Mind Games: an Interview with Zoë Lescaze

Does hypnosis work? Can you really hack your brain into becoming a better person? On the flip side: Can you possibly push people to do what you want, without their knowledge? In tonight's interview, Ben, Matt and Noel welcome the legendary journalist and author Zoë Lescaze, co-creator of Kaleidoscope's hit new podcast Mind Games, to learn more about the strange, controversial evolution of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
argue you are here. That makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Now, we've talked about something
in the past, friends and neighbors, something called n LP,
short for neuro linguistic programming. This is a group term

(00:52):
for a series of technique strategies, experimental models, all built
to theoretically help you people reach a variety of what
we'll call improved outcomes. You know, if you have a
problem speaking in public, maybe NLP can help. It can
help you quit consuming tobacco. It might, as we're going
to learn, even help you become a sharpshooter.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, recently we've probably heard about NLP in a different
context because as the AI boom, we're amongst it right now,
as it's been growing and generating. We hear natural language
processing rights to as NLP a lot, which is just
the way that computers are able to actually use human language, interpret,
and then basically regurgitate human language.

Speaker 4 (01:36):
They do it so well too.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
And that might be an episode for another day, but
that's an important distinction there, Matt. The parts of NLP
that we're talking about neural linguistic programming here. They're huge
in the self help industry. They're used by some of
the most famous life coaches, but as well as some
of the world's most well known celebrities and athletes. They'll
swear by this, you know what to look for. You

(02:02):
will begin to recognize these tactics or these practices all
over the place. But what is NLP exactly? Can you
really hypnotize yourself into becoming a better person. On the
flip side, what if you could secretly hypnotize people into
giving you whatever you want? These are headache questions. Luckily
we are not exploring these alone. We are thrilled, friends

(02:25):
and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realists to welcome the journalist, the author,
the podcaster and creator of the hit new podcast Mind
Games Zoe List. Guys, Zoe, thank you so much for
joining us today.

Speaker 5 (02:37):
Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Guys.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Got to tell you, Zoe, we just finished listening to
all the episodes, I believe nine episodes of mind Games. Yeah,
there is so much contained within your show that is
difficult to even know where to start. I was hoping
maybe we could go back to Santa Cruz, California, the
nineteen seventies, let's say, to a time when therapeutic techniques

(03:06):
were being developed by college students and just we were
getting real weird with it.

Speaker 5 (03:10):
Yeah, it was getting pretty weird. That's a great place
to start. That's where neurolinguistic programming originated. And as you say,
it's a super slippery subject. It means a lot of
different things in different places, in different contacts. So it's
also where I like to begin to explain it. Basically,
you have California in the nineteen seventies. Santa Cruz is

(03:32):
just down the road from Big sur where you've got
the headquarters of Esslin and the Human Potential Movement. So
you know, this is a place where people are trying
really novel approaches to become better versions of themselves, to
you know, reenact their births, to primarily scream, ideally to well,
I don't know. The podcast is not about Esslin but.

Speaker 4 (03:53):
Self actualized perhaps.

Speaker 5 (03:56):
Yeah, I was trying to avoid that traced out there,
and he is so laced. I mean even the name
right is this really odd putting jargony acronym, which, as
you say now has another meaning that but yeah, it's
like very alienating in so many ways. But basically, this guy,
Richard Bandler, is this sort of loose cannon, troubled twenty

(04:18):
something who's at EC Santa Cruz, specifically at this one
really experimental college within the university, Krisgi College, where it
was sort of conceived as this experimental new school where
students built their own dorms with lumber. When the school opened,
teachers that cross legged on top of their desks, barefoot

(04:39):
in blue jeans, talking about communism. You know, this was
the vibe. So basically I'm here for yeah, I know,
find me out right. It actually is very beautiful. I've
been to the campus now and although it's grown a
lot and changed, it is on this beautiful hill in
the middle of a redwood forest, so that's sort of
mist hanging in the branches. There's views of the ocean.

(05:00):
It's very atmospheric, and so Bandler is this sort of
troubled guy with a checkered past. We can talk about
his background a little more because it's fascinating, but he's there,
and he teams up with a linguistics professor, a young
professor who's in his thirties named John Grinder, and together
they basically start running these experimental therapy sessions on students

(05:23):
on Bandler's peers, and they're bringing in a lot of
different therapeutic modalities Virginia Setyer's Family Systems therapy. They're bringing
in gestalt where you basically yell a lot, among other things.
But you know, there's a lot of LARPing in both
of these therapy models, like you you know, have other
people pretend to be your family members, for instance, and

(05:45):
then you talk to them. Yes, lots of role play,
so it's very physical. It's you know, amusing at times,
but people are having these real breakthroughs, and eventually they
add hypnosis into the mix, and that really is what
launches NLP into the world, specifically the corporate world and
some other sectors. But I hope that's a helpful origin

(06:05):
story and we can dig into any parts of that
more detail.

Speaker 6 (06:07):
Just for sure, front though, is NLP is not I
mean it's not the same as run of the mill hypnosis, right,
and they're related, but there's it's like a plussed.

Speaker 4 (06:16):
Up version of hypnosis.

Speaker 6 (06:18):
I'm kind of interested in your thoughts on the connection
between those disciplines.

Speaker 5 (06:21):
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's not really
a run of the mill hypnosis. It's the thing like
hypnosis is probably the only form of therapy that you know,
can be used in these really rigorous, medically backed contexts
like smoking, cessation, pain relief, et cetera. But also sell
out stadiums in Las Vegas. I mean we've all seen people,

(06:42):
you know, quacking like a duck on stage, or you know,
giant dudes being made to imagine they're delicate ballerinas, all
of this sort of you know, I think very like
BDSMI humiliation based stage stage hypnosis. So you know there's
hip Hiosis has also been used for forensic purposes. I

(07:02):
mean a bunch of states have outlawed evidence collection from
witnesses or people who have been put into hypnotic states.
That's kind of a no, no, frowned upon.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
You know.

Speaker 5 (07:14):
Amazingly, it took a while, but you know, so it's
existed in all these places. But yeah, it's you know,
regarding the relationship between NLP and hypnosis, I would say
NLP is using hypnosis in various ways among other techniques
borrowed from these other therapeutic models. So it's one of
many things in this grab bag, but it's probably the

(07:34):
most dominant factor within NLP.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
There we go, and so I've got a couple questions
here to step back. For anybody who is unfamiliar, My
games is hosted with your collaborator and close friend, Alice Hines,
and in the in the beginning of this journey, you
all describe a pretty interesting origin story of your own partnership.

(08:00):
Could you tell us a little bit about how you
guys met and then how you became interested in in
LP and bonus points for anyone who doesn't know, could
you describe an LP.

Speaker 5 (08:13):
Al Science is one of my best friends, and we
met about ten years ago at a sound meditation in
New Jersey which involves sleeping over at this house near
the water and basically getting gongs and rainsticks and chimes
played over us and a group of other people.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Sound bad so much a sound bath, it was.

