The Self-Help Empire

00:00:11
Speaker 1: Picture this. It's nineteen eighty three and you're driving in your car when you hear this young guy come on the radio. He's maybe twenty three years old. That thing you hate about yourself, he can fix it.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: I don't care what your problem is. I don't care if you've had phobias for years, come see me. I'll handle it in one hour. I am the one stop therapist.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Right people start calling in with questions like could he care anxiety, binge, drinking, procrastination. The answer is always yes, of course absolutely. And then a skeptic comes on the air and he.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Starts 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 signist. Then he said, of course, I'm a scientist. I said, well, a scientist would never assume anything. And I said, as a scientist, you can come up with a hypothesis you want. If you're truly a scientist, isn't a true You have to test your hypothesis. And this is what launched my career.

00:01:14
Speaker 1: He throws down a gauntlet he's holding an event the next night at a holiday inn.

00:01:19
Speaker 2: So I suggest the best way you prove your hypothesis is bring me one of your patients, bringing somebody you've never been able to change. I said, I'm sure you've got plenty of those.

00:01:28
Speaker 1: They go back and forth, but eventually the doctor admits he does have this one patient, a woman with a snake phobia.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: And I said, how long have you treated her? And he said seven years? And I said, well, bring her down. That should take me ten or fifteen minutes. And the guy just lost it.

00:01:44
Speaker 3: What you know?

00:01:45
Speaker 2: And the radio guy says, we'll see you tomorrow night at the holiday inn.

00:01:51
Speaker 1: It's on. The young miracle worker was expecting thirty to forty people at the free event. Five hundred show up. There aren't enough chairs. He gets up on stage and introduces himself.

00:02:03
Speaker 2: So, Hi, I'm Tony Robbins. I'm here today and to share with you how you can have you know, more change and a more rapid pace than you probably ever thought possible. Changes you thought would take years or months could be done in minutes or hours. And right as I finish over, literally the side door bursts open.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: It's like high noon in an old western in walks. The psychiatrist in his patient, Tony brings her up on stage and I.

00:02:26
Speaker 2: Walked behind her to the back, and there's a table there, and I had a little knapsack and I reached in the knapsack and I'm walking behind her. I reached out and I paused this little gardener snake and I put the snake in front of her, and of course she jumped 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. I said, okay, and I said would you be willing to hold it? And she stayed a little more intensity. It's not very attractive, you know, lean back, but didn't shake, didn't spit, none of those overreactions. And I said, think about what it feel like. They just told that sname can conquer that fear, and the audience is going hold it, hold it, hold you know Sega movie.

00:03:06
Speaker 1: The woman reaches out and grabs a snake in front of everyone.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: This is part of why my career grew, because I did crazy.

00:03:12
Speaker 1: Things that day twenty three year old Tony Robbins cured a phobia and launched a self help empire.

00:03:23
Speaker 2: What if your worst day was actually your best day? What is the most painful day in your life could be converted to your best day? They can't. This is a new beginning for your life. This is taking your standard to a new level. This is embodying it at a whole new level. It's all happening for us, my friends, not to us. This is you unleash could deep breath in and breathed out.

00:04:10
Speaker 4: Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak primately on your unconscious mind.

00:04:18
Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, This is Mind Games Episode four. I'm Zoe Lascos and I'm Alice Hines.

00:04:30
Speaker 2: You don't know how you did it. You did you.

00:04:31
Speaker 4: You're going to a little time to Starsian stake and you're out of it.

00:04:39
Speaker 5: Last episode, we looked at how the co founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, discovered hypnosis and used the techniques they learned to market NLP as a persuasion technology.

00:04:53
Speaker 1: What began as a set of therapeutic techniques became a series of sales hacks, and from there NLP became the s sense of a new self help industrial complex.

00:05:03
Speaker 5: Bandler and Grinder 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 nineteen ninety.

00:05:30
Speaker 6: In the last year, over fifty 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, improve the quality of their relationships, and achieve peak physical performance.

00:05:48
Speaker 1: Today, at sixty five, Tony Robbins is the world's most famous coach. He's worked with corporations like AT and T, Procter and Gamble, Xerox, American Express, IBM, and DOW. Celebrities like Andre Agassi, Serena Williams, Hugh Jackman, Pitbull, Princess Diana. They have all been clients. Bill Pinon called you the night before nineteen ninety yeah and said, Tony, they may be impeaching me in the morning.

