All In Your Head

00:00:12
Speaker 1: So when you were in California, Zoe and you were hearing all of these crazy stories of people fixing all of their psychological issues. But also, you know, being crucified didn't make you want to try this stuff.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: Oh one hundred percent. It not only made me want to try this stuff, but it actually really up the stakes of the stuff I wanted to try. Specifically, the NLP crews experiments with hypnosis. Back then, they were playing around with it for the first time, sort of testing the limits of what they could do. So you might find them installing and uninstalling phobias in their friends and making people hallucinate things that weren't there, or hypnotically deleting things that were. But of all these applications of hypnosis, one stood out to me specifically. This guy Terry told me about how the co developers of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, put him in a trance and he was able to remember details of a car accident he'd been in years earlier that he thought he'd blacked out completely.

00:01:14
Speaker 1: So hypnosis can actually help you recover memories that you've lost.

00:01:19
Speaker 2: Well, it's really controversial.

00:01:22
Speaker 3: And let me just press okay, effect all right, but.

00:01:26
Speaker 2: I personally have a reason for wanting to believe it works. I was trying to think of meaningful applications of NLP and hypnosis to my life. And I certainly have some embarrassing habits and little flaws I'd love to vanish. But I was thinking of something a little more substantial than saving my cuticles and nails from my picking and biting. Or I'm on a call with an English hypnotist who has studied NLP. Her name is Cas Riley. And really, what sort of haunted me throughout my life is this void left by who died when.

00:02:00
Speaker 4: I was young.

00:02:02
Speaker 2: My father died of cancer when I was six, And although I love the person I've come to know through stories from my mom and their friends, I don't have that many of my own memories of him. Can I get some back through hypnosis? Just like he must have held me as a child, he must have lifted me up, He must have touched me, you know, just like colors, impressions, moments, the light things.

00:02:25
Speaker 3: Like the deepest sense with him.

00:02:28
Speaker 2: That's the goal. But I'm wary of even trying this because hypnotic memory recovery is not at all in exact or even remotely proven science.

00:02:38
Speaker 3: That's a very hotly debated subject. I'm quite rightly so, because.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: It's apparently alarmingly easy to install memories in someone's mind using hypnosis. People have come out of trances with false memories of alien abduction or even childhood abuse. But the way it Kas openly acknowledged the risks helped put me at ease.

00:02:58
Speaker 3: Is my view from the work that I've done, is that we can certainly help people get a deeper sense of somebody that they lost, especially somebody like a parent when they were younger, but we will never know if those memories are real or not.

00:03:16
Speaker 2: With the disclaimer that what we get might not be capital are real, Kas still believes it's worth doing. Kas says she avoids installing fake memories by steering clear of leading questions.

00:03:27
Speaker 3: It's really opening your mind and seeing what's in there with regards to dads and bring it into a more conscious state.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: If you like, you're about to hear Kaz hypnotize me. If you're driving, skip ahead to our theme music.

00:03:47
Speaker 3: Now, I wonder if you knew, Zoe that ever since today that you were born, you've learned and experienced so many wonderful and amazing things. And there's a very special, wonderful, amazing and unique part of you, You're inner mind, your subconscious mind. I can have access to all those wonderful things that lay within. Now in a moment, you can hear me count down from ten all the way down to zero. And as I count down from ten all the way.

00:04:38
Speaker 5: Down, take a deep breath in.

00:04:52
Speaker 6: And breathe out.

00:04:55
Speaker 4: Where your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak primate you're unconscious mine.

00:05:01
Speaker 5: You can notice that you feel rested, more alerted.

00:05:06
Speaker 2: Function from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is Mine Games, Episode three.

00:05:14
Speaker 1: I'm Zoe Lascas and I'm Alice Hines.

00:05:20
Speaker 4: You don't know how you did it?

00:05:21
Speaker 1: Do you?

00:05:22
Speaker 7: You're going to a little time to Starshi, stay and.

00:05:27
Speaker 4: You're out of it.

00:05:30
Speaker 1: Zoe re listening to that clip? What happened to you?

00:05:33
Speaker 2: Dude? I cannot even listen to that clip without slipping into a trance. It's like She's the whistle, I am the dog kaboom.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: That's so funny because it really does nothing for me.

00:05:44
Speaker 2: What are you serious?

