Meeting Bandler

00:00:11
Speaker 1: Richard Bandler is not an easy man to get a hold of.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: We've sent him countless emails over the past two years through his handlers, who always blew us off.

00:00:20
Speaker 1: We obviously wanted his perspective, being the co founder of neuro Linguistic Programming and all, but he didn't seem to want to talk to us. Meanwhile, we've interviewed Bandler's friends and former collaborators, even his lawyer, hoping he would realize we were serious and doing our homework.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: But no response, nothing, radio silence. I'm honestly baffled by how evasive he is. Bandler's not as famous as other people who've agreed to talk with us for this podcast, like Tony Robbins, or even infamous like Nancy Salzman.

00:00:57
Speaker 1: Maybe he just hates the press. But but we also began to wonder if he has something to hide, which frankly is like Alice Catnip.

00:01:06
Speaker 2: I'm in the airport in London. Gatwick just got off the flight.

00:01:11
Speaker 1: So in late May twenty twenty five, Alice headed to London to track him down.

00:01:17
Speaker 2: I am coming here to see Richard Bandler in the flesh. We've sent multiple letters to this guy trying to get him to talk to us, and so far we have been completely ignored. Does it make me want to come all the way here across the ocean to find this guy and show up at his hypnosis conference.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: Yes, it does.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: That's what I'm gonna do. I got a ticket to a two day seminar the Power of Hypnosis, taught by the man himself. Bandler is in his mid seventies and he's been doing NLP for half a century. I'm hoping to see the man behind the myth. I'm actually staying in the hotel where the hypnosis conference will occur.

00:02:08
Speaker 1: I hope he is too.

00:02:10
Speaker 2: That way, I'll have lots of opportunities to introduce myself.

00:02:15
Speaker 3: Here we go, take a deep breath in.

00:02:29
Speaker 4: And breathe out.

00:02:32
Speaker 5: Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak for him and your unconscious mind.

00:02:38
Speaker 3: You can notice that you feel rested moral arned.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: Concident from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is Mind Games episode nine. I'm Alice Hines.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: And I'm Zoe Lascaus. In this episode our final episode, a reckoning for Bandler and for his creation Neurolinguistic Programming.

00:03:02
Speaker 4: Yo Da how you did it?

00:03:03
Speaker 5: You go into a little time, a tarsia stakes, and you're out of it.

00:03:12
Speaker 1: So far in this series, we've looked at NLP as it grew from a groovy alternative psych movement in California to a persuasion technology big with army spies, major corporations, pick up artists, and cults like Nexium.

00:03:27
Speaker 2: Also everyday people around the world like us.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: We've been trying it out on ourselves and our friends.

00:03:33
Speaker 2: And we've explored how NLP can be used as a genuine tool for self help, but.

00:03:39
Speaker 1: It can also be used as an aid in manipulation and brainwashing.

00:03:44
Speaker 2: We've looked at NLP from basically every angle, well every angle but one. Bandler's own.

00:03:51
Speaker 1: Alice tell us how you finally got to Bandler?

00:03:54
Speaker 2: Well, it started in London. I was brushing up on my hypnosis skills ahead of this conference. I'm like steeped in these DVDs, but it's not the same as seeing someone in person.

00:04:04
Speaker 1: How often does he teach life seminars these days?

00:04:07
Speaker 2: Bandler does around three of these events every year, and this one had him build alongside this celebrity UK hypnotist named Paul McKenna. There were around three hundred people in the audience, and honestly the room was packed. People paid at least five hundred pounds to attend. I also paid my own way, and in doing so signed a waiver as an attendee, promising I would not record any of the actual session. So I get it. I mean, it's his intellectual property. He sells these tapes. But I was able to talk to some fellow students outside of the event. Okay, what brings you here?

00:04:40
Speaker 6: Alex?

00:04:42
Speaker 7: Just learning how to hypnotize my clients to be a better deal maker.

00:04:48
Speaker 2: Alex looks to be in his mid thirties and is wearing a slick gray suit. He's there with his gorgeous blonde wife, and they tell me they want to use NLP's persuasion techniques in order to sell hyper Bear chambers. This is essentially a medical device. You breathe pure oxygen and a pressurized environment. It can be used to revive divers. But it's also big these days among longevity bros.

00:05:12
Speaker 7: You can slow down aging, you can decrease biological aging bites alone ten years.

00:05:17
Speaker 2: Alex claim to have a lot of celebrity clients.

00:05:20
Speaker 7: Kim Kardashian Brian Johnson sports teams like NFL NBA teams Manchester United.

00:05:29
Speaker 2: He hoped NLP would be part of both his selling and deal making.

00:05:34
Speaker 7: I use empathy when I negotiate.

00:05:37
Speaker 6: That's part of it.

00:05:38
Speaker 2: Filding rapport.

00:05:40
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I can manipulate clients of leading towards my technology.

00:05:50
Speaker 2: Alex was exactly the type of person I was expecting to find at a Banler seminar in twenty twenty five, a sales guy of a fringe wellness hardware. But there were also a lot of people like Oliver.