00:06:14
Speaker 2: What should I do?

00:06:14
Speaker 7: What an extraordinary position of responsibility?

00:06:18
Speaker 8: You have?

00:06:18
Speaker 2: Not the only person he called.

00:06:20
Speaker 1: 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.

00:06:31
Speaker 2: Anybody could be in a good state when things are going your way, but if you can stay at a beautiful state when things don't go your way, then you're going to have a beautiful wife.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's the millions of dollars he's made in the process. He's not shy about his success.

00:06:51
Speaker 2: I'm Tony Robbins. You know, I'm a business specialist and he performance coach. He has a variety of techniques and tools. One hundred and fourteen companies across about twelve different industries. We do today about nine billion dollars in business.

00:07:07
Speaker 1: I reached Tony over Zoom at his home in Palm Beach. He Studi's ambivalent about the modern world of gurus, frauds and get rich quick schemes. He helped create and so I feel like I.

00:07:17
Speaker 2: Helped the father an industry that, quite frankly, is a monster. And then I call it a monster because there's no quality control. Right. It's like, you know, somebody goes some class, somebody gives some 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. You know, 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.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: Interviewing Tony Robbins can feel like talking to a YouTube video playing at double speed.

00:07:52
Speaker 2: My nature is unpassionate. I talk very rapidly, I talk aloud, I project to an audience, So I'm wired that way. Well. Our culture tends to to give more credibility to someone who speaks more like President Obama for example, and someone talking to this particular tempo or talking.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: To a runaway philosophy machine.

00:08:11
Speaker 2: I know it sounds corny, but the ultimate technique is love and caring for that client. I have a simple philosophy. I know every person I meet, Zoe, you included, and I mean it sincerely. Every person I meet, I know is going to be superior to me in at least one.

00:08:25
Speaker 1: Or more areas or a dictionary.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: 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.

00:08:38
Speaker 1: But Tony is also disarmingly nice. He was generous with his time and happy to talk about his NLP roots.

00:08:45
Speaker 2: I got involved in NLP when I was very young, when I was about, gosh, twenty three years old. I was kind of obsessed at a very early age of anything that can make a difference in people's lives.

00:08:55
Speaker 1: Tony grew up on the wrong side of the trucks, as he's fond of saying, whole my life was chaotic. His mother was addicted to alcohol and prescription pills, and he left home at seventeen.

00:09:06
Speaker 2: 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. 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 at myself.

00:09:27
Speaker 1: Tony discovered the world of development gurus as a teenage door to door salesman.

00:09:35
Speaker 5: This was the late nineteen seventies and motivational speaking was an increasingly crowded field. There was Werner Erhard and his est trainings.

00:09:44
Speaker 4: 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.

00:09:52
Speaker 5: There was Norman Vincent Peel with his Church of Positive Thinking.

00:09:56
Speaker 9: Don't tell me that taje Name's thinking doesn't work wonders.

00:10:04
Speaker 5: And there were eat or Be Eaten guys like Jim Rohn.

00:10:07
Speaker 10: Every single day you wake up with a choice. You can choose to be weak, to give in to your excuses, to let your fears control you, or you can choose to be strong.

00:10:19
Speaker 5: 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, aphorisms, visualizations, and long, vague stories of miraculous transformations that were impossible to fact check. Forget science. Anecdotal evidence spoke for itself.

00:10:40
Speaker 1: There's a reason these gurus suddenly appeared in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. 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.

00:11:15
Speaker 5: In, and no one bottled and sold this survival of the fittest mentality better than motivational speaker Jim Ron. Jim challenged his students to take charge of their lives, kill the weak parts of themselves, and banish limiting beliefs.

00:11:32
Speaker 1: Let me tell you something.

00:11:34
Speaker 10: 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.

00:11:48
Speaker 1: It was there at a Jim Rohan's seminar that Tony found his calling. He began working as Roan's assistant and then as a salesman, flacking roan seminars to businesses around LA. By the time he was nighe he was head of his own sales office. Tony got his drive to banish weakness from Ron by 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 you say, you were no stranger to motivation programs, you'd worked with Jim Rohn. What stood out to you about NLP versus other methods?

