Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: argue you are here. That makes this the stuff they
Speaker 3: don't want you to know. Now, we've talked about something
Speaker 3: in the past, friends and neighbors, something called n LP,
Speaker 3: short for neuro linguistic programming. This is a group term
Speaker 3: for a series of technique strategies, experimental models, all built
Speaker 3: to theoretically help you people reach a variety of what
Speaker 3: we'll call improved outcomes. You know, if you have a
Speaker 3: problem speaking in public, maybe NLP can help. It can
Speaker 3: help you quit consuming tobacco. It might, as we're going
Speaker 3: to learn, even help you become a sharpshooter.
Speaker 2: Well, recently we've probably heard about NLP in a different
Speaker 2: context because as the AI boom, we're amongst it right now,
Speaker 2: as it's been growing and generating. We hear natural language
Speaker 2: processing rights to as NLP a lot, which is just
Speaker 2: the way that computers are able to actually use human language, interpret,
Speaker 2: and then basically regurgitate human language.
Speaker 4: They do it so well too.
Speaker 3: And that might be an episode for another day, but
Speaker 3: that's an important distinction there, Matt. The parts of NLP
Speaker 3: that we're talking about neural linguistic programming here. They're huge
Speaker 3: in the self help industry. They're used by some of
Speaker 3: the most famous life coaches, but as well as some
Speaker 3: of the world's most well known celebrities and athletes. They'll
Speaker 3: swear by this, you know what to look for. You
Speaker 3: will begin to recognize these tactics or these practices all
Speaker 3: over the place. But what is NLP exactly? Can you
Speaker 3: really hypnotize yourself into becoming a better person. On the
Speaker 3: flip side, what if you could secretly hypnotize people into
Speaker 3: giving you whatever you want? These are headache questions. Luckily
Speaker 3: we are not exploring these alone. We are thrilled, friends
Speaker 3: and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realists to welcome the journalist, the author,
Speaker 3: the podcaster and creator of the hit new podcast Mind
Speaker 3: Games Zoe List. Guys, Zoe, thank you so much for
Speaker 3: joining us today.
Speaker 5: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Guys.
Speaker 2: Got to tell you, Zoe, we just finished listening to
Speaker 2: all the episodes, I believe nine episodes of mind Games. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there is so much contained within your show that is
Speaker 2: difficult to even know where to start. I was hoping
Speaker 2: maybe we could go back to Santa Cruz, California, the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies, let's say, to a time when therapeutic techniques
Speaker 2: were being developed by college students and just we were
Speaker 2: getting real weird with it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was getting pretty weird. That's a great place
Speaker 5: to start. That's where neurolinguistic programming originated. And as you say,
Speaker 5: it's a super slippery subject. It means a lot of
Speaker 5: different things in different places, in different contacts. So it's
Speaker 5: also where I like to begin to explain it. Basically,
Speaker 5: you have California in the nineteen seventies. Santa Cruz is
Speaker 5: just down the road from Big sur where you've got
Speaker 5: the headquarters of Esslin and the Human Potential Movement. So
Speaker 5: you know, this is a place where people are trying
Speaker 5: really novel approaches to become better versions of themselves, to
Speaker 5: you know, reenact their births, to primarily scream, ideally to well,
Speaker 5: I don't know. The podcast is not about Esslin but.
Speaker 4: Self actualized perhaps.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was trying to avoid that traced out there,
Speaker 5: and he is so laced. I mean even the name
Speaker 5: right is this really odd putting jargony acronym, which, as
Speaker 5: you say now has another meaning that but yeah, it's
Speaker 5: like very alienating in so many ways. But basically, this guy,
Speaker 5: Richard Bandler, is this sort of loose cannon, troubled twenty
Speaker 5: something who's at EC Santa Cruz, specifically at this one
Speaker 5: really experimental college within the university, Krisgi College, where it
Speaker 5: was sort of conceived as this experimental new school where
Speaker 5: students built their own dorms with lumber. When the school opened,
Speaker 5: teachers that cross legged on top of their desks, barefoot
Speaker 5: in blue jeans, talking about communism. You know, this was
Speaker 5: the vibe. So basically I'm here for yeah, I know,
Speaker 5: find me out right. It actually is very beautiful. I've
Speaker 5: been to the campus now and although it's grown a
Speaker 5: lot and changed, it is on this beautiful hill in
Speaker 5: the middle of a redwood forest, so that's sort of
Speaker 5: mist hanging in the branches. There's views of the ocean.
Speaker 5: It's very atmospheric, and so Bandler is this sort of
Speaker 5: troubled guy with a checkered past. We can talk about
Speaker 5: his background a little more because it's fascinating, but he's there,
Speaker 5: and he teams up with a linguistics professor, a young
Speaker 5: professor who's in his thirties named John Grinder, and together
Speaker 5: they basically start running these experimental therapy sessions on students
Speaker 5: on Bandler's peers, and they're bringing in a lot of
Speaker 5: different therapeutic modalities Virginia Setyer's Family Systems therapy. They're bringing
Speaker 5: in gestalt where you basically yell a lot, among other things.
Speaker 5: But you know, there's a lot of LARPing in both
Speaker 5: of these therapy models, like you you know, have other
Speaker 5: people pretend to be your family members, for instance, and
Speaker 5: then you talk to them. Yes, lots of role play,
Speaker 5: so it's very physical. It's you know, amusing at times,
Speaker 5: but people are having these real breakthroughs, and eventually they
Speaker 5: add hypnosis into the mix, and that really is what
Speaker 5: launches NLP into the world, specifically the corporate world and
Speaker 5: some other sectors. But I hope that's a helpful origin
Speaker 5: story and we can dig into any parts of that
Speaker 5: more detail.
Speaker 6: Just for sure, front though, is NLP is not I
Speaker 6: mean it's not the same as run of the mill hypnosis, right,
Speaker 6: and they're related, but there's it's like a plussed.
Speaker 4: Up version of hypnosis.
Speaker 6: I'm kind of interested in your thoughts on the connection
Speaker 6: between those disciplines.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's not really
Speaker 5: a run of the mill hypnosis. It's the thing like
Speaker 5: hypnosis is probably the only form of therapy that you know,
Speaker 5: can be used in these really rigorous, medically backed contexts
Speaker 5: like smoking, cessation, pain relief, et cetera. But also sell
Speaker 5: out stadiums in Las Vegas. I mean we've all seen people,
Speaker 5: you know, quacking like a duck on stage, or you know,
Speaker 5: giant dudes being made to imagine they're delicate ballerinas, all
Speaker 5: of this sort of you know, I think very like
Speaker 5: BDSMI humiliation based stage stage hypnosis. So you know there's
Speaker 5: hip Hiosis has also been used for forensic purposes. I
Speaker 5: mean a bunch of states have outlawed evidence collection from
Speaker 5: witnesses or people who have been put into hypnotic states.
Speaker 5: That's kind of a no, no, frowned upon.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: Amazingly, it took a while, but you know, so it's
Speaker 5: existed in all these places. But yeah, it's you know,
Speaker 5: regarding the relationship between NLP and hypnosis, I would say
Speaker 5: NLP is using hypnosis in various ways among other techniques
Speaker 5: borrowed from these other therapeutic models. So it's one of
Speaker 5: many things in this grab bag, but it's probably the
Speaker 5: most dominant factor within NLP.
Speaker 3: There we go, and so I've got a couple questions
Speaker 3: here to step back. For anybody who is unfamiliar, My
Speaker 3: games is hosted with your collaborator and close friend, Alice Hines,
Speaker 3: and in the in the beginning of this journey, you
Speaker 3: all describe a pretty interesting origin story of your own partnership.
Speaker 3: Could you tell us a little bit about how you
Speaker 3: guys met and then how you became interested in in
Speaker 3: LP and bonus points for anyone who doesn't know, could
Speaker 3: you describe an LP.
Speaker 5: Al Science is one of my best friends, and we
Speaker 5: met about ten years ago at a sound meditation in
Speaker 5: New Jersey which involves sleeping over at this house near
Speaker 5: the water and basically getting gongs and rainsticks and chimes
Speaker 5: played over us and a group of other people.
Speaker 3: Sound bad so much a sound bath, it was.
Speaker 5: Like a twelve hour sound bath, so it was pretty transformative.
Speaker 5: Alice came to that event dating someone she's been with
Speaker 5: for five years, and by the end of her astral journeys,
Speaker 5: induced by the experience, she was no longer dating that person,
Speaker 5: at least meant to me. She was still dating him. Yeah,
Speaker 5: she had to fill him in on these new developments.
Speaker 5: But it was there that we met that we found
Speaker 5: out we had a ton in common. We're both journalists,
Speaker 5: were both reporters. I think we're both interested in these
Speaker 5: kind of subcultures and niche aspects of culture that kind
Speaker 5: of fly under the radar but actually really shape how
Speaker 5: we think and what we believe as a society, and
Speaker 5: NLP is definitely one of those things. We became interested
Speaker 5: in hypnosis kind of generally. Alice had stumbled across NLP
Speaker 5: in her reporting on the Twin Flames Universe cult for
Speaker 5: Vanity Fair. She did a great piece for them that
Speaker 5: then became a documentary which I recommend everyone goes and watches.
