Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3: My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1: They called me Ben. We're joined with our guest super
Speaker 1: producer Max Max, the mesmerist Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 1: You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
Speaker 1: don't want you to know, Fellow conspiracy realists. Is a
Speaker 1: bit of a trick question. Have you ever hypnotized someone?
Speaker 1: Or have you yourself been hypnotized? What do you think
Speaker 1: about the idea of hypnosis in general? We didn't really
Speaker 1: talk about this one too much before we went on
Speaker 1: air with it, so I had to ask, guys, I
Speaker 1: feel like I see it in film and fiction all
Speaker 1: the time, but I I've never actually seen the kitchy
Speaker 1: trope of a stage hypnotist for entertainment. Have you, guys
Speaker 1: ever seen that?
Speaker 2: Yes, College did some college touring back in the day,
Speaker 2: and one of the one of the big acts that
Speaker 2: gets on college tours along with comedians musicians, is a
Speaker 2: hypnotist who will do a stage show. It's like an
Speaker 2: icebreaker basically for like orientation kind of stuff or early
Speaker 2: get togethers with like a new class coming in.
Speaker 1: Right right on. What was the experience like, as you can.
Speaker 2: Remember, people raise their hands, people go on stage, a
Speaker 2: hypnotist tells everybody what to do basically, and everybody for
Speaker 2: the most part kind of does it and plays along.
Speaker 2: And you know, we're going to get into a lot
Speaker 2: of the details here. From my perspective, it was people
Speaker 2: having an excuse to be a little more open and
Speaker 2: do things that they'd be nervous and anxious about doing
Speaker 2: if they didn't have a reason to do it.
Speaker 1: I see, because then there's a bit of a gosh,
Speaker 1: a bit of a scrimmage line between one's own agency.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, I wouldn't cluck like a chicken, for example.
Speaker 2: Well, even just like to be in a public place
Speaker 2: in front of a bunch of other people, that makes
Speaker 2: some people nervous to one level. Right now, imagine like
Speaker 2: dancing and putting yourself out there on that stage. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like showing yourself off a little bit. There's
Speaker 2: another level of anxiety associated with that stuff. So I
Speaker 2: think this just strips that away at least to some extent.
Speaker 3: But you have to imagine that no one with a
Speaker 3: crippling anxiety for being up on stage or being called
Speaker 3: out in public would ever raise their hand in a
Speaker 3: million years.
Speaker 2: Good point.
Speaker 1: So selection it's a big thing that our pal mentalist
Speaker 1: Darren Brown talks about at length when when you hear
Speaker 1: him speak about parts of his method. And it's weird
Speaker 1: because we're also going to find out why hypnosis has
Speaker 1: such a bad reputation. There two or three really big reasons,
Speaker 1: and as a result, even now in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: the public often derides this as pseudoscience or quirky quackery,
Speaker 1: but it turns out there's still Weirdly enough, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of science supporting this bizarre phenomenon and people still
Speaker 1: don't fully understand it. Hypnosis, you could say, is itself
Speaker 1: a bit of a conspiracy with a lot of fact
Speaker 1: and a lot of fiction around the whole concept. And disclaimer, folks,
Speaker 1: we might play around with examples of hypnotism or trance
Speaker 1: states in tonight's episode, so seriously, if you are vulnerable
Speaker 1: to experiencing trance states, please please make sure you're in
Speaker 1: a safe environment, not driving operating heavy machinery, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Here are the facts. Way to prime the pump.
Speaker 2: There, Man, You're not going to hypnotize you. You cannot
Speaker 2: get hypnotized.
Speaker 1: You are so unsuggestible right now, bro Us.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna look, we'll get there. But I am coming
Speaker 2: into this episode fully feeling like hypnosis is complete bs.
Speaker 2: And it's only because I watched that Penn and Teller
Speaker 2: BS episode from season two, like right before we're recording,
Speaker 2: and so I feel like this whole thing is kakamamine
Speaker 2: bum bumps.
Speaker 3: And yet it is used in some forms of therapy. Still,
Speaker 3: I know this day and sort of there's some stock
Speaker 3: put into it. Sorry, let's get those facts out, guys.
Speaker 1: Yes, here are the facts. Let's start with a brief
Speaker 1: history of hypnosis without making anyone sleepy. The term itself
Speaker 1: is pretty recent. It was coined back in the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and popularized by a guy named James Braid that
Speaker 1: you'll never hear about again in the rest of this episode.
Speaker 1: The actual thing, the experience of this state, it dates
Speaker 1: back into antiquity. Some experts who we'll get to later
Speaker 1: this evening have referred to it as the oldest Western
Speaker 1: form of psychotherapy. Trances, as we've discussed in the past,
Speaker 1: have been considered part of magic religion, soothsaying. I mean,
Speaker 1: if we look at the scientific history of hypnosis, we
Speaker 1: also see why those scientific origins caused it so much
Speaker 1: trouble down the road, we got to talk about our
Speaker 1: main man friends, friends, not Ferdinand Sadly Mesmer.
Speaker 3: This is cool to me. I mentioned this maybe recently
Speaker 3: when we were sort of hinting that this episode was coming.
Speaker 3: I recently watched a Japanese film from the nineties called
Speaker 3: Cure by Cursawa, but not that Curasawa and hypnosis and
Speaker 3: hypnotism is a huge plot point, and I'm not gonna
Speaker 3: give anything away, but Franz Mesmer ends up being this
Speaker 3: sort of specter hovering over the whole movie and the
Speaker 3: study of his work, and was he onto something? One
Speaker 3: of those kind of deals, right, Was he totally full
Speaker 3: of it? Was he an absolute quack? Or did he
Speaker 3: really have the truth? It was one of those types
Speaker 3: of movies, and I think everyone would really dig It's
Speaker 3: a little slow, a little odd, but very cool, very
Speaker 3: cool movie.
Speaker 1: I like that we're like Curasawa, but not that when
Speaker 1: the same way we had to say friends, but not Franz.
Speaker 3: That's true, that's true. Well, yeah, so I didn't know
Speaker 3: much about Mesmer before I saw this film, and some
Speaker 3: of this stuff is new to me as well. Well.
Speaker 2: I wanted to ask just quickly before we get into this,
Speaker 2: did you guys find in your research that a lot
Speaker 2: of the early hypnosis stuff went back to and refers
Speaker 2: to patients as we're talking about here with Mesmer, that
Speaker 2: were experiencing things that were quote hysteria or you know,
Speaker 2: someone who was maybe going through some kind of mental
Speaker 2: state that was not understood at all, but there were
Speaker 2: like attempts to make almost make contact with someone who
Speaker 2: was operating on a different level.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm glad you pointed that out, because
Speaker 1: I would say a big differentiation between hypnosis and its
Speaker 1: precursors versus something like faith healing is that faith healing
Speaker 1: would purport often to leave a physical condition, whereas a
Speaker 1: lot of Mesmerism and things that were hypnosis by other names,
Speaker 1: they sought to elite alleviate what they would call maybe
Speaker 1: demons of the mind or some sort of spiritual cognitive blockage.
Speaker 1: And you know, as we always have to say when
Speaker 1: we point out hysteria in general. Maybe the problem was
Speaker 1: that women lived in a really crappy society toward women,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, that's oh god, the etymology
Speaker 1: of hysteria and hysterics alone is pretty problematic.
Speaker 3: The wandering womb. Well, but they don't even get me started.
Speaker 2: No really, but there were even people who were like
Speaker 2: having some form of seizures, right that had It didn't
Speaker 2: have anything to do with that stuff necessarily, right, It
Speaker 2: has more to do with just again a malady that
Speaker 2: isn't misunderstood or not understood at all, but then attempting
Speaker 2: to use things like tuning forks and like all of
Speaker 2: these just so many different interesting ways to try and
Speaker 2: get someone in this trans It's like state.
Speaker 3: Yep, could be visual, could be auditory, could be pulses
Speaker 3: or like vibrations, like anything that's sort of a repetitive
Speaker 3: pattern that the mind can lock into and get sort
Speaker 3: of tricked into a fugue state kind of right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's apt. I mean you can even see
Speaker 1: it today on social media, the concept of a sound bath.
Speaker 1: That's that's so.
Speaker 3: Social media is hypnotism of it. Other find yeah, with
Speaker 3: the patterns like yeah, you look up and it's been
Speaker 3: three hours. You know, you know it's great.
