Behind the Scenes Minis: Self-talk Hoax

Holly and Tracy discuss the idea of autosuggestion and positive self-talk. Tracy shares her thoughts on writings about the Pompey stone. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about emil KOA and
auto suggestion this week. Yeah, I had a lot of feelings.

(00:24):
I knew you would. I also just thought there were
a couple of fun quotes that I came across while
researching Okay. One was written by that biographer of Koua
that we mentioned, and it is the French point of
view criticizing the way Americans wrote about hypnosis. Okay, and

(00:45):
he says, meanwhile, the ideas of the Nazi school had
spread in America. They were being exploited and popularized with
all the claptrap and noise that Accompani's bluff. And I
just love that. I was like, yeah, that's true, because
people were like hip itism, it's magical, and they were like,
we are trying to do science. You're messing it up,
You're making it harder. Yeah, kind of fascinating. On the

(01:08):
flip side of that, there was in that criticism of
Kua in the US, particularly from the medical community. The
New York Neurological Institute described Kua as astoundingly ignorant of
all scientific research and knowledge. So yeah, point of view
changes everything. Yeah, start in with your many thoughts. Well, So,

(01:33):
when I was in high school, my mom took me
to a workshop. I'm not going to say the specific
name because I don't want to prompt like discourse, right,
but it a lot of it had a lot of
stuff in common with what Kua was writing about. Yeah,
a significant part of it did not, and was way

(01:54):
more woo woo magic, Yeah, which would have made him
absolutely irate, I think. Yeah, And so that part, like
the whole wooo magic part, I've pretty much jettisoned out
of my mind. But the parts that were more about,
like the more self affirmation, positive thinking like that kind
of stuff, and some other aspects that had to do

(02:16):
with basically basically meditation and mindfulness. All of that I
have found very useful to me for my whole life
in the decades since then. When my mom first went
to this workshop, she we've talked about on the show before,
has an incurable, essentially untreatable, progressive neurological disease, and this

(02:42):
was happening when I was in high school. She had
not progressed nearly as far as she has today, and
the stuff that we learned in this class did absolutely
zero to slow the progression of her disease. But in
terms of making her feel more in control in a
situation that she had no control over, and improving her

(03:06):
outlook in her mood, and just having a better mental
state in the middle of all that, it was incredibly useful.
And I think all of that is like important, and
some of the stuff that dismisses this kind of thing
as not effective, I think sometimes kind of underestimates how

(03:29):
important a person's mental state is just too existing. Yeah,
Like you could do a bunch of research about does
a person's mental state affect how quickly they recover? Maybe
that's maybe yes, maybe no, whatever, But like you also
have the part where your improved mental state while that's happening,

(03:53):
means your life feels a little better exactly how it's happening,
and that's also important, Like I don't so yeah, yeah, yeah,
I think. I mean, the concept of positive self talk
is pretty bolstered by science at this point, right, Like

(04:14):
psychiatrists psychologists will encourage you to use positive self talk
as a way, whether or not it improves anything like
health wise, it can improve the way you deal with
the world, which is likely to have an overall improvement
on a lot of other parts of your life, just
because you're kind of operating at a better starting point
than if you were kind of down in the dumps

(04:35):
and saying a lot of negative stuff to yourself. There
are I didn't dig into them because they get really
heady and really fast, and it's a little bit hard
to draw direct conclusions. But there are a lot of
studies about not necessarily curing anything or fixing any malady,
but like your immune system getting a boost from the

(04:56):
positive attitude and positive self talk. So and it is
trick because it is stuff we don't always understand how
it's exactly functioning, right, Rich does make it very open
for people to be like, yeah, a little hokey about
the whole thing, and it kind of robs the legitimate
part of it of its of its you know, esteem,

(05:18):
because it has now gotten lumped in with a lot
of other things. Sympnotism kind of is the same, right.
There are definitely studies of like smoking cessation, oh sure,
and people you know, having a better, more effective outcome
and being able to stop smoking if they are getting
hypnosis for that versus not again, though that does all

(05:40):
there are other factors like who you are, what your
brain is open to. Yeah, it's tricky, Yeah, but I
do love that Emil Kuai does not appear to have
been a jerk. Yeah, And I mean it seems like
he didn't want people really making a ton of money
off of what he was doing. Like he would have
opposed to the world of wellness grift that we live

(06:04):
in very much so he did not believe in any
of that. No grift for him. He reminds me in
some ways of many, many many years ago when I
was in massage school. There were people in the class
that would say stuff that was just not founded in
reality at all. It was kind of frustrating. And we

