Wiretap - The Power of Suggestion

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

When Jonathan Goldstein was 11, his father gave him a book. It promised to teach you how to get rich, control other people's minds, and levitate. Jonathan found the book in his apartment recently and decided to look into the magical claims.

It's summer, and it's going to be a hot one in Canadian politics. I'm Catherine Cullen. Join me and some of CBC's best political reporters as we bring you all new summer programming, focused on everything from negotiating with Donald Trump to Canada's climate goals, to the future of the Senate, and more. We'll talk to the chief of the defense staff and a top senator. We'll visit the Maritimes to learn about the future of energy production there. Catch the House Saturdays wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to an all-new episode of Wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein on CBC Radio 1. Today's show, The Power of Suggestion.

Recently, I was packing up my apartment for a move when I came across an old book for my childhood. It's called Ultra Psychonics, How to Work Miracles, with the Limitless Power, of psycho-atomic energy. It was given to me by my father and was written by a man named Walter Delaney back in 1975. The basic premise of the book is that just as matter is composed of atoms, thoughts are composed of psychic atoms, or what Delaney called, psychons, ultrons, and egon's. I was 11 years old when my father walked into my bedroom and handed it to me. He wasn't much of a gift giver, more of a check giver, but I was into magic tricks and fantasy novels, so when he saw it in a used bookstore, he must have thought it would be right up my alley. The frayed yellow

dusk jacket promised a grab bag of every occult slash parapsychology slash self-help topic under the sun, all in 237 pages. Among other things, the book promised to teach you how to shoot mental laser beams, move solid objects with your mind, make others obey your command, multiply your brain power by a factor of a thousand, and defend yourself against demonic attack. Ultra psychonics revealed what I always suspected, that the adult world operated on magic. Finding a job, a wife, acquiring a bag of egg McMuffins with the mere flash of a plastic. card. How else were these things accomplished? To an 11-year-old, the book's theory seemed as plausible as anything else. An excerpt from page 217 explains the secret of ultra-levitation.

1. Remove all your clothes and stand on a bathroom scale. 2. Generate the ultronic power globe on a string as you did for the ultronic poltergeist technique. 3. Concentrate on making it rise like a balloon, lifting you with it. Four, keep your eyes on the scale. It will start to drop, bit by bit, showing that you are getting lighter. This wasn't your granddaddy's old levitation. This was ultra-levitation. And most importantly for me, ultra-psychonics required neither time nor effort.

The inside flap stated it was as simple, easy, and natural as breathing. and for a child adept at breathing, but little else, this was exciting news. In those dark, ignorant days before the universal remote, one had to rise, not unlike an animal, from one's perch, to change TV stations. By using ultraconetics, as outlined in Chapter 13, I'd never have to debase myself that way again. No longer would I be pathetic. I would be ultra-telepathetic.

This was during the Eden of my pre-adolescence, a time when I had yet to discover the Kmart lingerie insert, and so had plenty of time on my hands. I wasted hours in bed, lying flat on my stomach with the book open at my side, squinting so hard that my vision began to blur as I tried to close the bedroom door with my mind. Even though I had, as the book instructed, dutifully turned on the ultronic generator in my head to stimulate my flow of ultrons, I was getting nowhere. I assumed the fault was mine, that I was not following the instructions properly. But reading it now, it's hard to figure out how anyone could follow along. I now wonder whether my father knew it was insane, and it only gifted me with the book as a means of getting me out of his hair.

He could read in peace while his son stared at a door jam for hours on end. I wonder if my father still even remembered the book. Yes. You remember it? Yes. Right off the bat. Right. I thought I'd have to refresh your memory.

No, no, no. I remember it. It's all kinds of psychosome, what do you call it, experiments and magic, very scientifically proven and concrete and so forth. Did you try any of the techniques I were offered in the book? No, I never tried any of it. But for some reason, I thought maybe there's a certain amount of validity, maybe. But, I mean, I don't know that I necessarily think of you as a believer in that kind of stuff.

I don't poo-poo it. I don't poo-poo anything. This is patently false. My father has poo-pooed everything from sushi to liquid soap. He's poo-pooed abstract expressionism, the Rolling Stones, and the entire state of Florida. He once even poo-pooed my poo-poo platter, telling me egg rolls were best enjoyed cold. In fact, whenever my great-uncle Saul bragged about how his other nephew, Barney, was a successful doctor, my father poo-pooed the hell out of that. Getting himself worked up, he'd insist that a Sherropodotist was no doctor.

