The Drummer with the Knives

Summary

Mind Games: "The Drummer with the Knives"

Podcast: Mind Games
Hosts: Zoe Lescaze & Alice Hines
Episode Date: January 27, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, journalists and friends Zoe Lescaze and Alice Hines dig into the bizarre and controversial origins of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). They reconstruct the wild, cult-adjacent days of NLP’s early years in 1970s California—where mind-bending techniques, charismatic leaders, and experimental therapy intersected with counterculture communes, and even a gruesome murder that did little to slow NLP’s spread. Central to the story is Richard Bandler, NLP’s tough-guy co-founder, whose personal legend is equal parts myth, menace, and ingenuity. The episode questions: Where did NLP really come from? Who was Richard Bandler before the world knew his name? Can these mind games actually work, or are they just manipulation at best—and abuse at worst?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Early Days: Miracles in Santa Cruz ([02:46]–[05:44])

• Setting: Santa Cruz mountains, early 1970s—hotbed for New Age experimentation.
• Judy Delozer, a religious studies major, recounts seeing her friends “magically, linguistically fix a man’s legs” via talking, aka the earliest NLP workshops.
  • “It was kind of like a miracle. And I think that's probably what made me laugh, was going, that's pretty amazing. You know, that's crazy.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([04:14])
• Hosts note the skepticism but also the atmosphere of openness and possibility in the era.
  • “New realities were business as usual in Santa Cruz.” – Zoe Lescaze ([05:53])

---

The Enigma of Richard Bandler ([07:04]–[15:04])

• Bandler’s Persona: Variously described as a healer, egomaniac, genius, predator.
  • “He was very funny and he could be very empathetic. And he could also be meaner than a snake.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([12:31])
• Mythmaking: Claims of computer science brilliance, a black belt, owning a topless bar at 16, tough-guy stories about being stabbed and only able to eat meat, and even deliberately electrocuting his abusive stepfather as a boy.
  • “What the fuck? Yeah, that sounds very distracting.” – Zoe Lescaze, on Bandler claiming to hear radar ([08:08])
• Bandler’s vulnerability is acknowledged—a difficult upbringing, poverty, family violence.
• Despite (or because of) these contradictions, everyone agrees: “Bandler was brilliant and Bandler was unpredictable.” – Zoe Lescaze ([12:22])

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The Spitzer Family & The “Drummer with the Knives” ([13:17]–[18:17])

• The Spitzers: Radical, bohemian family who “sort of adopted” the young Bandler; Bob Spitzer, the father, was a psychiatrist and an LSD experimenter.
  • Bob brought Bandler into their world—first as his son Daniel’s drum teacher, notably “carrying a whole bunch of knives.” ([14:03])
  • “He had a buck knife, a bowie knife, a switchblade… It seemed more like a pose.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([14:08])
• Communal Life: Commune life at the Spitzer property included artists, musicians, guerrilla midwives, nudist colonists, home-birthing pioneers, and bright strays like Bandler himself.
  • “This place was basically a startup incubator for every out there New Age trend of the 60s. All paid for by this guy, Bob Spitzer.” – Alice Hines ([17:27])
• Transformation: Bandler goes from “tortured kid and alleged cowboy” to afterschool drum teacher/knife enthusiast to therapist protege: “They basically gave him a new identity, which was becoming a therapist.” – Alice Hines ([18:15])

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NLP’s Ideological Ingredients ([21:41]–[25:23])

• Influences: Bob Spitzer introduced Bandler to alt-psych luminaries in the “Human Potential Movement”—specifically Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls and family therapist Virginia Satir.
  • Bandler obsessively imitated their mannerisms, techniques, and sometimes even their accents.
  • “Bandler became obsessed with Pearls and techniques like this one. He started imitating Pearls German accent and mannerisms.” – Zoe Lescaze ([23:42])
• Central Ideas Adopted:
  • Healing “fragmented selves” (Gestalt)
  • Transforming inherited trauma (Satir)
  • The notion that “abuse doesn’t define you”
• Zoe’s conclusion: These ideas “helped form NLP.”

