And now for something entirely different.
Recently, my husband Peter gave a talk locally about mind control and how we human beings can be easily manipulated. Apparently, Mike Adams heard about it and invited Pete to join him on The Health Ranger to share his expertise on influence and persuasion, false beliefs, cognitive bias, social conformity, and psychological manipulation techniques. He also explained how we can free ourselves from personal fears and limiting beliefs using the tools of hypnosis.
Much of what I know and believe about propaganda and influence I’ve absorbed from being married to Pete. I credit him with recognizing, early on, the effects of mass persuasion at play during covid, and I’ve also seen how effective those same techniques can be in healing trauma at its root.
Freedom of every sort starts with awareness of limitations, whether imposed externally or internally, and I think Pete does a fantastic job in this interview of raising awareness of how those limitations are put in place.
For those who prefer to read the interview, I’ve provided a transcript edited for brevity and clarity. But it’s still long, and if you’re reading this as an email, it may cut off prematurely. Click on the “Mind Control” title of this piece to read it in full.
Peter McLaughlin: I got into this decidedly unusual path about 17 or 18 years ago. It was the result of a simultaneous diagnosis, same day, of leukemia and Lyme disease, when I was volunteering for a local fire department in Connecticut. The more that I studied how to solve this -- because the hematologist oncologist was saying, "we don't know what causes it, we don't know how to cure it"-- the more I was drawn into the effects that the mind can have over the body and even further, how much effect the spirit has over the mind, that has over the body. So that's what drew me to this work in the first place. And I've had a very varied background, as I mentioned. I was a volunteer fireman and EMT for about 14 or 15 years in two different states, using some of what I learned as a hypnotist in the field, and I was on Wall Street for a while.
I was working down there when 9/11 happened. I heard about the second plane impact when I was at Grand Central, getting ready to jump on a train going down to Wall Street. So I turned around and went back to Westchester County. I also had a security guard company for a while. So I've done a lot of different things.
Mike Adams: And in this process then, you really began to learn about how the mind works, mind- body interaction, spirit- mind- body interaction. And I would imagine that one of your conclusions is that our mind tends to create the reality that we experience.
PM: Absolutely. You know, science and medicine will pay homage to the mind-body connection, but that's where it ends. They'll say, yeah, the mind and body are connected, but they won't really tell you what to do to lower your blood pressure with your mind. Or do other things that you can do with your mind as well.
And that's not to diminish some of the things that they do and it's not to diminish things like diet and exercise, but the mind plays a huge role in our health, in our wellbeing, and how we're governed.
MA: It reminds me of The Matrix: “If you believe something has happened, your mind makes it real."
Todd Pitner (co-host): Peter, I'm interested in your perspective on what causes delusion, and why so many seemingly smart people adopt false beliefs. It has to be a hypnotic spell, right?
PM: I believe it is. It's persuading people to believe something that they otherwise would not believe.
I did a talk for a small group in Tarpon Springs, FL. One of the things that I made clear to this audience was the first five principles of hypnosis of persuasion, how to get something into the subconscious mind, because that's where everything lives.
The real game is the subconscious mind. That's where your emotions are; that's where your beliefs are. And a belief is simply an emotional idea. If you have an emotion and you have an idea, and they get married, now you have a belief. And a belief doesn't have to be true. It doesn't have to be false.
You know you've tripped over someone else's belief when they start arguing with you vehemently. It doesn't necessarily make sense to start screaming about a political issue, for example. Tripping over beliefs, frankly, is what motivates political talk radio to a degree: polarized, opposing positions.
There are five things I’d like to mention; the first one is repetition. If you want to learn something, you just repeat it over and over and over again, to move from a conscious awareness into an unconscious competence. Our entire educational system is based upon this one principle.
The second thing would be emotion. When a person is in a state of heightened emotion, their subconscious mind becomes open. There's this mechanism, a gatekeeper called a “critical factor” or a “critical faculty.” It prevents information from the outside getting into the subconscious…unless certain conditions are met. So repetition is one of the ways of battering down that door; another one is if you're in a state of high emotion, that door is wide open.
The next one would be authority. If a friend of yours tells you you have a tail, you're probably not going to look around to check and see if he's right. But if a doctor tells you, “Look, Todd, you've got a tail dragging around behind you,” you might actually look behind you because he's a doctor. He's an authority.
The next one would be the effects of your peer group. This is how advertising works: “Four out of five doctors choose this; more Americans choose this than any other kind.” And part of the reason for this is because we are herd animals. We're more like dogs than we are like cats. So we're heavily influenced by the effect of our peer group.
