrender your life a little bit. It’s like dying to the chemical.

SHAWN RYAN: Regular DMT is a death experience as well. Yes. I did not realize that.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s not like death. I mean, it’s like something’s taking, like you’re living inside of an animal and you get to crawl out of it. It’s kind of how it feels to me.

But some people, like, if you’re really, really wrapped in ego and like you have a lot of fear of doing that stuff, then there’ll be an anxiety spike. Which is why a lot of people will microdose MDMA right before DMT experience to help with that ego and opening your heart a little bit to what’s going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. I didn’t know that either.

CHASE HUGHES: It’s a beautiful thing to mix, especially in a micro form. So you’re not like rolling on MDMA. It’s micro.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha, gotcha.

The DMT Experience

CHASE HUGHES: But that experience when you’re on NN DMT is kind of like a really, really low frequency vibration. And the way that I could describe it is if you had low frequency sound that is shaped in scales, like fish scales, sound that looks and feels like fish scales just kind of like enveloping your body until the point that you’re exiting.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting, interesting.

CHASE HUGHES: It is amazing. And Danny, the guy who did the laser experiment, he took me through DMT. My first experience, we did breath work for 15 minutes or so. You held the molecule over your heart for 5, 10, 15 minutes with gratitude and just saying thank you, thank you, thank you over and over again.

And then going into the experience, I started freaking out. See, both of us were kind of military rigid and don’t want to give up control really. And I kind of fought it a little bit. And this face pops out of the wall like nine feet tall in a loving way. Because you can see some crazy stuff on DMT, but it’s very understanding and loving and pretty cool.

That’s telling me to relax. And as she’s saying that, Danny says you need to listen to her. Wow. And because he had taken one hit of the DMT as well as I was going in.

And dude, it just makes you ask more questions about reality, like where is it that we go? And I’ve worked with a lot of scientists, a lot of people, we’re doing a lot of consciousness research right now. We have a non-profit called Field Consciousness Laboratory.

And I’ve never met one person who thinks that what happens on DMT is a hallucination, not one, which is profound in itself. It’s just we don’t, I don’t think we can understand it yet.

Remote Viewing and Consciousness

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, on the topic of consciousness, I’m curious, what are your thoughts on remote viewing and ESP and all that kind of stuff?

CHASE HUGHES: With what we know now about consciousness and what they’re starting to prove with Rupert Sheldrake and those other guys, if consciousness is external to the body, your brain is kind of like a consciousness radio receiver that’s tuned to a frequency.

You ever heard of sudden savant syndrome? This happens when somebody gets in a car accident, bumps their head and suddenly they speak French and they’ve never learned French ever. This is well documented. Or somebody gets in a, bumps their head, falls off a bike and then they’re an expert genius at calculus or they can suddenly play the violin. It’s called sudden savant syndrome.

And so what? There is no possible scientific explanation for it. None whatsoever. So if our brains are little receivers of consciousness, maybe this, like a little bump on the head or a little head trauma somehow modifies that dial to where that person just shifted the frequency that they’re tuning into or something.

And if sudden savant syndrome can start to show us things like that and how people experience that. And you got this stuff out here called the telepathy tapes now where it’s showing us like we have no idea what’s going on, but maybe that’s what remote viewing is. It’s like that person just has a skill to be able to hit that tuner knob the right way, to be able to just tune into another piece of consciousness above a file on a desk in Moscow somewhere.

Language as a Parasite

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you know, it’s just talking about consciousness. So I wanted to bring it up, but you’d also, you were talking about, towards the beginning of the interview, I believe, you know, that words were talking about words, you know, and how they, you know, words can’t describe, you know, certain psychedelic experiences, other experiences.

And you know, the first guy that I, I guess actually the second guy that I interviewed about it was Joe McMoneagle. And he had talked about, I had asked him about, you know, where, how, why do you have this? Why doesn’t anybody else have this?

He says, I think we all have, you know, the capability to potentially do this, but it’s been lost through generations of technology. And actually, he’d brought up, the first thing that he brought up was language.

And he had mentioned, you know, at the beginning, we would travel in packs, and it was grunting and body language, facial expressions, things like that. Then we developed language, and it’s just a very, it’s a less efficient way of communicating. We think it’s more descriptive. Maybe it is.

But, you know, we had lost the ability to immediately communicate without words. And when you think about it, I mean, it’s…

CHASE HUGHES: Yeah. So that if you think of a parasite like an actual parasite, it needs a host to replicate. It invades the host without the host knowing, it uses the host to replicate itself, and it changes the host behavior so that it can replicate itself, and it modifies the host behavior. Overall, that’s language.

Language follows all the criteria of what really defines a parasite. So it’s interesting that there’s a theory out there of language becoming some kind of alien parasite, but it doesn’t have to be alien.

The grunt that you were talking about conveyed depth and meaning. The word is a description. The word points to something. The grunt conveyed something and passed on information and passed on feelings. And instead of grunt just meaning, I’m hungry, the grunt means, I’m hungry, I’ve had a bad day, and several other things. I’m tired. And it conveyed information without describing things.

So language was invented initially to just sell chickens and exchange them for rice and stuff like that. And they started this with cuneiform, where they would put little symbols on tiles. And even prostitutes had this little tile that would convey this. And it was like the first printed receipt were these little cuneiform tiles.

So language was designed for describing and conveying some kind of data, not for really giving deep meaning about a lot of stuff. And that’s why it’s so challenging to really do that with language.

Simulacra and Simulation

So this French philosopher, his name is Jean Baudrillard, he wrote a book called “Simulacra and Simulation,” where he’s saying, for the rest of humanity’s history, we will live in a world with more and more information and less and less meaning because everything is pointing to something.

So, like, the Instagram is pointing to something. It’s a simulation of something. Disney World is the ultimate simulation of something that’s pointing to another simulation that has no origin. It goes pretty deep.

But a lot of what we do in our lives is a simulation of something. We look at Walmart, it’s a simulation of a market with like wooden baskets around there. They’re simulating an environment that might be familiar to our ancestors. So a lot of our lives are representations of things instead of the thing itself.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

CHASE HUGHES: We get obsessed with it.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Well, Chase, fascinating discussion. Man, I am really happy we connected.

CHASE HUGHES: Me too, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

CHASE HUGHES: Thanks for having me on.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Cheers.

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