Hypnotize: A New Perspective on a Common Inheritance of All Humanity

Sure. It's great to be here. I think one reason why I'm on this podcast is that I've arrived at a moment in my life where I started to recognize that I think in paradigms, perhaps like you. And I think that paradigms are a powerful way of reframing one's existence. I should explain that.

Career-wise, I started off as a journalist, working as a newspaper reporter, then I was a feature writer, and I became a filmmaker in a weird way. I was reporting on a conflict in Canada involving the Mohawk. The Mohawk are native indigenous people in Canada, and there was an armed uprising of Mohawks against the police in a particular area. It turned into a standoff between the Mohawks and the Canadian army. A photographer and I were able to smuggle a camera behind the lines into the Mohawk encampment.

At that time I was a reporter, not a filmmaker, but because I had the only video camera in the situation, I was hired by TV networks all over the world. It was a big event, it was called the Oka crisis. So I became a filmmaker in that experience very quickly. And that's sort of the story of my life: I have these weird experiences that change my life dramatically.

Then I made a number of documentaries. I specialize in paradigm ideas. One of them is a documentary called Stupidity, which I made for television. It suggests that stupidity is a strategy for life, and that a number of people, particularly in America, use stupidity to their advantage. One would assume that we're all trying to be more intelligent, that we're all trying to say smarter things, but I try to demonstrate that that's not true: that stupidity is far more powerful than intelligence in certain ways, and that there's a kind of active ignorance and stupidity that you see particularly in American culture, which is probably a result of the class divide, ultimately.

So that was the first big documentary I made. One that a lot of people know is another documentary called Laughology, which is about laughter. Again, it was a paradigm, because it was the first documentary ever made about laughter. That sounds outrageous, but while there had been many films about humor, no one had ever investigated laughter itself, the behavior. That opened up a whole world for me. I think laughter is one of the great civilizing forces, not just for humans but for mammals. It's what makes the world a happier, more playful place.

In making those films, I started to realize each of these was a paradigm. For example, when I made Laughology, I became a laughologist. I would get hired by conferences or events and brought in just to make the audience laugh without telling jokes. I would just demonstrate laughter behavior, and because laughter is contagious, even just demonstrating the behavior will make an audience laugh. So for years my full-time job was laughologist, where all I did was demonstrate something that is innate: laughter is an innate behavior. I would demonstrate it in crowds, and I would explain the history of that.

There is some very interesting history. Famously, in Tanzania in 1962 there was a huge laughter epidemic, where [people laughed] and could not stop for weeks. It's a very interesting event, and it can possibly be explained by mass psychogenic illness. In the film we explore a lot of the unusual laughter phenomena, and it turns out that the weirdest things about laughter we actually all share in common. The weirdest thing about laughter is how contagious it is. It's probably the most powerful contagious behavior of all, because when somebody laughs contagiously, they are literally in your brain, causing signals to change so that you laugh along with them. You can try to stop it, but it's a very powerful behavior.

The last paradigm that I think may be relevant: as a filmmaker, I did a very strange documentary. I was just assigned to do it. I found that there was an interesting pattern of people who had dreams about the events of New York 2001 before they happened. A lot of people had very clear dreams where they, let's say, saw planes flying into a building or buildings collapsing. The dreams were notable enough that they either told somebody, or, in the case of people who were seeing therapists, they told the therapist and the therapist wrote it down in a book. And then when the events happened, there was actually a record where somebody said: I had this exact dream, and I had the dream before it happened.

I had a friend who had that exact dream before it happened. And it was a weird experience, because I had kind of made fun of them. They had told me they had this dream about burning buildings, the twin towers and fires, and I had said: wow, that's kind of a weird dream, good thing that hasn't happened. And then the next day it did.

To make a long story short: when I was working on the film, because there was some debate about how people died in the actual event, I watched a lot of footage, terrible footage of what happened to people, and I actually became traumatized. I think I have a previous history of trauma. When I saw the imagery, I was aware that some of it got completely stuck inside my head, meaning I couldn't think without seeing these pictures. It gave me a very bad feeling about life. I realized I had developed anxiety.

And I happened to see an ad online that said something along the lines of: do you have obsessive memories that you can't get rid of, or intrusive thoughts? Call this number. So, being a bit adventurous, I thought, what do I have to lose? I called this number, and I actually did not even know what hypnosis was at that time. This is now about 15, 16 years ago. A friendly guy answered the phone and said: I think I can help you with your problem. And then, in half an hour, this problem that I had had continuously for six months, literally pictures I could not get out of my mind, went away. It was immediately cured, and I couldn't believe it.

After that, I decided I had to learn hypnosis. It took me a few years, and then that opened up a whole avenue. That has brought me here to your show, where I think that hypnosis is the area where there are more potential paradigm shifts than almost anything else.

