March 11, 2026 • 44 mins
This week, we're talking 'human technology' — specifically, neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. If you have any interest in modern day cults like NXIVM or Twin Flames Universe, you may have heard of it. But did you know that NLP also has roots in therapeutic practices like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, or that Tony Robbins was an NLP practitioner before becoming a motivational speaker?
In the new podcast Mind Games, journalists and best friends Alice Hines and Zoë Lescaze investigate the origins of NLP, from its roots in the new age movement in 1970s California through the pick-up artist trend of the early 2000s. They even try their hand at hypnotizing themselves. But does it work?
Check out Mind Games from Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm mos Valoschen. On this show,
we talk a lot about technology that lives outside of
US computers, microchips, satellites, data centers. But today we're going
to talk about something built as a human technology, specifically
neuro linguistic programming or NLP, which shows up everywhere from
Hypnobirths to Tony Robbins to the Nixian cult. But does
(00:36):
it actually work. Our guests today are the hosts of
mind Games, which is a co production of Kaleidoscope and
I Heart Podcasts. Alice Hines and Zoe Laskaz are both
journalists and professional skeptics who met at a shamanic sound meditation.
Zoe is a science journalist and Alice has exposed various
wellness scams and cults. So they are the perfect pair
(00:58):
to tackle a practice that is both revered and maligned.
So let's jump in. Welcome Alice, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Great to see you us.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Great to see you Alice.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
And welcome Zoe, thanks so much, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
It's a special day today. I'm holding a copy of
the New York Post. What does it feel like to
see ourselves and the show covered in the New York Post.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm incredibly flattered. There's a picture of me and Zoe.
Zoe is shooting a target at What range was that, Zoe?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
That was a shooting range in the suburbs of Washington,
d C. And the target was seventy five feet away.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh shoot boggles the mind is the headline. Novice to
gun expert in three days.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm just relief they didn't drag us through the mud,
although we would have been in very illustrious company if
they had, with the Bernie Sanderses of the world. So also, well,
that ends.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, you used NLP to become a shop shooter. I did.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I went down and spent three days with a guy
who worked closely with Tony Robbins in the nineteen eighties
on a military contract. The US Army hired them to
make expert marksmen out of new recruits.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And did it work.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The proof is in the puddig. I hit the target,
which is somewhat remarkable because I'd never held a handgun before,
let alone fired one at something very far away. That said,
it was a inherently flawed experiment. You know, we don't
have a control group. There aren't multiple mes that we
could test using other methods. So with that caveat, yeah,
it worked, I hit the thing.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I want to hear more about it, but Alice first
tell us what is NLP.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Neurolinguistic programming, which is often called NLP is a set
of techniques drawing from psychology and linguistics that are designed
to change belief and behavior. So this is kind of
in the self help world, and you can attend seminars,
there are books where you can sort of learn these
(02:52):
techniques to try to solve certain problems that you may have.
People also use these techniques on others unwittingly, so these
are also something that you may have experienced without necessarily
knowing about it.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Can I make a confession? Yeah, as a teenage boy,
I was quite intrigued by NLP and I bought an
NLP book.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
What did you hope to use it for?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
What do you think you be? Well? Or at least
I at least I was attracted to the idea that
you could control people's response to you.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And how did that work out?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
You know? I never I never really I never really
employed it, but it was my first sort of introduction
to the idea of like this world of using your
mind as a tool against itself, I would.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Say, and potentially against others.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Against others, although I never I mean I didn't really,
I didn't really get very into it. But it's a
kind of I reference myself as a teenage boy because
there is a kind of teenage fantasy at the heart
of being able to use your mind to control people.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, and I think that a lot of teenage boys
and teenagers in general are slightly awkward.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I don't want to I was front of the line, Alice.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, okay, So this is a tech. This is a
sort of they call it a human technology that allows
you supposedly to become very charming, very personable. You can
kind of learn these social skills in a book that
you know, some people are born with and others aren't.
I attended an NLP seminar taught by the co founder
of NLP, this guy Richard Bandler, who's a big part
(04:15):
of our podcast, And there are definitely some of those
types sweet, sweet people who were taking an alternative approach
to learning communication.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
What is this what human technology or this phrase human
technology mean?
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I mean, I think it's symptomatic of our general cultural
obsession with optimization. This notion that you can hack your
problems and improve them. You can become wildly successful at
anything if you just get the user manual to this
complex thing called the human brain. That's the basic promise
of NLP, that you can simplify this really difficult thing
(04:55):
which is being alive. Basically you can suddenly, you know,
be the person you've wanted to be in pretty much
every respect. So there's a lot of overpromising, but at
the same time these really valuable techniques, and I think
that's a big part of our show, trying to parse
and excavate what's useful and what is a lot of
snake oil.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
I believe that the scientology guy l Ron Hubbard called
some of what he did technology as well, right.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, so there's definitely this gesturing at science and technology
at the heart of well obviously scientology and NLP as well.
I think maybe we can talk about the origin of
the name. Yes, would love to so NLP neurolinguistic programming.
This guy Bandler, who I mentioned before, I think he
(05:40):
got pulled over, right and someone asked him, and the
cop asked him what he did, and so he basically
had a bunch of library books on the floor of
his car neuroscience, linguistics and computer programming, and he just
made up the name right then and there, right he.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Said, I'm a neurolinguistic programmer. Well why the cop didn't
have more questions after that, like you're a what?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Anyway, he was an undergraduate who had been developing these
therapy techniques, the sort of all therapy techniques influenced by
linguistics and hypnosis with his professor and trying them out
on his students fellow students in this kind of avant
garde seventies new age California culture.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
This is taking place in Santa Cruz, so it's right
down the road from Esslyn, which is headquartered in Big
sur and it's sort of part of this broader nineteen
seventies alternative fringe psychology context. But unlike a lot of
those techniques like primal screaming or re enacting your birth,
NLP actually bridged the gap between the seventies and that
(06:39):
moment to the present day and it's now everywhere. I mean,
it's baked into corporate HR speak. Tons of companies use
NLP knowingly and unknowingly, and some of the characters we've mentioned,
like the co founder of the sex called Nexium, like
Ross Jeffries, the pickup artist who maybe authored one of
the books your teenage self was checking out, and a
bunch of other people in between.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you came to the story before, Zoe. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:04):
We came to it together. We developed the idea together.
But I think maybe what you're referencing is that I
was aware how I became aware of neurolinguisty programming. Right.
So the group Twin Flames Universe, which is an alleged
cult that I did some reporting on for Vanity Fair
and later became a docu series for Amazon. They took
(07:27):
methods from a lot of different spiritual gurus and they
also referenced NLP. So they had a program called MAP,
a Mind Alignment Process where they promised to quote reprogram
people's traumatic memories. And so they were interested in NLP
and developed this and it ended up becoming quite abusive
(07:50):
according to people that I interviewed for my Vanity Fair piece.
So this was something that was on my radar because
I was like, what is this NLP thing? And then Nexium,
the you know, another notorious cult also has used NLP,
and there's you know, there was a lot of documentation
already about that, but no one had really dug into it.
(08:12):
So that was one of the reasons why we were
interested in this. But I think the other reason is
that we were both personally fascinated by the science of
hypnosis in the brain, and that's a part of NLP
that we felt like is very legitimate, and so we
were really interested in learning about it and also trying it.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
And what did you learn? I mean, did it work? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:32):
I mean we used NLP on ourselves and on those
nearest and deors to us in a few different ways.
So I attempted to recover memories of my late father
using hypnosis. Alice used NLP on my mother to help
her overcome a fear of riding bicycle she's developed as
she's gone older. And Alice attended that seminar where people
(08:53):
were using it for all sorts of things. So whether
it works or not depends a lot on what you're
using it for, you know, the amount of sort of
buy in psychologically. I think Alice and I both suspect
that the placebo effect is a big part of this,
which is not actually an insult to NLP so much
as a compliment to the placebo effect. I mean, there's
tons of research on placebos right now, and it is
(09:15):
incredible how our brains are capable of having these real, somatic,
concrete effects on our health. Right Like, there's all this
mental power that we are generally not harnessing.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
That was the first thing somebody said to me yesterday
when I sent the New Post story. They said, I'm
sure that our brains have more power than we give
them credit for.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, I mean I agree with that premise. And then
the ways in which NLP practitioners sort of claim to
harness that is, you know, at times credible and at
times spurious.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I'm curious, what is your take on this idea of
mind over meta.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
The min over matter thing sounds like BS, but there
is actually science behind it. I was reading about this
study which is in Nature Medicine. It was published last
month where they gave people have B vaccines and then
had some of them do sort of like meditative exercises
where they sort of thought positively about the effect of
(10:07):
the vaccine, and those people had a different immune response
than people who did not use quote positive thinking who
were vaccinated.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I'm genuinely obsessed with placebo research. I mean, this was
a big part of our podcast that kind of ended
up on the cutting room floor. But there's this renaissance
going on in placebo research right now where researchers are
trying to move away from the history of placebos where
you have to dupe your patients into taking them basically
and not tell them they're getting sugar pills not real medicine.
(10:39):
Now the thing is telling your patients, hey, I'm giving
you a placebo, and they still work. There are all
these studies, like there's one guy at Harvard who does
a lot of research on this, and he had a
study of patients with IBS. He told them he was
giving them placebos and they still outperformed like actual medicine sometimes.