00:12:26
Speaker 2: Well, Jim ron was not my motivational speaker, per se. I mean that's the term people over you is. 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. He was more of a business philosopher. So I look at life as you need both philosophy and strategy. If you have strategy, that's how to, and the better strategy you'll get you the result faster. That's what NLP really was.

00:12:48
Speaker 1: He was about twenty three when he went to an NLP training. John Grinder was running near the Los Angeles Airport. Tony stuck out from the crowd.

00:12:57
Speaker 2: 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, they've been trained to take forever to make change. And it really annoyed me to see somebody, you know, 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 Grinder, I knew could be matter of sometimes hours or minutes. And so I kind of talked my way into this six month training class and I was obsessed.

00:13:24
Speaker 1: First, Tony tried NLP techniques out on himself.

00:13:28
Speaker 2: 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'd bid, it would be bitter. Nothing seemed to stop it, and I did the simple swish 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.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: Nail biting down. He craved something more ambitious.

00:13:53
Speaker 2: I started really thinking about you know, MLP is 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'd certainly want to use those too, 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.

00:14:10
Speaker 1: John Grinder gave him an assignment.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: I want you to come up with something else that's its seemingly impossible, and I want you to go model it and come back and show me you're done.

00:14:21
Speaker 1: And that's when Tony.

00:14:23
Speaker 2: Decided, tonight we have a firewalk to walk on fire, getting yourself when you're scared, to snap out of it and storm through. That's a perfect metaphor for the fire of your life. Now let me show you how.

00:14:34
Speaker 9: To walk on fire like the boot say yeah, Say yeah.

00:14:45
Speaker 1: Firewalks are Tony's signature. They're often the big adrenaline soak 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 cold, cheering each other on.

00:15:02
Speaker 2: 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 change their physiology, which to me was one of the fundamental tools that I learned from John Grindery.

00:15:18
Speaker 1: In the Tony verse, physiology is key to changing someone's stated 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 congo lines. There's also a lot of yelling.

00:15:37
Speaker 5: Firewalking is funny to me because, like a lot of magic tricks, it seems physically impossible but is actually not at all.

00:15:44
Speaker 11: Right.

00:15:44
Speaker 1: The coals are very hot, but as long as you keep moving quickly, you won't get badly burned.

00:15:50
Speaker 5: The whole point is just to hype you up.

00:15:52
Speaker 1: If you can walk on fire, Alice, what can't you do in your life?

00:15:55
Speaker 2: But the point was to get yourself to take that step, because it's just like if you take that first step, especially in firewalking, you're gonna take the second, third, or the fifth steps.

00:16:05
Speaker 5: Honestly, it seems to be basically getting people in an emotional state where they'll believe anything.

00:16:11
Speaker 1: 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.

00:16:30
Speaker 2: Metaphors were very helpful. The metaphor opens the door. Then you've got to really develop the skills, and you 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 do they need? And then show them how to basically shape themselves.

00:17:00
Speaker 5: I was actually feeling inspired by Tony Robbins, so I tried some of this recently.

00:17:05
Speaker 1: And who is your willing guinea pig, Alice?

00:17:07
Speaker 5: Okay, 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. When was the last time you were at Governor's Island?

00:17:32
Speaker 12: Never?

00:17:33
Speaker 10: You've never been?

00:17:34
Speaker 5: No? Oh cool, I'm with Zoe's mom Lynn. We're heading out to Governor's Island in New York City to find a calm place to practice bike riding. I also rented us bikes that are like upright bikes want so we don't have to do city bikes.

00:17:51
Speaker 11: Oh, I'm so happy because Lynn.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: Is in her early seventies.

00:17:54
Speaker 5: Before we met up for our bike ride, I visited her at her home to do a couple of MLP visualizingtion exercises.

00:18:03
Speaker 13: The bike riding inventiones are kind of a compositive flying through Times Square.

00:18:11
Speaker 5: In her younger years, she was a fearless bike rider.

00:18:14
Speaker 13: Failing invincible with my favorite pair of green and high heels in the basket and just the exhilaration and the freedom I felt.