00:05:46
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:05:46
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm just listening to a podcast our sexy hypno for us. I mean she's addressing you, she says your name. That might be part of it. That makes a lot of sense. Actually, it is very personal for me.

00:05:58
Speaker 2: When I'm slipping into trance, feels like my body is getting heavier at the same time that my mind is getting lighter, or like parts of my brain are even fluttering. And it's kind of addictive because in trance you can feel or be whatever you want, so.

00:06:15
Speaker 8: Your body can figure really big or really small. I can feel I'm in my body.

00:06:20
Speaker 1: It's funny that you describe it that way. That's exactly how this hypnotherapist, Stephen Gilligan explains trance.

00:06:26
Speaker 3: I can feel that I'm up on the ceiling.

00:06:29
Speaker 2: I can feel that I have five hands.

00:06:31
Speaker 9: I can feel like I'm five years old. I can feel like I'm ten thousand years old.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: Last episode, Richard Bandler was an undergraduate running experimental site groups with linguist professor John Grinder. It was the early seventies and what they were doing was weird, but it was also part of a larger alternative therapy moment.

00:06:53
Speaker 2: Everything changed when Vandler and Grinder learned about hypnosis.

00:06:57
Speaker 4: NLP grew out of my fascination with its phenomenon more than anything else, because when I saw people doing this stuff, I started going, it's the same brain doing it. I mean, if your brain will do it, it's just a question of who's driving the bus.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: That's Bandler talking about his interest in hypnosis during one of his seminars in the eighties. If you've ever seen tranced out people on a stage, making out with strangers or forgetting their own names, you know hypnosis can unlock weird mental feats. Bandler thought we could harness that.

00:07:30
Speaker 4: Now.

00:07:31
Speaker 7: The thing is is that once you get them into the altered state, you will remember to take the person back, take the new learnings. They just built the new attitude, and smooth through their personal history by having them go through and feel how much easier it would have been to have this attitude, how much more enjoyable, and see what freedom it would have given them, and then propel themselves down in the future with twice to four times much good feeling and sense of wanton anticipation about how this is going to permeate their life.

00:08:07
Speaker 1: This is Bandler in a seminar creating therapeutic change. What he's saying is that you can use hypnosis to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. For Bandler and Grinder, that included making a lot of money as the seventies turned into the eighties, and of course some people wanted to use hypnosis to control.

00:08:26
Speaker 2: Others, although to what extent that's actually possible is a big source of debate. More on that later.

00:08:33
Speaker 1: Hypnosis is tricky to study scientifically. Even hypnotherapists don't have a single official definition right that's.

00:08:40
Speaker 2: Right, And there's no one unifying physical cue all people demonstrate when they're in trance, no one part of the brain that lights up. I think hypnosis is a little like lucid dreaming. You're not a zombie, You're not not there. You're in a state of possibility.

00:08:58
Speaker 4: The thing about trance is that most of your beliefs get suspended in the altered state, because it's not that you can't do it, it's that you believe you can't do it.

00:09:12
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy four, Bendler and Grinder went down to Phoenix, Arizona, to meet a big deal psychiatrist named Milton Erickson, who probably did more than anyone else to put hypnotherapy on the mainstream medical map.

00:09:23
Speaker 1: I looked into Milton Erickson further. This guy's a hypnosis icon. As a teenager, he had polio and was paralyzed with limited speech. It made him an astute observer of other people's micro expressions and tones of voice. Eventually he was able to use self hypnosis to recover his speech and mobility. Later, as a doctor, he became a talented and innovative hypnotist. His big idea was to change the rhetoric of trance, so commands were disguised as suggestions.

00:09:55
Speaker 2: Perhaps you noticed the breath naturally slowing, deepening.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: Notice how she said the word Perhaps that's on purpose. By the way, this tape is from one of my favorite meditation apps where I hear Ericson's technique all the time.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: Do they call it hypnosis.

00:10:18
Speaker 1: No, they don't, So my theory is that hypnosis just got rebranded for our generation as mindfulness. Another one of Ericson's favorite techniques was the so called handshake interrupt. He'd come in and shake your hand, but instead of actually grabbing it, he'd touch your wrist and guide your hand up towards your face.

00:10:38
Speaker 2: That would definitely confuse me.

