Presenting Mind Games | The Guru’s Guru

Hey, it's me and Devin. We're off again this week, but we'll be back again next week. We got some really good episodes on Horizon. But this week we want to share a new show we're really excited about. It's called mind Games by journalists Zoe and Alice who are best friends diving into this world of neuro linguistic programming, which is a controversial form of hypnosis. NLP, as it's otherwise known, is relatively unknown, but it's also kind of

All right, I guess I.

Completely dissociated for my body. I had so much panic and I was so afraid that when I opened my mouth and said the five words that I said when I was in front of the room, I thought it was someone else talking, and I said, I'm never doing this again.

In the late nineteen eighties, Nancy had a phobia of public speaking and it was getting in the way of her job. She was a nurse who specialized in working with chronic pain patients.

But there's something about being able to help somebody that just makes me so It's probably the biggest motivator of my entire life.

Nancy wanted to share her skills more people and to grow her business, but there was one big problem. She was terrified of public speaking. Get her in front of a room of people, and Nancy would totally freeze. Then she met someone, a woman who said she could cure Nancy's lifelong fear in a few short minutes using something called neuro linguistic programming, or NLP.

She did an NLP phobia fix on me and took away my fear of public speaking. And look at me now, I'm a big ham and I love public speaking and I would do anything to do public speaking. But she fixed She fixed that problem using an NLP technique and it never was a problem again.

Quickly, NLP became Nancy's whole life. Soon she was working as a consultant for Fortune five hundred companies. As a coach, she helped thousands of people conquer their own fears. This was way more people than she had ever dreamed of helping as a nurse, and it was all thanks to NLP. NLP is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Nancy used it to found a self help company for ambitious professionals. The Dalai Lama even checked out one of their events. The company was called Nexium.

Nexium is a methodology that allows people to optimize their behavior.

Brainwashing, sex abuse, and even branding.

Nancy Saltzman, the co founder of the Capital Region based sex called Nexium, has been released from prison.

NLP made a Nancy's career, but then a version of it destroyed her and destroyed the lives of others. But what even is NLP.

Take a deep breath, is.

And breed out.

Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak privately on your unconscious mind.

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is episode one of mind Games. I'm Alice Hines, I'm Zoe Lascas.

You don't know how you did it.

Tell you you're going to a little Time to stars stake.

And you're out of it.

We're reporters, we're also friends.

We're into some pretty weird shit.

True story. We met at a shamonic sound meditation.

Yeah, that was a few years ago, and there were some changes that occurred.

Alice understatement of the century. You astraually traveled as I recall.

I mean, yeah, you like basically do like a long meditation at this thing, and I realized some shit about my life. Number one, Zoe was my new best friend, and Number on I actually broke up with someone who I've been dating for five years after this event.

Whoopsie daisies. It was for the best. Yeah, everything worked out just fine, especially the friendship. Here we are. But yeah, I think it was that weekend, sometime before all the gongs and rain sticks and chimes got going, that we realized we have a ton in common.

Yeah we do. We're both reporters and kind of professional skeptics, Zoe being a science journalist and me being a journalist who has exposed lots of wellness scams and cults, we sort of have to smell the bullshit, but at the same time keep an open mind.

And we've also, between the two of us, logged something like five million hours on the couches of our respective therapists, and I think that's partly why we're interested in alternative therapies, Like, what if you didn't have to spend hours and hours and hours of your life and hundreds of dollars on mainstream psychiatry.

I hope my therapist isn't listening to this.

Yeah, sorry, Annie, they probably are. So in this series, we're going to go spelunking into the murky depths of neurolinguistic programming or NLP, and we're gonna try to find out if it deserves its sort of shady reputation.

So I first heard about NLP because an alleged cult that I was investigating said they used it. So this wasn't Nexium, it was a different group called Twin Flames.

And what did they use NLP for?

Okay, here's a quote from some of the documentation around this group that they put out. Your practitioner will expertly access your trauma like a world class computer programmer, rooting out a bug in the system.

Not scary at all. No, that sounds totally normal.