I think I've had a number of turning points. In terms of my ability to heal myself as a human being, yes, it was the turning point in my life. I would say that up to then, I was always becoming more damaged, and when that happened, I was able to reverse that kind of phenomenon, that energy.

But I had another one when I made this film, Laughology. I think it was a similar thing. When I made Laughology, people always asked me: why? Where did you get this idea to make a film about laughter? Because laughter is something hiding in plain sight. It's something that we do all the time. It's very obvious. Nobody thinks: hey, that weird sound you made, I'm going to make a documentary about it.

But what happened was interesting. I was working in television at the time, doing satirical TV shows that were actually a little bit dangerous. What we would do is take actors and put them into real political situations, usually in Canada or the United States. We'd often have actors impersonating the bodyguards of well-known politicians. But the problem was we were too good.

In one incident, the prime minister of Canada had to walk from one room to another, and the real police misidentified our actors as another group of policemen. They wanted to show that they were the more important police, so they ordered our fake police to escort the prime minister of Canada through a hallway and out of the building. Which means that the only people protecting the head of state of our country were these buffoon actors who were friends of mine.

When the police realized what had happened, we were immediately detained and threatened. They threatened to confiscate our equipment and to put us in jail. We knew we had endangered people, but they knew that we were not malevolent people. We weren't trying to hurt anybody. We just wanted to tell funny jokes.

After that experience, I remember looking at my life and thinking: what am I looking for? Why am I so desperate to get into these dangerous situations for humor? I'll tell you the whole story, because I think it's funny. You may know of Tom Green. He's a Canadian, but now a Hollywood actor, famous for a shock kind of comedy. I think what you saw with Tom Green is that he always had to push the envelope. If he threw poop on people's faces, he had to go further the next time.

I was reading a magazine article about Tom Green driving in a car on a shoot, and they came across a dead moose on the road. Tom Green told his film crew to start filming. He ran out of the car and stuck his head up the dead moose's ass. This was a rotting corpse. And I remember thinking: is this where satire has to go? Is this where I have to go?

In that moment, I had an epiphany, because I asked myself: what am I really looking for? In my mind, I thought I was looking for the ultimate joke. But the epiphany I had was that the ultimate joke really is laughter. It's not the comedy, it's laughter itself: this common, universal, shared, wonderful behavior that begins in all humans at approximately one month and has virtually no exceptions. Humor varies from culture to culture, from person to person. We all laugh the same way.

When I had that epiphany, that was the second big change in my life that really changed me. I was luckily able to then confirm that I wasn't wrong in my theory that laughter was hiding in plain sight, because I did a bunch of research and I found out: whoa, no one's ever made a documentary that explores laughter. Tons on humor, none on laughter. And when I did, I realized laughter is a truly amazing thing. There's an exact mathematical code for how people laugh. You can't mess with the code; if you do, people don't understand you. It's intensely contagious. Of course, it has health properties: it strengthens your immune system, it's an antidepressant, and it's free. So that blew the doors wide open for me.

Quite a while [ago]. It was 2009, but it's now free online. We made it free. It played in theaters and then on some TV networks, but I deliberately wanted to make it [free]. It's on YouTube, you can find it there: Laughology.

Kind of the same, around the same time, but later. It was only later that I started to take hypnosis more seriously. And this is, I would say, a different ball of wax than laughter. It's a whole other game. But yes, those were two big paradigm shifts for me. It's not the humor, it's the laughter. That's a big paradigm for me.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm always thinking about a few. There are a couple I'm working on, but one I've thought about recently is the theory of shock inductions. I recently did a TEDx in Switzerland.

In hypnosis, there are basically two ways to hypnotize people. There are probably more, but two rough styles. One style is you simply sit somebody down, with their consent, and you ask them to relax, and then you show them a bunch of behavioral tricks that cause them to relax. One of them is slow breathing: you slow down their pace. Then you create imagery that might be positive. This style is called progressive relaxation. It's the typical kind of hypnosis that you see if you went to a hypnotherapist.

The other kind of hypnosis, which is not well understood, is called either snap inductions or shock inductions. And I think it's worthy of being a film, because it is the way by which we are often manipulated culturally. It might be the way that people start wars, essentially. I'll explain how it's done hypnotically.

If anyone's been to a stage hypnosis show: it's interesting, traveling around, I find stage hypnosis has different levels of popularity from country to country. In America it is quite big. In some countries it's still illegal. In Belgium, it is illegal to do public demonstrations of hypnosis, which is hilarious. In most European countries you're allowed to do it, but I find it's less popular in Europe.

What a shock induction is: if you sit somebody down once again and get them to relax a little bit, in about 10 seconds, by shocking them in a particular way, you can drop them into what's called a somnambulistic trance, which is a very deep trance. Their eyes roll up in their head, their muscles become limp, and they appear to faint. Now, they haven't fainted, because they can hear you. They can hear everything that's going on, but from the outward appearance, they flop over and they look like they have fainted. So when people see this without understanding it, they can actually become quite terrified, because they think: well, you've just knocked that person out. But it's not quite that.

