The Drummer with the Knives

But what if we didn't get the whole story? "How does this been made to fit?" "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.

Judy Delosier was a religious studies major in the early 1970s. She was used to reading about miracles, not seeing them go down in her living room, but one night, Judy witnessed something that sounds impossible. So this guy had a problem. It was like maybe one leg was slightly shorter than another. And so they had kind of convinced him that his legs were the same, and he walked fine.

Judy is living in a house in the mountains above Santa Cruz. It's the site of some unusual gatherings. Experimental psychology groups run by a volatile 20 something and a radical young professor. Judy is at one of these workshops, and the leaders are working on someone who limps because his legs are different lengths.

It doesn't seem like a psychological problem, but when they finish, the guy is walking fine. And everybody's like so serious, and I was cracking up laughing. This is the most hysterical thing I've ever seen that these guys are getting away with this. What was so funny about it? Well, it was just funny that it was kind of outside the framework

“of my reality I think. I was skeptical when Judy told me this, but she swears.”

She saw him walk out of that door magically cured by talking, magically cured by neurolinguistic programming. It was kind of like a miracle, and I think that's probably

what made me laugh was going, that's pretty amazing. That's crazy.

Wait, how does that work though? How do you know? I don't know. I'm glad I'm curious to find out. Take a deep breath in. And breathe out. Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak primarily of your unconscious mind. You can notice that you feel rested, more alert, confident.

From kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts, this is mind games, episode two. I'm Zoe Laskaz, 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.

What was going on at Judy's house was one of the very first NLP workshops.

Before NLP was NLP. Before it was considered a human technology. NLP would become a teachable set of mental and verbal techniques that were

kids trying stuff out on each other. You're going to hear from a number of them in this episode,

“telling us about this headdy time when they were open to trying new things and trying to heal themselves.”

NLP didn't just come out of nowhere. It emerged from a specific time and place. Santa Cruz in the 1970s. Once a sleepy resort town, the city had become a magnet for mystics,

surfers, roll-first, organic farmers and Kundalini experts.

So when Judy saw her friends magically linguistically fix the man's legs using words in her living room, it was definitely outside the context of her reality. But new realities were business as usual in Santa Cruz. One of the guys leading the workshop in Judy's house was none other than our very own Richard Banner. We learned about Banner, the code developer of NLP in the last episode. His techniques

are controversial, but seemingly effective. He's cured lifelong phobias on stage in 20 minutes. He's transformed people's lives in a single session. But figuring out who this guy is, or was,

before he became a quick fix king pin, is way more difficult than we thought.

We talked to many people who knew and worked with Banner, and we got wildly different versions of him. He had kind of a rough, tough guy, kind of attitude. He is nothing, if not confident. Sometimes you would see he had a caring side. Richard terrified me. He just, he had a presence about him that was very edgy, and I just wasn't comfortable. He struck me as being incredibly brilliant. Hearing people describe Richard Banner, you might think they're talking about completely different people.

He's a healer. He's an ego maniac. He's a genius. He's a predator. And he comes with a lot of lore. For example, people say he's a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist, not true, not at all. It seems like he took some college classes in those subjects, but they weren't even his major. What's funny to me is that today he insists on going by Dr. Banner, which I try to fact check. He's a few honorary doctorates.

Wait, from where? Well, one is from an online holistic university.

The best Banner stories always do come from Banner himself. I heard that he can hear radar.

Okay. What the fuck? Yeah, that sounds very distracting. No. My personal favorite is that he said he owned a topless bar at age 16, and that two years later he was a millionaire. Also, that he has a black belt in karate. Oh my god, wait. So he obviously

“wants to be perceived as some kind of tough guy. I think that's very on purpose.”

There's this one story I heard about Banner. He denies it ever happened. Like a lot of the other stories swirling around his past. But one guy said Banner supposedly cured his own speech impediment as a kid. This is fascinating because Banner ended up becoming an expert in communication using speech for persuasion. So the story goes that Banner was working with a doctor on this issue. And the doctor asked him, "If you weren't you, who would you want to be?" And Banner said John Wayne.

John Wayne, the actor who played Uber Mask Cowboys, precisely. So the doctor tells him to go out and imitate John Wayne. And Banner spends a month watching old westerns and mimicking his voice. Including quite possibly a movie in which John Wayne cures a kid's stutter. Listen to me, you whining little. Well, you're going to stop that stutter to get the hell out of here. You're going to stop it or go home. Do you hear me? You got damn son of a bitch. Say that again.

