The Self-Help Empire

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 Letbe, 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 fall 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.”

I was a monster. Listen to burden of guilt season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Picture this. It's 1983, and you're driving in your car. When you hear this young guy come on the radio.

He's maybe 23 years old. That thing you hate about yourself, he can fix it. I don't care what your problem is. I don't care if you've had phobias for years. Come see me.

I'll have one hour. I am the one stop therapist, right? People start calling in with questions. Like, could he cure anxiety, binge drinking, procrastination?

The answer is always, yes, of course, absolutely.

And then a skeptic comes on the air. Did he start attacking me? Saying people like you are charlatan, you're a liar.

“People like you should not be loud on the radio.”

You can't wipe out a phobia in that time period. And I said, well, you must be a scientist, then. So, of course, I'm a scientist. I said, well, a scientist would never ask you anything. And I said, as a scientist, you can come up with any hypothesis you want.

If you're truly a scientist, isn't it true? You have to test your hypothesis. And this is what launched my career. He throws down a gauntlet. He's holding an event the next night at a holiday in.

So, I suggest the best way you prove your hypothesis is bring me one of your patients.

Bring in somebody that you've never been able to change.

I said, I'm sure you've got plenty of those. They go back and forth, but eventually the doctor admits he does have this one patient. A woman with a snake phobia. And I said, how long have you treated me since seven years? And I said, well, bring her down.

She takes me 10 or 15 minutes, and then I just lost it. And the radio guy says, we'll see you tomorrow night at the holiday end. It's on. The young miracle worker was expecting 30 to 40 people at the free event. 500 show up.

There aren't enough chairs. He gets up on stage and introduces himself. So, I'm Tony Robbins. I'm here today to share with you how you can have, you know, more change in a more rapid pace than you probably have a thought possible.

Changes you thought would take years or months to be done in minutes or hours. And right as I finish, however, literally, the side door bursts open. It's like high noon in an old Western. In walks the psychiatrist in his patient. Tony brings her up on stage and...

I walked behind her to the back and there's a table there and I had... Well, nap sack and I reaching the nap sack and I walking behind her and reaching out and I pause. It's a little gardener snake. I put the snake in front of her and of course, to jump back at first. But I just held it there.

And then her whole nervous system just calmed straight down. Everyone could see it. And I said, "How do you feel about snakes?" And she said, "They're not very attractive for me." Okay.

And I said, "Would you be willing to hold it?" And she said it a little more intensity. It's not very attractive. You know, lean back, but didn't shake, didn't spit. None of those over reactions.

And I said, "I think I would feel like to just hold that snake

And the audience is going, "Oh, did hold it."

It's like a movie. The woman reaches out and grabs the snake in front of everyone. This part of my current group is I did crazy things. That day, 23-year-old Tony Robbins cured a phobia and launched a self-help empire.

What if your worst day was actually your best day?

“What if the most painful day in your life could be converted to your best day?”

It can't. This is a new beginning for your life. This is taking your standard to a new level. This isn't biting in the home level. It's all happening for us, my friend. Not to us.

This is you, unbelievable. 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.

From kaleidoscope and iHeartpodcasts, this is mine games, episode 4. I'm Zoe Liskaz, and I'm Alice Hines. You don't know how you did it. You're going to a little time to start your stay. And you're out of it.

“Last episode, we looked at how the co-founders of NLP Richard Bhandler and John Grindr discovered hypnosis”

and used the techniques they learned to market NLP as a persuasion technology. What began as a set of therapeutic techniques became a series of sales hacks. And from there NLP became the essence of a new self-help industrial complex. Bhandler and Grindr successfully smuggled psychiatric techniques out of the therapist's office and into the business world. But it was Tony Robbins who made these self-help hacks inescapable.

He and other gurus sold self-help to corporate America and NLP got into the water stream big time.

Even if you've never heard of NLP, you've probably heard of Tony Robbins,

maybe from one of his many infomercials, like this one from 1990. In the last year, over 50 million people met a remarkable man named Anthony Robbins. Since then, his personal power audio program has helped hundreds of thousands of people master their finances, improved the quality of their relationships, and achieved peak physical performance. Today at 65, Tony Robbins is the world's most famous coach.