00:10:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was the point. It was basically to open a window into someone's subconscious through confusion. I should also mention that Ericson pretty much only ever wore purple, which maybe contributed to the general sense of weirdness people got when they met him. They called him the wizard in the desert, and he was kind of magical. He developed his own style of hypnosis. It's called permissive hypnosis. Ericson told his patients deliberately confusing stories seemingly unrelated to their problems while they were in trance. It's purposely hard to follow in order to disorient your rational, analytic brain, forcing your unconscious mind to participate and supply the details.

00:11:23
Speaker 3: So that's what.

00:11:24
Speaker 2: Bandler and Grinder picked up from Milton Erickson when they met him in Arizona in nineteen seventy four. Bandler and Grinder came back from that workshop with a new bag of tricks. At first, they used trance to turbocharge their therapy sessions, hypnotizing people to get them past particularly stubborn mental blocks. Then they began using it more as a self improvement hack. Traveling abroad, try hypnosis for speedy language learning. Here's Daniel Spitzer again, Bandler's former drum student. We met him last episode.

00:11:54
Speaker 10: There was a period of time when Richard and John would use double induction.

00:12:00
Speaker 2: That's when two people speak into each of your ears to put you in trance, and.

00:12:04
Speaker 10: They would guarantee fluency in one of several languages within seventy two hours and charge a huge sub So does that work?

00:12:13
Speaker 2: Can you learn a language in seventy two hours?

00:12:15
Speaker 5: If you've got two guys whispering in each year, you.

00:12:19
Speaker 10: Can learn some aspects of communication.

00:12:23
Speaker 1: Okay, Zoe, should we try a double induction? Yes, let's do it, but not for languages. Let's install something else in our listeners.

00:12:31
Speaker 2: Don't worry, it's not going to be anything bad. But if you're driving right now or operating heavy machinery, please pause this podcast or skip ahead thirty seconds. We're going to do a double induction.

00:12:43
Speaker 1: You're walking through a desert. There's red Ond.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: Horizon audio program.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: You haven't seen a telescope which subscribe for hundreds in a year. So you're wearing life days and can be feeled.

00:13:01
Speaker 11: Agree say sometimes in your days days that can be your mouth is par moving backwards your ears into podcasts.

00:13:12
Speaker 1: The sun makes on your aura all right, so we'll tell you what we were going for at the end of this episode, but we're going to give it a beat to marinate in your subconscious mind.

00:13:30
Speaker 2: Bendler and Grinder grew so confident in their hypnotic abilities they even began using hypnosis to attempt to cure physical conditions like skin reactions to poison oak.

00:13:42
Speaker 12: One of the ladies came into the seminar, one of these young college students came in one of the worst cases of poison oak I have ever seen, and so I, you know, I had done this with her before. So I turned around and went back. She went out, you know, and I had her meet me in the middle of nowhere and put magic dust on her to have it go away. And damned that didn't.

00:14:01
Speaker 1: Another bold, highly doubtful Bandler story.

00:14:04
Speaker 2: I know, I was obviously skeptical of these sorts of claims, but I only kept hearing them. Terry McClendon, another early NLP guy I interviewed, swear as he was far sighted until Richard Bandler and John Grinder put him in a trance. Did John and Richard really cure your eyesight? How did that work?

00:14:25
Speaker 8: It was hypnosis?

00:14:27
Speaker 2: Terry noticed his eyes when blurry when he got stressed, so Bandler and Grinder performed an age regression. They hypnotically led Terry back to his childhood, to a time before he needed glasses. While he was in the trance, Terry struck upon a memory of watching The Lone Ranger on TV.

00:14:45
Speaker 8: So I'm watching television and my mother says, Terry, you should go outside because if you watch hi much television, you're going to have to wear eyeglasses.

00:14:53
Speaker 2: Bandler and Grinder identified this as the source of Terry's vision problems, so they hypnotically asked the Lone Ranger to give him a hand.

00:15:02
Speaker 8: And I was out on the prairie and I was all alone, this little boy eight years old, and a long Ranger comes up. Long Ranger, will you help me with my eyesight? Is sure?

00:15:13
Speaker 2: A partner, I'll help you in the trance, the Lone Ranger reached into his pocket, gave Terry a silver bullet and rode off. So you're sort of identifying your vision problems as a psychosomatic be maybe a kind of hypnotic suggestion from your mother.

