A Human Technology

But what if we didn't get the whole story?

"It has been made to fix." "The moment you look at the whole picture of the case, Colach."

“What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?”

Oh my god, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security. One of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world.

The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS,

and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets.

Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today.

“The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there”

is the only guy that's not there. No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children. I dread to conversation with my son. Listen to on purpose, with Jay Shetty, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guilt season two podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster.

Listen to burden of guilt season two on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Take a deep breath in. And breathe out, your conscious mind is going to go totally away, so that I can speak primarily on your unconscious mind.

From kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, this is episode five of My Games. I'm Zoe Lesgaz, I'm Alice Hines. You don't know how you did it? Yeah, you're going to a little time to start your stay, and you're out of it. In a previous episode, we met Tony Robbins.

The six foot seven self-help tycoon who built his empire on neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. We mentioned his work with Bill Clinton, celebrities ranging from pitbull to Princess Diana, and that he's introduced NLP to millions of everyday people. But there's one client we didn't tell you about. It's probably the biggest organization Tony's ever worked for.

We're talking annual budget just shy of $200 billion dollars big.

Yep, the U.S. Army. In the 1970s, the Army began searching for new technologies to enhance human performance. In 1981, members of the intelligence and security command began to investigate how they might operationalize NLP. It may seem weird that the military would look twice at NLP.

The brainchild of some California lefties. But the Army was, in many ways, the ideal self-help customer, and organizations struggling with insecurity and some serious baggage. Public perception of the military had tanked with the Vietnam War, and officials worried the Soviets were outpacing the U.S.

They were desperate for anything that would give them an edge.

“Didn't they also look into alien communication technologies in this era?”

What? Didn't they look into? They were all over the new agey map. They were doing long-distance viewing, like psychic viewing experiments. That continued until the 90s, by the way. Anyway, the Army intelligence and security command hired Richard Banner, John Grinder, and some of their NLP friends to run a whole bunch of experiments.

We're going to focus on one. One of the trainers in charge was none other than Tony Robbins. His job was to see if he could improve the standard pistol training for new recruits. "You know, I can take any training you do in the entire army. Cut the training time in half and increase the competency."

Tony said that only 70% of new recruits passed the standard 45 caliber pistol training. He also said it took way too long.

“"So, I said, I'll turn that around and cut it in half."”

According to Tony, that's exactly what he did. A hundred percent of the soldiers in the new NLP pistol training passed. It took half the time and the participants used half the usual ammo.

"And the crew had a letter of general saying it's the first breakthrough in pistol shooting since war war won."

"I traveled down to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to meet the guy who ran the pistol experiment with Tony." "Okay, this is a dirty, hairy special. This is the gun he uses in the movie." Why it would small is now in his 80s. He's had a long career as a prominent NLP trainer who's worked with some

“tradition as he clients, including several metal-winning athletes on the U.S. Olympic”

Dive Team, and major companies, like Polaroid and Avery Denison. At the time of the pistol experiment,

why it was interpreting incoming intelligence? Richard Banner was one of his NLP teachers.

"So, I figured we could run a little experiment of our own." "I wanted to see if NLP could make me a sharp shooter in just three days." This would be using NLP to do something that's very easy to measure objectively, marksmanship, either you hit the target or you don't." "Okay, this is a 44 magnum with an eight and three eight-chance barrel smithin' the Weston."

"I met Wyatt at his home where we took a look at his gun collection, which he keeps up stairs in two safes, the size of her fridgerators. From the outside, Wyatt's house looks pretty normal.

“Red bricks, white trim, a two-car garage. But right inside, there is a giant black and gold”

sculpture of an Egyptian god with the head of a bird. Also, many pictures of angels throughout the house, most of which are memorials to his late wife. As we looked at his guns, I found myself a little distracted by the decor." "You mentioned that she had had passed like experience in ancient Egypt, did she also follow her connection to angels?" "She came from the angelic realm." Wyatt handed me a gun and walked me through basic firearms safety. So neither of us ended up in the angelic realm.

"So put your finger on the trigger." "Okay. Please slowly." "So that gives you an idea of what the trigger pressure is going to be." After shooting laser bullets in his kitchen, we graduated to live ammunition and hit the local shooting range. "Okay, then can we throw another box of 9 millimeter?" "Yes." "Thanks." "And could we do one more red dot target?" "Yes." "But let's in hand, we don't our goggles and

went inside." "Are we ready?" "There was a line of booths separated by bulletproof glass, and the floors were littered with brass shells. It was busy, even on a Monday afternoon. It was tough to dial into Wyatt's advice with guns going off constantly and unpredictably. "Red dot and the action." "All right." "That's it, this one." "Rat yourself." "Leen four would slightly." "Okay." "The imbalance, like you were." "And squeeze the trigger." "Okay." "Why kept moving the target back?"