Speaker 5: But basically she'd encountered NLP and a cult context. I
Speaker 5: encountered it through researching hypnosis and figuring out which aspect
Speaker 5: of it we should dig into. Like I was saying,
Speaker 5: there's a ton of different forms of hypnosis. Well, unsurprisingly,
Speaker 5: we settled on the one that is popular with cults,
Speaker 5: the one whose founder stood trial for murdering a woman
Speaker 5: in the nineteen eighties. That woman happened to be a
Speaker 5: sex worker and his kokiine dealer's girlfriend. And I just
Speaker 5: became fascinated by Richard Bandler, by this guy who has this,
Speaker 5: you know, has this sort of like sordid criminal record,
Speaker 5: but at the same time is selling his wares to
Speaker 5: the US military. NLP was widely used by government spies,
Speaker 5: by army training dudes, So we can get into that.
Speaker 5: But just like what that bizarre Nick felt Worth exploring
Speaker 5: an answer to your third question, can I describe NLP?
Speaker 5: I would describe NLP as a as a rogue form
Speaker 5: of hypnotherapy that took over the world. That's my one
Speaker 5: life to.
Speaker 4: But that's a great place to start, for sure.
Speaker 3: So the ubiquity is part of the fascination for you,
Speaker 3: for sure, Alice, could you tell us now that we
Speaker 3: have that understanding, that's the best definition I've heard rogue hypnotherapy.
Speaker 3: What makes it as a concept so controversial in certain
Speaker 3: academic circles.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's been widely described as a pseudoscience.
Speaker 5: I actually went to this NLP event, the NLP Leadership Summit,
Speaker 5: a few years ago, and all the NLP trainers there
Speaker 5: were sort of all in a twitter about how the
Speaker 5: first line about NLP on Wikipedia is that NLP is
Speaker 5: the pseudoscience. I mean, this is just the way people
Speaker 5: generally perceive it. That has a lot to do with
Speaker 5: the founders antipathy for traditional therapy, even though they were
Speaker 5: borrowing from some of you know, these pioneering psychiatrists like Setier,
Speaker 5: like Milton Erics and the hypnotherapists, they had a lot
Speaker 5: of contempt for most therapists. They thought it was a
Speaker 5: total ripoff that you would spend years and years and
Speaker 5: years on your therapist couch getting to the bottom of
Speaker 5: your problems when you could just fix them instantly. That
Speaker 5: was what they were trying to do, and that basically
Speaker 5: became the selling point for NLP. You know, you don't
Speaker 5: have to spend thousands of dollars, you can just show
Speaker 5: up to an NLP session and boom your curt So
Speaker 5: they never were interested in putting NLP through a rigorous,
Speaker 5: peer reviewed scientific process. Some people have tried to do that,
Speaker 5: but Bandler and grind are the two founders. They were
Speaker 5: always pretty contemptuous of that, and they were just like,
Speaker 5: onto the next thing. If it works, it works, you know,
Speaker 5: and jokes on you nerds if you want to dig
Speaker 5: into the like nitty gritty details and do these lame experiments.
Speaker 3: There's something so thoroughly American too about that idea of
Speaker 3: no deferred gratitude, get me my results instantly. I have
Speaker 3: to wonder if LP could have reached the success it
Speaker 3: has if it had or the abiquity it has if
Speaker 3: it had not been started in the US.
Speaker 5: That's a great question. I mean, it is very popular
Speaker 5: in countries around the world. Now. At that event I
Speaker 5: mentioned there were NLP trainers from Egypt, from Brazil.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: It has a huge presence in the UK and Germany,
Speaker 5: also Australia. You know it really its reach is very
Speaker 5: wide at this point. But no, I think it is
Speaker 5: a uniquely American story. And really that transformation from those
Speaker 5: early days in Santa Cruz when all these movements, not
Speaker 5: just NLP but like Esselyn, etc. Know, it was all
Speaker 5: about like you know, realizing your full potential for good.
Speaker 5: You know, if we can make ourselves better individuals, we
Speaker 5: can avoid another Vietnam War by you know, by extension,
Speaker 5: we can you know, reform the ways we relate to
Speaker 5: each other by figuring out how we relate to ourselves,
Speaker 5: et cetera. And then you go from there to NLP
Speaker 5: at least becoming marketed as this kind of self optimization
Speaker 5: technique and like a lot of self help therapies that
Speaker 5: are presented as being very you know, outside the box
Speaker 5: and novel, like they really just sort of reinforce status
Speaker 5: quo values like be a better version of yourself so
Speaker 5: you can like work more, crank out more capital, you know,
Speaker 5: sleep better so you can be more productive. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's it's sort of beenal like ultimately what it what
Speaker 5: it ended up hearing.
Speaker 6: World and speaking of American stories, I mean, like the
Speaker 6: idea of being a life coach or a self help guru.
Speaker 6: That's sort of a way of getting around licensure and
Speaker 6: like actually going to school for psychology and studying rigorous
Speaker 6: being able to kind of brand yourself. Is this thing,
Speaker 6: this influencer type without actually being you know, a professional.
Speaker 4: Is that part of it? Like, is there any licensure involved.
Speaker 4: Is there a governing body? Ben?
Speaker 6: That was your question I saw in the outline. It
Speaker 6: just really occurred to me. I think it's a great
Speaker 6: time to ask.
Speaker 5: Yes. That is one hundred percent part of NLP, and
Speaker 5: it's part of what contributes to the sort of sketchy
Speaker 5: reputation you were asking about earlier. Ben, I mean the
Speaker 5: fact that you can just show up to an NLP
Speaker 5: seminar for I mean, they used to be thirty days.
Speaker 5: Now people are banging them out in a weekend. But
Speaker 5: you can go to one of these events. You can
Speaker 5: shell out a few hundred or a few thousand dollars,
Speaker 5: get trained by someone, and then go train other people
Speaker 5: or practice on clients who may come to you with
Speaker 5: say real trauma or with lifelong phobias, and hope that
Speaker 5: you can fix them. And you are not subject to
Speaker 5: the same oversight whatsoever. As a practicing psychologist. You know,
Speaker 5: you can't have your NLP license revoked in the same way,
Speaker 5: because there's no license. The first place you get a
Speaker 5: certificate when you get trained practice suits. Yeah, you're right,
Speaker 5: I sued my pseudo scientific n LP.
Speaker 4: Sorry warm up, Yeah, I know.
Speaker 5: I'm amazed. I stuck the landing on that one. Yeah,
Speaker 5: this is this is really haunted NLP from its early
Speaker 5: days too, right because at us at EC, Santa Cruz,
Speaker 5: Bandler and Grinda were really tight with Gregory Bateson, who
Speaker 5: you know, was and is the sort of extremely influential polymath.
Speaker 5: He is regarded as one of the founders of cybernetics,
Speaker 5: but you know, was also the sort of dude who
Speaker 5: can like give you a lecture on like the structure
Speaker 5: of beetle wings or whatever.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 5: He also studied trance. He was married to Margaret Meade,
Speaker 5: the anthropologist, and so you know, he connected them to
Speaker 5: Milton Erickson. He also connected them to NAPAs State Hospital,
Speaker 5: which is a psychiatric hospital not far from you see,
Speaker 5: Santa Cruz and Bandler and Grinder and their other like
Speaker 5: undergrad collaborators got cart Blanche to just experiment on the
Speaker 5: people there, people with schizophrenia, with absolutely no oversight. I mean,
Speaker 5: these are people who came up with this like rogue
Speaker 5: form of hypnotherapy and then it was like, yeah, why
Speaker 5: why do you see if it helps these inmates or
Speaker 5: sorry they're patients, but I mean, honestly give them the
Speaker 5: state of psychiatric hospitals back then.
Speaker 3: There you know, not consensual patients.
Speaker 5: Yeah, very vulnerable people who presumably were not in a
Speaker 5: state to you know, elect to receive this kind of
Speaker 5: therapy that didn't even have a name at that point.
Speaker 2: Can we talk more about Grinder. I feel like he
Speaker 2: has a weird past that you get into in the podcast,
Speaker 2: but he feels even more mysterious to me and like
Speaker 2: there's something there because he has quite a bit of
Speaker 2: a military like Cold War strategy kind of past. Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's tons of lore surrounding both of
Speaker 5: the founders of NLP, and it can be really hard
Speaker 5: to sort of nail down what's real in both of
Speaker 5: their cases. We did ultimately interview Bandler. Grinder wasn't interested
Speaker 5: in getting an interview, but I can tell you what
Speaker 5: said about him. He is said to have been some
Speaker 5: sort of spy. He was definitely in the army. He
Speaker 5: was definitely an officer serving in Europe during the Cold War.