00:06:02
Speaker 6: I just want to understand a part of my mind. I think it's super important, Like you know what I mean. Like, imagine we're born and we never understand really how powerful we are. Like that's a tragedy in my life.

00:06:11
Speaker 2: He's a life coach and personal trainer.

00:06:14
Speaker 6: Like a holistic gym as well. It's not like a normal gym. It's like a gym for having people evolved their consciousness.

00:06:20
Speaker 2: Or Andrea, a nice, hippyish mom who was using an LP to help with her social anxiety and to improve her relationship with her daughter.

00:06:29
Speaker 8: But also, my daughter's left home, so I don't have the AMMO to be so reactive.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: How old is your daughter?

00:06:37
Speaker 8: She's twenty now twenty?

00:06:40
Speaker 2: What does she think about NLP.

00:06:42
Speaker 8: Oh hates it?

00:06:44
Speaker 4: Oh?

00:06:44
Speaker 8: She was seven when I started doing it. She was my only client. I was like, come on, I'm going.

00:06:48
Speaker 6: To do this with you.

00:06:49
Speaker 8: She's just she used to say. I mean, even at that age, she'd say, you stupid psychology woman, with your stupid psychology ways.

00:06:59
Speaker 2: Andrea and I up during the seminar's first breakout session and practiced hypnotizing each other. It actually worked pretty well. Maybe it's cheesy, but I related to her as a mom who wanted the best for her daughter. Then there was Bandler. He lectured and did demos on stage when we weren't working in these small groups. Getting to see Bandler live after watching an embarrassing quantity of his DVDs was pretty fascinating. Bandler's in his mid seventies now. He doesn't look like a biker from the movie Easy Rider anymore. He was wearing a suit and had sort of a round, tall body and white hair, and was clean shaven. His mobility was kind of limited. He had to be helped on and off stage. People lined up at one point for autographs and there was an entire team devoted to line control, making sure no one cut or came close to him out of turn.

00:07:50
Speaker 1: What there were Bandler bouncers? Yeah, oh god, what a celeb.

00:07:55
Speaker 2: His lectures were meandering and kind of random at some points, like he ran to about taxes, but his hypnosis demos were pretty impressive. The guy still has it. At one point he had the whole room chanting.

00:08:08
Speaker 1: Bandler, Bandler, Bandler, and see about.

00:08:15
Speaker 2: What happened on stage?

00:08:16
Speaker 9: Okay.

00:08:18
Speaker 2: Paul Dunley is a tall Irish guy. I chatted with him over lunch after I saw him get hypnotized by Bandler.

00:08:24
Speaker 9: So he suggested to me I am Elvis Presley.

00:08:28
Speaker 2: Paul got up on stage and crooned after Bandler put him in a trance, he's.

00:08:32
Speaker 9: Your film a page? Shall I come back again? Tell me? Are your loads ton?

00:08:46
Speaker 2: Do you feel like Elvis?

00:08:47
Speaker 6: Now? Do I feel?

00:08:49
Speaker 9: Do you know? It's a strange guest. It's easier when you kind of go into a character and you believe you're in that character, then there's no doubt. So it helped me. Being in in France, I was just absolutely elevius.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: But something even weirder happened when Paul was on stage, his body twitched in this involuntary way.

00:09:11
Speaker 9: Just shaken all over. It's connecting with this divine energy outside.

00:09:16
Speaker 2: Us, like he was having a seizure, or like he was possessed by the Holy Spirit.

00:09:22
Speaker 9: I mean, the charging Jesus from your tonails right up through all the body, right up into the head, right up in the light. Everything is just alive. So you're shaking uncontrollably.

00:09:34
Speaker 2: I felt sort of embarrassed watching this, but it was undeniably fascinating. Paul wasn't the only person who had a powerful physical reaction to being hypnotized by Bandler. What happened on stage today.

00:09:47
Speaker 10: I've been struggling with a lot of pain now I'd mentioned to it, so that lunchtime was something I could possibly do. Like in the terms of self hypnosis, I was wondering, whender if I could do something myself, because all I'm doing and is thinking about it constantly.

00:10:02
Speaker 2: When Kevin got up on stage that afternoon, he said every step he took hurt his body, But then on stage the.

00:10:10
Speaker 10: Pain completely disappeared. On the stage. When I came back out, the body impacted it because I've been locked in this way for weeks and weeks and weeks. I'm aware that it's there, but the way I feel about it is totally different.

00:10:26
Speaker 2: On stage, Bamdler told Kevin to imagine he was bathing in an unbelievable sense of warmth and comfort, and he did some hands on touching of Kevin's shoulders and knee.

00:10:37
Speaker 10: I was thinking about all the things that's good about my body, not just the thing that's at the moment is not the best.

00:10:45
Speaker 6: And I kept thinking this term this.

00:10:48
Speaker 10: Too shall pass, This too shall pass, and it was just, yeah, it was really strange.