Speaker 5 (08:37):
Like a twelve hour sound bath, so it was pretty transformative.
Alice came to that event dating someone she's been with
for five years, and by the end of her astral journeys,
induced by the experience, she was no longer dating that person,
at least meant to me. She was still dating him. Yeah,

(08:57):
she had to fill him in on these new developments.
But it was there that we met that we found
out we had a ton in common. We're both journalists,
were both reporters. I think we're both interested in these
kind of subcultures and niche aspects of culture that kind
of fly under the radar but actually really shape how
we think and what we believe as a society, and

(09:18):
NLP is definitely one of those things. We became interested
in hypnosis kind of generally. Alice had stumbled across NLP
in her reporting on the Twin Flames Universe cult for
Vanity Fair. She did a great piece for them that
then became a documentary which I recommend everyone goes and watches.
But basically she'd encountered NLP and a cult context. I

(09:39):
encountered it through researching hypnosis and figuring out which aspect
of it we should dig into. Like I was saying,
there's a ton of different forms of hypnosis. Well, unsurprisingly,
we settled on the one that is popular with cults,
the one whose founder stood trial for murdering a woman
in the nineteen eighties. That woman happened to be a
sex worker and his kokiine dealer's girlfriend. And I just

(10:02):
became fascinated by Richard Bandler, by this guy who has this,
you know, has this sort of like sordid criminal record,
but at the same time is selling his wares to
the US military. NLP was widely used by government spies,
by army training dudes, So we can get into that.
But just like what that bizarre Nick felt Worth exploring

(10:25):
an answer to your third question, can I describe NLP?
I would describe NLP as a as a rogue form
of hypnotherapy that took over the world. That's my one
life to.

Speaker 4 (10:39):
But that's a great place to start, for sure.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
So the ubiquity is part of the fascination for you,
for sure, Alice, could you tell us now that we
have that understanding, that's the best definition I've heard rogue hypnotherapy.
What makes it as a concept so controversial in certain
academic circles.

Speaker 5 (10:59):
Yeah, I mean it's been widely described as a pseudoscience.
I actually went to this NLP event, the NLP Leadership Summit,
a few years ago, and all the NLP trainers there
were sort of all in a twitter about how the
first line about NLP on Wikipedia is that NLP is
the pseudoscience. I mean, this is just the way people
generally perceive it. That has a lot to do with
the founders antipathy for traditional therapy, even though they were

(11:22):
borrowing from some of you know, these pioneering psychiatrists like Setier,
like Milton Erics and the hypnotherapists, they had a lot
of contempt for most therapists. They thought it was a
total ripoff that you would spend years and years and
years on your therapist couch getting to the bottom of
your problems when you could just fix them instantly. That
was what they were trying to do, and that basically

(11:44):
became the selling point for NLP. You know, you don't
have to spend thousands of dollars, you can just show
up to an NLP session and boom your curt So
they never were interested in putting NLP through a rigorous,
peer reviewed scientific process. Some people have tried to do that,
but Bandler and grind are the two founders. They were
always pretty contemptuous of that, and they were just like,

(12:06):
onto the next thing. If it works, it works, you know,
and jokes on you nerds if you want to dig
into the like nitty gritty details and do these lame experiments.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
There's something so thoroughly American too about that idea of
no deferred gratitude, get me my results instantly. I have
to wonder if LP could have reached the success it
has if it had or the abiquity it has if
it had not been started in the US.

Speaker 5 (12:32):
That's a great question. I mean, it is very popular
in countries around the world. Now. At that event I
mentioned there were NLP trainers from Egypt, from Brazil.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
You know.

Speaker 5 (12:42):
It has a huge presence in the UK and Germany,
also Australia. You know it really its reach is very
wide at this point. But no, I think it is
a uniquely American story. And really that transformation from those
early days in Santa Cruz when all these movements, not
just NLP but like Esselyn, etc. Know, it was all
about like you know, realizing your full potential for good.

(13:05):
You know, if we can make ourselves better individuals, we
can avoid another Vietnam War by you know, by extension,
we can you know, reform the ways we relate to
each other by figuring out how we relate to ourselves,
et cetera. And then you go from there to NLP
at least becoming marketed as this kind of self optimization
technique and like a lot of self help therapies that

(13:25):
are presented as being very you know, outside the box
and novel, like they really just sort of reinforce status
quo values like be a better version of yourself so
you can like work more, crank out more capital, you know,
sleep better so you can be more productive. I mean,
it's it's sort of beenal like ultimately what it what

(13:45):
it ended up hearing.

Speaker 6 (13:46):
World and speaking of American stories, I mean, like the
idea of being a life coach or a self help guru.
That's sort of a way of getting around licensure and
like actually going to school for psychology and studying rigorous
being able to kind of brand yourself. Is this thing,
this influencer type without actually being you know, a professional.

Speaker 4 (14:08):
Is that part of it? Like, is there any licensure involved.
Is there a governing body? Ben?

Speaker 6 (14:12):
That was your question I saw in the outline. It
just really occurred to me. I think it's a great
time to ask.

Speaker 5 (14:17):
Yes. That is one hundred percent part of NLP, and
it's part of what contributes to the sort of sketchy
reputation you were asking about earlier. Ben, I mean the
fact that you can just show up to an NLP
seminar for I mean, they used to be thirty days.
Now people are banging them out in a weekend. But
you can go to one of these events. You can
shell out a few hundred or a few thousand dollars,

(14:37):
get trained by someone, and then go train other people
or practice on clients who may come to you with
say real trauma or with lifelong phobias, and hope that
you can fix them. And you are not subject to
the same oversight whatsoever. As a practicing psychologist. You know,
you can't have your NLP license revoked in the same way,

(14:58):
because there's no license. The first place you get a
certificate when you get trained practice suits. Yeah, you're right,
I sued my pseudo scientific n LP.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
Sorry warm up, Yeah, I know.

Speaker 5 (15:13):
I'm amazed. I stuck the landing on that one. Yeah,
this is this is really haunted NLP from its early
days too, right because at us at EC, Santa Cruz,
Bandler and Grinda were really tight with Gregory Bateson, who
you know, was and is the sort of extremely influential polymath.
He is regarded as one of the founders of cybernetics,
but you know, was also the sort of dude who

(15:34):
can like give you a lecture on like the structure
of beetle wings or whatever.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
I mean.

Speaker 5 (15:38):
He also studied trance. He was married to Margaret Meade,
the anthropologist, and so you know, he connected them to
Milton Erickson. He also connected them to NAPAs State Hospital,
which is a psychiatric hospital not far from you see,
Santa Cruz and Bandler and Grinder and their other like
undergrad collaborators got cart Blanche to just experiment on the

(16:00):
people there, people with schizophrenia, with absolutely no oversight. I mean,
these are people who came up with this like rogue
form of hypnotherapy and then it was like, yeah, why
why do you see if it helps these inmates or
sorry they're patients, but I mean, honestly give them the
state of psychiatric hospitals back then.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
There you know, not consensual patients.

Speaker 5 (16:21):
Yeah, very vulnerable people who presumably were not in a
state to you know, elect to receive this kind of
therapy that didn't even have a name at that point.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Can we talk more about Grinder. I feel like he
has a weird past that you get into in the podcast,
but he feels even more mysterious to me and like
there's something there because he has quite a bit of
a military like Cold War strategy kind of past. Right.

