Modern Wisdom
Psyop Expert: Secret Techniques For Psychological Power - Chase Hughes - #1103
28 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Who are you? How do you describe what you do for work? 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, you know, I teach everything from brainwashing to interrogation. Apply it 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've 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?
Do you think we're living in the most psychologically manipulated era in human history? Yes, absolutely. 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.
Is that because of it being facilitated through technology or is that because of a requirement for control? What's the motivation for that? I think the... 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, that'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, you know, really kind of kicking me out of a social group. And now with social media, you've got to worry about 5 or 10 million. So the consequences of doing something wrong are unbelievably exponentially increased, which has made us a whole different society, which we could get into.
And this is the origin of this pandemic of loneliness that we're in right now, where everybody will agree that we're in pandemic levels of loneliness and nobody, you don't hear anyone saying, I'm lonely. Which is a deeper root of this exact problem. What's happening then? You ever seen a French philosopher, this guy named Sartre? I've read a little bit of his stuff, but just single quotes.
He had this play. It was called Sartre's Hell, where three people are locked in a room, basically like this.
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Chapter 2: Do we live in the most psychologically manipulated era in history?
And it's a play. But the room's not totally locked. Every couple hours, the door opens and you can leave if you want to. But nobody leaves. And they're all desperate to be seen a certain way by someone else. This one guy, he, I'm paraphrasing, but he wants to be seen as a good person. So he asked this woman in there, please tell me I'm a good person, please.
And she says, yeah, you're a good person, but he knows she doesn't mean it. So he stays. The door opens, nobody leaves, and they stay because they're waiting for this confirmation from other people who they are. And 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.
And 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 today
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.
Like we're more connected than ever and more performative than ever at the same time. So we can't really connect. And our brains are wired for 120, 130 person tribe. And we start getting over that and we have massive issues. It's interesting that a lot of the time the person has been subsumed by the persona, the role that people are playing. Yeah. But the persona is incapable of receiving love.
It can only receive praise at best. And it feels like a pat on the back. It's the same as people don't love Chris Hemsworth. They love Thor. They don't love Russell Crowe, they love Gladiator. So how can you be surprised if you don't genuinely existentially feel the connection with your pursuits and your successes and the people around you?
You know that they're just applauding the role that you play as opposed to seeing who you are truly. Yeah. Have you seen the movie Pig with Nicolas Cage? No. You got to watch it. Even if you watch this one scene, it's like five minutes long. Nicolas Cage plays this guy who's just kind of had enough and he stopped performing forever. Like he doesn't care.
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Chapter 3: How does social media influence our behavior?
And it follows the thing of getting your focus, showing you an authority figure, telling you something threatening, making you fearful of judgment of a tribe, and then making you emotional, and then bringing you back up and then back down in that cycle. So it's focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. You'll see it in your feed, guaranteed. And you don't even need to scroll for like five minutes.
You'll see it right away. And then it'll be like one little thing to kind of bring you up like – One of those videos where the people are like, oh, we just found this baby deer on our porch one day and we decided to bottle feed him and raise him. And then, you know, it's like a fast cut to where like he's a giant deer, like sleeping in the kid's bed or something.
And he's like a family member now. It's like a heartwarming video that feels, and I love watching those. But it feels great. And then bam, they pull you back down again into the cycle. But what you'll notice after you see that fear video at the end of the focus authority tribe and emotion, right at the end of that, they're either going to A, bring you up or B, show you an ad.
I've never heard anybody talk about this before, but you can absolutely see it. And I'm not immune. I've bought stupid shit on Instagram like anybody else. Knowing about this stuff doesn't get you vaccinated against manipulation. I bought the dumbest shit in the world on Instagram. It just means I'm a well-informed victim of this stuff. But that's the core of brainwashing is focus, emotion.
That's that fractionation part of up and down. Then agitation. So this is doing something to where the mammalian brain recognizes this is a different environment than I was expecting. Not a thing that's happening. So now the landscape is changing. The oil prices are going up. This big thing is happening. There's a shortage of some critical resource. And then repetition.
So if it's in a detainee environment, the massive focus is them being woken up in the middle of the night over and over by strobe lights and loud sounds, cold water, that kind of stuff. Then the emotion, the entire time you're sitting there in your prison cell or whatever, I've got every photo your family's ever posted on the internet playing on a slideshow using a projector on the wall.
So focus, emotion, then agitation. Something is extremely disrupting to your ability to predict the future. That's agitation. And then repetition. The cycle begins again. And you can kind of do whatever you want. That process creates a blank slate in people. And that's like the baseline formula of how brainwashing works. And that is exactly what social media is using. Yes.
But I think a lot of people think, oh, there's some dark conference table, dudes smoking cigars. Like, how can we really mess these people up? I don't think it's that at all. I think it's just an algorithm that's rewarding what's creating the most revenue.
So showing you an ad for shoes is way easier after you watch the little baby deer video or after I make you think that the water supply is being destabilized. So I think it's just... I think there's many other things where there's people involved in manipulating the public. I don't think that social media is doing that on purpose, that one piece of it.
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Chapter 4: What are the signs of insecurity in body language?
And just as an example, just of how powerful conditions and context are. I think it was in the 1940s. This like stage hypnotist guy is doing like a comedy club thing. You know, we're like, oh, the guy next to you farted and it smells really bad. You're on a roller coaster now. And like all of this stuff. There's like 10 or 15 people up on stage.
And then a part of the show is, all right, all of you are cops. You got called to a party. Everybody in the audience is a party right now. And the more the audience laughs, the more you're going to get upset. So they get up and they're not allowed to leave the stage. So they're all kind of yelling, pretending like these kids are like a house party or something.
