Andrew Jarecki

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:31app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both?

1:09Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:18If you asked me a few weeks ago about Andrew Jarecki, I would have told you about a brilliant director of powerful documentaries capturing the Freedmen's, the Chinks, and most recently, the Alabama Solution. But if you ask me today who Andrew Jarecki is, I would tell you he's all that, and he's also a good friend. We met by chance at a small screening, and I asked him if he knew where everyone was eating afterwards. He said, I think it's at your house, Ruthie. At 2 a.m., Andrew and I were still talking about films and family and food and friendship. Today, Andrew and I are around the table again, this time in the River Cafe.

2:00And who knows, maybe we'll be here still at 2 a.m. After all, we are good friends. There's something nice about that night, just being in a home. Do you like home, to be home rather than restaurants? I do. I mean, I like to be home, and then I especially like to be in someone's home, if it's a place that kind of expands your mind. And I've spoken to people about you since we met, you know saying things that are obviously very effusive and they say well how long have you known each other and I feel silly saying not that long but love at first sight but I was going to talk about the food of Alabama because your last movie which we did a screening last night didn't you how was that yeah we did a screening yesterday you know the film is basically an investigative piece that took around seven years to make because I was interested in incarceration i was interested in how badly been in prison i was i went to jail for one day because when i was a kid i there was a pilot circling around a small airport and looked like he was in trouble and i climbed up the mini airport control tower and i turned on the runway lights and when I came down there were bobbies sitting there ready to arrest me I think I was 16 and um where was this near right it was in no it was in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands oh I see but anyway I'd had the experience of being um near prisons because I'd made in capturing the Friedman's a film that included uh Jesse Friedman who was sent to prison at quite a young age and I I just remember prisons being very secretive and very restrictive and couldn't understand why it was so hard for me to interview somebody that was in a prison that I was just being refused by the prison administration.

3:55And so I always had that in my mind. And then making the jinx, you know, Bob Durst was sort of the opposite. He was a guy that had all the money in the world and largely managed to keep himself out of prison, even though he'd killed a few people. and so at one point my daughter who was 14 Jeremy was reading a book by a guy who had been wrongfully convicted in Alabama and had been in the system for like 30 years and then we decided to take a road trip and we went to Montgomery Alabama to sort of see what we could see and we met a man there who was an older man I guess he was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama I'm appointed by George Wallace.

4:38I asked him questions about the prison system. And he very pointedly at some point said to me, well, if you come back and volunteer, you'll be able to see what you can see. And I said, well, if I come back, what will I see? And he said, well, if you come back to Alabama, I'll take you on the death row at Holman Prison and you'll see it's a slave ship. And that stayed with me. And I went back to New York and got together with Charlotte Kaufman, who I made the film with. And I said, I think we need to go back and see what we can see. And then when we went back, we were really prevented from seeing very much in the prisons.

5:17But we discovered that there was this network of people inside the prisons who had access to contraband cell phones. And that becomes a big part of what the film is. Now the men in the film can tell their story. That I'd never seen before. I'd never been able to hear directly from people who are currently incarcerated. Not people who are saying, well, back in the day I was in prison or whatever. But people who are saying, this is what's happening to me right now. Including speaking to people who are in solitary confinement right now. But food is very important in the film. It is. Because the whole reason that the chaplain gets to go into the prisons and bring his sort of religious observances there.

6:06And the reason they get such a big audience and that people in the prison really want to see him is that he goes in and brings food. And the food in the Alabama state prison system is so bad that they literally, we have images of meat and other food that they've delivered to the prison for serving to the men that literally have the legend outside not fit for human consumption. And so when the chaplain comes in, you know, he's got a kitchen in Montgomery. He's got a whole bunch of volunteers and they make food for 1 ,200 people. and then they load it up in trucks by the way he doesn't get paid to do this this is just part of his ministry and they bring the food and they bring them things that they otherwise would never have and things that are luxuries you know like little debbies which is kind of like a southern you know packaged food or he says you know i bring them uh ho-hos but they also bring them roast chicken or fried chicken and they also bring them biscuits and they also bring them mashed potatoes and you can see in the film that they're serving him a piece of roast chicken and the guy we're talking to says you know they should show you the meat that we get it doesn't look anything like this and also how food is used as an incentive to acquiesce or taking it away to make them feel punished in the food you know in the prison because it's a because it's an economy of deprivation, food is so much more important.