You got damn me son of a bitch. Say it faster. You got damn me, Johnny son of a bitch. I wouldn't make it. I haven't called on me that soon. I actually do think John Wayne sounds like Banner in this tape. What's funny is Banner is kind of

“the kid and the healer. He's both ultimately. But I think what's really key here is the rugged”

confidence. But people have told me Banner sort of swaggered around. He did the whole physical stick, too. Richard was a tough guy. You know, he was a new joysie guy. And he was a street kid. He struck me as looking like a speed freak. He had a slightly long beard. And his hair was a mess and dirty. And he was changed smoking. Banner apparently dressed like a biker minus the bike. He was skinny and had a long mustache. One guy told me he looked like Dennis Hopper in the movie

easy rider. Banner liked to imply he'd been in gangs since he was a kid. And even told some people

He could only eat meat. I don't get it. Yeah, I don't think this is real. But the idea is that he

“got stabbed in the belly and they had to operate and take out some of his intestines. So now he”

can't digest certain vegetables. Richard did a lead to his highly dramatic past making a big deal out of taking some medication that he had in his pocket that he needed, said he needed because of doing other things in his past. I don't know that Richard had a very difficult upbringing. And so we often say people who act like a bully are usually the most wounded. They're the most vulnerable. And Banner was vulnerable. According to one magazine, he would stuff Kleenex and his lunch

bag when he was in elementary school, so other kids wouldn't know he didn't have any food. The same magazine reported that his mother tried to shoot him a couple times. More recently, Banner told a reporter for the guardian that his stepfather physically abused him. But he said, he got revenge. When he was 10 years old, Banner deliberately electrocuted his stepfather. Banner said he rigged a booby trap that shocked the eye and he ended up in the hospital for months.

I find it so perplexing Alice that Banner would go around telling this story. Because if it's true, I mean, isn't this the sort of thing that you stuff in a box and bury the box and hide the

box and hope people never ever find out? Unless violence threats are part of your therapeutic persona.

Despite all the wild stories out there, everyone we spoke to agreed on two things. Banner was brilliant and Banner was unpredictable. He was very funny and he could be very empathetic and he could also be meaner and a snake, you know. There are a few things we know for sure about Richard Banner. He was born in New Jersey in 1950. His dad does seem to have been a jerk and left by the time he was five. His mom remarried and at some point in the 1960s, the family up and moved

to Sunnyvale, California, which is a sort of middle-class suburb in what's now still a convalley. That's where Richard Banner went to high school. I wanted to understand where he came from. So I traveled to Northern California to talk to people who knew him in his 20s. Sunnyvale isn't far from Palo Alto and that's where Banner met the family who had changed his life forever. The spitsers. All right, let's meet the spitsers. The spitsers were pretty out there

family Alice. Bob Spitser was one of the first psychiatrists at Stanford experimenting with LSD.

In 1967, he spent 10 days in jail for blocking the Oakland draft center. His kids grew up going to rock festivals like Altamont, where the hell's angels fatally stabbed a member of the crowd. One of those kids, Daniel, wanted to play the drums.

“So Bob hired a local team to give him lessons. I was, I think, as first-grunt student,”

it was really funny to cut hardly definite approach to teaching drumming. And guess who that teenage teacher was? Richard Banner, that tracks. Yep, so does the fact that Banner showed up to the lessons with a whole bunch of knives. He actually carried them in his pocket and he showed me a few at different times. He had a buck knife, a bowie knife, a switch blade.

I didn't really know it to make of it. I've never seen a fighting knife up close at that point in my life.

It's seen more like a pose. Banner was an unorthodox teacher, but he got results. He had this kind of brash, bold way of approaching a lot of things. And I was, I think, as first-grunt student. Daniel looked up to Banner, which is why he founded all that Banner, this older kid, was working so hard to impress him. He had a chip on a shoulder, and most of my buddies in the sixth grade didn't have chips on

their shoulder like that. And I was surprised that an older guy felt the need to impress me. And some of it impressed me, and some of it made me wonder what was going on with him at the time. Daniel's parents also began to wonder about Banner. They sort of adopted him. I'm struck by the fact that this family adopts Richard Banner, who even as a teenager seems like kind of a weirdo. I get the impression they were kind of in the habit of taking in talented

strays. And Daniel's mother reportedly had a huge heart. She saw right through Banner's tough guy antics, and recognized how bright he was, and basically wanted to nurture him. And his knives.