Speaker 5: He traveled widely and was apparently very gifted with languages
Speaker 5: and not just learning sort of the words, grammar, vocabulary,
Speaker 5: but also kind of the physical way in which people
Speaker 5: in different cultures communicate, and so that kind of you
Speaker 5: know again to the role playing that was sort of
Speaker 5: a big part of NLP. Like one one NLP concept
Speaker 5: essentially is that if you change your physiology, which means,
Speaker 5: you know, say, stand up straight instead of slouching over,
Speaker 5: you'll feel more confident. You'll be that confident person that
Speaker 5: you're trying to, you know, think your way into being well.
Speaker 5: You also need to physically embody that confidence. So you know,
Speaker 5: some of this is pretty intuitive, but Grinder's background helped
Speaker 5: him come to those realizations.
Speaker 6: Yeah, can I just say the moment you said that,
Speaker 6: I sat up more straight because I wanted to self.
Speaker 5: That I know, I know I was likestus school. That
Speaker 5: stuff they don't.
Speaker 7: Want to know you guys to know reminds me of
Speaker 7: your water conversation early on in one of the episodes,
Speaker 7: right about what Illicit's thirst.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was one of our cheeky demos. Badler and
Speaker 5: Grinder would do these things called double inductions, where they
Speaker 5: would each whisper in someone's ear at the same time
Speaker 5: saying different things, and the idea is one person This
Speaker 5: is a hypnotic technique. It's still used in other context,
Speaker 5: but basically one person is saying actually relevant stuff like
Speaker 5: they're embedding commands like you'll feel this, you'll do blah.
Speaker 5: The other person is just speaking about whatever. I mean.
Speaker 5: It could be utter nonsense. Indeed it should be. Basically,
Speaker 5: you're trying to distract the conscious mind, and so the
Speaker 5: brain basically can't process all this stuff, and then that
Speaker 5: makes it more susceptible to the messaging. So, Alison, I
Speaker 5: tried a little version of that. You'll have to let
Speaker 5: us know if it worked on you. But it was
Speaker 5: basically us just playing around and trying to figure out
Speaker 5: if we could pull the stuff off.
Speaker 3: I thought, what I think we all really loved about
Speaker 3: that in particular is when we start off with in
Speaker 3: LP as a concept. It's such a broad group term
Speaker 3: for various tactics and models that it's incredibly helpful to
Speaker 3: hear some of the nuts and bolts specific So the
Speaker 3: double induction is one technique. What are some other things
Speaker 3: people might encounter that could be called in LP techniques
Speaker 3: that they might not consciously clock.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let me think of some quick ones. So if
Speaker 5: you've ever heard, for instance, that people's eyes dart to
Speaker 5: the left when they're lying, or that they'll look a
Speaker 5: certain way when they're lying when they're telling the truth.
Speaker 5: That's essentially derived from NLP. NLP is a whole system
Speaker 5: of eye movements that correspond to what people are thinking, supposedly,
Speaker 5: So if you glance up, you're in the visual field
Speaker 5: and you're either imagining things that don't exist visually or
Speaker 5: you're recalling images that you have seen before. And then
Speaker 5: there's sort of directions for sounds, for feelings, and all
Speaker 5: of this is supposed to help you basically read people's
Speaker 5: minds and help you sort of guide or guide them
Speaker 5: in a therapeutic context or manipulate them. If you're trying
Speaker 5: to sell them a used car, you know, if you
Speaker 5: see them glancing up into this supposed visual realm, you
Speaker 5: might emphasize the visual aspects of the car you're trying
Speaker 5: to sell. So you might say, like, you know, imagine
Speaker 5: yourself on the open road and the wind is you know,
Speaker 5: in your hair when the convertible. But if someone's glancing
Speaker 5: down into the physical sensation directions, then you might be like, yeah,
Speaker 5: those those plush leather seats.
Speaker 4: Wow, I'm a.
Speaker 5: New York you actually like what do you say about cars?
Speaker 5: But you know, roar of the engine for hearing anyway,
Speaker 5: So you use these tells to appeal to people's thoughts,
Speaker 5: and I think that that premise has trickled down to
Speaker 5: us in various ways undernaths that are not an LP.
Speaker 6: Well, now that's interesting because there is a there is
Speaker 6: a you know, a method of trauma processing and therapy
Speaker 6: called e m D that focuses on some of the
Speaker 6: same left to right eye movement. It seems like almost
Speaker 6: the flip side of what you're talking about, But that
Speaker 6: does appear to be evidence based and something that is
Speaker 6: you know, there's a lot of stock put into Yes.
Speaker 5: This is what's crazy. So one of the big revelations
Speaker 5: of our podcast is that the founder of EMDR was
Speaker 5: an NLP practitioner. She was working for John Grinder as
Speaker 5: an office assistant for many years. She practiced NLP. She
Speaker 5: wrote about NLP, She was a card carrying NLPR. She
Speaker 5: sort of coincidence pulled away from NLP after Bandler's high
Speaker 5: profile murder trial, for which she was acquitted. I should mention,
Speaker 5: but it was a big, sordid tabloid story that focused
Speaker 5: a lot of negative attention on NLP. So after that
Speaker 5: she distanced herself from NLP and came up with this
Speaker 5: kind of cockmany story about how she figured out EMDR.
Speaker 5: She said, right, this is Francine Shapiro, and she said
Speaker 5: that while she was trying to think of the dissertation
Speaker 5: subject in psychology, she was walking through the park and
Speaker 5: thinking about something upsetting, and she just so happened to
Speaker 5: notice that her eyes were moving very rapidly, and those
Speaker 5: movements helped her feel. Okay, Like people have pointed out, like,
Speaker 5: there's no way you would clock the fact that your
Speaker 5: eyes are moving as quickly as they would need to.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I think her interest in eye movements clearly
Speaker 5: derived from NLP, and then unlike van Ler and Grinder,
Speaker 5: the founders of LP, she was interested in those clinical
Speaker 5: trials putting it to the scientific test. And that's why
Speaker 5: today NLP is regarded as a pseudoscience and EMDR is
Speaker 5: a widely practiced trauma therapy that's endorsed by the World
Speaker 5: Health Organization and the US military.
Speaker 2: But the same eye movement thing, you know, which is
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways just kind of this lore
Speaker 2: that was you know, created, and it's not really seems
Speaker 2: to be real and doesn't seem to be real to me,
Speaker 2: at least we see massive YouTube channels and other creators
Speaker 2: out there who use this as ways to analyze tape,
Speaker 2: let's say of a court case or something. You've likely
Speaker 2: seen some of this where there are huge true crime
Speaker 2: creators that just study eye movement and they will tell
Speaker 2: you whether or not someone's lying and what they're actually
Speaker 2: thinking about. It's just fascinating to me that something could
Speaker 2: be conjured, you know, in the nineteen seventies as this
Speaker 2: one thing NLP. Then it goes into a therapeutic technique
Speaker 2: later on, but it can also then spawn YouTube careers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't even made that connection, but
Speaker 5: that is a very concrete use case of NLP ideas
Speaker 5: trickling out, And that is what's fascinating about NLP. Like
Speaker 5: whether it's because that sort of damning press coverage during
Speaker 5: the murder trial, or because it's the pseudoscience NLP often
Speaker 5: is used under other names. We find it in a
Speaker 5: lot of places, whether it's those eye movement divinations or
Speaker 5: just you know, corporate HR speak. You know, a lot
Speaker 5: of the language baked into that is derived from NLP.
Speaker 5: I interviewed a former Army intelligence officer. This didn't make
Speaker 5: it into the podcast, but he moved from the government
Speaker 5: espionage context to corporate espionage. He founded a business and
Speaker 5: he would use NLP techniques all the time, and he
Speaker 5: would train people. He'd sort of had a consultancy, and
Speaker 5: he would train Allied government spies. You know, after the
Speaker 5: fall of the Iron Curtain, a lot of newly Allied
Speaker 5: members need to sort of be brought up to speed
Speaker 5: on US intelligence gathering techniques, so they didn't go around
Speaker 5: doing the Soviet model, and so he was teaching them NLP.
Speaker 5: He said this, but he didn't call it NLP because
Speaker 5: the terms are just so alienating. So instead he would
Speaker 5: just be like, Okay, here's the thing that I found
Speaker 5: really helpful, without using the like very technical jargon like
Speaker 5: this is a six step reframing, or this is a
Speaker 5: switch technique, which is just like, maybe.
Speaker 3: You don't need to know, Zoe, I'm here in a
Speaker 3: bonus episode because that's an interview i'd love to check out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh sweet, Well that's that's good feedback. I should
Speaker 5: talk to my producers.
Speaker 3: Well, one thing we do need to go back to
Speaker 3: or I definitely want us to go back to this.
Speaker 3: This is something that our audience has already clocked that
Speaker 3: we should explore in depth to the degree that you're comfortable.
Speaker 3: We mentioned a murder, right, We talked about Santa Cruz
Speaker 3: in the nineteen eighties. Something tragic occurred there. That is
Speaker 3: a I mean, it's a podcast version of a page turner.