So yeah, the brain crazy.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
One of the great things about this podcast is that
it is a podcast and the voices the NLP practitioners used.
I mean, you mentioned Nancy, you mentioned Richard Bandler, obviously,
Tony Robbins. I mean, listen to the show to hear
these voices, and we'll play some in this podcast as well.
But it's remarkable the consciousness with which these NLP gurus
(11:22):
modulate their voices. But Alice says, a bit more about
Richard Bandler and why he is important understanding this story.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I mean, Richard Bandler is just a fascinating guy. As
I mentioned, he was an undergraduate student when he came
up with a lot of these techniques through self experimentation
and also experimenting on his peers, and he, you know,
became very wealthy and successful through the promotion of this creation.
(11:50):
He's also someone who's very combative and who has had
high profile fallouts with his co founder, John Grinder, the professor.
You know, he he stood trial for murder in the
late eighties and he was ultimately acquitted. But the circumstances
of that trial and a lot of the press coverage
around it cast NLP in a very crazy light, honestly
(12:13):
for everyone who was paying attention. I mean, the one
witness at the trial said he could use NLP to
control street lights, right, I mean this is this is
people were sort of claiming supernatural powers associated with NLP
during this trial, and there was a speculation around whether
Richard Bandler hypnotized the jury to get acquitted, which we
(12:36):
don't think happened at all. Having read a lot of
these trial transcripts, I think that's that's not true. But
at the same time, there was just so much, so
much sort of mystery around who this guy was and
you know, what were the circumstances that led up to
these events? And then you know after that he only
became you know, more prominent. I mean I attended a
(12:57):
hypnosis focus seminar of his in London in last year,
and you know, there were tons of young people, I mean,
people of all ages. It was a full seminar and
it cost like seven hundred pounds to attend, so it
wasn't cheap and people were like, people were drooling over
this guy. People are obsessed with this guy. He is
(13:18):
a real like cult figure, not saying NLP as a cult,
but he is a cult figure for these people. And
so we were just so interested to know, you know,
what is it about this guy that have people dripping
over as every word?
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, and trying to get to the bottom of his
backstory too, because he's also sort of a fabuloust and
makes up these kinds of larger than life stories about himself.
We heard tales that he owned a topless bar when
he was sixteen years old, that he was a black
belt in karate, that he rolled with the Hell's Angels
or had organized crime connections, and you know, he has
(13:53):
this kind of tough guy exterior. Even fairly recently, he
told a journalist a story about deliberately electrocuting his stepfather
when he was ten years old. The stepfather was reportedly abusive,
and it was sort of a revenge thing. But you know,
this is a guy who stood trial for murder and
yet is still kind of making these violent actions part
(14:14):
of his public facing persona, which is interesting. You know,
he didn't sort of walk that back. He has a
track record of threatening people as.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Therapy with guns, right.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yes, he claims that he was using cigarette lighters shaped
like guns.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
That's what he told me, and we interview him for
the podcast. It was a slow burn and he blew
us off for a while that he finally did give
it an interview.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
But it's still so crazy to me that you would
still threaten someone with a gun with a gun shaped
cigarette lighter, whatever you're threatening people with, Like there is
a demonstrated history of threatening people with violence will produce
behavioral changes, you know, like we know this, and yeah,
any dictator exactly, and so I don't know, I mean,
(14:57):
he's just such a loose cannon on the one hand,
but then so I think there's this kind of vulnerable
person in there yet a kind of rough upbringing. So yeah,
it was all part of why we became fascinated with
this guy, Richard Bandler.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I was obsessed with the Nixime documentary The Vow, and
Nancy in particular just kind of played on the screen
that you couldn't take your eyes off her. And what's
fascinating what you learned in this podcast is that she
trained under none other than Richard Bendlett. Yeah, that's right,
and she has this amazing story about him drinking eight
martinis and then driving her.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Home eleven Martinez eleven Martini's.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
This was the first interview that she gave since leaving jail.
Leaving prison, that's right.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, So we did this interview in late twenty twenty four. Yeah,
and she had been released earlier that year. She was
extremely excited to talk about NLP because you know, she's
obviously been in the media a lot. She doesn't like
how she was portrayed in the media. Really no, you know,
she considers herself a victim of nexim So you know
(15:58):
a lot of people would say, well, she also was
an abuser, but you know, from her perspective, and I
think she credibly did tell us in the podcast about
you know, situations where some of these quote, human technologies
that she brought to the group were then turned on
people including her. But yeah, it was It's just fascinating
to hear how you know, in spite of this really
(16:21):
complicated history with NLP and with this guy, Richard Bandler.
I mean, she loves Bandler. You know, she thanked him
in my interview, crying for teaching her these tools that
quote helped her get through prison.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Now, some of the commentators on the podcast have said, you,
Alice must be out of your mind because you let
Nancy You've had LP on you right before you were
about to have your kid.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
That's right. Yeah, So.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I did do a hypno birthing session with Nancy Zelsman.
It was in the context of our interview. So what
we did in the interview was basically, she chatted with
me about my fears around childbirthgested this topic because I
had already even exploring hypnobirthing, and I knew that hypnosis
was a big part of NLP, so I thought that
(17:07):
that could be a way to learn some of the methods.
Some of these methods are just so hard to wrap
your head around unless you try them, and so this
was a concrete way to learn about it. I did
transcribe the hypno birthing tape that she sent me before
listening to it, which is something you listeners can do
as well. If you are listening to any sort of
hypnosis tape online. There are lots of them. Just like,
(17:30):
do a transcript, make sure that it's right for you.
I think that's best practices in general. And yeah, actually
her tape was pretty much like standard hypnobirthing.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
It was like, yeah, you used it.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah, I did. I So basically it's like a guided meditation,
I would say. And it was like only I think
it was like six minutes long or something like that.
And so it kind of the tape is like talking
about how you can relax and become more confident, and
this is how you can feel sort of in touch
with your b and how you're you know, this is
(18:02):
a very natural thing that you're about to do.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Was Nancy in your ear? Literally, why are you giving birth?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
No? Okay, fair question, No, I had a I did
not use hypno birthing to give birth because I had
a scheduled CEE section for medical reasons. So hypno birthing
is great for pain control. H I had no pain,
so it was I was under anesthesia.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
So yes, what is the difference between hypnosis and NLP?
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Great question when we tried to unravel over the course
of the show. There's tons of overlap. I mean, NLP
borrows from a bunch of different modalities. It's kind of
this grab bag of various psychoanalytic techniques, VERYUS psychological techniques,
and a big one of those is hypnosis. So when
Bandler and his professor Grinder were at EC Santa Cruz,
(18:56):
they were sort of LARPing as these famous therapists. They
were trying out Fritz Pearls's gestalt therapy, they were trying
out Virginia Setar's therapy. But what really crystallized things for
them was when they went down to Arizona and they
visited Milton Erickson, who was this legendary hypnotherapist. He did
a ton to put hypnotherapy on the mainstream medical maps
(19:17):
and make a psychiatrist. Yeah, he made it a little
less fringe and kind of amazingly because the guy only
wore purple and was sort of an eccentric but apparently for.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
You you hypno nerds deep cut, But yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
He only wore purple. He had, you know, this really
sort of strange way of hypnotizing people. That was very him.
He would tell you these stories while you were in
trance that would not seem related to your issue, but
he used metaphor anyway. The NLP guys were absolutely obsessed
with this and it changed NLP forever. They began using
hypnotic techniques. You mentioned the way these guys use their voices.
(19:54):
That's a hypnotic technique. When you put emphasis by dropping
your voice half an ho or start speaking a little
more slowly. It makes people focus on those phrases in
a different way. And theoretically you can use these techniques
to embed commands or whatever you want.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
That was very good. You should be teaching the classes.
Could we play the tape of Nancy.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
A knife in the hands of a surgeon is an
amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer
is a weapon. We heard this from pretty much every
single person we interviewed. This is like, I don't know
if they all had to memorize this inn NLP school,
but it is the stock defense of NLP, and honestly,
we kind of came to a similar conclusion. It is
(20:43):
such a broad, slippery technique. You know, it's not a
cohesive thing. There's no oversight, there's no licensing body, there's
no official NLP academy. There are many so anyone can
shell out a few thousand dollars, get trained at NLP
and then practice it and they might try to work
on someone with severe trauma, they might try to cure
(21:03):
phobias on stage, they might just use it for themselves.