But the reason why I think it makes for a great film is that I think a shock induction is a little bit what the international lockdown that happened during this Covid [pandemic was]. The formula for creating a shock induction is simply to begin relaxing somebody in an authoritative way: don't worry, I've got you. And then to surprise them. Any kind of surprise, as long as the surprise is swift and drastic. So the surprise can be a sentence, like: there's a terrible epidemic and we're all in danger. Or it can be an action, like: from here on in, everyone will be forced by law to stay inside.

In hypnosis, the reason why we do shock inductions or snap inductions: I work as a hypnotherapist, and if I had a client who was very hard to hypnotize, because some people are, I would say to them: if you like, we can try more aggressive methods. A shock induction or snap induction is a more aggressive method, and if they consent and they're okay with it, then you do it, and often you'll get a good result.

The principle of a shock induction is about whatever comes after the shock. In a stage hypnosis show, you can shock somebody, drop them into trance, and then you can tell them that they can't speak English anymore, and that person will start speaking gibberish. They will be unable to speak English. Not everybody, but about a third of the population will react consistently. You can also tell that person that they are a chicken. This is always a very comic moment in a show, but I actually think it reveals a very profound aspect of human nature, because that person will likely think that they are a chicken now.

So imagine the propaganda possibilities. If you can shock somebody and then make a suggestion that the only way you can stay safe is by staying inside your house, that suggestion goes deep. The principle is the shock and then the suggestion, and the suggestion goes deep.

Now, I'm not saying this to suggest that we were the victims of a mass conspiracy to control us. I think everybody was shocked by the reality of Covid. But I think it explains some of the reasons why people accepted things uncritically. If I hypnotize somebody and turn them into a chicken, and then you say to the person, hey, you're not a chicken, they would probably peck you, because they're still a chicken. Similarly, when people absorb a suggestion that's given to them through a shock induction, they've taken it deep: yes, if I don't stay inside, I'm in danger and I'm endangering everyone else.

So I think it would be great, and the reason it needs to be known is that people need to know that these things work. They work on human nature. So that's one of the films I'm working on now.

The second one is just one I would like to make. I believe in a very interesting phenomenon. I did a talk at TEDx at Queen's, and the interesting thing about this talk is that it has over 10 million views, for a TEDx talk. People often think it's a TED talk. It's not, it's an obscure TEDx talk. But I often find myself explaining why there's so much interest in this talk. It is entertaining, but there are a lot of entertaining things on YouTube, and that doesn't explain the numbers.

The explanation, I believe, is this. I didn't come up with this idea, but I was the first person to publicly explain a working model for hypnosis that actually explains it almost from top to bottom. Other people have had this idea, but I laid it out and then demonstrated it on real people to show that it's true. I think that's why there's so much interest in it. And I should explain why I think it's significant.

I believe, and I am different from other hypnotists in that, that hypnosis is a common inheritance, like laughter. It's a common inheritance of all humanity. And this is important because right now, I think you would...

It belongs to all of us. Right now, hypnotists are like the high priests of hypnosis, because we're the only ones that can do it. It's like only the priest can do the liturgy in the Catholic church: only the hypnotist can do hypnosis. But the truth is that everyone can do hypnosis. Everyone experiences hypnosis. Hypnosis is a universal phenomenon.

This is controversial, because many countries have laws around this. For example, Israel for many years had a law saying only doctors and officially accepted hypnotists are allowed to perform hypnosis, which is absurd, because hypnosis is being performed all the time. It happens everywhere.

One of the compelling theories of hypnosis is that we're all in trances all the time. They're just different kinds of trances. I might be in a talking trance; somebody might be in a listening trance. They exhibit trance behavior: when somebody is listening, they're not moving very much. It's like a trance. There are light trances and there are heavy trances. So this theory suggests that hypnosis is happening everywhere, and that we shouldn't allow it to be the private domain of doctors and hypnotists. It's too important.

In my TEDx, again, I'm not going to explain the whole theory of how hypnosis works, because it takes a while, but I'll give you the compelling key part. Let me start here. When you hypnotize people, you can often know when they've gone into deep trance because their limbs become limp. If you hold their limbs, there's a liquid quality to their wrists, and this is a way you may see a hypnotist test if somebody is in deep trance: to take the wrist and shake it.

Now, when you know that somebody is in deep trance and you look at their eyes, there's a specific behavior. You often see their eyelids flickering. If I could act it, I would, but it's a hard behavior to act. Many people have observed this, even way back a hundred years ago. I think Anton Mesmer observed this flickering eyelid effect. But it started to become relevant when studies appeared on REM sleep, because what happens to us when we're in REM sleep is that our eyelids flicker.

