1026: Hypnosis | Skeptical Sunday

24:37The reason that hypnosis has been taken quite seriously in the US dates back to a 1976 case where bus driver Ed Ray saved 26 kids who were kidnapped and buried below ground in a truck trailer. So it was this weird truck trailer that was like half or pretty much submerged below the earth. Ed Ray's bus had been stopped by three armed men and the kids and Ed were taken to this horrible trailer. It's part of a moving van buried underground and it had this intricate system for sucking in fresh air and they were going to demand five million dollars ransom for the kids. So the victims here piled mattresses on top of each other and one of the kids managed to squeeze through a vent to get out and informed a night watchman at the quarry where they were buried.

25:21That's a crazy plan. Can I just put a pin in that for that is a crazy ass plan. I mean, 1976. Okay, but holy cow. This is like something from Grand Theft Auto, where you kidnap them and then they bury the bus. Yeah, it's kind of a brilliant plan. But it's also like, oops, we accidentally killed everyone because the roof of the bus couldn't hold the dirt or they suffocated because our weird pump system broke at night. And they all die. I mean, it's just what the hell it's straight out of a movie, but like not a good one. It's the weirdest thing, man. Very odd. Yeah. I couldn't believe when I was researching this, I couldn't believe what I was reading, to be honest.

25:59And it's not the bus. Yeah. This almost, it sounds fake. Yeah. It's not the bus. It was a moving van. So it was like, they took them out the bus, the kids and the teacher, they took them to this quarry and it was this moving van trailer that they had underground with this weird like breathing system so that they could still breathe. But as you say, yeah, that could have failed. The kids could have all died and they wanted$5 million. The point is that Ed Ray, the bus driver, later under hypnosis, was able to remember the license plate number of the kidnappers. Wow. So Ed died in 2012. In his last days, many of the kids, now 36 years older, came to visit him.

26:33His lasting legacy for good or bad is that the courts sometimes admit hypnosis depending on the state. For example, Texas allows for hypnosis in court. It's a bit mad because although hypnosis does work to help recollect memories can also inspire all sorts of confabulations. So you can't tell what's real and what isn't. So Charles Flores is one example of a man, I think currently still, I couldn't find any sort of recent news about him in the last year. But before that, it seems that he's a man on death row for allegedly shooting a 64-year-old white woman during a robbery, with the main evidence being something a witness recalled under hypnosis.

27:10But that witness initially described two white men with long hair, then underwent hypnosis, and then was shown like a list of Hispanic men or a bunch of photos of Hispanic men, and then identified Flores. Well, if hypnosis was real, I wouldn't have to beg, borrow, and plead for you to patronize the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our sponsors does keep us going. Please check out the deals for yourself, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well.

27:42Please consider supporting those who support this show. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. It sounds like the whole thing is a bit of an ambiguous mess. There's so many aspects of forensics that we thought were absolute science. What is it? Polygraphed, the lie detector test, and we're starting to realize these are flawed. Like blood splatter patterns is another one, and different ways to work out the difference between arson and accidental fires. So many people are prosecuted and put on death row with pretty weak evidence. And it's terrifying, really. Hypnosis, memory recovery, it just sounds like a high stakes use of hypnosis, given the risk of creating false memories.

28:20Like, look, somebody sees a license plate and they have a bunch of other evidence that these are the guys that did it. The voice matches the recording and they were in the area at the time and they rented the moving van or whatever. It's like, OK, that I get. But when it's like, oh, I picked this guy out of a lineup while I was being hypnotized, but also the guy works at the barbershop where I go. So maybe it was that. It's like, death row for that. I don't know. It's a little dodgy. It actually reminds, so this is a tangent, has nothing to do with hypnosis, but it reminds me of this ridiculous story.

28:49I was in New York and I needed a haircut and I go to a barber. So, you know, I'm waiting to get my haircut. I'm sitting in the chair chatting with the guy. On my left, there's a couple of guys sitting by the window reading a newspaper. And one of the guys has all these tattoos. He's a barber. He just doesn't have anybody working with him right now. And one of the tattoos is like a barber sheer or whatever. I'm like, wow, this guy's really into cutting hair. And he's talking with another person, probably another barber or whatever. And they're reading about this rape that happened to an older lady, like 70, 80 years old in Central Park.