Speaker 1: Truly, casinos are also built gender that hypnotic state, a
Speaker 1: flow state you could call it, which it is, but
Speaker 1: it's also a flow state. That's the flowing helping your
Speaker 1: bank account too.
Speaker 2: And well, I want to talk about it more later,
Speaker 2: but because I want to get through this stuff, because
Speaker 2: it's really important to set this up. But just pop
Speaker 2: music and in the vibrations that comes through your speakers,
Speaker 2: and then when you combine it with the words, it
Speaker 2: gets into like we've talked about some of that in
Speaker 2: the past, but like.
Speaker 3: Oh Max Martin and the Swedish hit making machines, they're
Speaker 3: using a formula to keep you exactly as invested as
Speaker 3: they want you to be at the exact moment and
Speaker 3: then share you over and make that three minutes feel
Speaker 3: like it's an eternity in a good way.
Speaker 2: Sup. We're indie music, but you can again, you could
Speaker 2: be an indie musician and make that most him not stuff. Ever,
Speaker 2: it just maybe then becomes a crazy pop phenomenon like
Speaker 2: some of the artists we've seen over the past couple
Speaker 2: of years that start on a YouTube and then all
Speaker 2: of a sudden they're on the Grammys and you're like, whoa.
Speaker 1: What shout out ye but there yeah, And I love
Speaker 1: that you're saying that because it is technology and there
Speaker 1: is a democratization of it. You know, anyone can learn
Speaker 1: that math and you can apply that stuff. Mesmer Franz
Speaker 1: Mesmer is not worried about being a pop star, but
Speaker 1: he is worried about being a reality star, maybe more
Speaker 1: so than he's worried about being a physician. This guy
Speaker 1: was diplomatically put eccentric, and like a lot of other showmen,
Speaker 1: he stood on the shoulders of giants. He got a
Speaker 1: lot of his basic ideas from two people. One was
Speaker 1: a British physician named Richard Meade. And Richard's whole thing
Speaker 1: is that there are gravitational interactions of the planets. Then
Speaker 1: as now, people didn't fully understand gravity. And he said,
Speaker 1: the effect this kind of invisible substance or fluid. It's
Speaker 1: in all their bodies. Baby, you just got to feel
Speaker 1: the vibration and I can manipulate this according to the
Speaker 1: laws of what I call animal magnetism.
Speaker 3: Ooh yeah. Animal magnetism was the big thing, and care
Speaker 3: that's the most important central part of Mesmer's philosophy. You
Speaker 3: guys gotta watch Karen tell me what you think I'm fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, actually sure, but you get that that is another
Speaker 2: thing that has continued down the timeline into modern day. Right,
Speaker 2: It's just different terms, not the idea that there's some
Speaker 2: invisible fluid that's being affected by things. But if you
Speaker 2: think about how important astrology is to so many people,
Speaker 2: like in their personal lives right now, and how popular
Speaker 2: that is on social media, Like it's something within us
Speaker 2: that is affected by these heavenly other bodies, right.
Speaker 1: That reminds me. I think maybe we talked about this
Speaker 1: on air Fusebacker. Maybe was I had this mission a
Speaker 1: long time ago where I was like, maybe there is.
Speaker 1: Let me not be a jerk, let me not be dismissive.
Speaker 1: Let me see if in my own mind I can
Speaker 1: figure out some kind of theory for astronomy, right, so
Speaker 1: our astrology Excuse me how this would work? And the
Speaker 1: closest I got was a we don't really understand gravity
Speaker 1: as a civilization, right, as a scientific body of thought.
Speaker 1: Be we know that it affects things, and see, we
Speaker 1: don't know everything about the development of the human mind
Speaker 1: in gestation so, with those three things being true, could
Speaker 1: we argue that the passage of heavenly bodies in some
Speaker 1: infinitesimal way affects brain chemistry. And if so, does that
Speaker 1: mean that you know, a taurus is likely to taurus
Speaker 1: or in our case, Leo's are likely to roar. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I never got past that part.
Speaker 3: Well, I was also gonna add, you know, to me,
Speaker 3: the concept of animal magnetism is like what a cult
Speaker 3: leader has, like it describes a quality in somebody, like
Speaker 3: you got that raw animal magnetism. That means that you
Speaker 3: can like influence people, you can hold sway over people
Speaker 3: with your just sex, panther energy.
Speaker 1: I got that dog in me join my cult.
Speaker 2: Well, but it's not just it's it is influence and
Speaker 2: that's a major part of it.
Speaker 3: Right, I'm saying that's what I associated with. This is
Speaker 3: all other nuances, and I think it's maybe been co
Speaker 3: opted a little bit, but like this is fabulous.
Speaker 2: Please, But this thing of animal magnetism, for me, one
Speaker 2: of the most important parts is that the belief was
Speaker 2: this stuff this chi, right, you can think about it
Speaker 2: like chi, this energy, this whatever this for is that's
Speaker 2: inside you can be manipulated by your mind, and basically
Speaker 2: someone else can take your mind to a place where
Speaker 2: your body can do things like heal itself, right like Wolverine. Yes,
Speaker 2: in a potentially very dangerous manner. Right, the belief could
Speaker 2: be potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, because we enter into oh gosh, we're all
Speaker 1: excited to get to this. We enter into a world
Speaker 1: where the concept of truth experienced truth changes and it
Speaker 1: is a very real thing. And that's why we call
Speaker 1: it a conspiracy. At the top, I want to shout
Speaker 1: out the second guy who really informed a lot of
Speaker 1: Mesmer's work toward what he called in about of Humility Mesmerism.
Speaker 1: He had a teacher in Vienna, a Jesuit whose name
Speaker 1: was I kid you not father Hell, and father Maximilian
Speaker 1: Hell spelled the way it sounds. His whole deal was,
Speaker 1: I mean, on being a Jesuit to being a teacher.
Speaker 1: His third whole deal was this idea that he could
Speaker 1: heal patients of all sorts of stuff with the use
Speaker 1: of magnetized metal platest man magnets.
Speaker 3: Right, how unclear?
Speaker 2: How are these eighteen hundreds ideas just like popping back
Speaker 2: up like this is the big thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, asach what and this guy. Okay, so Mesmer has
Speaker 1: these two guys bumping around his head. They're huge influences
Speaker 1: on him. And so he takes it a little step
Speaker 1: further and he says, okay, animal magnetism, love it, magnets,
Speaker 1: I'm in invisible fluid chi if you will, you know
Speaker 1: it has to your point. Man, it has a thousand
Speaker 1: names throughout history. He says, Okay, a lot of diseases,
Speaker 1: a lot of infections of the mind are just all
Speaker 1: coming down to obstacles in the flow of this cosmic force.
Speaker 1: So all I have to do to fix it is
Speaker 1: induce what he called prices, trance states that culminate in
Speaker 1: an explosion of delirium or even physical convulsions revelatory moments.
Speaker 2: Which makes you think about the old hysteria treatments with
Speaker 2: with like hand created vibrating machines.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like that woman in the symphony that had a
Speaker 3: little too good at time.
Speaker 2: Well sure, but in this case, like the actual machinery
Speaker 2: that was developed by doctors who are like, I'm going
Speaker 2: to treat these patients.
Speaker 4: I would physically manipulate you into a sense of sedate
Speaker 4: well being and invulsions and it's all above board, your
Speaker 4: husband cannot be in the room.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't want to get on any kind of
Speaker 3: like feminist soap ex here, but it did occur to me.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is like stating the most obvious thing. I
Speaker 3: think women have been sort of subjugated over time because
Speaker 3: they are just the most powerful force that we know.
Speaker 3: They're the only ones that can actually create men, create
Speaker 3: more men who could potentially subjugate other men. Again, probably
Speaker 3: stating the obvious, but it's pretty wild when you think
Speaker 3: about to what degree that was realized and then just
Speaker 3: driven home by men.
Speaker 1: Oh one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: Well there's we're I don't know if we're going to
Speaker 2: get into it. But there was a whole hypnosis panic
Speaker 2: akin to the Satanic panic.
Speaker 3: Yes for a while, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Cool, Yeah, and that's the dangerous thing. Okay. So so
Speaker 1: Mesmer had a lot of ideas about how to get
Speaker 1: these crises going, and a lot of his ideas, now
Speaker 1: this is an unintentional pun, rubbed people the wrong way.