Yeah, so that's how they used NLP. But we were curious whether these techniques could be used in other contexts, and when we started looking into it, we realized NLP is literally.

Everywhere, and we do mean everywhere. You've probably used an NLP technique without knowing it, or someone's used one on you.

Yeah. It's the basis of a ton of self help movements, any type of manifesting, visualizations, vision boards. If you've done any of that, you've done NLP.

It has a ton of boldface name followers. There are Olympic divers who have used NLP to perfect their form. The Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort used it for closing deals. Fortune five hundred. Companies like Apple, IBM, Coca Cola have spent tons of money on NLP sales trainings over the past fifty.

Years, and so did Army Intelligence. They sought out NLP to improve soldier marksmanship and spycraft. They called it a technology for enhancing human performance.

And NLP spawned the self help behemoth that is Tony Robbins.

Anybody could be in a good state when things are going your way, But if you can stay at a beautiful state when things don't flow your way, then you're going to have a beautiful wife.

That's Tony from one of his many ads for Unleash the Power within a four day event that regularly draws thousands of people. He's coach Serena Williams, advised Bill Clinton, and even taught Oprah to walk on hot coals. Tony's built an empire telling people they can radically improve themselves using NLP.

Do you want to change your life? You want to get out of suffering, trade your expectations for appreciation, and your whole life will change in that moment.

But NLP promises more than personal growth. It also promises to teach you how to persuade others.

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Somebody would scared of when I said word control people's behaviors. It's already happening.

Fans of NLP say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It makes reprogramming the way you think quick and easy. You can simply delete bad habits, vanish crippling phobias, and install new patterns like.

Software sounds a little too good to be true.

NLP is a model of language patterns to create behavior change.

Every human problem is a behavioral problem.

All communication is some form of manipulation.

By changing all behaviors, we could change the entire world.

If you google NLP, you'll find a lot of credible sources saying it's a pseudoscience.

Yet not everything that doesn't go through peer review journals and double blind studies is necessarily useless. Think of alternative therapies. People get a lot out of anyway.

Or hypnosis, right, like.

Hypnosis which is used by legit doctors to help people with very concrete.

Problems smoking, cessation, pain management phobias.

But then it also exists in the collective imagination as this sort of magical Brainwashy's Fengalia mind control tactic.

By the way, a lot of NLP is hypnosis. There's huge crossover. Hypnosis is actually how Nancy Salzman got into NLP.

I'll do a session with you whatever you want, okay, So how do you feel about giving birth?

I am excited to give birth, but I'm also definitely afraid of the physical ordeal. I'm here in a suburban townhouse outside of Albany, New York. With Nancy. We're sitting on a comfy couch in her upstairs office, surrounded by books about Buddhism and neuroscience. I was expecting the Nancy salesman I'd seen on HBO, pant suits, corporate charisma, but today she's stressed casually and feels more like a mom hosting a soccer team. She's prepared an entire lunch spread

What is that physical ordeal of birth in your understanding?

Let's see. The physical ordeal is, like I guess, I'm afraid of like permanent change, that it is irreversible to my body. I'm afraid of injury, as you've probably guessed. I'm pregnant like do In a couple months. When I went to visit Nancy, I'd already been trying hypnosis for relaxation. Turns out hypnobirth thing is one of Nancy's specialties. So we're giving in a whirl.

Alice, Please don't get brainwashed by Nancy salesman.

Okay, I know everyone's probably thinking right now that I'm a little nuts, But I came here to learn about Nancy's methods and sometimes the only way to understand something is to try it.

How are you with risk in other things? I'm okay with some risk? What do you mean, like, I feel like I don't think.

I could be a journalist without taking on some risk.

That is what I was thinking. So probably, like today, for instance, you don't know me and here you are coming into my house. I mean, you have a little team with you, but who knows what I could have done here in my house to create a reversible, permanent change that could never be You never know, right, But this feels okay to you. Yeah, that's right.