7:42For us, we're going to go and have dinner tonight and we're going to be deciding how many pieces of focaccia we're going to have. For these guys, the prison is trying to manipulate them, which they often are. They'll very often just cut off the food supply. And they have such complete control over these men's lives that they'll put people in a position where they're getting very few calories to begin with. they're living on a diet that consists a lot of Rice Krispie treats that they're getting out of the commissary or ramen. And I think you have a population that's sort of unhealthy and not able to become healthier because they can't get access.

8:23And that's one of the reasons why you see people who have been in prison for 20 years have a lot of trouble staying alive as long as other people do because they've spent years being malnourished. And how long did it take you? Seven years? Yeah, I first went through seven years ago. Why did it take so long? Was it resistance? First of all, it takes me a long time to make a film. And I think it's partly because, you know, we're trying to get to the essence of a very complicated problem and trying to convey it in a very simple way relative to the problem. I always have a blackboard in my, wherever I am in office, I always have an old-fashioned blackboard.

8:58And at the very beginning of this, I wrote up this mnemonic device that was smithwit knows. And I said to the team that was working on the film, I said, this stands for how do we not make the saddest movie in the world that no one ever sees? And we had a strategy for how to do that. It kind of makes you just, I don't know, motivates me. And when I talked to the men who were inside, You know, I got to talk to kinetic justice, Robert Earl Council, who is such an important part of the film. I feel like I'm talking to Mandela. I feel like I'm talking to somebody who's not only incredibly resilient and shows is a model of resilience in the face of authoritarian power, but is somebody who is able to motivate others, is able to lead, you know, is so thoughtful and so inspiring.

9:55One of the ways that the men respond to this horrible brutality that's happening in the prison system is they go on strike. They say, we're not going to do free work anymore in the prison until we have conditions that are livable. And the way that the administration responds to that is by cutting off a food supply. And they're not supposed to do that. It's not legal. You can't have somebody who you have total control over and then just stop feeding them because you're killing them. But that's exactly what they did in Alabama. They did what's called bird feeding, which is they put just enough food in the plate that it kind of seems like they're feeding somebody something, but it might just be a piece of white bread and a string bean.

10:42And it's, you know, sending a message that you're not getting fed until you do what we say. and the other inspiring thing is you see that the men have before the strike happens they've all gone to whatever sources of food they had right so they've taken whatever little money they've had and they've bought all the rice krispie treats or all the ramen that they can remember one of them said that they got an oreo cookie yeah and then they and then they share those and that's a beautiful thing right that people who are in this economy of deprivation where they really don't have access to anything much that those people are sharing resources with each other one of the things that you learn i think or learn about in the film is what happens when you have um authoritarian power you have complete power over a population which is obviously what's happening in a number of countries in the world right now is you have these sort of dictatorial leaders.

11:46And when you have total control, including control over whether somebody can eat or not, or what they eat, you really are infiltrating every aspect of their life and personality. And one of the things that's inspiring about the men in this film, who somehow after years and years and years of deprivation and after years of abuse, are still somehow optimistic, are still willing to engage in a work strike, for example, that's a peaceful protest, even though their peaceful protests are always met with violence by the authorities. You, I think, take a lot of heart in that.

12:37new year new goals and in this economy a better money plan is more necessary than ever i am matt and i'm joel we are from the how to money podcast and every week we help you to spend smarter save more and make sense of what's going on out there if you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel and control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

13:11Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.