Then the last one of these first five — I know there are other ones — is hypnosis. And if you look at major incidents like COVID-19, or 9/11, all five of these were present immediately, and remained. People actually entered a hypnotic state, based on the shock.
TP: To go back to March of 2020… just think about everybody being around the TV, absorbing the repetition and the ultimate source of authority, Fauci. All of these appeals to authority over and over and over again. And then you have this biased media entering in. I believe the greatest weapon against the pursuit of honest objective truth was the CIA's invention of the smear, “conspiracy theorists.” Would you agree?
PM: Yeah, along with weaponizing very famous and influential studies that have been done on the mind. For example, the Asch conformity experiment. For those who are maybe not familiar with this, they had a room they filled with say, nine participants. And the trick was that eight of them were confederates. Eight of them were paid by the researchers to be essentially actors. So they only had one real participant.
They put simple vertical lines on a board, and one line was obviously far shorter than all the other ones. They would say, which line is the shortest line? Let's say it's number six. The first three or four or five confederates all say some other number, like “number two.” And by the time it gets to the real participant, 75% say “it's number two,” even though it’s obviously not the shortest line. Because we are herd animals. We have a need to conform.
It's the same thing that I remember seeing on Candid Camera when I was a kid. They would have someone get onto an elevator car where all the people on the elevator are faced the opposite direction from the door. The person gets on the car and they stand and look and then they turn around and face the back of the elevator car.
It's the way we're wired.
MA: Let me interject something here. This social conformity is I think the most powerful of the factors that you mentioned, because we now live in an age of very strong social connections. Before the internet, your social circle didn't have as much influence over you because it wasn't reinforced so globally. You could have a belief in your private life that wasn't known by your employer, or your pastor or known by other friends. Now because of social media, everything is interconnected. You say one thing online that is considered unpopular, then suddenly you are attacked or “exposed” by this entire network of people. That forces more social conformity today than at any time in human history. And, I've come to realize that most people would rather die than to be ostracized from their peer group.
PM: Well, I would say that has certainly always been true. And I would agree with you insofar as now, you can engineer reality. One of the words that I used in this talk I gave in Florida was the word “bolshevik,” which in Russian means “one of the majority.” They understood that if they presented themselves as the majority, which they were not, that it would be persuasive on everyone else, because most people want to feel like they fit in. You know, that's why in high schools you don't have to tell kids how to dress — they all dress the same way. Why? Because they want to fit in. How do you feel if you go to a black tie event and you're wearing a t-shirt and jeans? [laughter]
So the word “bolshevik.” The technology that we have now can engineer a fake reality. You can make it look like people are dropping dead in the streets of Wu Han. We can make it look like everybody's wearing masks when that's not necessarily true. We can make it seem like the only people that disagree are lunatics and they're dangerous to everyone else. Whereas before, in your own community, when everything was face-to-face, that was much harder to engineer. You could do it; I mean, cults certainly do it. Now we have all of this technology that is being harnessed to create a false illusion of what is true.
MA: Censorship is a key part of this also, because censorship blocks people from accessing any dissenting or counter-views. And because of this very heavy-handed censorship, combined with the phenomena that you just mentioned, it's very easy now for people to slip into what I would call “modern day cults.” There are all kinds of cults out there. I would say there's a climate cult. There's a transgenderism cult. There's a pro-war cult. There are endless names for different cults.
But they all share the same common traits: people, like you said, combine emotion [with an idea] to create a belief. It invades their subconscious mind, which then drives that belief. And then people never audit their own beliefs; they never go back and say, “Hey, why do I think that? What was the original thing that caused me to believe that thing? They never do that. They just spout out, like this has always been true because that's my reality.
PM: Absolutely. And on the censorship point that you raised: back to the Asch conformity study. When everyone was a confederate, except the one participant, talking about the obviously smaller line, there was 75% compliance.
When one other person said, “No, it's number six. That's the shortest line,” that number went from 75% down to 10%. That, my friend, tells you everything you need to know about the necessity from the controller's standpoint, of censorship.
MA: Yup. They can't allow one voice to disagree.
TP: That is fascinating. I came across the term, “fashionably irrational beliefs” today. Let me read this:
“Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs, IF holding those beliefs increases our status and wellbeing.”
I think it's called “identity protective cognition.” Would you agree with that, Peter?
PM: Completely. And one of the ways that I simplify that concept, that humans are herd animals, is: if you have a zebra, and the zebra is injured, where does it want to be for safety? It wants to be in the center of the herd. That's where safety is found.
