Chase Hughes — A behavior and influence expert, certified hypnotist, and 20-year military veteran who trained government and intelligence personnel. Author of the Behavior Ops Manual and a self-described leading authority on mind-control techniques.
The gist
Chase Hughes opens by describing how methylene blue stopped the seizures from his temporal lobe epilepsy, then unpacks his life's work: how authority plus novelty can manipulate the mammalian brain. He explains cult recruitment, the Milgrim and Asch conformity experiments, MK Ultra, and the Sirhan Sirhan and Manson cases, arguing Manchurian-candidate-style programming is real and easier than people think. He and Joe explore how hypnosis applies to elite fighters (Roy Jones Jr., Mike Tyson) and even stand-up comedy. The back half turns to psychological operations, with Joe and Chase dissecting COVID-era messaging, the demonization of the unvaccinated, and Joe's own experience as the target of a 'scop.' Throughout, Chase warns that human brains have no firewall against modern persuasion technology.
Big reveals
- Chase says his whole family takes methylene blue and he had to install black toilets because it dyes urine blue.
- Chase reveals Roy Jones Jr. hired him to give a fighter a split-personality 'alter ego' for a Vegas fight, scaring the fighter's own wife.
- Chase claims he could train anyone in covert hypnosis and how to create amnesia in three days.
- Chase admits he had seizures the day before the show after forgetting his methylene blue for three days, and feared seizing on the podcast.
- Chase says when his daughter was born he didn't recognize his own pregnant wife and took selfies pretending to know her.
- Chase says he'd 'bet his career' that COVID messaging was deliberately engineered following textbook psyop protocol.
- Joe recounts being turned green by CNN and becoming the subject of a psychological operation himself.
- The 'Torches of Freedom' campaign that got women to smoke was engineered by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew.
Things worth remembering
- Methylene blue is an MAOI and acts as an electron donor to mitochondria, and was first synthesized as a fabric dye in 1890.
- In the Asch line experiment, nearly 100% of subjects gave an obviously wrong answer just to match the group.
- In Milgram's shock experiment, psychologists predicted ~0.4% would go all the way; 67% actually did.
- Hans Scharff, history's most famous interrogator and a former Nazi, hand-made the mosaic at Disneyland's entrance.
- Chase says highly suggestible people are typically happier and 'live in front of their eyes' more.
- Mike Tyson's trainer Cus D'Amato was also a hypnotist who began hypnotizing Tyson at age 13.
- Tyson was 190 pounds at age 13 and was put in smokers against 16-year-olds.
- Chase claims methylene blue is studied for Parkinson's, ALS, myasthenia gravis, and epileptic disorders.
- Edward Bernays, the 'father of propaganda,' is the reason bacon became part of the American breakfast.
- In 1972 someone could be talked into murder in 45 minutes; Chase warns modern algorithms make this far more potent.