All In Your Head

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 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. How's it monster?

Listen to burden of guilt season 2 on the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So when you were in California, Zoe, and you were hearing all of these crazy stories of people fixing all of their psychological issues, but also, you know, being crucified, didn't make you want to try this stuff?

Oh, a hundred percent, it not only made me want to try this stuff, but it actually really up the stakes of the stuff I wanted to try. Specifically, the NLP crews experiments with hypnosis.

Back then, they were playing around with it for the first time,

sort of testing the limits of what they could do. So you might find them installing and uninstalling phobias in their friends, and making people hallucinate things that weren't there, or hypnotically deleting things that were. But of all these applications of hypnosis, one stood out to me specifically.

This one guy Terry told me about how the code of developers of NLP, Richard Banner and John Grinder, put him in a trance, and he was able to remember details of a car accident he'd been in years earlier, that he thought he'd blacked out completely. So hypnosis can actually help you recover memories that you've lost. Well, it's really controversial. Hey, let me just press OK. Perfect. All right.

But I personally have a reason for wanting to believe it works. I was trying to think of meaningful applications of NLP and hypnosis to my life, and I certainly have some embarrassing hat that and little flaws. I'd love to vanish, but I was thinking of something a little more substantial than saving my cuticles and nails from my picking and biting. I'm on a call with an English hypnotist who has

“studied NLP. Her name is Kaz Riley, and really what sort of haunted me throughout my life is”

this void left by my father, who died when I was young. My father died of cancer when I was six, and although I love the person I've come to know through stories from my mom and their friends, I don't have that many of my own memories of him. Can I get some back through hypnosis? Just like he must have held me as a child, he must have lifted me up, he must have touched me, you know, just like colors, impressions, moments, the light, things like moon, deepness meant to him.

That's the goal. But I'm wary of even trying this because hypnotic memory recovery is not at all an exact or even remotely proven science. It's apparently alarmingly easy to install memories in someone's mind using hypnosis. People have come out of chances with false memories of alien abduction or even childhood abuse, but the way Kaz openly acknowledged the risks help put me at ease.

of somebody that they lost, especially somebody like a parent when they were younger,

“but we will never know if those memories are real or not.”

With the disclaimer that what we get might not be capital R real, Kaz double use its worth doing. Kaz says she avoids installing fake memories by steering clear of leading questions. It's really opening your mind and seeing what's in there and with regards to doubts and bringing it into a more conscious state, if you like. You're about to hear Kaz hypnotize me. If you're driving, skip ahead to our theme music.

Now I wonder if you knew Zoe that ever since the day that you were born,

you've learned and experienced so many wonderful and amazing things,

and there's a very special, wonderful, amazing and unique part of you. You're in a mind. You're subconscious mind. You're going to have fluxes to all those wonderful things that lay within. Now in a moment, you can hear me countdown from 10, all the way down to zero, and as I count them from 10, all the way down to zero.

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. You can notice that you feel rested, more alert, confident. From kaleidoscope and iHeartpodcasts, this is mine games, episode three. I'm Zoe Laskos. And I'm Alice Heinz. You don't know how you did it. Do you? You're going to a little time to start your stay. And you're out of it. Zoe, re-listening to that clip. What happened to you? Dude, I cannot even listen to that clip

without slipping into a trans. It's like, she's the whistle. I am the dog, Kabum.

“That's so funny because it really does nothing for me. What are you serious?”

Yeah, I feel like I'm just listening to a podcast. Our sexy hip no voice. I mean, she's addressing you. She says your name. That might be part of it. That makes a lot of sense. Actually, it is very personal. For me, when I'm slipping into trans, it feels like my body is getting heavier at the same time that my mind is getting lighter or like parts of my brain or even fluttering. And it's kind of addictive. Because in trans, you can feel or be whatever you want. So your body can

feel really big or really small. I can feel and in my body. It's funny that you describe it that way. That's exactly how this hip no therapist Steven Gilligan explains trance. I can feel that I'm up on the ceiling. I can feel that I have five hands. I can feel like on five years old, I can feel like I'm 10,000 years old. Last episode, Richard Banner was an undergraduate running experimental site groups with linguist professor John Grinder. It was the early seventies and what they were doing

