 On this episode of Skepticoke, how to save someone's life in the emergency room. They still can't stop the bleeding. She is in and out of consciousness. Exactly four minutes in, Dr. Gandhi reaches for the black phone. That's the direct link to the OR. And how to do it with no hands. For example, to a lady in ventricular tachycardia, potentially lethal heart arrhythmia, where the nurse is off to get the medicine. I'm sitting there, I got nothing to do. Get rapport with her, breathe with her, and say, and you know, your heart has been beating in a regular way for a long, long time. And she'd nod. And it still knows how to do it. That first clip was from a news report in Fort Worth, I think, I just pulled it off of YouTube. But the second one was from today's guest, quite amazing guest, Dr. Steve Bierman, who joined me to talk about hypnosis, NLP, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Hope you enjoy the interview. Welcome to Skepticoke, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Icarus. And wow, we have a good one for you today. I'm joined by Dr. Steve Bierman. Steve is the author of Healing Beyond Pills and Potions. Let me read a little bit from the website. The website, by the way, you're gonna wanna check it out. HealingBeyondPills.com. Here is some bio stuff. Steve Bierman, MD, received his undergraduate UCLA, doctorate, Northwestern, worked 20 years, board-certified emergency physician at Scripps Memorial, Encinitas, right up the road from where Steve and I are both sitting right now. He's the founder of two medical device companies and holds over 200 utility patents on various medical devices. As an emergency physician, Dr. Bierman became renowned for performing painless procedures like simple injections, lacerations, repairs, and even childbirth. But his studied words and gestures did far more than prevent pain. They also produced astonishing physical outcomes. Dr. Bierman went further along the communication continuum. That's a very interesting, there's gonna be some very interesting reframing of a language here that will just blow your mind when you really get into what this guy has done. To first stall autoimmune diseases, shrink deadly tumors, relieve depression, and ensure bloodless surgeries. Many of his cures seem like miracles. Yes, they really do. And yet Dr. Bierman explains, they are inevitable consequence of a new and expanded understanding of disease, causality, and the focused power of ideas to access our healer within. Steve, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. That's a pleasure, Alex. Good to see you again. Well, you know, I was thinking about how to kick this off. And then I thought of this story that I heard from you that I'm sure it's told many times in different ways. But Steve, imagine it's a few years ago. I unfortunately get in a car accident, wind up being wheeled into Scripps Hospital, Encinitas, and I'm fortunate enough to run into Dr. Steve. I have a dislocated shoulder. I got a big gouge in my leg and bleeding. What happens now that is like mind-blowingly, radically different than what people might expect? The first thing that happens, Alex, is you're going to get all the care that you would normally get from any allopathic physician in an emergency room. That's going to happen. There's nothing taken out, but there are things added. The first thing that I'll do is establish a hypnotic rapport with you. That's not rapport used in the vernacular. That means that I'll, in a studied and subtle way, that I'll begin, in a sense, imitating you. I'll link up with your rhythms, your breathing rhythm, your vocal energy. I'll begin to establish a unique relationship with you, not just for the purposes of comfort and warmth, but because I'm going to use that relationship along with carefully selected words and the authority that's vested in me by virtue of being the one and only doc in that emergency room at the time. I'll take all of that and use it to your advantage. For example, I published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine a series of cases, including one where the dislocated shoulder you're talking about was reduced by me. That means returned to its normal anatomic position without any yanking or pulling or stretching or bending, rather just words, just words. And those words don't entail necessarily a hypnotic trance, but they rather through the relationship I've already developed with the rapport and careful choice of words in my authority, they persuade your body to relax. The muscles that are holding that dislocation in place let go and there's a natural tendency for the shoulder to roll back in. I may offer a metaphor or two, like a bowling ball rolling into the pocket, something like that, but I assure you whatever I do, there'll be less trauma to your shoulder and it'll be instantly, instantly meaning within minutes, return to its anatomic position. If you're bleeding, and I did this in different ways every night, I'll offer you strong suggestions that stop bleeding and they may be very direct. I had patients every evening come in with cuts on their fingers, from washing or drying dishes and they have arterial hemorrhage going on. It's been going on for an hour before they got there, but I'd be quite busy and I wouldn't have time to get to a finger laceration. I would have time to go up to them and say, hi, I'm Dr. Bierman. I can see you were distressed, were meaning it's now past tense, probably you bled a lot. I'm going to ask you to do something that's really important and it might seem a little funny. So now I have their attention, right? In the meantime, I'm breathing with them, I'm locking in with their posture in various movements, but I've got their full attention because what is this emergency doctor gonna say that's funny while I'm here hemorrhaging, watching all hell break loose around me? And then I'll look at them and take a breath and time it with their breathing and I'll say, I need you to stop your bleeding now and I'll exude this kind of earnestness. So they know, I know it can happen and I expect that it will. And this thing that's been bleeding for hours prior to or if you come in from an auto accident within four, five, six beats will stop bleeding as it did hundreds and hundreds of times night after night. That's the power, that's the impact of ideas on health and healing. I love that. I wanna say that you're just capturing the magic in the last minute. And I kind of feel like you're holding onto the reins because I feel like you have to hold onto the reins a lot. What you've discovered is amazing. The way you've discovered it is very, it's not mainstream, but it's not like you've going out and done, you know, Bandler-Grinder kind of, we got it. Erickson, famous hypnotherapist, we got it. You've studied all these people. You've done it clinically. But the net result of all this is magic. I mean, when you, like the part that I liked when you first told me that story was you got that kind of physicians in patience and urgency for just a second. And you were like, no, I could go up to people and instantly make them stop bleeding. I could go up to people and touch them on the shoulder and the joint would go back in their socket. And I know now from reading the book that that is true. And like you said, not like true once or twice, like thousands of times, thousands of patients that you treated. So there is something here that is kind of beyond what we like to kind of write and put in a nice little box and oh yeah, that's great. And he's got some kind of hypnotic suggestions that kind of boost this thing. There's something going on here that you're seeing that and you're doing that is, that we're really going to want to get into. But tell me, you know, tell me, am I off there or not? You're not off at all. You're actually recognizing what many, many people miss. And it's not just one thing that's going on, but it's a complex interaction of multiple things that are going on. And let's look at them if we can individually. The first, the thing that as you say, I've seen these wonders happen thousands and thousands of times. I'm always surprised by them. Yeah, I still, as you know, keep an office in Delmar do medical hypnotherapy for patients with both physical and psychological ailments. And I see wonders happen literally every day, just stunned. And here's the one thing that continually jumps out at me. What I'm doing is I'm somehow eliciting or conjuring or evoking a healing response that resides the capacity for which resides in the patient. They have this. We don't know it, we're not taught it. In fact, our culture often dissuades us from believing it but inside each and every one of those patients, there's this intrinsic healing capacity. You hear people talk about it, the healer within. This intrinsic healing capacity that does marvelous, wondrous things from shrinking tumors to allowing bloodless surgeries. I'm not talking about minor surgery, by the way I'm talking about hemicollectomies or knee replacements done bloodless, very hard to believe until you see it. But I've seen it scores and scores of times now. From things like that to the little thing stopping a finger bleed, which really isn't little to that patient. All of these