29:22It was really gross. And the guys were reading it. And the guy with the tattoos was like, wow, what happened? Let me see. Oh, they're looking for him. Crazy. And then the cops walk in and they're like, so and so. And he's like, the point to him, the guy with the barber shears on is reading the article. And they go, you're under arrest. He's like, what? What am I under arrest for? They're like, we don't disclose that, but you're under arrest. And he's like, this is a bunch of bullshit. What am I under arrest for? This is crazy. And they go, I don't think you want me to. He's like, I want to know right now.

29:52And they're like, you're under arrest for the rape of an 80 year old woman in Central Park last week. Like she identified you by your tattoo. And he's like, all right, I'll be, you know, he just basically was like, oh, that's it. So the article he was reading that he was interested in was about a crime he had committed. Oh my God. That's like in every TV show. Yeah. Isn't it? You know, in the TV shows, they got the paper out. They're like, oh, oh, look at this guys. This goes, and it was him. Yeah. I love that. It was him. And I couldn't believe that I was right there. And my barber just goes, oh man, he, he's fucked now.

30:22And it was like, nobody stopped cutting hair. the other nobody like got up and left because they were so surprised people talked about it sure if they were like oh man how long has he been working here and they're like oh he's new here you know that was it but it wasn't like everybody stop and go have a cigarette because we're so shocked our colleague raped somebody it was like that was just another day maybe an exciting one in New York and I thought this is just I can't believe what I just witnessed it was like I I expected somebody to yell and cut. Great job, everybody. Take five. Nope. Just a real thing that happened in New York on any given Tuesday.

30:59Show must go on. Unfrickin' believable. Anyway, yeah. So false memories. You were saying you can't really control people or make them do things they don't want to do or give them weird powers, but there have to have been some wacky and controversial attempts, right? I'm thinking projects like MKUltra, which I think included LSD, but wasn't that the plan? Create hypnosis assassins or something for the CIA? Yeah, that's right. That's right. It goes so deep and it's so hard to know what's real and what isn't with MKUltra. But MKUltra was a project conducted by the CIA in the mid 20th century, and it involved attempts at mind control, including the use of hypnosis.

31:35The project was shrouded in secrecy and involved a wide range of experiments, many of them ethically dubious, to explore various methods of manipulating the mind. So hypnosis was often used in conjunction with, as you say, mind-altering drugs such as LSD and other chemicals. Frustratingly, but typical of secretive CIA ops, many of the documents were destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms in the 1970s. So there's a lot we don't know. Although you could watch the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats from the book of the same name by one of my favourite former podcast guests, John Ronson. What we do know is that the CIA was interested in whether hypnosis could be used to force individuals to commit acts they would not otherwise consent to, including assassinations.

32:21Could it help people to resist torture as well? That could be really useful for an army or whatever. But again, the consensus is that hypnosis can't make you do things that are fundamentally against your will or your morals. It's more of a way of suggesting new ways of thinking, new ways of acting, and new ways of remembering. There's no evidence to suggest that these attempts by the CIA were at all successful. Hypnosis simply doesn't have the power to override an individual's free will or make them act against their deep-seated beliefs, or allow them to turn invisible or walk through walls as the CIA allegedly tried to make them do.

32:59That part doesn't make a ton of sense. But I guess while you're drugging people and hypnotizing them, you're like, all right, let's just let's exhaust all of our options here and see what what the limits of belief are. Like, how confident can you be when? No, he no. Now I need stitches. OK, no walking through walls. Check. So stage performers, magicians, they've also adopted hypnosis as a tool for their shows, which we talked about at the top here. So all of this begs the question as to what is really going on, right? If hypnosis can't fundamentally make people do things they don't want to do, does that mean these people secretly harbored the desire to get naked on stage and speak German?

33:35This wasn't a guy who didn't know German. You know, he took German in high school or something. That's the thing. It just seems like you're just asking people nicely to do something they wouldn't normally do and giving them, what, an excuse to do it? And so they can go, I was hypnotized. I don't really want to be a male stripper, but they're like, oh, I can get away with this right now. I don't know. I think there is an element of that. I mean, it's crucial to distinguish stage hypnosis from therapeutic hypnosis. In a stage setting, people are often more willing to go along with the hypnotist suggestions, as you say, partly because of the social context and their expectations.