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Radical Experimentation at UC Santa Cruz ([25:52]–[37:19])

• Kresge College: No grades, barefoot teachers, “Touchy-feely school”—perfect storm for hands-on experiments.
• Collaboration with John Grinder:
  • Grinder brings linguistic expertise and a checkered past (Special Forces, rumored CIA connections, later Communist activism).
  • They bond over their mutual distaste for aimless, endless therapy—their goal: quick, powerful “deep change.”
• Workshop Dynamics:
  • “They were doing their research with us.” – Jody Bruce ([30:51])
  • Therapy groups are marked by emotional breakthroughs, but also pushy, invasive questioning and peer pressure—sometimes feeling “cult-y.”
  • “There was that part of it that maybe that’s where the word culty comes in, is that for some people, for this to work, it needed to be a way of life.” – Jody Bruce ([32:23])
  • Early catchphrase: “What stops you from doing that?”
• Therapeutic Techniques:
  • Family reconstruction (role-play your family issues)
  • Reframing emotional states

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Growing Cult Status and Ethical Dilemmas ([35:05]–[38:52])

• The clique surrounding NLP becomes insular, self-referential ("We became unattractive people to be friends with" – Dawn McCormack, [35:21])
• The practitioners exude an infectious “we can change the world” confidence.
  • “You could go in and clear out the psychiatric ward of a hospital.” – Zoe Lescaze ([36:07])
• Bandler and Grinder test methods on vulnerable patients at Napa State Hospital, raising serious ethical alarms.
• For some, NLP feels more manipulative than therapeutic:
  • “It was a game for them to see how they could manipulate and control people, and they could share that laugh with each other.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([37:24])
• Boundaries between therapist and patient break down; group members, including the hosts’ interviewees, admit to romantic entanglements—blurring lines of consent and professional practice.

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Notorious Christmas “Therapy” Ordeal ([38:39]–[43:23])

• Memorable Moment: Devra’s account of a traumatic “therapy gift” at a holiday party:
  • Tripping on mushrooms, she was blindfolded, tied to a cross, while group members doused logs with lighter fluid below her.
  • Given a knife by a stranger to supposedly “cut herself out of victimhood.”
  • “I was angry, just incredibly angry, that I’d been put in that position by people I had trusted, that maybe I shouldn’t have trusted…Ethically, it didn’t seem right.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([41:56])
• She never returned to the group. Other witnesses corroborate the event; Bandler and Grinder do not respond to requests for comment.

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The Rise of NLP—and Its Dark Side ([43:57]–[44:30])

• Within years, NLP spreads to the business world—marketed as a “persuasion technology” for reading and manipulating others.
  • “How do you recognize how people organize their thoughts and then work with their language in a way to modify their thoughts?” – Zoe Lescaze ([44:08])
• The hosts tease the next episode’s exploration of the corporate, more sinister applications of NLP.
  • “That’s sin.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([44:26])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “It was kind of like a miracle. And I think that's probably what made me laugh, was going, that's pretty amazing. You know, that's crazy.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([04:14])
• “He was very funny and he could be very empathetic. And he could also be meaner than a snake.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([12:31])
• “They basically gave him a new identity, which was becoming a therapist.” – Alice Hines ([18:15])
• “Bandler became obsessed with Pearls and techniques like this one. He started imitating Pearls German accent and mannerisms.” – Zoe Lescaze ([23:42])
• “There was that part of it that maybe that’s where the word culty comes in, is that for some people, for this to work, it needed to be a way of life.” – Jody Bruce ([32:23])
• “It was a game for them to see how they could manipulate and control people, and they could share that laugh with each other.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([37:24])
• “I was angry, just incredibly angry, that I’d been put in that position by people I had trusted, that maybe I shouldn’t have trusted…Ethically, it didn’t seem right.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([41:56])
• “How do you recognize how people organize their thoughts and then work with their language in a way to modify their thoughts?” – Zoe Lescaze ([44:08])
• “That’s sin.” – Deborah Cantor Morton ([44:26])