And I think this is one of the reasons why — studies have shown this — that if all of your friends are significantly overweight, you are going to be significantly overweight. Because you have a need to fit in… and it's all happening subconsciously.
MA: I want you to speak to the power to change. I've never shared this publicly before, but it was probably 20 years ago that I hired an NLP practitioner to consult with me to overcome what was at the time, a terrible fear of public speaking. Which nobody could believe hearing that now, because it's just the most natural thing in the world — but that's how hypnosis works. You can consciously get assistance, which is what you do, Peter, you help people rewire their neurology. Please speak to the power of that because you can literally reshape the way your mind thinks about things.
PM: Absolutely. So what is it specifically about hypnosis? Do you want to know how we could apply that to helping people that we know that are deeply in this trance of COVID 19 and what the government is telling us, or do you want to know about hypnosis in relationship to something else?
I want to know about the profound nature of how it can be used for self-improvement.
PM: I'll pick up where you left off, because you said that at one point you had an intense fear of public speaking, which is fascinating because that's the number one fear, or at least it was 10 years ago in the United States. The fear of death was number three. Seinfeld had this joke: this means that you'd rather be the guy in the casket than the one giving the eulogy. [laughter]
So when I work with people, I'm working on two different levels.
One is root cause. If a person has a fear of speaking in public, it means something happened in the past that created this fear in the first place. In other words, it lodged in the subconscious mind and said, this is dangerous. Many clients with whom I've worked have that issue. It might have been that they were called up to the front of the room to solve a math problem in the third grade, and they weren't able to solve it. The teacher admonished them, and the other kids started laughing at them and it felt horrible. So the subconscious created this defense, saying it's dangerous to speak in front of people.
When I work with people, I work on the level of essentially solving that problem in the subconscious mind, solving that old — I'm going to call it a trauma, even though it wasn't like somebody put a gun to their head. They were publicly humiliated. We want to neutralize that, while at the same time, come in with hypnotic suggestions when the subconscious mind is open that say to the subconscious, it's safe for you to speak in public, and you're really good at this. And then we can do something which is from NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) which is “future pacing:” it takes the mind into the future — you're doing it in the future and it's going really well.
MA: I'm so glad you mentioned that. You’ve mentioned a variety of NLP techniques. What people I hope will understand from this interview today, is that these techniques are being used against you constantly, through advertising and media and so on, but you can harness these techniques consciously with your own goal-oriented outcomes. And why not? If there's a way to program yourself to think differently, why move through the world just passively absorbing everybody else's scripts? You know what I mean?
PM: I couldn't agree more. Because ultimately it's just a power. You can use electricity to take somebody's life with an electric chair, or you can use electricity to save someone's life. It's not the tool that’s the problem; it’s how it's wielded. And unfortunately right now, since 99.9% of the public gets zero instruction on hypnosis, including psychologists— [laughter] —it's a tool that can be used by what I would call the dark forces, to achieve their ends.
MA: I think part of it is because the idea of hypnosis — the way it's depicted in Hollywood and movies — is a comic book version of it. They almost try to mock it, in order to say, “this isn't a real thing.” But it is real; it's happening everyday, probably happening in that same show in some other way. For example, we know that the CDC was given about a billion dollars in order to pay script writers to incorporate pro-vaccine messages into movies and TV shows. That's a form of hypnosis.
PM: Without a doubt. Just watching television or watching a movie causes you to enter hypnotic state. We know this from people's vernacular. People will say, “I want to ‘veg out’ in front of the TV,” or “I want to ‘zone out’ in front of the TV.”
And we probably know it from our own lives. Your wife calls your name and you're watching a football game and you don't answer the first time or the second time. And the third time you're like, “Huh? Sorry, what'd you say?”
TP: I answer when she brings the chicken wings in. [laughter]
PM: The beautiful thing from their perspective is that people think, oh, well that works on other people, but it doesn't work on me. Right.
MA: They do think that! People think they are not influenced by advertising, but the studies show they go out and buy the things that are advertised.
PM: Why else would companies spend billions of dollars on advertising? And why would governments like the British government set up the Nudge Unit? They called it the nudge unit; it's a psychological warfare operation that was designed to be deployed against their people. To get them to take the COVID vaccine and to believe everything that they're being told.
MA: Yes. I remember I would ask a lot of people: Why are you taking the vaccine? And their answers were very informative. Number one, they would say, “I just believe in the science.” And I know from my studying of NLP, when they use the word, “just,” that means you've hit now at very deeply embedded subconscious belief. It means that they will reject any evidence when they say “just.” Is that what you've seen, too?