00:15:31
Speaker 8: It's a child exactly. So it's a two part thing. It's people's I can't believe it's not magic. It's using hypnosis to allow yourself to have bitter vision by removing these old suggestions.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: Can I ask you a good question? I just so if your mom said not to watch too much TV, it'll strain your eyes. I mean, lots of mothers say that to their kids. You do you seriously think that mothers are giving their children's vision problems?

00:16:01
Speaker 8: No, no, no, but I'm suggesting that parents give their kids suggestions all the time. I mean, you got to eat your greens or you'll never be able to do this. You're stupid. You will become a success.

00:16:13
Speaker 2: Right, But being stupid is you know that seems more about self perception than being able to see clearly or not.

00:16:20
Speaker 8: You keep sitting like that, You're not going to be able to use that leg when you get older.

00:16:24
Speaker 2: I mean that still seems really different than deteriorating eyesight.

00:16:29
Speaker 8: If you do, if you get rid of suggestions, it allows you to do the exercises that strengthen your eyes.

00:16:36
Speaker 2: Okay, so anyone could correct their vision if they do the exercises.

00:16:41
Speaker 8: No, they're not going to make my eyesight in my right eye any be there.

00:16:44
Speaker 2: I mean, you're wearing glasses.

00:16:45
Speaker 8: I'm wearing glasses that started with as you grow older.

00:16:49
Speaker 1: So this dude was literally wearing glasses when you had this exchange.

00:16:53
Speaker 2: Literally wearing glasses. And when I pointed that out to him, he said they were for a different issue, that his eyesight had deteriorated with age versus his mother programming him to be far sighted as a kid.

00:17:06
Speaker 1: Huh.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: Terry's explanation was that his eyes only got blurry when he was stressed. So he's saying that the underlying issue is more of a mental thing than some physical reality, like the shape of his cornea.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: I guess it's actually not that absurd to say that certain physical issues are rooted in our beliefs. It reminds me of hypnosis for pain relief, which is actually one of the best documented use cases for hypnosis clinically.

00:17:32
Speaker 2: Because pain is both physical and mental.

00:17:35
Speaker 1: Right, there's lots of studies on this. I was reading a meta analysis that showed a forty two percent reduction in pain for people who are especially suggestible to hypnosis. It didn't work as dramatically on everybody, but hypnosis reduced pain in most people, everything from sickle cell anemia to fibromyalgia, to chronic pain, and even childbirth.

00:17:57
Speaker 2: Speaking of which, how did it go with the hypno birthing tape you got from Nancy?

00:18:02
Speaker 1: Yes, my trance coach Nancy Salzman, So you remember Nancy Salzman made me a hypno birthing tape. I listened to it pretty regularly in my third tray muster, and Nancy also gave me another weird tip, pair the tape with an anchor, so I would basically listen to the tape and then squeeze my wrist. The idea is you can train yourself to conjure a calm emotional state, or really any emotional state on command.

00:18:30
Speaker 2: H Okay, how'd that go?

00:18:32
Speaker 1: Honestly, it worked pretty well, but I didn't end up using it in the hospital.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: Right because you had a cesarean.

00:18:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had a healthy dose of anesthesia and a scheduled cesarean, so zero pain to relieve through hypnosis or any other mind hack. But the hypnosis exercises have actually proved super useful since I've been using anchors on my daughter.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: Wait, how does that even work? She's a few months old.

00:18:58
Speaker 1: So children are actually some of the most hypnotizable people. Zoe it's an ability that we lose touch with during adolescence.

00:19:06
Speaker 2: M interesting.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: So what I do is I use a gentle hypnosis to get her to sleep. I have a series of anchors. I don't squeeze her wrist, but I sing a lullaby and stand in a specific position. And I noticed after a few weeks of doing this, her eyes started to get small with just the first few bars of the lullaby. Nancy gave me another weird tip. Basically, she said, to calm my baby down, I could hold her and match my breathing to hers. Then slow my breathing down and my baby would follow unconsciously.

00:19:40
Speaker 2: This is something hypnotists do to build rapport with their subjects.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, But to be honest, I haven't been able to pull it off yet.

00:19:47
Speaker 2: Interesting that you can do nonverbal or even pre verbal hypnosis. The only baby hypnosis I've heard of is that children's book The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep by a Swedish NLP guy.