Speaker 1: There were numerous allegations that he had inappropriate relationships with
Speaker 1: female patients. That was kind of true. I find it
Speaker 1: also incredibly interesting that his big, his big fall from
Speaker 1: Grace comes about when King Louis the sixteenth hears about this,
Speaker 1: and you know, Louise is balling out at this point.
Speaker 1: So he convenes a panel of experts, just like people
Speaker 1: that he can reach who he thinks are smart, and
Speaker 1: he says, investigate this mesmer guy's claims. See if there's
Speaker 1: real science to what he's saying. One of those guys
Speaker 1: was the famous Libertine ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who also had
Speaker 1: some inappropriate relationships throughout his life. And they said, according
Speaker 1: to our report, and you can read this online, he said,
Speaker 1: mesmerism is utterly fallacious and without merit, a little bit hypocritical,
Speaker 1: ben But.
Speaker 2: And he added, don't check my house for body.
Speaker 1: It is to check my London basement. And they're like,
Speaker 1: why did you put that at the top of every pitch.
Speaker 1: Just don't do it, please, don't do it, so right now,
Speaker 1: So like that's that's the past. But because of the
Speaker 1: controversy surrounding this just this guy Mesmer, then it gave
Speaker 1: birth to a cavalcade of accusations against hypnotism. And similar
Speaker 1: to the way that the US government's war against hallucinogens
Speaker 1: stymied a lot of research into addiction and into you know,
Speaker 1: the power of the mind and body relationship. Mesmer's terrible reputation,
Speaker 1: I would argue, also hamstrung the efforts of scientists who
Speaker 1: had come later. For a long time, the controversy surrounding
Speaker 1: this guy transferred into a controversy around hypnosis in general,
Speaker 1: and that's why a lot of times now people think
Speaker 1: of it as like a novelty. Did you guys ever
Speaker 1: play that game? Light as a feather, stiff as a
Speaker 1: board is getting?
Speaker 3: I played it. I just remember it from the craft
Speaker 3: very vividly. But that's the one where you're supposed to
Speaker 3: be able to put your fingers underneath the edges of
Speaker 3: a person's body and levitate them, you know, with the
Speaker 3: combined power of your mind. Right, yes, sir, Yeah, I
Speaker 3: was too happy. I was too stiff.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Well this this is a that's a
Speaker 1: form of hypnosis too, because really hypnosis is a series
Speaker 1: of tactics that create another create a state and the feeling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like it's kind of like driving toward
Speaker 1: the center of your whatever country you're hearing this in.
Speaker 1: There are multiple roads that lead there, but your destination
Speaker 1: is the same.
Speaker 3: There was this group of kind of weirdo performance artists,
Speaker 3: sort of hippies in the late sixties called the Yippies.
Speaker 3: I believe Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and an artist, was
Speaker 3: a part of it. And they supposedly did light as
Speaker 3: a featherstiff as a board on the Pentagon and the
Speaker 3: White House, and they claim to have levitated it a
Speaker 3: centimeter or so into the air, which it was all
Speaker 3: kind of like for you know, lulls and kind of
Speaker 3: like satire. But that's the whole thing, is Hey, if
Speaker 3: it's a shared belief, if we all believe it happened
Speaker 3: and felt that it happened, then it happened.
Speaker 2: You know, except for all the places where it's connected
Speaker 2: to the load bearing you know, rods, they can't well, first.
Speaker 1: Off, we need to look at buildings that are situated
Speaker 1: on lay lines. Right shout out to that episode. So
Speaker 1: all right, right now, skeptics and scientists don't buy a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff about hypnosis. They're not saying it's both.
Speaker 1: What they're saying is they don't buy a lot of
Speaker 1: the more extravagant claims about the effects or potential of
Speaker 1: these processes. And then law enforcement has their own special
Speaker 1: traumatic story, a story about trauma. In fact, they are
Speaker 1: pretty gun shy about types of hypnosis, such as memory
Speaker 1: recovery or memory regression therapy. And there's a good reason
Speaker 1: for that. We don't understand hypnosis fully. Humans don't and
Speaker 1: probably never will because it's a smaller question about a
Speaker 1: bigger problem, which is that humans still do not understand
Speaker 1: the human mind and may not for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: But despite all the controversy, there is one thing for certain.
Speaker 1: You can bet your bottom dollar on it. Hypnosis is real.
Speaker 1: Sorry to the guy reached out on Twitter, hypnosis is
Speaker 1: real asterisk depending on how you define it.
Speaker 2: See's speaking of mess Somebody just went through time and said,
Speaker 2: bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, and it just happened
Speaker 2: as soon as you said it, and complained in my mind,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm in a weird state, guys.
Speaker 1: Let's get in a state of sponsored add Hey, how
Speaker 1: about that. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, Real hypnosis
Speaker 1: triggers anchors, post hypnotic suggestions, Manchurian candidates. We'll get to
Speaker 1: all of that first. I think we got a bust
Speaker 1: some myths. Did you guys ever see that film The
Speaker 1: Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
Speaker 3: In film school but a minute because of all the
Speaker 3: canton angles and the crazy like it evokes a sense
Speaker 3: and this is a technique that's been used in film.
Speaker 3: Fincher uses it a lot where at the angle of
Speaker 3: the camera sort of tilted, it puts you in a
Speaker 3: different mindset, a mindset of maybe insanity or approaching madness,
Speaker 3: things like that. And that's the movie that really kind
Speaker 3: of created that language, which is really really cool and
Speaker 3: it's it looks very modern. Actually, it's a real cool movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we're gonna spoil it, so this is your
Speaker 1: spoiler warning three to one spoilers. The ostensible bad guy
Speaker 1: for a lot of the film most of the film
Speaker 1: is a dude named Caesar and it's spelled ceesa r.
Speaker 1: He is a hulking murderer. He's an evil somnambulist, a sleepwalker,
Speaker 1: and he's compelled to commit these homicides left and right.
Speaker 1: He's a real nasty customer. This depiction of hypnosis is
Speaker 1: not true it later it turns out in the film
Speaker 1: that the real bad guy is doctor Caligari, or is it.
Speaker 1: Because there's a twist at the end. But the reason
Speaker 1: this doesn't work, the reason it's what Joe Biden would
Speaker 1: call malarkey, is that real hypnosis does not remove free will.
Speaker 1: To your earlier example, Matt, about the icebreakers at a
Speaker 1: college or at college tours, that stage hypnotist cannot compel
Speaker 1: someone to murder someone or to act against their own
Speaker 1: kind of like moral compass, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: There's a great example of that exact thing been in
Speaker 2: that Pentin Teller BS episode where the stage hypnotist says, oh, now,
Speaker 2: everybody look down at your shoes. Oh, it's the most
Speaker 2: adorable puppy dog you've ever seen in your life. And
Speaker 2: everybody picks up their shoes and they pretend that they've
Speaker 2: got their cute dogs, and he's asking questions about their
Speaker 2: individual dogs. And in the post interview for Penn Teller's
Speaker 2: BS with all of the people who got hypnotized, they
Speaker 2: were all reporting, well, no, it was just I mean,
Speaker 2: it was fun to pretend, and I felt like I could,
Speaker 2: and it was just it was, you know, basically, that's
Speaker 2: what they're reporting.
Speaker 3: To Ben's earlier part or maybe years as well, Matt
Speaker 3: about crossing over into this like you know place where
Speaker 3: you can be more permissive with yourself and perhaps have
Speaker 3: a good time and play a little bit and be
Speaker 3: part of the show. And again to the point where
Speaker 3: anyone that wasn't down with that would keep their hand
Speaker 3: perfect firmly planted under their behinds.
Speaker 1: Social pressure, peer pressure and social dynamics, they're a huge
Speaker 1: part of that when you're working with groups as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, if you put someone into trance, what
Speaker 1: we're saying is they don't all of a sudden become
Speaker 1: an autumaton of some sort, even if they're very, very suggestible.
