Speaker
Chase Hughes
22 bits across the podcasts they've appeared on
Brainwashing follows four steps: Focus, Emotion, Agitation, Repetition — the same cycle social media feeds exploit on users daily.
Before social media, social mistakes risked judgment from only 30–40 people; now they can be judged by 5–10 million, exponentially raising the stakes of social performance.
The Milgram experiment showed ordinary people would shock strangers to what they believed was death at a 70% rate in about 47 minutes, purely through engineered context.
A president who speaks at a lower grade level is approximately 35% more likely to win a debate, because simpler language makes leaders more followable.
Average human blink rate in conversation is about 15 per minute; under stress it can spike to 85–90 without the person noticing, making it one of the most reliable behavioral stress indicators.
When deeply focused — such as watching a compelling movie — blink rate can drop to as low as 2 per minute, showing focus and relaxation are entirely different states.
Concealing shame or maintaining a false persona in social situations is more mentally taxing than doing calculus, according to Chase Hughes.
People who are socially or economically destabilized and distrustful of their neighbors are ten times more susceptible to manipulation and prepackaged narratives.
Getting someone in a state of social or political conflict reduces their ability to think critically by 50%, as shown in multiple studies.
Chase Hughes served 20 years in the US military, completing multiple deployments including a particularly rough one after which he underwent trauma release exercises.
A 10-year-old Japanese boy recently proved that a butterfly retains its ancestors' memories and those memories survive full caterpillar metamorphosis — the complete liquefaction of the organism.