“Knives and all. Bob owned an important psychology press, and Banner began working in the warehouse.”

He also got a new place to live. The Spitzer's commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Of course,

It was also the headquarters of the Gorilla Midwifery movement, fascinating. Yeah, this one radical woman who lived there, Raven Lang, helped launch the home birthing movement in California. When that was essentially illegal in California. Okay, so all of these people are living together on this property. They're living together, they're raising chickens together, they're farming together. So when we bought the place,

“it was actually a commune. It was a nudist colony. And I remember being 13 and I'm like,”

yeah, daddy buy it. And always make it people left. Bob Spitzer's daughter, Mandy,

showed me around the property, pointing out geodesic domes and former gardens. Walking around, it was easy to imagine this gaggle of renegade geniuses all living together. This was his magic place where he would come and smoke dope. And he had wonderful ideas. My father did. Some of them came to fruition and really did great changes. And then other ones just kind of spun out and got a little too out there for anybody to grab

one too. Like what? Like the university for becoming more fully human. That was going to take place. He had a group of young men here that made pretty terrible music. And they were called the Mysteries and another guy Jupiter, those his name. And he just flung paint everywhere. Yeah. And my dad sponsored a lot of this. And Richard was one of those ideas.

So this place was basically a start-up incubator for every out there new age trend of the sixties.

All paid for by this guy, Bob Spitzer. What's crazy is Bob somehow juggled this menagerie of wacky passion projects with his official role in the psychiatry world. He was friends and colleagues with all these luminaries rethinking what therapy could be at the time. And for Bob Spitzer,

“Bander wasn't just another lucky experiment. He was a protege. And that's how Bander got into”

psych. It's how he started NLP. It's nuts. Of all the families who could have semi-adopted Bander, the spitsers were the rare people who could give him some tools to deal with his issues. And introduce him to giants in the field. They basically gave him a new identity, which was becoming a therapist. Yep, tortured kid and alleged cowboy turned after school drum teacher/knife enthusiast Richard Bander reinved to himself yet again. This time, as a therapist,

for better or worse. You know, they wouldn't give me a license to do therapy because I'm not qualified. I think that's wonderful. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking 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 false story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, we followed 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 are doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level at 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. 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 be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Beau is born. My 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,

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 Germaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Germaine 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 fault of secrets. Listen to the 6th Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever you get your podcasts. I've been researching Bandlers early influences in psychology. What happened was that Bob Spitzer introduced Bandler to his friends and colleagues in this old psych movement. And it's here that Bandler found a new identity. He began to imitate famous therapists. Some of them lived at this place called Esselin and Big Sur, just on the road from Santa Cruz. It was the headquarters of the Human Potential Movement. That's a new age effort to remake mankind

“for the better. It was basically a therapy commune. Therapy cult? Therapy commune? Therapy cult?”

Okay, I think this might be a yes and let's go with Colta Jason therapy commune. Okay, so one of the therapists at Esselin was Fritz Perls. Bandler began listening to tapes of Perls' therapy sessions like this one. What do you feel physically? Hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer. Can you exaggerate this hammer hammer hammer? McKnoises. Here Perls is treating a student with stage fright. He tells her to talk to different parts

of herself to reintegrate them. That was the cornerstone of Gestalt. Perls' school of therapy. It was designed to heal the so-called fragmented self. I want to crack my clothes. I feel confined by the sandals. Now let your toes talk to the sandals. I feel confined by you. Let me go sandals. I can't move. I can't. Let me go. Scream it. Let me go. Again. Let me go sandals. Bandler became obsessed with Perls and techniques like this one. He started imitating Perls'

German accent and mannerisms. But Bandler didn't stop there. He also began mimicking an experimental psychotherapist named Virginia Satir. Satir's big thing was role-playing. She called it family reconstruction therapy. And she died groups to dramatically reenact family issues. And I wonder how you would feel just moving up to the son of yours and saying to him, thank you. Gotcha. Now to take both his hands and to tell him that.