Speaker 3: It's one of the episodes I listened to repeatedly. Could
Speaker 3: you take us back to nineteen eighty six and tell
Speaker 3: us how this homicide relates to the larger than life
Speaker 3: figures of NLP.
Speaker 5: Absolutely so. In the nineteen eighties, Bandler was having a
Speaker 5: tough time. He basically broke up from his co founder,
Speaker 5: John Grinder. He also so divorced from his first wife,
Speaker 5: Leslie Cameron Bandler, who was a NLP practitioner, And he
Speaker 5: was in Santa Cruz and falling in with this kind
Speaker 5: of increasingly seedy underbelly of the city. He found a
Speaker 5: close friend and this guy, James Marino, who had a
Speaker 5: two page rap sheet of mostly petty crimes, but was
Speaker 5: a prolific cocaine dealer, shall we say, and user, and
Speaker 5: they sort of bonded over their mutual love of that
Speaker 5: drug and of NLP. James Marino was into NLP. So
Speaker 5: with Marino with this woman, Karen Christiansen, who was Marino's
Speaker 5: on again, off again much younger girlfriend, also Bandler's bookkeeper.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's all a little hazy and a sex worker
Speaker 5: in Santa Cruz. He spends a lot of time with
Speaker 5: these people, and things take a turn when Marino grows
Speaker 5: increasingly paranoid about Karan Christensen. He thinks that she arranged
Speaker 5: for him to be beaten up at a Halloween party,
Speaker 5: for instance, and Bandler. It depends whose testimony you believe.
Speaker 5: Bandler and Marino had very different versions of these events,
Speaker 5: may or may not have come to suspect Korean of
Speaker 5: being involved in that violin attack on his friend. In
Speaker 5: early November, Karean Christianensen was killed in her living room.
Speaker 5: She was found by police on the floor with a
Speaker 5: single gunshot wound too the face. She had been doing
Speaker 5: cocaine at the time. She was killed in the early
Speaker 5: hours of the night with two men, Richard Bandler and
Speaker 5: James Morino. They were the only two guys present and
Speaker 5: they pointed the finger at each other. And this story
Speaker 5: basically took off not only in California, but attracted national
Speaker 5: media attention as well. The military contacts that Bandlor had
Speaker 5: worked with earlier in the nineteen eighties, rushed to his defense.
Speaker 5: They got him out on bail. This was important, so
Speaker 5: he didn't show up to you know, the subsequent court
Speaker 5: proceedings in a prison jumpsuit. We interviewed his defense, We
Speaker 5: interviewed people who who spoke to him at the time,
Speaker 5: who spoke to Marino at the time, and we get
Speaker 5: into all the kind of horrifically sorted details in that
Speaker 5: episode of the podcast. But hopefully that's a that's an
Speaker 5: okay overview. Sorry I couldn't.
Speaker 3: That's been phenomenal, That's phenomenal. We also we also in
Speaker 3: the follow up. One thing that will surprise a lot
Speaker 3: of people, do check out that episode in particular, folks
Speaker 3: check out the whole show, but for the for the
Speaker 3: deeper blow by blow. That's a canot miss and one
Speaker 3: of the most surprising things. Can't speak for everybody, but
Speaker 3: at least for me, was not just the acquittal, but
Speaker 3: the fact that later Bandler is able to arguably leverage
Speaker 3: this and become like the NLP guide to see post trial.
Speaker 3: Is that true?
Speaker 5: Yeah, one hundred percent. I actually interviewed someone in the
Speaker 5: NLP world who told me that it might have even
Speaker 5: burnished Bandler's reputation. He said, I'm paraphrasing. He said thing
Speaker 5: like yeah, if you're you know, from Sweden and you've
Speaker 5: never met an accused murder before, you know, this was
Speaker 5: a hugely seductive opportunity to study with Richard Bandler. Bandler
Speaker 5: had sort of cultivated a bit of a loose cannon
Speaker 5: mystique throughout his life prior to the murder. He actually
Speaker 5: recently bragged to a journalist for The Guardian about deliberately
Speaker 5: electrocuting his stepfather when he was a little kid. He
Speaker 5: said that his stepfather was abusive and to get back
Speaker 5: at him, he basically rigged a wire to a doormat
Speaker 5: to a door knob during an electrical storm. But basically
Speaker 5: when the guy opened the door, he got electrocuted and
Speaker 5: went to the hospital. And Badler was ten years old
Speaker 5: when he supposedly did this. But anyway, it's a kind
Speaker 5: of fascinating thing to tell the mainstream media after you've
Speaker 5: you know, stood trial for murder. So he clearly hasn't
Speaker 5: shied away from some of these more controversial stories about
Speaker 5: himself despite that.
Speaker 3: And here will pause for a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 3: We'll be back with more mind games.
Speaker 4: All Right, we're back. Let's hop right into it with Zoe.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about another seductive opportunity in the
Speaker 2: form of Ross Jeffries.
Speaker 5: Okay, so.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, this is a bit of there's a bit
Speaker 2: of a walk. So last night my partner and I
Speaker 2: watched Inside the Manosphere. This is the new Louis Thureau
Speaker 2: thing that you can find here on Netflix, actually, and
Speaker 2: it reminded me of his other film, My Scientology movie,
Speaker 2: which is one of the first times guys, I think
Speaker 2: I think some of the first interactions we had with
Speaker 2: NLP is when we were talking about Scientology. Some of
Speaker 2: the technology of NLP being used within that church in
Speaker 2: at least some ways.
Speaker 6: Are those techniques I want to use during some of
Speaker 6: the whatever the confession setting, that's the word.
Speaker 3: Some of this stuff is taught in like multiple organizations
Speaker 3: similar to Scientologist.
Speaker 2: Yes, it just took me down that whole pathway, which
Speaker 2: then got me to this video or this this clip
Speaker 2: that you play within the show of Louis throw with
Speaker 2: Ross Jeffries at like a cafe or something. Can you
Speaker 2: I know this is silly because I don't think we
Speaker 2: can play it in this medium. But if you can
Speaker 2: just explain, like just briefly, say what happened there between
Speaker 2: that interaction and then what this guy, Ross Jeffries did
Speaker 2: with NLP that was different.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure, I love that sequence. This was a
Speaker 5: clip from Louis Thuru's former show on the BBC Weird Weekends,
Speaker 5: and he did an episode around hypnosis. He looked at
Speaker 5: a few different applications of hypnosis, but the one we
Speaker 5: focused on for our purposes was his work with notorious
Speaker 5: pickup artist Ross Jeffries, the so called dog father of
Speaker 5: the up artistry movement. And for your younger listeners, pick
Speaker 5: up artistry was kind of a big deal in the
Speaker 5: nineties and early two thousands. And there's this book The
Speaker 5: Game by Neil Strauss, this journalist who embedded with Jeffreys
Speaker 5: and a bunch of other pickup artists to learn how
Speaker 5: to get women into bed using these kind of scripted
Speaker 5: verbal patterns and other techniques. So Ross Jeffries basically learn
Speaker 5: everything he knew from Richard Bandler. He went to go
Speaker 5: train with him sometime after the murder trial, sometime around
Speaker 5: the murder trial, and he's a little shaky on the
Speaker 5: dates but basically he learned how to hypnotically persuade women
Speaker 5: to sleep with him. That's his claim, And Alison, I
Speaker 5: have a lot of theories on pickup artistry and could
Speaker 5: unload with some of those. There's a lot to say
Speaker 5: about it. But I went to San Diego to interview
Speaker 5: Ross Jeffries. That's where he lives. And in the clip,
Speaker 5: Ross goes to this cafe and Marina del Rey he
Speaker 5: was living in Los Angeles at the time, and he
Speaker 5: demonstrates how pickup artists can supposedly talk anyonoman to sleeping
Speaker 5: with them, or at least going on a day with them,
Speaker 5: and it's pretty crazy to watch. I recommend everyone check
Speaker 5: this out. He goes up to this woman. She's sitting
Speaker 5: at a cafe with a friend. She's smoking a cigarette,
Speaker 5: she's having a coffee. She has this kind of nineties
Speaker 5: Meg Ryan style haircut, and he sits at the table
Speaker 5: next to her. He doesn't come on super strong, like
Speaker 5: hey baby, you know. He sits down next to her
Speaker 5: and he starts asking her to imagine these fantasy vacation spots.
Speaker 5: He sort of gets her to start conjuring these positive images,
Speaker 5: and as she does that, he begins running his finger
Speaker 5: up her arm slowly, and then he does that later.
Speaker 5: And this is an NLP hypnotic technique, calling yes exactly,
Speaker 5: And so you can anchor an idea or an emotion
Speaker 5: to a touch, a physical a physical sensation, a sound.