wonders reside within you. You've had it all along. And what I've learned studying from Grinder and Erickson and my own applications and innovations in the emergency room is simply how to turn that on, what triggers it. There's a side note to that though that I think is equally important. If I have this ability to say ignite this intrinsic healing capacity, then it turns out sadly, I often have the ability to extinguish that intrinsic healing capacity. In other words, I have, and if you'll allow this, the power to cure or curse. And I think everyone listening, at least most everyone listening knows that when they feel themselves helpless and dependent as people or injured people usually do. And they're in the company of an authority, someone who has very little detectable doubt about how to deal with this. That's how we recognize authorities. Well, he seems certain about this. He must know what's right. That dynamic empowers the authority such that their words will actualize. Their ideas will become that patience if you will, reality and not knowing that is a very dangerous thing. We see, for example, in randomized clinical trials which have been going on tens of thousands, tens and tens of thousands since 1949, we don't only see placebo effects which we should come back to and explain, but we see the opposite. We see what are now called nocebo are negative effects which tells you, if you think about this just very briefly, it tells you that whatever that authority says will land and actualize. So the burdens on him or her to say it right lest they cast a curse. And curses are being, as you and I speak, Alex, somebody in some office somewhere right now is getting a curse. Oh, you have a chronic disease. Oh, at best you have two years to live. Oh, well, there's really nothing more we can do about it. You'll have to go home and toughen out, et cetera. Those are all curses that could just as easily be flipped so that they ignite the intrinsic healing capacity in that patient. And then we can watch and see what wonders occur. Yeah, that's such a great point. It's scary, so scary. One of the things that I wanna bring you to a story you tell in the book, Healing Beyond Pills and Potions that is a wonderful story, because you're a healer, you are a very compassionate person, and we can tell that you've dedicated your life to serving and helping other people, truly in every sense of the word. And you tell a great story about a physician who you respect like a colleague and how he inadvertently curses a patient. I thought it was such a great story, and especially because it doesn't have a super tragic outcome, just a little bit of a problem. You know the one I'm talking about, right? Well, sure, and I'll tell it with some sort of generic coating. This guy is one of the, he's actually the best surgeon that I've ever known, a vascular surgeon with tremendous skills and a really good heart. And I tell this story to emphasize my key starting point, namely, compassion is not enough. It's not enough to be a compassionate physician or authority of any kind, and sit there holding hands with someone as you're both swept down this drain of misery and mayhem. That's not okay. Compassion's useful, but in my view, it should fuel this quest for wisdom and knowledge so that you know when and how to say the right thing at the right time to make your patients better. In this case, I had a lady who had thrown from her heart, thrown a large clot into her right leg. And the leg was pulseless and dying and extremely painful. It's hard to describe the level of pain she was experiencing. This is an older woman somewhere in her late 70s, early 80s. And this wonderful surgeon lived only four minutes away. He moved his house closer to the hospital so he could get in quickly for emergencies like this. This is how kind-hearted this guy is. The operating room refused to open another room for this lady. And they said, you know, we're doing a hip right now. We'll be done in 45 minutes. You've got to wait. We don't want to spend, in essence, the money on another crew. And he became incensed, of course. Picked up the phone next to the lady's bedside and said, listen, if you don't get this Galdarn crew in in the next five minutes, this woman's gonna lose her leg. And he slammed the phone down and walked out. That was in clear hearing of the patient. And so you can imagine any of us can, I think the horror that she went through and the curse that my colleague unintentionally with the best purposes in mind, cast upon her. He could just as easily have thrown the phone down, put his hand on her, breathe, gotten in report, breathe with her rhythm and said, her name, let's say, was Rose and said, do you know Rose? Sometimes I have to yell to get their attention. I'm here, we're going to save your leg. This is gonna be all right. I need you to just be comfortable. Just be comfortable. And with his hand on her shoulder, he could have reassured her tremendously. And instead of waking later that day, after he did, by the way, save her leg, she was beset with nightmares about losing it. Instead of being hag-ridden over these nightmares, she could have slept peacefully and known that it was a show to get people into the OR quicker. These types of things happen every day in hospitals and office practices, not just in this country, but around the world. And the reason, Alex, is much more fundamental than people think. It's not simply because doctors are not taught how to speak. It's true they're not. And we need to make what I call noetic medicine, medicine of the mind, the centerpiece of physician education. But the problem really comes from the causal assumptions that underpin our science. And this is what I think people miss. We have people out there saying, well, this medical system is broken. It's just, it's a cracked egg and it's not, it has no life left. We need to change to a, some people will say to a prevention disease reversal model or to a non-fee-for-service capitated model or to a this or a that model. And the problem is if that's all you do and you make no alterations in your fundamental causal assumptions, meaning what causes disease, what causes the return of health, if you make no change in those assumptions, however you alter the model, it will devolve to what we have now, which is eight minutes of patient, no time to ask the right and proper questions, no time to care about something other than the presenting symptom. Doctors returning home haggard after the days over only to go back and do it all over again. Burnout is rife, patients suffer from burnout caregivers and on and on it's gonna be the same. And here's why, because the science doesn't include any of that. It doesn't include your exhaustion. It doesn't include my fears or wishes. It doesn't include that patient's dangerous identification or their wish to go out of work no matter what or some condition response they acquired like retreating into illness when they were little boy or little girl. It doesn't include any of these noetic or mental causes because in our science, no matter what people say, sometimes they'll give a polite nod to the word stress, but in reality, our science is about stuff. It's about things palpable, cells and tissues and molecules and genes and it has no space available whatsoever for what makes us human. Well, you're touching on so many topics that we seem to talk a lot about here on the show. You bring a different perspective on it and I think there's so many angles that I wanna come at this from because it is an interesting way of exploring it. You are so much a caregiver, Steve and I always see that as it comes through. Like in the book, you are speaking to caregivers and you are passionately saying, gee, can't we do better here? This is better for you. You'll feel better. This is better for your patients that you care about. Here are some little tweaks we need to make in your communication. Awesome, I get it. But then at the same time, you're really touching on some much more fundamental issues about the structure of science, the structure of medicine, the assumptions that are being made that just blows your head off as soon as you get in there. I wanna interject a quote that I loved from the book. It's actually a quote of a quote, but it's a Thomas Kuhn quote that I hadn't heard before. Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly. The recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. There is so much packed into that, but that's what I hear you saying in kind of a polite way of kind of nudging folks and saying, maybe the paradigm isn't really working 100% here. So with that, I really wanted to launch into a little bit of a deeper dive into what we're really talking about. And again, check out, let me just mention again, check out Steve's website, because if you are at all kind of intrigued by what we're talking about, the website really has quite a bit. You can normally read an excerpt, but you can get a bunch of other stuff. So do check out healingbeyondpills.com, but I want to get back to this idea of what's wrong with our understanding of hypnosis, because it's really interesting that you, the take you have on it. Let me move to that from the authoritarian hypnotist prior to Erickson. So we can see what the contrast is and sort of tease out what the common elements are and hopefully arrive together at a really good understanding of what hypnosis is, but also of what it's not, which is somehow at this point in time, even more important. So the hypnotist and hypnotherapist prior to Erickson relied almost exclusively on what I call authority. Now I don't use that term as like meaning an expert and authority on archeology. When I say the term authority, I'm referring to a biologic authority, meaning in the same position as say a parent of a helpless, utterly dependent newborn. That's what I mean by authority where there's a power gradient like that. And when that gradient exists and it always is resurrected when the human organism feels helpless and dependent, it comes back. But when that exists, not just the words actualized, the reality of the authority becomes the reality of the patient or the subject or the baby. And that's kind of a hard concept for people to really get because if you think about it, a baby is nonverbal and yet the download to that child even in years one and two and three is extensive. You learn value systems and religious notions and what's dangerous and safe and language and locomotion, all these things get downloaded somehow into the psyche of a child even before the age of will and reason. And this is the pattern that resurrects in the early hypnosis literature. So Bernheim for example, who was a great hypnotist doctor in South of France centuries ago would hold up his two fingers and command sleep. Sleep, he'd commanded, this is the key thing for people to understand of a patient in a perfectly normal waking state. And they would shift from the waking state into a stom nambulistic trance, not always but often, right? And so the trance looked like that was the magical thing because after trance, then he'd tell him heal and they'd sometimes heal. And so everything was attributed to the trance and what was missed is that he was commanding sleep or trance about perfectly wide awake but helpless and dependent on him, patient. So bear that in mind when we get to Erickson. You fast forward 150 years or so and there's Erickson, a post polio victim who didn't own a hospital, didn't have a commanding presence. If he were to stand above a patient, he'd stand often with a cane crouched. He didn't have the kind of automatic authority that could necessarily command a some nambulistic trance and thereafter induce healing. Instead, what he had was from his times with polio was a deep, deep appreciation for language and for non-verbal communication. And he learned that if he could link words to someone's experience, like I'll do it with you right now. So here we are talking about hypnosis. And I imagine that some of the thoughts register and others may perhaps go somewhere else. And there may be other things you're thinking of at the same time, like perhaps we're questioned to ask next or where is this going? But what I'm doing is I'm carefully structuring each sentence so that it doesn't evoke resistance and it's somehow or other agreeable, right? He learned that and then he learned to link his words to certain behaviors and he created a pattern, a linkage pattern, my words equal your experience. And patterns tend to persist. So his next words would evoke their next experience. And eventually, as that pattern became stronger and stronger, he could use that plus the imitative pattern of rapport where he's mimicking them, breathing with them, posturing with them. He could use those patterns to induce a trance because he didn't have Bernheim's authority. Steve, share the example that you do in the book with the cigarette because I thought it was just scary. And that's what I want to get into next is the power that exists here, used for good, but maybe not all cases. Well, sure. So the subject in this case is a young lady who's smoking a cigarette. And in doing that, of course, she'll hold the cigarette, she'll watch the smoke curl, she'll bring it to her mouth, she'll take a draw, she'll put it back down. And Erikson, being very a student as observation skills would say things like, as she's bringing it up, unconscious movements happen from time to time or the unconscious is always there to lift a hand to help or the hand we know when we're listening to someone we agree with, the hand will rise automatically. And what he's doing is he's tying, he calls it conditioning value, he's linking his words to their experience so that the pattern he's creating becomes stronger and stronger until ultimately he could say something like, and the next time that hand rises, who knows, perhaps it won't taste so good. Perhaps you won't even wanna taste that. So he's cultivating a pattern that he intends to use once it's strong enough for some healing purpose. And that's one really important aspect of the modern hypnotic method. But it also, if you think about it, it begs the question, you know, what's going on there? What really is it? Right. Right? What's going on there? Right, right. For me, just quickly, I learned all this stuff. And like everyone, I thought trance was hypnosis and hypnosis and I'd go in the emergency room and there were shifts where I'd have six or eight or 10 people in various trances going to have radiology or wherever, right? Feeling comfort and safe, which was the main thing. As the emergency room became busier and busier, it was a solo one doctor at ER. And we were seeing toward the end, you know, 1800 patients a month, we were flying Mach speed. I didn't have time, even though I could do it in 12 sentences. I didn't have time to do formal trance infections. But I learned of the, because, you know, necessity here was the mother of invention. I could dispense with that. I could use my linguistic skills and say it in a way that did not evoke resistance but command results. And so I'd say, for example, to a lady in ventricular tachycardia, potentially lethal heart arrhythmia where the nurse is off to get the medicine. I'm sitting there, I got nothing to do. Get rapport with her, breathe with her and say, you know, your heart has been beating in a regular way for a long, long time. And she'd nod and it still knows how to do it. And I'd emphasize that return to normal sinus rhythm. And of course, the first time I do something like that, thankfully nobody's around, you know, I have no idea how this is gonna go. And the nurse comes whisking back in the room, syringe all loaded, ready to go. And she goes, look, and sure enough, she's converted back to normal sinus rhythm. And so what it begins to hint at, what I hope you're starting to savor is, wow, we got this whole thing wrong for 300 years. Hypnosis isn't trans. Trans is a response. It's a consequence of hypnosis. It's an effect. The cause is hypnosis, right? The cause is these tremendously powerful patterns, linkage, my words equal your experience, rapport. I equal you, my behavior, my posture, my breathing. And authority, my reality equals your reality. When you're helpless and dependent, that's a necessary precondition. These things and conditioning, they're so powerful that they drive ideas to actualize. And that's what's going on. Sometimes the idea is trance, like when Bernheim commands trance, but he could have said stop bleeding or keep your own blood, as I prefer to say. Or he could have said just comfort or any one of the, just the other things that we use to light the fire of their intrinsic healing capacity. It's not trance. It's not. Ideas evoking responses. Okay, so Grindr, tell folks who, Bandler and Grindr famous for NLP, down here where we live, Tony Robbins has made a huge fortune, basically out of copying those guys, but he's upfront about it. He says, hey, that's what I did. People are fascinated by NLP. They don't understand how it fits into this puzzle and they don't understand, none of us do, the larger question that you blurted out that we're gonna kind of poke around at the sides of is, what the hell's going on here? But to do it, I think it helps to deconstruct it the way that you did. You know, like, what did we think we knew about hypnosis? What do we now think we know about hypnosis? What do we think we know about neurolinguistic programming? How is that shamanism? Then we'll talk about, you know, you walking in the jungle and what you think that means and all that. So let's start with NLP and Grindr. Well, so John Grindr, a PhD in linguistics and Richard Bandler teamed up at UC Santa Cruz and at the behest of Gregory Bateson went out and visited for quite some time, Milton Erickson, the most renowned and I think in many ways a successful medical hypnotherapist of his time, of all time. And their purpose was to understand what the hell he was doing because it was very unclear, very, very blurred. People would sit down in the room, they'd go into trance sometimes inexplicably. Erickson would tell some stories and they'd get up after a session or two or five and their problem was gone. And so the question was, what the hell is going on here? What's this guy doing? And it turns out, and this is my assessment from reading Erickson and talking with Grindr, who I have to say, I think he's the smartest guy I know and I feel very