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About this Episode
A new group of fans flocked to NLP in the 90s: pickup artists. At the center of the movement was Ross Jeffries, a hypnotist and purported expert in getting women into bed. Jeffries lets Zoë in on the secret to his success, as she and Alice grapple with the realization that maybe they, as journalists, have more in common with pickup artists than they’d like to admit.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
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There's this question that's been haunting our series, Zoe,
and also neuro-linguistic programming in general.
Here it is.
Is it possible to hypnotize someone to get them to do what you want without them knowing?
This is the big spooky question.
In 1983, science digest was quoting experts who warned NLP could become, quote,
the most sophisticated mind-control technology ever.
A lot of academics say it's BS.
There's no magic switch that works on everyone, not even hypnosis.
The CIA tried to hypnotize people into becoming on winning assassins in the 1950s,
and it totally didn't work.
Right, Manchurian candidate stuff.
But there is one school that suggests hypnotic mind control is real.
And that's the pickup artists.
Yep, the Get Any Woman to sleep with you, speed-siduction guys.
And get this.
There's one pickup artist in particular who got everything he knows from NLP.
I'm really good in inducing trance.
I could speak to you in a way where I induce trance.
I will not unless you give me your consent because it's not a toy.
Master hypnotist Ross Jeffries.
Here he is in 2000, prowling Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles with BBC correspondent Louis Theroux.
Where are we now, Ross?
This is the coffee bean and tea leaf one of the pre-melt places in the marina to pick up women.
Rossessi prefers cafes like this to clubs or bars,
because in clubs and bars,
women are there to reject men and get free drinks.
I have to shout to be heard.
It sucks.
But this is a nice friendly place.
People are off their guard, you know.
His targets have just finished work.
They're relaxed and down to chat.
He zeroes in on a blonde woman with a 90s,
Meg Ryan style haircut, sitting outside having a coffee and cigarette with a friend.
No, I don't know how many people I just moved here.
Don't to me, but you're from the Midwest.
Yes, how could you tell?
You're from Chicago or Wisconsin.
Detroit.
Detroit, but close, huh?
First of all, my name is Ross.
I'm Jen.
Okay.
As Ross chats her up, he slips into an empty chair.
Not at her table, but just beside it.
He sits legs apart, confident, but casual,
turning slightly so he can face her.
Then, he launches into a speed seduction pattern.
Okay, I'm going to tell you something about yourself.
You make imagery in your mind.
Very, very vividly.
You're a very vivid daydreamer.
And in fact, so you're smiling because you know I'm right.
You can look at someone and they can think you're listening.
And usually you are listening.
Okay.
But if you're bored, you can be looking right at one.
And even though you're looking right at this person,
you could be a million miles away in your favorite ideal fantasy locations.
True?
You're right.
I'm absolutely right on.
Notice how he keeps the language vague.
He's not asking her where that fantasy vacation spot is or what it's like.
He's just getting her to imagine it, to ease her into a pleasurable state.
How'd you know that?
I do a very rare and very unusual, hardly anyone knows about.
It's a form of hypnosis that involves no sleep.
No, I call it blissnosis.
The two chat a bit more.
And then the show cuts to Louis interviewing Ross and the woman.
Jen, about what just happened.
Did Ross just try and pick you up?
I didn't think of it as him picking me up, but we had a great conversation.
And we're going to have coffee sometime.
Did I understand about you in a much deeper level than most people?
Yeah, I felt it.
Yeah.
And you know what?
You know that feeling, right?
Just as Ross reminds her of that feeling, his voice drops into a slow deliberate tone.
He starts running a finger slowly up her arm towards her shoulder.
Louis looks horrified.
Better.
Better.
Even better right now.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, more you focus in, more intense the warmth.
Why don't I press it?
La, la, what is going on?
Is that real good?
Do you want to be on TV?
Oh, does it feel good?
Is that what this is about?
On a scale of one to ten, how good does it feel?
Are you in?
That's ten.
Did you hear that?
Did you hear that?
No, I'm not.
What do you do?
I work for an earline.
Really?
Yep.
And you're not just trying to be on TV, right?
No, no.
Is it people just doing some voodoo on your arm?