PM: The one that I'm really familiar with is the word “because.” Studies have shown that if you have a line of students in front of a copy machine, and someone wants to cut in front of the line, and they use the word “because,” the compliance goes through the roof. “Because” implies that there is a rational reason behind it. “Can I cut in line because I need to make a copy?”
MA: That doesn’t even make any sense.
PM: That's what they say. “I need to cut in front of the line because I need to make a copy.” Right. Not “because I'm in a hurry,” or “because my copier doesn't work.” When they added the word, “because,” the compliance went through the roof.
MA: That's amazing. And the other common reason that I heard from people about why they took vaccines, was they would say things like, well, I didn't take it for myself. I took it so I could go to the nursing home or I could go visit my child. I had to take an airplane and fly to a city. I took the vaccine for someone else. Like, what?
TP: Let's think about the source of that. I submit that those controlling the media and the manufactured narratives, they know that people aren't looking to correct their delusions, but to justify them. Isn't that right, Peter?
PM: Yeah, that's how the mind works. So every decision the three of us have ever made in our lives, whether it's big or small, was an emotional decision that we later went to the conscious mind to justify.
MA: Right.
PM: The conscious mind wants to hang its hat on some kind of legitimate reason why you're making this choice, when 10 minutes ago you said you weren't going to eat any more donuts. And it will, like a lawyer, justify whatever you emotionally arrive at. So when you asked people why they took the vaccine, they're going to come up with something their conscious mind has already hung its hat on. Even if it doesn't make sense entirely.
TP: I keep going back to 2020 and the on-purpose with-intent onslaught of the media narrative, the manufactured media narrative that was out there. I think, I don't know, 90%, if not more than 90%, became hypnotized during that time. I'm equally as interested in those who were resistant to the hypnotic spell. Are there any specific traits that identify people who you’ve found as a hypnotherapist just aren't open to hypnosis?
PM: In my opinion, everyone can go into hypnosis. It's more of a, are they resisting you on purpose? Because that could prevent it. Or do they not know what it is? Do they think it's a catatonic sleep-like state where you do whatever you're told and don't remember anything?
If those two factors aren't present, I've never had a problem bringing somebody into hypnosis, ever. But they're also cooperating with me. I think there are a couple of factors here to answer your question a little deeper, Todd. One is, David Icke has used this term for years and I love it: “followers.” The higher you go in the educational system means you're a better follower; you're a better repeater. You're rewarded for repeating what you read in the book, and if you don't do that, you don't get a good grade. So the people who are getting to those higher levels up into the PhD level, are really good repeaters. And they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo because that's what gives them their status, money, and lifestyle, and everything else.
To the other part of Todd's question — what about the people that didn't buy into this; what about the people that saw through this quickly? I think part of that is you've been through this before. I can say for me, I worked in New York City and I lived just outside of the city when 9/11 happened. And I was 36 years old at the time, I think, and I tried to join the army.
There was a guy sitting next to me on the Metro North train coming back home — it took like four hours to get to get out of New York City — and he said, oh, this group of people did this and I thought, should I punch this guy? Well, he might've been right. Like I was deep in it. We call this being red-pilled now.
If you're able to see through something, if you understand that you can be hypnotized just watching TV, if you understand that the countdown that happens before a news show, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 is what a hypnotist uses, it's not effective on you anymore.
TP: That’s a good point, because through 9/11, recognizing that hmm, building seven looked a lot like a controlled demolition to me — no plane hit it — once you start engaging critical thought, you develop a different muscle, right? But you know, I find it almost impossible to argue anyone into the truth or critical thought.
PM: The key word is “argue” them into the thought. When you argue with somebody, they just put up their defenses. Bam.
TP: You know, I'll say persuade. Let me take “argue” back. “Convince,” “persuade.” Try to lead them to truth.
MA: The presumption is that people are rational beings and they're not; that's what Peter is really bringing to us today. I'm sorry to interrupt your question, Todd, but it leads me to a very important point here.
You know how I'm running a large AI, large language model R and D project. And I'm struck by how much electricity is necessary to do all the computations in order to build the language model versus how little energy the human brain uses. It's something like 60 Watts, the equivalent of bioenergy. Maybe it's a hundred Watts. I don't know. But it's very tiny. It's like a light bulb. Okay. How can the human brain achieve so much in terms of general purpose computation using so little power?
