The Pickup Artist Playbook

00:00:11
Speaker 1: There's this question that's been haunting our series Zoe and also neurolinguistic programming in general. Here it is, is it possible to hypnotize someone to get them to do what you want without them knowing?

00:00:25
Speaker 2: This is the big spooky question. In nineteen eighty three, Science Digest was quoting experts who warrened NLP could become quote the most sophisticated mind control technology ever.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: 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 unwitting assassins in the nineteen fifties and it totally didn't.

00:00:51
Speaker 2: Work right Manchurian candidate stuff. But there is one school that suggests hypnotic mind control is real, and that's the pickup artists.

00:01:03
Speaker 1: Yep, the get any woman to sleep with you speed seduction guys.

00:01:07
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. And get this, there's one pickup artist in particular who got everything he knows from NLP.

00:01:15
Speaker 3: I'm really good in inducing trans I could speak to you in a way where I induced trans I will not unless you give me your consent, because it's not a toy.

00:01:26
Speaker 2: Master hypnotist Ross jeffries here he is in two thousand, prowling Marina Del Rey and Los Angeles with BBC correspondent Louis Throux.

00:01:36
Speaker 4: We know this is the Coffee Bean and Tea Lea for one of the primal places in the Marina to pick up women.

00:01:41
Speaker 2: Ross says he prefers cafes like this to clubs or bars because in clubs and bars.

00:01:46
Speaker 4: Women are there to reject man 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.

00:01:54
Speaker 2: You know, his targets have just finished work. They're relaxed and down to chat. He zeros in on a blonde woman with a nineties Meg Ryan style haircut sitting outside having a coffee and cigarette with a friend.

00:02:06
Speaker 5: No, I don't know many people.

00:02:08
Speaker 6: I just moved here.

00:02:09
Speaker 4: Yes, but you're from the Midwest. Yes, how could you tell you're from Chicago or Wisconsin?

00:02:14
Speaker 5: Detroit?

00:02:15
Speaker 3: Detroit? But clothes huh? First of all, my name is Ross, I'm Jen Okay.

00:02:19
Speaker 2: As Ross schots 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.

00:02:34
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm gonna tell you something about yourself.

00:02:36
Speaker 5: You make imagery in your mind, very very vividly. You're a very vivid day dreamer. And in back, so you're smiling because you know.

00:02:45
Speaker 6: I'm right.

00:02:46
Speaker 5: 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, athlete, and even though you're looking right at this person, you could be a million ailes away in your favorite ideal fantasy vacation spot. That's true, You're right.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:22
Speaker 4: How do you know that I do a very rare, very unusual, hardly anyone knows about.

00:03:28
Speaker 5: It's a form of hypnosis that involves no sleep none.

00:03:32
Speaker 4: I call it bliss gnosis.

00:03:34
Speaker 2: The two chat a bit more, and then the show cuts to Louie interviewing Ross and the woman Jen about what just happened?

00:03:41
Speaker 5: Did Ross just try and pick you up?

00:03:44
Speaker 3: I didn't think of it as picking me up.

00:03:46
Speaker 7: But we had a great conversation and we're going to have coffee sometimes.

00:03:50
Speaker 4: Did I understand about you on a much deeper level than most people?

00:03:54
Speaker 5: Yeah?

00:03:54
Speaker 8: I felt it?

00:03:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know what? You know that feeling?

00:03:57
Speaker 3: Right?

00:03:58
Speaker 2: 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.

00:04:12
Speaker 3: Better, better, even better? Right now?

00:04:18
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah.

00:04:19
Speaker 3: The more you focus on, the more intense the word.

00:04:24
Speaker 2: Do you want to be on TV?

00:04:25
Speaker 4: Does it feel good?

00:04:26
Speaker 1: Is that?

00:04:26
Speaker 3: What?

00:04:26
Speaker 4: This is a balance on a scale of one to ten?

00:04:28
Speaker 3: How good does it feel?