Speaker 5 (16:43):
Yeah, I mean there's tons of lore surrounding both of
the founders of NLP, and it can be really hard
to sort of nail down what's real in both of
their cases. We did ultimately interview Bandler. Grinder wasn't interested
in getting an interview, but I can tell you what
said about him. He is said to have been some
sort of spy. He was definitely in the army. He

(17:06):
was definitely an officer serving in Europe during the Cold War.
He traveled widely and was apparently very gifted with languages
and not just learning sort of the words, grammar, vocabulary,
but also kind of the physical way in which people
in different cultures communicate, and so that kind of you
know again to the role playing that was sort of
a big part of NLP. Like one one NLP concept

(17:29):
essentially is that if you change your physiology, which means,
you know, say, stand up straight instead of slouching over,
you'll feel more confident. You'll be that confident person that
you're trying to, you know, think your way into being well.
You also need to physically embody that confidence. So you know,
some of this is pretty intuitive, but Grinder's background helped
him come to those realizations.

Speaker 6 (17:49):
Yeah, can I just say the moment you said that,
I sat up more straight because I wanted to self.

Speaker 5 (17:52):
That I know, I know I was likestus school. That
stuff they don't.

Speaker 7 (17:55):
Want to know you guys to know reminds me of
your water conversation early on in one of the episodes,
right about what Illicit's thirst.

Speaker 5 (18:07):
Yeah, that was one of our cheeky demos. Badler and
Grinder would do these things called double inductions, where they
would each whisper in someone's ear at the same time
saying different things, and the idea is one person This
is a hypnotic technique. It's still used in other context,
but basically one person is saying actually relevant stuff like
they're embedding commands like you'll feel this, you'll do blah.

(18:31):
The other person is just speaking about whatever. I mean.
It could be utter nonsense. Indeed it should be. Basically,
you're trying to distract the conscious mind, and so the
brain basically can't process all this stuff, and then that
makes it more susceptible to the messaging. So, Alison, I
tried a little version of that. You'll have to let
us know if it worked on you. But it was

(18:52):
basically us just playing around and trying to figure out
if we could pull the stuff off.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
I thought, what I think we all really loved about
that in particular is when we start off with in
LP as a concept. It's such a broad group term
for various tactics and models that it's incredibly helpful to
hear some of the nuts and bolts specific So the
double induction is one technique. What are some other things

(19:20):
people might encounter that could be called in LP techniques
that they might not consciously clock.

Speaker 5 (19:26):
Yeah, let me think of some quick ones. So if
you've ever heard, for instance, that people's eyes dart to
the left when they're lying, or that they'll look a
certain way when they're lying when they're telling the truth.
That's essentially derived from NLP. NLP is a whole system
of eye movements that correspond to what people are thinking, supposedly,

(19:47):
So if you glance up, you're in the visual field
and you're either imagining things that don't exist visually or
you're recalling images that you have seen before. And then
there's sort of directions for sounds, for feelings, and all
of this is supposed to help you basically read people's
minds and help you sort of guide or guide them
in a therapeutic context or manipulate them. If you're trying

(20:09):
to sell them a used car, you know, if you
see them glancing up into this supposed visual realm, you
might emphasize the visual aspects of the car you're trying
to sell. So you might say, like, you know, imagine
yourself on the open road and the wind is you know,
in your hair when the convertible. But if someone's glancing
down into the physical sensation directions, then you might be like, yeah,

(20:31):
those those plush leather seats.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
Wow, I'm a.

Speaker 5 (20:35):
New York you actually like what do you say about cars?
But you know, roar of the engine for hearing anyway,
So you use these tells to appeal to people's thoughts,
and I think that that premise has trickled down to
us in various ways undernaths that are not an LP.

Speaker 6 (20:52):
Well, now that's interesting because there is a there is
a you know, a method of trauma processing and therapy
called e m D that focuses on some of the
same left to right eye movement. It seems like almost
the flip side of what you're talking about, But that
does appear to be evidence based and something that is
you know, there's a lot of stock put into Yes.

Speaker 5 (21:13):
This is what's crazy. So one of the big revelations
of our podcast is that the founder of EMDR was
an NLP practitioner. She was working for John Grinder as
an office assistant for many years. She practiced NLP. She
wrote about NLP, She was a card carrying NLPR. She
sort of coincidence pulled away from NLP after Bandler's high

(21:34):
profile murder trial, for which she was acquitted. I should mention,
but it was a big, sordid tabloid story that focused
a lot of negative attention on NLP. So after that
she distanced herself from NLP and came up with this
kind of cockmany story about how she figured out EMDR.
She said, right, this is Francine Shapiro, and she said

(21:55):
that while she was trying to think of the dissertation
subject in psychology, she was walking through the park and
thinking about something upsetting, and she just so happened to
notice that her eyes were moving very rapidly, and those
movements helped her feel. Okay, Like people have pointed out, like,
there's no way you would clock the fact that your
eyes are moving as quickly as they would need to.

(22:16):
But yeah, I think her interest in eye movements clearly
derived from NLP, and then unlike van Ler and Grinder,
the founders of LP, she was interested in those clinical
trials putting it to the scientific test. And that's why
today NLP is regarded as a pseudoscience and EMDR is
a widely practiced trauma therapy that's endorsed by the World

(22:37):
Health Organization and the US military.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
But the same eye movement thing, you know, which is
in a lot of ways just kind of this lore
that was you know, created, and it's not really seems
to be real and doesn't seem to be real to me,
at least we see massive YouTube channels and other creators
out there who use this as ways to analyze tape,

(23:01):
let's say of a court case or something. You've likely
seen some of this where there are huge true crime
creators that just study eye movement and they will tell
you whether or not someone's lying and what they're actually
thinking about. It's just fascinating to me that something could
be conjured, you know, in the nineteen seventies as this

(23:23):
one thing NLP. Then it goes into a therapeutic technique
later on, but it can also then spawn YouTube careers.

Speaker 5 (23:30):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't even made that connection, but
that is a very concrete use case of NLP ideas
trickling out, And that is what's fascinating about NLP. Like
whether it's because that sort of damning press coverage during
the murder trial, or because it's the pseudoscience NLP often

(23:51):
is used under other names. We find it in a
lot of places, whether it's those eye movement divinations or
just you know, corporate HR speak. You know, a lot
of the language baked into that is derived from NLP.
I interviewed a former Army intelligence officer. This didn't make
it into the podcast, but he moved from the government

(24:11):
espionage context to corporate espionage. He founded a business and
he would use NLP techniques all the time, and he
would train people. He'd sort of had a consultancy, and
he would train Allied government spies. You know, after the
fall of the Iron Curtain, a lot of newly Allied
members need to sort of be brought up to speed
on US intelligence gathering techniques, so they didn't go around

(24:34):
doing the Soviet model, and so he was teaching them NLP.
He said this, but he didn't call it NLP because
the terms are just so alienating. So instead he would
just be like, Okay, here's the thing that I found
really helpful, without using the like very technical jargon like
this is a six step reframing, or this is a
switch technique, which is just like, maybe.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
You don't need to know, Zoe, I'm here in a
bonus episode because that's an interview i'd love to check out.