"Okay." "Right in the middle." "Right in the middle?" "Perfect." "Not bad for my first

time out with a pistol." "Hallover teacher Wyatt." "We celebrated with lunch at Red Lobster." "I was feeling pretty hyped about my progress, but I was beginning to wonder." "Okay, my big question is how is this NLP versus just teaching someone how to shoot a gun?" "You read my mind." "I pressed Wyatt to explain what he was doing with me, and how it came out of his work with the army." Wyatt says he developed these methods by modeling expert marksman,

champion shooters from the army marksmanship unit. The premise is that people who are really good at what they do usually can't explain what exactly makes them exceptional. Modeling involves observing and interviewing experts until you decode what they're doing, physically and mentally that gives them an edge. "And we noticed their eyes would flick up and to visual remembered." "Visual remembered?" "In NLP terms, that means the experts' eyes flick up and to the left before they took a shot."

"If you're constructing pictures, your eyes would go up here." "He glanced up." "If you're feeling sensations and feelings, your eyes would go down here." "He looked down and to his left."

NLP is really big on eye movements. You're going to hear more about them later in this episode. Wyatt noticed that right before each marksman pulled the trigger, he pictured perfect sight alignment. The small bits of iron at the end of the barrel framing the bull's eye. So Wyatt and Tony created a kind of mantra routine for the trainees. "Sight align with sight align with trigger squies, trigger squies, bang, recover sight align with sight align

trigger squies, trigger squies, bang, recover." Wyatt taught me this mantra and it did seem to help. "What? Day three of the great cheating experiment. How are you feeling about how it's gone so far?" "I think it's going superbly well. I am surprised at how well you're doing." "Okay, so Zoe's sharp shooter now." Alice, no one is more surprised than this reporter, but yeah, kind of, by day three, I was consistently hitting bull's eyes at 25 yards, which is far. It's

like the length of a tennis court. It's also one of the standard distances the army uses in their pistol training courses. So if I did it with accuracy, I would qualify as an expert." "So the funny thing about this whole experiment is that, okay, yes, on the surface, it's like, "Wow,

NLP worked, but also, like, Loki's always really going to everything." "Excuse me, look at who it's talking."

"Go ahead." "Uh-huh, sure, um, except not blushing, apparently. Alice."

“"Okay, so but here's the thing, this proves absolutely nothing about NLP."”

"No, it doesn't. We have no idea if I would have done any better or worse with another type of training." "And we're not the only ones who struggle to find hard evidence for whether NLP works." In 1984, the Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the various human enhancement technologies it had been pursuing. And a group of researchers in cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and a bunch of other related fields took a hard look at NLP.

And they were pretty damning. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences said about that

marksmanship experiment. The design of the study was experimentally flawed and no valid conclusions can be drawn from it. Basically, the NIS said the Army's pistol experiment was too informal to matter. NLP trainers boasted about the apparent improvement over the standard training, but it was impossible to compare them. Yeah, because the two trainings took place in completely different locations, real experiments are supposed to eliminate variables like this. In this one,

there were a million factors that could have affected shooter performance, like how hot the

room was, how much sleep the recruits had, et cetera, et cetera. So the Army never implemented the

new NLP pistol training methods. And it discontinued its other NLP programs, too. The NIS report probably didn't help. This quotes the kicker for me. Overall, there is little or no empirical evidence today to support either NLP assumptions or NLP effectiveness. So harsh. This is partly why people began to see NLP as a pseudo science. But to be fair, the NIS researchers were only looking at a

“few aspects of NLP that seemed important at the time. They reviewed 20 papers, mostly focused on”

whether you can persuade people using NLP, specifically by clocking their eye movements. That's this idea NLP that your eye movements provide a cheat code to your thoughts. Yeah, so the NIS said that just doesn't work. There's zero correlation between visualizing something and glancing upwards for instance. But eye movements didn't go away. In fact, they inspired one of the most prevalent trauma therapies on the market today. EMDR. I dug into the secret backstory of EMDR and realized

something like NLP is still being used by veterans. I'll be it under a different name. In 2023, a story gripped the UK of looking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppi.

“Lucy Leppi has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the full story?”

The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast

what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was. No voicing of any skepticism are

“doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong.”

Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the words celebrity hate

those words that you make me uncomfortable. But if you think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent

person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to

“me there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo is born. The whole”

identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children. Over my job, I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to on purpose, Jay Shetty, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guilt season two podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random

crime. He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified to remain Hudson as the perpetrator. Germain was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, "Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity." The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to burden of guilt season two on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful

spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is a special agent, Riegel, a special agent, Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Here how they got it on the 6th Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question of his life. And that's the Unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable.