was weird, but it was also part of a larger alternative therapy moment. Everything changed when Banner and Grinder learned about hip nocess. Inlp grew out of my fascination with trans phenomenon, more than anything else because when I saw people doing this stuff, I started going, if it's the same brain doing it. I mean, if your brain will do it, it's just a question of who's driving the bus. That's Banner talking about his interest in hip nocess during one of his seminars

in the 80s. If you've ever seen trance out people on a stage making out with strangers or forgetting their own names, you know hip nocess can unlock weird mental feats. Banner thought, we could harness that. Now, the thing is, is that once you get them into the altered state,

“you will remember to take the person back, take the new learnings they just built,”

the new attitude, and smooth through their personal history by having them go through and feel how much easier it would have been to have this attitude, how much more enjoyable, and see what freedom it would have given them. And then propel themselves out in the future with twice to four

permeate their life. This is Banner in a seminar creating therapeutic change. What he's saying

is that you can use hip nocess to achieve your goals whatever they may be. For Banner and Grinder, that included making a lot of money as the 70s turned into the 80s. And of course, some people wanted to use hip nocess to control others. Although, to what extent that's actually possible is a big source of debate. More on that later, hip nocess is tricky to study scientifically. Even hip no therapist don't have a single official definition, right? That's right. And there's

no one unifying physical cue all people demonstrate when they're in transfer. No one part of the

“brain that lights up. I think hip nocess is a little like lucid dreaming. You're not a zombie,”

you're not not there. You're in a state of possibility. The thing about trans is that most of your beliefs get suspended in the altered state because it's not that you can't do it, it's that you believe you can't do it. In 1974, Banner and Grinder went down to Phoenix Arizona to meet a big deal psychiatrist named Milton Erickson, who probably did more than anyone else to put hip no therapy on the mainstream medical map. I looked into Milton Erickson further.

This guy's a hip nocess icon. As a teenager, he had polio and was paralyzed with limited speech. It made him an astute observer of other people's micro expressions and tones of voice. Eventually, he was able to use self-hypnosis to recover his speech and mobility. Later as a doctor,

“he became a talented and innovative hypnotist. His big idea was to change the rhetoric of trans,”

so commands were disguised as suggestions. Perhaps you noticed the breath naturally slowing. Deepening. Notice how she said the word "Perhaps." That's on purpose. By the way, this tape is from one of my favorite meditation apps where I hear Erickson's technique all the time. Do they call it hypnosis? No, they don't. So my theory is that hypnosis just got rebranded for our generation as mindfulness. Another one of Erickson's favorite techniques was this so-called

hand-shake interrupt. He'd come in and shake your hand, but instead of actually grabbing it, he'd touch your wrist and guide your hand up towards your face. That would definitely confuse me.

Yeah, that was the point. It was basically to open a window into someone's subconscious through

confusion. I should also mention that Erickson pretty much only ever wore purple, which maybe contributed to the general sense of weirdness people got when they met him. They called him the wizard in the desert, and he was kind of magical. He developed his own style of hypnosis. It's called "Permissive Hypnosis." Erickson told his patients deliberately confusing stories, seemingly unrelated to their problems while they were in trance. It's purposefully

hard to follow in order to disorient your rational analytic brain, forcing your unconscious mind

“to participate and supply the details. So that's what Bannerland Grinder picked up from”

Milton Erickson when they met him in Arizona in 1974. Bannerland Grinder came back from that workshop

with a new bag of tricks. At first, they used trance to turbocharge their therapy sessions,

hypnotizing people to get them past particularly stubborn mental blocks. Then, they began using it more as a self-improvement hack. Traveling abroad? Try hypnosis for speedy language learning. Here's Daniel Spitzer again, Bannerland's former drum student. We met him last episode. There was a period of time when Richard and John would use double induction. That's when two people speak into each of your ears to put you in trance. And they would guarantee fluency in one of several

languages within 72 hours and charge a huge sum. So does that work? Can you learn a language in 72 hours if you've got two guys whispering in each ear? You can learn some aspects of communication. Okay, Zoe, should we try a double induction? Yes, let's do it. But not for languages. Let's install something else in our listeners. Don't worry, it's not going to be anything bad, but if you're driving right now or operating heavy machinery, please pause this podcast or skip ahead 30 seconds,

we're going to do a double induction. You're walking through a desert. There's red, red, hot horizon. You haven't seen a tell us to which of the two describe for hundreds of years. So it's on Monday. You're wearing a white zone. And can be feel to the grades of

an issue podcast. The sun pakes on your aura. All right, so we'll tell you what we were going for