He's worked with corporations like AT&T, Proctor and Gamble, Xerox, American Express, IBM, and Dow.

“Celebrities like Andre Agassie, Serena Williams, Hugh Jackman, Pitbull, Princess Diana.”

They have all been clients. Bill Clinton called you the night before. In 1990, in said, Tony, they may be impeaching me in the morning. What should I do? What an extraordinary position of responsibility. You have not the only person you call.

Tony brought NLP to a new league of elite customers. But his greatest success was building an audience of millions of ordinary people with a message of inner power and resilience. Anybody can be in a good state when things are going your way. But if you can stand a beautiful state when things don't go your way,

then you're going to have a beautiful wife. Or maybe it's the millions of dollars he's made in the process. He's not shy about his success. I'm Tony Robbins. You know, I'm a business specialist and a big performance coach.

He's a variety of techniques and tools. I have 114 companies across about 12 different industries.

We do today about nine billion dollars in business.

I reached Tony over zoom at his home in Palm Beach. He said he's ambivalent about the modern world of gurus, frauds and get rich quick schemes he helped create. And so I feel like I have to father an industry that quite frankly is a monster. And they're called a monster because there's no quality control.

It's like, you know, somebody goes some class. Somebody goes in certification who made it up. And then they go out and coach people and charge people. I think it's great that it's there. But it's like, unfortunately, like most industries.

There's a lot of great people. There's a few really great people. And there's a lot of terrible people out there. And so when I hear a life coach, I squirm even though, you know, I started with this. Interviewing Tony Robbins can feel like talking to a YouTube video playing a double speed.

My nature is unpassionate. I talk very rapidly. I talk loud and reject an audience. So I'm worried that way. Our culture tends to give more credibility to someone who speaks more like President Obama, for example.

Or talking to a runaway philosophy machine.

“I know it sounds corny, but the ultimate technique is loving caring for that client.”

I have a simple philosophy. I know every person I meet is only you included. And I mean, sincerely, every person I meet I know is going to be superior to me. And at least one or more areas. Or a dictionary.

And if you don't give up and you're relentless, which I am, I'm not persistent. Persistent is that steady consistency. I am relentless all in until we get the outcome. But Tony is also disarmingly nice. He was generous with his time and happy to talk about his NLP roots.

I got involved with NLP when I was very young when I was about got 23 years old. I was kind of obsessed at a very early age of anything that could make a difference in people's lives. Tony grew up on the wrong side of the tracks as he's fond of saying. His home life was chaotic. His mother was addicted to alcohol and prescription pills.

And he left home at 17. I was like, one of the most loving human beings you can imagine. But when you mix those drugs, you get a different personality. So I became a practical psychologist out of how to figure out how to manage your moods and emotion quite frankly at very early on in my life was a requirement.

And but that led to me also just wanting to see how to help people get out of pain.

“I think primarily because I experienced so much of myself.”

Tony discovered the world of development gurus as a teenage door to door salesman. This was the late 1970s. And motivational speaking was an increasingly crowded field. There was Werner Earhart and his est trainings. Rather than doing more in the same box or even doing better in the same box or even doing

something different in the same box, it's about creating new boxes. There was Norman Vincent Peel with his church of positive thinking. Don't tell me that positive thinking doesn't work wonders. And there were eat or be eaten guys like Jim Ron. Every single day you wake up with a choice.

You can choose to be weak to give into your excuses to let your fears control you. Or you can choose to be strong. A lot of these gurus styled themselves after evangelical preachers and many had a background in direct sales. They used a lot of the same techniques. Afarisms, visualizations, and long vague stories of miraculous transformations that were impossible to fact check.

Forget science and anecdotal evidence spoke for itself. There's a reason these gurus suddenly appeared in the late 1970s and early 80s. They were capitalizing on a period of profound economic uncertainty in the US. Inflation, sword, and wages stagnated. Companies were downsizing and jobs were increasingly outsourced overseas. Then, under Reagan, there were sweeping cuts to social welfare programs like food stamps, education, and Medicaid.