00:04:29
Speaker 5: Are you?

00:04:30
Speaker 3: Did you hear that? Did you hear that?

00:04:33
Speaker 4: What do you do?

00:04:34
Speaker 8: You work for an airline? Really?

00:04:36
Speaker 4: And you're sure you're not just trying to be on TV?

00:04:39
Speaker 9: Right?

00:04:39
Speaker 5: No, he's just doing some voodoo on your Thank you very much, Jenneva?

00:04:47
Speaker 2: Later, bye?

00:04:51
Speaker 4: Was that real?

00:04:52
Speaker 3: Was that real?

00:04:52
Speaker 10: Seriously?

00:04:53
Speaker 7: It's totally real?

00:04:54
Speaker 6: Then?

00:04:54
Speaker 2: You know she doesn't want you to hypnotize.

00:04:56
Speaker 3: I did hypnotize it.

00:05:01
Speaker 9: Take a deep breath in.

00:05:09
Speaker 3: And breathed out.

00:05:13
Speaker 6: Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak for him and your unconscious mind.

00:05:18
Speaker 2: You can notice that you feel rested, more alerted, confident. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is episode seven of mind Games. I'm Zoe la Scos, Ii'm Alice Hines.

00:05:37
Speaker 8: You don't know how you did it.

00:05:38
Speaker 6: You did you.

00:05:39
Speaker 8: You're going to a little time to Starsian state, and you're out of it.

00:05:47
Speaker 1: When we left off our last episode, Richard Bandler had just been acquitted of murder. People were wondering if you could have hypnotized the jury or warped his friend James Marino's mind.

00:05:59
Speaker 2: Around the time Bandler walked free in nineteen eighty eight, he got a new student who would take NLP into the Internet age and spawn the pickup artist movement.

00:06:09
Speaker 1: 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 two thousands, 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.

00:06:29
Speaker 2: 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.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: Pickup artistry was a big deal in the nineties and two thousands, 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 Throux even profiled at stars.

00:06:57
Speaker 2: 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 dad's had. At the same time, there was a huge backlash against feminism.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: And so this guy, Ross Jeffries, was the provocative face of the so called pickup artist movement.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: Here he is on a major talk show of the day, Wally George's Hot Seat.

00:07:22
Speaker 8: For women, getting some is a choice. For men, getting some is a choe. Oh if you don't recognize that you're getting yes, your how are you?

00:07:31
Speaker 2: Heay?

00:07:31
Speaker 3: I have news for him, getting some is impossible.

00:07:38
Speaker 2: Tom Cruise even played an alpha male seduction guru based on Ross in the nineteen ninety nine movie Magnolia.

00:07:45
Speaker 10: Respect the talk and tame the cunt.

00:07:57
Speaker 3: Tame it.

00:07:58
Speaker 1: This is from the nineties, 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.

00:08:13
Speaker 2: Okay, brief science rant. It drives me completely bonkers, Alice, how the manosphere uses the term alpha like it's a real biological concept.

00:08:22
Speaker 1: Wait, okay, so it's not.

00:08:24
Speaker 8: No.

00:08:25
Speaker 2: The idea that there are alpha wolves doming all the beta wolves for the right to breed is total bs. It was based on studies of wolves in captivity. Packs in the wild are just families, like parents with kids. The biologist who did most to popularize the idea of alpha's in the nineteen seventies has even said he was completely wrong about everything and has begged his publisher to stop printing his book.

00:08:49
Speaker 1: 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 pickup artists, though, and we want to use them as a case study to figure out whether hypno NLP mind control could.

00:09:06
Speaker 2: 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.

00:09:32
Speaker 1: But women don't go to coffee shops to get hypnotized and creepily stroked on the arm.

00:09:37
Speaker 2: Right, And this is what sets Ross Jeffrey's 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.

00:09:52
Speaker 3: I hope you're not too jet lag. I hope you're ready, as I'm coming loaded for bear and have all sorts of sneaky covert NLP gypnotic tricks up my sleeve, Zoe, Zoe, can't wait to see you there.