Speaker 1: Instead instead of dozing, really they're hyper attentive. They're just
Speaker 1: hyper attentive on different things than they would ordinarily be
Speaker 1: attending to. And there are different kinds of hypnosis. The
Speaker 1: two biggest self hypnosis and hypnosis brought on by an
Speaker 1: external source. In the modern day, that's a psychiatrist. In
Speaker 1: the past, it might have been a magician, the local
Speaker 1: holy figure, you name it. The weird thing is, and
Speaker 1: we'll see how this is true. But the weird thing is, folks,
Speaker 1: you likely hypnotize yourself. You are your number one hypnotist.
Speaker 1: We talked about that a little bit with our pal
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick about the kind of flow, absent minded state
Speaker 1: you might get in when you're taking the same route
Speaker 1: to or from work every day. You might hypnotize yourself
Speaker 1: during repetitive task and who doesn't have a moment of
Speaker 1: reverie when you're falling asleep or when you're kind of
Speaker 1: waking up and you're still sort of dreaming. That's self hypnosis.
Speaker 2: There's another popular thing that you can find on TikTok
Speaker 2: or Instagram wherever you look YouTube, something that would be
Speaker 2: titled probably guided meditation, and it's very similar to a
Speaker 2: hypnosis session. And they are separate things, right, but that
Speaker 2: there's there's so many similarities here, this concept of just
Speaker 2: maybe this is why I'm confused, because I think in
Speaker 2: that state you can be hyper attentive to the words
Speaker 2: that are coming out, but also you can These are
Speaker 2: often used to relax and to get people to fall asleep.
Speaker 2: So I wonder where that line is between a state
Speaker 2: of hypnosis that is hyper attentive that is also just
Speaker 2: lulling you into relaxation. So like, I think there's there's
Speaker 2: something there, right, there's a space, oh eliminal space in
Speaker 2: between those two states that is that is fascinating.
Speaker 3: I don't know. You know what's funny too, is you
Speaker 3: got me thinking about film noir. It's it's a trope
Speaker 3: you see come up in film noir a lot, like
Speaker 3: in terms of like the shadow self and like the
Speaker 3: idea of what could make someone capable of murder, you know,
Speaker 3: or even like perhaps someone was committing murder while under
Speaker 3: the influence of hypnosis from an external party who is
Speaker 3: trying to control their actions and stuff like that. So
Speaker 3: I'm looking at this list of amazing film noir from
Speaker 3: the forties and fifties, and I've got some homework to do.
Speaker 3: But really really interesting how that this idea, especially with like,
Speaker 3: you know, things like Freud and just you know, psychoanalysis,
Speaker 3: they sort of went hand in hand and really invaded
Speaker 3: the popular kind of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you said that, right, The shadow of Freud
Speaker 1: leans long into the modern day and actually leads to
Speaker 1: some of the problems we're going to explore here, some
Speaker 1: of the moral panics and conspiracies. That's your question, Like
Speaker 1: what is the difference between say a sleep aid and
Speaker 1: auditory sleep aid and this kind of guided hip. I
Speaker 1: would say that it's still again, it's that example of
Speaker 1: different roads to the same city, because those things still
Speaker 1: get you hyper attentive, but you're hyper attentive upon the
Speaker 1: inner workings of your mind right your your environment. The
Speaker 1: guided imagery is sometimes a big thing in those meditation videos,
Speaker 1: like we're going to the waterfall, you know, picture relaxing
Speaker 1: by the beach, a.
Speaker 3: Lot of thing in your cave.
Speaker 2: But it's a hypnosis technique to do that very exact,
Speaker 2: same exact thing.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, So I think as it gets
Speaker 2: weird to me because it is we're talking about self
Speaker 2: hypnosis now at this point guided meditation. To me, it
Speaker 2: rides the line of self hypnosis and somebody hypnotizing you,
Speaker 2: which is really weird because it's so often just experience
Speaker 2: with headphones right when you're in bed getting ready.
Speaker 3: Well, okay, this is just me showing you.
Speaker 2: I've done that many a time, a self guided meditation
Speaker 2: while I'm trying to go to sleep or something. And
Speaker 2: I just wonder if you could convey messages to someone
Speaker 2: that is being hyper attentive, just not on the conscious level.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, like the hypnotize yourself into quitting smoking kind
Speaker 1: of things. Or into changing some habit or some diet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there was. That's still a really big industry. There's
Speaker 1: a guy that I think we all got pretty into
Speaker 1: named doctor David Spiegel, who's a Stanford University psychiatrist, one
Speaker 1: of the top minds in the world of hypnosis. And
Speaker 1: he puts it this way. He says, if you look
Speaker 1: at the science during hypnosis and actually during flow state
Speaker 1: in sports and feats of creativity, activity in brain regions
Speaker 1: that helps you switch between task that's what starts to
Speaker 1: shut down, and the same region seems to disconnect from
Speaker 1: another part of your brain that helps you notice when
Speaker 1: you are being self reflective or notice when you're day dreaming.
Speaker 1: So the part of you that questions your stream of
Speaker 1: thought why it's down, that's that's the giant who is
Speaker 1: being put to sleep. Weird, it's a weird one. And
Speaker 1: also I've never done this now, I don't know anybody
Speaker 1: who has to be fair, but it seems that hypnosis
Speaker 1: can also be used to help you slowly gain control
Speaker 1: over autonomic functions that people usually can't control voluntarily, stuff
Speaker 1: like your heart rate, your blood flow, things like that.
Speaker 1: Like that's why people in these states their breathing tends
Speaker 1: to calm down, right, it slows their bpms go down.
Speaker 2: It's doctor Spiegels found like that that actually works.
Speaker 1: You can in gender that state when you are hypnotizing
Speaker 1: someone and putting them in a tranced state. But and
Speaker 1: Spiegel didn't say this, But what I have heard is
Speaker 1: that people have been able to be trained or to
Speaker 1: train themselves to have control over that sensory stimulus. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like remember whim Hoff. Sure, the guy.
Speaker 3: Who's towering his body temperature and all that.
Speaker 2: But he uses physical breathing techniques. That's at it pumps
Speaker 2: his core right, and like he's literally over exercising his
Speaker 2: core to send into this state of like heating it
Speaker 2: heating itself through kinetic movements. So I just wonder the
Speaker 2: difference between like, because look, it's for me, it's still
Speaker 2: feeling as though I cannot believe that there's some unseen
Speaker 2: force that's being actually manipulated, right, the animal magnetism stuff.
Speaker 2: I have trouble believing that that could possibly be true.
Speaker 2: And I maybe it's because I'm still connecting it to
Speaker 2: those concepts rather than just that the mind itself which
Speaker 2: controls all of those functions. That you don't consciously think about,
Speaker 2: like heart rate, right, or temperature or things like that.
Speaker 2: Maybe you could harness control over that somehow by changing
Speaker 2: the way you think. I don't know, it's just sorry,
Speaker 2: I'm just having problems with it. Still, Hey, you.
Speaker 1: Me and Noel in the rest of humanity, because again
Speaker 1: this is still not fully understood, and I do have
Speaker 1: to give credit where it's due. Wim Hoff probably not
Speaker 1: the best example. I could have went off the dome
Speaker 1: with our pals Robert and Sophie over it. Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: I think they just recently released a pretty great series
Speaker 1: on wim Hoff. Tune into that, as we always you
Speaker 1: don't get.
Speaker 3: Featured on that show unless you're kind of a pill.
Speaker 2: Oh wait really, Oh no, I don't want to listen
Speaker 2: to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's it.
Speaker 3: I do think it's interesting because that also is like,
Speaker 3: you know, I know that he's been tested, you know,
Speaker 3: science or whatever, and then it is determined that he
Speaker 3: can do feats of extreme extremity or whatever, and that
Speaker 3: he claims to be able to do a lot of
Speaker 3: the stuff with by focusing his mind. That is connected
Speaker 3: to a type of self hypnosis. It's sort of like
Speaker 3: psychosomatic where it's like, if you believe something enough, you
Speaker 3: can make your body do what your mind tells you
Speaker 3: to do, sort of like lucid dreaming or being able
Speaker 3: to gain self hypnotize in a way. But it's useful
Speaker 3: to you.
Speaker 1: M oh and yes, yeah, you're absolutely right, nol. And
Speaker 1: that's also it was correct Behind the Bastards multi part
Speaker 1: series on wim Hoff wim Hoff's surprisingly Deadly story, and
Speaker 1: that is from September of this year, so pretty current.