34:07This can create the illusion of mind control, but it's far from the reality of what hypnosis is. Right. So you get called up on stage. You sort of don't want to let the magician down in the audience. You don't want to let anybody down. They're all here for a good time. You don't want to be the guy who doesn't play along. And I've heard that hypnotists, they screen and target the most susceptible people in the audience. And actually, I have a friend who grew up on the street and he is part Albanian, part French, part Italian, whatever. And he grew up on the streets in Europe and he's basically like a really talented, I hate to say this, like con man kind of.

34:44He's very smooth. And we would go out for drinks and he could do amazing things. Really amazing. He would go, that girl right there. I am going to watch this guys. And he would walk up to her. And I know he doesn't know her because I might even know the person works there because it's my neighborhood. And he just showed up out of the blue because that's how he rolls. And he'll knock on my door at one o 'clock in the morning in New York. And he's like, I'm here. And he's like, we're going out. We're having a night on the town. I'm like, it's Tuesday. So we would go out and he would just pick a woman and he would be like, look at you.

35:17You want to give me a kiss. Look at this deep love you have for me. We just met. And the girl would be like, and melt into his arms. And I'm like, what is happening right now? I know you didn't pay her because you have no money. You're sleeping on my couch. What is going on? And he could do this. And I finally was like, okay, explain this. And he goes, I can tell who's going to be susceptible to this. It's not that I can do this to whoever I want as much as I'd like you to believe that. He's like, I just look around and I see who is feeling the Valentino, his name is Valentino, of course, who's feeling the Valentino vibe.

35:48And I think this is what he is doing. I don't even think he knows that he's doing this. If you would like Jordan Harbinger to keep doing the French accent that's supposed to be Albanian, please send an email to the show. No, he's got an accent that even he friggin can't identify. He just... Maybe that was perfect then. That was like, you just did a perfect one yeah i mean he calls me like poppy yeah but then he also has like all these other he's like baby come i'll do your hair you look fantastic fantastico like i'm pretty sure even he's just like making up whatever street accent he has that he grew up with yeah i'm pretty sure he's just american and he's putting he's just putting on the whole thing that would also not terribly surprise me it would actually make sense but there's times where this guy guy is living in a mansion with a Bulgarian model.

36:34And I'm like, what is going on? And then there's other times where he's like, yeah, I'm just couch surfing. Like what happened to the model in the mansion? And he's like, oh, good things come to an end. Jordan, you know, there's Poppy. That's him. He's like a guy from a gypsy movie. I know you're not supposed to say that, but I mean like traveling, trickster, romantic guy, really amazing guy, really interesting guy. But anyway, way. The hypnosis thing, this is clearly what he's doing, right? He finds people who have a certain look in their eye and he just goes like, oh, I can meet this woman and shack up with her for a week at her nice apartment or her apartment that she has that I don't have because I'm in another city where I'm homeless.

37:14And he just had to do this for so long that it's a survival instinct. Yeah, I think there's something to that. There definitely is being able to see a susceptibility, But again, I wouldn't want to conflate it with being susceptible necessarily to other things. I don't think because you're susceptible to a form of hypnosis, it means that you would also fall for, you know, junk mail spam scams and things like that. I think it's a different kind of thing. No, I don't think they're gullible. I think they're just susceptible to this particular thing. It's not like, and I met some of the women that he's done this to.

37:45They're not idiots. These aren't like people where you go, oh my gosh, this person will fall for anything. It's like a server at a place who's been perfectly nice to me for months at a time. And she meets him and she just somehow falls in love immediately. And he'll bring her back to our apartment and she's like dancing and singing. And I'm like, this shy girl is now in a completely different mode. And looking back, I'm like, oh, there's some consent issues here now that I think about it, right? Like with what's going on. But at the time, I'm like 25 and I'm just thinking, wow, this guy's got crazy game.

38:14Well, given what we've looked into about the moral issues and how you can't really hypnotize someone to do something against their will, then I wonder if there really are consent issues. That would be something to do a deeper dive on. We don't really know. I guess it's a tricky ground, isn't it? Yeah. Look, at the end of the day, again, I know some of the women that he met, none of them were like, where's your friend who's screwing me over? They were just like, where is he? He's so interesting. What is his deal? How do you know that guy? Nobody that I met after they met him was like feeling burned by it.