NLP becomes something very different if you're using it to say,
help someone through a traumatic memory, or to seduce someone
on the street. So it's very difficult to generalize. And
for that reason, I think, yeah, Nancy and everyone else
has a point when she says, yeah, it can be good,
(21:25):
it can be bad. It depends what your intentions are.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And I think that goes back to why they call
it a human technology, right, Like then a knife is
a technology, so it's a tool. So that's that same
metaphor you.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Took the words out of my mouth at LIS because
people often know about technology is dual use, right, the
same algorithm that can target you with an AD can
target you, you know, on a battlefield, right. So I
think it's it's interesting that technology connection that you.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Raise, and I think like people who are interested in
NLP really do want to see themselves as a technology
as well. I think that's where the optimization culture feeds
into NLP. I don't want to go as far to
say that NLP created that culture. I think it was
probably coming from the same sort of primordial soup with
twentieth century history and how our culture emerged. But I
(22:15):
think it is this idea that we can not just
perfect our bodies or make our bodies the perfect body,
but also our minds. That there are these hacks right
that talk therapy with its you know, years and years
of rehashing the same issues often from childhood. Is there's
(22:37):
a quicker way right there.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
So you say, banded, I'll give you more therapy in
five minutes than you'll do in twenty years.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
As I say that, yeah, yeah, so you know, and
maybe you have to be extreme about it. I mean
you do have to sometimes threaten people or you know,
what are what are what are the techniques that could
be most effective if we sort of take our gloves off, right,
Like that's what NLP is asking for, better or worse?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
What do you think I mean this cult connection? Like
which is the chicken and which is the egg? Like
do people who want to start cults figure out all
the ways they can manipulate people and then NLP comes
up and they decide to use it? Or is there
something inherent in LP which is almost like the ring
in Lord of the Rings, where as soon as you
put it on you but used, your soul starts to decay.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
I don't think if you use NLP you will eventually
and inevitably become corrupted and turn into NLPSRN.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
You know it's.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
I interviewed a lot of NLP trainers, close to two
dozen people in the NLP community, and a lot of
them have hearts of gold, and they genuinely believe this is,
you know, a really useful technology. It has the capacity
to change the world for the better if only people
would recognize it and accept it in a broader way.
And they're so motivated by trying to do good it
(23:50):
just drives them crazy that this isn't everywhere. On the
other hand, it's been used by some you know, nefarious
characters and bad actors. So this gets us back to
technology is neutral, right.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
And you interviewed Tony Robbins, I did, why does he
fit in this continuum for you?
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Well, so, Tony Robbins probably did more than anyone else
to take NLP mainstream, right, I mean, Tony Robins has
a million billion followers all over the world and chanting
Tony Tony in his seminars. Tony emerged from NLP. He
was in his early twenties when he attended an NLP
seminar near the Los Angeles Airport with John Grinder, Richard
(24:26):
Bandler's partner and collaborator, and he was transfixed, I mean
really for the quick fixed reasons Alice identified. He thought
it was nonsense that you would spend years and years
and years and thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars
on your psychiatrist couch. Why not just do it quickly?
So he seized on these techniques and for a long
time he was identifying as an NLP practitioner. He changed
(24:48):
the name of what he does from neuro linguistic programming
to neuro associative conditioning in the early nineties.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Oh, he changed it back right now, he's sort of
firms his pastor with NLP.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
There's a blog post on his website where he says, hey,
you know, NLP's great, check it out. He I haven't
seen him, you know, go on stage and say, hey,
I'm doing NLP and LP so great. But yeah, he
had Richard Bandler at one of his events lately. He's
open about his origin story or you know, he wouldn't
have talked to me for an hour and a half
about his early days in NLP, but he did.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
And I mean this stuff he does with like getting
people to walk on coals and stuff like how does
he actually do that?
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Specifically coal walks? Yeah, coal walking actually isn't that difficult.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
You can do it at home?
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Really yeah?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Yeah, oh my god if you walk fast enough. I mean, yeah,
the coals are very hot. But if you sort of
walk briskly and purposefully, you know, you won't get severely burned.
People have gone burned at Tony Robbins's coal walks. But
all of this is about pumping people up. I mean
he operates from this position where you can't create behavioral
change unless people are at this sort of peak. Like
(25:57):
if you picture a bell curve, people need to be
at the absolute top. That's when they're receptive to changing
their behaviors, to changing their minds. And Nancy said something
similar in her interview with Alice. You know, you really
want to establish hypnotic anchors, for instance, when someone's at
peak emotions. So if you wanted to feel more confidence
oz for instance as a teenage boy or otherwise, you know,
(26:19):
you would imagine yourself in a situation where you felt
on top of the world. You know, you just had
a great success, and then you might squeeze your wrist
or something to anchor that peak emotion. But you have
to get yourself there. So that's why Tony Robbins has
people walk on hot coals, break boards and to create
their heads off.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Yeah, to be able to see it portable.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
That feeling can be portable, right, and you can.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Go back to it at your leisure.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I think some of these techniques can be helpful. I
think unfortunately though, some people just get caught up in
like Tony worship and like probably spend money that at
least I wouldn't spend on like attending them of those seminars,
Like I mean, the Platinum Lions Club is like.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Hang out with Tony Robbins Club.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, it's like eighty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Yeah, a deal at a new price.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
After the break. The link between NLP and EMDR therapy
stay with us. The fatigue with talk therapy is an
(27:42):
interesting thought, and the idea of shortcuts is interesting, especially
at a time when Ayahuasca I began get him in psychedelics.
What is there a connection between these sets of interests.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
That's really interesting? You know, I don't know. I think
like I do think that sometimes people see especially I
will say ayahuasca and I begain as as shortcuts. But
I guess I would place them more in the lineage
of pharmaceutical interventions, right, I mean, these are pharmaceutical interventions
to brain chemistry, right. I mean NLP is essentially guide
(28:20):
in meditation and self hypnosis or communicative coercion, right, Like,
it's not.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
A drug, no. But on the other hand, I think
it's interesting that we see psychedelics becoming increasingly co opted
by this very sort of you know, business bro, tech
bro kind of contingent that wouldn't have you know, looked
at psychedelics twice forty years ago, fifty years ago, the
fact that this group of people, you know, like Wall
(28:48):
Street dudes are using ayahuasca, are going to ceremonies and
things like this. Like yeah, I think all of this
plays into a sort of culture of self optimization, such
that we can become more efficient. And why do you
want to be better? Why do you want to improve
your mind, improve your body, get more sleep, wear an
aura ring so you can work harder, so you can
(29:08):
be better in your job, and essentially just produce more
capital for your employers. I mean, I think what's interesting
about self help is it's often branded as a sort
of like radical alternative to a mainstream way of living,
but really it reinforces these very business as usual norms
like go up, you know, wake up, go to your job,
(29:29):
do well, come home, you know, go to sleep. It's
not that it's not as out there when it falls
into the hands of people just trying to improve themselves
at any cost, I guess yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
And there's also I mean, the quick fix, the promise
of the instant fix. I think that's what connects some
NLP promises with you know how iahuasca and ibogain are
sometimes advertised the US.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
A Meal was interested in psychedelics and LSD in particular,
and they were interested in NLP. What was their interest
in LP and did it become an official army program?
And obviously I'm thinking about U Zoe and the holding
the gun in the in the New York Post.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Yeah, so the Army used NLP for a few different things.
I spoke to a few former intelligence officers who were
trying to see if they could use NLP to improve
their spycraft, so to make people more effective in terms
of establishing rapport with sources, recruiting spies, you know, in
places of interest, and then rapidly downloading information from them
(30:31):
when they came back from the other side of the
iron current.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
You want to give a good trick, There's one good
trick that this spy gave Zoe. Oh yeah, I like
am like.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Low key filed away. This is great. This isn't really
an LP, but I'm willing to share it just out
of journalistic you know, fair youth.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
This spy I was interviewing said that a great way
to get information out of someone, if you are a
journalists and they don't want to tell you, or if
you're a spy, is to kind of say something so
egregiously wrong, they feel compelled to correct you. So he
moved into the corporate espionage space after he left the
US Army, and one of his tricks was like, if
(31:09):
you want to figure out what a rival company's profits are,
be like, okay, so you guys, do you know two
hundred and twenty five percent every year? Right? And the
guy's going to say, no, no, what are you talking about?
You crazy? We do more like fourteen percent, you know,
whatever it is. And so yeah, people, Collor's just being right. Yeah,
that's right. Cannot resist being right. So they'll correct you
and tell you something they shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Versus, if you ask him point blank what's the increase
in profits year over year, they're not.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Going to say.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
They'll be like, oh, they just asked me something I
don't allowed to share.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Right. Has it changed your lives doing this? Hmmm?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
I use certain techniques in my life.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yes, yes, I definitely. I mean the experience I had
trying to recover memories of my father was extremely transformative.
You know, he died when I was six. Pretty used
to him being, you know, dead, It's not something that
shakes me up on a daily basis, but it was
extremely emotional work and extremely productive. I do feel like
hypnosis helped me cultivate this sort of posthumous intimacy with him,
(32:05):
and you know, it was very different than sort of
just sitting on my couch saying, Okay, I'm gonna think
about Dad. Let's try to remember stuff. You know, the
hypnosis was very helpful. So I used it for that.
And then there was the shooting. We didn't talk about
the other thing the Army used NLP for, but they
did try to see if they could cut down on
the training time required to make new recruits expert marksmen.
(32:25):
So using a few different techniques, they tried to make
their soldiers better shooters.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
And we should disclose that this kind of didn't work. Yeah,
the Army cut the program.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
The Army did not pursue this because the National Academy
of Sciences did a report on not just NLP but
a lot of the wackadoudal New Age technologies they were
pursuing at the time. You know, they were doing remote viewing,
they were doing spoon bending all that.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Also, like also meditation, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Meditation, And you know, the researchers were like, hey, meditation
seems cool. I don't know maybe it seems to reduce stress. Great,
but yeah, in terms of endorsing that or NLP as
like a formal program, they're like, yeah, no, yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
They basically really discredited NLP with this report in the
late eighties, and so this is one of the main
reasons why when you look when you google NLP, you
will find that it is a pseudoscience. And we agree
with that. Is it is a pseudoscience. It hasn't been
it hasn't been rigorously vetted, and that was in part
a deliberate decision on the part of Richard Bandler and
(33:24):
other people involved in NLP. But I think what's been
interesting to me and Zoe is to say, Okay, like
we know that parts of this arebs and parts of
this are also nefarious, right, so is there a middle ground?