blessed to be a friend of his for 35 plus years now. They wanted to tease out what was making these things happen and they were uniquely qualified to do that. They were bold and daring and John had linguistic knowledge and categories and they could break things out and see it. Whereas Erickson, as I was saying, was sort of operantly conditioned by his own patience. I'll try this, if it works, I'll do it again. And he's getting like many of us, I'm subject to this too, certainly. Reinforcements, he's not quite aware of at a conscious level and the behaviors begin to repeat. And so he's got a repertoire of behaviors that are very difficult to explain consciously. And that's kind of where they were in my estimation. And what Grindr and Bandler did was they said, now we can tease a lot of this apart and we can methodize what it is this guy Erickson is doing and create patterns that people can utilize for patient care. And that was NLP, not new code, which is what John's teaching now, which has more to do with creative states and things of that nature. But these early patterns were NLP patterns that you could teach almost anyone if they had some level of linguistic skill to use for the betterment of their patients. And so they could induce a trance, but because I had the perfect laboratory, right? I mean, I'm seeing 30 to 60 patients a day and nobody's watching. And so I was able to learn a pattern, learn an approach, go in and try it out, make whatever mistakes correct and eventually hone my skills so that I could apply it to not only psychiatric problems but also to real physical problems and witness are working there every bit as well as it does for psychological issues. Hey, Steve, can I interject with a question there? How do you understand this method? This is not like an egotistical, you know, like here's the bearman method that everyone, it's nothing like that in this book. It's more like just, hey, can't we wisen up a little bit about this? But I do get the sense that you have some specific ideas about what you've been able to figure out and what you've been able to do in that setting and in your clinical work as a hypnotherapist. What's your secret sauce? Well, so there's two sides to this table, okay? The one side is the ideas of the doctor or the authority. And the other, which I think we'll come to are the ideas of the patient and how to deal with those. In the first part of the book, I talk about how to convey our ideas to patients. And I use a lot of linguistic find points that Bannler and Grinder actually pointed out that they extracted from Erickson's work. Simple things like stated in the positive, right? Understand the word try implies an obstruction. So use it selectively. Like I'll say, if I want someone to go into a trance, try to stay out of a trance for just one more minute because that implies an obstruction to that effort and they will go into trance. They inevitably do, one sentence induction. Or words like really, do you really wanna get well? And then watch them closely and see if they say, yes, I really do. Or yes, I really wanna quit smoking. No, they don't, they've told you they don't. Now you have something to talk about. These subtle linguistic things, and there are many of them in the book, teach doctors that the time of haphazard speech is done and passed. You don't get a pass on a single word, make every word count. And that seems like a really heavy burden to carry, but just like everything, you develop linguistic habits and it becomes really easy to speak right. I think it's a really heavy burden to carry. I love your attempt to teach healthcare workers doing this. I'd love to know from your experience how successful you are in helping people move along this path. Well, I have a lot of experience with that and I'm happy to report that if you take a extensive three-day course with me, say. Now the course I teach in Europe every year, it's 10 hour days for three days with breakouts every hour or so, practicing various techniques. Let me tell you what you learn in, so what's that, 30 hours. You learn first that every word counts. You learn how to get painless injections so that kids aren't scared for the rest of their lives to go to the doctor. In fact, they're fascinated by it. How does it work? You learn that greetings are your first opportunity to establish rapport, that goodbyes are your last opportunity in that visit to implant a therapeutic suggestion. You learn to deliver dire diagnoses properly so you don't rob your patients of hope. Give us an example. There's some great ones in the book. Give us, that's gonna be life changing for a lot of people. Well, here's the simple example. Let's say it's cancer, okay? And let's say that the survival rate is 20%, okay? And this goes to, I'll do the informed consent on this. So this is the other thing people are going to learn. Again, in the first 30 hours of training, let me do it wrong first, okay? Because this is what's happening right now while you and I are talking. Some doctor is saying, all right, look, I've got some bad news for you. You have cancer and it's actually begun to spread, which that's not good news either. I'm sorry to say. But there's a sliver of hope. 80% of people die from this, but there's a 20% possibility and we'll do everything we can. And we're going to try to make that happen, okay? And you know the meaning of the word try. It implies an obstruction. That's a disaster. And I'll tell you right now, I don't have any doubt at all that in that moment of utter helplessness and dependency and of near absolute authority of the physician that those are voodoo type deadly curses and they're happening every day, okay? Now, here's all you need to know to do it right. This is how simple it is, okay? We're gonna do this. We're going to understand there's a difference between you, which linguists call a specific referential index, and some people, others, some patients, them, okay? And we're going to put risks over there. So my hand is going to go over there. It's going to be some people, others, them, patients, right? And then we're going to put benefits right here with you. But unlike the doctor who I just pretended to be, I'm going to actually deliver the statistical information truthfully. That was a dishonest delivery because statistics never tell anyone about any individual. They tell you about the behavior within groups. Groups you may or may not even resemble, right? So here's how that informed consent goes. Before I tell you anything, I want to tell you the most important thing we need to know and share. And that is that miracles, wonders, positive outcomes, whatever you want to call it, they happen every day and I see them every day. And for all I know, you could be the next miracle I'm looking at. Now, the news that we got, and I'm saying that we got, I'm creating an alliance, the news that we got is unfortunately, not what we had hoped for. It is, not you have, it is cancer and it has begun to spread. And so together we need to take measures to stop the spread, kill the cancer and get you well again. Here's what I suggest we do, okay? Let's say it's chemotherapy. I'm gonna talk about that. Now, the risks are some people may have lower blood counts, some people have nausea and vomiting, others are at risk of infection. Some patients even have more dire adverse reactions. And if they do, not when, but if, if they do, we have the medicines and facilities to treat them. On the other hand, there are many patients, perhaps, I'm saying perhaps to be honest, perhaps just like you who do quite well through this whole thing, have a comfortable course and you go on to survive. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if when this is all over, you and I sit here and realize that your chances of survival in retrospect were 100%. Then the patient will inevitably say, but what are my chances? And this is the big moment. This is the sort of truth tell because if any doctors are listening, you don't know the answer to that and you can't know the answer to that. And I can prove it to everyone who's listening, just tell me what your tomorrow is gonna be like. How's your health tomorrow? What are you gonna be doing tomorrow? At the end of tomorrow, what will have happened to you? Of course, nobody can answer that. So this, as David Deutsch, who I love, in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, says, this is the fallacy of prophecy. So when they ask you, what are my chances? There's only one answer to that and that is we won't know until we're through this whole thing and hopefully you're well. And then they have to give the honest information. What I can tell you, and watch my hands now, is that in a group of 100 people, there are, with this particular diagnosis, 80 out of those 100 people will not make it. And on the other hand, for reasons we don't fully understand, 20 out of those 100, perhaps as I say very much like you, will survive. I just said, you will survive. And I underscored it with my eyes and my vocal energy. That's a simple technique. It's on the one hand and the other technique. It's them and you technique. And you get this in the first 30 hours. You even learn in 30 hours how to do pre-surgical hypnosis, believe it or