All of this meant there was much fiercer competition in the workforce. As people groom themselves to get ahead, a new social Darwinism set in. And no one bottled and sold this survival of the fittest mentality better than motivational speaker Jim Rohn. Jim challenged his students to take charge of their lives, kill the weak parts of themselves, and banish limiting beliefs. Let me tell you something.

That weak version of yourself, the one that's always complaining, always procrastinating, always settling for less.

That version needs to go. It's time to kill it off once and for all. It was there at a Jim Rohn seminar that Tony found his calling. He began working as Rohn's assistant, and then as a salesman flocking Rohn seminars to businesses around LA. By the time he was 19, he was head of his own sales office. Tony got his drive to banish weakness from Rohn, but his techniques, the skills that made him a star.

Those he got from NLP. Let's go back to when you first learned about NLP. Can you give me a fuller picture of what was going on in your life? Because as he said, you were no stranger to motivation programs. You'd worked with Jim Rohn.

What stood out to you about NLP versus other methods? Well, Jim Rohn was not my motivational speaker per se. I mean, that's the term people over you as I hate the term because it's to me it's like a warm bath. I mean, obviously he needs some motivation, but it's not enough.

“You have to be a strategist, which is what I am.”

It's always more of a business philosopher.

So I look at life is you need both philosophy and strategy. If you have strategy, that's how to. And the better strategy will get you the result faster. That's what NLP really was. He was about 23 when he went to an NLP training.

John Grinder was running near the Los Angeles airport. Tony stuck out from the crowd. At the time, you really had to be a therapist to go do the training in those days. And I basically went to John and said, look, you know, all these therapists that they've been

And it really annoyed me to see somebody working with somebody for seven years on a problem

“that I knew could be done in a matter of weeks or months.”

And once I met Rinder, I knew could be a matter of sometimes hours or minutes. And so I kind of talked my way into this six month training class. And I was obsessed. First, Tony tried NLP techniques out on himself. I used to bite my fingernails down to the quick.

And they'd even bleed and sometimes, you know, I put something on there. So if I did it would be better, nothing seemed to stop it. And I did this simple switch pattern that I picked up from one of the books.

You know, I never bit my fingernails ever again.

So I was like, this is phenomenal. And I was, I was on fire at that stage to want to master every aspect of it. Nail biting down. He craved something more ambitious. I started really thinking about, you know, NLP's a great set of techniques.

And I thought, I don't want to just learn a bunch of techniques like a dog. Anybody can do that. I certainly want to use those two. But I'd like to learn deeper about what makes the human psyche work.

“I'd like to understand more about how to create global change.”

John Grinder gave him an assignment. I want you to come up with something else that's seemingly impossible. And I want you to go model it and come back and show me what's done. And that's when Tony decided. Tonight, we have a firewall to walk on fire.

Getting yourself in your spirit to snap out of it and storm through that is a perfect metaphor

for the fire of your life. Now let me show you how to walk on fire. You're doing it. Say yes. Say yes.

Say yes. Firewalks are Tony's signature. They're often the big adrenaline-soaked culminations of his multi-day seminars, which cost a few thousand dollars and generate millions annually. After long days of group therapy, everyone charges across the coal, cheering each other on.

I certainly know the power of energy. Without energy, nothing changes. Low energy, you're not going to change. So I use high energy and then I use the tools.

“That's one of the reasons I think I did better than most people.”

I changed their physiology, which to me was one of the fundamental tools that I learned from John Grinder. In the Tonyverse, physiology is key to changing someone's state. And by extension, their lives. Tony's not a sit down, talk out your problems sort of therapist. He gets people to break boards, punch the air, hug strangers,

and dance around in pungolines. There's also a lot of yelling. Firewalking is funny to me because like a lot of magic tricks, it seems physically impossible but is actually not at all. Right, the coal's are very hot, but as long as you keep moving quickly,

you won't get badly burned. The whole point is just to hype you up. If you can walk on fire, Alice, what can't you do in your life? But the point was to get yourself to take that step. Because it's just like life.