Can we can we look at this program and find
elements of it that are worth salvaging. And I think
we were surprised that we actually did.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Absolutely Alis and I went into this, I think being
way more sort of skeptical of NLP, regarding it very rarely,
and we're pleasantly surprised by there being tools that we
do continue to use every day. And I think other
goal of ours was to figure out how to make
use of those techniques without falling in the thrall of
a guru, like of a Tony Robbins, of a Richard Bandler.
(34:08):
And one of our takeaways is you can use these
techniques without sort of hitching your wagon to someone who
then kind of ends up having more control over you.
I mean, that's one of the ironies of NLP and
a lot of other self help techniques, right that you
go into it to get more control over your life,
more agency, more willpower, and you end up just giving
away your agency, give away your willpower to what you know,
(34:32):
this like charismatic leading figure tells you you should be
doing with your life.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
I think it's that power dynamic that creates cult leaders,
by the way, I think it's a combination of people
who are else already have maybe that narcissistic personality trait
referring to your question earlier, but also the power dynamic
of being a guru who is teaching all of these
people who often want to give someone a lot of
power over their lives because they want answers, because they're struggling,
(34:58):
Because it could be a range of issues that these
people are dealing with that make them want to turn
to you the guru for answers. And I think that
level of credulousness that is so prevalent is sort of
what makes people take advantage. And I do think that
certain aspiring cult leaders go looking for tools and find NLP.
(35:19):
My opinion is that's probably what happened with twin Flams Universe.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
One part of an LP is EMDR, right or was EMDR?
Which is? What is EMDR? Does it come from n LP?
And why does it show up today in mainstream therapy?
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, this is such an interesting facet of therapeutic history.
So EMDR is a prevalent therapy for trauma that is
endorsed by the World Health Organization. The Veterans Administration has
videos on its website explaining how it works. It's got
a lot of great evidence behind it. It outperforms placebo.
(35:54):
We know that EMDR does work to relieve symptoms of PTSD.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
It has to do with moving your eyes while you
tap your body or what.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Is the Yeah, so it has to do with bilateral stimulation.
So what an EMDR practitioner a therapist typically does is
they'll have your eyes follow either their finger or a
light or sometimes they will tap on your shoulders while
you re experience and recount a traumatic or problematic memory
(36:24):
for you. And so this process we don't know why
it works. This is the sort of controversy and strangeness
about EMDR. What is this doing in the brain to
make people's traumatic memories less acute, less vivid. There's a
lot of debate on that. We're not really sure. So
that's EMDR, and what is the connection to NLP. The
(36:46):
founder of EMDR, the creator that I guess, the developer
of this technique, Francine Shapiro, who came up with this
and who developed this program. She has a secret hot
back history as an NLP trainer. Before she got her
she was very involved in the NLP community. She wrote
articles about NLP. There's an academic who publishes about this
(37:08):
who we interviewed, Gerald Rosen, and he found a wealth
of archival material tying Francine Shapiro to NLP, which is
not something that's commonly known or reported and perhaps something
that figures within AMDR, who have a lot of mainstream
credibility and recognition, have kind of kept under wraps because
this is sort of a connection to something that is,
(37:29):
you know, if you google it, it's supposedly NLP is
a pseudoscience, and yet I think it's I think, having
learned about EMDR and NLP, there are a lot of connections.
I mean, NLP has a big focus on eye movements, right,
it's not using eye movements as a therapy, but you
use eye movements and NLP to diagnose someone's cognitive state.
(37:51):
And I think it's absolutely in the context of being
influenced by these ideas and being part of NLP that
Francine Shapiro would have thought to research something like eye
movements for therapy and trauma therapy. So yeah, it's really interesting,
kind of murky backstory.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Because Francine Shapiro, she told the press that she came
up with EMDR while she was going on a walk
in the park and somehow noticed while she was thinking
of something unpleasant that if her eyes darted rapidly, it
didn't seem to bother her anymore. And a few researchers
have pointed out that there's no way you would be
conscious of the extremely rapid eye movements that you know
(38:32):
are involved in this while just strolling through the park.
So Joel Rosa and the academic Alice mentioned dug into
this a little more and was like, maybe this emerged
from her really well established background in NLP, which does
put tons of emphasis on eye movements. It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Do you look at polygraphs in this context? Oh no,
it's kind of similar thing, right where it's I think,
I think polygraphs are considered a pseudoscience and not to
mispels evidence, but also.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Like Depinda going to use them, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Right, exactly. No, it's like hypnosis. I mean, I think
Elis and I are both interested in these sort of
fringe things that are on the one hand, you know,
credible in some ways or are widely regarded or institutionalized,
but on the other hand exist in this spooky, supernatural realm.
You know, Hypnosis is something that you know, it's probably
(39:21):
the only mainstream medical therapy that also sells out stadiums
in Las Vegas, And you know, on the one hand, yeah,
there's tons of research behind hypnosis and it's proven to
be extremely useful for pain relief, for anxiety, for all
sorts of stuff. On the other hand, we tend to
regard it as this spooky's Bengali mind control tactics.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So also there's lots of debate like what even is hypnosis?
Is it the state of trance? We can't find biological
markers that define hypnosis in every person? Is it a practice?
Is it related to trance states in non Western cultures?
Like what even is hypnosis?
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Like that?
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Is? That is still an unanswered question. And so the
fact that there's a lot of medical evidence behind it,
but there's these fundamental questions that we just do not
understand about it is fascinating that there's.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
No collective definition. I mean, what's incredibly interesting is that
all these people researching it can't really agree on what
it is because you know, you might have someone visualize something, well,
a different part of their brain is going to light
up on an ekg Than someone who is accessing a
memory maybe or who's having another experience. So there's just
no one size fits all hypnosis, which makes it both
(40:29):
difficult to study and lesslie compelling.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
I mean, a lot of today's AI scientists came out
of studying the brain, and you know this huge desire
to make the brain legible using AI and stuff. So
it'll be interesting if in our lifetimes this becomes more legible.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
To that point. Just briefly, it's worth noting that Richard
Bandler and John Grinder were early distributors of Apple computers,
which were developed very nearby when they were at UC
Santa Cruz in the nineteen seventies, and so I don't
think it's a coincidence that they kind of developed this
affinity with this company that made technology extremely user friendly.
(41:06):
You know more about this auce, but you know, my
impression is Apple computers aren't necessarily inherently better than say IBM,
but they are a lot more intuitive and friendly and like, hey,
you can do this. You know, it's a window, it's
your trash can you know, it's just all very cute
and easy to use and LPs kind of like that
in some ways, Like, man, you thought having a brain
was complicated and tricky. It doesn't have to be like
(41:29):
here's how you do that, five minutes you're done. You know,
there's this user friendly ethos that pervades both to.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Out standing out stadiums. I mean Steve's jobs, self presentation,
the iconography of himself that he created, way he spoke,
the way he looked. I mean it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Yeah, and I think Richard Banler, you know, in addition
to cultivating this tough guy image of himself, I mean,
he often referred to himself as a mathematician, as a
computer programmer. He took some undergraduate courses in these subjects
from what we can figure out, but they weren't his
major Even so, I think his fascination with being that
kind of rogue genius too isn't coincidental.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
And people sometimes confuse NLP with natural language processing, which
is so hard to read, which is yeah, which is
you know, a field of computer science that greatly influenced AI,
and it's unrelated, but the NLP creators probably wish.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
It were related.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Just to close, Zoe, you mentioned this idea of you know,
taking psychedelics and then using them essentially to optimize in
order to do more work. NLP emerged from Santa Cruz
in the nineteen seventies in and around the technology industry,
and now in the twenty twenties, there's this you know,
optimization culture with psychedelics and with aura rings, et cetera
(42:44):
emerging from the Silicon Valley of today. Are there any
explicit parallels to be drawn? Is there anything about kind
of that part of California. Like, what have you thought
about the connections between Silicon Value now and Santa Cruz
in the seventies in terms of what people are aspiring
to terms of transcending themselves in one way or another.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, I mean, I think some of the aspirational language
around both, you know, they have that in common, right,
I mean in the nineteen seventies in a sort of
New age context, like Santa Cruz or Esslon down in Bigsar,
you have people saying, Okay, well, we have to sort
of reinvent our relationship to our own minds such that
we can be better people and have better communities and
(43:25):
save the world. And there's this kind of notional altruism
or this you know, grandiose thinking about the implications for
what you're doing, you know, with your friends in your
dorm room. You know. Does that resonate with what's going
on in Silicon Valley? Yeah, kind of. I mean, people
claiming that these technologies are going to, you know, deliver
us from work and jobs that no one wants to do,
(43:47):
when who knows, maybe they'll put us all out of
work again, you know, won't be the saving grace. They're
sometimes billed as.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Alice Zy, Thank you so much. Congratulations on an incredible podcast.