That's okay.
Thank you very much.
Okay, Jennifer.
See you later.
Bye.
Was that real?
Yeah, it's totally real.
Was that real, seriously?
That's totally real, dude.
You know what?
You're hypnotized, huh?
I did hypnotize you.
Take a deep breath in.
And breathe out.
Your conscious mind is going to go totally away
so that I can speak privately with your unconscious mind.
You can notice that you feel rested,
more alert, confident.
From kaleidoscope and iHeartpodcasts,
this is episode seven of Mind Games.
I'm Zoila Skaz.
I'm Alice Hatt.
I'm Zoila Skaz.
I'm Alice Hines.
You don't know how you did it.
Do you?
You're going to a little time distortion state.
And you're out of it.
When we left off our last episode,
Richard Bandler had just been acquitted of murder.
People were wondering if he could have hypnotized the jury
or warped his friend James Moreno's mind.
Around the time Bandler walked free in 1988,
he got a new student who would take NLP
into the internet age and spawn the pickup artist movement.
Okay, so for younger listeners,
we should explain what the fuck the pickup artist movement is.
Here's how I figured it out.
So I was in high school in the 2000s
and there was this best-selling book called The Game.
People's annoying older brothers were showing up at parties
and they were reading it and pretending they had all these hacks
to sleep with the hottest girls.
The game introduced readers to a bunch of guys
intent on restoring the natural order of the universe.
You know, where every man gets the babe harem he so rightly deserves?
Pick-up artistry was a big deal in the 90s and 2000s
in part because more women were supporting themselves
and some men felt like they were getting a raw deal.
The movement gained so much attention
that major pop culture reporters like the BBC's Louis Thuroux
even profiled at stars.
There were economic reasons for this.
The American dream was falling apart.
Guys couldn't just go and get manufacturing jobs
and support households with them like their dads had.
At the same time, there was a huge backlash against feminism.
And so this guy, Ross Jeffries,
was the provocative face of the so-called pickup artist's movement.
Here he is on a major talk show of the day,
Wally George's hot seat.
For women, getting some is a choice.
For men, getting some is a chore.
Oh, if you don't recognize that,
you're going to get your hair done.
Hey, I have news for him getting some is impossible.
Tom Cruise even played an alpha male seduction guru
based on Ross in the 1999 movie Magnolia.
Respect the cock.
And tame the cunt.
Tame it!
This is from the 90s, but it's still so relevant.
Guys talk like that on the internet today,
like in cells, for instance.
And then there's this so-called alpha influencers,
like Andrew Tate,
who somehow convinces men if they're misogynistic,
they'll also get rich.
Okay, brief science rant.
It drives me completely bonkers, Alice.
How the manosphere uses the term alpha,
like it's a real biological concept.
Wait, okay, so it's not?
No, the idea that there are alpha walls
doming all the beta walls for the right to breed is total BS.
It was based on studies of wolves and captivity.
Packs in the wild are just families, like parents with kids.
The biologist who did most of popularize the idea of alphas in the 1970s
has even said he was completely wrong about everything
and has begged his publisher to stop printing his book.
That's crazy.
Okay, but we're not here to talk about all the absurd claims
the manosphere makes about science
and what's quote-unquote natural.
We are here to talk about pick-up artists, though,
and we want to use them as a case study
to figure out whether hypno-NLP mind control
could actually be real.
Most of the people we've met so far
use NLP on willing subjects.
You hire Richard Bandler because you want him
to reprogram your brain.
You pay gazillions of dollars to go see Tony Robbins
because you want to unlock all that unlimited power.
Even if you go to a car dealership and the salesman uses NLP on you
without you knowing, you're only there
because you're fundamentally open to buying a car.
But women don't go to coffee shops to get hypnotized
and creepily stroked on the arm.
Right.
And this is what sets Ross Jeffries apart.
The idea that you can use these techniques on anyone, anywhere.
I went to San Diego to find out how and if it works.
Good morning.
I hope you're not too jet lag.
I hope you're ready because I'm coming loaded for bear.
And have all sorts of sneaky covert
and NLP hypnotic tricks up my sleeve.
Zoe, Zoe.
Can't wait to see you there.