If you take that first step, especially in firewalking, you're going to take the second or the fifth step. Honestly, it seems to be basically getting people in an emotional state where they'll believe anything, including that change is possible. And I guess that's the placebo effect.

Right, which is one of the reasons why NLP techniques do sometimes work, because people believe they will. Maybe that's not such a bad place to start working on something you're resistant to,

and think you could never, ever, ever get over.

metaphors were very helpful. The metaphor opens the door. Then you've got to really develop the skills and you've got to shift the beliefs in people. Beliefs can create and beliefs destroy.

And when you learn not just NLP, but you learn how he people structure what they value and what they believe. And you show them how to change it for themselves, not tell them what to believe, not tell them what to do. That's a cult.

I have people ask them what they need. And then show them how to basically shape themselves. I was actually feeling inspired by Tony Robbins, so I tried some of this recently. And who is your will in getting tickets?

I know you already know this. Okay, so it's Zoe's mom, Lynn. She wanted to figure out how to get over this really specific hang up. That's after the break. 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 follow the evidence in here from the people that lived it. To ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was.

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 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 to conversation with my son. What do you think you two?

Listen to on purpose, Rijay Shatty, on the iHard 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 Compride became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termine Hudson as the perpetrator.

Termine 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 iHard 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 Special Agent Riegel, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the US 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 iHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

What he was the last time you arrived over in his island, was never. You've never been? No. Oh, cool.

I'm Zoey's mom, Lynn. We're heading out to Governor's island in New York City to find a calm place to practice bike writing. I also rented us bikes that are like upright bikes. So we don't have to do city bikes.

Oh, I'm so happy, because I-- Lynn is in her early 70s. Before we met up for our bike ride, I visited her at her home to do a couple of NLP visualization exercises. It's a bike riding, images are kind of a composite of flying

through time to square. In her younger years, she was a fearless bike rider. Feeling invincible. With my favorite pair of green high heels in the basket, and just the acceleration and the freedom I felt.

But these days, she's way less confident on two wheels. Part of her problem is physical. Schooliosis changed her center of gravity. So it's like I've lost my power. I'm not the one in control.

“Right, you feel like you're kind of on the little kid, you know?”

Yes. And part of it is mental. She gets extremely anxious when making turns, or in traffic, and she psychs herself out. And she hates feeling this way.

I hadn't figured out the physical element in it. So I thought, my God, this is what getting old is. Your world shrinks, fear replace this confidence, and you just sort of dwindle down. You can't fade off.

I don't know. How that is not what I was.

I had Lynn remember a situation where she felt confident on a bike.

“She mentioned riding to a lighthouse on fire, island.”

So I gave her an NLP visualization technique. We're going to try to trigger that feeling of wobbliness, and instability, and apprehension. Was I think the way you? Right.

And now the control. Right. So we're going to try to trigger that without it actually happening. I'm getting tensile. There we go.

So your mind's doing it for you. And right now, practice it. Can you see the lighthouse? Tricking your brain to switch from a state of anxiety

to a state of confidence, isn't an NLP technique.

They call it switch. S, W, I, S, H. It's what Tony used on the woman with the snake phobia.

“At the heart of it is the idea that you can change your emotional reactions”

by manipulating your memories. Specifically, the sensory details associated with a memory. Well, colors are part of the memory. This is a specific palette. How did you see all?

Thanks for exhilarated. Powerful. Compton. Manipulating a memory, playing with the color, speed, music, or volume, even playing the memory backwards, helps you gain more emotional control.

You can dial back the vividness of a negative memory,

or train yourself to replace it with a positive one.

And so, imagine yourself on that poor walk in Santa Monica, that feeling of wobbliness in apprehension. Can you feel it? Who called it? Okay.

Now I want you to make it small. Switch the two images, okay? And make the image of the lighthouse big, full color, purposeful, confident. Whoosh, do this, see this, whoosh, do this, see this, see this, see this,

see this, see this, see this, see this, see this, see this, see this, see this, see this, see this, and till when you see the old thing, of like one and about your fingernails, it triggers in your mind, the wish, the new thing, which is, no, I don't need to do that. This is who I really am.