Very proud to have it on the Kaliascope network and
check out the show mind Games. It is a must listen.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Thanks us, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Thank you. That's it for tech Stuff this week. I'm
os Voloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and
Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Caroen Price,
(44:26):
Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Novel
for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Paul Bowman. Jack Instantly
makes this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Please rate and review the show wherever you listen to podcasts,
and send us an email at tech Stuff podcast at
gmail dot com.
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm mos Valoschen. On this show,
we talk a lot about technology that lives outside of
US computers, microchips, satellites, data centers. But today we're going
to talk about something built as a human technology, specifically
neuro linguistic programming or NLP, which shows up everywhere from
Hypnobirths to Tony Robbins to the Nixian cult. But does
(00:36):
it actually work. Our guests today are the hosts of
mind Games, which is a co production of Kaleidoscope and
I Heart Podcasts. Alice Hines and Zoe Laskaz are both
journalists and professional skeptics who met at a shamanic sound meditation.
Zoe is a science journalist and Alice has exposed various
wellness scams and cults. So they are the perfect pair
(00:58):
to tackle a practice that is both revered and maligned.
So let's jump in. Welcome Alice, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Great to see you us.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Great to see you Alice.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
And welcome Zoe, thanks so much, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
It's a special day today. I'm holding a copy of
the New York Post. What does it feel like to
see ourselves and the show covered in the New York Post.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm incredibly flattered. There's a picture of me and Zoe.
Zoe is shooting a target at What range was that, Zoe?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
That was a shooting range in the suburbs of Washington,
d C. And the target was seventy five feet away.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh shoot boggles the mind is the headline. Novice to
gun expert in three days.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I'm just relief they didn't drag us through the mud,
although we would have been in very illustrious company if
they had, with the Bernie Sanderses of the world. So also, well,
that ends.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, you used NLP to become a shop shooter. I did.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I went down and spent three days with a guy
who worked closely with Tony Robbins in the nineteen eighties
on a military contract. The US Army hired them to
make expert marksmen out of new recruits.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And did it work.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The proof is in the puddig. I hit the target,
which is somewhat remarkable because I'd never held a handgun before,
let alone fired one at something very far away. That said,
it was a inherently flawed experiment. You know, we don't
have a control group. There aren't multiple mes that we
could test using other methods. So with that caveat, yeah,
it worked, I hit the thing.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I want to hear more about it, but Alice first
tell us what is NLP.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Neurolinguistic programming, which is often called NLP is a set
of techniques drawing from psychology and linguistics that are designed
to change belief and behavior. So this is kind of
in the self help world, and you can attend seminars,
there are books where you can sort of learn these
(02:52):
techniques to try to solve certain problems that you may have.
People also use these techniques on others unwittingly, so these
are also something that you may have experienced without necessarily
knowing about it.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Can I make a confession? Yeah, as a teenage boy,
I was quite intrigued by NLP and I bought an
NLP book.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
What did you hope to use it for?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
What do you think you be? Well? Or at least
I at least I was attracted to the idea that
you could control people's response to you.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And how did that work out?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
You know? I never I never really I never really
employed it, but it was my first sort of introduction
to the idea of like this world of using your
mind as a tool against itself, I would.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Say, and potentially against others.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Against others, although I never I mean I didn't really,
I didn't really get very into it. But it's a
kind of I reference myself as a teenage boy because
there is a kind of teenage fantasy at the heart
of being able to use your mind to control people.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, and I think that a lot of teenage boys
and teenagers in general are slightly awkward.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I don't want to I was front of the line, Alice.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, okay, So this is a tech. This is a
sort of they call it a human technology that allows
you supposedly to become very charming, very personable. You can
kind of learn these social skills in a book that
you know, some people are born with and others aren't.
I attended an NLP seminar taught by the co founder
of NLP, this guy Richard Bandler, who's a big part
(04:15):
of our podcast, And there are definitely some of those
types sweet, sweet people who were taking an alternative approach
to learning communication.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
What is this what human technology or this phrase human
technology mean?
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I mean, I think it's symptomatic of our general cultural
obsession with optimization. This notion that you can hack your
problems and improve them. You can become wildly successful at
anything if you just get the user manual to this
complex thing called the human brain. That's the basic promise
of NLP, that you can simplify this really difficult thing
(04:55):
which is being alive. Basically you can suddenly, you know,
be the person you've wanted to be in pretty much
every respect. So there's a lot of overpromising, but at
the same time these really valuable techniques, and I think
that's a big part of our show, trying to parse
and excavate what's useful and what is a lot of
snake oil.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
I believe that the scientology guy l Ron Hubbard called
some of what he did technology as well, right.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, so there's definitely this gesturing at science and technology
at the heart of well obviously scientology and NLP as well.
I think maybe we can talk about the origin of
the name. Yes, would love to so NLP neurolinguistic programming.
This guy Bandler, who I mentioned before, I think he
(05:40):
got pulled over, right and someone asked him, and the
cop asked him what he did, and so he basically
had a bunch of library books on the floor of
his car neuroscience, linguistics and computer programming, and he just
made up the name right then and there, right he.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Said, I'm a neurolinguistic programmer. Well why the cop didn't
have more questions after that, like you're a what?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Anyway, he was an undergraduate who had been developing these
therapy techniques, the sort of all therapy techniques influenced by
linguistics and hypnosis with his professor and trying them out
on his students fellow students in this kind of avant
garde seventies new age California culture.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
This is taking place in Santa Cruz, so it's right
down the road from Esslyn, which is headquartered in Big
sur and it's sort of part of this broader nineteen
seventies alternative fringe psychology context. But unlike a lot of
those techniques like primal screaming or re enacting your birth,
NLP actually bridged the gap between the seventies and that
(06:39):
moment to the present day and it's now everywhere. I mean,
it's baked into corporate HR speak. Tons of companies use
NLP knowingly and unknowingly, and some of the characters we've mentioned,
like the co founder of the sex called Nexium, like
Ross Jeffries, the pickup artist who maybe authored one of
the books your teenage self was checking out, and a
bunch of other people in between.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you came to the story before, Zoe. Is that right?
Speaker 2 (07:04):
We came to it together. We developed the idea together.
But I think maybe what you're referencing is that I
was aware how I became aware of neurolinguisty programming. Right.
So the group Twin Flames Universe, which is an alleged
cult that I did some reporting on for Vanity Fair
and later became a docu series for Amazon. They took
(07:27):
methods from a lot of different spiritual gurus and they
also referenced NLP. So they had a program called MAP,
a Mind Alignment Process where they promised to quote reprogram
people's traumatic memories. And so they were interested in NLP
and developed this and it ended up becoming quite abusive
(07:50):
according to people that I interviewed for my Vanity Fair piece.
So this was something that was on my radar because
I was like, what is this NLP thing? And then Nexium,
the you know, another notorious cult also has used NLP,
and there's you know, there was a lot of documentation
already about that, but no one had really dug into it.
(08:12):
So that was one of the reasons why we were
interested in this. But I think the other reason is
that we were both personally fascinated by the science of
hypnosis in the brain, and that's a part of NLP
that we felt like is very legitimate, and so we
were really interested in learning about it and also trying it.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
And what did you learn? I mean, did it work? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:32):
I mean we used NLP on ourselves and on those
nearest and deors to us in a few different ways.
So I attempted to recover memories of my late father
using hypnosis. Alice used NLP on my mother to help
her overcome a fear of riding bicycle she's developed as
she's gone older. And Alice attended that seminar where people
(08:53):
were using it for all sorts of things. So whether
it works or not depends a lot on what you're
using it for, you know, the amount of sort of
buy in psychologically. I think Alice and I both suspect
that the placebo effect is a big part of this,
which is not actually an insult to NLP so much
as a compliment to the placebo effect. I mean, there's
tons of research on placebos right now, and it is
(09:15):
incredible how our brains are capable of having these real, somatic,
concrete effects on our health. Right Like, there's all this
mental power that we are generally not harnessing.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
That was the first thing somebody said to me yesterday
when I sent the New Post story. They said, I'm
sure that our brains have more power than we give
them credit for.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, I mean I agree with that premise. And then
the ways in which NLP practitioners sort of claim to
harness that is, you know, at times credible and at
times spurious.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I'm curious, what is your take on this idea of
mind over meta.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
The min over matter thing sounds like BS, but there
is actually science behind it. I was reading about this
study which is in Nature Medicine. It was published last
month where they gave people have B vaccines and then
had some of them do sort of like meditative exercises
where they sort of thought positively about the effect of
(10:07):
the vaccine, and those people had a different immune response
than people who did not use quote positive thinking who
were vaccinated.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I'm genuinely obsessed with placebo research. I mean, this was
a big part of our podcast that kind of ended
up on the cutting room floor. But there's this renaissance
going on in placebo research right now where researchers are
trying to move away from the history of placebos where
you have to dupe your patients into taking them basically
and not tell them they're getting sugar pills not real medicine.
(10:39):
Now the thing is telling your patients, hey, I'm giving
you a placebo, and they still work. There are all
these studies, like there's one guy at Harvard who does
a lot of research on this, and he had a
study of patients with IBS. He told them he was
giving them placebos and they still outperformed like actual medicine sometimes.
So yeah, the brain crazy.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
One of the great things about this podcast is that
it is a podcast and the voices the NLP practitioners used.
I mean, you mentioned Nancy, you mentioned Richard Bandler, obviously,
Tony Robbins. I mean, listen to the show to hear
these voices, and we'll play some in this podcast as well.