00:10:52
Speaker 2: So as I was talking to Kevin, this other lady named Gwen came up to him and she was like, Wow, that was in a stat thing to witness.

00:11:01
Speaker 8: When you worked up on the stage, your pain or your discomfort was palpable.

00:11:06
Speaker 2: Could tell I've had that, and I was like, oh, that guy's hard.

00:11:09
Speaker 6: But when you got up, well, even through it, you were like going into place.

00:11:17
Speaker 2: But when you stood up, like you just moved completely differently. It was like holy shit.

00:11:22
Speaker 10: Yeah.

00:11:23
Speaker 2: So I know from our research, Zoe, that hypnosis can be a really powerful thing for pain relief, specifically, like there's really good data behind this that said, I was a little skeptical of what was happening on stage because it seemed like there was a lot of pressure on Kevin to have some sort of dramatic transformation, so.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: It felt kind of phony, like he was partially just meeting the expectations of Bandler in the crowd.

00:11:47
Speaker 2: I think so, but not every part of the event felt phony to me, Like, I actually really loved working with my fellow students. There's something that felt radical about letting a random stranger hypnotiz. I resisted it at first, but when I gave in, it was honestly awesome, Like what if these are skills that truly anyone can use?

00:12:08
Speaker 1: And that's the spirit out of which NLP was born. I mean, that's how it got started, people experimenting on each other, genuinely wanting to experiment and change and grow together. And I'm frankly glad to hear that that spirit is still alive and well.

00:12:22
Speaker 2: It definitely is. On the other hand, I found Bangler very abrasive.

00:12:26
Speaker 1: Ooh, what rubbed you the wrong way?

00:12:28
Speaker 2: Well, at one point he exploded on this guy in the front row. This is a guy who had paid for a VIP ticket. Okay, and the guy, I guess, was taking notes and his pen was jiggling while he was taking notes. Bandler interrupted his own lecture and exploded on the guy. He told him to stop or move out of the seat because apparently the jiggling distracted him.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: Yikes.

00:12:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the funny thing is this pen outburst and what I considered pretty abrasive behavior didn't bother most people.

00:13:00
Speaker 9: So I think it's a very clever strategy that he has to break down barriers. He doesn't over complicate.

00:13:06
Speaker 6: He's like, no bullshit.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: It's like everyone can can grasp it.

00:13:10
Speaker 6: It's not over people's heads.

00:13:12
Speaker 11: I could actually sit and listen to Richard probably for a week.

00:13:15
Speaker 4: He just makes me die a lobster.

00:13:19
Speaker 3: He's fopulous.

00:13:20
Speaker 4: Hmmm.

00:13:21
Speaker 1: So people were eating up this semi hostile vibe.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they didn't just love Bandler as a wise guy from America. They also saw him as a healer. What did it change in your life?

00:13:34
Speaker 10: Just got me to look at the the damage you can do with your thoughts, but the power you can do with it when you use it the right way.

00:13:47
Speaker 9: Yeah.

00:13:51
Speaker 2: Hearing from Bandler's fans only made me want to talk to him more. He basically ignored me at the conference after one of his handlers said he wasn't available to talk, But we ended up speaking a few months later. I got to learn what it was like to be the target of a Bandler outburst.

00:14:09
Speaker 1: Did you juggle a pen?

00:14:11
Speaker 6: Way?

00:14:11
Speaker 8: Worse?

00:14:13
Speaker 1: That's after the break.

00:14:26
Speaker 2: Richard Bandler a man who invented a set of techniques, a human technology, as some call it, is a paradox. The paradox of Richard Bandler is that he is an emotionally explosive man with a troubled past, who makes his living teaching people emotional controls.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: And how to literally entrance others through the subtleties of communication.

00:14:53
Speaker 2: And yet the pen thing, how he exploded on a random spectator at an event, It suggests what we've known about bands for a while is still true. He's volatile.

00:15:03
Speaker 1: He's cultivated this tough guy image since he was a teenager wearing a knife on his hip. More recently, Bandler bragged to a reporter for The Guardian that he deliberately electrocuted his stepfather when he was ten.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: Multiple people have said he pulled guns and threatened to punch people to prompt behavioral change.

00:15:23
Speaker 1: His ex wife also accused him of choking her, and according to court documents from his murder trial, he also threatened a former colleague at gunpoint.

00:15:33
Speaker 2: All of this, we know, all examples of potential harm to others, and yet we also know that Bandler has helped thousands of people achieve transformations that they describe as amazing, like revelatory. How is this possible? More than anything else, we wanted to understand this paradox of Richard Bandler. It's a paradox of human nature. A healer can also hurt people. A flawed man can create good in the world, But another part of the Bandler paradox haunts his creation. NLP. NLP is a human technology built to better us to harness and control our minds, and yet it is also a form of dominance and manipulation, a way to gain power over others.

00:16:29
Speaker 1: No one could help us get to the bottom of that contradiction better than Bandler himself. After a not insignificant amount of back and forth, his people finally agreed to a video call.

