My assumption had always been Tony Robbins is a maniac snake oil salesman. Turns out I might be way off. The podcast with Theo Von is worth a watch and the Standford paper is surprising to me. What's your experience?

Many many many years ago I believe a very elderly friend of mine actually told me, or maybe they were told this by very elderly friends of theirs, that they and a couple of their friends had attended a nazi rally where Hitler spoke and this went on for the entire day. They explained that they did not agree with any of the ideas of Hitler, they knew that all this was not going to be good for them or for the things that they wanted or believed in, but after the rally they realized the effect that this rally had had on their minds and it took time and effort to try to undo some of the effects of that exposure.

Far more recently, someone wrote a web page describing how their father had to do several long haul commutes and to pass the time he listened to a paranormal radio program, or maybe it was an ultra conservative radio program. After this the family realized how this radio program had convinced their father that all this stuff was absolutely true. That might have been mentioned on HN in the last few years.

I suppose the punch line is: Millions of years of history have made each of us want to REALLY convince those around us of what WE believe and we sometimes seem prone to believe things that people who are REALLY convinced tell us. That has tended to keep us alive for all these years. Carefully choose what what you put in there because it isn't going to easily be removed. If I had an editor that worked and I could easily visualize all the stuff that I've put in there then I would give almost anything to use that editor to scrub a decent fraction of that.