Speaker 5 (25:01):
Yeah, oh sweet, Well that's that's good feedback. I should
talk to my producers.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Well, one thing we do need to go back to
or I definitely want us to go back to this.
This is something that our audience has already clocked that
we should explore in depth to the degree that you're comfortable.
We mentioned a murder, right, We talked about Santa Cruz

(25:26):
in the nineteen eighties. Something tragic occurred there. That is
a I mean, it's a podcast version of a page turner.
It's one of the episodes I listened to repeatedly. Could
you take us back to nineteen eighty six and tell
us how this homicide relates to the larger than life

(25:47):
figures of NLP.

Speaker 5 (25:48):
Absolutely so. In the nineteen eighties, Bandler was having a
tough time. He basically broke up from his co founder,
John Grinder. He also so divorced from his first wife,
Leslie Cameron Bandler, who was a NLP practitioner, And he
was in Santa Cruz and falling in with this kind

(26:09):
of increasingly seedy underbelly of the city. He found a
close friend and this guy, James Marino, who had a
two page rap sheet of mostly petty crimes, but was
a prolific cocaine dealer, shall we say, and user, and
they sort of bonded over their mutual love of that
drug and of NLP. James Marino was into NLP. So
with Marino with this woman, Karen Christiansen, who was Marino's

(26:33):
on again, off again much younger girlfriend, also Bandler's bookkeeper.
Maybe it's all a little hazy and a sex worker
in Santa Cruz. He spends a lot of time with
these people, and things take a turn when Marino grows
increasingly paranoid about Karan Christensen. He thinks that she arranged
for him to be beaten up at a Halloween party,

(26:54):
for instance, and Bandler. It depends whose testimony you believe.
Bandler and Marino had very different versions of these events,
may or may not have come to suspect Korean of
being involved in that violin attack on his friend. In
early November, Karean Christianensen was killed in her living room.

(27:16):
She was found by police on the floor with a
single gunshot wound too the face. She had been doing
cocaine at the time. She was killed in the early
hours of the night with two men, Richard Bandler and
James Morino. They were the only two guys present and
they pointed the finger at each other. And this story

(27:37):
basically took off not only in California, but attracted national
media attention as well. The military contacts that Bandlor had
worked with earlier in the nineteen eighties, rushed to his defense.
They got him out on bail. This was important, so
he didn't show up to you know, the subsequent court
proceedings in a prison jumpsuit. We interviewed his defense, We

(28:00):
interviewed people who who spoke to him at the time,
who spoke to Marino at the time, and we get
into all the kind of horrifically sorted details in that
episode of the podcast. But hopefully that's a that's an
okay overview. Sorry I couldn't.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
That's been phenomenal, That's phenomenal. We also we also in
the follow up. One thing that will surprise a lot
of people, do check out that episode in particular, folks
check out the whole show, but for the for the
deeper blow by blow. That's a canot miss and one
of the most surprising things. Can't speak for everybody, but
at least for me, was not just the acquittal, but

(28:37):
the fact that later Bandler is able to arguably leverage
this and become like the NLP guide to see post trial.
Is that true?

Speaker 5 (28:49):
Yeah, one hundred percent. I actually interviewed someone in the
NLP world who told me that it might have even
burnished Bandler's reputation. He said, I'm paraphrasing. He said thing
like yeah, if you're you know, from Sweden and you've
never met an accused murder before, you know, this was
a hugely seductive opportunity to study with Richard Bandler. Bandler

(29:11):
had sort of cultivated a bit of a loose cannon
mystique throughout his life prior to the murder. He actually
recently bragged to a journalist for The Guardian about deliberately
electrocuting his stepfather when he was a little kid. He
said that his stepfather was abusive and to get back
at him, he basically rigged a wire to a doormat

(29:33):
to a door knob during an electrical storm. But basically
when the guy opened the door, he got electrocuted and
went to the hospital. And Badler was ten years old
when he supposedly did this. But anyway, it's a kind
of fascinating thing to tell the mainstream media after you've
you know, stood trial for murder. So he clearly hasn't
shied away from some of these more controversial stories about

(29:55):
himself despite that.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
And here will pause for a word from our sponsors.
We'll be back with more mind games.

Speaker 4 (30:09):
All Right, we're back. Let's hop right into it with Zoe.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
I want to talk about another seductive opportunity in the
form of Ross Jeffries.

Speaker 5 (30:19):
Okay, so.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Right, yeah, this is a bit of there's a bit
of a walk. So last night my partner and I
watched Inside the Manosphere. This is the new Louis Thureau
thing that you can find here on Netflix, actually, and
it reminded me of his other film, My Scientology movie,
which is one of the first times guys, I think

(30:44):
I think some of the first interactions we had with
NLP is when we were talking about Scientology. Some of
the technology of NLP being used within that church in
at least some ways.

Speaker 6 (30:56):
Are those techniques I want to use during some of
the whatever the confession setting, that's the word.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Some of this stuff is taught in like multiple organizations
similar to Scientologist.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yes, it just took me down that whole pathway, which
then got me to this video or this this clip
that you play within the show of Louis throw with
Ross Jeffries at like a cafe or something. Can you
I know this is silly because I don't think we
can play it in this medium. But if you can
just explain, like just briefly, say what happened there between

(31:30):
that interaction and then what this guy, Ross Jeffries did
with NLP that was different.

Speaker 5 (31:37):
Yeah, for sure, I love that sequence. This was a
clip from Louis Thuru's former show on the BBC Weird Weekends,
and he did an episode around hypnosis. He looked at
a few different applications of hypnosis, but the one we
focused on for our purposes was his work with notorious
pickup artist Ross Jeffries, the so called dog father of

(31:59):
the up artistry movement. And for your younger listeners, pick
up artistry was kind of a big deal in the
nineties and early two thousands. And there's this book The
Game by Neil Strauss, this journalist who embedded with Jeffreys
and a bunch of other pickup artists to learn how
to get women into bed using these kind of scripted
verbal patterns and other techniques. So Ross Jeffries basically learn

(32:24):
everything he knew from Richard Bandler. He went to go
train with him sometime after the murder trial, sometime around
the murder trial, and he's a little shaky on the
dates but basically he learned how to hypnotically persuade women
to sleep with him. That's his claim, And Alison, I
have a lot of theories on pickup artistry and could

(32:48):
unload with some of those. There's a lot to say
about it. But I went to San Diego to interview
Ross Jeffries. That's where he lives. And in the clip,
Ross goes to this cafe and Marina del Rey he
was living in Los Angeles at the time, and he
demonstrates how pickup artists can supposedly talk anyonoman to sleeping

(33:08):
with them, or at least going on a day with them,
and it's pretty crazy to watch. I recommend everyone check
this out. He goes up to this woman. She's sitting
at a cafe with a friend. She's smoking a cigarette,
she's having a coffee. She has this kind of nineties
Meg Ryan style haircut, and he sits at the table
next to her. He doesn't come on super strong, like
hey baby, you know. He sits down next to her

(33:29):
and he starts asking her to imagine these fantasy vacation spots.
He sort of gets her to start conjuring these positive images,
and as she does that, he begins running his finger
up her arm slowly, and then he does that later.
And this is an NLP hypnotic technique, calling yes exactly,

(33:53):
And so you can anchor an idea or an emotion
to a touch, a physical a physical sensation, a sound.
It's basically Pavlovs dogs for humans. You know, like instead
of hearing the balance salivating, this woman supposed to feel
that touch and then go back to thinking about, you know,
these extremely relaxing, sensuous vacation spots. So that's what happens

(34:15):
in that clip. I went to go talk to Ross
Jeffries in San Diego and he actually I was sort
of braced for this interview. You know, you've been leaving
me a lot of voice memos telling me he was
going to covertly hypnotize me during the interview. That didn't
exactly have it, Yeah, it was. It was really weird.
He also showed up to the interview wearing this like

(34:37):
purple jacket over a purple shirt. It was like, which
felt to me like a kind of hypnosis deep cut
because various purple yeah, yeah, yeah. And he actually ended
up being one of I think are more lucid sources
sort of breaking down some of these hypnotic techniques and
how they're supposed to work. So that's one of my

(34:58):
favorite episodes. I love the pick up Artist.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Let's stay on hypnosis here for a moment, Zoe, How
would you define hypnosis and why is it considered so
controversial in some circles? Is it because of the sometimes
extravagant claims that hypnotists make, or is it because of
misconceptions like what is the what is hypnosis to you?