“at the end of this episode, but we're going to give it a beat to marinate in your subconscious mind.”

Benler and Grinder grew so confident in their hypnotic abilities. They even began using hypnosis to attempt to cure physical conditions. Like skin reactions to poison oak. One of the ladies came into the seminar, one of these young college students came in, one of the worst cases of poison oak I have ever seen. And so I, you know, I had done this with her before, so I turned around and she went out, you know, and I had to meet me in the middle of

nowhere and put magic dust on her to have it go away and damned if it didn't. Another bold, highly doubtful, bandler story. I know, I was obviously skeptical of these sorts of claims, but I only kept hearing them. Terry McClendon, another early NLP guy I interviewed, swears he was far sighted. Until Richard Benler and John Grinder put him in a trance. Did John and Richard really cure your eyesight? How did that work? It was hypnosis.

Terry noticed his eyes when blurry when he got stressed. So Benler and Grinder performed an age regression. They hypnotically led Terry back to his childhood, to a time before he needed glasses. While he was in the trance, Terry struck upon a memory of watching the lone ranger on TV.

“So I'm watching television. And my mother says, Terry, you should go outside because”

if you want to miss television, you're going to have to wear eyeglasses. Benler and Grinder identified this as the source of Terry's vision problems. So they hypnotically asked the lone ranger to give him a hand. And I was out on the prairie, and I was all alone, this little boy, eight years old, and a lone ranger comes up. A lone ranger, were you helping with my eyesight? Is that sure, partner, I help you?

In the trance, the lone ranger reached into his pocket, gave Terry a silver bullet, and wrote off. So you're sort of identifying your vision problems as a psychosomatic B, maybe a kind of hypnotics ingestion from your mother during childhood. Exactly. So it's a two-part thing. If people are, I can't believe, it's not magic. It's using hypnosis to allow yourself to have better vision by removing these old suggestions. Can I ask you a question? I just, um, so if your mom said not to

watch too much TV, it'll strain your eyes. I mean, lots of mothers say that to their kids.

“Are you, do you seriously think that mothers are giving their children vision problems?”

No, when they say that. They've given them, no, no, but I'm suggesting that parents give their

kids suggestions all the time. I mean, you got to eat your greens, or you never be able to do this.

You're stupid. You won't become a, um, a success. Right. But being stupid is, you know, that seems more about self-perception than being able to see clearly or not. You keep sitting like that. You're not going to be able to use that leg when you get older. Um, I mean, that still seems really different than deteriorating eyesight. If you do, if you get rid of suggestions, it allows you to do the exercises that strengthen your eyes.

Okay. So anyone could correct their vision if they do the exercises? No, they're not going to make my eyesight my right eye any better. I mean, you're wearing glasses. I'm wearing glasses. That started with, um, as you grow older. So this dude was literally wearing glasses when you had this exchange. Literally wearing glasses. And when I pointed that out to him, he said they were for a different issue that his eyesight had deteriorated with age versus his mother,

programming him to be first sighted as a kid. Huh. Terry's explanation was that his eyes only

got blurry when he was stressed. So he's saying that the underlying issue is more of a mental thing than some physical reality, like the shape of his cornea. I guess it's actually not that absurd to say that certain physical issues are rooted in our beliefs. It reminds me of hypnosis for pain relief, which is actually one of the best documented use cases for hypnosis clinically, because pain is both physical and mental. Right. There's lots of studies on this. I was reading

a meta analysis that showed a 42% reduction in pain for people who are especially suggestible to hypnosis. It didn't work as dramatically on everybody, but hypnosis reduced pain in most people. Everything from sickle cell anemia to fibromyalgia to chronic pain and even childbirth. Speaking of which, how to go with the hypno-birthing tape you got from Nancy? Yes, my transcoch,

regularly in my third trimester, and Nancy also gave me another weird tip, pair the tape with

an anchor. So I would basically listen to the tape and then squeeze my wrist. The idea is you can train yourself to conjure a calm emotional state, or really any emotional state on command. Hmm.