So there are many I wasn't sure how much to trust Nancy, And the fact that this whole thing was being recorded and my producers were in the room was also kind of awkward. This was also the very first interview she was giving since she got out of prison. Nancy pled guilty to some charges related to her work in Nexium, but she's consistently maintained that she was also a victim of the group, and she says she was unaware of its most infamous crimes like branding and sex trafficking.

I thought doing this interview would be good because the media that happened when my company fell apart was so inaccurate, and I've always wanted people to know who I was, what I was involved in, why I did the work that I did, because it was overshadowed all by the media craziness.

I wasn't here to rehash the Naxium story. I wanted to learn more about her work with NLP, and I had to give it to Nancy. She was very perceptive. Anytime I used a word, she dug into the unconscious reasons I had maybe picked it, And.

I'll be tell me, just listen very carefully to why the person says, and I'm trying it on going. Did I worry about that? Any of the women I've ever I've ever done this with, ever say that I'm worried about injury. Nobody's ever said that I'm worried about injury.

Okay, just want to jump in here for a second. It's very odd to me, Alice, that she said no woman has ever told her they're worried about injury during childbirth. For most women, I know that is a major concern. Why do you think Nancy was going out of her way to make you feel like a freak.

Okay, I guess you're right. I mean, so, here's what I think she was doing. By making me think my problem is in my head, it becomes weirdly fixable. So it's a strategy.

Are you afraid of pain? Have you had much pain in your life?

Some I got in a skiing accident once that was pretty painful.

What happened? I actually don't really know.

I had mixed feelings about this whole session. But later Nancy used our conversation to make me a hypno birthing tape, and I was surprised by how into it I was.

Take a deep breath in and slowly exhale, and notice how your body feels that you have a body, and that your body has taken care of you all through your life and will continue to take care of you now and in the future.

I listened to this tape regularly as I prepared to give birth, although I will admit I transcribed it first to make sure there wasn't anything creepy or supplemental messages.

You can allow yourself to become more and more self assured.

So did it work?

I think it kind of did. Yeah. I mean, even listening to it now, it makes me feel relaxed, you.

Too, are Yeah, No, it's a vibe. It honestly reminds me of something you'd find on a meditation app.

Yeah, and it's not just Nancy's words, but her tone and the way she's pacing it. It gave me confidence as I listened it. Yeah, it totally took the edge off.

And you can relax into each contraction and allow your body to do what it already knows how to do.

Nancy learned these hypnotic language patterns from NLP. It's her secret sauce. When Nancy was a kid, her mother suffered from debilitating back pain.

I grew up in New Jersey in a middle class family. My mother had a chronic pain problem that started when I was about six, and I think I was one of those kids who was really empathic.

So she became a nurse specifically interested in treating chronic pain patients through alternative medicine. That's how she found hypnosis.

I didn't want to use drugs. I wanted to do something non traditional, and my ex husband was a physician and he introduced me to the whole idea whole idea, hypnosis for chronic pain and biofeedback, and one thing led me to another, to another to another.

And hypnosis is how Nancy found NLP.

I thought the language patterns in NLP were brilliant, and NLP said that you could break down any behavior and teach it to somebody else. So I started learning to break down behaviors and look for different things that I had ever looked for before.

But she was weary at first.

Well, they made a lot of claims that the skills of NLP could fix phobias, could do a whole number of things that were amazing to me, and if it was possible, I wanted to learn, but I was kind of skeptical.

If it was possible. If you're beginning to wonder what exactly NLP is, that's normal. It can mean a lot of different things and be used a lot of different ways. Don't worry. We're going to explain it over the course of the series, and we'll get into how some people see it as the ultimate life hack, while others have laundered it into extreme methods of controlling others.

For now, what you need to know is that NLP formed the basis of Nancy's self help programs. In Nexium.

I saw many, many, many many people benefit.

And you are still proud of the program you created.

Yes, I'm absolutely proud of it. I'm not proud of how everything ended up.

Nancy still believes in NLP deeply and uses it all the time. It got her through prison.

I will tell you that the judge sentenced me to go to a camp like Martha Stewart, and that's what I thought was going to happen. And they sent me to a maximum security female prison and it was a nightmare.