Speaker 1: We do know that regardless of the different variables we're
Speaker 1: going into hypnosis, guided or self almost said, inflicted, self inspired, whatever,
Speaker 1: it generates that famous sense of physical relaxation. Hypnosis brings
Speaker 1: us ultimately to the same state. All roads lead to
Speaker 1: the same rome. Figuratively, the outer world falls away and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you're like a deep sea diver
Speaker 1: in the mind. You know what, dreams may come, et cetera.
Speaker 1: You plunge into your own mental ocean and you're entranced
Speaker 1: by your own inner world. Any hypnotic state can be
Speaker 1: described as a trance state characterized by well, they'll say extreme,
Speaker 1: but let's say higher than normal suggestibility, relaxation and a
Speaker 1: heightened imagination, very reading, rainbow. These all sound like good things.
Speaker 3: They do.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I just sound is great.
Speaker 3: Butterfly in the Sky am I right? Stop? Yeah it's
Speaker 3: too late, man.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we made I'm glad we made it through psychosomata,
Speaker 1: even though I know we were all figuring a round it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's but the state is not like sleep, very
Speaker 1: very important. It is not like sleep because the subject
Speaker 1: in the trance is alert the entire time on some level.
Speaker 1: That's why the Manchurian candidate stuff doesn't really work. We'll
Speaker 1: get into that. We got a scary story there. Most
Speaker 1: people can compare this to daydreaming, or the feeling that
Speaker 1: you get when you when you mentally exist in another world,
Speaker 1: like you watch an incredibly enrapturing or moving film, or
Speaker 1: you read an amazing book and you kind of forget
Speaker 1: where you are, or music can transport you as well.
Speaker 1: That's that's what people compare it to, more so than
Speaker 1: just like take a melatonin and conking out for you know,
Speaker 1: four to eight hours or whatever.
Speaker 2: I just remember one of the best examples of this
Speaker 2: thing from a recent, well somewhat recent movie, Get Out
Speaker 2: with the Yea.
Speaker 3: The spoon, spoon trigger, yeah, and and cure. It's a lighter,
Speaker 3: a flickering flame, it can be anything. Those are both
Speaker 3: the that's visual and sonic at the same time, and
Speaker 3: they're in sync with what another.
Speaker 1: No, no, you're right. I'm like, I love that you bring
Speaker 1: up the flame because the flame is one of the
Speaker 1: oldest induction methods. And we'll learn about induction in like
Speaker 1: a second. But the thing is whether whatever you call
Speaker 1: these states, when people are in them, you are tuning
Speaker 1: out the majority of the stuff happening in the physical
Speaker 1: world around you so that you can hyper focus on
Speaker 1: the subject at hand, the truth occurring in your mind,
Speaker 1: whatever that could be. You're really paying a sort of
Speaker 1: super attention. You're just taking all of the all of
Speaker 1: the attention you would have paid to the outside world,
Speaker 1: and you're putting it into your inner world. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: that's so cool. It It means that the emotions you feel,
Speaker 1: because they're the like non physical sensations, right, they're paying
Speaker 1: more attention to those emotions are very real, and those
Speaker 1: feelings then become for a time, your reality. It's pretty weird.
Speaker 1: That's why, like the that's why hypnotists have to be
Speaker 1: very careful with their leading questions.
Speaker 2: It makes me think of hypnotic regression again. And when
Speaker 2: you guys remember we talked to Toby Ball, who's made
Speaker 2: a show Strange Arrivals. The first season was about the
Speaker 2: Hill family, right, Benny and Barney Hill. And one of
Speaker 2: the major pieces of that whole close encounter of the
Speaker 2: third and or maybe fourth kind was that they were
Speaker 2: they were hypnotically regressed and remembered things that they had
Speaker 2: not remembered before. And the big question was could any
Speaker 2: of that have been implanted or like, could they have
Speaker 2: been led down the pathway by the person leading the set?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Yes, it's dangerous, dude, That's one of the most dangerous parts.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't do we want to Should we
Speaker 1: talk about the basic process of hypnotism?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I think people get the gist in general,
Speaker 3: but I'd love to maybe even review some of the
Speaker 3: terms you mentioned induction, you know, so, I think it's
Speaker 3: definitely a smart movement.
Speaker 1: Excellent idea. We're going to tell you the first and
Speaker 1: most important thing about hypnotizing people right after this word
Speaker 1: from our sponsors, and we have returned the first and
Speaker 1: most important thing about any guided meditation any hypnotic activity
Speaker 1: is to make sure the subject consens I know that
Speaker 1: sounds like all goodie goodie, but it's very important. There
Speaker 1: are ways to know. You asked about induction. There are
Speaker 1: ways to get people to enter a hypnotic state without
Speaker 1: their consent, but they're very unethical. They're also pretty difficult,
Speaker 1: and it's best to avoid them. Once you have consent,
Speaker 1: make sure the person's comfortable. Once you have them comfortable
Speaker 1: with no interruptions, you can begin the process of induction.
Speaker 1: Induction is just the fancy word for kind of ushering
Speaker 1: someone in to this trance state. And there are a
Speaker 1: million ways to do it. I'm using hyperbole. They're like
Speaker 1: several dozen good ways to do it, and they really
Speaker 1: depend on the subject more than they depend on the
Speaker 1: hypnotists themselves. Like mentioned fire right, star into the fire.
Speaker 1: They used to do that to us in boy Scouts.
Speaker 1: Or they would say, or you know what's the other one?
Speaker 1: The one we always hear.
Speaker 3: The clock watch ependulum swinging thing, and it's to you know, focus,
Speaker 3: make the eyes move in a hypnotic pat I'm also
Speaker 3: like perhaps a crystal looking into a crystal ball, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean? That can be just as much
Speaker 3: for the person on the other side as it is
Speaker 3: for the quote unquote hypnotists or soothsayer. You know, it's
Speaker 3: a shared experience.
Speaker 1: A black mirror, yes, yes, like the like the minds
Speaker 1: did once.
Speaker 3: Upsprying mirror or something like that.
Speaker 2: And also like an Apple iPhone fifteen promax just.
Speaker 1: So just so brought to you by Apple quotes. So
Speaker 1: there's yes, again, this very ancient stuff. And that's after that,
Speaker 1: Assuming that works, you get to progressive relaxation. Progressive relaxation
Speaker 1: is Matt kind of like what it's exactly what you
Speaker 1: were describing with some of those things we've listened to
Speaker 1: about going to sleep or meant to help you go
Speaker 1: to sleep. Progressive relaxation just sort of makes you more
Speaker 1: conscious of your body, makes you more conscious of your
Speaker 1: breathing and slowing that down. And this requires a certain
Speaker 1: amount of willingness or trust on the subject's part. It
Speaker 1: is again extremely difficult to hypnotize as someone who doesn't
Speaker 1: want to be hypnotized. You also should not do it
Speaker 1: because can sent is key. You can. You know, once
Speaker 1: you get people relaxed and they're breathing and they're kind
Speaker 1: of entering that trans state they're going to naturally start
Speaker 1: to close their eyes. You can prompt them to do so.
Speaker 1: The way a lot of folks will get into it
Speaker 1: is counting. We've all seen this or heard this in
Speaker 1: film as well. You may hear this in some meditation,
Speaker 1: things like we're going to count from one to and
Speaker 1: you know, pause at certain points to say, like feel
Speaker 1: your body begin to float, the lightness, a warmness.
Speaker 3: I do that with my therapist every time we start
Speaker 3: and he does a mindfulness meditation, and I actually have
Speaker 3: asked him of late, can we actually do that at
Speaker 3: the end, because we do at the beginning. It's cool,
Speaker 3: but sometimes I'm it's like I only see him every
Speaker 3: couple of weeks. Sometimes I'm ready to jump right in
Speaker 3: and talk. But if you do it at the end,
Speaker 3: it transitions me and allows me to think about sort
Speaker 3: of what we've talked about, like me, but also kind
Speaker 3: of just transition into the state of calm. So I've
Speaker 3: really been enjoying doing it at the end, and then
Speaker 3: it sort of feels like I'm getting the most value
Speaker 3: out of the exercise.