You remember Mom's Uncle Saul used to have a nephew named Barney? A corropatist. A foot doctor. No, he's not a medical doctor, no. You're not an MD. Can't operate on my foot. Here's what I'm saying is I have a bunion or a corn. Right, okay.

I bring that up to illustrate the fact that you don't just swallow things, hook, line, and sinker. Here was somebody presenting someone as a foot doctor, and you said, no. Right. He's not a doctor. That's right. But, I mean, in the case of this, I imagine you approached it probably with some skepticism. This book, you know, it was kind of, how could I put it, seemed to me to be backed by some fact.

Why? Well, because it was so concrete, so specific. There was nothing vague about it. Yeah. It's a solid book. It's got a table of contents, if I remember, you know? It's not like any little leaflet or a pamphlet. Yeah.

Whoever wrote this, well, he put a lot of effort into it, I'll tell you that. He put a lot of effort into it. You know, I get the feeling this guy wasn't trying to counter anybody. He really believes what he was writing. Did Walter Delaney really believe what he was writing? Believe, for instance, that while the old-fashioned zodiac was outdated, his psychonic zodiac, with its Kryanox, Vernox, Estovox, and Invernax signs, was more scientific as it was seasonally based,

and that even if you were born under the Estabox summer sign, you might exhibit a more Kryonox winter-type personality if you were born in an air-conditioned hospital. The back of the book refers to him as, quote, one of the world's leading authorities on the psychic and occult sciences, but I could find no mention of him anywhere on the internet. It was only when I searched on Walter Delaney and pseudonym

that I finally got a lead. It turns out that like so many other mystical men, from Leonard Suskin to Regis Philbin, to my father, Buzz Goldstein, Walter Delaney was originally a Jew from the Bronx, by the name of Joseph Schaumburger. Schaumburger passed away in 2011, but I managed to track down his daughter, Barbara. She was in her early 20s when her dad was writing the book, and she remembers it clearly. At the time, Schaumburger was living in New Jersey and making a decent wage as an editor at a publishing house that specialized in occult self-help books

with titles like Secrets from Beyond the Pyramids and The Magic of Chantomatics. And he was astonished by the amount of money he saw writers making. Here's Barbara. They were just taking buckets of money home and was driving him crazy. So his wife, Dorothy, said,

And why don't you write one of these books yourself? Had he ever written a book before? No. But what he did was he did this kind of careful study. He just kind of flipped through magazines and looked at newspapers, and he read scientific journals and such. So from that combination of things, he just, pulled ideas out and made, you know, what sounded good to him. Was his intention to make it scientific, or was it...

No. No, his intention was to make money. You have to understand that this was just a kind of... It started out as a kind of warped family joke, and he'd read it to the family and say, does this sound reasonable? Does this sound interesting? Do you remember him reading you actual passages from the book? Oh, yeah, yeah. The best one, our family, the absolute family favorite was the money one, where he, one chapter was about money, about making money. I think that was in the chapter on ultra-pictronics, how to materialize the riches you desire.

I'll be honest, I've never read the whole book all the way through. But anyway, he said, this is where you would go around the house and you'd gather up your bills and your bank statements and your wallet and such. You'd put them all under your pillow, and then you would have this formula, this chant that you would use. The lyrics go, my money lies under my pillow, my money lies close to me. No matter what I do tomorrow, bring back my money to me. This was written to be sung to the tune of my body lies over the ocean. Anytime I hear those words, I can hear it in my head. You know, I can hear the echo of my father singing that song.

Looking at it now, it seems obvious it was a lark. It almost reads like a parody of another famous science fiction-y-slash-self-helpy book with a lot of pseudoscience jargon, that, for legal reasons, I will only say rhymes with diuretics. Take, for instance, the astral spur. You were supposed to use it at the racetrack. to give your horse extra energy, and it involved standing on one foot

and projecting a psychic laser at your horse's hindquarters. And then there's the section on ultra-vision influence. The road to domination is explained this way. One, sit in front of a mirror and practice staring fixedly into your own eyes. Two, practice the look on animals.

Cats are the best. See if you can stare down a cat. don't be surprised if the cat seems to win the first few rounds. Three, practice the look on strangers, on various forms of public transport, until you force them to turn their head away or look down. You have just mastered your first human subject. If you're absolutely loving your summer read and don't want the book to be over, your experience doesn't actually have to end when you finish reading.

I'm Matea Roach, and on my podcast bookends, I sit down with authors to get the inside scoop behind the books you love. Like, why Emma Donoghue is so fascinated by trains, or how Taylor Jenkins-Reed feels about being a celebrity author. You can check out bookends with Matea Roach wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, I'm not that surprised, but I'm not that surprised, but I'm not that surprised. I'm a little saddened or the part of me. Because, I mean, I discovered the book when I was like 11 years old, so that little kid part of me is a little. Oh, I'm so sorry.