But it's remarkable the consciousness with which these NLP gurus
(11:22):
modulate their voices. But Alice says, a bit more about
Richard Bandler and why he is important understanding this story.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I mean, Richard Bandler is just a fascinating guy. As
I mentioned, he was an undergraduate student when he came
up with a lot of these techniques through self experimentation
and also experimenting on his peers, and he, you know,
became very wealthy and successful through the promotion of this creation.
(11:50):
He's also someone who's very combative and who has had
high profile fallouts with his co founder, John Grinder, the professor.
You know, he he stood trial for murder in the
late eighties and he was ultimately acquitted. But the circumstances
of that trial and a lot of the press coverage
around it cast NLP in a very crazy light, honestly
(12:13):
for everyone who was paying attention. I mean, the one
witness at the trial said he could use NLP to
control street lights, right, I mean this is this is
people were sort of claiming supernatural powers associated with NLP
during this trial, and there was a speculation around whether
Richard Bandler hypnotized the jury to get acquitted, which we
(12:36):
don't think happened at all. Having read a lot of
these trial transcripts, I think that's that's not true. But
at the same time, there was just so much, so
much sort of mystery around who this guy was and
you know, what were the circumstances that led up to
these events? And then you know after that he only
became you know, more prominent. I mean I attended a
(12:57):
hypnosis focus seminar of his in London in last year,
and you know, there were tons of young people, I mean,
people of all ages. It was a full seminar and
it cost like seven hundred pounds to attend, so it
wasn't cheap and people were like, people were drooling over
this guy. People are obsessed with this guy. He is
(13:18):
a real like cult figure, not saying NLP as a cult,
but he is a cult figure for these people. And
so we were just so interested to know, you know,
what is it about this guy that have people dripping
over as every word?
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, and trying to get to the bottom of his
backstory too, because he's also sort of a fabuloust and
makes up these kinds of larger than life stories about himself.
We heard tales that he owned a topless bar when
he was sixteen years old, that he was a black
belt in karate, that he rolled with the Hell's Angels
or had organized crime connections, and you know, he has
(13:53):
this kind of tough guy exterior. Even fairly recently, he
told a journalist a story about deliberately electrocuting his stepfather
when he was ten years old. The stepfather was reportedly abusive,
and it was sort of a revenge thing. But you know,
this is a guy who stood trial for murder and
yet is still kind of making these violent actions part
(14:14):
of his public facing persona, which is interesting. You know,
he didn't sort of walk that back. He has a
track record of threatening people as.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Therapy with guns, right.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yes, he claims that he was using cigarette lighters shaped
like guns.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
That's what he told me, and we interview him for
the podcast. It was a slow burn and he blew
us off for a while that he finally did give
it an interview.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
But it's still so crazy to me that you would
still threaten someone with a gun with a gun shaped
cigarette lighter, whatever you're threatening people with, Like there is
a demonstrated history of threatening people with violence will produce
behavioral changes, you know, like we know this, and yeah,
any dictator exactly, and so I don't know, I mean,
(14:57):
he's just such a loose cannon on the one hand,
but then so I think there's this kind of vulnerable
person in there yet a kind of rough upbringing. So yeah,
it was all part of why we became fascinated with
this guy, Richard Bandler.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I was obsessed with the Nixime documentary The Vow, and
Nancy in particular just kind of played on the screen
that you couldn't take your eyes off her. And what's
fascinating what you learned in this podcast is that she
trained under none other than Richard Bendlett. Yeah, that's right,
and she has this amazing story about him drinking eight
martinis and then driving her.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Home eleven Martinez eleven Martini's.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
This was the first interview that she gave since leaving jail.
Leaving prison, that's right.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, So we did this interview in late twenty twenty four. Yeah,
and she had been released earlier that year. She was
extremely excited to talk about NLP because you know, she's
obviously been in the media a lot. She doesn't like
how she was portrayed in the media. Really no, you know,
she considers herself a victim of nexim So you know
(15:58):
a lot of people would say, well, she also was
an abuser, but you know, from her perspective, and I
think she credibly did tell us in the podcast about
you know, situations where some of these quote, human technologies
that she brought to the group were then turned on
people including her. But yeah, it was It's just fascinating
to hear how you know, in spite of this really
(16:21):
complicated history with NLP and with this guy, Richard Bandler.
I mean, she loves Bandler. You know, she thanked him
in my interview, crying for teaching her these tools that
quote helped her get through prison.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Now, some of the commentators on the podcast have said, you,
Alice must be out of your mind because you let
Nancy You've had LP on you right before you were
about to have your kid.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
That's right. Yeah, So.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
I did do a hypno birthing session with Nancy Zelsman.
It was in the context of our interview. So what
we did in the interview was basically, she chatted with
me about my fears around childbirthgested this topic because I
had already even exploring hypnobirthing, and I knew that hypnosis
was a big part of NLP, so I thought that
(17:07):
that could be a way to learn some of the methods.
Some of these methods are just so hard to wrap
your head around unless you try them, and so this
was a concrete way to learn about it. I did
transcribe the hypno birthing tape that she sent me before
listening to it, which is something you listeners can do
as well. If you are listening to any sort of
hypnosis tape online. There are lots of them. Just like,
(17:30):
do a transcript, make sure that it's right for you.
I think that's best practices in general. And yeah, actually
her tape was pretty much like standard hypnobirthing.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
It was like, yeah, you used it.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah, I did. I So basically it's like a guided meditation,
I would say. And it was like only I think
it was like six minutes long or something like that.
And so it kind of the tape is like talking
about how you can relax and become more confident, and
this is how you can feel sort of in touch
with your b and how you're you know, this is
(18:02):
a very natural thing that you're about to do.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Was Nancy in your ear? Literally, why are you giving birth?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
No? Okay, fair question, No, I had a I did
not use hypno birthing to give birth because I had
a scheduled CEE section for medical reasons. So hypno birthing
is great for pain control. H I had no pain,
so it was I was under anesthesia.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
So yes, what is the difference between hypnosis and NLP?
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Great question when we tried to unravel over the course
of the show. There's tons of overlap. I mean, NLP
borrows from a bunch of different modalities. It's kind of
this grab bag of various psychoanalytic techniques, VERYUS psychological techniques,
and a big one of those is hypnosis. So when
Bandler and his professor Grinder were at EC Santa Cruz,
(18:56):
they were sort of LARPing as these famous therapists. They
were trying out Fritz Pearls's gestalt therapy, they were trying
out Virginia Setar's therapy. But what really crystallized things for
them was when they went down to Arizona and they
visited Milton Erickson, who was this legendary hypnotherapist. He did
a ton to put hypnotherapy on the mainstream medical maps
(19:17):
and make a psychiatrist. Yeah, he made it a little
less fringe and kind of amazingly because the guy only
wore purple and was sort of an eccentric but apparently for.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
You you hypno nerds deep cut, But yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
He only wore purple. He had, you know, this really
sort of strange way of hypnotizing people. That was very him.
He would tell you these stories while you were in
trance that would not seem related to your issue, but
he used metaphor anyway. The NLP guys were absolutely obsessed
with this and it changed NLP forever. They began using
hypnotic techniques. You mentioned the way these guys use their voices.
(19:54):
That's a hypnotic technique. When you put emphasis by dropping
your voice half an ho or start speaking a little
more slowly. It makes people focus on those phrases in
a different way. And theoretically you can use these techniques
to embed commands or whatever you want.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
That was very good. You should be teaching the classes.
Could we play the tape of Nancy.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
A knife in the hands of a surgeon is an
amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer
is a weapon. We heard this from pretty much every
single person we interviewed. This is like, I don't know
if they all had to memorize this inn NLP school,
but it is the stock defense of NLP, and honestly,
we kind of came to a similar conclusion. It is
(20:43):
such a broad, slippery technique. You know, it's not a
cohesive thing. There's no oversight, there's no licensing body, there's
no official NLP academy. There are many so anyone can
shell out a few thousand dollars, get trained at NLP
and then practice it and they might try to work
on someone with severe trauma, they might try to cure
(21:03):
phobias on stage, they might just use it for themselves.
NLP becomes something very different if you're using it to say,
help someone through a traumatic memory, or to seduce someone
on the street. So it's very difficult to generalize. And
for that reason, I think, yeah, Nancy and everyone else
has a point when she says, yeah, it can be good,
(21:25):
it can be bad. It depends what your intentions are.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And I think that goes back to why they call
it a human technology, right, Like then a knife is
a technology, so it's a tool. So that's that same
metaphor you.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Took the words out of my mouth at LIS because
people often know about technology is dual use, right, the
same algorithm that can target you with an AD can
target you, you know, on a battlefield, right. So I
think it's it's interesting that technology connection that you.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Raise, and I think like people who are interested in
NLP really do want to see themselves as a technology
as well. I think that's where the optimization culture feeds
into NLP. I don't want to go as far to
say that NLP created that culture. I think it was
probably coming from the same sort of primordial soup with
twentieth century history and how our culture emerged. But I
(22:15):
think it is this idea that we can not just
perfect our bodies or make our bodies the perfect body,
but also our minds. That there are these hacks right
that talk therapy with its you know, years and years
of rehashing the same issues often from childhood. Is there's
(22:37):
a quicker way right there.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
So you say, banded, I'll give you more therapy in
five minutes than you'll do in twenty years.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
As I say that, yeah, yeah, so you know, and
maybe you have to be extreme about it. I mean
you do have to sometimes threaten people or you know,
what are what are what are the techniques that could
be most effective if we sort of take our gloves off, right,
Like that's what NLP is asking for, better or worse?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
What do you think I mean this cult connection? Like
which is the chicken and which is the egg? Like
do people who want to start cults figure out all
the ways they can manipulate people and then NLP comes
up and they decide to use it? Or is there
something inherent in LP which is almost like the ring
in Lord of the Rings, where as soon as you
put it on you but used, your soul starts to decay.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
I don't think if you use NLP you will eventually
and inevitably become corrupted and turn into NLPSRN.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
You know it's.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
I interviewed a lot of NLP trainers, close to two
dozen people in the NLP community, and a lot of
them have hearts of gold, and they genuinely believe this is,
you know, a really useful technology. It has the capacity
to change the world for the better if only people
would recognize it and accept it in a broader way.