Speaker 5: It's basically Pavlovs dogs for humans. You know, like instead
Speaker 5: of hearing the balance salivating, this woman supposed to feel
Speaker 5: that touch and then go back to thinking about, you know,
Speaker 5: these extremely relaxing, sensuous vacation spots. So that's what happens
Speaker 5: in that clip. I went to go talk to Ross
Speaker 5: Jeffries in San Diego and he actually I was sort
Speaker 5: of braced for this interview. You know, you've been leaving
Speaker 5: me a lot of voice memos telling me he was
Speaker 5: going to covertly hypnotize me during the interview. That didn't
Speaker 5: exactly have it, Yeah, it was. It was really weird.
Speaker 5: He also showed up to the interview wearing this like
Speaker 5: purple jacket over a purple shirt. It was like, which
Speaker 5: felt to me like a kind of hypnosis deep cut
Speaker 5: because various purple yeah, yeah, yeah. And he actually ended
Speaker 5: up being one of I think are more lucid sources
Speaker 5: sort of breaking down some of these hypnotic techniques and
Speaker 5: how they're supposed to work. So that's one of my
Speaker 5: favorite episodes. I love the pick up Artist.
Speaker 3: Let's stay on hypnosis here for a moment, Zoe, How
Speaker 3: would you define hypnosis and why is it considered so
Speaker 3: controversial in some circles? Is it because of the sometimes
Speaker 3: extravagant claims that hypnotists make, or is it because of
Speaker 3: misconceptions like what is the what is hypnosis to you?
Speaker 6: And is it itself considered pseudoscience by some you know,
Speaker 6: in the psychological community and the psychology community.
Speaker 5: Well, I would shy away from defining hypnosis only because
Speaker 5: medical experts have failed out this task. I mean, that's
Speaker 5: one of the fascinating things about hypnosis, Like even among
Speaker 5: hypnotherapists who use it, who study it, who research it,
Speaker 5: there's no single agreed upon definition of what it means
Speaker 5: to slip into a hypnotic trance, to be hypnotized. And
Speaker 5: that's partly because different things can happen when you've been hypnotized.
Speaker 5: You know, if you're prompted to visualize something, you know
Speaker 5: a different part of your brain is going to light
Speaker 5: up an EKG. Then you know, if you're imagining pain
Speaker 5: or the absence of pain, and so it's just really
Speaker 5: tricky to study because you know, brains are weird and
Speaker 5: the mind doesn't really But I wouldn't say it's regarded
Speaker 5: as a pseudoscience by anyone in the medical community. I
Speaker 5: mean there's tons of research surrounding its impact on subjective
Speaker 5: experiences of pain, for instance. So yeah, yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 5: you know, it doesn't work for everyone to the same degree.
Speaker 5: I mean, some people aren't going to get a lot
Speaker 5: out of it, but for the people who are hypnotizable, yeah,
Speaker 5: it can show pretty dramatic reductions in pain relief in
Speaker 5: situations like childbirth. It's also use for anxiety. You know,
Speaker 5: there are people who have, you know, phobias of going
Speaker 5: to the dentists. So there's actually this whole like pro
Speaker 5: hypnosis dentistry community. But yeah, hypnosis is totally bonkers. Like
Speaker 5: I read this one experiment where I'm not sure if
Speaker 5: you've ever come across this other experiment. This might be
Speaker 5: too clunky to explain, but basically it's where like the
Speaker 5: words of different colors are printed in colors. Yes course, yeah, right, Okay,
Speaker 5: you know this there's a name for us about escaping
Speaker 5: me right now. But so it's like, you know, you'll
Speaker 5: see the word blue but it's printed in red. You'll
Speaker 5: see the word green but it's printed yellow. Hypnosis and
Speaker 5: it's supposed to be really hard to read like it,
Speaker 5: and it reveals, you know, how our brains like kind
Speaker 5: of go on fritz trying to do that. Well, they
Speaker 5: had hypnotized people do it, and they just had no
Speaker 5: stumbling blocks whatsoever. They're just like, oh, red, green, blue, yellow, bluh.
Speaker 3: You know it was fine, Zoe. I cheated just a bit.
Speaker 3: I believe we're talking about the stroop effect.
Speaker 5: There we go.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's the why, because it was right on the
Speaker 3: tip of my tongue. It does you know the stroop
Speaker 3: waffle effect right now, I'm going to remember.
Speaker 5: It as the waffle effect green.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I do want to share one story that'll that is
Speaker 3: a bit of a walk, but I promise it'll it'll
Speaker 3: lead us to something, uh that is mission critical for
Speaker 3: a lot of our audience.
Speaker 5: I had, well, Francine Shapiro discovered EMDR on a walk.
Speaker 5: So who knows where this is going to be the
Speaker 5: next week trauma therapy.
Speaker 3: Everybody, close your eyes, look up, roll your eyes up
Speaker 3: and put yourself in a walking situation by a beach.
Speaker 3: So here we go. I had, I had done a
Speaker 3: lot of research previously on different allegations of things like
Speaker 3: the Satanic panic, right, or child abuse rings or UFO
Speaker 3: UAP encounters and abductions. You alluded to this just a
Speaker 3: moment ago, and I don't want us to lose it.
Speaker 3: What I kept finding over and over again is that
Speaker 3: for many years a form of hypnosis, a genre of
Speaker 3: hypnosis called regression therapy, was treated often as concrete evidence
Speaker 3: in these experiences or these stories. Could you tell us
Speaker 3: your take on this memory regression, memory recovery stuff and
Speaker 3: why it is considered so controversial.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one hundred. I actually have a pretty personal stake
Speaker 5: in this as someone who tried it for my personal lives.
Speaker 5: So yeah, hypnosis from memory recovery is one of, if
Speaker 5: not the most controversial application of hypnosis. You mentioned the
Speaker 5: Satanic panic. Basically, this one woman who was working with
Speaker 5: her psychiatrist who later became her husband, through hundreds of
Speaker 5: hypnotic sessions, recovered memories of being abused by a Satanic
Speaker 5: cult as a young child, and despite the fact that
Speaker 5: her siblings her family were like, what are you talking
Speaker 5: about that did not happen. She quote unquote recovered memories
Speaker 5: of watching them, you know, sacrifice babies and turn them
Speaker 5: into you know, ash smoothies. I mean it was really
Speaker 5: specific and disgusting, and she you know, described murders, She
Speaker 5: described all these really serious crimes. And so instead of
Speaker 5: making people you know, shy away from this, it sparked
Speaker 5: this huge boom where suddenly there were tons of copycat imitators,
Speaker 5: people you know, recovering memories of satanic abuse through hypnosis.
Speaker 5: So people went to jail, you know, people were ostracized
Speaker 5: from their communities, you know, school teachers who were accused
Speaker 5: of you know, kidnapping children. It was really awful and
Speaker 5: gave hypnosis a bad name in these contacts, and it
Speaker 5: also inspired a bunch of research.
Speaker 6: That is all discussed in the incredible podcast The Devil
Speaker 6: you Know with Sarah Marshall, who we also had on
Speaker 6: the podcast not terribly long ago from the CBC.
Speaker 4: So if you're interested in digging more.
Speaker 6: Into that, check out that podcast and maybe go back
Speaker 6: and listen to the interview.
Speaker 4: Just talking to folks out there in Netflix Land.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're talking to me too. I missed that episode,
Speaker 5: but great one. Yes, Elizabeth Loftus is this oneble talk
Speaker 5: about that memory researcher. Okay, so she comes up in
Speaker 5: that All right, great, well I really want to watch
Speaker 5: it now. I'm kind of flow key obsessed with her.
Speaker 5: But basically she studies memory and she she actually had
Speaker 5: an experience, despite being a memory researcher, where some family
Speaker 5: members were a family member accident implanted this false memory
Speaker 5: in her. Her mother drowned when she was a young child,
Speaker 5: and I think her aunt found the body floating in
Speaker 5: a swimming pool. But she was talking to this relative
Speaker 5: as an adult and the relative was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: you know when you found your mom's body, and she
Speaker 5: was like, what, No, that was my own. They're like, no, no,
Speaker 5: I think you found her. And then she found over
Speaker 5: the subsequent days that she was sort of having these images,
Speaker 5: you know, the hair swirling in the swimming pool. And
Speaker 5: eventually the relative got in touch and was like, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm so sorry, I was mistaken, and she's like, geez, Louise,
Speaker 5: you know, this Israeli potent. So she did a lot
Speaker 5: of the pioneering research on deliberately installing fake memories in
Speaker 5: experimental participants, and it's really not that hard to do,
Speaker 5: is what she demonstrated.
Speaker 6: So I kind of part of the plot of Shutter Island,
Speaker 6: the Scorsese movie. There's a big plot line and that
Speaker 6: that's very similar to what you just described.
Speaker 4: No spoilers, but that's it.
Speaker 3: And you said you have a personal steak in this
Speaker 3: to the degree that you were come for bo Zoe,
Speaker 3: would you mind sharing a little bit about your first
Speaker 3: hand experience with the technic?
Speaker 5: I should be comfortable sharing it because it's sort of
Speaker 5: episode three in the podcast. Right before that episode aired,
Speaker 5: I was like, what the fuck was I thinking? Like this?
