Psyop Expert: “Brainwashing Is Real And It’s Happening Now” - Chase Hughes - #1103

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Who are you? How do you describe what you do for a look?

**Chase Hughes** (0:02)
It's so hard. But if I'm talking to somebody that's boring, I'll just tell them I teach psychology stuff. But if I want to get into it, I'll say, I teach everything from brainwashing to interrogation, applied on yourself and other people. And most of what I do is train sales teams nowadays. So sales has gotten really addicted to this stuff.
But I've studied neuroscience for a long time, and I spent my life trying to figure out how the brain works, and how to shift human behavior, not just like to get someone to confess to something in an interrogation, but how do we modify our own behavior, and what are the mechanics that make that possible?

**Chris Williamson** (0:41)
Do you think we're living in the most psychologically manipulated era in human history?

**Chase Hughes** (0:45)
Yes.
Hands down. But I mean, you go to ancient Rome, some shit would happen and they would say, hey, do the lion fighting thing with the guy. Let's distract everybody. So I don't think it's new. I think it's a lot more pervasive, though.

**Chris Williamson** (1:00)
Is that because of it being facilitated through technology or is that because of a requirement for control? What's the motivation for that?

**Chase Hughes** (1:08)
I think just the digital media. If you think about what is the number one fear of human beings, like every psychology class talks about it, it's the public speaking. But it's never public speaking. I don't want to be judged. I don't want to be ostracized because in our brain, it's 200,000 years old.
Getting kicked out of a tribe means I'm dead. I'm not going to have sex, I won't have babies, and I'm going to die. It's a mortal fear of dying. But if you go back to the 1980s, if I did something stupid in high school or even as an adult, I have to worry about 30 or 40 people judging me and maybe really kicking me out of a social group. Now, with social media, you've got to worry about five or 10 million.
The consequences of doing something wrong are unbelievably exponentially increased, which has made us a whole different society, which we can get into. This is the origin of this pandemic of loneliness that we're in right now, where everybody will agree that we're in a pandemic levels of loneliness and nobody, you don't hear anyone saying, I'm lonely, which is a deeper root of this exact problem.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
What's happening then?

**Chase Hughes** (2:30)
You ever study French philosopher, this guy named Sartre?

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
I've read a little bit of his stuff, but just single quotes.

**Chase Hughes** (2:38)
He had this play, it was called Sartre's Hell, where three people are locked in a room, basically like this, and it's a play. But the room's not totally locked. Every couple of hours, the door opens, and you can leave if you want to, but nobody leaves. They're all desperate to be seen a certain way by someone else. This one guy, I'm paraphrasing, but he wants to be seen as a good person. So he asks this woman, and they're, please tell me I'm a good person, please. She says, yeah, you're a good person, but he knows she doesn't mean it. So he stays. The door opens, nobody leaves, and they stay because they're waiting for confirmation from other people of who they are.
In this world today, with how performative and artificial everybody has become, I've got to show my best self, I've got to hide shame, I've got to conceal all this guilt and stuff that people carry around.
The reason that somebody can feel lonely in a room full of people, and I'm not just talking about on Facebook, I'm saying like in a real room full of people, is because no matter how many times your friends come over and pat you on the back and say, Oh, Chris, you did a great job. We love you. You're a great guy. Your spouse might say, Oh, we love you and you're a great person. In the back of your mind, you know you're faking it, and you know that none of them really like the real you.
You get at the end of the day, and I'm not saying this is you, but at the end of the day, you're lonely in a room of 150, 200 people, because you know that none of them know you, and you haven't ever really been seen by anybody. So increased fear of judgment because of social media equals increased performance equals I'm wearing a costume almost all the time, and nobody has ever seen me, nobody really knows me. So even if they claim to like me, in the back of my brain, there's this little reminder mechanism that says, they don't like the real me, and nobody ever has, nobody's ever seen me. So this is my opinion, but I think that's the root of the pandemic that we're in right now of loneliness. We're more connected than ever and more performative than ever at the same time. So we can't really connect. Our brains are wired for 120, 130 person tribe, and we start getting over that and we have massive issues.