I'm not going to let you see your mother anymore, Aaron, because she hurts you. Satir got seemingly magical results. Families who'd been fighting for years or were traumatized, rebonded. Bandler was dazzled. Here Satir is on a public access show called Sinking Allowed in 1988. When you focus quite a lot in your lifetime on human potential, on dealing with people who come, you know, from tormented families. You feel very hopeful that

countless number of little jets. And if our energy were free to flow, then these jets were all open.

“And our possibilities. And that when we allow that to happen, then we become in a totally different”

place because we then can have harmony moving. And we have the total force of the energy that's possible. And that's all I've done with people is open. You can see how these ideas that abuse doesn't define you, and that feelings can be transformed to unlock new human potential would appeal to a young Richard Banner. And they helped form an LP. Banner would start putting all of these radical psychotherapy influences together as an undergraduate student, and he added his own

special sauce. Richard Banner arrived at Kresgi College in the early 1970s. The school was brand new. It wasn't just some place to get a degree. It was a radical community experiment. I've been researching Kresgi and went there on my trip to California. At the school, there were no grades or academic

“honors. Some teachers were jeans walked around barefoot, and others taught cross-legged on top of their”

desks. Everyone participated in mandatory tea groups, unstructured forums for sharing and conflict resolution. It was weird even by Northern California standards. Other colleges at UC Santa Cruz called it the Touchy Fili school. It looked different, too. The campus was designed like a little village on a winding path through the Redwoods. Most students lived in apartments. Others got lumber to build their own dorms. Naturally, there was no hierarchy at Kresgi, which may explain why an

undergraduate with no formal training or certification in psychology was allowed. Maybe even encouraged to practice therapy on his peers. Banner began running the stalt therapy groups after hours. Kribbing heavily from Fritz Pearls and Virginia Cityer, he got surprising results.

“Fellow students cried and had big life-fulturing breakthroughs. The Banner had no idea why.”

And that's where linguistics professor John Grinder comes in. We heard he had been in the CIA or at least that he consulted with them. Grinder had been a special forces captain stationed in Europe during the Cold War. But he also seems to have been some kind of spy while he was in the military. You know, he was one of those guys. Apparently that would, you know, parachute in and get somebody out on his feet. When Grinder quit the service, he got a PhD and his politics did 180.

NLP trainer Robert Dilt Scott to no Grinder as one of his linguistic students. And so according to John, he went from being a CIA agent to the president of the Communist Party the following year. Grinder organized anti-war demos in downtown Santa Cruz and streaked naked across campus at least once. But he drew the line at therapy. Banner and Grinder met in one of the mandatory T groups and immediately bonded over their mutual disdain for talking endlessly on and on with no structure or concrete goal.

They thought psychiatrists had no real incentive to cure their patients. The longer the therapy

took, the more they got paid. So people never got better. But Banner knew the rapid results he

was getting were unique. And that they might even appeal to Grinder's Marxist principles. And it was trying to get John to come to these groups and John kept saying, "Oh, you know, that's visualised, you know, that people just wallowing in their own problems." Banner finally convinced Grinder to come see what he was up to. But what he saw at what Banner was doing, he was impressed because he could see that he wasn't just

having people wallowing their problems. That he was actually influencing them and their behavior. And very, I would say, you know, very powerful way. Banner needed Grinder. Someone who could analyze his ad hoc experiments and therapy larks and turn them into a codified method. John Grinder, the linguist, looked at what Richard Banner was doing and identified the structure. Grinder began analyzing what Banner was saying,

how he was saying it, and what he was doing physically to identify effective patterns. Richard was my first real therapist. Devercenter Morton was a student and one of their first guinea pigs. I actually did quite a bit of my personal work with the both of them. That was extremely

powerful. Deverc experience therapeutic breakthroughs with Banner and Grinder. But by the end of

her time, I plotted revenge. I thought of suing them. I thought about quitting sugar and

center. And Banner was the trainer. Richard Banner was in their training you.

You're both undergraduate students. How did he get in the position where he was training anyone to work on people with real problems? I have no idea how that happened. There must have been some kind of supervision. God, you know, so what were the trainings like? It was um, I used the word wholesome. But I used the word wholesome and contrast to where I feel like it went later. When I met them, they knew what they were doing. Jody Bruce met Banner and Grinder when she enrolled

in a linguistics course. They were teaching together. They were developing it with us. I mean, they were, they were doing their research with us. Jody joined the workshops Banner and Grinder were running off campus. The students would arrive in chat a bit but it wasn't a party. They were there to work. Banner and Grinder would make a dramatic entrance and ask the group who wants to make a deep change tonight. A few volunteers would step up. They were the patients. Everyone else

became their doctors. That's who we worked on. We worked on ourselves with each other.