“Okay, how that go? Honestly, it worked pretty well, but I didn't end up using it in the hospital.”

Right, because you had a cesareum. Yeah, I had a healthy dose of anesthesia and a scheduled cesareum. So zero pain to relieve through hypnosis or any other mind hack. But the hypnosis exercises have actually proved super useful since. I've been using anchors on my daughter. Wait, how does that even work? She's a few months old. So children are actually some of the most hypnotizable people, Zoey. It's an ability that we

lose touch with during adolescence. Hmm, interesting. So what I do is I use a gentle hypnosis to get her to sleep. I have a series of anchors. I don't squeeze her wrist, but I sing a lullaby and stand in a specific position. And I noticed after a few weeks of doing this,

her eyes started to get small with just the first few bars of the lullaby.

Nancy gave me another weird tip. Basically, she said to call my baby down. I could hold her and match my breathing to hers. Then slow my breathing down and my baby would follow unconsciously. This is something hypnotist do to build rapport with her subjects. Yeah, exactly. But to be honest, I haven't been able to pull it off yet. Interesting that you can do nonverbal or even pre-verbal hypnosis. The only baby hypnosis I've heard of is that children's book, the rabbit who wants to

“fall asleep by a Swedish NLP guy. Yeah, this was a huge book. It was a huge success. I think desperate”

parents have bought it in like 43 countries. How many copies did you get at your baby shower? I have a copy. There we go. So it's like a bedtime story full of hypnotic commands, bolded phrases like sleep now. But parents are supposed to emphasize as they read it. Yeah, that's right. So did Kaz do anything similar with you? I think putting me to sleep would have been small potatoes for Kaz. What she ended up doing was much crazier.

In 2023, a story gripped the UK of looking horror and disbelief. The 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?”

A moment you look at the whole picture in the case of collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it. To ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was? No voicing of any skepticism or 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. 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 word 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 we'll do anything

to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Beau 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 with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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. It tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, "Law, this can't be real.

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,

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,”

wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so what I'm going to do, I know, and as I've already said to you, anyway you want to move, just move, and you're not going to break, it's not a magic spell. This is my first hypnosis session with Caz. You know, we go in and out of hypnosis all the time anyway. I know you did it last night when you went to sleep, for example, so it's a nice easy thing to do. She asked me to hold up my hands and imagine a magnetic field between them. You can begin to feel

the force of that magnetic field pulling those hands closer and closer together. My fingers touched. My eyes closed and Caz led me deeper into the trance.

Somewhere deep inside, always that when you run to return to it.

We began this episode with an experiment to see if I can hypnotically recover memories of my father. We had a few false starts. I got distracted several times by random thoughts, and when music started blasting outside on the street. But every time I emerge from the trance, Caz counted back down. I was not optimistic at this point, but we tried again, and something she said clicked.

She was asking me about Gork the Octopus, a character my dad invented and used to tell me stories about. And when you just think about the stories of Gork the Octopus,

still allow your amazing mind to show you how they used to make you feel, they funny,

sighting, adventurous, happy. I saw a vaguely hideous rocking chair in my childhood bedroom I'd forgotten about, and then I felt myself in a lap. I sort of feel like my knees bent, must like I'm folded up, like maybe in someone's lap. It doesn't feel like totally identifiable, you know, but just that sense of being kind of like being very small and