The answer is that it takes shortcuts, and the shortcuts are exactly what Peter's talking about, that the human brain doesn't actually typically think rationally. It simply takes shortcuts, which are “beliefs” and the beliefs are formed through mechanisms that people are unaware of. So, Peter, what are your thoughts on that, of how efficient the human brain is, which was a survival mechanism during times when food was not abundant? But because of these shortcuts, it's kind of crippling our ability to be rational at this point.
PM: I would agree. That's why it's hackable. This is how magicians work; they know how our minds work and they hack into that system to make it look like they're doing magic when it's really just sleight of hand. We're looking over here while something's happening over there. I would suspect that's part of what's going on in our world and how we're being misled and persuaded. And I would then go back to technology and say, never in history have people in power had this kind of control over individuals. You know, Hitler talked about the radio and how powerful the radio was in terms of persuading people, but we've gotten orders of magnitude beyond that, haven’t we.
The other thing I wanted to mention to you about what can we do with other people — and I'm not trying to say I have all the answers — but we do know about the Asch experiment, that if a second person is introduced into this, suddenly the compliance goes from 75% all the way down to 10%.
We know from sales, for example, that in order to be successful in sales, you have to have rapport, and rapport is established at the subconscious level. NLP teaches how to establish rapport with another person, through mirroring, pacing, and leading. It's amazing how it works. So I think we have to understand what's going on with these people by returning to the principles of hypnosis and persuasion: repetition, emotion, peer group, authority figures, and being in a hypnotic state. Returning to that Ash experiment and understanding: we may not be able to persuade them intellectually, rationally. This may happen in a different way.
It may happen by them seeing, oh, it's not just Peter who's a lunatic; now it's his wife who's also a lunatic. Oh, and his kids are lunatics too. And the neighbor’s a lunatic. And uncle Jimmy's a lunatic. At some point, that herd thing begins to work in our favor.
We don't want to push them to the point where they start fighting us because now we've lost rapport, and once you've lost rapport, you might as well be a telemarketer or worse.
MA: One of the most powerful things that I've discovered over the years is to show them that the authority that they believe in is caught lying to them. That shatters the belief in authority. And as you mentioned earlier, Peter, belief in authority is one of the most powerful persuasion techniques.
That's why doctors get on TV and wear the white coats, the stethoscope. It's a costume of authority. That's why war generals have all these medals that they never earned. They were never on any battlefield. All these Pentagon officials, they wouldn't know how to dig a trench if their life depended on it, but they have all these medals. Give me a break, right?
It's all just costumes, but it works for people. And if you can help shatter that illusion of false authority… here's a great example. We've been talking about 9/11 today. I asked people, “do you remember that something hit the Pentagon?” And they said, “yeah, a commercial jet slammed into the Pentagon.”
I said, “Okay, great. Now, see if you can find photos, any photos whatsoever of the wreckage of a commercial jet on the lawn of the Pentagon… because don't you agree that if a jet crashed into something, you would see landing gear, seats, luggage, plane parts?” And they say, “Okay, I'll go search.”
They come back a day later, saying “I couldn't find anything. There's no photos of jet wreckage.” And I'm like, “Yeah, because it wasn't a commercial jet that hit the Pentagon. It was a missile.” And then they go, “Whoa.” All of a sudden they realize. They went through their own process of discovery and their reality is getting shattered. That actually works for some people
PM: That can definitely work for some people. I think the other thing too is… when I look at what's happening in the whole world right now, and the United States in particular, I say okay, defense department is creating wars, and the justice department is pursuing injustice, and medicine is producing disease and worse. And the treasury department and the economics of this country are destroying our economy.
I think for us first to be an example, of leading a kind of clean life. A healthy life. Because the proof ultimately is in the pudding, right? By your fruits, you will know them. At some point, that you haven't dropped dead as an anti-vaxxer, that your marriage is still intact, that your finances are good, that you're taking care of your body, that you look like you're a happy person, that your house is clean and your lawn is mowed, I think starts over time to have an influence on the people around us. And I feel like that's where this all starts. Is it calls upon us to get our own house in order… and to realize this is an emotional issue for this other person that they've held on to. There is that saying that it's easier to swindle a man than it is to convince him he's been swindled.
So we can't necessarily do it all at once and we can't necessarily rescue everyone. But we can be an example in our own lives. And we can use some of the principles that I've talked about today in order to demonstrate, because our power as a model I think is often underlooked.
MA: The defenses that people put up to this though are extraordinary. What the human mind can justify is extraordinary.