And they're so motivated by trying to do good it
(23:50):
just drives them crazy that this isn't everywhere. On the
other hand, it's been used by some you know, nefarious
characters and bad actors. So this gets us back to
technology is neutral, right.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
And you interviewed Tony Robbins, I did, why does he
fit in this continuum for you?
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Well, so, Tony Robbins probably did more than anyone else
to take NLP mainstream, right, I mean, Tony Robins has
a million billion followers all over the world and chanting
Tony Tony in his seminars. Tony emerged from NLP. He
was in his early twenties when he attended an NLP
seminar near the Los Angeles Airport with John Grinder, Richard
(24:26):
Bandler's partner and collaborator, and he was transfixed, I mean
really for the quick fixed reasons Alice identified. He thought
it was nonsense that you would spend years and years
and years and thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars
on your psychiatrist couch. Why not just do it quickly?
So he seized on these techniques and for a long
time he was identifying as an NLP practitioner. He changed
(24:48):
the name of what he does from neuro linguistic programming
to neuro associative conditioning in the early nineties.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Oh, he changed it back right now, he's sort of
firms his pastor with NLP.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
There's a blog post on his website where he says, hey,
you know, NLP's great, check it out. He I haven't
seen him, you know, go on stage and say, hey,
I'm doing NLP and LP so great. But yeah, he
had Richard Bandler at one of his events lately. He's
open about his origin story or you know, he wouldn't
have talked to me for an hour and a half
about his early days in NLP, but he did.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
And I mean this stuff he does with like getting
people to walk on coals and stuff like how does
he actually do that?
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Specifically coal walks? Yeah, coal walking actually isn't that difficult.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
You can do it at home?
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Really yeah?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Yeah, oh my god if you walk fast enough. I mean, yeah,
the coals are very hot. But if you sort of
walk briskly and purposefully, you know, you won't get severely burned.
People have gone burned at Tony Robbins's coal walks. But
all of this is about pumping people up. I mean
he operates from this position where you can't create behavioral
change unless people are at this sort of peak. Like
(25:57):
if you picture a bell curve, people need to be
at the absolute top. That's when they're receptive to changing
their behaviors, to changing their minds. And Nancy said something
similar in her interview with Alice. You know, you really
want to establish hypnotic anchors, for instance, when someone's at
peak emotions. So if you wanted to feel more confidence
oz for instance as a teenage boy or otherwise, you know,
(26:19):
you would imagine yourself in a situation where you felt
on top of the world. You know, you just had
a great success, and then you might squeeze your wrist
or something to anchor that peak emotion. But you have
to get yourself there. So that's why Tony Robbins has
people walk on hot coals, break boards and to create
their heads off.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Yeah, to be able to see it portable.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
That feeling can be portable, right, and you can.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Go back to it at your leisure.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I think some of these techniques can be helpful. I
think unfortunately though, some people just get caught up in
like Tony worship and like probably spend money that at
least I wouldn't spend on like attending them of those seminars,
Like I mean, the Platinum Lions Club is like.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Hang out with Tony Robbins Club.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, it's like eighty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Yeah, a deal at a new price.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
After the break. The link between NLP and EMDR therapy
stay with us. The fatigue with talk therapy is an
(27:42):
interesting thought, and the idea of shortcuts is interesting, especially
at a time when Ayahuasca I began get him in psychedelics.
What is there a connection between these sets of interests.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
That's really interesting? You know, I don't know. I think
like I do think that sometimes people see especially I
will say ayahuasca and I begain as as shortcuts. But
I guess I would place them more in the lineage
of pharmaceutical interventions, right, I mean, these are pharmaceutical interventions
to brain chemistry, right. I mean NLP is essentially guide
(28:20):
in meditation and self hypnosis or communicative coercion, right, Like,
it's not.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
A drug, no. But on the other hand, I think
it's interesting that we see psychedelics becoming increasingly co opted
by this very sort of you know, business bro, tech
bro kind of contingent that wouldn't have you know, looked
at psychedelics twice forty years ago, fifty years ago, the
fact that this group of people, you know, like Wall
(28:48):
Street dudes are using ayahuasca, are going to ceremonies and
things like this. Like yeah, I think all of this
plays into a sort of culture of self optimization, such
that we can become more efficient. And why do you
want to be better? Why do you want to improve
your mind, improve your body, get more sleep, wear an
aura ring so you can work harder, so you can
(29:08):
be better in your job, and essentially just produce more
capital for your employers. I mean, I think what's interesting
about self help is it's often branded as a sort
of like radical alternative to a mainstream way of living,
but really it reinforces these very business as usual norms
like go up, you know, wake up, go to your job,
(29:29):
do well, come home, you know, go to sleep. It's
not that it's not as out there when it falls
into the hands of people just trying to improve themselves
at any cost, I guess yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
And there's also I mean, the quick fix, the promise
of the instant fix. I think that's what connects some
NLP promises with you know how iahuasca and ibogain are
sometimes advertised the US.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
A Meal was interested in psychedelics and LSD in particular,
and they were interested in NLP. What was their interest
in LP and did it become an official army program?
And obviously I'm thinking about U Zoe and the holding
the gun in the in the New York Post.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Yeah, so the Army used NLP for a few different things.
I spoke to a few former intelligence officers who were
trying to see if they could use NLP to improve
their spycraft, so to make people more effective in terms
of establishing rapport with sources, recruiting spies, you know, in
places of interest, and then rapidly downloading information from them
(30:31):
when they came back from the other side of the
iron current.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
You want to give a good trick, There's one good
trick that this spy gave Zoe. Oh yeah, I like
am like.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Low key filed away. This is great. This isn't really
an LP, but I'm willing to share it just out
of journalistic you know, fair youth.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
This spy I was interviewing said that a great way
to get information out of someone, if you are a
journalists and they don't want to tell you, or if
you're a spy, is to kind of say something so
egregiously wrong, they feel compelled to correct you. So he
moved into the corporate espionage space after he left the
US Army, and one of his tricks was like, if
(31:09):
you want to figure out what a rival company's profits are,
be like, okay, so you guys, do you know two
hundred and twenty five percent every year? Right? And the
guy's going to say, no, no, what are you talking about?
You crazy? We do more like fourteen percent, you know,
whatever it is. And so yeah, people, Collor's just being right. Yeah,
that's right. Cannot resist being right. So they'll correct you
and tell you something they shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Versus, if you ask him point blank what's the increase
in profits year over year, they're not.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Going to say.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
They'll be like, oh, they just asked me something I
don't allowed to share.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Right. Has it changed your lives doing this? Hmmm?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
I use certain techniques in my life.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yes, yes, I definitely. I mean the experience I had
trying to recover memories of my father was extremely transformative.
You know, he died when I was six. Pretty used
to him being, you know, dead, It's not something that
shakes me up on a daily basis, but it was
extremely emotional work and extremely productive. I do feel like
hypnosis helped me cultivate this sort of posthumous intimacy with him,
(32:05):
and you know, it was very different than sort of
just sitting on my couch saying, Okay, I'm gonna think
about Dad. Let's try to remember stuff. You know, the
hypnosis was very helpful. So I used it for that.
And then there was the shooting. We didn't talk about
the other thing the Army used NLP for, but they
did try to see if they could cut down on
the training time required to make new recruits expert marksmen.
(32:25):
So using a few different techniques, they tried to make
their soldiers better shooters.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
And we should disclose that this kind of didn't work. Yeah,
the Army cut the program.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
The Army did not pursue this because the National Academy
of Sciences did a report on not just NLP but
a lot of the wackadoudal New Age technologies they were
pursuing at the time. You know, they were doing remote viewing,
they were doing spoon bending all that.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Also, like also meditation, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Meditation, And you know, the researchers were like, hey, meditation
seems cool. I don't know maybe it seems to reduce stress. Great,
but yeah, in terms of endorsing that or NLP as
like a formal program, they're like, yeah, no, yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
They basically really discredited NLP with this report in the
late eighties, and so this is one of the main
reasons why when you look when you google NLP, you
will find that it is a pseudoscience. And we agree
with that. Is it is a pseudoscience. It hasn't been
it hasn't been rigorously vetted, and that was in part
a deliberate decision on the part of Richard Bandler and
(33:24):
other people involved in NLP. But I think what's been
interesting to me and Zoe is to say, Okay, like
we know that parts of this arebs and parts of
this are also nefarious, right, so is there a middle ground?