“like gangly. And then I heard his voice. I don't remember specific words, but I do sort of”

remember the timber of my father's voice, like now that more kind of the like slow deliberation of his voice. With every scenery described, Caz would pluck out a certain sensation and weave it into her next hypnotic prompt to see if it led somewhere new. So I took a nice deep breath going to that feeling of being small and gangly. Allow yourself to go back to to be immersed in that memory where the salad bowl is there, you see the salad bowl, is it something dad said, it's tone,

we did, perhaps as excitement having shared such a lovely thing with you, just notice, or whatever that brings next. But take your time that take all the time you want to be there.

taken by someone else, but the feeling of it turning up close above me. I have this smell this crazy,

because people smell doesn't linger after they die, but I just feels like very immediate and

“visceral disorder from the flood one self with that to breathe him in. But I think like thinking about the”

smell, I said brought me to his closet and my parents bedroom and just like that being a sort of center for that smell. The deepest parts of the trans felt like a vivid dream or an intense trip, this really felt but difficult to put into words. When I was in my parents' closet, for instance, I could also sense this wild topography of cascading hills and undulating platos in shades of blue. It felt like my brain kept zooming in and out, like telescoping towards the horizon and back.

This was at nine in the morning, and I hadn't even had coffee, let alone any other drugs. So, one, two, three, and I turn lighter, four, five, six, brighter, seven, and eight,

“and eyes opening up. That's wonderful, nine, and ten, and just have a bit of movement to watch.”

Well, cast was this wild. Oh, my god, so much going on there, but like the use of like now is so effective, but at the point where even when you start other words with that abstinence, like sound, it had the same effect, but it's just like really bonkers. Again, like, this is such a new fight. Like, whoa, this is no system. It's crazy, you know this already, but I know, but I still have enough to 20 odd years. I'm still like,

wow, this hypnosis stuff is so amazing. Before cast hypnotized me, I'd been expecting

images of my father, but what I got were moods, temperatures, and physical sensations, which kind of tracks. Often this is what comes up, especially when people lost a parent when they're very young, it's about just being in their vicinity and their presence. It's not like, oh, much to forth, we went to the zoo, and we saw full penguin to giraffe, you know, that tends not to be what it is, it tends to be this kind of feeling of just being

with somebody. I'm not sure these memories are real, but I don't really care if they're not.

They're powerful, and we do forget things all the time. Only to find them later.

That sounds really beautiful. Well, ultimately, it was so tremendous as because it was like, things that don't occur to you if you just sit down and, you know, say to yourself, I'm going to remember my dad that today. It's like the feeling of his voice coming through his chest, like the reverberations that you feel when you're pressed against someone. I was crying, and I've had so many years without my dad, that's not like a thing I cry about. I've lived

most of my life without him, but I was absolutely a mess. I was exhausted afterwards as well. How has it been sitting with you in the time since you did that hypnosis? I've been grateful for it. I feel like it was this lovely way to cultivate some sort of posthumous intimacy, and I'm really not that attached to the idea of reality, I guess, because

“I've spent so much of my life having no idea if what I think I remember, remember about him,”

is legit. It's like, well, this was really emotionally affecting and physical, like my skin, like, could feel the temperature of his body. That really tracks with what I've been reading about the science of hypnosis. So they've actually hypnotized people and measured what's going on in their brains. And when you're in a trance and you get a suggestion to feel something, your brain behaves as if you're having the actual experience in real life. If you're not

under hypnosis and you get the same suggestion, a totally different part of your brain works. So it really transports you vividly into these memories. And I think suggest something about the power of our expectations, right? Because hypnosis is kind of capitalizing on this

feels like to be held, for instance, or what pain feels like. So in that state, when you conjure

those things, you're actually reliving them. And it points to the fact that our realities are already often constructs. When we go about our day, we can't actually process all of the different physical stimulation. So our brains make predictions and what hypnosis does is sort of harness those to actually imagine something new. This is a lot like the placebo effect. People who think they're

“getting real drugs often experience the same effects. That may honestly be a big part of why”