38:46They were just kind of like, what a whirlwind that was. It was like something out of a romance novel for them. This is a guy who would write them a goodbye letter, leave at four o 'clock in the morning. And he even did this to me. He would write a letter like, thank you for letting me stay at your place. But when you open the letter, the money he owes you comes out. And so do a bunch of flower petals that he got from like some person's flowers in New York. Jesus. Yeah. This guy, what a showman. Such a showman. Yeah. Speaking of showmen, I was at a Derren Brown show recently, the magician and mentalist.

39:16And I saw how he, and he does this publicly on his TV shows as well. So I'm not like giving out any secret here, but he sort of tried to hypnotize or influence the entire audience. There's like 20 ,000 people there. So what he does is he keeps adding layers and layers to this hypnosis process. So he gets everybody to like stand up, put your hands behind or put your hands together and like they're stuck. Right. And yeah, and your hands are supposed to be stuck. And I really wanted mine to be stuck. Cause again, I wanted to experience what that would be like, but you know, It was just easy to move my hands apart, and it was a bit disappointing.

39:49So he keeps doing all these things where he says, right, well, if your hands are stuck, stay standing. And he does trick after trick like that, and eventually you're left with the five most susceptible people in an audience of 20 ,000 people. And then they come up on stage, those five people. And he just clicks his fingers. That's how easily these people fall into a trance, and he's just carrying them then. and these kinds of people who can easily fall into a trance are supposed to make up about 10 % of the population. So scientists have measured what again what happens in the brain during a trance and they found a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate and a decrease in the links between the part of the brain for moving your body and the part for understanding what you're doing with your body.

40:36So it is really like a science and it's pretty impressive. Although whenever I've heard Darren Brown talk about it, he seems to have no idea what's going on. But a bit like that movie Get Out, there does seem to be this voice at the back that is still there. And so if you are being told to go murder someone, that voice can kick in and go, hang on a minute, you know, wake up. So to get the effects they need on stage, magicians need to mix the hypnosis with a range of stage tricks. So I ended up going up on stage with Darren Brown, and he did all these amazing things. And the audience were there in hysterics, and everyone was laughing at me and I was embarrassed because he was able to reveal some pretty embarrassing stories about me to 50 ,000 people or 20 ,000 or whatever it was.

41:15It was just a big number of people. And I was amazed at the time, like how has he got like looked into my eyes and found out all this stuff? And look, you're not supposed to give away the magician's tricks. He's an amazing magician, hypnotist and showman, but he's also a comedian and he puts on the most fantastic show. But being up on stage and thinking it all through later, I was able to see exactly how he did each bit. And if you knew, it's actually a little disappointing and simplistic, but that's magic. You know, magic is dressing up really simple, boring things to make them look incredibly interesting.

41:49I really want to come up with some sort of corny pseudo hypnosis phrase for getting you to buy a mattress, but I'm coming up a little bit dry in lieu of that. Let's just hear from some of our sponsors. We'll be right back. Thank you once again for listening to the show. The support of our advertisers keeps the lights on around here. All the deals, all the sponsors are in one place, one searchable place, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor, any promo code from any time on the show using our AI chatbot on the website as well. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

42:18Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Darren Brown is amazing. He's been on this podcast. We talked a lot about what he's done, but you're right. When I saw Penn and Teller and I knew those guys from, I went backstage with them too because they were friends with a friend of mine and they'll tell you that it's all tricks even on their tv stuff they're like this is a trick don't try to practice catching a bullet with your like this is fake and yeah i'm like wow this stuff must be so elaborate and pen will say something like actually this one is so shockingly simple that if we told you you would never want to see another one of our shows again because you'd be like you'd be offended at how simple this trick is.

42:59Yeah. And I believe that, right? Because it's probably something obvious, like, well, the bullet is in his mouth and he hides it well initially. And then they check the gun, but then we swap the gun. Or like the gun is never real. It has fake real, you know, it's all designed to look like, and then it just, yeah, it has a blanket it. And then something, something, when I shoot him, it produces the bullet. Like, it's going to be so simple that he's like, you're just going to be angry with us. You're going to want your money back if you find out how simple some of these are. But more importantly, what were these embarrassing stories that he revealed about you to the audience of 50 ,000 people, Andrew?