Speaker 5: So this is so personal. I never do things this
Speaker 5: personal in the context of my reporting. But yes, I
Speaker 5: made myself a guinea pig for the sake of mind
Speaker 5: games and worked with a hypnotherapist on recovering memories of
Speaker 5: my father, who died when I was six of lung cancer,
Speaker 5: and throughout my whole life. It's kind of amazing, Like
Speaker 5: when I go to a cocktail party I don't know
Speaker 5: and it comes up that my dad's dead, people are
Speaker 5: always like, oh, wow, how old are you among six?
Speaker 5: And they say, wow, that's really young. How much do
Speaker 5: you remember about him, and like, oh, I get why
Speaker 5: they're you know, I get why they're curious, but it's like, oh,
Speaker 5: you kind of just asked like the like staking my
Speaker 5: hard question, you know, at this cocktail party. I don't
Speaker 5: really know is the answer. I mean, I've definitely had
Speaker 5: experiences where I think I have a memory of him,
Speaker 5: like the quality of the light in the room, it
Speaker 5: feels like a memory. And then all stumble upon a
Speaker 5: photo in a childhood photo album and be like, oh,
Speaker 5: I clearly constructed a memory around this photo that I
Speaker 5: have seen before.
Speaker 4: Shoot.
Speaker 5: So you know, memory is really slippery. It's really hard
Speaker 5: to know what's real and what's not it to begin with,
Speaker 5: you know, even when you haven't you attempted hypnotic memory recovery.
Speaker 5: But I went into work with this therapist with the
Speaker 5: understanding that any memories we quote unquote recovered may or
Speaker 5: may not be capital are real. Like, there's just no
Speaker 5: way of knowing. And so she really Covey added that
Speaker 5: she was like, look, I think this could still be productive.
Speaker 5: That could still be a way to cultivate some sort
Speaker 5: of posthumous intimacy with your dad. You didn't get to
Speaker 5: spend a lot of time with him, and I was like, great,
Speaker 5: let's give it a shot. I went into it extremely skeptically.
Speaker 5: You know, it's not like I hadn't tried to think
Speaker 5: about my dead dad before. But you know, if you
Speaker 5: just sort of sit down in your chair, let's come
Speaker 5: up with some memories. You know, they're not forthcoming, or
Speaker 5: at least they haven't been for me over the course
Speaker 5: of my entire life. And then I tried this with
Speaker 5: her and it was extremely moving. It was really profound
Speaker 5: and surprising. Like I'm a pretty visual person, so I
Speaker 5: expected like images, even just fleeting moments, and instead what
Speaker 5: I got were these physical sensations, like the heat of
Speaker 5: his touch and like his voice, you know, not coming
Speaker 5: from over there, but like the way a voice vibrates
Speaker 5: through someone's chest when you are being held by them.
Speaker 5: I mean, it was just intense. I was like crying.
Speaker 5: I couldn't even like talk to my partner about it
Speaker 5: for weeks or anyone. I was just like really processing.
Speaker 5: So we did a few sessions and yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: if you're curious, if anyone listening is curious about trying
Speaker 5: this kind of work, I do personally recommend it, but
Speaker 5: just really going into it with that understanding that like
Speaker 5: you can't know if they're real or not, which didn't
Speaker 5: bother me because I don't know whether I'm real. Memories
Speaker 5: are real, so whatever wasn't in.
Speaker 4: That context, it makes so much sense.
Speaker 6: How could you can gain insight from it but then
Speaker 6: using it in court proceedings for example, or you know,
Speaker 6: as a way of you know, accusing someone of a crime.
Speaker 4: That makes a whole lot less sense. And that's sort
Speaker 4: of the point.
Speaker 5: Right, yes, exactly, And like, you know, what I did
Speaker 5: get were these like lovely sense memories but pretty nonspecific,
Speaker 5: like being hell, you know, maybe like you know, I
Speaker 5: kind of remembered the setting, but I wouldn't be able
Speaker 5: to say, like, on July fifth, my dad he'll be
Speaker 5: you know, like this holds up and yeah, and you know,
Speaker 5: like my hypnotist was also pretty careful to check whether
Speaker 5: I was going looking for trauma, because she was. I
Speaker 5: don't think she would have worked with me if that
Speaker 5: had been the case, but it was like no, no,
Speaker 5: no trauma. Aside from the dad dying part.
Speaker 3: CAT appreciate the caveat as well that that your therapist
Speaker 3: proposed and was very clear with that at the beginning,
Speaker 3: So it sounds like what we're saying here is Zoe,
Speaker 3: is that even though we cannot one hundred percent verify
Speaker 3: whether a memory is quote unquote real or created, it
Speaker 3: still lends some some sort of helpful outcome, right, some
Speaker 3: sort of breakthrough. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's an hundred percent fair to say.
Speaker 2: Hypnosis is so striking to me because of it the
Speaker 2: intensity of one on one focused attention, which I feel
Speaker 2: like is one of the major keys to a hypnosis
Speaker 2: session or being taken under hypnosis. There is a human
Speaker 2: being with you, generally, and they are talking to you,
Speaker 2: They are making eye contact with you, they are talking
Speaker 2: and very you know, the patterns that you've described in
Speaker 2: the show. I feel like that is such the key
Speaker 2: to it. When we're we walk around most of the
Speaker 2: time with our phones in our faces, you know, unable
Speaker 2: to pay real, true attention to many of the things
Speaker 2: happening around us. And I wonder how often those hypnosis
Speaker 2: techniques can be weaponized against us and we would be
Speaker 2: wholly unaware, think very easily.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you've ever watched TV like that, has
Speaker 5: al underd person appened to you. But I mean the
Speaker 5: thing is you don't have to make eye contact with
Speaker 5: someone to hypnotize them. You don't have to be in
Speaker 5: the same room with them. Caz, my hypnotist, was in
Speaker 5: London and I you know, we met through zoom. There
Speaker 5: are also crazy stories about people just listening to hypnotic
Speaker 5: tapes and having pretty behavior mind altering stories like I'm
Speaker 5: not sure if you like dug into the God what
Speaker 5: were they called the Bunny the Bunny sex tapes? Like
Speaker 5: they oh there, oh yeah, you guys know about this,
Speaker 5: Like right, so these people were sort of inducted into
Speaker 5: this one man's sexual orbit. He had them listen to
Speaker 5: these hypnotic tapes and they were, you know, willing to
Speaker 5: do it. They were kind of into kinky stuff, but
Speaker 5: they did not anticipate it basically completely transforming them and
Speaker 5: being hypnotically forced into doing all the stuff. So yeah,
Speaker 5: they were just listening to audio. So yes, it is
Speaker 5: easy to abuse.
Speaker 3: And you, you and your co host have a thankfully
Speaker 3: not that similar and experience as the Buddy tapes, but
Speaker 3: you have you have an experience where you receive you
Speaker 3: all receive hypnotic tapes. I think in the lead up
Speaker 3: to a birth, a pregnancy, and listening through to those
Speaker 3: tapes about I guess addressing concerns right which anybody would
Speaker 3: have carrying a child. Could you talk a little bit
Speaker 3: about that experience, because it just hit me. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: another ten ten textbook example of listening to hypnotic cues
Speaker 3: over and over again.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, neither of us smoke. If we did, we
Speaker 5: would definitely have tried it for smoking cessation. But Alice
Speaker 5: was pregnant when we started making the podcast, and so
Speaker 5: she bravely volunteered herself to try hypnobirthing to deal not
Speaker 5: only with you know, pain during childbirth, but with with
Speaker 5: anxiety leading up to it because you know, like a
Speaker 5: lot of people, she was understandably freaked out about the
Speaker 5: kind of violent experience that is childbirth. So what's crazy
Speaker 5: about her time exploring this is that she did it
Speaker 5: with Nancy Salsman. Nancy Salzman is the co founder of
Speaker 5: the most notorious sex cult of this century NEXIM, and
Speaker 5: what very few people know about Nancy is that she
Speaker 5: was a hypnotist and an NLP practitioner before she founded
Speaker 5: that organization. So we dig into her backstory on the
Speaker 5: podcast and how hypnotic and NLP techniques found their way
Speaker 5: into NEXM and were used against members, perhaps even against
Speaker 5: Nancy herself. But Nancy made a hypno berthing tape for Alice.
Speaker 5: It was I think maybe five or ten minutes long,
Speaker 5: and Alice listened to it repeatedly over the course of
Speaker 5: her pregnancy. She did find it helpful. She didn't end
Speaker 5: up using it during the birth itself because she ended
Speaker 5: up going in for a scheduled see section for medical reasons,
Speaker 5: so there was no pain to control hypnotically or otherwise.
Speaker 2: I see, Well, let's pause right here here from our sponsors,
Speaker 2: and then we'll be right back to create some more
Speaker 2: therapeutic change.
Speaker 3: We've returned, we're out of our trans state and backa zooey.
Speaker 3: What are the questions that we have to ask when
Speaker 3: we're on a journey on a show like this is
Speaker 3: what surprised you and your co host the most in
Speaker 3: your discovery so far.