00:19:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was a huge book. It was a huge success. I think desperate parents have bought it in like forty three countries.

00:20:07
Speaker 2: How many copies did you get at your baby shower?

00:20:09
Speaker 1: I have a copy.

00:20:11
Speaker 7: There we go.

00:20:12
Speaker 2: So it's like a bedtime story full of hypnotic commands, bolded phrases like sleep no that parents are supposed to emphasize as they read it.

00:20:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. So did Kaz do anything similar with you?

00:20:26
Speaker 2: I think putting me to sleep would have been small potatoes for Kaz. What she ended up doing was much crazier.

00:20:41
Speaker 3: Okay, so what I'm going to do. I know, as I've already said to you. Anyway you want to move, just move. You're not by the breaks. It's not a magic spell.

00:20:50
Speaker 2: This is my first hypno succession with Kaz.

00:20:53
Speaker 3: You know, we go in and out of hypnosis all the time. Anyway, I know you did it last night when you went to sleep, for example, so it's a nice easy thing to do.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: She asked me to hold up my hands and imagine a magnetic field between them.

00:21:06
Speaker 3: You can begin to feel the force of that magnetic field pulling those hands closer and closer together.

00:21:17
Speaker 2: My fingers touched, my eyes closed, and Kaz led me deeper into the trance.

00:21:22
Speaker 3: Somewhere deep inside, always there when you're wrong, to return to it.

00:21:33
Speaker 2: We began this episode with an experiment to see if I can hypnotically recover memories of my father. We had a few false starts. I got distracted several times by random thoughts and when music started blasting outside on the street. But every time I emerged from the trance, Kaz counted back down.

00:21:56
Speaker 3: Nine, drifting and letting go down and down.

00:22:00
Speaker 5: What's that say?

00:22:01
Speaker 2: I was not optimistic at this point, but we tried again, and something she said clicked. She was asking me about Gork the Octopus, a character my dad invented and used to tell me stories about.

00:22:14
Speaker 11: And my news.

00:22:15
Speaker 13: Just think a ben stories of Gork the Octopus. Just allow your amazing mind to show you how they used to make you feel. They funny, exciting, adventurous happy.

00:22:39
Speaker 2: I saw a vaguely hideous rocking chair in my childhood bedroom I'd forgotten about. And then I felt myself in a lap.

00:22:46
Speaker 14: I sort of feel like my knees bent must like unfolded up, like maybe in someone's lap.

00:22:55
Speaker 5: It doesn't feel.

00:22:58
Speaker 14: Like identifiable, you know, but just that sense of being kind of like being very small and like gangly.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: And then I heard his voice.

00:23:16
Speaker 5: I don't remember specific words, but I do sort of remember.

00:23:23
Speaker 14: The timbre of my father's voice like now a bit more kind of the like slow deliberation.

00:23:35
Speaker 5: Of his voice.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: With every scene I described, Kas would pluck out a certain sensation and weave it into her next hypnotic prompt, to see if it led somewhere new.

00:23:46
Speaker 3: So take a nice deep breath, go into that feeling of being small and gangly, allow yourself to go back to be immersed in that memory where the salad bowl is that you see the salad bowl. It's something that's said his tone we did, perhaps his excitement having shed such a lively thing with the just notice whatever that brings next, to take your time, that take all the time you want.

00:24:18
Speaker 8: To be there.

00:24:28
Speaker 2: I began to see things, my dad's head turning, and not the way it might have looked in a photo taken by someone else, but the feeling of it turning up close above me.

00:24:39
Speaker 7: I have.

00:24:40
Speaker 15: The smell is crazy, because you know, people's smell doesn't linger after they die. I just feels like very immediate and visceral to sort of flood oneself with that.

00:24:57
Speaker 3: To breathe him in.

00:25:00
Speaker 5: Funny, I think like thinking about the smell as it brought me to his closet in my parents' bedroom and just like that being a sort of center for that smell.

00:25:13
Speaker 2: The deepest parts of the trance felt like a vivid dream or an intense trip. This really felt but difficult to put into words. When I was in my parents closet, for instance, I could also sense this wild topography of cascading hills and undulating plateaus in shades of blue. It felt like my brain kept zooming in and out, like telescoping towards the horizon and back. This was at nine in the morning and I hadn't even had coffee, let alone any other drugs.