not, and induce bloodless, painless, rapid healing from surgery in your patients. You can learn that in three days. You spend three or four more days and you can learn the advanced techniques. Fantastic, 1,000% behind you in doing that. I gotta ask, do you run into resistance and what is that resistance like? I don't know why anyone would resist, but I'm sure you do. What is that all about? Well, yeah, of course I do. So in the classes, no, because it's pre-selected group and it's skewed toward caregivers who care and who wanna make a difference and who know they're not quite doing it right and they're willing to learn. It's, I would say, generally speaking amongst primary care doctors, there's less resistance. And the reason I believe is because in order to be a primary care doctor, you have to make peace with uncertainty. You have to get comfortable with saying, I don't know. And to really understand the limits of your knowledge. I think that people, broadly speaking, in medicine go into specialties so that they can get on top of their little hill and not have to experience the discomfort of uncertainty. And so once they're there, once they're on the top of the hill looking at it, surveying their vast domain, they're gonna resist. Because remember, the science that they're following is the science of, if I can use this analogy, it's the science of billiard balls, right? Without realizing that that billiard ball is moving because someone had the idea to put it in the quarter pocket, right? And so those people are quite naturally resist and you read Thomas Kuhn and he's devoted an entire book to this sort of reluctance to shift paradigms even in the face of glaring anomalies. Steve, tell us about The Trip to the Shaman. Amazing story in the introduction to the book. And it's gonna kind of take us in some different directions as well in terms of trying to understand what is this thing that we're kind of trying to zero in on? Well, so when I was in my, I think it was early 40s, I had a ruptured disc C5 on my left side. It was tremendously painful and made work almost impossible. And my arm, left arm was getting weaker and weaker. I couldn't do a pushup. I could do a pushup. One side would get me up and the other side was down. And so I did what you might expect. I went and talked to my surgical neurological colleagues and they said, well, yeah, we can fix this. It's really simple. Here's what we'll do. We'll cut into your neck, avoiding the carotid artery. We'll spread things open. We'll take a chunk out of your neck, hammer pound a chunk of cadaver bone in there to spread it open. So you get more space for that nerve and you'll be fine. And that was a very unattractive option for me. At that time, and of course, it's even more unattractive now as I think about it, what a nightmare. So it was a wonderful journey for a physician. I learned so much through that. So I went to every imaginable alternative modality that you could think of. And I learned a lot from some really good people, some Feldenkrais people and others about various techniques. But regrettably, those techniques or the severity of what I was dealing with were less than perfect. And I kept reading. I was reading Andrew Weil. I was reading, I read a book entitled The Way of the Shaman. And it talked about a little town in Southern Ecuador, Macas, outside of which some tremendously powerful brujos exist, ayahuascaeros. And they have amazing healing capacity. So I called up one of my doc buddies who spoke fluent Spanish. And I said, hey, Ron, we're not going on a surf trip this month. He says, well, what are we doing? I said, we're going on a drug trip. I had to disguise it somewhat. What drug? Ayahuasca. And so we went to Macas. And we got, we paired up with a brujo in training, Jose, drove to the end of the road on the Pustazo province and mud walked our way hours and hours into the jungle and ultimately arrived at an encampment where supposedly the most powerful brujo of the area was holding court. And when we got there, it was what we had read about and what we were in our minds requiring as a test. But it was still stunning. We got there. It was dark and the patients, 13 patients were in the room that day. And they were all saying, what took you? What took you? We've been waiting for you. And it turned out two hours before we arrived, the shaman was lifting the ayahuasca to his lips. And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Two white men are coming. I don't know, maybe they want to buy a cow or something. And we're going to wait for them. So long story short, we stayed there for several days. I went through a healing ritual with him a typical shamanic ritual, which I call the second blow. So he's on the ayahuasca. He identified, I didn't tell him anything at all. He had a little crystal. He identified this part of my neck as where the problem lie. And then he applied his lips. Wait, he blew on that close up. And the air, instead of being the hot, moist, tropical air of the Amazon, was this frigid, arctic, almost like a icicle going through you. And I could feel that. He looked again. He wasn't quite satisfied. He did it one more time, once again, the chill. And then he looked me in the eyes and he said, I'll never forget it. He said, curado, you're cured. And within days, the pain, of course, diminished almost immediately. Took about a day and a half. The strength returned. Ultimately, I was cured. I was back to doctoring and surfing and left with the mystery of how the hell did that happen? Which is the question, how do you understand that experience? Yeah. Well, so as you know, that happened to me. At the same time, I was dear and deep friends with a Taoist priest who was an energy healer. And so I shared cases with him, work with him. And I saw things. I saw a healing that he was able to do, like on a non-union of the scaffold bone that had been broken and not healed for two years. I followed it with x-ray. He worked on it three or four times. And it healed just by virtue. It seemed of his, quote, energy. And then I had all the mysteries that were manifesting in front of me in the emergency department without trance. I was going at a fast pace and commanding effects. And they were actually happening. Commanding them using subtle hypnotic language, but nonetheless. And so I had all these mysteries. In addition, I was reading the hypnosis literature. And there was this curious thing. Some groups had decided they were going to treat migraines by having people turn their hands hot. Often these guys would induce a trance, so to speak, and say, OK, your hand will heat up. And they'd measure with the thermistor and go up a few degrees. And the migraine would disappear. But there were other groups that were saying, no, keep your hand cold. And the temperature of the hand would go down. And the migraine would disappear. So I was left with this broad palette of confusion, where it appeared as if everything was working. But what the hell is the common element? And that became clear to me when I disentangled trance from hypnosis and realized that trance is just an effect, just like stopping bleeding, normalizing heart rhythm, relaxing a birth canal. Those are effects that you command when you have hypnotic influence. The hypnotic influence comes from the authority. But remember, there's a precondition. What was I in that jungle? In the middle of a place I couldn't walk out of alone. With a disease I couldn't fix by myself. I was the perfect, helpless, and dependent prototype. And that brujo swirling in his ayahuasca haze, that guy was my authority. And same in the hypnosis and same with, you name it, any of the therapeutic rituals conducted around the world. And I realized that they're all offering, either implicitly or explicitly, the same suggestion. It's the exact same idea as being conveyed and actualized in all of our healing rituals since time immemorial. And here's what it is. It's a simplest idea. If you do the intervention, whatever it is, let me blow on you icicles in the neck. Let me manipulate your spine, crack, crack, crack. Let me have you sit on a couch and agree on the meaning of your past. Let me do this surgery. Let me give you this pill. Let me subject you to the, it doesn't matter. If you submit to the intervention, X, which has to be credible, that's the one thing. It's gotta be credible. If you submit to that, then the prescribed outcome will occur. And I call that the generic placebo suggestion. That suggestion, whether you say it or not, is implied when the patient walks through the door and your authority, your rapport and your linkage will drive that to actualization. So be careful what you prescribe. Prescribe a cure, not a curse. That was absolutely awesome. And you just laid out the secret sauce. Here's the big question. It's the question of agency, right? It's like, with you 1,000%, we're all connected from this consciousness, global connection and somehow you're able to get in there and do that. But did that shaman, was there agency there? And the other thing that we have as evidence that you're bringing, you brought through in the story, so it's not like you're afraid to face any of this stuff. You're the opposite of that. But he did know you were