No, no, it's, I mean, it makes sense. Because, like, there are parts in the book where he references things like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Golden Flower and things from Eastern philosophy. Oh, he was very familiar with all these things. You know, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead was a big one because it was always, you know, the thing of, well, maybe if they had followed the formulas correctly, maybe something, you know. He would say that. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that sounds like someone who, you know, either did believe or kind of wanted to believe. He may have wanted to believe. I mean, it may be that in his private thoughts there were some things in there that he believed in. He wouldn't have, I can't see him as sharing that with us. Because he didn't want to open himself up to ridicule. No, he was a very kind of geeky science fiction-looking person. You know, the thick black, heavy-lensed eyeglasses, you know, kind of short, pudgy Jewish boy from the Bronx.

No, he was a very kind of quiet, private person. Do you have any idea how he arrived upon the name Walter Delaney? Oh, of course. He was at the office, and the book was all ready for publication, gone through all the copy editing, and he wandered into the men's room at Prentice Hall and thinking, where am I going to find a name? What name can I use that's not going to be identifiable?

And he just kind of looked at the top of the urinal, and there was the brand of the urinal, Delaney Flush Boy. So it became Walter Delaney from the Delaney flush boy urinal. So he never considered at any point just putting the name Joseph Schoenberger to it. No, no. He never wanted me in the spotlight. Barbara told me that not only did her father make enough money from the book, to buy a large, beautiful house

and take his wife on European vacations where they went to operas. She also said that Schaumburger received boxes and boxes of letters from readers, thanking him, and requesting further guidance. In rereading the book all these years later,

I still remembered the stuff about how to travel to the furthest reaches of the galaxy through mind power. But what I didn't remember at all, at all, was the last chapter, Chapter 14. In the book's introduction, Schaumburger promises that in the final chapter he would reveal nothing short of the meaning of life. What could be of less interest to an 11-year-old? And what does the chapter contain? It outlines the ten actions for leading a good life, the joy of giving, humility, working, caring, fidelity,

sufficiency, calmness, learning, meditation, and reverence. Nothing flashy, no ultras, just the golden rule kind of stuff. I asked Barbara why she thought her father included all this straightforward, do unto others kind of thing, with nigh a single ultra in sight. I think he believed in that quite passionately, and it would have been the only platform he had. And if there was anything that would transform their lives, It wasn't going to be gained by chanting.

It would be gained by, you know, living your life according to some basic principles of decency, you know. Chapter 14 is the last stage in ultrasonic, wrote Schaumburger. It is the culmination of many long and arduous years of research. Please do not try to read it now. You will not be able to understand it until you have mastered the rest of the book. But once you are ready for it,

I think you will find it to be one of the most profound and rewarding experiences in your life. Of all the chapters in Schaumburgers' book, it's this last one that might be the hardest of all to master. It's the chapter with the fewest instructions. And on some days, I still don't feel quite ready for it. It doesn't always take a whole book to infiltrate a person's thoughts.

There are times when all it takes is a single word. Emily and her college boyfriend went out for four years. He was her first real love. And when they broke up, she couldn't imagine life without him. and so she undertook this project to make them be friends. Her ex was not amenable. He just didn't think he was ready for that. But Emily decided that she was going to make it work, no matter what.

By sheer force of will, she would seamlessly transition them from two people in love into two people who were pals. And so, after a lot of persuading, he finally relented to hanging out with her at a baseball game. We were sitting there watching and sort of trying to navigate this whole situation and partway through the game. They did the kiss cam that they do at baseball games where, you know, on the Jumbotron, they focus on a couple sitting next to each other and then they're supposed to kiss and everybody claps and people do like funny kisses and that sort of thing. And the kiss cam came on and I just remember like my heart pounding and just being terrified that the kiss cam was going to come on us and just knowing that I had. I had, you know, just no idea what I would do if that happened. Why did they do that kiss-camp thing anyway?

Like, what do they do if, like, it's a brother and sister or something? Well, I mean, sometimes they'll do, like, a dad and a daughter, and then they'll do, like, something cute. Or, you know, or sometimes people will sort of make, like, frowny faces and face away from each other. You know, that's it. People are supposed to ham it up. I mean, it would be enough to keep me from ever going to a baseball game with my mother.