Speaker 6 (35:23):
And is it itself considered pseudoscience by some you know,
in the psychological community and the psychology community.

Speaker 5 (35:30):
Well, I would shy away from defining hypnosis only because
medical experts have failed out this task. I mean, that's
one of the fascinating things about hypnosis, Like even among
hypnotherapists who use it, who study it, who research it,
there's no single agreed upon definition of what it means
to slip into a hypnotic trance, to be hypnotized. And

(35:51):
that's partly because different things can happen when you've been hypnotized.
You know, if you're prompted to visualize something, you know
a different part of your brain is going to light
up an EKG. Then you know, if you're imagining pain
or the absence of pain, and so it's just really
tricky to study because you know, brains are weird and
the mind doesn't really But I wouldn't say it's regarded

(36:14):
as a pseudoscience by anyone in the medical community. I
mean there's tons of research surrounding its impact on subjective
experiences of pain, for instance. So yeah, yeah, yeah, So
you know, it doesn't work for everyone to the same degree.
I mean, some people aren't going to get a lot
out of it, but for the people who are hypnotizable, yeah,

(36:35):
it can show pretty dramatic reductions in pain relief in
situations like childbirth. It's also use for anxiety. You know,
there are people who have, you know, phobias of going
to the dentists. So there's actually this whole like pro
hypnosis dentistry community. But yeah, hypnosis is totally bonkers. Like
I read this one experiment where I'm not sure if

(36:57):
you've ever come across this other experiment. This might be
too clunky to explain, but basically it's where like the
words of different colors are printed in colors. Yes course, yeah, right, Okay,
you know this there's a name for us about escaping
me right now. But so it's like, you know, you'll
see the word blue but it's printed in red. You'll
see the word green but it's printed yellow. Hypnosis and

(37:18):
it's supposed to be really hard to read like it,
and it reveals, you know, how our brains like kind
of go on fritz trying to do that. Well, they
had hypnotized people do it, and they just had no
stumbling blocks whatsoever. They're just like, oh, red, green, blue, yellow, bluh.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
You know it was fine, Zoe. I cheated just a bit.
I believe we're talking about the stroop effect.

Speaker 5 (37:37):
There we go.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
Yes, that's the why, because it was right on the
tip of my tongue. It does you know the stroop
waffle effect right now, I'm going to remember.

Speaker 5 (37:46):
It as the waffle effect green.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
I do want to share one story that'll that is
a bit of a walk, but I promise it'll it'll
lead us to something, uh that is mission critical for
a lot of our audience.

Speaker 5 (38:00):
I had, well, Francine Shapiro discovered EMDR on a walk.
So who knows where this is going to be the
next week trauma therapy.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
Everybody, close your eyes, look up, roll your eyes up
and put yourself in a walking situation by a beach.
So here we go. I had, I had done a
lot of research previously on different allegations of things like
the Satanic panic, right, or child abuse rings or UFO
UAP encounters and abductions. You alluded to this just a

(38:31):
moment ago, and I don't want us to lose it.
What I kept finding over and over again is that
for many years a form of hypnosis, a genre of
hypnosis called regression therapy, was treated often as concrete evidence
in these experiences or these stories. Could you tell us
your take on this memory regression, memory recovery stuff and

(38:55):
why it is considered so controversial.

Speaker 5 (38:58):
Yeah, one hundred. I actually have a pretty personal stake
in this as someone who tried it for my personal lives.
So yeah, hypnosis from memory recovery is one of, if
not the most controversial application of hypnosis. You mentioned the
Satanic panic. Basically, this one woman who was working with

(39:19):
her psychiatrist who later became her husband, through hundreds of
hypnotic sessions, recovered memories of being abused by a Satanic
cult as a young child, and despite the fact that
her siblings her family were like, what are you talking
about that did not happen. She quote unquote recovered memories
of watching them, you know, sacrifice babies and turn them

(39:42):
into you know, ash smoothies. I mean it was really
specific and disgusting, and she you know, described murders, She
described all these really serious crimes. And so instead of
making people you know, shy away from this, it sparked
this huge boom where suddenly there were tons of copycat imitators,
people you know, recovering memories of satanic abuse through hypnosis.

(40:07):
So people went to jail, you know, people were ostracized
from their communities, you know, school teachers who were accused
of you know, kidnapping children. It was really awful and
gave hypnosis a bad name in these contacts, and it
also inspired a bunch of research.

Speaker 6 (40:20):
That is all discussed in the incredible podcast The Devil
you Know with Sarah Marshall, who we also had on
the podcast not terribly long ago from the CBC.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
So if you're interested in digging more.

Speaker 6 (40:31):
Into that, check out that podcast and maybe go back
and listen to the interview.

Speaker 4 (40:34):
Just talking to folks out there in Netflix Land.

Speaker 5 (40:37):
Yeah, you're talking to me too. I missed that episode,
but great one. Yes, Elizabeth Loftus is this oneble talk
about that memory researcher. Okay, so she comes up in
that All right, great, well I really want to watch
it now. I'm kind of flow key obsessed with her.
But basically she studies memory and she she actually had
an experience, despite being a memory researcher, where some family
members were a family member accident implanted this false memory

(41:02):
in her. Her mother drowned when she was a young child,
and I think her aunt found the body floating in
a swimming pool. But she was talking to this relative
as an adult and the relative was like, oh, yeah,
you know when you found your mom's body, and she
was like, what, No, that was my own. They're like, no, no,
I think you found her. And then she found over

(41:23):
the subsequent days that she was sort of having these images,
you know, the hair swirling in the swimming pool. And
eventually the relative got in touch and was like, oh,
I'm so sorry, I was mistaken, and she's like, geez, Louise,
you know, this Israeli potent. So she did a lot
of the pioneering research on deliberately installing fake memories in
experimental participants, and it's really not that hard to do,

(41:44):
is what she demonstrated.

Speaker 6 (41:46):
So I kind of part of the plot of Shutter Island,
the Scorsese movie. There's a big plot line and that
that's very similar to what you just described.

Speaker 4 (41:53):
No spoilers, but that's it.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
And you said you have a personal steak in this
to the degree that you were come for bo Zoe,
would you mind sharing a little bit about your first
hand experience with the technic?