13:53He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What was your home like growing up? What was home? Where was home? I sort of lived between Manhattan and Westchester County, Rye, New York. and my mom was a huge part of our upbringing my parents have been together since they were 16 and they're now both 92 well they met on the wolverine that the train that goes from new york to michigan and they both back in the day they they would skip you grades if you were doing well in school so they they both skipped two grades and they went to university of michigan when they were yeah they connected on the train and then stayed together in one form or another for a very long time.

14:4992, yeah. But my dad is a big kind of world beater getting out there and slaying dragons and things. And my mom was definitely the one who had the responsibility and thrill of raising me and my brothers. My grandparents came to America, I think with my dad when he was around five years old. And they had a very large business in Germany. I think they had the largest shipping lines in Germany called Kunstmann. and they had hundreds of ships and all the ships were named for the kids in the family and then from one day to the next almost they became nazi warships and uh they moved to america and they came here in around 1937 yeah that's when my husband's family came from from italy for the same reasons you know suddenly they were they were trieste jews were suddenly you know yeah did they did they bring did you and your grandparents so did they bring their food with them?

15:45Do they live near you? Well, first of all, I'm a giant fan of Italian food, and my dad grew up, I guess, on German food. So for me, I have a difficulty with German food. Let's talk about German food. What is German food? Somebody said to me recently, you know, how's your dad's health? And I said, you know, he's in extremely good health for a person whose diet consists primarily of a combination of liverwurst and marzipan oh yeah those are his sort of his favorite things yeah whereas on my mother's side my my grandmother was very good at cooking things and i think when i was growing up always going to her house she would make me simple things like you know cream of wheat with certain kind of brown sugar and that was but no great borscht or kind of those i think she did some of that you know she was very good at cooking like brisket and things and my mom was actually very uh advanced i think i remember when i was little we went to this um store in westport connecticut and then the the the new rage was people eating insects probably remember chocolate covered insects yeah what year would that be like this it was sort of like yeah like yeah probably around 68 69 something like that But then my mom was very quick to feed me steak tartare when I was a kid, you know.

17:11And I remember just thinking, God, this is incredible. Like she knew how to get the best beef and she knew that. And she was more sophisticated than the butcher. And I remember the butcher writing on the butcher paper when he would get her like the special high quality beef. He would write steak tata. Tata, T-A-T-A. Because he thought it was like a highfalutin thing. But then I remember my mom just making little pinches of it and taking a little bit of kosher salt and dropping it on there and saying, you got to try this. And it was incredible. I remember just feeling like it was this great secret that my mom had.

17:49She loved food and she made sure that I was exploring it. And I remember friends of mine saying, you can't eat raw meat. And I was like, well, my mom says that you can't. Did she work? Did she have a career? Yeah, she was a writer at Time Magazine, and she was actually partners with John McPhee, who was a great writer. And that was in the days when the women were called researchers and the men were called writers. And then she became the film critic working with a guy named Brad Darrow, who was the unnamed Time Magazine film critic. So they used to, you know, my mom reviewed Fellini's Eight and a Half, which she did not like.

18:31Did she get a credit? negative review of it they didn't give her a byline almost ever but but over time she did start to get named and then she was in the masthead but also you know my mom was was working in the city and i was working in the city my dad made sure that we started working when we were like 12 years old on all summer long i worked i had strange jobs but like i worked for a rare coin dealer a numismatist on west 55th street where i learned everything i mean i it was just a man with a shop who was making millions of dollars just by being smart you know he knew everything about history and about greek and roman coins and i was like cleaning the what did you do yeah display cases but i was you know i picked up a lot and it was just great to have a boss and to have him tell me how you're supposed to work and yeah so did you ever work in a restaurant um i never worked in a restaurant that's interesting because most americans at some point my yeah my dad always i think wanted us to learn about business or which was strange because my sort of artistic side was always something that my mom nurtured, not my dad.