As Tony Robin suggests here in his VHS tape, unleashing the power within, this becomes automatic. The idea is eventually you'll react that way in real time, too. On Governor's Island, I gave Lynn a guided meditation. I asked her to think of the bicycle as her friend,

and then another one, where I had her envision herself on a bike, confidently moving towards her destination. And you're going to come out in three, two, one, open your eyes. That was very interesting. Several things happened when I was on the bike,

would give me the most confidence. Was imagining, I used to take Zoe to school on my bike, and with her on there, I had to get her safe beach to school. So, yeah, there's traffic, but there is Zoe. I dropped her off, and after I did that, I could head for the lighthouse.

That's great, Lynn. It really worked. That one really worked. Oh, okay. And with that, we pushed off.

That was pretty good, right? People on one side, car on the other, tracker, instrument of doom, I know, right? I was going to stop this while I was thinking, but then he was just enough room.

I'm really curious why this worked. Not only because she's my mother, but because I've tried all sorts of stuff together back on a bike. Yeah, like getting her drunk, tipsy. Oh, my God, I can't believe she told you this.

Yes, I figured a drink would help take the edge off, so we may or may not have gotten a cocktail at this bar near my house and bike drum my neighborhood. Yeah, when she told me about that,

“I think she said she didn't like the pressure.”

Okay, fair, but I have seen her ride perfectly well for miles at a time quite recently, and seen her just fixate on the one little thing that goes wrong. So I do think this whole problem is mostly in her head. Okay, so at the end of our day on Governor's Island,

she was still a bit wobbly and nervous, but she stayed on the bike. So I was happy about that. That's great. I'm really happy to hear that.

But how much of it do you think was the NLP? That is what I'm on the fence about. Practicing riding a bike in general, maybe would have helped just as much.

There's a technique in clinical psychology

called Exposure Therapy, which is honestly kind of identical to Tony's phobia cure. When his punk flickers out at you, you know he's saying I'm a little bit scared,

please support me. How does that feel? She starts wrapping around you. Not bad. Here's Tony doing the snake phobia cure

that launched his career in that same VHS tape.

“And how would you make it feel good if you make it feel good now?”

What would you say to yourself, or what would you picture? I'd sing to the snake. What would you sing to it? I'd sing happy days are here again. Okay.

So all the snake I found didn't sing to the snake. Okay. Be gay. I can't. I can't.

I can't. I can't. I can't. And enjoy it. License therapists also give their clients

visualization techniques like this. And I'll be may have cribbed it from them. Basically, if you give a woman with a fear of snakes, a snake, or even have her think of snakes, all in a safe situation where nothing bad happens,

it's called exposure therapy. And Tony is also doing these curses on stage where there's an audience and all this pressure

to make some crazy miraculous breakthrough

in front of the audience. You've got a lasting change.

“You've got to stand the whole human being.”

And to do that is, you know, it's not quick sometimes, right? You know, unfortunately, to a lot of psychiatry and psychology is using techniques from 100 years ago.

You, when you use a phone from 20 years ago, you think you're an idiot, but they're still doing that because it's what they've been trained to do. And they're not trained in results.

And that's the biggest difference. I say, my obsession is, can't produce a result, a consistently for people. And what good is it?

So it's been a few months since you went to Governor's Island with my mom Alice. Did these sparkly new techniques stick? I've been deliberately not asking her about this whole experiment. Yeah, so she's been practicing on her own

and I recently called her up to check on her progress. The thing I do like about this approach is it makes you feel that it's possible. That you, your brain, which has been driving yourself crazy, can be kind of came down and used.

And that's a huge inspiration for somebody who thinks they can't do it. Lensman and proving for sure, but it's been slow. Do mhm, catastrophe. I can't do this.

Break out physical panic. And of course, then I do it. And I'm looking at my body, which is working fine. It's making the turn. And then there's my brain.