Before I met Ross, he sent me many, many voicemailos.
The suffering of many men is inconceivable.
I'm not putting down on how women suffer, how women are abused.
So full disclosure, Ross asked me to call him by his civilian name, Paul,
which I did when we were talking.
But because everyone knows him as Ross Jeffries,
we're going to use that for the rest of the episode.
Sorry, Paul.
Sorry, Ross.
These days, he's expanded his brand to include sales.
He's embraced Vipassana meditation and builds himself as a healer focused on men's pain.
But the pain of men is shamed.
They're not allowed to talk about it as he said.
He can't talk to anyone about it.
He'd be shamed about it.
Ross had just texted me a screenshot of something called the Ross Jeffries Elite Student
Mastermind Group.
A man there said he was a 31-year-old virgin who'd been abused as a child and that he had
severe eczema all over his face and body.
Speed seduction, he wrote, had been a big help.
So I send this to you because I want to share with you
how I choke around and call myself the guru getting laid.
That's actually one of his more polite sober case.
He's also called himself the guru of gash.
I need a vulgar language and stuff to attract attention.
But I send this to you in the hope that you paint me in a fair light because if you don't,
the people who need that help will never reach out for it.
Ross was worried I'd drag him through the mud, which is a reasonable concern because a lot of
women hate him, at least his Ross Jeffries persona.
These days, Ross is in his late 60s with short curly white hair mustache and beard.
When we met, he was wearing a purple button down under a plum-colored blazer,
which honestly felt like an NLP deep cut.
Big deal hypnotherapist Milton Erickson or a lot of purple,
and Erickson is one of Ross's all-time heroes.
Ross's polarizing persona was born in the late 1980s.
At the time, Ross was a failed comedy writer living in Los Angeles,
furious with all the women who wouldn't sleep with him.
I was very awkward, socially backward, was unattractive, or at least I thought I was,
and what you project is what people see.
I didn't have social skills, and I was not brought up in a family where those were
emphasized or modeled or taught, and I certainly didn't have any skills in attracting women again.
No skills until he discovered NLP.
He was browsing at a bookstore when he felt an almost mystical pull.
And however improbable this may seem, and use your adult ability to tell when someone's
bullshitting you, you're an experienced journalist, and this is what happened.
My hand floated up, and I grabbed a book, and it said,
frogs into princes, Richard Boundler and John Grinter live.
I thought, oh, okay, I'll give this a shot. Why not?
I recalled distinctly sitting down on the floor of that bookstore, and flipping through
it and thinking, oh, that's interesting.
Ha, that's, uh-oh, wow, this is amazing.
Frogs into princes wasn't about getting laid.
It was the first approachable, not-too-jarginny book from NLP co-founders, Richard Boundler
and John Grinter. It came out in 1979 with a psychedelic fantasy prince on the cover,
and got a ton of people hooked on NLP, including Ross.
The book revealed Erickson's conversational model, where it's completely a matter of what appears
to be a conversation, but it has presuppositions, it has metaphors, it has stories.
That immediately struck me as something of incredible power.
And I began to see how I can use that in conversations with women
to engineer states of emotion, which to me is what it's all about, it's about engineering
consciousness. Ross read every scrap of NLP literature he could get his hands on.
Around 1988, he attended a seminar with Richard Boundler, and another hypnotist named Don Wolfe
in San Diego. Don gave him a hypnotic command to call Boundler an asshole, and he time Boundler
said Manuel Noriega. I guess Boundler was into talking about Panamanian dictators, because
sure enough, he said the name. And I remember jumping up and calling him an asshole,
and he came over to me and threatened to thrall me. And then something happened that I don't remember.
Apparently Richard took me backstage and hypnotized me and told me that I was going to take NLP
in a completely new direction, innovate with it.
Oh my god, he did it. He just said new direction, or new direction.
Ugh, that's like this pickabartistism. It's a sneaky command to imagine boners, which supposedly
gets you interested in people, though I honestly don't know if that works at all.
You don't feel it, Alice? No. The irresistible image of a boner? It's not working on you?
No. Huh. Weird. Well, this and more hypnotic speech,
seduction tactics after the break.