This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition, and mistakes, opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the 6th Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You are looking at a radical new form of psychotherapy.

“The key is the patient's eyes, shifting back and forth in a process that mysteriously”

unlocks the trauma of time's past, trauma like war. This is a 2020 investigation from 1994 into iMovement desensitization therapy, better known as EMDR. It's being practiced by some 7,000 therapists across the country, and the numbers are growing. It's a combination of traditional talk therapy with something that sounds bizarre. Here's how EMDR works. A therapist moves their fingers or an object in front of the patient's eyes. The patient follows

those movements while thinking of an upsetting or traumatic memory. By 2024, over 7 million people

had been successfully treated by more than 100,000 therapists, according to the EMDR Association. The military is one of the biggest proponents of EMDR. It's one of only three "evidence-based treatments" for PTSD endorsed by the Veterans Affairs Health Administration. Here's an official video from the Veterans Administration PTSD portal. If the belief you hold that's attached to your trauma is that I'm worthless, and that's been true for however long you've been surviving this

trauma, as we move through the treatment that belief is going to stop feeling so true, and we're going to bring in a positive belief. EMDR was invented in 1987 by Francine Shapiro, a PhD student

She was thinking about something disturbing, and she noticed her eyes moving in a certain way.

Then, the thought no longer upset her. Here's Shapiro on 2020. If I had seen you that day in the park, what would I have noticed a better eyes? That they were moving very rapidly in a diagonal, just flickering, up and down, very, very rapidly.

“So I thought I stumbled upon some mind process that worked with thought, and that's what”

was so fascinating because I hadn't been doing it deliberately, but I noticed it happening. So she's saying she noticed her own eyes moving when she was thinking about something disturbing, and that eye movements are connected to thought. Sounds familiar. And turns out it's not a coincidence.

Shapiro was an NLP trainer, not something she often promoted about herself.

Her whole story about inventing EMDR at the park struck some people as a little fishy. I've read that eye movements are hard to notice yourself. They're really small and subtle. So what seems likely is that Shapiro was inspired by NLP, and primed to notice eye movements. One of the findings of the Neural and Guistic Programming Research here's Zoe reading an article Shapiro wrote in 1985.

Two years before she created EMDR.

“Is that all people cross culturally with the exception of the Bosch nationality?”

Show how they're thinking by the way their eyes move. Using Neural and Guistic Programming, people are shown how to top into their personal power, change their state of mind and psychology at will, and access a state of total confidence whenever they encounter a situation that they would otherwise find frightening or upsetting. Gerald Rosen is a psychologist and clinical professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.

He's written about EMDR's secret origins. Their theory was pseudo-scientific, and bizarrely in their theory was that their statements about these eye patterns didn't apply to the Bosch people. What kind of crazy thing is this? You mean like people from the best country in space, right?

“Yes, to give you the overview, EMDR is a novel technique that focuses on eye movements.”

A foundation of it was discovered by Shapiro when she was going for a walk in 1987. By good chance she needed a dissertation and it's a great thing for the clinical world. That's a positive overview. The other overview is that Shapiro was a manipulative marketer who took off from NLP and developed her method. Gerald is uniquely sensitive to snake oil. As a young clinical psychologist, he researched

phobia cures and published in peer-reviewed journals. Then he wrote a self-help book, summarizing his research for the general public, and his publisher exaggerated the results on the book jacket to somewhere copies. Gerald's been on a mission to expose gurus who over promised ever since. The paradigm and psychology is that gurus are developing their

treatments. Requently, if not always, it involves elements that are known to be effective

ingredients to intervene and help people. They package it in a way, they have a name and then they have their acronym and then they give workshops and then you can get certified in it and it's just the model that's based on gurus. It attracts charismatic people. We sell the public on this idea that they got to be buying these products to get happy. No one's talking to them sensibly about just the difficult state of the human situation and how we're coping with all these things.

Here are some good tools we know about. Okay, so it does seem like Shapiro may have been interested in eye movements because of NLP, but NLP is generally don't direct eye movements. They observe them. It's the way of reading people's thoughts. Yes, so at the time Shapiro developed EMDR, there was nothing in the NLP literature on using eye movements to treat trauma. It was mostly a diagnostic. So this could have been a real innovation by Shapiro,

even if she were influenced by NLP. Although NLP co-founder John Grinder did claim to have invented EMDR after it got big. Another day, another NLP term for. Yes, so Grinder says Shapiro stole EMDR from him and he wasn't happy that Shapiro, his former office assistant, went and copyrighted it. So juicy. Grinder's account doesn't line up with Shapiro's story, of course. She claims she discovered EMDR during a walk in the park. And Shapiro died in 2019, so we

and they didn't get back to us. Woo, let's back up though. Everything I've read indicates the NLP