00:10:11
Speaker 2: Before I met Ross, he sent me many, many voice memos.

00:10:16
Speaker 9: The suffering of many men is inconceivable. I'm not putting down how women suffered, how women are abused.

00:10:26
Speaker 2: 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.

00:10:51
Speaker 3: But the paint of.

00:10:52
Speaker 9: Man 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 that.

00:11:01
Speaker 2: Ross had just texted me a screenshot of something called the Ross Jeffrey's Elite Student Mastermind Group. A man there said he was a thirty one year old virgin who'd been abused as a child, and that he had severe exima all over his face and body. Speed seduction, he wrote, had been a big help.

00:11:19
Speaker 3: And so I send this to you because i't want to share with you how I'd choke around and call myself the Guru getting laid.

00:11:30
Speaker 2: That's actually one of his more polite sobriquets. He's also called himself the Guru of Gash.

00:11:37
Speaker 9: I need a.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: Vulgar language and stuff to attract attention. But I send this to.

00:11:42
Speaker 9: 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.

00:11:53
Speaker 2: Ross was worried I'd drag him through the mud, which is a reasonable concern because a lot of women hate Himsti Ross Jeffrey's persona. These days, Ross's in his late sixties 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 Ericson is one of Ross's all time heroes. Ross's polarizing persona was born in the late nineteen eighties. At the time, Ross was a failed comedy writer living in Los Angeles, furious with all the women who wouldn't sleep with him.

00:12:37
Speaker 3: 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.

00:12:57
Speaker 2: Again, no skills until he discovered NLP. He was browsing at a bookstore when he felt an almost mystical pull.

00:13:06
Speaker 3: 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 Bandler and John Grinder 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, huh, that's uh, oh wow, this is amazing.

00:13:42
Speaker 2: Frogs Into Princes wasn't about getting laid. It was the first approachable, not to jargony book from NLP co founders Richard Bandler and John Grinder. It came out in nineteen seventy nine with a psychedelic fantasy prince on the cover and got a ton of people hooked on NLP.

00:14:00
Speaker 3: 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 and 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.

00:14:29
Speaker 2: Ross read every scrap of NLP literature he could get his hands on. Around nineteen eighty eight, he attended a seminar with Richard Bandler and another hypnotist named Don Wolfe in San Diego. Don gave him a hypnotic command to call Bandler an asshole anytime Bandler said Manuel Noriega. I guess Bandler was into talking about Panamanian dictators, because sure enough he said the name, and I.

00:14:52
Speaker 3: Remember jumping up and calling him an asshole. And he came over to me and threatened to throllow me, and then something ha 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.

00:15:11
Speaker 1: Oh my god, he did it. He just said new direction or nude erection. Ugh, that's like this pig of artistism. 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.

00:15:28
Speaker 2: You don't feel it, Alice, irresistible image of a boner. It's not working on you. No, huh weird. Well, this and more hypnotic speed seduction tactics. After the break, reading his books and watching his videos, I couldn't help feeling like, once you cut through the cringe marketing, a lot of Ross Jeffreys's 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 twenty twenty.

00:16:15
Speaker 8: So let me ask you, do you mind. If I ask what do you do for a living? Sure, I'm I'm a writer an author. Ah okay cool, And now my response is one of genuine curiosity because I like creative people. This is not fained. I really enjoy it. 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.

00:16:37
Speaker 7: Amen.

00:16:37
Speaker 8: 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.

00:16:46
Speaker 2: 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.

00:17:04
Speaker 8: If I said if I wanted to create a data fascination with Barbara, and I looked at her and said, you will be fascinated with me. You will hang on every word and it'll laugh at me.

00:17:13
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:17:14
Speaker 8: Now I could try to create a fascination by saying, every 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.

00:17:37
Speaker 2: So with each word, you are interesting.

00:17:40
Speaker 1: 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.