Speaker 1: And that's a that's a good point because that's we
Speaker 1: see the bookend of this in hypnotic sessions. Like at
Speaker 1: the end of a hypnosis session, there's the counting back
Speaker 1: to the waking world, right, But once you have someone entranced,
Speaker 1: then that's that's when the work begins. That's where you
Speaker 1: have the repetition of phrases. That's where you have this
Speaker 1: stuff where you set up like anchors, suggestions, triggers. Right,
Speaker 1: you see a red light, you will always feel warm,
Speaker 1: which is a very easy one because people already do
Speaker 1: that if they can see red and green.
Speaker 2: But again, we're not saying that you can actually make
Speaker 2: someone respond to these things, right, because there's no scientific
Speaker 2: proof that you do in all of this stuff we're
Speaker 2: talking about, actually make someone see a chicken when they
Speaker 2: look at, you know, a shoe.
Speaker 1: No, that's an extreme version, and that would be for
Speaker 1: that to happen, you would need a lot more work
Speaker 1: put in and it would not be ethical.
Speaker 2: But we're saying we could. You could potentially pair the
Speaker 2: color red with making someone think something.
Speaker 1: You could, Yeah, you could make them more likely to
Speaker 1: have that association as long as it was as long
Speaker 1: as it was emotively anchored, as long as it's anchored
Speaker 1: in an emotion.
Speaker 3: You're talking about implanting as well. Right, that's sort of
Speaker 3: what mentalists do, where they'll they'll implant an idea subconsciously
Speaker 3: and then there's a trigger like the color red or
Speaker 3: a word or whatever it might be. And again, this
Speaker 3: is a Manatorian candidate's screen to action and killing somebody,
Speaker 3: but it could make them say a thing or think
Speaker 3: a thing. We can do that to ourselves all day long.
Speaker 3: Be triggered by a thing that Matt joked earlier about,
Speaker 3: what was it? Something that yeah, Annie, like I mean,
Speaker 3: and that wasn't really a magical moment, but it was
Speaker 3: something that triggered that thing in you that already existed.
Speaker 3: And if a mentalist or practitioner of this kind of
Speaker 3: stuff had put it there, then he could have easily
Speaker 3: recalled that. I do believe that's true. I think the
Speaker 3: stuff that Darren Brown does is absolutely real. But it's
Speaker 3: also not magic. It's just weaponized psychology. Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: Yes. And at one point, at some point, we have
Speaker 1: to ask, what's the difference. So you do this stuff,
Speaker 1: and you know, you say, like you'll have a more
Speaker 1: hardcore thing would be implanting a suggestion or attempting to
Speaker 1: implant an association of disgust with like cigarettes, right, every
Speaker 1: time you pick up a cigarette, you will you'll be
Speaker 1: repulsed by the smell or the taste of it in
Speaker 1: your mouth or something like that. And people have sworn
Speaker 1: by that. But again, it's not one hundred percent solution
Speaker 1: because at the every step of the way, there are
Speaker 1: myriad there's a myriad of options and variables. There's no
Speaker 1: real silver bullet. That's all malarchy. There's no one side
Speaker 1: fits all.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: What I love about your conversation with your therapist, Noal
Speaker 1: is when people count out of a hypnotic session, they
Speaker 1: are often the hypnotist is often going to encourage the
Speaker 1: subject to continue carrying that warm, relaxed feeling when they exit,
Speaker 1: and that's a cool, powerful.
Speaker 3: Thing, Plasmo effect or no. I do find that it
Speaker 3: makes me feel a little more grounded, a little more chill,
Speaker 3: and a little more able to shake off some of
Speaker 3: the stresses of my week and or day, you know.
Speaker 1: And here's here's the other thing. Okay, we're going into
Speaker 1: the deep water now. Sorry. I recently rewatched What Dreams
Speaker 1: May Come, and it's messing with me. I loved it,
Speaker 1: so we know.
Speaker 3: It's a bummer it's it's heavy, it's it's good, it's amazing,
Speaker 3: it's just God. Not to mention, I haven't rewatched it
Speaker 3: since we've lost dear Robin Williams, so that may even
Speaker 3: make it hard to watch.
Speaker 1: He's really good in serious roles. Not. Yes, we know
Speaker 1: to the earlier point that we've all made in the
Speaker 1: course of tonight's show, we all know that you cannot,
Speaker 1: through hypnosis alone, create something that create a Manchurian candidate.
Speaker 1: One cannot compel a person to do things that they
Speaker 1: would not ordinarily do or that they have a strong
Speaker 1: moral moral barrier against. However, you can get closer to
Speaker 1: that kind of thing if you use other compliance techniques,
Speaker 1: brainwashing drugs. Check out the story of Buckley when he
Speaker 1: got abducted by the CIA. Evil evil, infernal stuff.
Speaker 2: But I guess what I'm saying is if you can,
Speaker 2: if you can convince someone to feel disgusted when they
Speaker 2: look at a physical object like a cigarette, then you could.
Speaker 2: Then it would you would have to be able to
Speaker 2: convince someone to feel a certain way when they, let's say,
Speaker 2: look at a picture of a certain political leader, right, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean you.
Speaker 1: Could do that, because that is an emotive feeling, but
Speaker 1: that feeling does not have a one to one translation
Speaker 1: to an action, which is why people can go through
Speaker 1: these self hypnosis things and then they'll still smoke or something,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Yeah, so there is an
Speaker 1: air gap there, and it's a very important one I think.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you're absolutely right. The most dangerous thing we
Speaker 1: teased it. We had to do it at the beginning.
Speaker 1: This is probably an episode we want to revisit in full,
Speaker 1: in more detail, but for now you need to know.
Speaker 1: The most dangerous thing about hypnosis, outside of mass hypnosis,
Speaker 1: outside of propaganda, the most dangerous thing in the West
Speaker 1: is the widespread panic of memory regression. The recovered memory
Speaker 1: movement of the eighties and nineties is the idea that
Speaker 1: you could have experienced childhood sexual abuse, or you know,
Speaker 1: just very very unspeakably horrific things in your past, and
Speaker 1: they would be so horrible and so scarring that you
Speaker 1: would bury them and you would never think about them
Speaker 1: until a skilled therapist who happens to have a book
Speaker 1: that they can sell you once.
Speaker 3: Along brought it out of you. Right. Yeah, that's where
Speaker 3: we start getting into the kind of implantation that's a
Speaker 3: little more deadly in life ruining than just like a
Speaker 3: reality show with Darren Brown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the stuff where, this is the stuff
Speaker 1: where the danger of leading questions and soft suggestions comes
Speaker 1: into play, because when people are in a very suggestible state,
Speaker 1: these therapists are, they're portraying themselves in the eighties and
Speaker 1: nineties as kind of a I would call a cognitive spelunker. Right,
Speaker 1: we're going back through the layers and we're finding we're
Speaker 1: finding that grain, you know, that led to the actions
Speaker 1: and the feelings you can't explain in the modern day
Speaker 1: as the modern you. This seemed like a revelation at first,
Speaker 1: patients all across the Western world where claiming they had
Speaker 1: recovered memories of abuse that began maybe in infancy, lasted
Speaker 1: for decades they had completely forgotten about them. And this
Speaker 1: also saw the rise or the popularization of the idea
Speaker 1: that trauma would be so bad that your mind had
Speaker 1: fractured into multiple personalities, which is where we see things
Speaker 1: like is the pop culture phenomenon sibyl that's the right one, right,
Speaker 1: So that's correct?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's sure.
Speaker 1: So in how dangerous did this get? Well, people got
Speaker 1: wrongfully convicted shout out Jason Flum based off of these
Speaker 1: memories that appear to have been repressed. And again, no
Speaker 1: one's a villain here. Everybody who was working in good
Speaker 1: faith turned out those memories might have been manufactured. And
Speaker 1: this leads a guy, uh, well, he was already a
Speaker 1: Harvard psychology professor. But in two thousand and five, Richard McNally,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's related to the MAP Empire.
Speaker 1: He calls the recovery recovered memory movement quote the worst
Speaker 1: catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.
Speaker 1: Those are strong words, right, they are strong words.
Speaker 3: And you know, obviously things that were invasively a trepanation,
Speaker 3: you know, drilling holes and the skulls to release demons
Speaker 3: and stuff, lobotomies, things like that, horrific abuses of science
Speaker 3: quote unquote of power. And so I could see how
Speaker 3: you might could potentially categorize this kind of stuff as
Speaker 3: soft sciences. They couldn't possibly do as much damage as
Speaker 3: drilling into someone's brain or attaching electrodes to them, but
Speaker 3: left unchecked, it can do just that. It can do
Speaker 3: horrible things.