I might be stating the obvious here, but there's probably an obvious connection between REM sleep and deep trance hypnosis, because in both cases people's eyes are rolled up and their eyelids are flickering. That's basically one of the themes of my TEDx. And when you understand that, you understand huge implications. If hypnosis is a way to engineer a kind of waking REM state, then what does that mean?

Well, one, and this is conjecture, but I think it is true: famously, people describe healing experiences when they're hypnotized. They've described sometimes dramatic healing. You can stop wounds from bleeding. You can bring down inflammation simply through hypnosis. One possible explanation is that studies on sleep show there are only two healing states in sleep. The only time that a wound or an injury will heal is when a person is either in deep sleep or in REM sleep. REM sleep is profoundly healing. So it stands to reason that if we can recreate REM sleep in people at the snap of our fingers, without them having to go to sleep, then we can recreate a powerful healing state. That's the first assumption. That's kind of intriguing.

The second assumption, and what I've suggested too, is that deep trance hypnosis is a bit like the holodeck in Star Trek. I usually use Star Trek to explain this. You kind of have to be a Star Trek fan, but do you remember the second Star Trek series?

Yeah. Remember, they had the holodeck. The holodeck is a place where you can recreate any reality and live out any kind of experience, in a sense without consequences. And part of the twist is that sometimes the consequences are real: if you died in the holodeck, you might die for real.

Well, hypnosis is very much like the holodeck. Take the classic example of somebody who is a chicken. What this points to is the reason why people become chickens under hypnosis, and not just chickens. You can turn somebody into a cat, or you can turn somebody into a rap singer or a ballet dancer.

I was working once with a group of motorcycle bikers, and they were in deep trance, and I asked: what would you like to see these guys do? Somebody said: dance in the Bolshoi Ballet. So I took a bunch of bikers and had them dance as if they were ballet dancers, and people fell off their chairs laughing, because those bikers became the most serious ballet dancers you've ever seen. So how could this be possible? I'm five foot seven, I'm not particularly imposing. How could I convince a bunch of bikers to become very feminine ballet dancers in a matter of minutes, and convincingly? They danced very seriously.

Here's the explanation, which points to another paradigm within hypnosis and the holodeck. One of the theories of dreaming is that dreaming is an educational process. Like everything that humans do, it has multiple processes, so it's not just educational, it's also [about] deep potentiation. But we learn things when we dream. And they know this because they've actually caused some mammals not to dream, particularly in the womb, and those mammals end up fundamentally [impaired]. So that's the interesting thing.

Now, if you had dreams, for example, that you were being chased by wolves, it may then occur to you that you should climb a tree. What dreams suggest is that they are a way to play out things that are probably too dangerous in real life. Testing whether or not you could escape from wolves is probably not a good idea in real life. It's better that you have a dream about it, where you remember the qualities of wolves, and you remember that wolves can't climb trees and you can. Once you have that dream, and then you're walking in the forest, a simian version of a human, and you are chased by wolves, you remember to climb the tree, you save your life, and you pass along your DNA. So this educational aspect of dreaming is very, very powerful, and not researched.

There's a very interesting and obscure term that explains it: dream credulity. And one theory is that the only creatures that have a high level of dream credulity may actually be humans. I'm not sure about this, but I think it may be true. Let me explain it, because it does require explanation. Dream credulity means that for you to learn from your dreams, you need to believe they are true. You need to be in the dream, believing that the wolves can hurt you, so that you can figure out to climb the tree and escape. If you don't think the wolves can hurt you, you won't get the answer.

And this is the holodeck. If you don't believe on some level that it's real, then you won't learn from it, and you don't get the enjoyment of the holodeck experience either. What hypnosis offers is this ability to create a kind of easy holodeck. I've often done this with groups of people. I take a group of people, they're hypnotized together, and I'll have them visit other planets. Usually they're just sitting in chairs, I don't want them running around, it's potentially dangerous. But they're just sitting in chairs, and you can describe them going to other planets where it's hot or where it's cold. If it's hot, they will sweat. If it's cold, they might shiver. They have a kind of holodeck experience.

Now, if you do it for a show, it all appears to be comedy. But again, what I'm interested in is the dream credulity part. To me, it's a much more profound experience.

What's interesting to me, and I'll just finish here, is that you might say: oh, that's an interesting theory, that hypnosis is REM sleep, or that there's such a thing as dream credulity. But I can tell you, and it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's not: the scientific establishment, the psychological and psychiatric establishment, does not agree. I had a group of psychologists contact me and tell me REM hypnosis is not a REM state, it's not a waking dream state, it's not true. They were adamant that I had to stop saying this. But I was like: no, I'm not going to stop saying it. I see it every day. Every day I see people go into REM state hypnosis. So there's a bit of a culture war around this.