00:16:40
Speaker 2: So I met him again on a remote call on a recent Tuesday afternoon. He called in from his wood paneled home office outside of Dallas, Texas. Oh, by the way, is that one of your paintings behind you?

00:16:53
Speaker 9: What?

00:16:54
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about over my head.

00:16:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bandler has taken up painting in his later year.

00:17:00
Speaker 4: No, that's Vincent ben Go. Oh, it's a reproduction.

00:17:06
Speaker 2: It was given to him by his gallerist though, who incidentally also knows President Trump.

00:17:11
Speaker 4: Do you know that picture that Trump has hanging over his himself of himself with his fists up after they tried to shoot him. He had that painted and gave it to him and showed me a picture of him giving him the painting.

00:17:26
Speaker 2: Your gallerist gave a painting to Donald Trump had it painted. After two years of reporting. I had a lot of questions for Bandler, but we only had an hour. And op is everywhere like it's it's it's people are doing it all the time and not realizing it.

00:17:43
Speaker 11: Right.

00:17:44
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean, it's it's a it's a model of good communication. So of course you know it's going to turn up all over the place. Plus it's being taught under different names. You know. I started this, you know, some fifty five years ago, and it spread all over the planet. It's everywhere. You know, we have trainers in almost every country, and you know, I'm translated into dozens of languages, so it's as like you said, now, it's pretty much everywhere. It may not be called that, but it is.

00:18:23
Speaker 2: Why do you think that the name got changed or that people are practicing it but not disclosing that it's NLP.

00:18:29
Speaker 4: Money primarily money or ignorance one or the other, because like corporations do that a lot because they don't want to get sued. Not that I'm running around suing people.

00:18:42
Speaker 2: I wanted to understand how some of the miraculous seeming moments that we've heard about actually worked, So I asked Bandler about one of the more intriguing tales from the early days of NLP, where he and John Grinder supposedly used NLP to fix a man's legs. We talked about at this in episode two, and somehow he was able to walk normally, like you re taught him how to walk, correcting a physical disability. That story is incredible to me. How did you do that?

00:19:14
Speaker 4: Well, I'm not sure exactly which case you're talking about. I've had a lot of those over the years. It's just one of those byproducts of deep trance that sometimes the brain and the plasticity of the brain is greater than anything I know how to do. And that's why, if you believe in people, you let their unconscious take over, their natural healing takeover. So you know, miracles have abounded in my fifty year career. So whereas you hear a story like that, you're very impressed. I've seen it so many times that I expect that sort of thing.

00:19:50
Speaker 2: I was hoping to build rapport by first asking Bandler about some positive stories, and it was kind of working, even though he said he never cured him self of a stutter by watching John Wayne.

00:20:03
Speaker 4: I don't have any recollection of imitating John Wayne. I don't know where you're getting this stuff from.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: We got that from a book called NLP Secrets Untold Stories by Michael Hall, an NLP trainer who worked with Baandler. Bandler did admit to doing a lot of accents.

00:20:20
Speaker 4: You want talk like a Texan. You keep your teeth.

00:20:22
Speaker 2: Close together, no mature right now.

00:20:26
Speaker 4: I go to Texas and then I go to New York, and I'll teach the New Yorkers to talk like a Texan so that they can start to realize that these things are not genetic. Taking control over the tone of your voice means you can take control over the meaning of your words. You can say no and mean yes. You can go oh, sure, I'll go out with you. You know, it doesn't mean you will, It means the opposite. About eighty percent of the meaning of words is the tonality. So, especially as a hypnotist, especially as an educator, you want your tonality to match what you're saying so that you can become convincing. It's part of being persuasive.

00:21:05
Speaker 2: It turns out Badler did have a stutter, but not as a child.

00:21:09
Speaker 4: I got hit in the head and started stuttering. When I was in my twenties. Somebody opened a van and the whole door came off hit me in the head, and I for some reason started stuttering, and I trained myself not to do it. But wow, I did not have a stutter as a child. That's just that's just another one of the myriads of lies that people tell about me.

00:21:34
Speaker 2: Some of the lies and crazy stories about your life come from you yourself, though, right.

00:21:43
Speaker 4: I don't know that. Well, which lies and crazy stories are you talking about?

00:21:48
Speaker 2: Well, I've heard so many. I mean, there's the idea that your you have a PhD in mathematics, that you were a computer scientist. I don't think that's true.

00:21:57
Speaker 4: What mathematics.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: PhD in mathematics.

00:22:00
Speaker 4: I didn't start that. I've never said I had a PhD in mathematics.

00:22:03
Speaker 2: So other people created these stories.

00:22:06
Speaker 4: Well, I don't have a PhD in mathematics. I've never claimed you I was a mathematician, but I didn't have a PhD in mathematics. I have two doctors of letters. I have a doctor in psychology. I have a master's in psychology.