Nancy pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges for her role in Nexium. She was sent to federal prison in West Virginia in February of twenty twenty two.

I was terrified because they were really mean. They were very mean. I had no rights, like you have no rights when you're there, and whatever they want to do with you, they're going to do with you.

She says. This dark chapter of her life still haunts her. When she's feeling down, she turns to NLP.

And when I tell you the worst moments, moments when I believed I had been dealt a really unfair hand, and I had been stuck in a horrible situation where I was given no control, and I allowed myself to start really suffering about it and feeling really victimized and miserable. About a month in, I said to myself, what is wrong with you? You have all of these tools, use them. And I put myself in a good state. And I said,

Oooh, yikes. That was intense.

Yeah, And I know maybe some listeners are thinking, can we trust Nancy here? Is it possible she's hyping NLP because she's looking for a comeback or a way to talk about anything other than exium. Maybe maybe not.

I actually find Nancy credible here. She didn't have to talk about using NLP on herself in prison. And what I find really striking is that NLP clearly isn't just some scammy hustle she used on other people. She used it on herself. This is what saved her.

Yeah, she's saying she used NLP in the most high stake situation of her whole life.

Did she explain though, how that actually worked, like which NLP methods was she using.

Yeah, So there's this concept in NLP. It has kind of a CYBORGI name. It's called state control.

And what's so great about state control is that once you learn that you can bring up an excited state, it naturally follows that you can bring up any state you want.

Nancy learned of these techniques from a man who was incredibly influential in her life, NLP co founder Richard Bandler.

And what Richard Bamler taught me in that weekend, which was the most amazing thing of all, was that I had control over my emotional states. And I had no excuse ever to be in a bad state ever unless I was allowing it. And I will forever be grateful to him for that.

You were using these techniques decades later when you went to prison.

I'm still using them. My mother just died. I could just sit here and cry with you. I'm so sad, but that's not what we're here to do, so I'm not going to and you don't have to see that.

So, just to give you some context, Nancy's mom died three weeks before our interview. We were going to cancel, but then she said she didn't want to, and when we got to her house, she had cooked us this whole lunch like black bean soup, So naturally when she started crying in this moment, I felt really bad and just wanted to give her a hug.

Okay, apologies, this is going to sound incredibly harsh, but I have to ask, are we sure she was actually losing control of her emotions. Didn't she just tell us she can be wildly happy in prison? Could she also make herself cry on cue?

Part of me did feel like I was watching a talented actor. It was kind of whiplash her swing from anguish to then calmly referencing her mother's death, and these emotions were also visible in her her face and voice, so it would just instantly shift. My take is that these are Nancy's real emotions, but she has an insane level of control about when to dial in to a specific emotion and immediately shift to another. She says, anyone can do this, it's the power of NLP.

As someone who does occasionally fall to pieces, this ability sounds incredibly seductive. I would honestly love to have more emotional control on command.

Yeah, totally. But what's scarier is the idea that the person teaching you these emotional control techniques could also use them against you.

This is one of the truly disconcerting things about NLP. Even the most seemingly helpful techniques can be used in sinister ways. And because NLP masters pride themselves on controlling their every little word and emotion, it's really hard to know who to.

Trust, including the guy who started it all, Richard Bandler, a man with a checkered.

Past and a crazy, spooky laugh.

To understand neurolinguistic programming, you have to understand its contradictory founder, Richard Bandler. Sources have told us Bandler is a liar and a drunk, and he has.

A history of making violent threats.

Although Jesse, you know he disagrees with and denies all of these characterizations.

And yet here's the Bandler paradox. He spent his career trying to help others, and he succeeded. Tons of clients swear by him.

For example, I've had a lot of people that have you know, that didn't believe that people could change quickly, that went to a workshop and walked out and changed the whole world about that.

As he explains in the seminar from the nineteen eighties, Bandler's whole thing was making people feel like they have the power to fix their own problems. We collected as many of the DVD box sets of his seminars as we could find, watching and studying hours of tape. Here he is in another series, Creating Therapeutic Change.