The moral of the story is that the reason why that TEDx is so interesting is that a lot of people along the way have already figured this out or have some understanding of it, and that TEDx was the one place where, I think, it comes together.

Yes. I would say classically, yes, I think it's a very good example. A good example would be that certain racist responses have [the quality of] a shock.

For example, right now there's a controversy every week in the United States where usually a white person overreacts to a black person walking into a store or walking in a park. And I think what's not really well understood is that these people are often legitimately afraid. They may be racist too, but part of the reason they're having this issue is that they see a black person, a black man, who maybe is too close to them, and they actually are legitimately feeling fear. They think this person can hurt them. But I think it's a result of what you're describing. If I show you a bunch of movies... It's a very interesting thing.

A very dramatic example of this is actually the difference between Canada and the United States. Let me explain. Both Canada and the United States have fairly sizable African or African-derived populations, but there's a big difference. Most black people in the United States are African American; they have a history through slavery. And most African-derived people in Canada are from the Caribbean, because of the history of immigration from the Caribbean. So there are many different things.

People have noticed, for example, that the crime rate related to, let's say, the black underclass is much lower in Canada than it is in the US. I'm not an expert in this area, but you might explain that by the history of trauma and slavery, which was much stronger in the United States than in Canada. You really have two different kinds of people: you have African Americans, and then you have more Afro-Caribbeans in Canada.

Well, in Canada you often have a very similar reaction, where Canadians will respond to black men fearfully, because they watch American television. They watch American TV shows where scary black men mug people, scary black men jump out of cars and shoot people, scary black men do these very shocking things. That works as a shock induction. Literally, a gunshot is a shock induction: if you hear a gunshot, you will pay very close attention to whatever comes next. So similarly, when you have a bunch of black men shooting guns on TV, you basically make the suggestion that black men are potentially extremely dangerous.

And the absurdity is that, even though statistics would suggest there might be a reality to it, that if you walk in rough neighborhoods in the United States there is a chance you might get mugged and maybe that mugger might be black, in Canada there's no similar reason to think that. Yet many Canadians respond that way. And I think it's exactly the process that you described.

Yes. Well, I would say again, as I started off by saying, that hypnosis is not something that just happens at a hypnotist's office. Trance behaviors are happening all the time, and hypnosis is just a model for understanding them.

For example, I often joke that spanking is a shock induction. Literally, when the child is spanked violently, it's a shock, and then there's a moral to the story: behave better, stop doing what you were doing. The reason why spanking works is the same reason why shock inductions work. The spank is the shock, and then the moral, or the suggestion, comes right after. It's usually a story like: be a good child, don't misbehave. Spank, spank, spank. I'm recreating a spanking scenario here.

But similarly in wartime, or when wars are declared. Classically, the war in Iraq was actually a giant shock induction. You see this horrible event, it scares the living daylights out of you. Americans were scared, they saw it. And I'm not trivializing any aspect of it, because we know this was a massive and terrible event by human standards. But the effect would be that after a shock induction, the next suggestion that is made becomes powerful. So whatever it is, this horrible thing that you saw, and then I say: it's all Saddam Hussein's fault, or it's all Osama bin Laden's fault. At that moment, you will go: yes, it's all Osama bin Laden's fault.

I think this method even goes back to the Blitzkrieg. It works in two ways. It can work in creating adherence: if I shock you and say, we've got to beat up the guy down the street, and you're kind of my friend, you are more likely to go along with me if I've shocked you first. But it also works if I'm trying to scare people: I shock them and then suggest that I possess supernatural power.

This is my limited understanding of the famous Blitzkrieg by the Nazis: part of the idea was to start with an incredibly shocking attack, which would cause the enemy to fold. That is the same principle, I think, as a shock induction, because the suggestion isn't that you should fold. The suggestion is that the one thing I did was so overwhelming that I can now make the suggestion that I possess a power beyond your imagination, which is terrifying.

Another good example of a shock induction is getting punched in the face. I don't know if you've ever been punched in the face. I have, a few times. But that is a shock induction too. It gets your attention, and the next thing that somebody says to you after they punched you in the face is something you will always remember. So it's a similar principle.

Yeah. Well, the reason I think it's an issue, and maybe even a problem: for example, there are movies I can recommend if you're interested in finding out more. I would recommend watching Now You See Me. It's a Hollywood film about a group of magicians, mentalists and hypnotists who rob banks, become incredibly rich and manipulate governments. It's a Hollywood film, but in the film, one of the actors portrays a hypnotist who is able just to walk up to people in the street and perform a shock induction, and you see the people collapse in his arms.

Now, I can do that. I can walk up to people. You can do it: if I showed you the technique, you could do it. I can walk up to people and perform a shock induction, and they will collapse. I have to catch them. They may not stay in that state for long. It's not as dangerous as it seems. When people see this, they're like: oh my God, somebody could just walk up to me, pull my hand, and then I'd fall on the ground, and they could take my wallet and run away.