Can we can we look at this program and find
elements of it that are worth salvaging. And I think
we were surprised that we actually did.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Absolutely Alis and I went into this, I think being
way more sort of skeptical of NLP, regarding it very rarely,
and we're pleasantly surprised by there being tools that we
do continue to use every day. And I think other
goal of ours was to figure out how to make
use of those techniques without falling in the thrall of
a guru, like of a Tony Robbins, of a Richard Bandler.
(34:08):
And one of our takeaways is you can use these
techniques without sort of hitching your wagon to someone who
then kind of ends up having more control over you.
I mean, that's one of the ironies of NLP and
a lot of other self help techniques, right that you
go into it to get more control over your life,
more agency, more willpower, and you end up just giving
away your agency, give away your willpower to what you know,
(34:32):
this like charismatic leading figure tells you you should be
doing with your life.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
I think it's that power dynamic that creates cult leaders,
by the way, I think it's a combination of people
who are else already have maybe that narcissistic personality trait
referring to your question earlier, but also the power dynamic
of being a guru who is teaching all of these
people who often want to give someone a lot of
power over their lives because they want answers, because they're struggling,
(34:58):
Because it could be a range of issues that these
people are dealing with that make them want to turn
to you the guru for answers. And I think that
level of credulousness that is so prevalent is sort of
what makes people take advantage. And I do think that
certain aspiring cult leaders go looking for tools and find NLP.
(35:19):
My opinion is that's probably what happened with twin Flams Universe.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
One part of an LP is EMDR, right or was EMDR?
Which is? What is EMDR? Does it come from n LP?
And why does it show up today in mainstream therapy?
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, this is such an interesting facet of therapeutic history.
So EMDR is a prevalent therapy for trauma that is
endorsed by the World Health Organization. The Veterans Administration has
videos on its website explaining how it works. It's got
a lot of great evidence behind it. It outperforms placebo.
(35:54):
We know that EMDR does work to relieve symptoms of PTSD.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
It has to do with moving your eyes while you
tap your body or what.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Is the Yeah, so it has to do with bilateral stimulation.
So what an EMDR practitioner a therapist typically does is
they'll have your eyes follow either their finger or a
light or sometimes they will tap on your shoulders while
you re experience and recount a traumatic or problematic memory
(36:24):
for you. And so this process we don't know why
it works. This is the sort of controversy and strangeness
about EMDR. What is this doing in the brain to
make people's traumatic memories less acute, less vivid. There's a
lot of debate on that. We're not really sure. So
that's EMDR, and what is the connection to NLP. The
(36:46):
founder of EMDR, the creator that I guess, the developer
of this technique, Francine Shapiro, who came up with this
and who developed this program. She has a secret hot
back history as an NLP trainer. Before she got her
she was very involved in the NLP community. She wrote
articles about NLP. There's an academic who publishes about this
(37:08):
who we interviewed, Gerald Rosen, and he found a wealth
of archival material tying Francine Shapiro to NLP, which is
not something that's commonly known or reported and perhaps something
that figures within AMDR, who have a lot of mainstream
credibility and recognition, have kind of kept under wraps because
this is sort of a connection to something that is,
(37:29):
you know, if you google it, it's supposedly NLP is
a pseudoscience, and yet I think it's I think, having
learned about EMDR and NLP, there are a lot of connections.
I mean, NLP has a big focus on eye movements, right,
it's not using eye movements as a therapy, but you
use eye movements and NLP to diagnose someone's cognitive state.
(37:51):
And I think it's absolutely in the context of being
influenced by these ideas and being part of NLP that
Francine Shapiro would have thought to research something like eye
movements for therapy and trauma therapy. So yeah, it's really interesting,
kind of murky backstory.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Because Francine Shapiro, she told the press that she came
up with EMDR while she was going on a walk
in the park and somehow noticed while she was thinking
of something unpleasant that if her eyes darted rapidly, it
didn't seem to bother her anymore. And a few researchers
have pointed out that there's no way you would be
conscious of the extremely rapid eye movements that you know
(38:32):
are involved in this while just strolling through the park.
So Joel Rosa and the academic Alice mentioned dug into
this a little more and was like, maybe this emerged
from her really well established background in NLP, which does
put tons of emphasis on eye movements. It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Do you look at polygraphs in this context? Oh no,
it's kind of similar thing, right where it's I think,
I think polygraphs are considered a pseudoscience and not to
mispels evidence, but also.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Like Depinda going to use them, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Right, exactly. No, it's like hypnosis. I mean, I think
Elis and I are both interested in these sort of
fringe things that are on the one hand, you know,
credible in some ways or are widely regarded or institutionalized,
but on the other hand exist in this spooky, supernatural realm.
You know, Hypnosis is something that you know, it's probably
(39:21):
the only mainstream medical therapy that also sells out stadiums
in Las Vegas, And you know, on the one hand, yeah,
there's tons of research behind hypnosis and it's proven to
be extremely useful for pain relief, for anxiety, for all
sorts of stuff. On the other hand, we tend to
regard it as this spooky's Bengali mind control tactics.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
So also there's lots of debate like what even is hypnosis?
Is it the state of trance? We can't find biological
markers that define hypnosis in every person? Is it a practice?
Is it related to trance states in non Western cultures?
Like what even is hypnosis?
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Like that?
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Is? That is still an unanswered question. And so the
fact that there's a lot of medical evidence behind it,
but there's these fundamental questions that we just do not
understand about it is fascinating that there's.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
No collective definition. I mean, what's incredibly interesting is that
all these people researching it can't really agree on what
it is because you know, you might have someone visualize something, well,
a different part of their brain is going to light
up on an ekg Than someone who is accessing a
memory maybe or who's having another experience. So there's just
no one size fits all hypnosis, which makes it both
(40:29):
difficult to study and lesslie compelling.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
I mean, a lot of today's AI scientists came out
of studying the brain, and you know this huge desire
to make the brain legible using AI and stuff. So
it'll be interesting if in our lifetimes this becomes more legible.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
To that point. Just briefly, it's worth noting that Richard
Bandler and John Grinder were early distributors of Apple computers,
which were developed very nearby when they were at UC
Santa Cruz in the nineteen seventies, and so I don't
think it's a coincidence that they kind of developed this
affinity with this company that made technology extremely user friendly.
(41:06):
You know more about this auce, but you know, my
impression is Apple computers aren't necessarily inherently better than say IBM,
but they are a lot more intuitive and friendly and like, hey,
you can do this. You know, it's a window, it's
your trash can you know, it's just all very cute
and easy to use and LPs kind of like that
in some ways, Like, man, you thought having a brain
was complicated and tricky. It doesn't have to be like
(41:29):
here's how you do that, five minutes you're done. You know,
there's this user friendly ethos that pervades both to.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Out standing out stadiums. I mean Steve's jobs, self presentation,
the iconography of himself that he created, way he spoke,
the way he looked. I mean it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Yeah, and I think Richard Banler, you know, in addition
to cultivating this tough guy image of himself, I mean,
he often referred to himself as a mathematician, as a
computer programmer. He took some undergraduate courses in these subjects
from what we can figure out, but they weren't his
major Even so, I think his fascination with being that
kind of rogue genius too isn't coincidental.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
And people sometimes confuse NLP with natural language processing, which
is so hard to read, which is yeah, which is
you know, a field of computer science that greatly influenced AI,
and it's unrelated, but the NLP creators probably wish.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
It were related.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Just to close, Zoe, you mentioned this idea of you know,
taking psychedelics and then using them essentially to optimize in
order to do more work. NLP emerged from Santa Cruz
in the nineteen seventies in and around the technology industry,
and now in the twenty twenties, there's this you know,
optimization culture with psychedelics and with aura rings, et cetera
(42:44):
emerging from the Silicon Valley of today. Are there any
explicit parallels to be drawn? Is there anything about kind
of that part of California. Like, what have you thought
about the connections between Silicon Value now and Santa Cruz
in the seventies in terms of what people are aspiring
to terms of transcending themselves in one way or another.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, I mean, I think some of the aspirational language
around both, you know, they have that in common, right,
I mean in the nineteen seventies in a sort of
New age context, like Santa Cruz or Esslon down in Bigsar,
you have people saying, Okay, well, we have to sort
of reinvent our relationship to our own minds such that
we can be better people and have better communities and
(43:25):
save the world. And there's this kind of notional altruism
or this you know, grandiose thinking about the implications for
what you're doing, you know, with your friends in your
dorm room. You know. Does that resonate with what's going
on in Silicon Valley? Yeah, kind of. I mean, people
claiming that these technologies are going to, you know, deliver
us from work and jobs that no one wants to do,
(43:47):
when who knows, maybe they'll put us all out of
work again, you know, won't be the saving grace. They're
sometimes billed as.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Alice Zy, Thank you so much. Congratulations on an incredible podcast.
Very proud to have it on the Kaliascope network and
check out the show mind Games. It is a must listen.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Thanks us, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Thank you. That's it for tech Stuff this week. I'm
os Voloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and
Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Caroen Price,
(44:26):
Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Novel
for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Paul Bowman. Jack Instantly
makes this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Please rate and review the show wherever you listen to podcasts,
and send us an email at tech Stuff podcast at
gmail dot com.
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