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carton, wrapper, or bag, or a McDonald's cup. Yes, any of those items you do it.
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I could help feeling like once you cut through the cringe marketing, a lot of Ross Jeffries'
Speed Seduction Tactics are just basic social skills. Among other radical strategies,
Ross recommends asking women questions about themselves and actually listening to what they
have to say. Here he is demonstrating on a woman named Barbara for a crowd of men in a video
someone posted on YouTube in 2020. So let me ask you, do you mind if I ask what do you do for a living?
Sure, I'm a writer and author. Okay, cool. Now, my response is one of genuine curiosity because
I like creative people. This is not fainting. Let me ask you a question. I know as a writer,
people face certain challenges. There's always a challenge of selling your work and all that
other stuff. Amen. Amen to that. So I'm getting some rapport. I'm pacing her world by demonstrating
verbal understanding. I demonstrate understanding so I get rapport. But other more sophisticated
techniques involve hypnosis. Speed Seduction newbies learn scripted stories and language patterns
designed to elicit certain reactions like arousal and trust. The whole idea is that you can use
NLP to change your own emotional state and that of your prospects. If I said, if I wanted to create a
fascination with Barbara and I looked her, I said, you will be fascinated with me. You will hang on
every word. It's gonna happen me, okay? Now, I could try to create a fascination by saying,
if I've been really, really intrigued by someone, you ever meet someone like a teacher who is just
you knew that this person had such a passion for what they were doing, that everything they said
painted vivid mental images in your mind, their words were guides to your own experience. So with
each word, you're interesting. So Ross is trying to get you to daydream so you lose track of what
you're doing in the conversation or maybe that you're trying to exit this conversation. Ross broke
down methods like this for me during his interview. What's the technique? Well, let me give you the
principles behind it. First and foremost, I believe that any kind of persuasion, whether it's a
sale, whether it's an interview, whether it's a seduction, the currency of any of that is focus.
If the person can't focus deeply on what it is you're listening to and that smile only means that
a deeper and more exploratory part of your mind is responding in a way where you didn't expect.
Anyway, so you need to create focus and after focus, it's a matter of what states of consciousness
do you want that person in. There's all sorts of ways to evoke these states. I read or jump in.
So when you slow down your voice and do hypnopal speak, is that supposed to be putting me in a
transfer now? I'm leaning. I'm leaning into it so you can see it. I would normally never be this
overt about it. It would be covert. What? Okay, give me the same line, but covert mode, covert.
Well, you're expecting it. But no, I mean, this is such an artificial situation. We've got folks
in the other room. There's all sorts of ways to evoke these states. Okay.
For example, some of them have to do the kinds of questions you ask.
I teach my students to not use fact-based conversations. For example, if I said to you,
if we were on a date and I said, what do you like to do for fun? Everyone asked that,
but if I asked what's something you've always dreamed of doing, fantasized about doing,
but haven't let yourself dare. That requires an answer from a different part of your consciousness.
It has to activate your imagination and your emotions to answer the question.
That's not a seduction in and of itself, but it's the start of getting leverage into that part of
your consciousness. Another way to gain that leverage is through a hypnotic technique called a
pattern interrupt, basically purposely derailing a conversation. See if you can catch the way Ross
does it here during our interview. When you were teaching seminars still and you were promoting
them in the ineffable way you did, were you ever concerned that the craftness and the vulgarity
of the Ross Jeffries ad copy would lure people who had dark intentions to your seminars and maybe
even alienate dudes in need who were kind of turned off by the sexist pattern.
Crass, interjecting your personal opinion into objective journalism. Now that's crass.
Now that's an NLP technique called reflexively apply to the speaker. I took your term and I
reflexively applied it to you. And that is supposed to make me feel how? It's a minor pattern interrupt.
Now you're you're a very experienced. It's not going to do jack shit with you, but it's a way of
diverting, but more importantly, it's interrupting the pattern. Okay, so he's like trying to create
confusion, which is supposed to derail your interview. And I guess make you forget what you were
going to ask him about. Yes. And then you use that fleeting moment of what the fuck to establish a
new power dynamic. I've seen Richard Bantler doing really similar things. And honestly, I think he
does it even better than Ross Jeffries. Check out this DVD called The Art and Science of Nested
Loops from 2003. Bantler's describing watching someone from across the room. If you see a woman and
you're really interested in her, you can try to work up the courage to walk over or you can go like
this. Bantler waves his hand like he's beckoning a woman over. It's easier. And she'll come over and go
yes. And you go, did you want something? Did you want something? Did you want something?