“Which was pretty brave now that I say that. What I think about it, you know, just these other people,”

these other students who happened to be interested in the same thing. We were suddenly um, bearing our hearts to each other. Therapy is everywhere today. But in the 1970s, therapy was still controversial. So it was pretty radical for these kids to be working on each other, exploring new forms of care. And we did do a lot of sharing. The big phrase that comes back to me as I think about NLP is what stops you from doing that. So if I said, I feel afraid, that would be

dissected into who I feel afraid of and how and what I can't tell my father that I mad at him, what stops you from doing that. Jody Bruths, attended the groups with Jim, her boyfriend

at the time. He was a lot of work because he was always trying to failpise me, you know,

“and sometimes I would get frustrated and just say, like, we're just going to have an argument, okay?”

Just how it goes. And this is, I don't want to be a chapter in your book. And so I think there was that, there was that part of it, maybe that's where the word "culti" comes in is that for some people for this to work, it needed to be a way of life. Like, I couldn't just say, I'm tired, I'm checking out right now, you know, it would be tired of what, how, you know, checking out of what to go to and where and those probing questions. What stops you from being away? What's the point of these

questions? It sounds kind of plushy. It honestly sounds so invasive. They would grill you about why you feel the way you feel about your biggest hangups and issues in front of all your friends, but there was actually a point. And the point was to help you realize that you actually have way more options for how you might feel about something than you might know. This is the whole control your emotional state thing. Nancy Salzman, who we met last episode, is a mega fan of this

technique. She used it to get herself through prison. And this is where it all began. The idea that the way you're feeling is just one way you could feel about it. But if you back up, you could choose from a whole range of reactions. I asked Deborah what exactly they were working on. She said it was not light stuff. It was serious psychic pain, insecurity, and trauma. I remember really stumbling on believing that my father loved or proved of me at that time. To help Deborah, Banner and Grinder perform

the family reconstruction. This is one of the techniques they got from Virginia Cityer, where basically

you have people pretend to be the patient's family members, and then the patient can say things to them they might be too afraid to say in real life. John was sitting in front of me. He would tell me that that he loved me. And then Rich would ask, well, do you believe? Do you believe? John.

“I know I don't. Well, is there something that he could do that you would believe him?”

And it became pretty clear to me that it was the fact that I wasn't believing what he was saying. And the possibility is that maybe my father was telling me that he loved me in lots of different ways that I wasn't perceiving. And it was quite a aha moment after that therapy I called up my dad and I told him that I realized that he did love me. He opened his heart at that point.

cleak became cool. They had a community of followers. I think there were quite a few women that were enamored with them. But another NLP here, Don McCormack, said they were kind of insufferable. When there was a small group of us who were into this, that's all we talked about. And we laughed about how we were losing all our friends. We became unattractive people to be friends with. Jim Eiker, another early NLP guy, remembers the group had a certain mystique by the time

he arrived at Kresgi in 1973. People came out of sessions raving about the revelations they were

having. Wow, what just happened? That was the most amazing understanding of behavior I could ever

“imagine, like learning how speeches so patterned and reveals how I think and how I learned.”

NLP trainer Robert Dilt said the confidence bandlor and Grindr exuded was infectious. Whatever they would suggest, we would go try it. And there was definitely this feeling. You could go in and clear out the psychiatric ward of a hospital. So it was very much that kind of feeling that what you're doing here is life changing in world changing. That's exactly what Bandler and Grindr tried to do.

Bandler and Grindr actually brought their experimental therapy to NAPA State Hospital,

a psychiatric facility with thousands of patients. This is pretty shocking. They were given free reign to test their ideas out on extremely vulnerable

“people. At the time, one of the problems in these facilities was that doctors would just slap”

diagnosis on people and then if the treatments didn't work, the patients were deemed incurable. Right. Movies like one flu over the kukus nest captured the general consensus at the time that psychwords and institutions were essentially prisons. When I asked this one early NLP guy who was involved in these experiments, but who's now a licensed therapist, if he thought what they were

doing was, you know, a little unethical? He was basically like, hey, at least we were trying something

new instead of just giving up on these people. But others felt bandler and Grindr sometimes did more harm than good. It was a game for them to see how they could manipulate and control people and they could share that laugh with each other when they could do an induction on somebody