From Lens perspective, it's not as easy as advertised. She's frustrated about how these tactics are at times marketed as simple instant fixes. But to take a poor person who is struggling,

you can't over something. This is easy. You just close your eyes and you spend one second, no more than one second on it. Bad image and then you replace it with a good image.

But just for one second. So anyway, let me just say that that is not true. So you end up feeling bad. And you end up feeling that it's your fault. This is the problem with self-help in general, right?

It promises the world and that's empowering. But when it doesn't work, people end up blaming themselves. I asked Tony about the miracle cure claims surrounding an LP. What are the limits of an LP? Well, I don't think you should limit it to an LP.

“I think you should think of it as neuroscience.”

You should think of it as psychology. You should think of it as, you know, Eastern practices. Like if you limit yourself to one set of techniques. Yes, there's limits.

You'll always bump into limits.

I think the limits are our own belief systems in most cases. Either limits like, you know, physical limits of how much heat you can deal with, right? Firewalking. Of course there are. Right?

But the limits we think there are are rarely the real limits. And so I think it's really about extending beyond that. Well, I ask in part about limits because people have criticized NLP and other forms of self-help. Because they tell people that they can radically change their lives. When there are systemic societal problems.

That mean that not everyone is playing on an even playing field. What would you say to those people? I'd say, well, if you want to argue that people's limitations, you'll create them. I think it's bullshit when you tell people that they have all these disadvantages. Not that there aren't disadvantages.

But the most successful people on earth started with disadvantages. But what happened is they didn't let them stop it. They didn't buy that story that excuse, right? Because everyone has some injustice in their life. Some more than others for sure.

But some of the people with the most injustice. Whether it be societal or whether it be physical being born blind or losing or going to something that nature. And they need some of the greatest contributors to society in the world. Tony spilt his brand on this idea of sheer determination. Infomercials like this one, personal power, broad Tony and NLP into the homes of millions of Americans.

Call now and order the complete personal power 30 day success system for only 179.95.

Through the infomercials, Tony sold a crazy number of cassette tapes.

Over 120 million copies in the first five years they aired.

But he also sold Tony. There's no question about Tony Robbins skills in teaching people success principles. The only question that a person listening can have is can I do it?

“My number one job in life is really to be the destroyer of limitations.”

I took on everything that could imagine. You know, women who had an orgasm in ten years obviously didn't touch your an orgasm on stage. Guys were coming to tell me, can you teach me how to do that when I'm tired? So it just expanded and then gradually I started applying all the things I learned into business and built businesses. Tony is without rival the most successful NLP practitioner.

His courses teach success, including financial success.

But it hasn't always worked out for other people.

I did some research into Tony's organization. In the 1990s, he franchised his seminars, but apparently that wasn't always as lucrative for the folks taking the courses or selling them. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Tony's franchise NLP seminars misrepresented to people how much they would make selling the seminars. Apparently in some cases if you went to one of these events, like from a franchisee, you just sat in a room and watched videos of Tony.

“Yeah, and the agency said that Tony promised that people doing this would make between 75 and 300K a year.”

But in fact, people made way less. Tony paid $200,000 to settle with the FTC in 1995. Though he maintains that some franchisees did make what he claimed. Tony didn't comment on the settlement. Today, Tony has expanded beyond NLP trading.

He told us he has 114 different companies around the world. Thousands of people are attending fireworks every year, and some even pay more than $80,000 for a membership in what he calls the Platinum Lions. Basically an elite club where you just get to hang out with Tony. He learned these human persuasion technologies from NLP. Techniques like rapport.

There is something that always works to get rapport, and it's something called matching and mirroring.

This is from a Tony Robbins YouTube clip on how to forge a sense of connection with anyone. In the video which was posted in 2016, Tony claims people like people who are like them. And then teaches a room full of students to match their breath, tone, and body language to someone else's. Breathing, breathing is very powerful, one of the most powerful. If you breathe at the exact same pace as another person, you will feel what they are feeling.

Period, but you got to be in the same location the same tempo, and breathing is magnificent because it really hooks you to this person. This supposedly can create instant trust. So you start bouncing your foot like this, back and forth. Can I bounce my foot at the same tempo? If I do, you'll feel totally connected to me.

