In 1957, journalist Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller exposing how advertisers were using motivational research and depth psychology to tap the unconscious desires behind what we buy. Psychologists like Ernest Dichter, who brought psychoanalytic techniques into marketing, appear throughout, and Packard also pointed to the same methods reaching politics. The book’s cover asked what makes us buy, believe, and even vote the way we do. Packard argued these techniques undermined the idea of open, rational choice. Sean and I dig into what he documented, how well those methods actually worked (still debated), and what’s changed since.

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Alfred Redl rose to head the counterintelligence arm of Austria-Hungary’s General Staff, hunting spies for the empire. Yet for roughly a decade he was also feeding secrets to Russia, and he’s believed to have sacrificed his own agents to protect himself. In 1913, postal censors intercepted envelopes containing nothing but cash, and the trail led back to Redl. Drawing on Fitzroy Maclean’s Take Nine Spies, Sean and I dig into one of the twentieth century’s most famous espionage cases: how a spy catcher became the spy, what he is believed to have given away, and where historians still disagree about his motives and the damage he did.

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Necromancy, sorcery, astrology, alchemy, prophecy — practices humanity has turned to for millennia to try to bend the unseen world to its will. Based on Robert Masello's book Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them, Sean and I trace the occult arts from ancient Babylon to the present day, and the people throughout history who risked everything — their reputations, their freedom, some would say their souls — to practice them.

More from FMT: https://linktr.ee/ThinkChangeRepeat