He makes it seem like she was the one who wanted something, not him, which I can honestly see working.
He's creating an opening for conversation through disorientation. Pattern interrupts are subtle,
but that's what makes them disconcerting. The idea that merely by interrupting you or saying
something that doesn't quite make sense, someone can capitalize on your confusion.
There's no distinction in my mind between shifting someone's consciousness unexpectedly
and a hypnotic technique. If I created confusion by giving you an unexpected response,
it creates a temporary, what I would call a mind stutter. A little pause in your conscious mind
and it creates a window of suggestibility. Just a little one. Not a deep trans where you're out
and I can do surgery on you. But it's the start of getting leverage into your unconscious mind.
Once you have that leverage, you can establish an anchor or embed a command.
NLP tactics we've encountered before. And anchoring is what happened in that clip you heard
at the beginning of the episode. Better, better. When Ross ran his finger up that woman's arm at the
coffee shop. Even better right now. It takes for us. You can't just abruptly start stroking people.
You've got to be smooth. There are some techniques like anchoring that get used in various
different ways. I mean to help people anchor positive feelings about themselves, for instance.
But also used out in the field on women. Can you talk about using with women? With women.
Okay, it's collaborative. It's collaborative. It's a party. It's participatory. How do you use that
with irony and a little sarcasm in your voice? Well, we'll take it as given.
Proof me wrong. Tell me about how you would use anchoring.
I don't care about anything, but okay. Tell me how you would use anchoring.
My voice is my anchor. Your voice is your anchor. I have a very distinctive voice. So if I wanted
to anchor, I'd just slightly speak just a little softer. When I want to give commands and suggestions,
I'd just be a little softer. I'm leaning on it so they can hear it at home.
So if I ever give you commands or suggestions to describe my ideal vacation, I would anchor using my
voice. I would say, do you like to travel Debbie? Really? Tell me about your ideal travel spot.
I'd let her speak and really listen. I'd say, well, I don't know how well you can
imagine this as I describe it. That's a command to imagine where I'm about to describe.
Here's the idea. Because those words are subtly set off, the brain absorbs them differently
than everything else in the sentence. It processes it outside of conscious awareness.
Ross admits his techniques don't work on every woman, but he says they work most of the time.
Well enough to have inspired a host of imitators. Are you familiar with Negging, Zoe?
Yeah, it's not a Ross thing, but it's probably the most notorious pickup artist track, right?
It's when you insult a woman in a supposedly playful way to make herself conscious. Like,
oh, it's so cute how your teeth are a little crooked. Yeah, yeah, that's it. So you might have
experienced this and maybe it worked on you, maybe it didn't. I've been trying to figure out
if Negging is NLP. We don't know exactly where its inventor who was a different pickup artist
got it from, but I did find Bandler talking about using something similar with clients.
It's from this tape called creating therapeutic change from 1987. In fact,
typically I like to embarrass them once and anchor it. Because one of the things about being
embarrassed is it is one of the forms of unfamiliarness that allows people to escape the
traditional ways that they act. Alice, do you think that works? I think Negging does and doesn't
work. Like, it wouldn't work on me, but I think it could work on someone who is maybe quite young
or for some reason is in a vulnerable place in their life and is looking for approval.
Someone whose Neg could then be hooked because they're waiting for that compliment that was with
held. I buy that. It's kind of a diagnostic tool for pickup artists to see if the person they're
talking to is seeking validation from someone else. So Alice, I've obviously been thinking a lot
about seduction while doing this reporting, and I had a kind of disturbing thought the other day.
I think journalists might have more in common with pickup artists than we'd like to admit.