---

Key Segment Timestamps

• [02:46] – Introduction to early NLP experiments in Santa Cruz
• [07:04] – Building the legend of Richard Bandler
• [13:17] – The Spitzer family “adopts” Bandler; knife stories
• [16:14] – Commune life and New Age incubator in Santa Cruz mountains
• [21:41] – Bandler absorbs Gestalt and family therapy influences
• [25:52] – Kresge College: radical education, therapy experimentation
• [29:15] – Partnership with John Grinder, linguistics meets mind-hacking
• [32:03] – “Cult-y” atmosphere and boundaries blurring in NLP groups
• [36:21] – NLP's bold expansion in psychiatric hospitals
• [37:24] – Confessions of manipulation and ethical overreach
• [38:39] – The notorious Christmas “cross” ordeal; group breaks up
• [43:57] – NLP hits the business world, shift toward persuasion and control

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Tone

The episode is both investigative and irreverent, blending journalistic skepticism with curiosity about mind control, healing, and power. Zoe and Alice balance incredulity, empathy for those involved, and vivid, candid storytelling to unravel the mess and magic of NLP’s lawless origins.

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Conclusion

This episode traces NLP from miracle cures and communal living to dangerous games and eventual mass-market “mind control.” Central to the story is the blurred line between healing and manipulation—a legacy that haunts NLP to this day. The hosts leave listeners with a preview of more sinister ethical questions as NLP infiltrates the world of business and persuasion in the next episode.

Transcript

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Alice Hines]

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[Zoe Lascoz]

Judy Delozer was a religious studies major in the early 1970s. She was used to reading about miracles, not seeing them go down in her living room. But one night, Judy witnessed something that sounds impossible.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

So this guy had a problem. It was like maybe one leg was slightly shorter than another. And so they had kind of convinced him that his legs were the same and he walked fine.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Judy is living in a house in the mountains above Santa Cruz. It's the site of some unusual gatherings. Experimental psychology groups run by a volatile 20 something and a radical young professor. Judy is at one of these workshops and the leaders are working on someone who limps because his legs are different lengths. It doesn't seem like a psychological problem. But when they finish, the guy is

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

walking fine and everybody's like, so serious. And I was cracking up laughing. I thought, this is the most hysterical thing I've ever seen that these guys are, you know, getting away with this.

[Zoe Lascoz]

What was so funny about it?

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Well, it was just funny that it was kind of outside the framework of my reality.

[Zoe Lascoz]

I think I was skeptical when Judy told me this, but she swears she saw him walk out of that door magically cured by talking, magically cured by neuro linguistic programming.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

It was kind of like a miracle. And I think that's probably what made me laugh, was going, that's pretty amazing. You know, that's crazy.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Wait, how does that work, though? How do you.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I don't know, but I'm curious to find out.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Take a deep breath in.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

And breathe out. Your conscious mind is going to go

[Zoe Lascoz]

totally away so that I can speak

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

privately with your unconscious mind.

[Zoe Lascoz]

You can notice that you feel rested, more alerting, confident. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this is Mind Games episode two. I'm Zoe Lascoz.

[Alice Hines]

And I'm Alice Hines.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

You don't know how you did it, do you? You go into a little time distortion

[Zoe Lascoz]

steak and you're out of. What was going on at Judy's house was one of the very first NLP workshops. Before NLP was nlp, before it was considered a human technology, NLP would become

[Alice Hines]

a teachable set of mental and verbal techniques that were honed to change your beliefs and behaviors.

[Zoe Lascoz]

But back then, it was an experiment, a group of college kids trying stuff out on each other.

[Alice Hines]

You're going to hear from a number of them in this episode telling us about this heady time when they were open to trying new things and trying to heal themselves.