00:17:50
Speaker 2: Ross broke down methods like this for me during his interview.

00:17:54
Speaker 3: 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 a 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 what states of consciousness do you want that person in. There's all sorts of ways to evoke these states.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: I'm going to jump in, so when you slow down your voice and do hypne Paul speak. Is that supposed to be putting me in a transfer?

00:18:45
Speaker 3: I'm leaning into it so you can see it. I would normally never be this overt about it. It would be covert.

00:18:52
Speaker 2: What okay, give me the same line, but covert mode.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: Covert, Well, you're expecting it.

00:19:01
Speaker 2: No, I mean, this is such an artificial situation. We've got folks in the other room.

00:19:05
Speaker 3: There's all sorts of ways to evoke these states, okay. For example, some of them have to do with the kinds of questions you ask. I teach my students do 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 ask, what's something you always dreamed of doing fantasized about doing? But have them let yourself there? That requires an answer from a different part of your consciousness. It has to activate your You have 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.

00:19:49
Speaker 2: 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 during our interview. So, when you were teaching seminars still and you were promoting them in the ineffable way you did, were you ever concerned that the crassness and the vulgarity of the Ross Jeffreys ad copy would lure people who had dark intentions to your seminars and maybe even alienated dudes in need who were kind of turned off by the sexist pattern.

00:20:30
Speaker 3: 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 reflexibly applied it to.

00:20:44
Speaker 2: You, and that is supposed to make me feel how it's.

00:20:48
Speaker 3: A minor pattern interrupt Now your very experienced. It's not going to do jackshit with you. But it's a way of diverting. But more importantly, it's interrupting the pattern.

00:20:58
Speaker 1: 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.

00:21:06
Speaker 2: Yes, and then you use that fleeting moment of what the fuck to establish a new power dynamic.

00:21:12
Speaker 1: I've seen Richard Bandler 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 two thousand and three. Bamdler's describing watching someone from across the room.

00:21:28
Speaker 10: 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.

00:21:34
Speaker 1: Like this, Bandler waves his hand like he's beckoning a woman over.

00:21:40
Speaker 10: 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?

00:21:50
Speaker 1: 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 disorder orientation.

00:22:01
Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:12
Speaker 3: There's no distinction in my mind, between shifting someone's consciousness unexpectedly and a hypnotic technique. If I created a 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 trance where you're out and I can do surgery on you. But it's the start of getting leverage into here on conscious mind.

00:22:43
Speaker 2: Once you have that leverage, you can establish an anchor or embed a command NLP tactics we've encountered before.

00:22:51
Speaker 1: 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 own or I'm at the coffee shop.

00:23:02
Speaker 3: Even better right now? Oh yeah, yeah.

00:23:06
Speaker 2: It takes finesse. 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 ink women with women? Okay, it's collaborative, collaborative, it's a party. It's participatory.

00:23:34
Speaker 3: How do you use You say that with irony and a little sarcasm in your voice, But well that we'll take it as given.

00:23:41
Speaker 2: Proof be wrong. Tell me about how you would use.

00:23:43
Speaker 3: Anchoring anything, but okay, tell.

00:23:46
Speaker 2: Me how you would use anchoring.

00:23:48
Speaker 3: My voice is my anchor.

00:23:50
Speaker 2: Your voice is your anchor.

00:23:51
Speaker 3: I have a very distinctive voice, So if I wanted to anchor, I 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 by 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, and I'd say, well, I don't know how well you can imagine this as I describe it. That's a command to imagine what I'm about to describe.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: Here's the idea. Because those words are subtly set off, the brain absorbs them differently than everything else in the sentence.

00:24:41
Speaker 3: It processes it outside of conscious awareness.

00:24:45
Speaker 2: 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.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with nagging, Zoe.

00:24:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not a ross thing, but it's probably the most notorious pick artist trek right. It's when you insult a woman in a supposedly playful way to make your self conscious, like, oh, it's so cute, how your teeth are a little crooked. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

00:25:11
Speaker 1: 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 it's 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 nineteen eighty seven.