coming two hours before. He was outside of space-time. And we hear over and over again from all these different sources of people who've looked at this extended consciousness realm that maybe there's some other shit going on. So how are you processing that? Like, I get that you got the secret sauce and it works so fricking effectively and we should change the whole world and the whole medical system. There is no doubt. I don't say that cynically or facetiously, absolutely. But what about back to our thing? What's really going on there? This guy is able to do some stuff and it does have to do with this extended consciousness realm that we don't understand. Well, first I'd say that people who read about ayahuasca effects and write about them talk about this all the time, right? These brujos know you're coming. They understand within the bounds usually of their territory, which can be extensive. They know what's going on. They know where the jaguars are, let's say. Steve, they know how to make ayahuasca. They have access to 15,000 herbs, medicines, compounds in their jungle and they know how to select one that is this DMT if I cook it this way and this other, which is this DMT inhibitor and that if I cook it just, I mean, and then you ask them, how do you know that? And they say, oh, well, the spirit guides came and told us to go over here and find this plant. And I'll do this. Yeah, you're doing it right, right? I mean. No, it's, this is commonly reported throughout the entire Amazon basin and elsewhere where shamans work in other places with other medications. Let's say to go back to what you quoted, this is one of the paradigm induced anomalies that break with the paradigm induced expectations of our current model. And so we have to, I think at the very least, acknowledge that it exists and realize that because it exists, it calls either for the abandonment of our current paradigm, which I don't think anyone is seriously advocating, or for the expansion of that paradigm so that we can embrace, subsume these various anecdotes, facts, and make sense of them. Now, how the shaman himself does that, I can't pretend to know because I haven't had a direct experience like that with respect to strangers, right? Strangers coming into my territory and sensing them. I actually may have had that and not known it. I don't know, you know, whatever's unconscious is unconscious. But what I can tell you, and what I think bears in some way on this, perhaps heavily, is that all the way back to Mesmer himself, people doing hypnosis have realized that there's a connection far beyond words that goes on between the operator and the subject. For me, I'll tell you the first time that happened because it was a little stunning, but it happens now in the office every day and it's just a business as usual thing. I was early in my career and I was using a metaphor to deepen a trance and I had a leaf break off and gently flowed down. It was rocking deeper and deeper down and as it went down, it was slowing until it rested deeply, safely on the surface of the sea. Something like that, right? Some metaphorical suggestion for trance deepening and things went well in the session. Patient woke up and he said after some talk, hey doc, you know that leaf you were talking about? Yeah, he says, I saw that way before you even mentioned it, right? That's characteristic, right? If you're doing hypnosis and you're not familiar with experiences like that, probably you're not listening because that happens all the time. I could give you, I'm sure, at least 1,000 similar anecdotes and what happens in hypnosis is you have these two patterns, no matter what's going on, you have the authority pattern. Trance enhances your authority so people in trance are more likely to identify with you. Meaning your reality becomes the reality. But also rapport, and rapport is this pattern of sameness, I equals you, where my breathing, my words, my posture, they all begin to line up and as people align with each other, let's say externally, it's clear to me that internal alignments occur as well. And that makes sense because think about it, your external, let's say I'm imitating your posture right now, okay? Well, that tells you that there are brain configurations that are in some way or other identical. And we know that those brain configurations give off a certain electromagnetic pattern which we can pick up to some limited degree with EEG, right? So this alignment that you and I are sharing is also manifest at, I don't think anyone can really doubt this, it's manifest in whatever the electromagnetic signals are coming off our aligned brains in that moment of sameness. Somehow that must bear on these facts, exactly how I don't think we've gotten to a point, certainly not with paranormal experimentation. I don't think we've gotten to a point where we can satisfy ourselves that we have a scientific explanation for it, but it begins with acknowledgement of the anomalies and therefore the need to expand our paradigm. Yeah, definitely, I would definitely agree. And I think that this whole consciousness thing, what I, my mantra is that what science has done in its exploration of consciousness is really obsoleted itself because it's come to the point of saying, hey, look what we discovered. We discovered we can't really measure anything. Anything we measure has a big asterisk by it which is consciousness was at play here, we're not sure how, we're not sure why. And I love your expanded kind of understanding of that. Like our knowledge is not wrong always, it just is incomplete. Let me add to kind of the story, the leaf story I love. If you ever heard of the story of Dr. Michael Newton, the guy who's famous for the past life and between life regressions, do you know that the first time he encountered that? Yeah. Oh, you're gonna love this. I love being able to share this with you. He's a hypnotherapist. This is probably back in the 70s, I wanna say that he's doing this. So he's doing, the lady comes in, I'm afraid of spiders, okay, let me take you back. Oh, I was two years old, your mom freaked out cause there was a spider calling that. We fix it, you walk out, you're not afraid of spiders. Okay, next, next, next. Gets a tough case, man. This guy, he's got a problem with his shoulder, his arm and he just can't, he's going to the doctors. The doctors give up on him, say, we don't know what's wrong with it, it's up in your head. Go see this guy, Michael Newton. Same thing, okay, let's take him. Okay, you go back, go back, go back. Stubborn, it won't work. Okay, go back further. He goes, oh, wait a minute, I'm on a battlefield. As a matter of fact, I see now, oh my God, he's gonna hit me with that bayonet. The bayonet goes right into my shoulder. Well, Michael Newton is fascinated. He happens to be like an amateur historian, particularly interested in war. So he kind of breaks protocol a little bit and says, hey, what insignia are you wearing? Once he gets some details about it, goes and researches it later, because he's just so fascinating, because like you, I mean, like a really trained hypnotherapist who's done thousands and thousands of these, he recognizes that something different has happened here, but it's within the realm of legitimate and all the other ways. This begins his whole experimentation, exploration of past life regressions and hypnotherapy. And adding to this is the guy comes back and his shoulder is resolved in some way. They work through it and that's it. And he does the research on the guy and finds all this evidence to back up. It kind of supports it. So you don't have to buy into all that, especially since I'm telling you the story for the first time, but I do think it speaks to the leaf thing. It's like we're entering into this realm here of extended consciousness that you're entering into. And there's all sorts of stuff that can happen. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I do. So first let me say, I don't have any expertise in past life regression. So I'm seeing this through my lens and I'm open to that, but look at what I've laid out already and what we know. If you think of the generic placebo suggestion, let me say it again in a sort of abstract structure. If you submit to X, the intervention, then Y, the prescribed outcome will occur, okay? X has to be credible at the outset, somewhat difficult to achieve, but achievable and then credible upon completion. In other words, before, during, and after, the intervention can't be something that diminishes the authority. It's got to be something fully credible, all the way through. And when that is true, then why the prescribed outcome will occur, okay? So now I deal with this all the time in a slightly different connection. Let me give you the illustration with phobias because that's where you sort of trailed into it. So I don't treat phobias with regression. I've never, I have to seriously knock wood here. I've never, to my knowledge, failed at treating a phobia usually in a single session. I use the technique that with some modification that John Grendert taught me in 1985, it works. I have a wonderful friend in Europe, Norbert Preitz, great hypnotherapist who only does regression therapy for the treatment of phobias. And he's been on national TV 14 times, doing spiders and snakes and hornets and you name it. My if X, okay? My intervention is, you know, a dissociation, look at a screen, play it backwards for black and white color, reunite and blah, blah, blah. So that X is credible, credible, credible. And I'm the authority, haven't failed, feeling good about it. So why your phobia will be gone happens. The same thing is true of Norbert. He exudes confidence, he's never failed. He, if X, his X is this regression to something that may or may not be real, but it's certainly the experience is real no matter what. And so because it doesn't, in any way diminishes authority in the doing, why also happens, right? This global generic placebo effect is present in all of these things. So to me, when I hear that, the question is outside of the placebo effect, which would have gotten this guy's shoulder well, no matter what, what's the intrinsic value of the discovery? Is it real? What's the science? What do we have to enlarge conceptually in order to grasp this? So that's kind of how I approach those things. I would say, let me add one thing. The, this is, again, this is, I think wherever you go with this, this is one element that's so essential and so important in caregiving. It can't be omitted because there is clearly this connection, right? Once you're in authority, once your patient is identifying with you, once the rapport is established, you not only don't get a pass on haphazard speech, you don't get a pass on haphazard think. You have to be very careful what you think before you go in the room. And this is what I teach in my advanced course. If you can't go in that room with curative intent, you're not the guy, take a pass. Let someone else go in that room because we know through the science of nonverbal communication, these micro expressions are gonna tip your hat anyway. Well, what you and I, Alex are talking about is something deeper and more, I think, complete than simple micro expressions. And those two in my view get picked up. And if you're walking in that room saying, man, this guy is dead, I just hope I can keep him somewhat comfortable. You're the wrong person, you're the wrong person. Hey, I love it. I love the compassion is not enough toughness and especially when it's coming from this total caregiver kind of thing that you're all about. My thing is really, who are we, why are we here? So I'm interested in all of that. I'm interested in operationalizing and implementing what you're doing. But shit, man, I wanna know Newton. I wanna know past lives. I wanna know between lives. I wanna know what part of that reality I need to incorporate into my Thomas Kuhn paradigm collapsing kind of thing. And I think you do too. You're just kind of picking your lane and you got a huge, it's a mixed metaphors. You got a huge field to plow there and you just gotta get on it. So no difference in that. I tell you where I wanna go in the little bit of time that we have left. In the book, Healing Beyond Pills and Potions, you tell stories about some of your failures, some of what we can learn from some of that. I love the story about Scott, who you're just a little bit too upfront with because I think it leads us into naturally maybe an interesting discussion about some of the nefarious uses for this, whether we want to go there or not somebody else will. But tell us about Scott. He's a guy who I know is somewhat, he's a physician in the community actually. And he came into the office and said, life sucks. I hate my practice. I hate my patients. I hate myself. I hate my wife. I hate this, I hate that. And I remember feeling like, because I don't use that word very often. It's a word I like to reserve. And I remember feeling somewhat assaulted and almost dirtied by this onslaught of hate speech, which I rarely experience in an office setting. And so the question that I had was, okay, well, what's the source of this? And as you know, in the last part of the book, I talk about common causes of common noetic, meaning mental causes of human illness. And one of the very common causes is a sort of retained past its time identification with a primary parent, a mother or father. And the identification teaches us how to relate to the world, how to find and relate dynamically to a spouse. And also the most neglected aspect is how to relate to ourselves. And so, you know, if you have a father saying who you identified with as a child and he's a cheerful, optimistic, loving guy, you pick that up. And that's in you until you dis-identify and you may still, having cut the cord, may still want to retain certain aspects of that identification that serve you well. So I was exploring this with him. And when I got to, okay, Walt, so tell me about your dad. How was he with the world? Oh, everybody loved him, he was a pillar of the community wherever we went, we didn't have to pay. Well, I knew that this guy was the same kind of guy. He operated in the world the same way. How was your dad with his wife? Oh, he despicable, you know, he won every argument, he put her down, he had an open affair. Well, I knew that this guy was behaving similarly. Now we get to part three, how is your dad toward himself? What was his, how did he view himself? You know, what do you think he found? He hated himself, he hated his office, he hated his patients, he hated what he did, ate his wife, da, da, da, da, da. There it was, right? So now I see the ideology of his unhappiness, his discontent, is this persisting identification with father. And I made the mistake, you know, okay, now I know that. But as I say in the book, catharsis is not cure. And anyone who thinks it is, I'm sorry, you're wrong. It may be for one or 2%, but it's not for the human herd generally speaking. And yet it was so blatant, so apparent, so right in front of us that I just blurted it out there. And he responded perfectly, everything you'd want. Oh, I get it, yeah, okay, about that. A week later, he wasn't better in any way. And he said something, this was out in town, some casual bump in. And he said, oh, I remember everything we said, it was about honesty. Hadn't even mentioned the word honesty. But the wall of denial had come down, the rationalization had come up and I was a total failure. Fortunately he came back and I got to redo it and address it in a more subtle and unconscious way. Tell us a little bit from what you remember, how you did it differently. Well, differently is, assume that the outside, that if he could have fixed it consciously, he would have. And of course we have evidence of that. So this isn't gonna be a conscious cure, right? So I often in the office setting, I'll use trance. I'm not in an ER with a white coat and stethoscope. I'll induce a trance to augment my authority. And then I'll often tell stories. I've kind of devolved into an Ericksonian type guy. And so I'll tell a story about a kid who's on a raft and the raft is on a slow moving river and the current takes him along and he's happy. And I'm cutting this way short. When he wants to swim, he jumps off the raft, swims around, it's not moving so fast, he can't catch up with it. But just for safety's sake, he's got a cord wrapped around his waist. Later as time goes on years past, he finds himself in a deep ravine, the river is narrow, the current is pulling him, there's a roar and a rush and there's danger ahead. And he realizes that time on the raft is over. And he's got a jump and he jumps and swims and he's making for a beach when suddenly there's tug and he realizes, I'm in trouble. I have not cut this cord. And he reaches in his pocket and finds the implement he needs and cuts not one, not two, but all three fibers of the cord. And the raft goes taking where it goes and he swims and finally makes the beach but that's not the end of it. He's got to climb the cliff, he's got to make some choices. He's out there on this bass plane of options and opportunities where there's no current, where each choice is a simple independent choice for health and happiness. So a metaphor like that is introduced and I expect that to work gradually over two or three weeks and see changes. And I'll give other suggestions as well for, what a healthy choice might be and what an unhealthy choice might be and so forth. But at the end of the day, three or four or five sessions later, there's a very different person. And here's the sad thing to note. So many of us have failed to disidentify in our late years and that current is still pulling us over a cascade that leads to sadness and unhappiness. And when that cord gets cut and healthy choices are made, everything changes, the body changes, the mind changes and you become who you're meant to be, your best youth. It's an awesome story. The tough part for me is the implication for those who would choose to use the science, this art, this whatever we're gonna call it for nefarious purposes. And just like the treatments or interventions that you're doing are multifaceted and I love before, you know, there's so many subtleties to what you're saying here and there's so many lessons to pull out of this and people really have to pick up the book and go to the website and study it more to get all this. But like you're talking about your one friend