(06:24):
had an anatomy and physiology teacher who was a nurse
and was very practical about things and was like, look,
you don't need to be telling your clients that their
massage is going to like cure anything that they have
going on, because just getting the massage feels good. I

(06:45):
know you are not a fan of massage, Holly, I
love a massage, And he was like, get a massage,
you will you'll feel better, and like that is reason enough.
That's enough, that's enough. You don't need to be saying
that you know your massage will help all of these
other things, that there is evidence for some stuff, but

(07:05):
like the fact that you will feel better by itself
is important. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the massage feels good to me. Yeah.
The problem is that my brain gets real panicky that
I am too relaxed and something that will happen and
I can't handle it. I don't know why I feel

(07:28):
responsible for everything that goes on around me in the world,
but I apparently do all the time. There's no reason
for this. I'm not an oldest child. I have you
tried some auto suggestion. I am not responsible for everything
in the world. I'm not responsible for all of it.

(07:49):
Here's the other thing that I would like to discuss,
and it's very important, okay, and I especially like it
because Emil Kua appears to have been delightful. I think
he could potentially unseat Pierre de Kub as best mustache
on the episode, and then it will be someone who

(08:10):
I don't think was a misogynist jerk. Oh yeah, great,
let's celebrate it. When you see pictures of him. Nice, nice,
he looks so he looks happy all the time, not
that everybody has to be, but like he has just
that sweet countenance. His smile is adorable. He looks charming
as heck. Oh sure, it's kind of like Santa and

(08:33):
Colonel Sanders had a very smiley baby. He's so cute.
He's so cute, Okay, and I love this. I will
see if I can find some pictures of him that
we are allowed to use, then will put it on
our Netflix. Yeah. I think probably there are there are
some some usable pictures. He is very, very very sweet face,

(08:55):
like the kind of person that I believe that there
are probably people who just by being in the room
with him, felt better. Yeah, therefore you cannot measure the
efficacy of his method because it's like, well you were
with Emil Kua, of course you felt better. Yeah. He
looks very reassuring, brightening up the room. Just a charming

(09:17):
little sweetheart. Everyone every description of him, even people that
wanted to debunk him, talked about how charming and kind
he was, which is kind of a good measure of
a man. Even if you don't agree with them, you
still think they're a good guy. Yeah, that's not bad
at all. So hopefully if anyone out there is dealing

(09:37):
with anything that perhaps could be helped by auto suggestion,
like I said at the end of that episode, couldn't hurt,
may or may not help, but it's probably not going
to do any harm if you just want to try
it and see if it works for you. You know,
I'm a believer in positive self talk. It's a thing
I've had to learn in recent years. It does seem
to help me. I don't know that to cure anything,

(09:59):
but it's helps me feel a little better about myself
in the world, and that's good enough for me. Doesn't
have to be more than that. We talked about the
Pompy Stone for an April Fool's Day episode with just

(10:20):
a very low stakes historical hoax or prank, very little pain,
kind of a whoops, but not anything evil. Yeah. I
found it very silly, and it became more silly the
longer it went on, Like every new person who wrote
a book just assuming that it was a historical relic

(10:44):
that dated back to fifteen twenty got a little funnier
to me. And then the fact that the last major
publication on it was so detailed and so full of speculation.
It was like thirteen pages of speculating about stuff. I
wrote a note and called it the homes fanfic because

(11:07):
it was kind of a weird thing about making up
a person that this was about with a shocking amount
of like believed details about that person's life. I was like,
right where you just feeling creative, sir, It's true that
those are a lot of things that all happened. There
really were a lot of expeditions that came to North America.

(11:31):
There really were a lot of people from Spain on them.
There really were a lot of people who, for whatever
means or reason, went to live with an indigenous community.
None of that meant that the stone was connected to
any of it. I think the fact that while this
stone was kind of a public curiosity and people were

(11:55):
taking like a nail or a file to like clean
the inscription out, that became an explanation for why it
didn't look that old. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because it
it doesn't really look that old, and so people were like, well,
of course, like in the process of cleaning it up,
this whole inscription has been freshened up, Like that must

(12:16):
be why, But that it was not. Why it really
speaks to the human desire to want to believe things. Yeah,
something that I think Schoolcraft is the person who said this,
Craft whose writing style was incredibly circular. Everything that he
said took twice as long as it really needed to,

(12:39):
was very round about. But he was sort of saying that,
like one of the characteristics of the age that he
was living in was turning any local artifact into a
wonder and that this had been done with the Pompy Stone.
Like people sort of treated it as this wondrous thing,

(13:00):
which led to a lot of people being overly credulous
about it. I guess. I mean there's also just the
like it's exciting to consider something like that, like can
you believe, yeah, that farmer just accidentally found this amazing thing.
And I understand the impulse to jump on the bandwagon

(13:22):
and about it. But when when I was a kid,
we had like the house that we lived in had
a small amount of land. It was like one in
a third acres or something like that, And so there
was the house and then there was a hilly wooded
area and then at the bottom was where we had

(13:44):
a garden that for most of my childhood, We like
we grew all of the vegetables that we ate, And
if I'm remembering correctly, it was somewhere in that stretch
of land or nearby my brother or I one of us.
The details are very fuzzy. Someone found us, as you do.
And boy did I want that skull to be a dinosaur.