Speaker 5 (42:05):
I should be comfortable sharing it because it's sort of
episode three in the podcast. Right before that episode aired,
I was like, what the fuck was I thinking? Like this?
So this is so personal. I never do things this
personal in the context of my reporting. But yes, I
made myself a guinea pig for the sake of mind
games and worked with a hypnotherapist on recovering memories of

(42:30):
my father, who died when I was six of lung cancer,
and throughout my whole life. It's kind of amazing, Like
when I go to a cocktail party I don't know
and it comes up that my dad's dead, people are
always like, oh, wow, how old are you among six?
And they say, wow, that's really young. How much do
you remember about him, and like, oh, I get why
they're you know, I get why they're curious, but it's like, oh,

(42:51):
you kind of just asked like the like staking my
hard question, you know, at this cocktail party. I don't
really know is the answer. I mean, I've definitely had
experiences where I think I have a memory of him,
like the quality of the light in the room, it
feels like a memory. And then all stumble upon a
photo in a childhood photo album and be like, oh,

(43:12):
I clearly constructed a memory around this photo that I
have seen before.

Speaker 4 (43:16):
Shoot.

Speaker 5 (43:17):
So you know, memory is really slippery. It's really hard
to know what's real and what's not it to begin with,
you know, even when you haven't you attempted hypnotic memory recovery.
But I went into work with this therapist with the
understanding that any memories we quote unquote recovered may or
may not be capital are real. Like, there's just no

(43:37):
way of knowing. And so she really Covey added that
she was like, look, I think this could still be productive.
That could still be a way to cultivate some sort
of posthumous intimacy with your dad. You didn't get to
spend a lot of time with him, and I was like, great,
let's give it a shot. I went into it extremely skeptically.
You know, it's not like I hadn't tried to think
about my dead dad before. But you know, if you

(43:57):
just sort of sit down in your chair, let's come
up with some memories. You know, they're not forthcoming, or
at least they haven't been for me over the course
of my entire life. And then I tried this with
her and it was extremely moving. It was really profound
and surprising. Like I'm a pretty visual person, so I
expected like images, even just fleeting moments, and instead what

(44:19):
I got were these physical sensations, like the heat of
his touch and like his voice, you know, not coming
from over there, but like the way a voice vibrates
through someone's chest when you are being held by them.
I mean, it was just intense. I was like crying.
I couldn't even like talk to my partner about it
for weeks or anyone. I was just like really processing.

(44:42):
So we did a few sessions and yeah, you know,
if you're curious, if anyone listening is curious about trying
this kind of work, I do personally recommend it, but
just really going into it with that understanding that like
you can't know if they're real or not, which didn't
bother me because I don't know whether I'm real. Memories
are real, so whatever wasn't in.

Speaker 4 (45:04):
That context, it makes so much sense.

Speaker 6 (45:05):
How could you can gain insight from it but then
using it in court proceedings for example, or you know,
as a way of you know, accusing someone of a crime.

Speaker 4 (45:13):
That makes a whole lot less sense. And that's sort
of the point.

Speaker 5 (45:15):
Right, yes, exactly, And like, you know, what I did
get were these like lovely sense memories but pretty nonspecific,
like being hell, you know, maybe like you know, I
kind of remembered the setting, but I wouldn't be able
to say, like, on July fifth, my dad he'll be
you know, like this holds up and yeah, and you know,
like my hypnotist was also pretty careful to check whether

(45:36):
I was going looking for trauma, because she was. I
don't think she would have worked with me if that
had been the case, but it was like no, no,
no trauma. Aside from the dad dying part.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
CAT appreciate the caveat as well that that your therapist
proposed and was very clear with that at the beginning,
So it sounds like what we're saying here is Zoe,
is that even though we cannot one hundred percent verify
whether a memory is quote unquote real or created, it
still lends some some sort of helpful outcome, right, some

(46:10):
sort of breakthrough. Is that fair to say?

Speaker 5 (46:12):
Yeah, that's an hundred percent fair to say.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Hypnosis is so striking to me because of it the
intensity of one on one focused attention, which I feel
like is one of the major keys to a hypnosis
session or being taken under hypnosis. There is a human
being with you, generally, and they are talking to you,
They are making eye contact with you, they are talking

(46:35):
and very you know, the patterns that you've described in
the show. I feel like that is such the key
to it. When we're we walk around most of the
time with our phones in our faces, you know, unable
to pay real, true attention to many of the things
happening around us. And I wonder how often those hypnosis
techniques can be weaponized against us and we would be

(46:58):
wholly unaware, think very easily.

Speaker 5 (47:01):
I mean, if you've ever watched TV like that, has
al underd person appened to you. But I mean the
thing is you don't have to make eye contact with
someone to hypnotize them. You don't have to be in
the same room with them. Caz, my hypnotist, was in
London and I you know, we met through zoom. There
are also crazy stories about people just listening to hypnotic

(47:21):
tapes and having pretty behavior mind altering stories like I'm
not sure if you like dug into the God what
were they called the Bunny the Bunny sex tapes? Like
they oh there, oh yeah, you guys know about this,
Like right, so these people were sort of inducted into
this one man's sexual orbit. He had them listen to

(47:42):
these hypnotic tapes and they were, you know, willing to
do it. They were kind of into kinky stuff, but
they did not anticipate it basically completely transforming them and
being hypnotically forced into doing all the stuff. So yeah,
they were just listening to audio. So yes, it is
easy to abuse.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
And you, you and your co host have a thankfully
not that similar and experience as the Buddy tapes, but
you have you have an experience where you receive you
all receive hypnotic tapes. I think in the lead up
to a birth, a pregnancy, and listening through to those
tapes about I guess addressing concerns right which anybody would

(48:26):
have carrying a child. Could you talk a little bit
about that experience, because it just hit me. Yeah, that's
another ten ten textbook example of listening to hypnotic cues
over and over again.

Speaker 4 (48:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (48:39):
I mean, neither of us smoke. If we did, we
would definitely have tried it for smoking cessation. But Alice
was pregnant when we started making the podcast, and so
she bravely volunteered herself to try hypnobirthing to deal not
only with you know, pain during childbirth, but with with

(48:59):
anxiety leading up to it because you know, like a
lot of people, she was understandably freaked out about the
kind of violent experience that is childbirth. So what's crazy
about her time exploring this is that she did it
with Nancy Salsman. Nancy Salzman is the co founder of
the most notorious sex cult of this century NEXIM, and

(49:23):
what very few people know about Nancy is that she
was a hypnotist and an NLP practitioner before she founded
that organization. So we dig into her backstory on the
podcast and how hypnotic and NLP techniques found their way
into NEXM and were used against members, perhaps even against
Nancy herself. But Nancy made a hypno berthing tape for Alice.

(49:45):
It was I think maybe five or ten minutes long,
and Alice listened to it repeatedly over the course of
her pregnancy. She did find it helpful. She didn't end
up using it during the birth itself because she ended
up going in for a scheduled see section for medical reasons,
so there was no pain to control hypnotically or otherwise.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
I see, Well, let's pause right here here from our sponsors,
and then we'll be right back to create some more
therapeutic change.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
We've returned, we're out of our trans state and backa zooey.
What are the questions that we have to ask when
we're on a journey on a show like this is
what surprised you and your co host the most in
your discovery so far.