who uses regression for handling the same kind of issues and you handle them in a very different way and they're both successful because they're both getting at something that we're still trying to understand and you're open about trying to understand that. But in trying to understand that we have to understand that there are people who are using this for evil intent, you know, how to be direct. There's a guy sitting in a cell 30 miles from us south. His name is Sirhan Sirhan. And he was mind-controlled Manchurian candidate and the guy who they say killed Robert F. Kennedy, he didn't kill Robert F. Kennedy, he had a gun in his hand, he shot one bullet like I told the story many times. They found more bullets in the kitchen where they shot them but there wasn't his gun. So it's obviously not that and it's all this other stuff. But that was the technology circa 1960. They had a guy, whoever that guy was who could massage that consciousness. I don't want to say, because whatever I say it is out of ignorance. Put it in a trance. Well, we don't know if that was it. Program, we don't know if that was it. Induce, you know, whatever, but something happened that, you know, and if that's the technology, if that's the state of the art 60 years ago, what's the state of the art now? Well, it is, let me, let me march into that from sort of what's going on every day inadvertently to what you're talking about, which is the real malevolence and misuse of this technology. Remember what I'm saying is basically that hypnosis is ideas driven by these patterns, authority being chief among them, ideas evoking responses, right? And doctors and other authorities, police officers, teachers, they're not taught the power of their authority and the influence they have. And so they inevitably misspeak and the harm we see and denote as no SIBO effects is going on all the time every day inadvertently. So, you know, my mission is to do as much as possible to rectify that particular situation. But listen, so that's the precondition. The condition is the authority must be the one is recognized by the helpless subject must be the one who's least uncertain. They cannot show doubt and bear that in mind because we just had an extraordinary exhibition of this thing gone completely wrong. You can look to any demagogue anywhere in the world. For example, I'm just gonna take this briefly because I'd rather move to the health sphere. And what you'll see is the first thing they do instinctively is they create conditions of helplessness and dependency on the part of the populace. It's American carnage, it's disaster and ruin, it's drug lords over where it doesn't matter what it is, you have to create this sense of helplessness and dependency. And then you rise to the authority by never advancing an ounce and iota of doubt. You're the one least uncertain. And so you become the authority and what happens is the ideas of the authority autonomously enter the psyche of the subject without the influence of will or reason. This is what happens. And so I have my wife watching TV saying, how can they believe that? Don't they see all the evidence? And I keep saying this has nothing to do with will or reason. This went in below and it sustains, you know? So think of the medical application. We all witness this, suddenly there's a scorch and it can take you down no matter how healthy you are. This is the original and we have no cure for it. And we've got to lock down the economy and isolate ourselves in houses and people are dying in droves. What that does, true or false, what that does is that creates the precondition for an authority, the one least uncertain, least doubt to emerge. And who emerges but somebody who says, I am science, I speak for science. What I say is a scientific fact. And whether you agree with him or not, what I'm saying is that condition is just taking my office microcosm and turning it into a macrocosmic example of the authority pattern of ideas evoking responses. And this is the malevolent application of this technology. Yeah, awesome. You know, Steve, a final point, and I thought this was just amazing. And you could dedicate your life's work to this as well and it'd be very, very fruitful. It's in the appendix of the book. But you talk about kind of, I don't wanna say re-imagined isn't the right word, but you talk about rethinking scientific experiments and what we think about in terms of the controls and the protocols that we're using and how we might be just invalidating our results from the outset again when we get down to the language that we communicate and the language that we internalize. And I thought that was just stunning in terms of when you really think about the implications of that for honest, quote unquote, honest scientists who are trying to make discoveries. Do you wanna speak to, explain to people what I'm talking about and speak to that? Well, so first I wanna thank you for reading the appendix. I don't know how many people do. I'm very impressed and it means a lot. And I hope the listeners out there spent some time on that because I do put a lot of thought into what experiments can be done in the future to solidify the evidentiary base of what I'm talking about and also what kind of training we can introduce into caregiver training so that people learn the power of their words and how to use them properly. Well, what I'd say to that is that we need to understand that the generic placebo suggestion is present and operative in everything we do. And so if we do a study and there are words delivered to patients and you get certain outcomes, I as a reader, you as a reader have every right to ask, well, before I make any judgments about what happened here, please tell me exactly what you told these patients because you have a hypnotic influence on the outcome, right? And they'll say, oh, well, it's double-blinded. Well, that doesn't matter. What matters is remember in the expression Fx, then Y, the Y, what did you promise? What was the prescribed outcome because you're the authority, that's what's gonna happen, whether it's blinded or not. Yeah, that's stunning. And I think the implications go even further and I know you do too. It's not just in experiments where we're communicating to patients and let me see exactly. It's our internal communication. It's our deciding on the protocols and how we set up and the questions we ask to drive the answers we get. And all that needs to take into account healing beyond pills and potions, core principles for helpers and healers. As we've talked about with today's amazing guest, Dr. Steve Bierman, you will get a book that is very, very much written for healers and helpers, for healthcare professionals, and they definitely need to read this. But so many of you, me kind of people will really get a lot out of this, a lot of just amazing stories. And then you can check out the website too, healingbeyondpills.com and a lot of great stuff there. Steve, how is this going for you and what other stuff are you up to? Well, so thanks so much for asking, Alex. The book actually is doing quite well. I've won, I think, three literary awards and it's getting in the right hands. I'm happy to say that many of the key opinion leaders in the family practice movement, family medicine movement in the United States are reading it, responding to it. I'm speaking at a plenary session of 1,200 family doctors later in September. And so programs are beginning to incorporate it, it's still on the early stage, but it's having an impact and I hope it'll have a much deeper impact as days go on. I'm teaching around the world, I teach multiple courses here in San Diego and elsewhere in the U.S. And then I teach in Europe in May and June and plan on continuing that for well into the future. I'm also working on, we didn't get to it, but the next book, which is the next obvious book, it's entitled Cures. And it talks about how the ideas of patients which you can excavate with a single question, how the ideas of patients contribute to their illness. And once you know what those contributory ideas are, they tend to fall out in certain categories, how to treat those categories. So I'm very excited about that, I'm probably two years away from finishing. But what I hope to do is create modules where one by one, caregivers of all stripes can learn how to ask that single question, mine for causes, and then treat with curative intent so that people don't have, you know, what I call blunt beginnings and endless endings. Instead, they have a single solitary cure and get on with their life. Awesome, fantastic stuff. Again, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you, I really enjoyed it, you're great. Thanks again to Steve Bierman for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I'd have to tee up from this interview and it's really the only question, it's the level one entry point question is, do you believe him? Do you believe he did what he said he did in the YAR? Because if you do, like I do, then we got something to talk about. Let me know your thoughts on that. Always love to hear from you, even if it gets a little bit contentious. We always learn something from each other, so let me know what you think. Until next time, take care and bye for now.