00:25:45
Speaker 3: So on two, three, lighter and lighter, four, five, six, brighter, seven and eight and eyes opening up. That's wonderful, nine and ten and just have a bit of movement moving what.

00:26:02
Speaker 14: Whoa cas this is wild, like oh my god, like so much going on there.

00:26:11
Speaker 5: But like the new use of like now is so effective.

00:26:14
Speaker 14: But to the point where even when you said other words with that absonance like sound, it had the same effect. But it's just like really bonkers again, like this is such a neo fight, Like whoa, this hypnosis stem is crazy?

00:26:32
Speaker 5: You know this already, but I know.

00:26:34
Speaker 3: But I slay after twenty odd years, I'm still.

00:26:38
Speaker 2: Like, Wow, this hypnosis stem is so amazing. Before Caz hypnotized me, I've been expecting images of my father, but what I got were moods, temperatures, and physical sensations, which kind of tracks.

00:26:52
Speaker 3: Often this is what comes up, especially when people have lost a parent when they're very young. It's about just being in their vicin, in their presence. It's not like on March the fourth we went to the zoo and we saw four penguin to giraffe. You know, that tends not to be what it is. It tends to be this kind of feeling of just being with somebody.

00:27:22
Speaker 2: I'm not sure these memories are real, but I don't really care if they're not. They're powerful and we do forget things all the time, only to find them later.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: That sounds really beautiful.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: Well, ultimately it was so tremendous else because it was like things that don't occur to you if you just sit down and you know, say to yourself, I'm gonna remember my dead dad today. It's like the feeling of his voice coming through his chest, like the reverberation that you feel when you're pressed against someone. I was crying and I've had so many years without my dad. That's not like a thing I cry about. I've lived most of my life without him. But I was absolutely a mess. I was exhausted afterwards as well.

00:28:15
Speaker 1: How has it been sitting with you in the time since you did that hypnosis.

00:28:20
Speaker 2: I've been grateful for it. I feel like it was this lovely way to cultivate some sort of posthumous intimacy. And I'm really not that attached to the idea of reality, I guess because I've spent so much of my life having no idea. If what I think I remember remember about him is legit, it's like, well, this was really emotionally affecting and physical, like my skin could feel the temperature of his body.

00:28:48
Speaker 1: That really attracts with what I've been reading about the science of hypnosis. So they've actually hypnotized people and measured what's going on in their brains. And when you're in a trance and you get a suggestion to feel something, your brain behaves as if you're having the actual experience in real life. If you're not under hypnosis and you get the same suggestion, a totally different part of your brain works.

00:29:11
Speaker 2: So it really transports you vividly into these memories, and I think suggest something about the power of our expectations, right, because hypnosis is kind of capitalizing on this well of experiences we rack up. Our brain has this whole repertoire of knowing what it feels like to be held, for instance, or what pain feels like. So in that state, when you conjure those things, you're actually reliving them.

00:29:35
Speaker 1: And it points to the fact that our realities are already often constructs. When we go about our day, we can't actually process all of the different physical stimulation, So our brains make predictions, and what hypnosis does is sort of harness those to actually imagine something new.

00:29:51
Speaker 2: This is a lot like the placebo effect. People who think they're getting real drugs often experience the same effects.

00:29:59
Speaker 1: That may honestly be a big part of why NLP works in therapeutic contexts. You go in with an expectation that a rapid quasi magical transformation is going to occur, and it does.

00:30:10
Speaker 2: It's the power of suggestion and that can be harnessed to sell to sell pretty much anything. As Baneler told seminar goers, when I.

00:30:20
Speaker 4: Was selling cars, I mean to me, you know, I mean I literally did a trance at the end of the closing. I mean it's as deep a trance as the one I do at the end of workshops, you know. And as they signed the contract, I'd say, now, just I want you to close your eyes for a minute and feel good about what you've done.

00:30:38
Speaker 1: Byler didn't actually sell cars, did he. I looked into it, but I couldn't verify it. But he was selling NLP to people who did sell cars.

00:30:47
Speaker 4: Right now, with your eyes shut, you can't see your car. But in a minute, when you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings that you're going to want to share them with other people to realize that you've made the right decision into realize who helped you to do that.