00:25:34
Speaker 6: 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.

00:25:48
Speaker 2: Alice, do you think that works?

00:25:50
Speaker 1: I think megging does and doesn't work like it wouldn't work on me, but I think it could work on someone who is maybe like quite young, or for some reason is in a vulnera place in their life and is looking for approval. Someone who's nag could then be like hooked because they're waiting for that compliment that was withheld.

00:26:08
Speaker 2: Iye 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.

00:26:38
Speaker 1: I mean absolutely, I've been thinking about the same thing throughout this whole podcast. And I would use Richard Bandler's beckoning trick to approach someone at a conference who might otherwise try to avoid me if I came on directly.

00:26:49
Speaker 2: 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 staff 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.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: 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.

00:27:26
Speaker 2: 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 trance or how you define persuasion.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: 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.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: And everyone can become Ross Jeffries. We're all pickup artists.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: Yay, okay, but reality check, I do not know how to hypnotize people, even when I'm really on fire in an interview.

00:28:40
Speaker 2: Same unfortunately, unless I'm doing it unconsciously.

00:28:44
Speaker 1: But I don't think I am.

00:28:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, I 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 cover manipulation actually works. Can you sort of break down some of the techniques that you were using?

00:29:01
Speaker 3: 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.

00:29:20
Speaker 2: So what kinds of conditions are you creating with those?

00:29:23
Speaker 3: I'm creating a condition that no matter what happens, it's evidence to you. It's a ratification to you that the trance is working.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, So there's no escape.

00:29:32
Speaker 3: It's called inclusive set and ratification. I'm letting you ratify through your own experience that it's working.

00:29:39
Speaker 2: So what he's describing as 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 trans.

00:29:52
Speaker 1: 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.

00:30:12
Speaker 2: 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 hypno powers. 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.

00:30:42
Speaker 1: 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 three hundred women in a single weekend, one of them is bound to hit exactly.

00:30:56
Speaker 2: So at the very end of our interview, I asked Ross if speeds to do action was just that.

00:31:01
Speaker 1: Basically something you believe in, so it works a placebo.

00:31:06
Speaker 2: Effect, or maybe there's more to it. Is it possible to use NLP to manipulate people?

00:31:13
Speaker 3: Define manipulation to.

00:31:16
Speaker 2: Make them do something that they wouldn't otherwise do.

00:31:21
Speaker 3: I had a mentor I don't care to mention his name, and I said to hey, can you use hypnosis to make people do things against their will? It gave me very interesting answers Zoe. He said, well, technically no, but in fact, in reality and actuality, most people don't have a will. I said, what do you mean by that? He said, most people just have wishes that flit in and out of their mind, conflicting desires, but will and 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 mean 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 is 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.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: 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 the supposedly neutral, harmless approaches to changing someone's state of mind.

00:33:04
Speaker 3: 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.

00:33:25
Speaker 2: 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 get it. We like to think of ourselves as these super rational, singular beings, but that's just not true.

00:33:45
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:02
Speaker 2: 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.

00:34:14
Speaker 1: 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 pistiche 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 an NLP capitalize on that.

00:34:36
Speaker 2: They tell followers that can fix all their internal conflicts and make them whole, and most grooves also promote the idea that they're going to give you more agency and power in that process.

00:34:47
Speaker 7: Right.

00:34:47
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:56
Speaker 7: So once you've sort of taken that step then and 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 twelve years I was going to be branded with the leader's initials, I would have clearly given them the finger and ran out the door.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: What Nexium, a notorious cult whose leader was convicted of sex trafficking, stole from NLP That's Next Time on mind Games. 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 Alsop and Dara Lukpotz, edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan.

00:35:49
Speaker 2: Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone, fact checking by Aman Waylan from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswaloshan Mangeshatikador and Kate Osbourne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki Etor.