Speaker 5 (50:33):
I think discovering that NLP isn't total hogwash was pretty
surprising for both of us. I mean we went into
it pretty skeptically. I mean, see for sentence on Wikipedia
this is a pseudoscience, and you know, we're just kind
of like what, you know, what is this thing. It

(50:54):
seems to attract really nefarious people, you know, people who
want to pull one over on unsuspecting victims, like what
could possibly be redemptive here? And as we began experimenting
with it, we actually found some of the techniques really
productive in our own lives, and just I think there
are aspects of NLP that both of us will continue using.

(51:16):
And as I did with the reporting, you know, I
was the one to interview a lot of people who
were involved in the early days of NLP, and so
many of them have hearts of gold and are just
lovely people and who really believe this is, you know,
the most powerful and potent technology, as many of them
referred to it, for improving the human condition, for helping

(51:39):
people become all that they can be, and overcoming these
hurdles that are very difficult to address in other ways.
And they just want to spread the good word, you know.
And I was kind of touched by their earnestness, which
sort of counterbalance some of the shadier applications of NLP.

Speaker 4 (51:56):
So take away don't throw the baby out with the bath. One.

Speaker 5 (51:59):
I don't throw the maybe out with the bath will hutter,
but definitely do your homework on the baby, make sure
that baby is right for you.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
Because and maybe don't automatically drink the bath water because
someone tells you it's good.

Speaker 4 (52:11):
Yeah, yeah, I regret.

Speaker 5 (52:15):
Throw out the bath water. Yeah we're gonna let it
die or go down a drain, and I guess yeah there.
I would just advise anyone who's curious to try NLP
to maybe read some books before you sign up for
a really expensive seminar. You might not need a guru
to benefit from NLP. We certainly learn techniques on our

(52:37):
own and have gotten, as I said, a lot out
of them. So maybe maybe you know, do your homework
and know that not all NLP practitioners are created equally,
because like we were talking about earlier, Noel asked the
question about oversight. I mean, there's just no quality control.
Anyone can say they're an NLP practitioner if they coughed

(52:58):
up the cash or aster an LP practitioner, which meets
you coughed up even more gosh, and you know, spend
somewhat more time doing it.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
But like you know, or you just see confidently just
say yeah, I'm an LP qualified person with my just
out at my posture nice.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Exactly after you though, there's something you mentioned right towards
the end of the show where you're talking about oh
gosh and the Tony Robbins of it all and the
self help versions of this, where you're where NLP is
being used for sales, and you know you're taking these

(53:36):
classes by gurus. Where in that time, I believe it's
in the late seventies early nineteen eighties, you describe it
as a time of inflation in the United States, stagnant wages,
job losses, cuts to social welfare, extreme competition in the workforce,
a new social Darwinism that's arising in that time. And

(53:58):
I do wonder if we're not inside currently of another
one of those times, or entering into one of those,
you know, as things occur around us in society. I
do wonder if we should be on the lookout for
new versions of something like this that would come our
way that we might try and defend ourselves against, Like
don't fall prey to someone who's trying to sell us

(54:21):
this kind of guruism.

Speaker 5 (54:22):
I think you're spot on. I think the entire self
help movement in the United States was born out of
these conditions you just described. The fact that, you know,
people were competing with one another as their jobs got
sent overseas. I mean suddenly you had to have an
edge to survive in the workplace, to get ahead, and
that really transformed workplace culture. And I think, yeah, as

(54:46):
we see what happens with AI, I mean, I think
it would be naive to think that's not going to
radically change the labor market, what work looks like in
the United States, and a lot of people are forecasting
widespread unemployment, and should that happen, there are definitely going
to be people who say they have the answer, who

(55:06):
say they can help you, you know, outshine your competitors,
or you know, you can train yourself not to sleep
so you can just do more. I mean, yeah, it
could take a lot of different forms, but I think
you're righty, the.

Speaker 4 (55:16):
End times are a real opportunity period, you.

Speaker 6 (55:19):
Know, for sure, Just booming, take five seconds to just
talk about the AI connection, because Matt mentioned it at
the top, about how the term is being more broadly
applied to some of that language learning model type stuff,
and I don't think we touched on it again, I'm
just I'm curious personally.

Speaker 5 (55:37):
Yeah, I mean, that's just kind of a coincidence that
they happen to these two very different things happen to
have the exact same acronym. I mean, it's certainly one
of the reasons why NLP neuro linguistic programming has become
difficult to research, because you start NLB and you get
a whole lot of AI stuff, which is over my
head for the most part. But yeah, I mean, there

(55:59):
are there are a certainly people working in the tech
space who use NLP, and you know, startup culture surely
incorporates aspects of that kind of NLP we were reporting on.
But there's always been this kind of uneasy connection between
NLP and Silicon Valley. Like Richard Bandler and John Grinder
were early distributors of Apple computers that didn't mean a

(56:20):
whole hell of a lot in the nineteen seventies. You
basically just had to buy more than one or maybe
it was four something. These are the garage days, right, Yeah, yeah,
these are garage days, and they but you know, nonetheless,
they they were attracted to this new technology, they bought it,
and I think it's so interesting that you know, they
were they were drawn to Apple because NLP is not
so different in the sense that the central promise of

(56:43):
NLP is that your brain is a computer. You've just
never got the user manual, and they promised to take
this really complicated, chaotic thing called the mind or the
self and make it legible, make it easy to hack.
And Apple computers correct me if I'm wrong. They're not
inherently so much better than IBM computers or any other

(57:04):
kind of computers, but they are way easier to use
if you are not a tech savvy person. So they
kind of nail the intuitive design features that make them
so popular.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
Well.

Speaker 5 (57:15):
NLP appeals to a similar ethos, like, let's just simplify
its streamline and let's give you the consumer the rings brilliant.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
Oh so well done. That connection. That absolutely nails it.
We've got just a couple more follow up questions. There's
so much more we want to get to, folks. Please
do check out mind Games available now wherever you find
your favorite shows. Early on in the show, you all
have a quotation that really stood out to me and

(57:45):
I kept revisiting it. It is quote, all communication is
a form of manipulation. And I'm sure a lot of
people have already asked you to unpack what we mean
by that brilliant statement. But before we do that, here's
what this means me think of And this is one
of our last questions, Zoe, have you used n LP

(58:06):
techniques on us during this interview?

Speaker 5 (58:09):
I wish I could say I deployed some masterful hypnotic strategy,
but no, you guys are are fun to talk to,
so it wasn't necessary. I reserve the right to hypnotize
you if you.

Speaker 4 (58:20):
Mis behave, and I'm open to it.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
You know, did you notice the collection of blues and
reds and our screens? All of us.

Speaker 5 (58:28):
Believe the same like purple growth liminal.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
We got a great deal on blue lights, is what
it was.

Speaker 5 (58:38):
They're all really into plants like and ask monsterra just
off screen.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
I brought drums, but I didn't have a knife, so
I brought a hatchet. The drummer with the knives the episode.

Speaker 4 (58:53):
This is the only way we get window.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
What do we hope our audience takes way from mind games?
Like after people listen through the show, what are some
of the big learning opportunities there?

Speaker 4 (59:08):
For me?