43:32Yeah, that you'll have to hypnotize me to find out. That's between me, Darren, and the 20 or 50 or whatever thousand people who were there. You know what? I wouldn't ever have a gun pointed at me like that. Even in a magic trick, even I know it's a plastic gun. I just feel like obviously there was that rust shooting with Alec Baldwin. You just think like somehow something could have gotten confused and now that's a real gun and not doing it. Yeah. I mean, this is Penn shooting at Teller, not like, okay, random audience guy, come on up here and just trust me. You know, this is like him checking the gun.

44:04But even then, yeah, you'd rather be Penn than Teller in that particular trick. I would be, yeah. But yeah, that trick, you know, with Darren and all that, there's no way he can know from looking at me secret stories about my life, right? So I don't need to give a, this isn't giving away too much. obviously somebody who was with me was asked things i don't want to be that guy who gives away too many things but you can't that magic doesn't exist where you can like find out what happened when i was 15 and i was doing this and someone else saw me you know that had to be person i was with me wrote it down and later that was confirmed so that's what's happening but the show was incredible suffice to say it was a huge audience derren brown and i was very red in the face you know you know when you're so red that your eyes water oh god eyes were like dripping I suppose that's crying, actually.

44:48I wasn't crying. Yeah, that's called crying because you've been humiliated in front of 50 ,000 people. Yeah, my eyes, it's a sort of very 1950s man way of describing crying, isn't it? My eyes watered for some reason. I have no idea what was going on. I felt flushed due to the lights. My eyes became dehydrated as they seeped some sort of liquid. I have no idea what it might have been. But yeah, look, it was still a great time. And hypnosis in magic acts really can be a lot of fun. Yeah, even if that fun is at your expense. It does seem like a lot of fun. And I think one of the things that I like about Darren Brown is he, again, like Penn and Teller, doesn't pretend to have magical powers.

45:25He makes it clear from the start. It's all an act. It's a trick. There was a Netflix special he did called Miracle, where he basically pretended to be, I think, a faith healer or an evangelical pastor of some kind. and he got people up on stage and he somehow cured their blindness and their pains and all the while explaining to the audience that he was using psychological tricks. He's not channeling God or whatever. And I think he even wanted to train someone else to kind of do this, but it didn't. It was too hard because you're teaching somebody to be an amazing stage magician, basically. But I think the proof of what he's trying to do is show that everybody who's doing this is using these same tricks.

46:03Yeah. Just a little aside, did you see that one where he managed to beat a lot of chess grandmasters. No, but that's incredible. What if he just got them to make mistakes, I guess? There you go. And I'm going to get into that in a minute about the psychology of it. That's what he probably wants to make you think is happening. But he explained it on the show. So again, it's okay, I think, to reveal it. He got like 12 of them of the biggest grandmasters in the world at chess, and he's not very good at chess. But all he did was he got the first person to make the first move. Then he went around the circle and he made the same move that the person before did.

46:33And he remembered everybody's moves. So he basically used their own moves against them as he went around the circle playing each of these chess people. And he won six, lost six, and drew one. So I think it was like 13 people he played against. Right. Even beating one in 12 would have been incredible because it's a chess grandmaster and you're just some schmo making a TV show. Well, it's Darren Brown, but still, you're not a chess grandmaster. So to do that by using their moves is so smart, but yeah, so simple, right? Like he didn't trick them into forgetting their strategy. He just used their strategy.

47:03Exactly. So that miracle show you talked about, that reminded me a little of the exorcist that I investigated for a BBC documentary. You can still find that on YouTube. Just type my name and Andrew Gold, exorcism, you find that. And I hung around his church while he exercised people. I'm quite sure that some of the people I saw him exercise went into a hypnotic trance or something similar to that. And the amazing thing was that they did seem to get better and recover from their various psychological ailments. It only worked temporarily, but it was amazing to see how placebo and hypnosis combined to seemingly heal these people for months and months.