See, once you give people the resources, then you also got to tell them it doesn't happen to them. Too many people think that they come in and they go hypnotize me and change me, and aw's gon No, that's too easy. You don't deserve that. So you have to earn that from me. You have to go out and kick the shit out of your own problem.

First.

I'll give you the.

Basis to do it, but you've got to actively participate in your own life.

NLP has spread throughout the world since it emerged in Santa Cruz California in the nineteen seventies. Do a quick search for therapists on psychology today and you'll find tons of people with PhDs who include NLP in their list of.

Methods, and some therapy professionals even use NLP without disclosing it, maybe without even realizing it. The inventor of one of the most widely used therapies for trauma, EMDR, was very influenced by NLP.

NLP changed over the decades, but the central promise remains the same. These techniques will give you more power, this Bandler explains is his goal for all his students.

Even though I do do it to them, I won't tell them I did. I won't give them the satisfaction of knowing, because I still want them, above and beyond whatever change they make, to get actively involved in their own life, actively involved in running their own brain.

NLP is all about getting out of your patterns, out of your head, and creating more choice.

The reason they want you to come in and just hypnotize me and make the problem go away is because the reason the problem is there is because it mysteriously has been controlling their life, and the missing piece is their active participation.

Bandler's idea was that with NLP, you can achieve anything you desire, really anything.

You must take as a presupposition that what they have been doing in their life is absurd. If it is not bringing them wealth, ecstasy, and happiness all at the same time, it's got to be pretty absurd.

In the early nineteen nineties, Nancy attended a five day seminar with Bandler in Pennsylvania. So you trained with Richard Bandler. What was he like as a person?

I want to say he was impressive in every way, positive and negative, and his skills were amazing, and at the same time he would devalue them by calling it that shit.

Nancy was paying one thousand dollars to learn that shit, and while she was impressed with the techniques, she found Bandler himself pretty off putting.

Yes, I was a little horrified by him at first.

I was.

I mean, if I'm gonna be honest, you know that I have deep respect for him. I just told you he helps me trem ment. I think he's a genius, but I was a little shocked at how unprofessional he was. He would just show up in like his clothes often looked like he had been sleeping in them for three or four nights before he showed up in them.

This is one of the many things that intrigued me about Bandler. At NLP's height, he was teaching corporate success techniques to executives. But the guy's own life was kind of a mess. I mean, he was kind of an unrepentant recreational drug user, right.

I wasn't aware of his drug use. I was aware of his alcohol use, because he did that quite openly. I didn't see anything like that. I heard about it, but I didn't see it.

Nancy told me this one crazy story about Bandler where it seemed like he could kind of control her mind and manipulate her into doing something she would never normally do.

After training, he would go to the bar and drink a lot with everybody. Didn't seem to get drunk, but he could consume an awful lot of alcohol. It was impressive.

One night, Nancy and some people were having drinks after their NLP seminar, and Bandler was there.

And we were sitting together, and he wanted to go somewhere, and I had watched him drink several several is a thought for me. It's not three or four or five or six, even ten several is more than ten martinis. And he wanted to go someplace. And I had just gotten a brand new car, and he asked me if we could go in my car, and I said yes, and he convinced me to let him drive you. I don't know how he did that.

You let Richard Vandler drive your brand new Volvo ten martinis in.

He didn't seem drunk.

This guy had something he did.

What did he have? I don't know. Well. Also, he was Richard Bandler, and I was an NLP master practition I wanted to be around him after it was all over, I couldn't believe he convinced me to do that.

Damn, Nancy goes hard.

It should be noted Bandler denies the story, but seriously, this is a common Bandler motif. He somehow persuades people to stand by him as he does extremely reckless, scary, dangerous things. How'd this work on Nancy? Well, she thinks it's NLP.

Well do you know anything about NLP anchoring? So, an anchor is a stimulus and a response. They happen normally in life. Like let's say you can be anchored to your your father's angry voice or your mother's angry voice. So if they use that tone, you just stopped as a child, and that's an anchor.