I mean, absolutely. I've been thinking about the same thing throughout this whole podcast,
and I would use Richard Bannler's beckoning trick to approach someone at a conference who might
otherwise try to avoid me if I came on directly. That's a good one. And I mean, it's been said before,
right? Like, everyone got super pearl clutchy when Janet Malcolm, the New Yorker stuff writer,
famously described the journalistic process as seduction and betrayal. But I think she's dead on.
Like, when we do interviews, the whole point is to put people at ease and charm them and get
them to tell us stuff they don't consciously want to say. It makes me go back to the question we
raised at the beginning of the episode. Like, is mind control real? Is it actually possible to hypnotically
manipulate someone covertly and get them to do something they wouldn't otherwise do?
Okay. So no, I don't think it's possible to hypnotically make someone a mindless puppet.
But I do think we are being manipulated all the time covertly by advertising, by politicians,
and it really just depends on how you define trans or how you define persuasion.
One definition is that all communication is persuasion or manipulation. You're changing someone's
emotional state when you tell an exciting story or a scary story. Think of the score of a movie or
a podcast, suspense, romance, tragedy, curious, scientific, investigatory.
This all manipulates your emotions in a certain way. And perhaps by becoming more aware of the
power dynamics that are inherently part of everyday interactions, anyone can gain them.
And everyone can become Ross Jeffries. We're all pick-up artists. Yeah.
Okay. But reality check, I do not know how to hypnotize people even when I'm really on fire in
an interview. Same, unfortunately. Unless I'm doing it unconsciously, but I don't think I am.
Yeah, don't sell yourself short, kid. I did ask Ross about this, though. I asked him to do a demo
at the end of our interview. And what he said actually felt key to understanding how
covert manipulation actually works. Can you sort of break down some of the techniques that you were
using? I love it. I gave you the pre-talk. I said, you're not going to go to sleep, you're not
going to quack like a duck. Then I gave you something called permissive hypnosis. I didn't say
you're going to listen to every word I say, then you'll just go to sleep. I said, you can listen to
every word I say and you don't have to. So what kinds of conditions are you creating with those
options? I'm creating a condition that no matter what happens, it's evidence to you. It's a
ratification to you that the trans is working. Oh, interesting. So there's no escape. It's called
the inclusive set and ratification. I'm letting you ratify through your own experience that it's working.
So what he's describing is a rhetorical trap, right? Because he's giving you two options.
You might hear every word I say or you might not. But whatever you experience ends up reinforcing
the trends. Yeah, it's disarming. And I could see this maybe working on someone who wants to get
hypnotized. But again, would this work on someone who is just a stranger in the street? I still am
skeptical about that. I don't think any of these techniques could work on someone who's truly
resistant. And that's the problem with pickup artistry overall. I mean, I wonder if the real secret
of pickup artistry is simply empowering a bunch of men who are insecure. Like these guys who have
been rejected a million times and they're afraid of women and shy. And Ross Jeffries basically
tells them he's giving them magic hypnopowers. So when they go out, even if they don't successfully
hypnotize women, they probably feel as though they have these secret weapons. And that makes
them more confident. And that confidence is inherently more attractive. And then on top of that,
the pickup artists tell them to just do not stop until you pick up a woman. So it's a numbers game.