Speaker 1: Shout out fantastic New York Times piece by a guy
Speaker 1: named Ethan Waters, who is the co author of a
Speaker 1: book called Making Monsters, which came out in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 1: It is about this phenomenon, the recovered memory movement, and
Speaker 1: he points out that all of the techniques these therapists
Speaker 1: were using, they have been proven to be much more
Speaker 1: likely to distort memory rather than to help enhance accurate recalls. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the science was out and the backlash was pretty quick,
Speaker 1: but it was overwhelmed by the deluge of pop culture
Speaker 1: and self help books, all of which shed the deluge
Speaker 1: of delusions, yes perfect, all of which seemed to paint
Speaker 1: these therapists as these great fonts of knowledge, these gurus
Speaker 1: who could solve any problem you had by finding a
Speaker 1: memory that you did not know existed, or a.
Speaker 3: Crime I am perhaps that you may or may not
Speaker 3: have witnessed. We already know that eyewitness accounts are so fallible,
Speaker 3: even though they seem like they wouldn't be. The mind
Speaker 3: does crazy things to convince you that you're correct and
Speaker 3: that you're remembering, and oftentimes there can be a confirmation
Speaker 3: bias at play, and if someone's really pushing you to
Speaker 3: remember the thing, you can very easily manufacture that memory
Speaker 3: inside your head well thinking.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's almost a hypnotic state when you're sitting
Speaker 2: there and being interrogated for hours on end being told
Speaker 2: you're not telling us the truth. Come on, Jimmy, you're
Speaker 2: not telling us the truth. But no, I am telling
Speaker 2: you the truth. You're not telling us the truth. We're
Speaker 2: gonna be here till you tell us the truth.
Speaker 3: And then I got a thing. I gotta go fin
Speaker 3: nights at Freddy's.
Speaker 1: You do the befriending thing. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole
Speaker 1: there's a whole pattern twisted.
Speaker 2: But really quickly, just what this is the last time
Speaker 2: I'm going to reference that Pen and Teller episode. There
Speaker 2: is someone named Wendy Freesen f r I E s
Speaker 2: e N and it's spelled w E N d I.
Speaker 2: This is a person who in nineteen ninety four, and
Speaker 2: this is coming back because of the time that this
Speaker 2: New York piece was written in nineteen ninety four. She
Speaker 2: on that pent and Teller episode takes a woman back
Speaker 2: through hypnotic regression to the moment of birth right, and
Speaker 2: it's to help her get over some anxieties that she's having.
Speaker 2: They just, you know, scientifically, they talk about well, actually,
Speaker 2: the way the eyes develop, there's no way you could
Speaker 2: have the clear picture of all the things that were
Speaker 2: just described throughout. You know, this person who has just
Speaker 2: supposedly went through this birth process right through hypnotic regression.
Speaker 2: This same person, Wendy has been making audio and video
Speaker 2: products for sale for years and years and years since
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety four. She I'm just gonna run quickly run
Speaker 2: down the types of hypnosis that she or like sessions
Speaker 2: that she will sell to you on through her website
Speaker 2: wendyweandi dot com, which you can still go to. You
Speaker 2: can take a financial abundance course for one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty bucks. You can take a back pain relief hypnosis
Speaker 2: session for fifty bucks, a stroke recovery session for thirty bucks.
Speaker 2: You can remotely influence somebody for forty five dollars.
Speaker 3: Why only thirty for the stroke recovery.
Speaker 2: I don't know then, I think I think it's multiple
Speaker 2: videos in a course or something. You can end your
Speaker 2: pornography addiction for fifty bucks. You can enlarge your breasts
Speaker 2: through her hypnosis sessions for forty dollars, or you can
Speaker 2: get a penis enlargement for seventy dollars.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, she knows people pay more for that.
Speaker 2: Huh. Well, But it's all going back to this concept
Speaker 2: that through your you can trick your mind into doing
Speaker 2: things like growing more cells in your penis or you know, no,
Speaker 2: I'm serious.
Speaker 3: I know that's the belief. I'll still giggle when people
Speaker 3: say penis because I'm a child.
Speaker 2: But but it all goes back to this same thing
Speaker 2: of like you're in a way, you were tricking yourself
Speaker 2: into believing something to the point where in this case,
Speaker 2: like this New York Times article that we're referencing here,
Speaker 2: you are tricking someone into believing they maybe even did
Speaker 2: something that they didn't do exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And if it's a past occurrence, then you don't
Speaker 1: need physical evidence the way you would need with like
Speaker 1: enlargement of body parts, right, or improvement of vision. And
Speaker 1: this goes into Okay, so this moral panic the reason
Speaker 1: hypnosis can be so dangerous.
Speaker 3: First, it Israel.
Speaker 1: It does do some things, it doesn't do what Charlatan's claim,
Speaker 1: and it certainly has a at least the way it
Speaker 1: was applied during the recovery movement, the recovered memory movement,
Speaker 1: it was certainly more likely to invent implant or distort
Speaker 1: memories than it was to help you accurately recall things,
Speaker 1: and people went so nuts for this. These folks were
Speaker 1: celebrities on name your favorite talk show here all the hits, Oprah,
Speaker 1: Ricky Lake, Donahue, I think it was Donahue, a million,
Speaker 1: Fox and Friends, Fox and Friends, like this before Fox
Speaker 1: and Friends. But they would have loved it. They probably
Speaker 1: did do this right they were and this is the
Speaker 1: most dangerous part. Though states changed their statute of limitation
Speaker 1: laws to allow for criminal prosecutions based entirely on repressed memories.
Speaker 1: That is thankfully no longer the case, because it turns
Speaker 1: out that was very dangerous and innocent people got locked up.
Speaker 3: Well, but to your point, both of y'all's points about
Speaker 3: like convincing yourself that something has happened, and maybe that
Speaker 3: even convinces the practitioner that they've actually done something. It's
Speaker 3: it's almost like self fulfilling prophecy, or that's sort of
Speaker 3: like cope, what's the word almost like parasitic slash kind
Speaker 3: of not what's the word where you're actually kind of
Speaker 3: helping symbiotic kind of Exactly do you think that? I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't I personally. Don't think that everyone who believes
Speaker 3: the stuff. You know, that everyone who purports to be
Speaker 3: able to do this are Charlatans. No, I think some
Speaker 3: people really believe in it, and they think that what
Speaker 3: they're doing is actually helping people, and maybe it is.
Speaker 3: Maybe there are some instances where this is helping.
Speaker 1: If you feel better again, if you're in a state
Speaker 1: where an emotional experience is your core focused reality, then
Speaker 1: that does have measurable effects on the body over time.
Speaker 1: It's just I think it's really important that you pointed
Speaker 1: that out. The vast majority of these practitioners were acting
Speaker 1: in good faith. They were probably inadvertently doing dangerous things,
Speaker 1: but they weren't all out for a cash grab. And
Speaker 1: there's a thing that happens, right, because the practitioners are
Speaker 1: themselves human, right, there's a fundamental design flaw they can't
Speaker 1: get around. And how many people have to tell you
Speaker 1: that you have magic powers before you start to believe
Speaker 1: there might be something to these claims. It's social dynamics
Speaker 1: and another form of pure pressure yet a gut.
Speaker 3: And there's no FDA process for checking out and overseeing
Speaker 3: you know, hypnosis, and you don't need any equipment you've
Speaker 3: already got it all, you know, So there's really it's
Speaker 3: very difficult to oversee this kind of stuff unless something
Speaker 3: absolutely catastrophic happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I yeah, I think it just points to maybe
Speaker 2: the dangers of feedback loops in general, because I'm again like,
Speaker 2: in defense of that person I called out Wendy, it
Speaker 2: looks like in all the video I've seen of her,
Speaker 2: in all the writing I've seen in her website, that
Speaker 2: she truly believes she's helping people and is capable of
Speaker 2: providing those services. I can't, you know, subjectively whether I
Speaker 2: believe her or not, that's one thing, But she appears
Speaker 2: to truly believe it, and I do wonder if that's
Speaker 2: exactly what it is. Been just she's been told enough
Speaker 2: times that it works, right. She in the Pentaitellar episode,
Speaker 2: she says she got a call from a guy who said, yeah,
Speaker 2: it grew an.