Okay. So Banglor often modulates his voice, That's one part of it.

Yeah, he played with his voice a lot, now that I'm thinking back about him. He did different accs, did different accents, he did different intonation patterns. He was very good at that.

How much more fun could I be having? How much better can it get? And as you keep that voice and lock in your head, your unconscious mind can and will confirm that you will make this a way of life that you can and will enjoy.

As you can hear in his seminar Creating Therapeutic Change, Bandler changes his voice on command.

And as you do so, take a deep breath and begin to feel a good feeling start to spread throughout your body. That's right, start to tingle all around.

Start to see these shifts in tones and accent. He's trying to embed hypnotic commands with his voice.

So there, slowly, as you return back to the waking state, that commitment becomes locked, firm and solid.

In NLP terms, that's called anchoring eight.

And the more your body will feel wonderful.

And as we were talking, Nancy was like, wait a second, that's exactly what happened in the bar.

Oh took me.

He anchored you to his voice. That's what he was doing. When he was doing that, he would get you in a certain state, and then when he would use that voice again, you would go back into that state.

Now, that's just a suggestion you will carry out and follow utterly and completely.

The idea of anchoring is that you trigger an emotional response or behavior in someone with a physical sensation squeezing their wrist or using a sound like a bell or a word said in a certain tone. First, you build a heightened emotional state in your client or target.

In NLP, what they learned is that when you're having an emotional state, it looks like a bell curve, you know, up and around, and when the state is building, you're going up, up, up, up, up up up with an emotional state. At a certain point, the peeks out, meaning that's the full state.

Once they reached full state, that's when you anchor Subscribe now to mine game.

Subscribe now to mine game, Subscribe.

Now to mind games. It's kind of like training a dog. But you're doing it with a person.

And that's allegedly how Bandler convinced Nancy to drive her new car drunk. Isn't she an NLP wizard too?

Though?

How'd she not notice that? Do you think Nancy is particularly susceptible to manipulation?

Well, that's exactly what she says. She told me she has a gullible streak.

See I'm very gullible.

Oh my gosh, but she does really believe she was anchored.

Now I know what he did. I never could figure out what he did. I was anchored to his voice.

If that exists, that's an amazing power and amazingly dangerous.

I ask Nancy about that. Can NLP be used for good or evil? Is it a neutral tool?

You know? When people ask me about that, one of the things that I say is a knife in the hands of a surgeon is an amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer is a weapon. I believe because I've worked with behavior change so much, and even when people want to change sometimes it's hard. I believe that for the most part, you have to have very bad intent to try to figure out ways of

Uh, fear anchors. This is sounding not so neutral. When people are afraid, they're more compliant.

Yeah, and fear was an explicit part of Richard Bandler's therapy. He scared people into fixing themselves.

You know, he did threaten punch me in the face.

That was actually turned out to be a very good intervention. You know, it helped me to have one of the most profound experiences of my life. That's Don McCormick, a retired psych professor who knew Bandler and Santa Cruz during the early days of NLP. He was trying to learn a new technique but kept getting stuck. It was only when Bandler thraned to punch him that suddenly Dawn got it.

Because in some versions of the story, Bandler has a loaded gun with him.

Naturally, and the guy's into it at first. He knows Bandler and his aggressive antics, and he even says, well, I'd have to believe you'd actually use it on me for it to help. So Bandler's like challenge accepted. He tells the therapist, you have no idea how nuts I am. I don't have to kill you, I just have to wound you. Apparently that did the trick. The guy tells Bandler, huh, okay, mission accomplished. I can change that part of my life and Bandler's like, yep, I know, because I would have

I have no idea what to make of this story, Like what the fuck I mean? I honestly also am like did it really happen? But also okay, let's say it did and it supposedly worked.

That's the thing. Even years later, the guy continued to tell reporters that Bandler had helped him. In fact, most of the people I've spoken to have said that when Bandler pulls these kind of hardcore changer I'll kill you sort of cures, He's just getting in there and doing what needs to be done.