PM: Because again, it's going back to protecting — that's the job of your subconscious mind, to protect you. And it has no conception of time.
TP: This is what ticks me off about the mainstream media, and the people behind this con, that they know all of this. So when they induce that fear, and they plant the seeds that you are an asymptomatic, silent assassin… this is what keeps me up at night.
PM: It's fifth generation warfare. I'm sure you've talked about this on your program. That's what we're facing. And we've been trained to expect that war looks like World War II, with tanks and missiles and planes, bombs and bullets. Armies moving across continents, not a war of the mind. That's what's happening: the battlefield is the mind and people are not expecting this. When the Germans launched the Blitzkrieg, a more powerful army on paper — the French and the Maginot line — wilted and was destroyed within weeks… because the Germans brought a new way of warfare that the French were not expecting. Well, that's what we've been under. And like human beings that have come before us, we will figure this out and we will defeat it.
MA: This brings me to my question of focus. As you know, hypnosis requires attention. And in fact, choosing the direction of the public's attention is itself a form of hypnosis. Like right now, the west is losing the war in Ukraine. And we're seeing early signs that we're going to be told to forget about Ukraine. This is almost a hypnotic suggestion that's coming, like, what Ukraine? What are you talking about? Uh, now we're focused on the Middle East instead, right? Ukraine, nothing happened there. It's all about manipulating attention.
PM: Absolutely. I wanted to come back to, what do you do with people that are on the “other”side? Questions are very powerful, because they put you in the role of a director or an artist, painting on the canvas of someone else's mind. Certain kinds of questions could be, “Do you trust politicians?” In my personal experience, when I ask that question, nobody says “yes!” When you start saying “this candidate is better than that one,” then people become defensive.
Part of the way in, is asking questions like, “Do you think they [politicians] always tell you the truth? Do they think they have your best interests at heart? How would you know if you were being lied to by the authority?”
MA: Ooh, that's a great question.
PM: You don't even have to say, do you know this statistic, or this fact. Or that the circular for the shots have nothing on them. You don't have to go there. You can say, “Do you know why the circular on the shot has no writing on it? I'm still confused by that. Do you know why?” knowing you're planting a seed which is a hypnotic suggestion in their mind, and that their mind has to go to that question in order to answer it.
This is hypnotic language you can use, like “not” and “don’t.” You know, “don’t think about a giraffe.” You have to go to a giraffe in your mind. You can use this kind of language to avoid resistance: “You don't have to go into hypnosis right now and you certainly don't have to go deeper with each breath you breathe while you listen to my voice speaking to you in that chair; you don’t even have to feel comfortable, just sitting there with your eyes closed is enough sometimes to feel the way you want.” That’s hypnotic language I used, built around what I call the negative clause.
MA: That's a great example of how you worked it right in there. I want to bring our attention deliberately to the fact that in the early days of the vaccine being rolled out, they used the scarcity principle to create controlled demand. You and I were talking about Robert Cialdini's book Influence, kind of a classic. One of the principles is the principle of increasing scarcity.
They had a study where there was a cookie jar. The subject was asked, do you want a cookie? And there's like two cookies in the jar, then somebody comes in, takes a cookie, and leaves, and now there's only one. And the subject will always want that last cookie.
They did the same thing with vaccines in the early days. They said, “Oh, there's not much supply. You're going to be lucky to get a vaccine.” It was classic manipulation right there.
PM: 150%. I was the only one in my family of five in the beginning that could see through this because of what I went through with 9/11, and I was considered the lunatic. And I remember I was just blown away, in a state of awe, by this onslaught against our minds. It was like a masterclass in hypnotic persuasion and neuro-linguistic programming. They were pulling out all the stops and yes, scarcity was one of them. Along with authority, repetition, the effect of the peer group, emotions and so on.
Even now we have Travis Kelsey of the Kansas City Chiefs. His salary, with his other endorsements, is something like $14 million dollars. And Pfizer gave him something like $19 or $20 million for the commercial. The Cialdini principle that would relate to that is “liking linking.” So when someone does an endorsement, you already have feelings about this person that you’re basically transferring to the product.
MA: Here's something else. One of the most authoritative voices that's used to influence people is Morgan Freeman. He is hired constantly to voice commercials in which he never appears. And why is that?
Morgan Freeman brilliantly accepts roles in movies where he is the moral hero. Morality is then linked to the Morgan Freeman voice which admittedly, it's a very pleasant voice to listen to, and he can then promote a product. People won't even recognize that that's Morgan Freeman's voice, but they will feel a connection; here comes the emotions and the belief, “Oh, that must be good. I don't know why, but it must be good.”