No matter what techniques you use, if you use them on 300 women in a single weekend, one of them is
bound to hit. Exactly. So at the very end of our interview, I asked Ross if speed seduction was
just that. Basically something you believe in. So it works. A placebo effect. Or maybe there's more
to it. Is it possible to use NLP to manipulate people? Define manipulation. To make them do something
that they wouldn't otherwise do. I had a mentor. I don't care to mention his name. And I said to
him, hey, can you use hypnosis to make people do things against their will? He gave me very
interesting answers. So he said, well, technically no. But in fact, in reality, in actuality, most
people don't have a will. I said, what do you mean by that? He said, most people just have wishes
that flip in and out their mind, conflicting desires, but will an actual focused, strong, intent
and desire. They don't have that. So if you're talking about getting people to do things against
their will, most people don't have a will. If you're talking about manipulation, let's unpack what
we mean by that, because let's be clear in our terms. Manipulation, if you want to call it that,
if you want to use the term, just means skillful means of creating change. For example, I had a
surgery. The scars are very small recently to fix a double hernia. That surgeon was extraordinarily
good at manipulating the robot. The robot actually does the surgery. He's very good at it. I had a very
short recovery time. So that's a form of manipulation. If by manipulation, you mean taking someone
at a certain state of consciousness and then moving them to another one in a way that does
no harm, that in fact serves them. For Ross, there's a difference between destructive forms of
manipulation, like knowingly selling someone a car that's going to explode or praying on their
deepest darkest weaknesses, and these supposedly neutral, harmless approaches to changing someone's
state of mind. See, you can look at what I do, whether it sales your seduction, is getting ideas
past the person's conscious mind into their unconscious, but you can also look at it as expanding
their consciousness to include new ideas, new perspectives that they otherwise would not have had
from their autopilot. What really jumps out at me here, Alice, is the idea that people don't have a
will. When he first said that, I was like, excuse me, I have a will, how dare you suggest otherwise,
but I actually got it. We like to think of ourselves as these super rational, singular beings,
but that's just not true. And that's why covert hypnosis could work. Some targets unconsciously
want it to work. That's why stage hypnosis works. When people are walking on all fours and
barking like a dog and pretending to be a poodle, well, it's actually kind of fun and liberating.
We're full of conflicting desires. And maybe if you do persuade someone to sleep with you,
it's not about overriding their will. It's about appealing to one of their many contradictory
selves. And you know what, Zoe? I also think that's weirdly why people seek out workshops on
pickup artistry or any form of self-help. We're unsatisfied with the kind of like pastiche of a
self that doesn't feel like it has a strong direction or meaning. Gurus like Ross Jeffries,
or even Tony Robbins, or Richard Bandler, and NLP capitalize on that. They tell followers
they can fix all their internal conflicts and make them whole. And most gurus also promote the idea
that they're going to give you more agency and power in that process. Right, but what's really scary
is that once you start to depend on a guru to provide your sense of power, that person can take it
away. So once you've sort of taken that step, then it means actually I don't know what's best for me
and you do know what's best for me. That's how it can become so scary. Like if someone had said to me
that in 12 years I was going to be branded with the leader's initials, I would have clearly given
them the finger and ran up the door. What nexium, a notorious cult whose leader was convicted of
sex trafficking, stole from NLP. That's next time on Mind Games.
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Mind Games is a kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
The series is created and hosted by me, Alice Hines, and Zoe Lascaz. It's produced by writer
Alsob and Dara Lookpots. Edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adiza Egan.
Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone. Fact checking by Amon Whalen.
From kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oswo lotion,
Mangesh Hatikador, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville
and Nikki Eator. This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. I want to take a second to talk
about something that's personal to me. I've had the privilege of working closely with Robert
Kraft for a long time, and one thing I've always respected is how seriously he takes up standing
up to hate. As a Jewish athlete, my identity is something I am proud of, but I also know what
it feels like to be singled out for it. That's why this new commercial for the Blue Square
Alliance against hate that aired during the big game really hit home. It's about showing up for
someone when they're targeted, even if you don't have the perfect words, and sometimes standing next
to someone is enough, and you can show support by sharing the Blue Square.
Janice Torres here. And I'm Austin Hankwitz. We host the podcast,
Mind the Business, Small Business Success Stories, produced by Ruby Studio,
in partnership with Intuit QuickBooks. We're back for season four to talk to some incredible
small business owners. The big thing about working at Tech is that it's ever evolving,
ever changing, everyone's a rookie. That's how fast the industry is changing, so what I'm
really excited about is to be part of that change. So listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts
over wherever you get your podcasts. When you stay in your home, what you love gets to stay too.
From the gardens that grow wild to the grandkids that run wilder. From the Friday night baseball
games to the Sunday morning brunches, even the daily crosswords, and weekly bookclubs.
There's room for it all with help from home instead. The largest in-home senior care network,
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Visit home instead online for a better what's next.
This episode is brought to you by Bobcat. They started the compact equipment industry through
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broke records, empowered people to build bigger and higher, to dig deeper, to make the impossible
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We don't need their permission. We're forgiveness. We just get things done. So go ahead and doubt me.
Judge me. Challenge me. But when the time comes, watch me. Bobcat.