He would sometimes use threats to get people to do something or to or sometimes just even losing his temper. So I had to him threatened me before.

But I think what.

Well Richard, out of the goodness of his heart, would have the compassion to hold a gun to the side of a student's head to provide the motivating factor that would allow them to make a change.

Bandler didn't just intimidate students. According to court documents, he also threatened his employees with violence.

Hey, push it to the limits. Man, go for the throat at this point, because this is exactly what's going on in their life. They aren't choosing, and you want it to become a magnanimous choice.

One that's fairly obvious.

Which direction they're going to go in? A positive future or shitty future? What's it going to be?

And Bandler pushed it to the limits in his own life.

Were you around when he got accused of murder?

No? I think it was before that was to talk about it, they used to say, three people went in the room, two came out alive.

Yeah, you heard that right. Richard Bandler stood trial for murder in nineteen eighty seven and was acquitted. Oh interesting, you joined up afterwards? Did you know about that? During his murder trial, including in his own court testimony, the whole world learned that Bandler was a heavy cocaine user and involved with shady characters like Santa Cruz drug dealers. Even after Bandler was found not guilty, the trial became part of his bad boy loose cannon mystique.

Now this is the kind of subtle stuff that I'm trying to get you guys to do. All right, it's none of this sitting around and going and how do you feel about that? You know, are going into a meeting and going, uh.

Well, do you see any good prospects for the future? Fuck that jam them in their head. You know, if I want people work for me to have a positive view of the future, I'm gonna take it and put it on a brick and shove it right.

In their skull so they don't miss it. I sort of the sledgehammer approach to things.

Listening to Richard Bandler his sledgehammer approach to healing. It's what's so provocative about NLP, the grand claims and the seemingly absurdly simple yet weirdly effective techniques, and then there's the whole if you know, you know, aspect of the thing. It was shocking to me that NLP was so unknown

It's that pervasiveness that sent us down this road of trying to figure out where it comes from, in part through the story of one of its central figures, Richard Bandler, brilliant outside the box healer.

They wouldn't give me a license to do therapy because I'm not qualified. I think that's wonderful.

He tries to get you to relive trauma. I try to get people to stop thinking about it so much. My technique's focus on getting people to take control of their mind.

Or Slick Hustler, who sold pseudoscientific life hacks to the US military and inspired hundreds of imitators.

It spread all over the planet. It's everywhere. I'm translated into dozens of languages.

We're deeply skeptical of gurus, but we want to separate what's legit from the jargon and empty promises.

So we're going to interview sales with us.

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually.

Aroused pick up artists.

She looked at me and she said, Mondongo gun numb and I said, that's because you have a message for me. What's your message? And then she leaned over and numb tongue said something about wanting.

To pleasure me.

And NLP's most famous practitioner, Tony Robbins.

Tony Robbins doing all this, he said he's the best NLP guy in the world, which I did, said I wasn't. I challenged him. I said, let's have an ALP off. You give me your worst patient and we'll see who can hale them quicker. I said, I'm happy to do it, and I want every time I did.

All of whom credit NLP as the basis of their success. So do some accused cult leaders or are they innocent victims?

Well? I knew that it was cultish and weird, but I liked it for all of those reasons.

We'll even test NLP on ourselves. I don't know what I expected to get exactly, but what I got were some pretty specific images from my childhood. This is wild and on you, the listener, with your consent.

A whole lot of NLP is pretty shady, but some of it is real. We're going to dig into those parts and the science of hypnosis behind them, And don't worry, we will get to the murder.

Oh and we'll even hear from the man himself, Richard Bambler.

This is what we referred to as a hit job and I find this very fucking offensive.

Wow.

Richard mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me Alice Hines and Zoe Lascas. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Lukpotts, edited by Kate Osborne, Editorial consulting from Adiza Egan, original composition and mixing by Steve Boone, fact checking by Aman Whalen from Kaleidoscope.

Our executive producers are Ozwaloshan Mangesha Tikador, and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norbl and Nikki Etour