47:38And I remember thinking, if only he was honest about his work, like, hey guys, come and see me. You've got like this psychological problem at the moment. I can cure you for like three or four months. Maybe you've got exams to do and you want to be in a good state of mind. I'll cure you for a few months. This is placebo. It's a kind of hypnosis and it will cure you temporarily. It wouldn't have been such a bad thing. But in the end, he turned out to be a charlatan who was charging extortionate fees to people who couldn't afford it. And he nearly killed me when we exposed him. So it was a bit of a bad.

48:05We talked about this on the show the first time. That was episode 596, by the way. Didn't he have like an underage assistant that was one of the girls that he supposedly cured from demonic possession and he was taking her on trips and there's photos of him snogging her a bunch. He's just kind of a pedo, gross guy. Yeah, well, allegedly. Allegedly. The woman was over 18, but he was in his mid-50s and he's a priest, and he's wandering around with this 19-year-old girl who had schizophrenia. Right, so it's not illegal, it's just really gross. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And charging poor people extortionate fees to say that he can channel God and cure them.

48:40Yeah, bad. Gross. Darren Brown, also on the show, discusses his shows as well, episode 150. We've since become friends. He's a really great guy, as are you, my friend. Well, thank you so much for saying so. Of course. I have to. Otherwise, it's going to be so awkward. So I kind of didn't have a choice. It's written into my contract. Every episode, you have to compliment me at least once. I've made my fiancé sign a similar deal. I think that's wise. That's wise. Good writer. Darren Brown was also, I mean, he was, I think he watched my Exorcism film as well, but he didn't recognize me when he hit me up on stage.

49:09His memory isn't that good. But at least he didn't seem to recognize. He can remember chess moves from Grandmasters and their whole strategy, but he can't remember a face from a YouTube video. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd lost a bit of weight, you know. But I think you've touched on a big problem, and that's being misled, right? So to an extent, we're being misled even with Derren Brown and other magicians. There are often several layers to the deceit. Something is supposed to look like it's magic. We know that it's not, right? We're paying to go to the theater to be misled. The thrill is in being misled, you know?

49:39And so a lot of magicians will let you believe that what's really going on is not magic, but that they're reading you psychologically, which is almost as impressive that they're spotting body language, slight movements in your eyes and reading your mind. And they sort of, they're admitting to you, okay, magic isn't real, but this is the real magic behind the magic, you know, the psychological stuff. But there's another deeper layer behind that because you and I have already debunked body language on this podcast. And we know you can't just look at someone's body language and know their secrets.

50:07So as we were saying, the reality is usually a bit rubbish. The use of stagehands, hidden cameras, just information they found out about you before, things like that. But we go there for the spectacle. The problem is people like my exorcist guy, or famous or infamous charlatans who really claim to have magical or supernatural powers and mislead people in that sense. So Yuri Geller comes to mind. He gives false hope to people by claiming, for example, that he can locate missing passengers from a plane crash. His most famous act is bending a spoon with his mind. But unlike other stage magicians, he appears to really want us to believe that he's doing it with his mind, right?

50:46Yeah. Most of them are like, isn't it cool that I can make it look like I'm doing it with my mind? He really wants you to think it is that. The late skeptic, James Randi, offered$1 million to anyone who could prove they genuinely had supernatural abilities, and Geller hasn't yet stepped forward. Surprise, surprise. Yeah, he's really a sort of a dangerous fellow and a charlatan of kind of the grossest kind. And it does remind me, the mentalism stuff is incredible, though. I went to a show where a guy said, write down a place that you want to or did go on vacation. And I remember like writing under the chair, North Korea, thinking he's never going to guess this.

51:22And, you know, he doesn't have to pick us. He can go with the whole audience. And he was like, this is a place that most people wouldn't go. And we're so far away from him that we can, you know, we're not next to him at all. And he guessed North Korea. And so the only thing I could think of was there's cameras under the seats that look under. But even then, he didn't say write it under the seat. We just happened to do that. So I don't know. He's got to have - But the pen, was it his pen? I don't even think it was his pen. It might've been though. And that's pretty important if it was. It might've been though.