(14:07):
It was definitely not a dinosaur. I think it was
a you know, a horse or a cow or maybe
a deer. Not remotely a dinosaur at all. But I
remember in my very small childhood being like, but what
if it's a dinosaur? Should we get someone to check
if it's a dinosaur? It was definitely not a dinosaur. Yes,

(14:31):
but you were a child, Yes, I was a child.
I mean we also lived in an area where people
would sometimes find like arrowheads or other projectile points or
dinosaur maybe dinosaurs somewhere. Definitely not that skull. I think
my dad has started listening to the podcast. He may

(14:51):
now fill in the gaps of my memory about the skull.
I could be completely misremembering it from my very small childhood.
Patrick grew up in New York, but much much farther
west in New York than where this happened, and so
I asked him if he had ever heard of it when,

(15:13):
because I didn't quite really, I hadn't yet visualized the
map where these places were on the map, and so
I just the names were reminiscent enough of some of
the places that he did live very close to that
I thought it might have been in his area. And
I was like, did you ever hear He said, absolutely not.
I have no idea what you're talking about. So even

(15:36):
if it did make kind of a splash at the time,
it's maybe outside of that immediate area of New York,
maybe not as known based on the sample of one
person that I asked, right, And also, I mean to
be fair, it was kind of like a, well, this
is so cool, this is so cool. It's not as
cool as we thought, you guys. Let's just I like that.

(16:00):
It did seem like he did not get a sudden
wave of hate mail after debunking the Pompy Stone. Yeah.
It had. Instead, somebody immediately corroborreate, like, yeah, you're right,
it's that's a fake. It is tricky too, like even
the people that invoked this as evidence of something they

(16:24):
wanted to be true after it had been debunked. I mean,
I'm willing to give them grace because they didn't have
things where they could just look it up and check
if there were a traditional pieces of information. But it
is quite funny how long that went on. Yeah, yeah, well,
and I think at least two of the three people

(16:46):
that we mentioned including it in stuff we're specifically writing about,
like Catholic history. And so it would make sense to
if you had previously heard this thing about how there
was you know, a Spanish Catholic in New York in
fifteen twenty, then especially if you just latched onto that

(17:06):
might not go verify whether it has been debunked and
the however, many years since you heard about it, I've
honestly done that on this show. Relied on something that
I learned in childhood. It is no longer accurate. I mean,
I think most of us have things that we learned

(17:27):
at an early age or at some point not even
necessarily an early age, in college, in high school, as
an adult that it turns out that people now know
are not true. But yeah, that information doesn't automatically filter
to everybody if you're not out there going, oh, hey,
was that debunked you? Yeah? Never know, well, and there's
also the stuff that you learn as like a much

(17:48):
more simplistic way. Yeah. That then, like the thing that
always I remember is like when I was a child,
I learned that your cells have a membrane around them, right.
And then when I got I was an adult and
I was in massage school, and our massage school anatomy
textbook was one that was used in nursing schools a lot,

(18:10):
and I learned that this membrane that I had learned
about was something called a lipid bilayer, not remotely what
I had imagined by the word membrane, not a sack. Well,
when you're in when you're a school kid, right, like
we all remember the exercise draw the cell and its
component parts and you started with like an oblong sipper

(18:34):
usually and then put the pieces inside of it. So
I mean, yeah, makes that makes sense? Yeah, totally appropriate
to teach the simplest, the simpler explanation of something to
younger kids and then to build on that later or not.
If you don't go to massage school, you may never know.
If you never take a more advanced anatomy class. You

(18:54):
could just think of it as a membrane. It's fine.
If you love April fools Day pranks, I hope there
were good pranks for you this past April Fool's Day.
And if you hate that, I hope nobody messed with you.
And I hope that no one fell for fake April

(19:17):
Fool's Day articles on the internet and then felt bad
about it. Whatever is coming up for you this weekend,
I hope that is also great. We will be back
on Monday with a brand new episode I think on
Nothing prank related, and we will be back with a
Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed in History Class is

(19:43):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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