00:18:25
Speaker 5: But these days she's way less confident on two wheels. Part of her problem is physical scoliosis changed her center of gravity, so it's.

00:18:34
Speaker 8: Like I've lost my power.

00:18:36
Speaker 11: I'm not the one in control, right.

00:18:38
Speaker 5: You feel like you're kind of I'm the little kid, you know, Yes, And part of it is mental. She gets extremely anxious when making turns or in traffic, and she shakes herself out and she hates feeling this way.

00:18:50
Speaker 8: I hadn't figured out the physical element in it, so I thought, my god, this is what getting old is. Your world strengths, fear replaces calm, and you just sort of dwindle down. You've kind of fade off.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: Hell No, Hell now is not what I want.

00:19:12
Speaker 5: You are going to crush it. Today when 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.

00:19:31
Speaker 11: Was I think the word and out of control?

00:19:33
Speaker 5: So right, So we're going to try to trigger that without it actually happening.

00:19:37
Speaker 8: I'm getting tensolrad.

00:19:38
Speaker 1: There we go.

00:19:39
Speaker 5: 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 is an NLP technique. They call it Swish swish. It's what Tony used on the woman with the snakephobia. 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.

00:20:11
Speaker 12: Well, colors are part of the memory. Is there a specific palette? How did you feel?

00:20:21
Speaker 13: Accelerated? Powerful compliment?

00:20:27
Speaker 5: 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.

00:20:46
Speaker 2: And so.

00:20:48
Speaker 14: Imagine yourself on that boardwalk in Santa Monica, that feeling of wobbliness and apprehension.

00:20:54
Speaker 3: Can you feel it?

00:20:55
Speaker 13: Who got ya?

00:20:57
Speaker 1: Okay?

00:20:58
Speaker 14: Now I want you to make it small. Switch the two images, okay, and make the image of the Whitehouse big, full color, purposeful, confident.

00:21:13
Speaker 2: Woosh, do this, see this. Whoosh, do this, see this, do this, see this, do this, see this, do this, see this, do this, until when you see the old thing of like wanting to bite 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.

00:21:27
Speaker 5: As Tony Robbins 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.

00:21:52
Speaker 14: You're going to come out in three two one, open your eyes.

00:22:02
Speaker 11: Ah.

00:22:04
Speaker 15: That was very interesting. Several things happened when I was on the bike. What gave 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 safely to school. So yeah, there's traffic that stuff.

00:22:33
Speaker 1: But there was Zee.

00:22:35
Speaker 13: I dropped her off, and after I did that, I could head for the lighthouse.

00:22:41
Speaker 14: That's great when it really worked.

00:22:43
Speaker 1: That one really worked, right.

00:22:47
Speaker 5: Okay, And with that we pushed off.

00:22:56
Speaker 1: That was pretty good, right, people.

00:22:59
Speaker 16: Onside car on the other tracker instrument of doom.

00:23:04
Speaker 1: I know, right, like ooh, I was going to stop, that.

00:23:09
Speaker 8: Is what I was thinking, but then he it was just enough.

00:23:12
Speaker 2: Real.

00:23:13
Speaker 1: I'm really curious why this worked, not only because she's my mother, but because I've tried all sorts of stuff to get her back on a bike.

00:23:21
Speaker 5: Yeah, like getting her drunk tipsy.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: 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 biked around my neighborhood.

00:23:36
Speaker 16: Yeah.

00:23:36
Speaker 5: When she told me about that, I think she said she didn't like the pressure.

00:23:40
Speaker 1: 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.

00:23:53
Speaker 5: 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.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: That's great, I'm really happy to hear that. But how much of it do you think was the NLP?

00:24:07
Speaker 5: That is what I'm on the fence about. Practicing riding a bike in general maybe would have helped just as much. So I'm not sure how much the guided imagery played a role. There's a technique in clinical psychology called exposure therapy which is honestly kind of identical to Tony's phobia cure.

00:24:24
Speaker 2: And you look at his snake and when his tongue click is out at you, you know he's saying, I just I'm a little bit scared. Please support me. And how's that feel? As he starts wrapping around you. Not bad.