The truth is that it doesn't work that way. But the movies portray it as working that way, that anybody can walk up to you and just do this and you're knocked out. What they're not showing you is what's happened before. If I would do this to somebody, I would say: would you like to try a hypnotic experiment? Are you okay with going into hypnosis? And I've suggested to them that I'm not going to hurt them in any way, that I'm going to watch out for their safety. So what I've created is a safe atmosphere.

Then I might tell them to breathe in. Why? Because when people slow their breathing down, they're starting to move into the calmer nervous system. So I've set a kind of momentum, an intention, where I'm suggesting you can go to a calm place. Then I perform the shock induction, and at that point they might drop.

So this has implications. My question, I guess, I would ask you, or I would ask your audience: is this information that belongs to humanity, or should it be the private purview of hypnotists and maybe people who are interested in mind control? And my feeling is that this belongs to humanity. It's an aspect of human nature. I think it's there for a reason.

I think the way it originates is a little bit of a hack of an evolutionary behavior. Things in the animal world move very quickly. If you were being stalked by a tiger, the moment you have to respond is very short. You might hear a rustle and then the tiger is on you. So we are equipped with a very quick reorientation system, because any kind of attack event in nature happens very fast. Famously, snakes and other animals have been designed by evolution to strike so quickly that the other animal can't respond. So it's something that's out there a lot, and mammals have the ability to reorient really fast. I'm sure this has happened to you: you hear a loud bang and you jump. That's you reorienting.

What hypnotists have discovered, and I didn't discover it, it's been known probably for a few decades as far as I know, is that when you shock somebody and they try to reorient quickly, you're basically psychologically saying to them: it's okay, don't panic, just go to sleep. And because that instruction is given to their unconscious mind, not their conscious mind, they often will go straight into sleep. They will go deep into trance.

So this phenomenon is essentially a hack of a very natural impulse to reorient when you're shocked. But it's been used to control and manipulate people. I think it's used regularly to start wars, to rally people to your cause. It's just an effective method of persuasion.

It reminds me of a documentary I did on the origins of the death squad. Well, actually, it was a newspaper article, not a documentary. My belief is that the concept of the death squad originates in Romania, with the Romanian Iron Guard, a fascist movement that rose to prominence at the same time as the Nazis, and they actually influenced the Nazis. One theory is that the Nazis got their idea from the Romanians.

What the Romanian Iron Guard would do is this. If you had a political opponent, let's say you and I were political opponents and the opposition became ferocious, instead of arguing with you, or just shooting you, what the Iron Guard invented was a system where they would go to their opponent's house, kill the person, and very violently mangle the corpse, or kill them in a terrible way. And they had a signature move: they would leave a knife, a big dagger, directly in the person's heart. So when the family or other people arrived, they would see this horrible scene.

The reason why this mattered is that the Iron Guard became very successful. They were probably a bunch of crackpots, bullies, conspiracy theorists, priests, fanatics. They weren't people who should have had a large movement, but they quickly gained a very large movement, because they scared the shit out of everybody. I think it was in effect a shock induction: they performed an act that was so shocking that people needed to create another reality, and that reality probably was: I don't want to challenge these people, because that could happen to me, or I'm just going to run away. Which is sort of what happened.

The Nazis then developed very similar tactics: always start with shock, and make the shock so crazy. That's basically the definition of hypnotic suggestion. ISIS did the same thing: cutting off someone's head, something so crazy and so shocking that your opponents are going to be like: I don't even want to dance, I'm not interested in engaging with you, because it's so crazy. That principle is still at work in all those situations, I think. It's probably in the CIA manuals and that kind of thing. It's taught, would be my guess.

Maybe just one. I think hypnosis has many implications for me, and I say this almost not as a hypnotist. It sounds funny to say that, but I say it almost as a journalist: I'm looking at what's going on, and I'm like, wow, this is interesting.

One of the weirdest aspects of hypnosis is another side of it. If you go to a late-night hypnosis show in Las Vegas, which is generally where the raciest shows are, at the end of the show the hypnotist will commonly say something like: when I snap my fingers, everyone on stage will have an enormous orgasm. And when you watch it happen, what you see is a bunch of people writhing around, and it appears that they are having orgasms.

When you go to these shows, it's usually people that are drunk. People laugh quite a bit. But I find that nobody really cares about whether this is real or not. I'm a kind of nerd myself. When I saw this phenomenon, maybe 10 years ago, of course my reaction was: is this real? Are these people just acting like they're having orgasms, or are they really having orgasms? And this blows another door wide open.