Speaker 5 (59:09):
I think some of the main takeaways from the show
are to be a little suspicious of the sort of
guruism that has pervaded so many aspects of our society.
You know, we look at Richard Bandler and his influence,
but you can see this in all sorts of places,
the promise of the quick fix, and the promise of

(59:32):
techniques that purport to give you more agency and control
over your own life, when in fact you may end
up just spending more money surrendering your agency to someone
else's ideas. I mean, there's this great George Garland that
where he's riffing on self help. This is from the
eighties or nineties, so he was really watching this industry

(59:52):
boom around him, and he says something like, if you
read a self help book, it's not self help, it's
help you ask someone else for help. Like and anyway,
I love that bit, and I do think it just
kind of neatly encapsulates the dependency that's baked into a
lot of these purported self help technologies, Like you know,

(01:00:15):
it's it's a way of making people feel better sometimes
about giving over the reins. I think it can also
be productive to think about that dynamic in terms of
like do we even want control over our own lives?
I mean, we sort of tend to claim, like, yes,
give me more agency. I just want more agency. Agency
is such a buzzword. But do most people really want

(01:00:38):
agency or I mean, or is it just this sort
of thing where we think we want it and then
we kind of realize it's actually easier to just get
through life if someone else is kind of telling us
what to do, you know, what to eat, how to
work out, how to you know whatever, make ourselves better
and like better for what cause? So these are sort
of the questions we tried to trojan Horse into the podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
For Sometimes the agey comes from choosing who to listen to.

Speaker 5 (01:01:03):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, And it's a product. I mean, it's
just these people are selling something exactly. I mean, also,
maybe you know, be on guard for mena cafes who
creepily stroke the ladies.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
We often talk on this show about there being the
smallest truth at the center of the craziest conspiracy theories.
You might hear and that that truth, when you hear
it spoken or you see it written somewhere, it might
resonate with you. And then there's all this other, all
these other details they get glommed on to that one

(01:01:39):
truth that then becomes this big conspiracy, whether it's you know,
everything from reptilian overlords, you know, controlling the world, to
flat Earth to all these crazy theories that we've talked
about on this show. At the heart of it, there's
something about this feeling of not being in control that
is so human to you know, to it on and

(01:02:00):
on and on. But there is one thing that Richard
Bamler says when you're when I think, is it you
or Alice.

Speaker 4 (01:02:06):
That talks to him?

Speaker 5 (01:02:07):
A goes really well.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
And when Alice is talking, we'll talk about that. But
when Alice is talking to him, he says, if you
change the way you think, it changes how you feel
and therefore changes what you're capable of doing and not doing.
And that kind of tiny little nugget, you know, at
the heart of some of the NLP practices really does
resonate with me and and it probably resonates with a

(01:02:34):
lot of people.

Speaker 4 (01:02:35):
The power of positive thinking, right, I mean, to a degree.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
But that kind of thing allows you to build all
this other junk around it that then, you know, becomes
the vocabulary and becomes the techniques and the reason why
you need this new book that has all the updated
stuff in it to me at least.

Speaker 6 (01:02:54):
But the nugget is something that any of us could
have probably figured out on our own.

Speaker 4 (01:02:58):
Is that what you're saying, Matt's.

Speaker 3 (01:02:59):
Part of it?

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
Yeah, kind of.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
And this goes to you know, this goes back to Zoe,
your powerful point about agency and what people want to
think they want versus what sort of satiates them in
their experience and their existence. This is a lot to
ponder and we can't thank you enough, along with your
co host Alice, for making this phenomenal show. We're not

(01:03:25):
blowing rainbows, guys. This is worth checking out, Zoe. For
anybody who wants to learn more of your work outside
of mind Games, where can they find you?

Speaker 5 (01:03:34):
That's so nice of you to ask? They can check
out Zoe Lascaus dot com. It's just my first name,
hard to spell, last name dot com. That's where I
tend to plunk all my journalism. I write about art
and science in various ways. I just filed a story
for The Science Times about these endangered snails off the
coast of Mexico, for instance, and this indigenous community that

(01:03:57):
extracts purple dye from them. So you know, my interests range.
It might be meteorites one day, snails the next. It
was certainly NLP for a while, and that I think
will continue to preoccupy me. So yeah, I keep an
eye out for bonus episodes, and yeah, check out mind
Games wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Nice. Also check out Paleo Art Visions of the Prehistoric Past.
I believe a new edition just published last year.

Speaker 5 (01:04:22):
That's right, Yeah, thanks for the plug. Yeah, So this
was my first book. It's about how humans have imagined
the prehistoric world. So basically, if you were a scientist
or a scientific artist in the nineteenth century and very
little was known about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, you
might get handed a tooth and a femur and someone
would say, what did this animal look like? And of

(01:04:44):
course the results were wildly speculative, imaginative. They drew a
lot from the tradition of drawing dragons and other monsters,
and so this is a book about how that tradition
evolved over time, from around the eighteen thirties to around
the nineteen nineties. I was published by Tasha and yeah,
there's a nice new edition.

Speaker 4 (01:05:03):
We love toash.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Nomenal, We love Tasha, and thank you again. Zoe. Again,
mind Games is out wherever you find your favorite shows,
and there you have it, folks, what a wild ride. Again,
we are not being hyperbolic. This show Mind Games really
blew our collective minds so much so that before we

(01:05:27):
did this intro, guys, I had to walk out and
get some mayor. I had to take off my jacket.
Now I'm just in a short sleeve shirt because it
got so hot.

Speaker 4 (01:05:35):
E see was the opposite for me.

Speaker 6 (01:05:36):
It chilled me to my very core, and I had
to put on a sweater, which I then subsequently removed
because I didn't want to break the illusion that I
was here from earlier.

Speaker 4 (01:05:45):
You went and done and Ben, so I fully support your.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Move there, and I kept my clothes exactly the same.

Speaker 6 (01:05:51):
Matt actually has a continuity person there just to make
sure all the full they take my rods, you know, metahuh.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
She's a very good to us, Yes, yeah, very loyal and.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
A point dog American and on the point of continuity,
you know, I feel like this was such an amazing
compliment to our earlier episodes on things like inn LP
on Nexium. It's related to so many things that we
have talked about in the past, including weird experiments by

(01:06:25):
Uncle Sam. So we would love to hear your thoughts. Folks,
have you experimented with hypnotism? Have you ever hypnotized someone
or felt that someone has hypnotized you? What's your take
on in LP? We would love to hear your thoughts
and we can't wait for you to join us. You
can find us on the lines. You can call us
on a phone. You can always send us an email.

Speaker 4 (01:06:46):
Are you hypnotized right now?

Speaker 6 (01:06:48):
You can reach out to us at the handle conspiracy
stuff or conspiracy stuff show on your social media platform
of choice.

Speaker 4 (01:06:55):
And there's another way to contact us if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):
Yes, you can call us. It's an opportunity to use
your voice on us. Call one eight three three std WYTK.
Why don't you go ahead and call that number? See
if you can hypnotize us all of us. Woo wouldn't
that be fun?

Speaker 4 (01:07:16):
Please do it? Please, I'm here for it. I will
come out and say that I am fully open to this.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
Me too, Ben you in no comment?

Speaker 4 (01:07:25):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
You can also send us an email.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet out of raid sometimes
the void writes back quick pro quo plarice. Give us
a random fact and you will receive one in return.
We can't wait to hang out here in the dark
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.