00:24:33
Speaker 5: Here's Tony doing the snake phobia cure that launched his career in that same VHS tape.

00:24:39
Speaker 2: And how would you make it feel good? If you can make it feel good? Now, what would you say to yourself or what would you picture?

00:24:45
Speaker 12: I'd sing to the snake?

00:24:46
Speaker 2: What would you sing to it?

00:24:47
Speaker 11: I'd sing happy days are here again?

00:24:50
Speaker 2: Okay, so all the snag I kin sing to his face, ohead b and enjoy it.

00:25:03
Speaker 5: Licensed therapists also give their clients visualization techniques like this. NLP 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.

00:25:20
Speaker 1: And Tony is also doing these cures on stage where there's an audience and all this pressure to make some crazy, miraculous breakthrough in front of the audience.

00:25:30
Speaker 2: You're gonna have lasting change. You gotta understand the whole human being. And to do that is you know, it's not quick sometimes, right, you know. Unfortunately today a lot of psychiatry and psychology is using techniques from one hundred years ago. You when you use a phone from twenty years ago, 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 training results. And that's the biggest difference. I say, my obsession is can't produce the result consistently for people, and what good is it?

00:26:00
Speaker 1: In a few months since she went to Governor's Island with my Mam Malice, did these sparkly new techniques stick? I've been deliberately not asking her about this whole experiment.

00:26:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, so she's been practicing on her own, and I recently called her up to check on her progress.

00:26:14
Speaker 16: The thing I do like about this approach is it makes you feel that it's possible that you, your brain, which has.

00:26:21
Speaker 11: 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.

00:26:32
Speaker 5: Lin's been improving, for sure, but it's been slow.

00:26:35
Speaker 11: Doom catastrophe.

00:26:37
Speaker 7: I can't do this freak 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.

00:26:48
Speaker 5: From Lin's perspective, it's not as easy as advertised. She's frustrated about how these tactics are at times marketed as simple instant fixes.

00:26:58
Speaker 16: Did take a pork, said person who is struggling to get over something.

00:27:03
Speaker 11: This is easy. You just close your eyes and you spend one second, no more than one second.

00:27:08
Speaker 16: On 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.

00:27:20
Speaker 1: 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 ask Tony about the miracle cure claims surrounding NLP, what are the limits of NLP?

00:27:36
Speaker 2: Well, I don't. I don't think you should limit to NLP. 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 the 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, are there limits, like you know, physical limits of how much heat you can deal with, like firewalking. Of course there are, right, but the limits we think they are are rarely the real limits, and so I think it's really about extending beyond that.

00:28:06
Speaker 1: 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.

00:28:28
Speaker 2: Say, well, if you want to argue for your 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 happens is they didn't let them stop it. They didn't buy that story or that excuse, right, because everybody has some injustice in their life, some more than others, for sure, But some of the people with the most injustice, whether they be societal or whether it be physical being born blind or losing or going through something of that nature, and they be some of the greatest contributors to society in the world.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: Tony's built his brand on this idea of sheer determination. Infomercials like this one Personal Power brought Tony and NLP into the homes of millions of Americans.

00:29:12
Speaker 17: Call now and ordered the Complete Personal Power thirty Day Success System for only one seventy nine to ninety five. You'll receive twenty four audio cassettes, each containing life changing information that Tony Robbins teaches and his live seminars through the infomercials.

00:29:28
Speaker 1: Tony sold a crazy number of cassette tapes, over one hundred and twenty million copies in the first five years they aired, but he also sold Tony.

00:29:36
Speaker 5: There's no question about Tony Robbin's skills in teaching people success principles.

00:29:42
Speaker 2: 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. Can imagine. I had a you know, a woman who hadn't had an orgasm inntenure its obviously didn't touch her, and had 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.

00:30:14
Speaker 5: Tony's, 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 nineteen nineties, 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 franchised 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 franchise e, you just sat in a room and watched videos of Tony No Yeah, And the agency said that Tony promised that people doing this would make between seventy five and three hundred K a year, but in fact people made way less. Tony paid two hundred thousand dollars to settle with the FTC in nineteen ninety five, though he maintains that some franchises did make what he claimed. Tony didn't comment on the settlement. Today, Tony has expanded beyond NLP trainings. He told us he has one hundred and fourteen different companies around the world. Thousands of people are attending firewalks every year, and some even pay more than eighty thousand dollars for a membership in what he calls the Platinum Lions, basically an elite club where you just get to hang out with Tony.