So of course I worked with a group of people. I'm obviously interested in experimental hypnosis, and it's not hard to do: you can get a group of friends together and you can just try things. I got a group together in Montreal called the Montreal Experimental Trance Group. It's a group of hypnotists, people who are interested in hypnosis, meditators, that kind of thing. We experimented, and we found out: whoa. Put somebody in a particular trance, a somnambulistic trance, which is not that hard to get. Basically, a quarter of the population can do it easily, and those people can very easily be walked into a huge orgasm in any situation.

For example, I did a talk, and we filmed a woman in front of 12 people at a workshop having an enormous orgasm. And she certainly didn't mind. This happens with people with their clothes on, obviously with their consent. But the implications are also huge. Let me explain what I think the implications are.

I believe, and this is a project I'm working on right now, that one of the problems with humanity is that our sexual codes and cultures are wrong, and that most sex behavior is actually a stress behavior. We live in a culture where men and women are expected to perform, where sex is this act of high accomplishment, like a kind of gymnastic exercise which both partners engage in and which is supposed to come naturally. It only does on a number of rare occasions, and the fallout is that most people feel like they're sexually dysfunctional. A certain percentage of men have never had orgasms. And I think that this is very easy to fix.

Again, hypnosis is the doorway. The one part I didn't tell you about earlier, in explaining the whole model for hypnosis, the last part, which may be significant here, is that hypnosis basically allows you to get into the programming language of unconscious human nature. The reason why people go [to a hypnotist] to quit smoking or to lose weight is that ultimately smoking is like a bad program. Your body interprets smoking as something that's good for you, but ultimately it's bad for you. Hypnosis is good at fixing that, because we get into the programming language and we go: oh, this is what smoking really is, and this is what healthy things really are. You should stop doing that unhealthy thing and let's start doing the healthy thing.

Really, hypnosis offers you access. I know we're uncomfortable saying that people are like computers, but hypnosis shows that people are like computers a lot. We're very sophisticated computers, but we definitely run programs. And similarly, almost everybody in our culture right now runs sexual programs, cliché programs like: I do this, and then you do that; you do that, and I do this. And that creates a lack of intimacy, of closeness, ultimately a lack of love.

From my point of view, it's very easy to fix. When people go into these very relaxed states, they are far more orgasmic. And what's interesting is that the orgasms can be tailored. Somebody can have an orgasm and you can tell them: you're going to taste lemon when you have the orgasm. And then when you ask them what it was like, they'll say: holy cow, I had an orgasm, and the whole thing was lemon flavored. That sounds like a joke, but the significance of it is that you're in the programming language.

So, for example, I've had clients who love their husbands or love their wives or love their partners, but they don't associate their partner with orgasms. For whatever reason, there's a block there. So it's very easy to take that person, with their consent, put them into a deep trance and then have them have an orgasm about the person that they love.

Now, this is all theory. One theory is that orgasm is a target state, a target state in hypnosis being whatever you're trying to get to. So when you have an orgasm about the person that you love, you start to increase attraction and arousal for that person, even if you didn't feel it before. So this is a wonderful thing in the right hands. It's a really beautiful thing.

There are dangers with this, I should mention. There are a lot of ethical issues around it. Of course, you could possibly manipulate people. I know people would probably listen to this thinking: what about mind control? Well, here's the interesting thing. Let's say that as a hypnotist, I was able to put someone in a trance, and I'd say: at the end of this experience, you're going to go to your bank account, withdraw all your money, and email it to me, and you'll forget that you did it. In an individual holodeck experience, I might be able to do that. I can make people forget things in trance; anyone who's a good hypnotist can make people forget things in trance. But when they wake up, it all comes back. It's just a holodeck experience, a temporary experience. So then they would remember: hey, you told me to take all my money and give it to you. And then I would get arrested. So it doesn't work. If hypnosis had the ability that people sometimes think it has in terms of manipulative or criminal acts, there would be hypnotists committing crimes everywhere. But they don't.

Maybe I'll close with one interesting story. There was a guy, I think in Italy, who was hypnotizing cashiers to drop their money into a bag, and they would do it. They had video where the cashier would get a blank look, and he would take the money out of the cash [register], put it in his bag and run off with the money. But what was funny about the story was that eventually he got caught, because a cashier woke up in the middle of it, which is typical.

There's another example of this that proves the reality of the situation. There's a hypnotist called Spidey who really likes to push the envelope of what can be done. He demonstrated that he would drive through a stop sign, knowing that the police would catch him, and then he would try to hypnotize the police into not giving him a traffic ticket. There's an amazing video, you can look it up: look up hypnotist police. The guy drives at twice the speed limit through a stop sign and gets pulled over by the police. They're right there, he knows they're there, he drives right in front of them, and he gets pulled over. And then he does hypnosis, and he actually uses snap inductions.