00:31:02
Speaker 1: They began marketing NLP as a persuasion technology in their seminars. By nineteen seventy nine, they're traveling around training salesmen, lawyers, and corporate types trying to close big deals. That's, as you just heard in Bandler's DVD, creating Therapeutic change perceptual grids, in other words, using the skill set of hypnosis in a commercial context, and as part of that, Bandler taught people how to modulate their voices.

00:31:33
Speaker 6: Try the word relaxed, snaky, snaky, very snaky, because if you go relax with a little hiss at the end, poor people like the word now in English really flows off your tongue. You go now.

00:31:55
Speaker 1: Bandler also taught clients how to read people's nonverbal cues and to classify people according to their preferred representational systems. That basically just means whether someone thinks in terms of images, sounds, or physical sensations.

00:32:13
Speaker 4: The thing is, when you put information into a system and it matches the system perfectly, it's absolutely irresistible. It's not that the information that you're putting is being forced through. It's that you can just put it out like bait, and if it's in the right package, it's irresistible. They want it. That's why I said, like offering them a specific vacation, if you can pick one that the person probably wouldn't go on on their own, and know how to describe it in terms of metaprograms, they'll want it. And you can make them want it just because that packaging of it fits the way they are so much.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: So we watch this one together it's a DVD called Building and Maintaining Generalizations and Bandler saying you should listen to people and notice if they say things like I see what you mean instead of I hear you, that would suggest they're a visual person instead of an auditory person.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: I'm skeptical of this. I feel like those are just figures of speech.

00:33:11
Speaker 2: And I'm not necessarily sure that you can hack those systems right, because this is the premise of what Bandler and Grinder are saying, that once you figure out if someone is visual or kinesthetic or auditory, then you can manipulate them by appealing to that system.

00:33:27
Speaker 1: And like in hypnosis, you're speaking to the person's unconscious.

00:33:34
Speaker 4: I'm damn blunt, straight a yeat and you know, people may not like it, but at the unconscious level, they know they can trust it.

00:33:44
Speaker 1: This is what really made NLP take off Beyond Santa.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: Cruz, Bandler and Grinder get written up in Psychology Today in nineteen seventy nine. It's a big, splashy article with the headline the people who Read People and it went a long way to legitimize them in their methods. Or two experts who can teach you how to clock other people's subtle cues.

00:34:03
Speaker 1: But also exploit them to get what you want. I read that article and they were selling how to control and manipulate people and basically tip them into a decision to buy a car or whatever else.

00:34:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was their product, the power of persuasion, And by the late nineteen seventies, Bandler and Grinder were full time traveling gurus instructing people in all sorts of different industries in which they had no personal experience how to be successful.

00:34:28
Speaker 1: And business was pretty good. By nineteen seventy nine, Bandler was selling out ten day workshops at one thousand bucks ahead. He was curing people's phobias and addictions on stage, and the psych people who were originally in the room were increasingly being joined by corporate salespeople.

00:34:44
Speaker 2: That must have been odd for the psychiatrist to suddenly be sharing a row with like a bunch of car salesmen who were like, tell me how to control my clients.

00:34:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they left.

00:34:54
Speaker 2: So with this new cash flow, Bandler moved from living on the Spitzer Commune to ac super splashy nouveau riche mansion. Please describe, well, it was very California playboy. It had shag carpets, a swimming pool, big redwood beams, a tennis court, and the garage was stacked. He bought two BMW's, a Fiat Spider, and a Mercedes. Dude also bought a vacation home in Hawaii, because you know, sometimes you just got to take a break from the oppressive mansion life. Okay, but as Bandler and Grinder got more successful, their early mentors got worried.

00:35:33
Speaker 10: And John were suddenly in the business of holding trainings and seminars and acting as stage therapists. They had no certification this therapists and no background as therapists, but suddenly they were doing it on the stage, kind of like a magic show. Felt a little bit like hucksterism.

00:35:58
Speaker 2: Bandler and Grinder's focus on quick fixes, their obsession with reading people for personal gain, and their interest in covert persuasion concerned Daniel's father, doctor Bob Spitzer. If you remember from last episode, Bob was basically an adoptive father to Bandler and a major early supporter of NLP.

00:36:17
Speaker 10: Richard Bandler and John Grinder were very affective in what they did often, but there was collateral damage from time to time. And what happens in the stage doesn't necessarily translate into what happens subsequently off the stage, And I know that my father was really concerned about what would happen afterwards.