51:51I can't remember. It's been a long time, but it was really incredible. I felt like, how the F did you do that? Yeah. Although my best mentalism memory here would be, we went to another show because it's, you know, there's a lot of that stuff in San Francisco. And this guy who worked at Google, but was also doing mentalism and it was really good at it. He had a show and it was like his first or second time doing it, I think, in front of a large audience. And we met his parents who were there. And I said, oh, you must be so proud of your son. We're talking about it. And I go, oh, you know what? Let's play a trick on him.

52:17What's something he had as a child that only he would remember potentially? And they told me the name of like this guy's stuffed animal. And I went up to him after the show. There's like a drinks thing after. And I was like, wow, that was so good, man. You're really amazing. He's like, hey, thanks. I was like, I'm a little bit into mentalism. Nowhere near at your level. But, you know, like when I look at you, I'm thinking something, something. I can't remember exactly how I brought it up, but I was like, you know, you look like the kind of guy who would name his teddy bear, like Rockspin or whatever the hell the name was.

52:45And he was, his eyes widened so much. And then he went, wait a second. And I was like, yeah, I met your parents. They're very lovely people. And he, it was a really fun sort of trick. But when you get to Uri Geller, he's kind of doing the same thing, but he's telling you he has supernatural powers and that he can talk to your dead relatives for 10 grand. And he's a complete friggin bastard because of that. Yeah, opinion. This is Jordan's opinion about a man who allegedly did the things we said. Right, correct, yes, allegedly, because he's a... But my opinion, professionally, is that he's a complete charlatan bastard.

53:16We want the magicians misleading us to be honest about their deception. I think that's what I'm getting at. And that makes sense, right? Snake oil salesmen who managed to con others into believing their magic powers is terrible. Part of the reason is, one, scams are bad, but it also targets the most desperate and vulnerable almost all the time. That's what really gets in my craw. If you're tricking a rich guy into giving up his money, that's unfair. That's fraud. That's a scam. It's a crime. But it's even worse when you're doing it to a mother whose son was kidnapped and you're saying, like, I know where he is.

53:47He's looking for you. Pay me the money you would normally need to take care of the rest of your children so that I can help you find him. And what you're doing is like screwing around with her emotions, you know, and that's worse than fraud. With respect to hypnosis, it appears we have a tool that can be both powerful and controversial. So what's the bottom line here? Is it something people should consider for some uses or approach with caution or not at all? Well, can I just say, can we add another episode called Jordan Harbinger, What Gets in My Craw? Yes. I like that. Sure. Why not? I've never heard that expression before and it sounds fantastic.

54:22Yeah, it gets in my craw. Like we have to make a cool alliteration, like Jordan's craw. What crawls in my craw. Jordan's craw unloaded. Somehow that's really disgusting. I don't know. Anyway, continue. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, hypnosis, bottom line, as with many things, it's not black and white. Hypnosis can be a powerful tool when used appropriately and with consideration for its limitations. At the start of this episode, we talked about hypnosis in sports and joked about how it didn't help the England soccer team, but hypnosis under the label of visualization is taken a little more seriously in the world of sports today.

54:58One study in India looked at 22 cricket team players and found better throwing accuracy and all-round performance in players who were hypnotized. Visualization has athletes focusing on all their senses as they imagine themselves scoring points, winning games, and so on. It seems to work to an extent. The reason for this is that neurometer pathways are often the same or similar. That's neuromotor for people who are not British, but continue. Oh yeah. In fact, I think that's for everyone. It might be. Neurometer sounds like something that measures neuromotor pathways. Yeah. We've just given away that I'm not a neuroscientist.

55:36These are all foreign words to me. Neuromotor pathways are often the same or similar when someone is carrying out the action and when they're just visualizing it. So if you have to step out in front of 90 ,000 fans for a nerve-wracking big game, it might help to have visualized it many times. I think that's what happened with my own hypnosis when I had to give that talk. It no longer felt like the first time I'd done it before a bunch of times in my head. One advocate of visualization, which is also known as mental maps or simply just as imagery, is swimmer Missy Franklin, who won four gold medals at the London Olympics.