And that trust and connection can be used to sell. As he explains in one of his trainings, mastering influence. We don't do things for logical reasons. We don't for emotional reasons.

“I think this is really the truth that selling is the process of finding people's pain,”

disturbing them, stirring up their pain, making them feel the hurt, and then healing it through new sets of choices, usually in the form of your products or services. It's a herd of him in healing business. Tony wasn't the only one putting his own spin on the techniques. In the 1990s, Jordan Belfort, aka The Wolf of Wall Street, taught an army of cold collars how to use rapport.

That's according to training materials from his investment bank that I found. Years later, Belfort came out as a fan of NLP. Here's some talking about its power for sales in some YouTube videos from 2021. I had the benefit of selling the resume from Dr. Richard Bannon. Imagine, in every time that you were about to walk into a situation of influence, you could feel as confident and as clear as the moment you've felt after you closed the best sale of your life.

As NLP grew, seminars churned out licensed trainers eager to start new businesses. Nancy Salzman, who we met in our first episode, was another enterprising young NLPwiz. In the 1980s, Nancy was a nurse specializing in hypnosis for chronic pain. By the 1990s, she was an NLP trainer and had secured new gigs teaching NLP to corporate employees at a con Edison nuclear plant.

rapport would later become one of the methods "nexium" taught their members in order to recruit new people.

But took me 20 years to figure this stuff out. But I don't know, you know, they go to a seminar and they go home and they sleep and they wake up the next morning and it's in their mind, just like that. Now, I wouldn't want to be real impressed with the psychological technology and try to steal it from the person who developed it. We don't think Banner's talking specifically about anyone here, but about the number of people borrowing from his toolkit. It seems to be getting to him.

This is from Richard Banner's tape, creating therapeutic change. I mean, I get this a lot of times in seminars with people that try to come up and use my techniques on me. And they don't realize that this will piss me off, right? I had one guy come home from the practitioner course and he called me on the phone and told me he was having a certain sexual problem.

“And did I think there was any relationship between the example I kept giving him over and over and over again?”

And I said, "Nah, it's probably a coincidence." And he bought it, that's what I love. He bought it, I hung up the phone and I would Jesus Christ. If Banner was upset about people learning NLP and making it their own, hypnotically ruining their sex lives was pretty much all he could do about it.

Because Banner and Grinder never copyrighted NLP, it got away from them.

That's it's later, they were fighting over ownership. In 1997, Banner sued Grinder, his old collaborator, along with a bunch of other high profile NLP trainers and 200 John and Jane Does for tens of millions of dollars. He claimed unfair trade practices and trademark infringement among other offenses. A ton of people stopped using the term NLP because they were so afraid they get dragged into this lawsuit. Tony had already stopped using the word's neurolinguistic programming in 1991.

He said in an article he was "icked out" by the word programming and began calling what he does. Neuro-associative conditioning. Okay, yeah sounds familiar. Tony's rebrand may be a big part of why relatively few people have heard of NLP. Even though Tony is a household name, these days Tony does mention NLP on his website,

and he hosted Banner at a platinum lines event not long ago, where he talked about his debt to NLP and to Banner.

“And that's what made me want to honor my fact.”

More people need to know about Richard. Actually, I asked Tony specifically about Banner. Well, Richard is a wild man. He's brilliant. And Richard is going to give us it with people think. Richard is willing to do just about anything to get the outcome. Next time on mine games.

Am I a better shop than Richard Banner? Yes.

What you heard of your first?

And you're a better shop than Tony. You taught Tony how to shoot, too. [Music] Mine games is a kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeartPodcasts. The series is created and hosted by me, Zoey Laskaz, and Alice Hines.

It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Lookpots, edited by Kate Osborne, editorial consulting from a Disa Egan. Original composition and mixing by Steve Bohn. Fact-checking by Amen Wailin. From kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oz Wolotion,

Mangesh Hatika Doer, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki E. Toer. [Music] 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?

It had just been based at first.

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 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 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 with Jay Shetty, on the iHeart Radio app,

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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.