Then he's like, oh, one of them's got a gun. He's going to take you down. And one of these guys on the stage is an off-duty police officer carrying a weapon, starts firing into the crowd, a real gun. And I think one person was in, I don't know if he died, but Shot a real gun into a crowd. The cop was a good person, well-meaning, just wanted to go out with his wife, you know, for an evening.
But context can dictate your behavior no matter what. Like we're going to probably both you and I, not together, but we will get naked by the end of the day, both of us.
We're going to get into a shower. The day is young.
The day is young. We're going to get into a shower, get into a bath, whatever. But we're not like, as we're standing in front of the shower, we're not like, oh, I don't know if I should. We just get naked, right? So context tells us what's allowed, right? So if I can modify context, I can get you to do anything. All I have to do is it's a PCP formula.
I change your perception about the situation that's going on. Then I say, yeah, since you're viewing this differently, it's actually this situation where people are trying to do X. Or I reframe this as someone is a complete threat. But I've changed your perception of what's possible to do. Then the context is some person is a threat. And now I say the word mortal. They're a mortal threat.
So I've changed the category. And if I shift category and context, that changes what you think you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. Does that make sense? So if I'm in a perfect world, the only question, if you're really good at this stuff, like a lot of these systems are, what is the context where the behavior I want you to do is automatic? What is the context?
So if I can make you believe that you're in a shooting range and you're actually standing in a bar, your behavior is going to be very different. So what you're really seeing over time is a drift of perception and then context. So with this PCP, perception, context, and permission.
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Chapter 5: What common stress behaviors can we observe in people?
Some are idiosyncratic, there's a baseline, and then there's deviations from the baseline. But presumably there are also some relatively common patterns that happen across everybody, regardless of whether they're a finger tapper or a foot tapper or an egg scratcher. Yeah. So the most common thing that you want to look for is what stress does. We have a little cortisol that comes up.
But if it's real stress, the person's also going to have a little dump of epinephrine, which is adrenaline. And when the body says, whoa, you know, there's a little too much adrenaline here. I need to burn some of this shit off. It's going to move like you'll see their foot. You'll see their body move because their foot's tapping a lot.
Chapter 6: How do body movements relate to emotional states?
Or you'll see... Like some part of their body, they'll think, oh yeah, I was just tapping my foot because it's convenient. What their body is doing is burning off excess adrenaline because of the stress. So right when you see like someone start burning off stress, the stress started like 10, 15 seconds before that. That's interesting. This thing has occurred. Epinephrine's increased.
I need to burn this off. Movement. Yeah.
Chapter 7: What are the signs of insecurity in body language?
Frequent, quick moving movement. Yeah. And a lot of people do it through stiffness too. So you'll see someone go from rigid and I can burn it off like this. Like I'm going to, my body gets more rigid, my posture and everything, the stress. Actually actively tensing as opposed to just being still. Yeah. Right. From stillness to stiffness maybe. That's interesting.
Chapter 8: How can we effectively process our emotions?
Just go back to, can you recap the... that display insecurity again? Yeah, so protecting arteries is number one. And this is brachial, carotid, femoral. And this arm wrap that you'll see more likely in women of wrapping like a single arm like this. protecting the uterus, and incomplete gestures. So someone makes a gesture, they don't complete it, and then they kind of stop, or it's interrupted.
Interrupted gestures. What's going on there? It's self-doubt. Like, am I allowed to do this? Do I have permission to do this? Is this going to make me look weird? How am I being perceived? So it's a lot of people that are insecure. It's experiencing insecurity. It's about self-perception. Like how is Chris perceiving me? Does he like me? Is there something going on? Am I being judged right now?
And move in a hesitant manner. Maybe this was too fast. Maybe I did this thing weirdly. Maybe I need to slow down. Can I grab this thing right now? It's not open. Can I open it on a podcast? It's got a loud ass thing next to a microphone. Answers yes. Answers always yes. I've been wondering this whole time. Good, good, good.
And that is the same presumably as the micro pauses when it comes to words, communication. Am I okay to say this thing? I'm unsure. I've got more processing power. I guess there's more going on than just that.
uncertainty about what I'm saying, how I'm going to say it, where am I going next, what did I just say, how is this couched in the broader context of what I've been saying throughout this entire conversation. Yeah, it's a lot more self-management. And if you're wanting to spot insecurity changes, watch for someone in a conversation that their lips have been parted the whole time.
And all of a sudden they're like, oh yeah. And they close their lips and they stay closed a little bit. So that's another one. So if you're seeing a little bit, a tiny bit of stress behavior, and then their lips close when they're normally just, if we're really interested in something, our lips part just a little bit.
And then when we experienced a little bit of stress, we'll have lip closure again. I remember seeing a image of someone doing the holding gesture, that thing. And it was described, it's a very British thing to do. I don't know whether you're aware of this. So there's something in the UK called chavs. Chavs are a little bit like hicks or rednecks, sort of antisocial behavior.
That's not to dismiss hicks and rednecks, many of them, but there's some of them in this room. But, uh, yeah, I've been to Stoke-on-Trent. Okay. That city, that city, if that city was a person, that person would be a chow. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that, uh, antisocial behavior thing is, was, was a meme in the UK probably until the early 2010s.
And then it kind of stopped and it doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah. And it was a meme of someone saying, the face that I make when I walk past a grandmother walking her small dog in the street to show her that I'm not a chav or a threat. And I've noticed... I bet there's a German word to describe exactly that entire phrase. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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