00:22:23
Speaker 2: That makes sense. Yeah, I think there's just so much storytelling. And I think I noticed in one of the DVDs I watched that it even said many things that doctor Bandler will say in this DVD may not be true. This is for the purposes of teaching. So there were lots of stories that went around, right, and you became really famous, so people started to say things about you.

00:22:44
Speaker 4: Well, that happens. That doesn't mean I have to agree with them.

00:22:48
Speaker 1: But Badler makes stuff up about himself all the time. According to one source, Bandlor has said he can hear radar, and according to the publication Mother Jones. Bandler has claimed that the CIA tested his methods for pain control by impaling an agent's hand with an ice pick. Then there was also that disclaimer in one of his DVDs, The Art and Signs of Nested Loops. It begins with some texts saying quote. Richard is well known for his many irrelevant stories. They may or may not be factually accurate. As Richard is demonstrating state elicitation and using these states to impart other specific information to the participants.

00:23:29
Speaker 2: Our interview started getting a little tense. It's a story that I've heard multiple times about you kind of pulling a gun on people in training to get them to change.

00:23:39
Speaker 4: That's absolutely not true. Really, what absolutely not true. What happened was is I had a cigarette lighter that looked like a gun. It looked like a little derringer. And somebody said to me in a seminar. They said, I said, you know what would it take to get you to change this? Because he had, you know, some horrible blue that stopped him from being even decent to other people. And he said the only thing that would change me is if somebody pointed a gun towards my head. So I pulled out the cigarette lighter and pointed it at him. I lit a cigarette with it, and it's been blown out of proportion over the years. It shocked him so much. I put him in a trance and got him to start changing his beliefs by putting new pictures in his head. It wasn't the gun that did it, and it wasn't even a gun.

00:24:28
Speaker 1: That's wild because our sources for that story include major publications and a former Banler associate.

00:24:36
Speaker 2: What about like provocation or shocking people as therapy in general?

00:24:40
Speaker 4: Though I don't think about it as therapy. I think about it as education that you know, you're not there to fix something, You're there to make people smarter. The reason people get stuck is they're doing something stupid. You know, if you keep making pictures of a bad memory and feeling bad over and over and over over again, and you know the more you do it, the worse it'll be. Therapy tries to get you to relive trauma. I try to get people to stop thinking about it so much, and that's not going to occur psychologically, that's going to occur neurologically. So my techniques focus on getting people to make neurological changes so that they can take control of their mind. If you change the way you think, it changes how you feel and therefore changes what you're capable of doing and capable of not doing.

00:25:32
Speaker 2: That's super interesting. Yeah, I think when I said therapy, maybe that's the wrong word. You don't consider what you do therapy not at all.

00:25:40
Speaker 4: Every single school of therapy has the same Freudian flaw that started with Freud, which is that if you understand how you got screwed up, that somehow or the magically that insight will make it so you won't be And people do not get smarter without new learning. And so my focus is to get people to stop this and start that. You create a void and fill it with something that's more functional. Think smarter, Feel smarter, Do smarter.

00:26:11
Speaker 2: When I asked Baandler about NLPs being the basis of nexium, he claimed to have never heard of Nancy Salzman or nexiom.

00:26:18
Speaker 4: The fact that somebody sat in a room where I talked does not make me responsible for their stupidity.

00:26:25
Speaker 2: But he had an interesting answer as to whether NLP is inherently manipulative.

00:26:30
Speaker 4: All of the verbal techniques and the things that I teach have existed all along. People have been manipulating each other for centuries, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Manipulate just means to move from one place to another on purpose.

00:26:47
Speaker 2: It's the idea that all communication is manipulation. You might as well get the upper hand with NLP.

00:26:54
Speaker 4: You know, if you learn about this stuff, you can defend yourself against it. And you know, cults have been around since the beginning of time, and they're probably going to be around till the end of time. Our ability to be smarter requires that we get educated. And the more I educate people, the more they can defend themselves against manipulation. People have been manipulating without knowing NLP for a long long time. The fact that somebody learns NLP and refines their skills a little bit is not my fault. Right There are people that misuse guns and shovels and everything else, and you know, people are constantly bringing it up like that's the important part. The important part is I've created a body of knowledge by which people can get smarter and have better lives.

00:27:43
Speaker 2: This point has been made by people we've interviewed on this podcast. Before any tool, any technology can become a weapon, so why single out NLP. It's a fair defense to a point. Bandler certainly isn't responsible for nexium, But I also think the fact that NLP is beloved by shady characters isn't a random coincidence. Bandler marketed his tools to people focused much more on power than on ethics, and he never wanted to play by the rules of science. If you google NLP, you mostly find academics and people calling it a quote pseudoscience, So I'm curious how you feel about that.

00:28:24
Speaker 4: Well, name calling doesn't seem to me to be very scientific.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: Bandler went on to tell me something pretty interesting. He said that hypnosis is a word that encompasses thousands of different altered states. Trance is different for different people, and it's tough to study. He said that he straight up told the National Academy of Sciences, who were critical of NLP to get lost.