Speaker 5: I think discovering that NLP isn't total hogwash was pretty
Speaker 5: surprising for both of us. I mean we went into
Speaker 5: it pretty skeptically. I mean, see for sentence on Wikipedia
Speaker 5: this is a pseudoscience, and you know, we're just kind
Speaker 5: of like what, you know, what is this thing. It
Speaker 5: seems to attract really nefarious people, you know, people who
Speaker 5: want to pull one over on unsuspecting victims, like what
Speaker 5: could possibly be redemptive here? And as we began experimenting
Speaker 5: with it, we actually found some of the techniques really
Speaker 5: productive in our own lives, and just I think there
Speaker 5: are aspects of NLP that both of us will continue using.
Speaker 5: And as I did with the reporting, you know, I
Speaker 5: was the one to interview a lot of people who
Speaker 5: were involved in the early days of NLP, and so
Speaker 5: many of them have hearts of gold and are just
Speaker 5: lovely people and who really believe this is, you know,
Speaker 5: the most powerful and potent technology, as many of them
Speaker 5: referred to it, for improving the human condition, for helping
Speaker 5: people become all that they can be, and overcoming these
Speaker 5: hurdles that are very difficult to address in other ways.
Speaker 5: And they just want to spread the good word, you know.
Speaker 5: And I was kind of touched by their earnestness, which
Speaker 5: sort of counterbalance some of the shadier applications of NLP.
Speaker 4: So take away don't throw the baby out with the bath. One.
Speaker 5: I don't throw the maybe out with the bath will hutter,
Speaker 5: but definitely do your homework on the baby, make sure
Speaker 5: that baby is right for you.
Speaker 3: Because and maybe don't automatically drink the bath water because
Speaker 3: someone tells you it's good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I regret.
Speaker 5: Throw out the bath water. Yeah we're gonna let it
Speaker 5: die or go down a drain, and I guess yeah there.
Speaker 5: I would just advise anyone who's curious to try NLP
Speaker 5: to maybe read some books before you sign up for
Speaker 5: a really expensive seminar. You might not need a guru
Speaker 5: to benefit from NLP. We certainly learn techniques on our
Speaker 5: own and have gotten, as I said, a lot out
Speaker 5: of them. So maybe maybe you know, do your homework
Speaker 5: and know that not all NLP practitioners are created equally,
Speaker 5: because like we were talking about earlier, Noel asked the
Speaker 5: question about oversight. I mean, there's just no quality control.
Speaker 5: Anyone can say they're an NLP practitioner if they coughed
Speaker 5: up the cash or aster an LP practitioner, which meets
Speaker 5: you coughed up even more gosh, and you know, spend
Speaker 5: somewhat more time doing it.
Speaker 3: But like you know, or you just see confidently just
Speaker 3: say yeah, I'm an LP qualified person with my just
Speaker 3: out at my posture nice.
Speaker 2: Exactly after you though, there's something you mentioned right towards
Speaker 2: the end of the show where you're talking about oh
Speaker 2: gosh and the Tony Robbins of it all and the
Speaker 2: self help versions of this, where you're where NLP is
Speaker 2: being used for sales, and you know you're taking these
Speaker 2: classes by gurus. Where in that time, I believe it's
Speaker 2: in the late seventies early nineteen eighties, you describe it
Speaker 2: as a time of inflation in the United States, stagnant wages,
Speaker 2: job losses, cuts to social welfare, extreme competition in the workforce,
Speaker 2: a new social Darwinism that's arising in that time. And
Speaker 2: I do wonder if we're not inside currently of another
Speaker 2: one of those times, or entering into one of those,
Speaker 2: you know, as things occur around us in society. I
Speaker 2: do wonder if we should be on the lookout for
Speaker 2: new versions of something like this that would come our
Speaker 2: way that we might try and defend ourselves against, Like
Speaker 2: don't fall prey to someone who's trying to sell us
Speaker 2: this kind of guruism.
Speaker 5: I think you're spot on. I think the entire self
Speaker 5: help movement in the United States was born out of
Speaker 5: these conditions you just described. The fact that, you know,
Speaker 5: people were competing with one another as their jobs got
Speaker 5: sent overseas. I mean suddenly you had to have an
Speaker 5: edge to survive in the workplace, to get ahead, and
Speaker 5: that really transformed workplace culture. And I think, yeah, as
Speaker 5: we see what happens with AI, I mean, I think
Speaker 5: it would be naive to think that's not going to
Speaker 5: radically change the labor market, what work looks like in
Speaker 5: the United States, and a lot of people are forecasting
Speaker 5: widespread unemployment, and should that happen, there are definitely going
Speaker 5: to be people who say they have the answer, who
Speaker 5: say they can help you, you know, outshine your competitors,
Speaker 5: or you know, you can train yourself not to sleep
Speaker 5: so you can just do more. I mean, yeah, it
Speaker 5: could take a lot of different forms, but I think
Speaker 5: you're righty, the.
Speaker 4: End times are a real opportunity period, you.
Speaker 6: Know, for sure, Just booming, take five seconds to just
Speaker 6: talk about the AI connection, because Matt mentioned it at
Speaker 6: the top, about how the term is being more broadly
Speaker 6: applied to some of that language learning model type stuff,
Speaker 6: and I don't think we touched on it again, I'm
Speaker 6: just I'm curious personally.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, that's just kind of a coincidence that
Speaker 5: they happen to these two very different things happen to
Speaker 5: have the exact same acronym. I mean, it's certainly one
Speaker 5: of the reasons why NLP neuro linguistic programming has become
Speaker 5: difficult to research, because you start NLB and you get
Speaker 5: a whole lot of AI stuff, which is over my
Speaker 5: head for the most part. But yeah, I mean, there
Speaker 5: are there are a certainly people working in the tech
Speaker 5: space who use NLP, and you know, startup culture surely
Speaker 5: incorporates aspects of that kind of NLP we were reporting on.
Speaker 5: But there's always been this kind of uneasy connection between
Speaker 5: NLP and Silicon Valley. Like Richard Bandler and John Grinder
Speaker 5: were early distributors of Apple computers that didn't mean a
Speaker 5: whole hell of a lot in the nineteen seventies. You
Speaker 5: basically just had to buy more than one or maybe
Speaker 5: it was four something. These are the garage days, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: these are garage days, and they but you know, nonetheless,
Speaker 5: they they were attracted to this new technology, they bought it,
Speaker 5: and I think it's so interesting that you know, they
Speaker 5: were they were drawn to Apple because NLP is not
Speaker 5: so different in the sense that the central promise of
Speaker 5: NLP is that your brain is a computer. You've just
Speaker 5: never got the user manual, and they promised to take
Speaker 5: this really complicated, chaotic thing called the mind or the
Speaker 5: self and make it legible, make it easy to hack.
Speaker 5: And Apple computers correct me if I'm wrong. They're not
Speaker 5: inherently so much better than IBM computers or any other
Speaker 5: kind of computers, but they are way easier to use
Speaker 5: if you are not a tech savvy person. So they
Speaker 5: kind of nail the intuitive design features that make them
Speaker 5: so popular.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 5: NLP appeals to a similar ethos, like, let's just simplify
Speaker 5: its streamline and let's give you the consumer the rings brilliant.
Speaker 3: Oh so well done. That connection. That absolutely nails it.
Speaker 3: We've got just a couple more follow up questions. There's
Speaker 3: so much more we want to get to, folks. Please
Speaker 3: do check out mind Games available now wherever you find
Speaker 3: your favorite shows. Early on in the show, you all
Speaker 3: have a quotation that really stood out to me and
Speaker 3: I kept revisiting it. It is quote, all communication is
Speaker 3: a form of manipulation. And I'm sure a lot of
Speaker 3: people have already asked you to unpack what we mean
Speaker 3: by that brilliant statement. But before we do that, here's
Speaker 3: what this means me think of And this is one
Speaker 3: of our last questions, Zoe, have you used n LP
Speaker 3: techniques on us during this interview?
Speaker 5: I wish I could say I deployed some masterful hypnotic strategy,
Speaker 5: but no, you guys are are fun to talk to,
Speaker 5: so it wasn't necessary. I reserve the right to hypnotize
Speaker 5: you if you.
Speaker 4: Mis behave, and I'm open to it.
Speaker 2: You know, did you notice the collection of blues and
Speaker 2: reds and our screens? All of us.
Speaker 5: Believe the same like purple growth liminal.
Speaker 3: We got a great deal on blue lights, is what
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 5: They're all really into plants like and ask monsterra just
Speaker 5: off screen.
Speaker 2: I brought drums, but I didn't have a knife, so
Speaker 2: I brought a hatchet. The drummer with the knives the episode.
Speaker 4: This is the only way we get window.
Speaker 3: What do we hope our audience takes way from mind games?
Speaker 3: Like after people listen through the show, what are some
Speaker 3: of the big learning opportunities there?
Speaker 4: For me?