During that portion of the evening, just like neither of us said anything there was just mortifying. And so finally that was over. And, you know, I breathed this huge sigh of relief. And it was raining really hard. And we hadn't eaten anything. And so he asked me if I wanted to go over to his house. And he, you know, lived in a new apartment, which I hadn't seen yet. So we went to his house, which, you know, felt a little weird to be.

begin with. Just because, you know, being in public at a baseball game, it's sort of one thing, but then when you're just the two of you and you're in his house, you're like, wait, what does this mean? And you don't quite know how to act. And so, you know, the whole thing just felt very kind of loaded that I was really doing my best just to, you know, plow through and have a good time. So we ordered a pizza and, you know, it's like pouring rain out, so it took a really long time to arrive. And so, you know, this whole time we're sitting there and the conversation is sort of, you know, uncomfortable. And so finally, you know, after like somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, the pizza guy shows up. And so we went down to retrieve it and

brought it up and we were just starving. And he puts it on the table and he flips open the box and we look at the pizza and facing it on the other side of the cardboard box is written in big letters in black pen the word poo wait I'm sorry so this word is written on the inside of the pizza box directly over exactly where the pizza that we are about to eat is and there was no mistaking it that was what it said it said poo P-O-O-P-Poo. And we both see this, and we just freeze.

Like the breath goes out of my body. And it's just staring up at us. And we just have no idea what to make of this. And my first thought, the first thing I said, was like, Oh, it must mean pepperoni, olive, and onion. That must be what it means. That's what it means. Wait, so was it a pepperoni, olive, and onion pizza?

Absolutely not. There was not pepperoni on this pizza. But I had to find a way to explain what was going on here. And what was your ex-boyfriend's take on the whole thing? He immediately was just like, we cannot eat this pizza. And so he sort of instantly took this as, like, an aggressively, nefarious sign that somebody had done something terrible to this pizza, and they were daring us to eat it.

I mean, between the two of us, like, I'm the more optimistic one, and he's the more pessimistic or, you know, more likely to sort of suspect, or just be mistrustful. So we were at this kind of crossroads or standstill, and part of it very truthfully was I was just, like, really hungry. I was committed to the idea that, like, we are going to eat this pizza, and he was equally committed to the idea that, like, we are not going to eat this pizza. And so then he said to me, like, okay, that's it. Like, I'm calling the place, and I'm going to ask them. And I was like, you can't call the place. Why?

Why? Because somehow that made this, like, real in the world. and the implications were too upsetting. Like, I was really hanging on to this idea that, like, it must mean pepperoni, olives and onions. I mean, you'd think if that's what they meant, that somebody would have figured out at some point to do, like, OPO or OOP or something. And by this point, you know, like, I'm turning the box each way to see if it makes a shape,

if it, you know, like I'm trying to figure out, almost like they were hieroglyphics. Like, could this mean something else? Or could it be a number, like an address or something? Right, like all of those things. But it's clear as day. There's no other explanation. So he called and just was like, look, we just got a pizza from you guys, and we opened it up and it says P-O-O, what hell? What does that mean?

What are we supposed to do with this? We can't eat it. And the person who answered was just like, what are you talking about? I don't know what that means. I'm sure it's nothing. Deal with it. And so he got up the phone. It was just, like, incredibly angry.

And by this point, you know, like, I'm famished. I'm frustrated. And so I just say, like, I'm eating it. I'm eating it. I need it to take a stand. Like, I need to live in a world where people have not done something evil to the pizza for no particular reason. You know, when I stuck that, when I. Put the peach in my mouth and ate it.

There was a sense of, I'm embracing the world. Like, I'm going to live. And that was sort of directly opposed to his being ruled by fear and skepticism. But I think as much or more than that even was my unwillingness to acknowledge that anything was wrong. because in a sense, after the end of our relationship, there was sort of no way to make what had happened, right? You know, what had happened between us, like, we'd been in love, then it was over, and there was sort of no way to reconcile that in a way that felt okay, but like I needed to reconcile it. I needed it to be okay.

And so seeing this word, it was an intrusion of, you know, ugliness and kind of horror into this moment. And, you know, it just felt like a sign that I couldn't just move everything over. I couldn't make everything okay. And he'd been telling me that from the beginning. But it really took this pizza box, you know, for that to get through to me. But, you know, I ate it, and ultimately it tasted fine. I didn't get sick afterward. On Wiretap today, you heard Buzz Goldstein, Barbara Byro, and Emily Condon.

Wiretap is produced by Mirabirdwin Tonic, Crystal Duhame, and me, Jonathan Goldstein. Special thanks to Jonathan Minivar, Alex Bloch, Bloomberg, Sean Cole, Ira Glass, and Nancy Updike. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.