PM: There's something called an NLP anchor, where you can anchor an emotional feeling to something else. For example, if I were giving a speech in front of 500 people, I could ask people about their last vacation. “What did it feel like when you're on vacation? Close your eyes, go into your body and just tell me what it feels like when you're on that vacation. Now, open your eyes.” And if I'm standing downstage center, and maybe I adjust my tie, I'm setting an anchor to that feeling of being on vacation. 15, 20, 30 minutes later, whatever it is in the speech, I can walk back down center, I can adjust my tie, and I will fire the anchor. People will feel this feeling as I'm giving them “the ask,” whatever that is.
So Morgan Freeman's voice has been anchored through repetition multiple times to these characters, like you correctly point out, to characters of moral authority, including God. There's your NLP anchor, that then gets transferred onto something else that he might be representing.
MA: I apologize, I did not realize how much time has slipped by. That's a great sign of a very engaging, fascinating conversation when we lose track of time. Let me use this opportunity to plug our guest’s website: blueskyhypnosis.com.
So Peter, can you describe what do you do with new clients?
PM: The first thing is, we talk about what they want to work on. On the one hand, I focus on people who are having a terrible time in relationships, or they're dealing with significant grief, or they have a tremendous amount of anxiety. And then on the other hand, I've worked with athletes — NFL players, college players — on enhancing their performance.
What I'm always looking for, that I mentioned at the outset of the conversation, is: what is the root cause? Because I know that the subconscious mind’s job is to protect you, and it has no concept of time. If you put those two factors together, you perfectly describe post-traumatic stress disorder.
You know, the man is no longer in the army. Fallujah was 15 years ago or whatever it was, and they're 6,000 miles away from what happened. And yet they get triggered. And when they get triggered, their neurology, through the control of the subconscious mind, tells them: you're under immediate threat right now. This happens to people when they want to get on an airplane and they're scared, or public speaking is another one. It could come up in groups — social anxiety is a thing now. It could be a person that's had failed relationship after failed relationship.
So I'm helping these people get to the root cause of what created this dynamic in the first place, neutralizing that, and then adding in the hypnotic suggestions to produce the results that they want. Because everything is coming from our mind — in our physical health, our relationships, our finances. Everything is coming from there.
MA: How do you normally do this?
PM: I use zoom. I also have an office where I live in Florida, but what I have found, especially through my YouTube channel where I've got 120,000 subscribers at this point, is that I get people coming from all over the world and I'm able to work with them via zoom. You know, the symbol of the yin and yang, the dark and the light that are conjoined together, means to me that in the best of times, there's something horrible happening. In a political state, that's probably things like corruption and people's morals starting to deteriorate. And in horrible times, good things are happening too.
In New York City on and after 9/11, New Yorkers, people that just walk past each other, or fight each other over a cab or a square meter of sidewalk space, were hugging each other. Embracing each other. This is something else to keep in mind as well, that both of these are at play.
So. I want to help people to neutralize the thing that created this in the first place, that underlying fear, and then program in through hypnotic suggestions the outcome that they want.
MA: A lot of people are very excited about these chatbots language models. And it has everything to do with what you just described, Peter. If you take a base model of an LLM, and you retrain it through a process called fine tuning, you can get it to change the way it speaks, to change the answers, to change its knowledge.
Well. It works with our minds, too. You can fine tune, train your own mind consciously with an end goal. You can literally say to yourself, okay, I would like to become a person that's more confident public speaking; I would like to be a person that listens better, that has better self-discipline in the goals that I wish to achieve. You can reprogram yourself with the help of professionals like you.
PM: 100%. The other thing that I'd like to add to this is MK Ultra: trauma-based mind control. We know that that's one of the ways of controlling people. And so I say, why not heal your own trama, the trauma that's driving you to have an anger and rage problem? The trauma that's causing you to self-medicate with alcohol; the trauma that doesn't let you be in a stable and loving relationship; the trauma in your past that's keeping you on the same track, the same rut that doesn't allow you to live the life that you want to live.
So I really think it's both sides. It's cleaning up what is the root cause, and then putting the seeds on the fertile soil.
MA: I've got two more things to add to what Peter just said. Years ago, I was part of a training process in energetic healing, and came to find out that a shockingly high percentage — I think something like 70 to 75% of the other students — had experienced sexual trauma. I'd like to know if you're seeing this, Peter, across the board.