00:28:49
Speaker 4: And they told me, if I didn't develop anything new for the next five years, they could do studies and prove that NLP was of science. And I looked at them and I said, it's not art form, and I think of it that way, and to me, it's an art form. I'm not interested in doing double blind studies by the criterion set up by scientists, because most of the science I read to tell you the truth is not science as I would determine it.

00:29:20
Speaker 2: I ask the artist about one of my favorite techniques of his state control, which I found really helpful leading up to the birth of my child. So the idea that you can anchor a different emotional state in order to sort of choose your reaction to your reality instead of having a automatic reaction of anxiety. Right, And so I was wondering about your own experience using state control. Is this something that you've used in your life.

00:29:50
Speaker 4: To me, freedom is absolutely everything, and freedom comes from having choice, and if you don't have a choice, then you're not a free person. And when my first wife died, you know, I felt very very bad, but I still had to go teach seminars and do things. You know, I you know, I was under contract. I had literally no choice about that, And so I could have either gone in and been an asshole, or I could go into the best state that I can go into. There are some things in this world you can control and some things in the world that you just can't. And you know, The question is how are you going to respond in the moment. And you're either looking forward or you're bathing yourself in the past. And if things are good in the past, a good thing to bathe yourself. And that the future requires planning. You have to think your way into a new future. And if you don't plan a new future, you won't have one. And that's a daily event, not a yearly event.

00:30:53
Speaker 2: Is there a burden to have to always be so carefully controlling your emotions.

00:31:00
Speaker 4: Well, it just becomes second nature. You know that if there's a variety of choices, you know, you move in the direction that propels you forward. You know it's not that bad shit isn't going to happen to you. Take it from me. You know I've been alive a long time, and you know that's not the only bad thing. Bad stuff happens. You know, all the same things that frustrate everybody. You're going to come and frustrate me. Question is how long you can stay there? And if you develop in yourself programs to make better decisions, then you don't have to suffer as much. And that's simply a time efficient thing. And it's not a burden to be free. It's it's just the opposite. It doesn't mean that you don't remember what happens. It means that you don't dwell on it and blow it out of proportion. As people say, you don't take little bad pictures, make them big. You shrink bad pictures down, and if it happens at the speed of light, you barely notice you're doing it.

00:32:07
Speaker 2: I think some people would wonder if they're repressing these bad feelings by immediately moving past them.

00:32:16
Speaker 4: Really, it sounds very psychological.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: You're saying that sounds like what the psychotherapist would say.

00:32:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, they stay in business.

00:32:26
Speaker 1: I got you, I got you, ma'am. Guys, sure hate shrinks.

00:32:32
Speaker 2: It's pretty much the most consistent thing about him. But as he was telling this story about his first wife dying, which is obviously tragic, I couldn't help but wonder what exactly he was talking about, because his first wife or ex wife, is alive. Her name is Leslie Cameron. She didn't want to give an interview for our podcast, perhaps because of how her marriage with Bandler ended.

00:32:58
Speaker 4: Well, I was married for us period of time to somebody who just didn't work out at all.

00:33:04
Speaker 2: Later in our interview, Leslie came up again. You mentioned your marriage to Leslie Cameron. That was very short, you did. That's right, We've discussed it, right.

00:33:17
Speaker 4: So you mentioned it, and I said, I don't count it.

00:33:21
Speaker 2: We've heard allegations that you perpetrated domestic violence against Leslie as.

00:33:27
Speaker 4: Well as also a lie that she perpetrated so that she could get a lot of money out of a divorce. She married me and got me, you know, and she asked me to marry her specifically to help her get custody of her kids, and then proceeded to engage in all kinds of behaviors that made it so I just didn't want to be with her anymore. And she turned that divorce into a gold mine. Was she had was part of the business, and she tried to get the house which I had owned before we married, and all kinds of stuff. Eventually took a bunch of money and went off with some other guy in the marine. But why we're talking about this now is absolutely beyond my comprehension.

00:34:13
Speaker 2: Well, we heard that you happened.

00:34:17
Speaker 4: I have I've never had any domestic violence against her. She excused me of strangling or and forcing her to sign a divorce settlement, and basically what I did was keep her out of jail because she beat up Robert Dilton's secretary.

00:34:34
Speaker 2: Thank you for explaining that, and I'm so sorry that I know this is a topic that isn't so fun to discuss, but it is infortient for us to discuss this.

00:34:43
Speaker 4: It's also it's not an interview about NLP. This is what we referred to as a hit job. And I find this very fucking offensive, very offensive. You asked to interview me about NLP and then you start accusing me of domestic violence and people with guns, all this rumor bullshit. You know, are you just trying to get your ratings up? What the hell's wrong with you?

00:35:08
Speaker 2: Well, Richard, for someone who, Wow, Richard, I was going to say that, for someone who says they're so good at emotional control, you would think that he would be able to calmly respond to questions from a journalist.