“when they didn't know that they were being inducted. I could tell that they thought it was fun to”

have that kind of power over people. Debra had her criticisms of bandler and Grindr, but she clearly wasn't completely immune to the confidence they gave off. Both Debra and her friend developed a crush on bandler and they made out with him together after one of their sessions. Okay, so just FYI, making out with a client as a therapist is a huge ethical breach. It does seem like almost everyone in these therapy

groups was somehow romantically entangled. We all spent so much time together. We were very aware of the dynamics of each others, the sex lives, the partying and whatever else. Debra, one of bandler and Grindr's early guinea pigs, was down for the atmosphere for the most part, consenting adults and all. She was looking forward to the groups 1974, Christmas party. I made the assumption that it was just a regular Christmas party, so I got myself ready for that by taking some mushrooms

beforehand. But this was the night it went way too far. The night Debra walked away from Richard Bandler, John Grindr, and what would become an LP forever. When I got to the party, I found out that it was not the kind of party I thought it was going to be. The party was just for the people in Bandler and Grindr's therapy clique, and they had prepared an unusual gift for each guest. Each person was called up to the front to do some work with John and Rich, and they had a

certain task that they had to do. Most of the gifts were playful. Bandler and Grindr had Debra's friend, as a little cocky, chant, "Ohm." And when his mouth was open, they both pied him in the face. He thought it was hilarious. But when it was Debra's turn, they blindfolded her. Bandler and Grindr stood on either side of Debra, and began speaking simultaneously into both of her ears. I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing. Don't ask for help unless I really need it

She felt them lift her about four feet above the ground. Her legs were loosely bound,

and her arms were tied outstretched to something wooden. I still had my blindfold on, and I opened my eyes. I was standing up there with my legs and my arms strapped onto a cross. I said,

“"This is Christmas, not Easter, and I think Richard said from home, and I had kind of one of those”

itty feelings passing through my body at that time." Remember Debra was tripping throughout this. Somehow, she got her blindfold off, and what she saw freaked her out. All of the people that

were in the training workshop were standing below me in a half moon holding candles.

Freaky are still, they were placing logs below her feet, and dousing them in lighter fluid. So I was prompted earlier in the evening to trust somebody to keep something that I would need later. Debra picked someone she didn't even know, and Bandler and Grindr gave that person her gift,

“which was a knife. A knife. Someone struck a match and set the logs on fire.”

Just then Debra managed to cut herself free. And I was angry, just incredibly angry, that I'd been put in that position by people that I had trusted. That maybe I shouldn't have trusted. I met with John and Rich afterwards, and I expressed my anger to them about them putting me in that position, and they maintained that it was an expression of caring and thoughtfulness that they put me in this position because this was what

they had intended to help me therapeutically, to take me out of my victim position and to give

“me the knife to cut myself out of the victim position. I was angry at them for doing that to me.”

Ethically, it didn't seem right. They took my permission as my therapist to go too far.

Debra left the group. She never went back. Although she became a marriage and family therapist,

she said she's never used any of the techniques she helped bandler and Grindr develop. I decided that I was tired of the hijinks and the threat to my personal safety, and I decided not to have anything further to do with either of them. It should be noted, this is Debra's version of events. Although Terry McClendon, who is there that night, wrote about it in his own book, and he told me about that evening during my interview with him. Bandler didn't respond to

questions about this incident, nor did John Grindr. But NLP was just getting started. What began as one more new age alternative therapy would grow and change and in some applications and in some hands evolve into something more sinister. Only a few years after NLP developed, it spread beyond the mountain communes of Santa Cruz, and it found a new home in the business world. Bandler and Grindr began marketing NLP as a persuasion technology that could be used to read people,

and manipulate them. 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. That's next on mine games. Mine games is a kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeartPodcasts. The series is created and hosted by me, Zoe LaScaz, and Alice Hines. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dar Look Pots, edited by Kate Osborn, editorial consulting from a Disa Egan, original composition and mixing

by Steve Bohn. Fact-checking by Amenwalen. From kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oz Wolotion, Mangesh Hatika Dore, and Kate Osborn. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina

we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't

get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. 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 Riggle, 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 the conversation with my son. 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 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.