PM: It's staggering. I know that the work that I do, the people that come to me are a very self-selected group. But having said that, the women and some men that have had this is over the top. It's so heartbreaking. I just worked with somebody yesterday who went through this as a kid, and then she became promiscuous when she was in her early twenties, which is related back to this. It's related to the shame and the guilt that came out of this, even though she was a victim, thinking, well, I guess this is what I deserve on a subconscious level. And that then governs the behavior through her life that produces results that are consistent with the trauma.
MA: That's right. Now those of you listening, if that's something that has been part of your experience, now as an adult you have far more resources to recalibrate that experience. You do not have to live your life as the child who experienced that. With the lack of defenses, being the complete victim. That is no longer who you are. So why not recalibrate your mind, your consciousness, your belief system to take advantage of your adult neurology and your wisdom that you have today? Is that a fair statement, Peter?
PM: I couldn't agree more. And if people want to dip their toe in the water and not spend any money, they can go to my YouTube channel, which is blueskyhypnosis. I've got 200 videos on there and many of them are self-hypnosis, guided hypnosis tracks. They can guide themselves through this and you can read the comments. It's amazing when you are able to touch that many people, how many people will say, “I lost 88 pounds over the last six months, and I just don't feel craving for this and that” or “I healed my abandoned child on the inside.” And I'm not saying that that works for everybody. A lot of people need the personalized one-on-one thing rather than something generic, but this is a way of dipping a toe in the water.
MA: What you offer can be so helpful to people. And I think so many people go through life wondering why things are not working. And they lack the answers, but the answers sometimes can be so simple. Not to say that it doesn't take a lot of courage to do it. It takes some guts. Even to name what you want.
PM: And to open up to somebody. And that takes me back all the way to that word rapport. You know, when somebody knows, likes, and trusts you, they're willing to listen to you. They're willing to open up to you in a way that they won't if you don't have rapport. So, whether you're working one-on-one with a hypnosis client… or Mike and Todd, you guys have built rapport with your audience… or you're trying to talk to a family member that is all the way down the rabbit hole, just remember, you have to have rapport because without that, you've got nothing.
Mattias Desmet, the psychologist that talked about mass formation psychosis — which he said is a dangerous form of hypnosis — said “The key is to break the illusion of consensus.” Which is exactly what we learned from the Asch experiment: when a second person stepped up, it went from 75% down to 10%, because that second person broke the illusion of consensus.
MA: And that's what we do with this show and today with your help. So I just want to thank you, Peter. This has been truly fascinating. We'd love to invite you back and do more with you. I think we've only scratched the surface here, but the greater context of what we're doing with the show, what Todd and I do, and with our special guests like Peter today, we work to give you tools so that you can take back your freedom. Freedom to think, your life, your liberty, controlling your own future instead of having it programmed for you. If you want to have a good future, you need to write your script, and this is the way to get that done. So thank you for joining us today, Peter, it's been a pleasure.
PM: You’re welcome, and thank you.
That was a very interesting interview. One of the overlooked and odious architect of "nudge" theory is Cass Sunstein. He has been an extremely important, behind the scenes, player in both the Obama and Biden administrations. In 2008, Cass Sunstein laid out his “counterspeech” doctrine in his paper, “Conspiracy Theories.” He suggested that the U.S. government recruit “nongovernmental officials” to pose as “independent experts with information” so the U.S. government could “prod them into action from behind the scenes.” From 2009 to 2012, Cass Sunstein served in the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, then the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.
Since its inception in 2008, Sunstein’s “counterspeech” strategy has evolved into a preemptive, offensive doctrine used to shore up the holes in whatever non-oppositional ideology rules the day. Criticize Hillary Clinton? Trump supporter! Object to open borders? White Nationalist! Don’t want digital currency? Conspiracy theorist! Questions the war in Ukraine? Putinista! If public ridicule and shame does not dissuade critics, the alphabet soup agencies in Washington can always “nudge” the real arbiters of free speech in America today, the Sultans of Silicon Valley. Sunstein is married to Obama and Biden administration official Samantha Power and, among other things, the author of a book entitled "Nudge."
I just inhaled the entire transcript. Quite fascinating. I want to dig in more into NLP and hypnosis and Pete’s YT channel and I still plan on making an appointment to see if I can unearth something of this ancestral trauma. It’s so hard to assess your own troubles, isn’t it? I can armchair psychoanalyse the world, but hard to gaze an inch into my own naval.
I wish I could see the video, but terrible internet prevents me. Will put a pin in it tho and return.