00:35:29
Speaker 1: Right, This, to be clear, is standard journalistic protocol. You kind of need to give people the opportunity to respond to the allegations that have been made against them. You were just doing your job.

00:35:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think like he probably is not surrounded by anyone who's critical of him and hasn't been for many decades, and anyone who questioned him probably left the inner circle. And the way he responds, I mean, frankly, I had a lot of other questions for him, and even get to them.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: Before he abruptly hung up on you.

00:36:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, like this was the start of my fact check, not the end.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: So much for state control.

00:36:08
Speaker 2: Part of me had a hunch Bandler would have an outburst. It's the paradox of Richard Bandler.

00:36:14
Speaker 1: For the record, I asked Robert Diltz whether he remembers Leslie physically assaulting his secretary. He said he didn't have a secretary and was quote mystified by These comments and Leslie's claims that she was a victim of domestic violence were reported by journalists from Mother Jones and San Jose Mercury News, who cited court and police records. While some will claim that Bandler's private affairs with an ex wife are not relevant to his public work, aggression has been a theme of both Bandler's public and private lives. You may recall this tape we played earlier in the series, in which Bandler speaks freely about domestic violence in one of his seminars. The DVD set is from nineteen eighty seven and called Creating Therapeutic Change.

00:36:59
Speaker 5: I did a thing for or a shelter for abused women, and you know, I was in near five minutes and I felt like slapping the shit out of him.

00:37:07
Speaker 6: You know.

00:37:07
Speaker 5: It was like, change your tone of voice, man, you want me to help you shut up, or I'll smack your one.

00:37:13
Speaker 4: And I mean it was they had the horrid tonality.

00:37:17
Speaker 5: I mean it was like, you know, five dental drills coming at you at one time, you know, And I really had to teach them. Look, if this is the way you want men to treat you, keep talking this way.

00:37:26
Speaker 2: Bandler didn't respond to a request for comment about this tape.

00:37:31
Speaker 1: I spoke with lawyer Phil Burkhardt, who represented Bandlor's former secretary of Beverly Duda, in a case she filed against her old boss. Beverly began working for Bandler in nineteen eighty six. She helped him organize and promote his NLP seminars and claimed he had promised her a financial cut of those events, but he never paid up. Beverly took Bandlor to court in nineteen ninety three to get those back payments, but she also made a more serious claim.

00:37:58
Speaker 12: The last claim there is what's called a national affliction of emotional distress, which includes threats, including threats on her life.

00:38:07
Speaker 1: What were those threats?

00:38:10
Speaker 12: That he would kill her? To use her words, he put his hand down her throat and rip her herd out. He's intending to inflict emotional distress on her. Whether he intended to carry out the threats or not is not the question.

00:38:29
Speaker 1: The jury was convinced. The judge ordered Baandlor to pay Beverly nearly five hundred thousand dollars in combined damages and back payments, but Bandler didn't pay. Phil foreclosed on Bandlor's property in San Francisco, but it didn't cover the debt, which eventually exceeded one million dollars as interest piled up year after year. They eventually settled decades later. A few years after Phil first met Beverly, another Bandler associate, Christina Hall, came to him for help.

00:39:00
Speaker 2: About Christina Hall in episode six, She's the Bandler colleague who he admitted to threatening with a gun in his trial testimony.

00:39:08
Speaker 1: And in nineteen ninety seven, Bandler filed a lawsuit against her, as well as several other prominent NLP trainers and two hundred John and Jane Does, claiming unfair trade practices and misappropriation of intellectual property. Bandler was demanding tens of millions in damages. The whole case boiled down to a single question, who owns NLP.

00:39:32
Speaker 12: Banner's position was all rights in NLP flowed through Bandler, and that if you wanted to use the term NLP neurolinguistic programming, if you wanted to say you remember of the society, if you wanted to certify people to say they could be practitioners, you wanted to teach this, you wanted to do anything you know, pay him as the lord of the manner he gets a cut of year work.

00:40:02
Speaker 1: Christina and various other NLP trainers had bought the rights to the Society of NLP part of Bandlard's old company during a liquidation sale in nineteen eighty three. Bandler had filed for bankruptcy and was selling off assets, so naturally, Christina thought bandler suit was BS and countersuit. Bandler reportedly tried to use NLP in court.

00:40:24
Speaker 12: At least according to these NLP folks, was trying to use NLP on the judge by doing a thing that they would call modeling.

00:40:33
Speaker 1: Modeling or maybe mirroring an NLP tactic designed to build rapport. By mimicking people you want to persuade ma theorius.

00:40:42
Speaker 12: He had picked up on certain gestures that the judge had brother. It was like putting his hand to his head or to his chin. I don't remember what the gestures were.

00:40:50
Speaker 6: But he was able.

00:40:51
Speaker 12: Look, Bandler is doing what the judge is doing.