19:38And I don't think my dad ever really got it. And also my mom, I had like when I was kind of bumping around in the early days trying to figure out what to do, I learned that I could do magic for like children's parties. Magic, magic, magic. And I could make like$35 if I went and did a birthday party, but I was only like 12 or 13 when I was doing it. So my mom had to pretend to be my assistant. And so my mom helped me take out an ad in the local paper and she helped me like lay out the ad and put the top hat in the corner of it and give me a name. I think I was called the conjurer extraordinaire.

20:17And I would go to people's houses and I would invariably, I would show up because they had no idea that I was 12. So I would show up for a birthday party that was going to be like 10 or 12 year olds and the mom would come out and she would say oh come on in the magician will be here any minute and then i would have to go in there and like do battle with these 12 year olds and get them interested which i did reasonably successfully i learned it i think i largely learned it by going to a magic shop in manhattan called tannins which had been around for many many many years and it was basically like six or seven magicians who would stand behind these counters and they would just show you how to do stuff and it figured into my life a lot because Because when I, you know, I had made some films, then I had a business for a long time, and then I went back into filmmaking.

21:04And the first film that I made was this film called Capturing the Freedmen, which started out as a story about professional children's birthday party entertainers in New York City. So I was kind of bringing myself back to that odd period when I was doing that as a kid. And then it became a very dark story when I kind of discovered what it was about. But it was this connection. And my mom was the person that drove me to the magic shows or take me to the library and let me go set up my stuff and do my thing. And she would sit me in the car and just pour out knowledge to me. She would just tell me like every day we'd go on a drive and she'd pick something that she wanted to tell me about.

21:43And then we had this thing I would say IO, which meant input overload. So if she was telling me stuff and it was too much and computers were just becoming a thing. So computers would choke on information. They would say input overload. So my mom would say, if I ever tell you too much, just tell me I owe mommy. And I did. But I learned a lot. When she was taking you out and doing this, was there somebody in the kitchen cooking? My mom had kind of a partner who was an incredible black woman from Virginia. and was just a masterful cook like and made you know fried chicken and made just made so much southern food that I became really dependent on she just brought something to it that was like you'd walk in the kitchen and she'd be cooking it and you'd see how many pieces of chicken you could eat before she said okay enough I'm putting it on the plate and I'm gonna bring it out and then we're gonna have dinner but um she was also a big part of my life and I think there was a little co-parenting going on between her and my mom because my dad wasn't around all that much so you know she was there to kind of be the relief pitcher but in the in the kitchen she was incredible what happened when you kind of left this attentive and interesting growing up to go to was that a big change or was it i was always interested in making theater making film and i when I was in college, I direct a lot of plays.

23:12Oh, did you? Yeah. And then when I was getting ready to graduate, I think my dad said to me, you know, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm going to go to Yale Drama School for directing. And he said, well, just hold on a second. Let's just talk about this. And basically said to me, you know, all the people that we know that are artists, that are filmmakers are often manipulated by the people that understand business. And so, you know, you might want to consider the possibility of going to business for a couple of years and learning if you learn what a treasury bill is and you learn how a contract gets written, then you'll be more likely to be able to do what you want.

23:46And it was a pretty persuasive argument. It was very much in his interest because he wanted me to kind of join him and thought he would eventually get my interest up in doing business. So did you go to business school or not? I didn't. I actually got into Harvard Business School and I went and visited and I thought, oh this is going to be great i'm going to do this and ultimately i just don't think my heart was in it um but then i came up with an idea um what was that so i was trying to go to the movies one night and i was in manhattan and i was calling my local theater and and it was busy the number was engaged because everybody calls the theater at the same time the cinema to go to the movies and um i i by By the time I got through from all the busy signals, it was maybe 8.30 and the machine told me the movie had started at 8.15.

