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