00:40:55
Speaker 1: Whatever he was doing, it didn't work. The court ruled overwhelming in Christina Hall's favor. She won a judgment of six hundred thousand dollars. We couldn't reach Christina for an interview, but Phil, her lawyer, called her a quote true believer in NLP. He said she never cared about the money. Hokey as that might sound, She just wanted to be able to practice NLP in peace.

00:41:19
Speaker 2: Bandlor didn't respond when we asked about this. It's so interesting to me that Christina was so invested in NLP, even after Bandler treated her so poorly over the years, from threatening her with a gun to trying to sue her at a business.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: Exactly even though Badlor had done all those things, She said, she thought NLP had advanced human consciousness. She used that phrase in a love letter to NLP. It was the conclusion of a summary of the whole legal ordeal she wrote for the wider NLP community, asking them to stick together.

00:41:53
Speaker 2: It sounds like she was able to separate the art from the artist.

00:41:57
Speaker 1: Maybe we're not so different and exactly hate the conference in London elis.

00:42:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, true. I mean the most powerful parts for me were the self guided, peer to peer portions where you don't need a guru or a teacher.

00:42:14
Speaker 1: That's kind of the conclusion My mom came to as well. Hi Mom, thank you for doing again.

00:42:20
Speaker 2: You remember Zoe's mom Lynn right, I tried to use NLP techniques to help get her back on a bicycle.

00:42:26
Speaker 3: I've been thinking a lot about the whole experience and what it has and has not done for me, and I'm profoundly grateful to both of you for including me in this because it's been a journey, so to speak.

00:42:39
Speaker 1: She took the visualization techniques Alice taught her and began coming up with her own images. She began to imagine her fear of biking as this kind of barnacled incrustacean covering her back.

00:42:51
Speaker 3: I think one of the major strength of NLP is that it helps you separate yourself from whatever.

00:42:59
Speaker 1: It is if you want to work with my mom said. She realized the bike had become a metaphor for aging, for diminishing. Alice helped her tease them apart, and this barnacled carapace began to crumble away.

00:43:12
Speaker 3: After listening to Alice's tape, I started being able to detach myself from the fear. It gave me a path, It gave me options. I could sort of choose something personal that worked for me.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: I saw it working. My mom and I went on a twenty one mile bike ride last summer.

00:43:34
Speaker 2: What yeah, you did not tell me it was twenty one miles.

00:43:39
Speaker 1: Oh my god. It was gorgeous. We biked along the seashore and through the scrubby New England woods and Saltwater marshes. It was a real trip. It wasn't just around the block.

00:43:49
Speaker 2: I had no idea.

00:43:51
Speaker 1: Well, what's crazy is that we had tried the exact same path before Alice and my mom was terrified the whole time. This time was different, which was striking to me because my mom had originally been really turned off by NLP. When the supposedly quick fix didn't work so quickly for her, she felt like a failure and like NLP was a scam. I'm curious if you could tell us what happened. What was that shift.

00:44:20
Speaker 3: In the beginning, it made me angry. Vandler's little swishy technique or switching images made me feel like it was blamed the victim, and then it was also too formulaic.

00:44:33
Speaker 11: But what I saw after that, as I got deeper, was that it was very powerful in making you realize you had options that you weren't your fear, that it didn't trivialize what you were feeling.

00:44:49
Speaker 9: It was very powerful.

00:44:51
Speaker 3: It just changed everything. Yeah, it gave me myself back in a way.

00:45:00
Speaker 2: When I was working with your mom, I honestly had no idea that this would work. I'm kind of amazed that she got so much out of it.

00:45:08
Speaker 1: Me too, and honestly, thank you, Alice. I love that I get to bike with her now and it's not a big deal.

00:45:16
Speaker 2: I do want to note that I didn't follow NLP books by the letter. I did read them. My favorite Bibandler was this one called using your Brain for a Change, So I sort of took what it said as an inspiration and made my own version that was tailored to your mom And then I used a lot of stuff from this other book. What other book? Okay, it's sort of a fringe NLP text that I found for a free download on this anarchist pdf share.

00:45:43
Speaker 1: I don't even want to know what corner of the Internet you were plunging into when you stumbled upon this Dallas Anarchist pdf share.

00:45:51
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, so google this book. It's called Visual Magic with a CNAKA, and it's sick. It's NLP through the lens of magic, which is a practice I don't have a stake or experience in, but it basically presents magic as a metaphor for the power of your imagination and unconscious So there's a lot of cool exercises in it.

00:46:12
Speaker 6: Check it out.

00:46:13
Speaker 1: I think that's ultimately what we've come to love about NLP. It's endlessly flexible. That's why it's outlasted a lot of other New Age therapies, and despite Richard Bandler's efforts to control NLP, that's why it's gonna outlast him too.

00:46:29
Speaker 2: I'm gonna keep using it.

00:46:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too.

00:46:41
Speaker 2: Mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me Alice Hines and Zoe Lescas. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Loukpotts, edited by Kate Osborne, Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan.

00:47:00
Speaker 1: Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone, fact checking by Aman Waylan from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswaloshan, Mangeshatikador and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norble and Nikki Etor