24:39So I kind of missed my window. And I remember sitting down and kind of sketching out what just happened to me and why is there this multi-billion dollar business that can't get my$7 out of my pocket. And I couldn't see the movie that I wanted to see. So I ended up starting this service called Movie Phone, which became very popular on the phone and then eventually on the internet but there was a way to serve all those people by having a central number so we came up with this number 777 film and we got it in all the various area codes and we put it out and and started to have call centers then we just had it was all totally automated so it was never a person on the phone it was sort of the early days of interactivity and so you could put in the first three letters of jurassic park you'd put in j-u-r and it would say, you've selected Jurassic Park.

25:28So it was kind of like magic for the moviegoer because they thought, well, I call this number. It's never busy. It's free. And I can go to the movies. And then I ran that business for 11 years. The last film I'd made was 88. And then 89, we started the business, sold it in 99, and immediately started making Capturing the Freedmans. And then around that time, I moved to Rome with my wife and my kids. and how many children at that point we have three now but at that point we had two yeah and you know you just picked up and went to Rome why Rome when you were making movies in New York because that we had sort of sold the business and were just in a moment when we were really free to make a choice and because our kids were growing up in the Manhattan we just thought I think we should get these kids and go somewhere really interesting where they're going to be welcomed and they can learn the language and and so we moved to Rome and it was it was glorious it was probably the best choice I've ever made how long did you live there two years tell me more about the food in Rome what do you remember when you think back to those days I mean I think that being in a place where you could have unlimited truffles being in a place where you could have unlimited porcini mushrooms, being in a place where the tomatoes were so extraordinary all the time and you could have them all year.

27:00We got very hooked on certain restaurants. It also teaches you a way to eat, doesn't it? It's the idea that somehow you don't think about what you're going to cook. You go to the market and you sort of say, oh, the porcini are here, so we'll have porcini next week. or, well, you know, the idea of kind of running around trying to find ingredients, but kind of you can just go to the market. And I think Italy is so, where did you live? We lived in an area called San Teodoro, which is basically between the Roman Forum and the foot of the Palatine Hill. So it was really, on one side we had the Chitco Massimo, where I would go running, and then the the you know my kids would come home from school and literally go to the roman forum and be sitting at the temple of saturn and then you know run around our neighborhood which was this incredible cobblestone and there was an extraordinary restaurant that was like a half a block from our apartment and i would go in there and i got to know the the owner and he showed me so many things about the restaurant that i didn't know i didn't understand that there were machines that would reduce the temperature of certain things or that you could quickly heat or de-escalate.

28:17There were just so many amazing techniques and things that I hadn't thought about before. I think I ended up getting very fixated on this restaurant called Da Pietro, which always had a little basket in the window that had the tartufi bianchi, had the porcini mushrooms, had this incredible access to just great produce.

28:52You know? Get out of here. Look who just showed up. It's Fisher Stevens. Andrew the Great Jarecki. You introduced us. But you know, there's so much to talk about. All right, so we're here. We've been talking about food. So if we think about food is also giving us comfort. Is there a food that you would go to that would be a comfort to you? Yeah, I think so. My best friend's grandmother used to, the day after Thanksgiving, make white toast with stuffing, cranberry sauce, turkey,

29:30and tomato sandwich. do you make it sometimes? I do do you only make it Thanksgiving or do you do it with chocolate? I do it, sometimes I just do it when I need to feel that feeling you talk about food and movies and films and what he's done you know this film is so important to all of us and thank you for making it thank you for being here thank you thank you for inviting me here to the River Cafe let's go have something to eat it is a great film

30:08Ruthie's Table 4 is proud to support Leukaemia UK. Their Cartwheel for a Cure campaign raises funds for vital research and more effective and kinder treatments for acute myeloid leukaemia. Please donate, and to do so, search Cartwheel for a Cure.

30:30Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell and Zad Rogers. with Robbie Hamilton, Andrew Sang, and Bella Salini. This has been an Atomize production for iHeartMedia.

30:49Hey, it's Joel. And Matt. From HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

31:25Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.