Speaker 1: Inch his rest his self confidence. Let's go with that euphemism. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a good point. And you know, we also
Speaker 1: we're also aware that, look, if you are a patient
Speaker 1: of any sort, you will tend to adopt your healers
Speaker 1: patterns of behavior and belief, and you might not know
Speaker 1: you're doing that. Even little stuff like mirroring behaviors. You'll
Speaker 1: pick up cues and clues from social settings and you
Speaker 1: might not be aware that this is happening. And the doctors,
Speaker 1: the therapist, the psychiatrists, there's a ton of literature on this.
Speaker 1: They have to be very careful to not unintentionally cause
Speaker 1: you to pick up things, pick up cues that you
Speaker 1: don't know you're throwing. And that's why all this leads
Speaker 1: us to, of course, the Satanic panic. This also leads
Speaker 1: us to the reason the American Psychological Association has said
Speaker 1: conclusively it is not possible to distinguish repressed memories from
Speaker 1: false memories without corroborating evidence. We need something physical there.
Speaker 1: And this tells us the following hypnosis is real. You
Speaker 1: hypnotize yourself more than likely on a regular, if limited basis. Yes,
Speaker 1: hypnosis can be used for dangerous purposes, even with the
Speaker 1: best of intentions. But you know, there's so much we
Speaker 1: didn't get to. The susceptibility scale, like the reason about
Speaker 1: two thirds of human beings are considered to be pretty
Speaker 1: susceptible to suggestion. I should say pretty suggestible. I don't
Speaker 1: want to make it look like a weakness because it is.
Speaker 1: It kind of does have a correlation with the power
Speaker 1: of your imagination, which is a beautiful thing. We didn't
Speaker 1: really go into this a ton, but like, there are
Speaker 1: people that are more quote unquote suggestible than others.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's real. Like, and I was gonna mention earlier,
Speaker 3: like the one time I've seen a hypnosis show was
Speaker 3: at the Renaissance Fair here in Atlanta, and I was
Speaker 3: pretty impressed because, like I just I don't think these
Speaker 3: people were plants, and I don't remember exactly what they did,
Speaker 3: but it was some stuff that was really interesting and
Speaker 3: pretty compelling. And I remember, I'm pretty you know, I'm
Speaker 3: skeptical as the next person on this kind of stuff,
Speaker 3: and I just remember seeing some of these people just
Speaker 3: walking around. They weren't stooges, as Darren Brown calls them.
Speaker 3: They were just there having a good time with their families,
Speaker 3: and they definitely did some weird stuff. So I do
Speaker 3: love that we've pointed out the whole idea of the
Speaker 3: performative aspect of it and how it's fun to just
Speaker 3: participate and have a good time, and maybe that's more
Speaker 3: of it than anything. Maybe that is it, but I
Speaker 3: do remember being taken by it and being like, oh man,
Speaker 3: how does he pick out the ones that are the
Speaker 3: most suggestible? Because he picks and chooses, a lot of
Speaker 3: people raise their hands and the person on stage decides,
Speaker 3: you know, who to take up there.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be crazy if you heard a fingersnap and
Speaker 1: noll you open your eyes and you were on stage
Speaker 1: at the Renaissance Fair so for years right.
Speaker 3: Now it had been for a year. Dude, Oh my god,
Speaker 3: that's terrified. That's good story material right there. I like that.
Speaker 2: Are you guys cool with me? I don't believe hypnosis
Speaker 2: is real at all? Oh please, I don't think you
Speaker 2: can do any like. I don't think it's real. I
Speaker 2: think I think we're the thing that is like hypnosis
Speaker 2: and meditation and some of those things that you can
Speaker 2: like access is not the same thing as hypnosis. But
Speaker 2: because I understand meditation and guided things like implanting ideas
Speaker 2: when you're in a susceptible state is one thing. But
Speaker 2: like hypnosis, hypnosis, I don't think it's a real thing.
Speaker 1: That's why I say it's like, it's the definition what
Speaker 1: is hypnosis? Hypnosis? Then how do we define the thing
Speaker 1: that is not.
Speaker 2: Real, someone putting you under, getting you calm, and then
Speaker 2: making you think things that you're unaware of.
Speaker 1: Okay, but then that would be How is that different
Speaker 1: from implanting a memory.
Speaker 2: I don't think you. It's weird because I don't think you.
Speaker 2: I don't think you can do that either. I think
Speaker 2: you can take someone into a place where you like
Speaker 2: create a story in your head. But to me, that's
Speaker 2: not implant a memory. That is literally using your imagination
Speaker 2: to come up with a scenario.
Speaker 3: But what if we took it to an even a
Speaker 3: more extreme, like borderline techno torture kind of situation where
Speaker 3: you literally had like like clockwork Orange, you know, where
Speaker 3: you've got someone being forced to watch stuff on a
Speaker 3: loop for an incredible long periods of time, and pair
Speaker 3: that with drug injections that make you open up to
Speaker 3: this kind of suggestion, Like do you think that's possible?
Speaker 2: But that's like torture? And I think it's just the
Speaker 2: terminology maybe, is what I've like, am having a problem with.
Speaker 3: I understand. I think we're all on the same page. Frankly,
Speaker 3: That's why I really do MM.
Speaker 2: Well, but it's weird because you can do things like,
Speaker 2: I got a feeling.
Speaker 3: I don't remember the next lines.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be something which just to how many people
Speaker 2: in their target, Because you can do weird stuff like
Speaker 2: that right with the mind. You can play tricks with
Speaker 2: somebody's mind if you have bad intentions through repetition.
Speaker 3: It's about repetition. I wouldn't have been able to finish
Speaker 3: that line for you if I hadn't heard that song
Speaker 3: of a gazillion.
Speaker 1: That's one of the tools. Repetition is one of the tools.
Speaker 1: But definitely, yeah, I see you, Matt, and I do
Speaker 1: like to your point, noll, I do think we're all
Speaker 1: on once we get past the nomenclature. I think we're
Speaker 1: on the same page about the phenomenon and the limits
Speaker 1: importantly of that of that phenomenon, right, because you know,
Speaker 1: there's no way someone's going to be hypnotized into flying
Speaker 1: because humans don't do that without a specific set of tools.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and changing your mind about it is not
Speaker 1: going to help you beat gravity or other kind of
Speaker 1: physical limitations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I'm thinking about just watching the news or something,
Speaker 2: depending on how you feel about like a political issue
Speaker 2: or a global news issue. I feel like that's more
Speaker 2: conditioning based on what you've encountered in the past.
Speaker 3: There, how is conditioning different than hypnosis? That's what how
Speaker 3: now we're getting somewhere? I think what I was describing
Speaker 3: too earlier, the clockwork orange example, that's conditioning to an
Speaker 3: aggressive degree. Hypnosis is almost meant to be a shortcut
Speaker 3: to long term conditioning.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe it's just the H word and the
Speaker 1: way it's been associated with such Kakamami's stuff since the
Speaker 1: days of Mesmer and well before. But the idea of
Speaker 1: a flow state or trance or suggestibility is that part
Speaker 1: is real and that does have you know, it's a
Speaker 1: kissing cousin to conditioning. It can be used as a
Speaker 1: kind of conditioning. But folks, we we're obviously, we're obviously
Speaker 1: having a lot of fun with this. We've all consented
Speaker 1: to be here. We are not in a current trance state.
Speaker 1: We hope you enjoyed tonight's show. We would love to
Speaker 1: hear your opinions.
Speaker 2: Harmonica or not.
Speaker 1: What this is?
Speaker 2: I have this thing.
Speaker 3: It says music on it. It looks like somebod's supposed
Speaker 3: to blow into but I don't know what it does.
Speaker 3: It doesn't really do anything. I've been holding off on
Speaker 3: throwing it away because I was like, maybe it's useful,
Speaker 3: but I don't think it is. Sorry, guys, I.
Speaker 2: Was listening to Ben and I felt like I was
Speaker 2: being pulled back from a hypnosis session or something.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you are, You're being pulled back
Speaker 3: from our hypnosis session, and then that it's our episode
Speaker 3: on hypnosis and it's coming to an end to Ben's boy.
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