NOP works in therapeutic contexts. You go in with an expectation that a rapid quasi-magical transformation is going to occur and it does. It's the power of suggestion. And that can be harness to sell, to sell pretty much anything, as Banner told seminar goers. When I was selling cars, I mean to me, you know, I mean, I literally did a trance at the end of the closing. I mean, it's as deep a trance as the one I do at the end of workshops. You know, and as they signed the

contract, I'd say, "No, just I want you to close your eyes for a minute and feel good about what you've done." Banner didn't actually sell cars. Did he? I looked into it, but I could verify it. But he was selling NLP to people who did sell cars. Right now with your eyes shut, you can't see your car. But in a minute, when you look at your car, you're going to become

“overwhelmed with such good feelings that you're going to want to share them with other people”

to realize that you've made the right decision and to realize who helped you to do that. They began marketing NLP as a persuasion technology in their seminars. By 1979, they're traveling around training salesmen, lawyers, and corporate types trying to close big deals. That's as you just heard, and Banner's DVD, creating therapeutic change, perceptual grids. In other words, using the skill set of hypnosis in a commercial context, and as part of that,

Banner taught people how to modulate their voices. Try the word 'relaxed'. Sneaky, sneaky, very sneaky. Because if you go relax with a little hiss at the end, or people like the word 'now' in English really flows off your tongue, you go, 'now'. Banner also taught clients how to read people's non-verbal cues, and to classify people,

according to their preferred representational systems. That basically just means whether someone thinks

in terms of images, sounds, or physical sensations. The thing is, when you put information into a system, and it matches the system perfectly, it's absolutely irresistible. It's not that the information that you're putting is being forced through, it's that you can just put it out like

“bait, and if it's in the right package, it's irresistible. They want it. That's why I said like”

offering them a specific vacation. If you can pick one that the person probably wouldn't go on on their own, and know how to describe it, in terms of meta-programs, they'll want it. And you can make them want it just because the packaging of it fits the way they are so much. So we watch this one together. It's a DVD called "Building and Maintaining Generalizations." And Banner saying you should listen to people and notice if they say things like,

"I see what you mean instead of "I hear you." That would suggest they're a visual person instead of an auditory person. I'm skeptical of this. I feel like those are just figures of speech, and I'm not necessarily sure that you can hack those systems, right? Because this is the premise of what Banner and Grinder are saying, that once you figure out if someone is visual or kinesthetic or auditory, then you can manipulate them by appealing to that system. And like and hypnosis,

you're speaking to the person's unconscious. I'm damn blunt, straight ahead, and you know, people may not like it, but at the unconscious level they know they can trust it. This is what really made NLP take off beyond Santa Cruz. Banner and Grinder get ran up in psychology today in 1979. It's a big splashy article with the headline, the people who read people, and it went a long way to legitimize them in their methods.

Here are two experts who can teach you how to clock other people's subtle cues, but also exploit them to get what you want. I read that article and they were selling how to

control and manipulate people and basically tip them into a decision to buy a car or whatever else.

Yeah, this was their product, the power of persuasion. And by the late 1970s, Banner and Grinder were full-time traveling gurus instructing people in all sorts of different

By 1979, Banner was selling out 10 day workshops at a thousand bucks ahead. He was curing

people's phobias and addictions on stage, and the psych people who were originally in the room were increasingly being joined by corporate salespeople. That must have been odd for the psychiatrist, to suddenly be sharing a row with a bunch of car salesmen who were like to tell me how to

“control my clients. Yeah, I think they left. So with this new cash flow, Banner moved from”

living on the Spitzer Commune to a super splashy, newvo-rich mansion. Please subscribe. Well, it was very California playboy. It had shag carpets, a swimming pool, big red wood beams, a tennis court, and the garage was stacked. He bought two BMWs, a fiat spider, and a Mercedes. Dude, also bought a vacation home in Hawaii because, you know, sometimes you just got to take a break from the oppressive mansion life. Okay. But as Banner and Grinder got more successful,

they're early mentors got worried. He and John were suddenly in the business of holding trainings and seminars and acting as stage therapists. They had no certification as therapists and no background as therapists, but suddenly they were doing it on the stage. Kind of like a magic show, but it felt a little bit like hoxterism. Banner and Grinder's focus on quick fixes, their obsession with reading people for personal gain, and their interest in covert persuasion

“concerned Daniel's father, Dr. Bob Spitzer. If you remember from last episode,”

Bob was basically an adoptive father to Banner and a major early supporter of NLP.