00:31:41
Speaker 1: He learned these human persuasion technologies from NLP techniques. Like rapport.

00:31:46
Speaker 2: Here is something that always works to get rapport, and it's something called matching and mirroring.

00:31:52
Speaker 1: 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 twenty sixteen, 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.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: Breathing's 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 being from the same location, the same tempo and breathing is magnificent because it really hooks you to this person.

00:32:27
Speaker 1: This supposedly can create instant trust.

00:32:30
Speaker 2: 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.

00:32:38
Speaker 1: And that trust and connection can be used to sell. As he explains in one of his trainings, Mastering Influence, we.

00:32:46
Speaker 2: Don't do things for logical reasons. We do them 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 it through new sets of choices, usually in the form of your products or services. It's a hurd him and healing business.

00:33:06
Speaker 5: Tony wasn't the only one putting his own spin on the techniques. In the nineteen nineties, Jordan Belfort aka the Wolf of Wall Street, taught an army of cold callers how to use rapport. That's according to training materials from his investment bank that I found. Years later. Belfourt came out as a fan of NLP. Here's him talking about its power for sales in some YouTube videos from twenty twenty one.

00:33:31
Speaker 3: I had the benefits of studying the revenue gost, but Richard Band would imagine if 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 felt after you closed the best sale of your life.

00:33:50
Speaker 5: As NLP grew, seminars churned out licensed trainers eager to start new businesses. Nancy Salzman, who we met in our first episode, was another and surprising young NLP whiz. In the nineteen eighties, Nancy was a nurse specializing in hypnosis for chronic pain. By the nineteen nineties, 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. We're going to get into Nexium and some other wild applications of NLP and future episodes.

00:34:31
Speaker 4: It took me twenty 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 a psychological technology and try to steal it from the person who developed it.

00:34:52
Speaker 5: We don't think Bandler'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 Bandler's tape Creating Therapeutic Change.

00:35:05
Speaker 4: I mean, I get this a lot of times at 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.

00:35:14
Speaker 2: Right.

00:35:15
Speaker 4: 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.

00:35:34
Speaker 15: He bought it.

00:35:35
Speaker 4: I hung up the phone and I went Jesus Christ.

00:35:38
Speaker 1: If Bandler was upset about people learning in LP and making it their own hypnotically ruining their sex lives, was pretty much all he could do about it. Because Bandler and Grinder never copyrighted on LP, it got away from them decades later they were fighting over ownership.

00:35:55
Speaker 5: In nineteen ninety seven, Bandler sued Grinder, his old collaborator, along with a bunch of other high profile NLP trainers and two hundred 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 stop using the term NLP because they were so afraid they get dragged into this lawsuit.

00:36:20
Speaker 1: Tony had already stopped using the words neuro linguistic programming. In nineteen ninety one, he said in an article he was icked out by the word programming and began calling what he does neuro associative conditioning.

00:36:34
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, sounds familiar.

00:36:36
Speaker 1: Tony's rebrand maybe 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 Bandler at a Platinum Lines event not long ago where he talked about his debt to NLP and to Bandler, And that's what.

00:36:55
Speaker 2: Made me want to honor my thought. More people don't need to know about Richard.

00:36:58
Speaker 1: Actually, I asked Tony's secifically about Bandler.

00:37:01
Speaker 2: Well, Richard is a wild man. He's brilliant, and Richard's and give a shit what people think. Richard is willing to do just about anything to get the outcome.

00:37:22
Speaker 5: Next time on Mine Games.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: Am I a better shot than Richard Bandler?

00:37:25
Speaker 2: Yes?

00:37:27
Speaker 1: What you heard it your first and you're a better shot than Tony. You talk Tony how to shoot too. Mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me Zoe Lascas and Alice Hines. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara luck Potts, edited by Kate Osborne, editorial consulting from Diza Egan.

00:38:01
Speaker 5: Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone, fact checking by Aman Whalen from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswaloshan, Mangesh Hatikador, and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki Etour