56:12Swimmer Michael Phelps and soccer star Ronaldinho are also big proponents of visualization. Perhaps you and I should imagine ourselves putting out brilliant podcasts time and time again. Yeah, no imagination necessary, frankly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. In most cases, this visualization is not really hypnosis, at least not in the sense we all imagine it with a swaying object, a ticking clock, or a stirring spoon. You don't go into a trance. Hypnosis itself is not a magic bullet that can solve all problems or unlock all secrets of the mind. but visualization can help. Still, it's pretty impressive, Justin, how it can help you recall old memories.

56:51That's amazing. And, you know, send some people into a trance that really shows up differently in brain scans. That's sort of hard to fake, I would imagine. And I suppose it's important for people to approach it with an open mind, but also a healthy dose of skepticism, just as we might guard against dismissing its potential outright. We should also be wary of attributing to it powers that it doesn't possess at all, right? So placebo, cool, certain types of memory things cool, curing your actual disease instead of getting real medicine not cool. So thanks, Andrew. I appreciate your balanced perspective on this complex and often misunderstood topic.

57:26And that's all we got for today, folks. Remember, stay curious, stay skeptical. And as always, we'll see you next time. And if you have a topic suggestion for the show, email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. A lot of really good suggestions coming into the inbox there. Show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Andrew Gold on his podcast On the Edge with Andrew Gold anywhere you get your podcasts.

57:57This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Milio Campo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer but not your lawyer. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Remember, We rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

58:28You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with the one and only Dr. Drew Pinsky of Loveline fame. It's like a movie script. This person was saying a bunch of crap, didn't make any sense. And then you said something along the lines of, is there someone else in there I can talk to? And then they were like, sure. Yeah, I could tell it was multiple. Yeah, that's a pretty easy thing for me to tell. You listen with your whole body. You don't listen with your ears. And that really started happening dealing with drug addicts out in the clinic because they pull you into a vortex. If I hear the sound, you know the little cartoon where these go, yuggity, yuggity, yuggity, yuggity.

59:02Yeah, sure. I know I'm with a drug addict. Okay. When I hear that yuggity, yuggity sound in my head, I go, somebody's doing drugs. I just know. I'm just going to be sitting here listening to somebody going, huh, huh, huh. And all of a sudden I go, oh, okay, I got it. I can stop listening now and just start asking what they're taking, how much they're on, that kind of stuff. I'm thinking right now of this guy that called us and wanted to know. Women always forget when they find out what I was in jail for. And all of a sudden Adam goes, wait a minute, find out that you were in jail or find out what you were in jail for?

59:29He goes, what I was in jail for. And we go, oh, well, what were you in jail for? I broke into a mausoleum and I twisted off the head of an old lady and boiled it to a skull because I needed it for my little brother's snake's aquarium. And I thought, wow. And you don't understand that might be a little disturbing to me. Well, why? Okay, so he was psychopath. Psychopath, yeah. Self-esteem obviously doesn't care if you're successful. Right. Self-esteem is something established, I think, by age five. I mean, you can enhance it and you can move it a little bit, but most of it is set early. And mine was bad.

1:00:06Yeah, that's okay. That's all right. You know, it just, if it gives you trouble, if it makes you feel bad, if it gives you symptoms, it impairs your functioning, that's therapy time. Okay. Did you ever try therapy for that? 11 years. Oh my God. Not for that per se. I was having overwhelming anxiety. That was my main reason. At least that's my wife's reason for sending me. For more with Dr. Drew, including what experiencing imposter syndrome usually reveals about you and how we can spot the behaviors of addiction in others as well as in ourselves, check out episode 72 right here on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:00:54your online and in-person sales? That's kind of our thing. Wherever you sell, businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen. Shopify.com slash listen. This episode is sponsored in part by the Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a great new podcast can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Let me save you some hassle. Check out Something You Should Know with my friend Mike Carruthers. Every episode is packed with fascinating insights that you can actually use. Mike interviews top experts on topics that shape your life, like how to optimize your brain chemistry, the best and worst ways to apologize, probably could have used that recently, why couples hate to talk about money.

1:01:31No matter the topic, Mike asks the questions you'd want to ask, getting straight to the good stuff. And the conversations are always engaging, always insightful, guaranteed to leave you a little smarter than before. They've got thousands of five-star reviews. But do you even need that? I'm recommending it. You don't need other people's opinion, right? At this point, I would hope. Anyway, give it a listen. Just search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening to something you should know. Thank you.