00:36:36
Speaker 2: Family therapist Virginia Setier, one of the main people Bandler and Grinder borrowed from, also expressed her concerns to Daniel.

00:36:42
Speaker 10: Particularly when it became manipulative. How do you recognize how people organize their thoughts and then work with their language in a way to modify their thoughts. That's sinister, and she was very uncomfortable. She told me that several times.

00:37:02
Speaker 2: So you think Bandler was fully cognizant that bringing it in this direction was unethical.

00:37:11
Speaker 10: These are brilliant guys, or at least very smart guys, and they heard plenty of times from plenty of people that what they were doing was questionable, and there was desperation there. Richard hung with the wrong people. He did massive amounts of cocaine, and cocaine is really difficult on people's brains, and he carried a gun for years, and these kinds of forces can really twist your mind for a period of time.

00:37:42
Speaker 1: Bandler's cocaine use has been documented in court testimony, as has his gun ownership. Ultimately, Bandler's response to critics was something like fuck em, as he told paying seminargers.

00:37:56
Speaker 4: Because it wasn't easy, you know, to be the new kid on the block and come in and say, look, everything you're doing works, but you don't know when or how.

00:38:03
Speaker 1: This is Bandler speaking at a seminar during the nineteen eighties.

00:38:06
Speaker 4: People would go, oh, no, we don't want to know consciously. If we know consciously, then then we'd be manipulating who knows we might even be effective, and then we wouldn't have clients. We'd run out. That was the big psychotherapists fear when they'd learned they'd learn NLP. They think, but if I cure all my clients, how will I make my car payments? And I've tried to reassure them there is plenty of nuts around. There's no shortage of them whatsoever.

00:38:30
Speaker 1: Bandler made it out like therapists were criticizing him out of self interest, that they wouldn't make as much money if someone started curing their patients more efficiently. But it sounds like they were worried about something else.

00:38:42
Speaker 2: Something that had crept into NLP. The thrill of controlling other people. In nineteen eighty three, Science Died Just published a story on NLP featuring various critics sounding the alarm bells. One cult expert quoted in the article said NLP could become the most sophisticated mind control technology ever.

00:39:04
Speaker 1: Detractors were especially worried about the ways it could be used in the marketplace, where NLP seemed to, like quote, a hazardous tool for personal manipulation and in the wrong hands, a dangerous instrument of social control.

00:39:19
Speaker 2: At the time, Grinder said he was getting a dozen complaints every month about what he called unethical manipulation people teaching car salesmen and others to do unscrupulous things with NLP.

00:39:32
Speaker 1: This trend seemed to bother Grinder. He said he'd kicked people out of seminars who didn't seem like they were there for the right reasons.

00:39:39
Speaker 2: Still, he and Bandler had trained about five thousand people in NLP at this point, and those people had gone on to train as many as fifty thousand more. NLP was spreading fast.

00:39:51
Speaker 1: And these techniques actually seemed to work. That's what frightened NLP's detractors.

00:39:57
Speaker 2: The most NLP had its critics, but it also got some new fans. US military and spies rush to hire Richard Bandler, John Grinder and a young kid who would take NLP global.

00:40:12
Speaker 9: I'm Tony Robbins. You know I'm a business specialist and formance coach. He's a variety of techniques and tools. I have a one hundred and fourteen companies across about twelve different industries. We do today about nine billion dollars in business. But I think the thing you're most interested in, ID assume, is what I'm doing related to my history with anir linguistic programming NLP. Is that correct?

00:40:34
Speaker 2: Next time Online Games, I interview Tony Robbins about where his empire began.

00:40:39
Speaker 1: But wait, wait, wait did we control your mind?

00:40:42
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, dear listeners, you have to tell us if we managed to manipulate you with our masterful double induction demo.

00:40:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, so here's the reveal. Did any of you go get a drink of water or juice or any other liquid?

00:40:56
Speaker 2: Let us know in the comments. We were trying to make you thirsty. Mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me Zoe Lascaz and Alice Hines. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Luk Potts, edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan, original composition and mixing by Steve Bone.

00:41:22
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Aman Whalen from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Ozwaloshin, Mangesh Hattikador, and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etour.

00:41:35
Speaker 2: Special thanks to kas Riley for hypnotizing me. Check her out at Kasreilly dot com.