He was into NLP (the hypnosis theory) from way back.

James Hoffman, the coffee YouTuber, had an interesting comment on how he tried to use that in one of his 90s barista competitions, but seemed skeptical of it now. Scott remained a believer.

It's a communications skill, like, say, making powerpoint slides. If you get good at it, you will swear by it. But if can't gain skill, it's easy to think it's bogus. If you're deeply interested I can go into detail as to what it's about and not about. Or you can buy some books, get a trainer, or take a class.

Tl; dr: it's about adding a second layer to your communication which attends to the subconscious, not unlike art. It was originally for therapy, but unfortunately a lot of businessdorks in the 90s got into it and perverted it.

I've pondered awhile on what hypnosis is. My current model is it's like prompting LLMs, the hypnotic commands are just stuff in the context window but not currently being talked about.

I went to a sceptics talk by a stage hypnotist a while back that I found very interesting.

He said after many years he wasn’t sure what hypnotism was exactly, or even if it was an identifiable thing at all, and that in a lot of ways he was just giving people license and cover to do stuff they probably wanted to do anyway. You can’t hypnotise people to do something they don’t want to, apparently.

So if he says “Come up on stage and cluck around like a chicken, make a real show of yourself in front of the crowd”, then quite a few people will go and do it and come away saying “That wasn’t me, the hypnotist made me do it, but what laugh eh?”.

He was less sure how this might apply to (for example) hypnotic pain control, but it was an interesting take.

The cluck like a chicken thing reminded me that with small kids the teachers would have us run around and then say 'be a tree' or whatever. I guess a combination of kids liking doing that kind of thing and the authority figure telling them to.

Social manipulation has been around a lot longer than the books and movements attempting to redress it as "hypnosis".

I’m interested. Especially if you can point to moments in your career or projects where it has worked.

> The law of attraction

The Secret has sold 30 million copies.

And at the end of the day, it's prayer. 'Prayer helps, somehow' is a very common worldview.

AFAIK he tried it in addition to regular treatment.

He got into a heated debate with his audience about COVID vaccines and ivermectin (he was pro vaccine and said they were idiots). Later he admitted he was wrong, when more evidence came out.