He also uses another thing called a pattern interrupt. The police officer starts to talk and says: do you know that you drove... And he says: hold on a second, do you know where the next gas station is? I'm sorry, I just want to ask you, I just need to know where the gas station is. He says it politely. And that phenomenon is the same principle: when you interrupt somebody's pattern, they're more open to suggestion.

Then, when the police officer starts to talk, the hypnotist snaps his fingers. The snap is a shock. And he says: have you ever gone somewhere and forgotten why you're there? The hypnotist acts like he's talking about himself, but he's really made the suggestion to the police officer: have you ever gone somewhere and forgotten why you're there? And then that's what happens to the police officer. He actually gets very confused. And the hypnotist says: well, I guess I can just go then. And the police officer goes: yes, you can just go. And he drives away without a ticket.

So this is amazing. When people see it, they're like: holy cow, imagine the mind control possibilities. Well, I know that hypnotist, and what he demonstrates at the end of the video, which a lot of people don't see, is that he did this four or five times, and four out of the five times he got a ticket, for something like $157. And that's roughly the proportion of how much it works. About a quarter of the time people go deep, but it's not a successful crime tactic, because you're going to get caught.

So the moral of the story is that hypnosis, in my view, belongs to everybody. There's no reason that it has to be the mysterious purview of hypnotists. It has huge implications for human health and safety. It has huge implications for human sexuality. And it offers a kind of access point. If you look at anybody's problems in their lives, very few problems are conscious problems. Nobody acts like a jerk and then says: I knew very well I was acting like a jerk. Usually behaviors that are problematic are unconscious. We get anxious, we get angry, we get upset, we do unconscious things, we get addicted. These are all unconscious behaviors. So hypnosis offers us a way to change bad programs and to become better people. And it's easy. It's not that hard.

And the irony of it is that it all came from Vienna, where you come from. Franz Anton Mesmer, who was the first person to really demonstrate hypnosis publicly and widely, was tragically discredited, ridiculed, made fun of, and died tragically in obscurity, being made to feel that he was wrong, that it was all witchcraft. But he was right.

That's a very good question. I would say that even as a teenager, I had the sense that I was living in a false reality. I remember when I went to high school, it was a little bit like I was in a Walt Disney movie, full of facades. And I even think that many people's human personalities are a little bit like facades, because we've been given these cliché ways of being and ways of living. So I became hungry for the awareness that there was more. And I really think there is more.

I'm not talking just about hypnosis. I bet this has happened to you as well, since you're pursuing paradigm shifts. I could go on about ayahuasca: that's a whole other paradigm. Plant medicine, a whole other paradigm. Aliens, a whole other paradigm. So I think that's what really motivated me.

My father was a scientist, a physicist, and I think I might have inherited some search for truth from him. For me, and I don't know if this is the same for you, I felt like the search for truth actually makes my world safer. It should work out to be a better world for me and maybe my people, my family, that kind of thing, if things are known, if things are understood.

I've seen this with the pandemic. One of the frightening parts of the pandemic, and I don't think it's as bad in Europe, but here in America: if you look at the history of pandemics, there's a part that people aren't talking about, which is the weird scapegoating behavior. Throughout pandemics, people were always burning people at the stake. Why? Because they would blame the pandemic on the guy with the weird house, or the people with the darker skin, and those people would die.

It is not that bad now, thankfully, but you do see a similar pattern, where somebody always needs to be blamed: the people not wearing masks, the people that are old, the people that are young. Somebody's always getting blamed, and I actually think that is part of the pandemic.

So the last thing I would say about understanding this is what I've also seen: I've confronted some people, I've accused them of using scapegoating behavior, and I've actually seen them correct their behavior right away. They kind of snap out of it and go: whoa, what was I doing there? So it's one of the interesting areas where awareness can make a big difference. When you say to people: black people didn't cause the pandemic, they might go: you're right, I have to think about that, I should stop blaming somebody. So knowledge really matters. So I'm glad we did [this].

Yeah. And I think my style has always been a very clear street reality. Before I was in anything, I was a street performer, I was a street musician. For some reason that really showed me [a lot]. I performed with every kind of drunken, regular person. So I have a sense of the guy on the street, the man or woman on the street, and I like that. I like that I can speak to everyone about things that might be quite abstract or quite scientific.

And I think the world needs [that] right now. We have the knowledge for a better world. We have the knowledge to stop climate change. We have the knowledge to stop this pandemic. We have to use it.

I have a pretty clear answer. I would want people to laugh, because I think laughter is this non-judgmental, shared, universal human [thing]. Rather than people saying, that guy was really smart, I'd rather they say: that guy really made me laugh. I guess that's a good way to be remembered. It's a good feeling.

And I'm worried about the way the world is going. I think we'd have to do a whole other podcast [on that]. I think a lot of us aren't feeling it's going in a good direction. But, like I said, I think the reason why you do what you do, and I do what I do, is that sharing important information makes the world better.

Thank you.