Speaker 5: I think some of the main takeaways from the show
Speaker 5: are to be a little suspicious of the sort of
Speaker 5: guruism that has pervaded so many aspects of our society.
Speaker 5: You know, we look at Richard Bandler and his influence,
Speaker 5: but you can see this in all sorts of places,
Speaker 5: the promise of the quick fix, and the promise of
Speaker 5: techniques that purport to give you more agency and control
Speaker 5: over your own life, when in fact you may end
Speaker 5: up just spending more money surrendering your agency to someone
Speaker 5: else's ideas. I mean, there's this great George Garland that
Speaker 5: where he's riffing on self help. This is from the
Speaker 5: eighties or nineties, so he was really watching this industry
Speaker 5: boom around him, and he says something like, if you
Speaker 5: read a self help book, it's not self help, it's
Speaker 5: help you ask someone else for help. Like and anyway,
Speaker 5: I love that bit, and I do think it just
Speaker 5: kind of neatly encapsulates the dependency that's baked into a
Speaker 5: lot of these purported self help technologies, Like you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's a way of making people feel better sometimes
Speaker 5: about giving over the reins. I think it can also
Speaker 5: be productive to think about that dynamic in terms of
Speaker 5: like do we even want control over our own lives?
Speaker 5: I mean, we sort of tend to claim, like, yes,
Speaker 5: give me more agency. I just want more agency. Agency
Speaker 5: is such a buzzword. But do most people really want
Speaker 5: agency or I mean, or is it just this sort
Speaker 5: of thing where we think we want it and then
Speaker 5: we kind of realize it's actually easier to just get
Speaker 5: through life if someone else is kind of telling us
Speaker 5: what to do, you know, what to eat, how to
Speaker 5: work out, how to you know whatever, make ourselves better
Speaker 5: and like better for what cause? So these are sort
Speaker 5: of the questions we tried to trojan Horse into the podcast.
Speaker 4: For Sometimes the agey comes from choosing who to listen to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, definitely, And it's a product. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: just these people are selling something exactly. I mean, also,
Speaker 5: maybe you know, be on guard for mena cafes who
Speaker 5: creepily stroke the ladies.
Speaker 2: We often talk on this show about there being the
Speaker 2: smallest truth at the center of the craziest conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: You might hear and that that truth, when you hear
Speaker 2: it spoken or you see it written somewhere, it might
Speaker 2: resonate with you. And then there's all this other, all
Speaker 2: these other details they get glommed on to that one
Speaker 2: truth that then becomes this big conspiracy, whether it's you know,
Speaker 2: everything from reptilian overlords, you know, controlling the world, to
Speaker 2: flat Earth to all these crazy theories that we've talked
Speaker 2: about on this show. At the heart of it, there's
Speaker 2: something about this feeling of not being in control that
Speaker 2: is so human to you know, to it on and
Speaker 2: on and on. But there is one thing that Richard
Speaker 2: Bamler says when you're when I think, is it you
Speaker 2: or Alice.
Speaker 4: That talks to him?
Speaker 5: A goes really well.
Speaker 2: And when Alice is talking, we'll talk about that. But
Speaker 2: when Alice is talking to him, he says, if you
Speaker 2: change the way you think, it changes how you feel
Speaker 2: and therefore changes what you're capable of doing and not doing.
Speaker 2: And that kind of tiny little nugget, you know, at
Speaker 2: the heart of some of the NLP practices really does
Speaker 2: resonate with me and and it probably resonates with a
Speaker 2: lot of people.
Speaker 4: The power of positive thinking, right, I mean, to a degree.
Speaker 2: But that kind of thing allows you to build all
Speaker 2: this other junk around it that then, you know, becomes
Speaker 2: the vocabulary and becomes the techniques and the reason why
Speaker 2: you need this new book that has all the updated
Speaker 2: stuff in it to me at least.
Speaker 6: But the nugget is something that any of us could
Speaker 6: have probably figured out on our own.
Speaker 4: Is that what you're saying, Matt's.
Speaker 3: Part of it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 3: And this goes to you know, this goes back to Zoe,
Speaker 3: your powerful point about agency and what people want to
Speaker 3: think they want versus what sort of satiates them in
Speaker 3: their experience and their existence. This is a lot to
Speaker 3: ponder and we can't thank you enough, along with your
Speaker 3: co host Alice, for making this phenomenal show. We're not
Speaker 3: blowing rainbows, guys. This is worth checking out, Zoe. For
Speaker 3: anybody who wants to learn more of your work outside
Speaker 3: of mind Games, where can they find you?
Speaker 5: That's so nice of you to ask? They can check
Speaker 5: out Zoe Lascaus dot com. It's just my first name,
Speaker 5: hard to spell, last name dot com. That's where I
Speaker 5: tend to plunk all my journalism. I write about art
Speaker 5: and science in various ways. I just filed a story
Speaker 5: for The Science Times about these endangered snails off the
Speaker 5: coast of Mexico, for instance, and this indigenous community that
Speaker 5: extracts purple dye from them. So you know, my interests range.
Speaker 5: It might be meteorites one day, snails the next. It
Speaker 5: was certainly NLP for a while, and that I think
Speaker 5: will continue to preoccupy me. So yeah, I keep an
Speaker 5: eye out for bonus episodes, and yeah, check out mind
Speaker 5: Games wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Nice. Also check out Paleo Art Visions of the Prehistoric Past.
Speaker 3: I believe a new edition just published last year.
Speaker 5: That's right, Yeah, thanks for the plug. Yeah, So this
Speaker 5: was my first book. It's about how humans have imagined
Speaker 5: the prehistoric world. So basically, if you were a scientist
Speaker 5: or a scientific artist in the nineteenth century and very
Speaker 5: little was known about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, you
Speaker 5: might get handed a tooth and a femur and someone
Speaker 5: would say, what did this animal look like? And of
Speaker 5: course the results were wildly speculative, imaginative. They drew a
Speaker 5: lot from the tradition of drawing dragons and other monsters,
Speaker 5: and so this is a book about how that tradition
Speaker 5: evolved over time, from around the eighteen thirties to around
Speaker 5: the nineteen nineties. I was published by Tasha and yeah,
Speaker 5: there's a nice new edition.
Speaker 4: We love toash.
Speaker 3: Nomenal, We love Tasha, and thank you again. Zoe. Again,
Speaker 3: mind Games is out wherever you find your favorite shows,
Speaker 3: and there you have it, folks, what a wild ride. Again,
Speaker 3: we are not being hyperbolic. This show Mind Games really
Speaker 3: blew our collective minds so much so that before we
Speaker 3: did this intro, guys, I had to walk out and
Speaker 3: get some mayor. I had to take off my jacket.
Speaker 3: Now I'm just in a short sleeve shirt because it
Speaker 3: got so hot.
Speaker 4: E see was the opposite for me.
Speaker 6: It chilled me to my very core, and I had
Speaker 6: to put on a sweater, which I then subsequently removed
Speaker 6: because I didn't want to break the illusion that I
Speaker 6: was here from earlier.
Speaker 4: You went and done and Ben, so I fully support your.
Speaker 2: Move there, and I kept my clothes exactly the same.
Speaker 6: Matt actually has a continuity person there just to make
Speaker 6: sure all the full they take my rods, you know, metahuh.
Speaker 2: She's a very good to us, Yes, yeah, very loyal and.
Speaker 3: A point dog American and on the point of continuity,
Speaker 3: you know, I feel like this was such an amazing
Speaker 3: compliment to our earlier episodes on things like inn LP
Speaker 3: on Nexium. It's related to so many things that we
Speaker 3: have talked about in the past, including weird experiments by
Speaker 3: Uncle Sam. So we would love to hear your thoughts. Folks,
Speaker 3: have you experimented with hypnotism? Have you ever hypnotized someone
Speaker 3: or felt that someone has hypnotized you? What's your take
Speaker 3: on in LP? We would love to hear your thoughts
Speaker 3: and we can't wait for you to join us. You
Speaker 3: can find us on the lines. You can call us
Speaker 3: on a phone. You can always send us an email.
Speaker 4: Are you hypnotized right now?
Speaker 6: You can reach out to us at the handle conspiracy
Speaker 6: stuff or conspiracy stuff show on your social media platform
Speaker 6: of choice.
Speaker 4: And there's another way to contact us if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 2: Yes, you can call us. It's an opportunity to use
Speaker 2: your voice on us. Call one eight three three std WYTK.
Speaker 2: Why don't you go ahead and call that number? See
Speaker 2: if you can hypnotize us all of us. Woo wouldn't
Speaker 2: that be fun?
Speaker 4: Please do it? Please, I'm here for it. I will
Speaker 4: come out and say that I am fully open to this.
Speaker 2: Me too, Ben you in no comment?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 2: You can also send us an email.
Speaker 3: We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
Speaker 3: we receive. Be well aware, yet out of raid sometimes
Speaker 3: the void writes back quick pro quo plarice. Give us
Speaker 3: a random fact and you will receive one in return.
Speaker 3: We can't wait to hang out here in the dark
Speaker 3: conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.