“theories of eye movements are bogus, but they are apparently helpful in EMDR? Yeah, I mean,”

it depends on who you ask. Gerald says you don't need the eye movements for EMDR to work. So in the case of EMDR, the element that you think is effective is the exposure therapy, portion of it, right? Like that seems like it could be helping people with trauma. It's a wonderful structure. I give her credit, except for the fact that other people were reporting the structure at the same time. When EMDR came out, exposure therapy, which is revisiting a traumatic

memory repeatedly in detail with a therapist was already a treatment. And so for this reason, Gerald calls EMDR a purple hat therapy. Sorry, purple hat therapy? The therapist is wearing a purple

hat? Fabulous. He is a kind of, it's a metaphor. Basically a purple hat therapy is what happens when

“you repackage an existing treatment that works with some flashy new element that does nothing.”

The basic idea is that the treatment works because of known ingredients, and you add this inert element as a way to promote or market or claim that you have a new and novel treatment. So it's basically a placebo effect? Well, a placebo effect is where you're taking something that has no known active ingredient other than the very general specific impact of suggestion and telling someone it's a treatment. And here you really have a treatment effect. So if I have

someone with a phobia and I tell them how they should practice driving to get over their fear, that isn't placebo. That's the real use of guided exposure to overcome an anxiety problem. Which is the part of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has evidence behind it, right? Absolutely. So it's adding nonsense to an active ingredient. And people could do that who we believe in what they're doing or you could have people who know what's a purple hat, but this is a way to

start a new company. According to Gerald, the purple hat in EMDR is the eye movements, which Shapiro marketed and copyrighted, selling workshops to therapists that today go for several thousand dollars ahead. Zoe, I should disclose that Gerald is in the minority as a skeptic today. Why eye movements work hasn't been proven? But the majority of researchers think they actually are an active ingredient in EMDR treatment. So not a purple hat.

So what should we make of this Alice? I mean, how is it possible that NLP is so scientifically maligned? Well, EMDR has not only stood up to scrutiny, but got in all this mainstream credibility. It's endorsed by the World Health Organization. When, in fact, they share some common elements. So one reason could be that EMDR was a lot more savvy in presenting itself to researchers. EMDR's creator, Francine Shapiro, took great care in her method to whittle it down to a

specific testable theory. And then over a few decades, researchers did the slow-boring,

“but important work of actually testing what about eye movements helps, or doesn't.”

And they're still testing it. Meanwhile, Richard Banner pulled techniques from a bunch of sources called the MNLP and made wild claims about what they could achieve, like curing schizophrenia's in 10 minutes. Yeah, and Banner didn't stop there. He marketed NLP pretty unscrupulously, as a sexy new persuasion technology to men and suits. He was trying to get rich and it worked. Real psychologist noticed. And when those researchers from the National Academy of Science

were trying to study NLP, Richard Banner basically made it impossible. They met with him in July

1986. They'd done their homework. They'd read all of his books to date. But when they interviewed him about things like eye movements that seemed like a really big deal, Banner was just like, "Oh, yeah, those? Forget about 'em." Weird. And the scientists were equally flumixed. Banner told them NLP is continuously changing. He wasn't interested in building up a solid, unchanging theory over time. You can just discard elements whenever you get sick of them.

So if NLP is just a process that can involve literally any technique at any time, it's impossible to test or hold to any scientific standard. Exactly. There aren't any fixed

banners like jokes on unirds, you can find amongst yourself about whether this is scientific or not.

I never said it was. The NES report discredited NLP to a lot of important people.

It was basically the nail in the coffin for NLP gaining mainstream respect. People have been

“calling it a pseudoscience ever since. But it was not the only thing that made people wary of NLP.”

The NES report came out in January 1988. Oh my god, January 1988. Literally as Banner's entire life and business is crumbling. Yeah, his entire future was hanging in the balance at this exact moment.

What did you see when you first saw the case against Richard Banner? A face value was overwhelming

evidence of guilt. You know, it doesn't look good. We got two guys in a room with a woman and you know, the woman's dead and each of the two guys are pointing at each other.

“Richard Banner stands trial for murder. Next time on nine games.”

Mindgames is a kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and

hosted by me, Alice Hines, and Zoe Liscos. It's produced by a writer, Alsop, and Dara Lookpots,

edited by Kate Osborne, editorial consulting from Adiza Egan, original composition and mixing by Steve Bone, fact checking by Amon Wayland. From kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oswo Lotion, Mangesh Hateka Dore, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville, and Nikki E. Torre. Special thanks to why it would small for the shooting lessons, and to Chris and Holly Darling for hosting our team.

I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast "Doubt," the case of Lucy Leppby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't

“get the whole story? What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?”

Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Leppby, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS,

and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guilt season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random

crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to burden of guilt season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.