Richard Banner and John Grinder were very affected on what they did often, but there was collateral damage from time to time. And what happens in the stage doesn't necessarily translate into what happens subsequently off the stage. And I know that my father was really concerned about what would happen afterwards. Family therapists for junior satir, one of the main people Banner and Grinder borrowed from also expressed her concerns to Daniel. Particularly when it became

manipulative, how do you recognize how people organize their thoughts and then work with their language in a way to modify their thoughts? That's sinister. And she was very uncomfortable. She told me that several times. So you think Banner was fully cognizant that bringing it

“in this direction was unethical? These are brilliant guys, or at least very smart guys. And”

they heard plenty of times from plenty of people that what they were doing was questionable. And there was desperation there. Richard hung with the wrong people. He did massive amounts of cocaine. And cocaine is really difficult on people's brains. And he carried a gun for years. And these kinds of forces can really twist your mind for a period of time. Banner's cocaine use has been documented in court testimony. As has his gun ownership.

Ultimately, Banner's response to critics was something like fucking. As he told paying

seminargoers. Because it wasn't easy, you know, to be the new kid on the block and come in and say, "Look, you know, everything you're doing works, but you don't know when, or how." This is Banner speaking at a seminar during the 1980s. People will go, "Oh no, we don't want to know consciously. If we don't consciously, then we'd be manipulating." Who knows, we might even be effective. And then we wouldn't have clients. We'd run out. That was the big psychotherapist fear.

When they learned, they learned in L.P. they think, "But if I cure all my clients, how will I make my car payments?" And I try to reassure them. There is plenty of nuts around. There's no shortage of them whatsoever." Banner made it out like therapists were criticizing him out of self-interest, that they wouldn't make as much money if someone started curing their patients more efficiently. But it sounds like they were worried about something else.

Something that had crept into N.L.P. The thrill of controlling other people. In 1983, science died just published a story on an L.P. featuring various critics sounding the alarm bells. One cult expert quoted in the article said, "N.L.P. could become the most sophisticated mind-control technology ever." Detractors were especially worried about the ways it could be used in the marketplace, where an L.P. seemed like, quote, "a hazardous tool for personal manipulation

and, in the wrong hands, a dangerous instrument of social control." At the time, Grinder said he was getting a dozen complaints every month about what he called on ethical manipulation. People teaching

He said he'd kicked people out of seminars who didn't seem like they were there for the right reasons.

Still, he and Banner had trained about 5,000 people in N.L.P. at this point, and those people had gone on to train as many as 50,000 more. N.L.P. was spreading fast,

“and these techniques actually seemed to work. That's what frightened N.L.P. is to track”

there's the most. N.L.P. had its critics, but it also got some new fans. US military and spies rushed to hire Richard Banner, John Grinder, and a young kid who would take N.L.P. global. I'm Johnny Robbins. I'm business specialist in former coach. He's a variety of techniques and tools. I have a put in 14 companies across about 12 different industries. We do today about nine

billion dollars in business, but I think the thing you're most interested in, I would seem is

what I'm doing related to my history with my linguistic programming. And I'll please that credit. Next time on mine games, I interview Tony Robbins about where his empire began. But wait,

“wait, did we control your mind? Oh yeah, dear listeners, you have to tell us if we managed to manipulate”

you with our masterful double induction demo. Yeah, so here's the reveal. Did any of you go get a

drink of water or juice or any other liquid? Let us know in the comments. We were trying to make

you thirsty. Mine games is a kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeartPodcasts. The series is created and hosted by me, Zoila Scott's and Alice Heinz. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Lookpots, edited by Kate Osborn, editorial consulting from Adiza Egan, original composition and mixing by Steve Bohn. Fact checking by Amen Willin. From kaleidoscope,

“our executive producers are Oswo Lotion, Mangesh Hatikador and Kate Osborn. From iHeart,”

our executive producers are Katrina Norvel and Nikki E. Torre. Special thanks to Kazraily for hypnotizing me. Check her out at Kazraily.com. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, 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 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 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. Listen to burden of guilt season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.