[Zoe Lascoz]

NLP didn't just come out of nowhere. It emerged from a specific time and place. Santa Cruz in the 1970s. Once a sleepy resort town, the city had become a magnet for mystics, surfers, rolfers, organic farmers, and Kundalini experts. So when Judy saw her friends magically, linguistically fix a man's legs using words in her living room, it was definitely outside the context of her reality. But new realities were business as usual in Santa Cruz. One of the guys leading the workshop in Judy's house was none other than our very own Richard Bandler. We learned about Bandler, the co developer of nlp, in the last episode. His techniques are controversial, but seemingly effective. He's cured lifelong phobias on stage in 20 minutes. He's transformed people's lives in a single session. But figuring out who this guy is or was before he became a quick fix kingpin is way more difficult than we thought. We talked to many people who knew and worked with Bandler, and we got wildly different versions of him.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

He had kind of a I'm a rough, tough guy kind of attitude.

[Zoe Lascoz]

He is nothing if not confident.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Sometimes you would see he had a caring side.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Richard terrified me. He just.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

He had a presence about him that

[Zoe Lascoz]

was very edgy, and I just wasn't comfortable.

[Ryan Seacrest]

He struck me as being incredibly brilliant.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Hearing people describe Richard Bandler, you might think they're talking about completely different people. He's a healer. He's an egomaniac. He's a genius. He's a predator. And he comes with a lot of lore. For example, people say he's a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist.

[Alice Hines]

Not true.

[Zoe Lascoz]

No, not at all. It seems like he took some college classes in those subjects, but they weren't even his major.

[Alice Hines]

What's funny to me is that today he insists on going by Dr. Bandler, which I tried to fact check. He has a few honorary doctorates.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Wait, from where?

[Alice Hines]

Well, one is from an online holistic university.

[Zoe Lascoz]

The best Bandler stories always do come from Bandler himself. I heard that he can hear radar. Okay, what the fuck? Yeah, that sounds very distracting. No, Like Pew.

[Alice Hines]

My personal favorite is that he said he owned a topless bar at age 16 and that two years later he was a millionaire. Also that he has a black belt in karate.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Oh, my God. Wait, so he obviously wants to be perceived as some kind of tough guy.

[Alice Hines]

I think that's very on purpose.

[Zoe Lascoz]

There's this one story I heard about Bandler. He denies it ever happened, like a lot of the other stories swirling around his past. But one guy said Bandler supposedly cured his own speech impediment as a kid.

[Alice Hines]

This is fascinating because Bandler ended up becoming an expert in communication using speech for persuasion.

[Zoe Lascoz]

So the story goes that Bandler was working with a doctor on this issue, and the doctor asked him, if you weren't you, who would you want to be? And Bandler said, john Wayne.

[Alice Hines]

John Wayne? The actor who played Uber Mask Cowboys?

[Zoe Lascoz]

Precisely. So the doctor tells him to go out and imitate John Wayne and Bandler spends a month watching old westerns and mimicking his voice, including, quite possibly, a movie in which John Wayne cures a kid's stutter.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Listen to me, you whining little whelp. You're gonna stop that stutter or get the hell outta here. You're gonna stop it or go home. Do you hear me? You goddamn son of a bitch. Say that again. You goddamn mean son of a bitch. Say it faster. You goddamn mean, dirty son of a bitch. I wouldn't make it a habit calling me that, son.

[Alice Hines]

I actually do think John Wayne sounds like Bandler in this tape.

[Zoe Lascoz]

What's funny is Bandler is kind of the kid and the healer. He's both, ultimately. But I think what's really key here is the rugged confidence bit. People have told me Bandler sort of swaggered around. He did the whole physical shtick, too.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Richard was a tough guy. You know, he was a New Jersey guy and he was a street kid. He struck me as looking like a speed freak. He had a straggly long beard and his hair was a mess and dirty and he was chain smoking.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Bandler apparently dressed like a biker, minus the bike. He was skinny and had a long mustache. One guy told me he looked like Dennis Hopper in the movie Easy Rider. Bandler liked to imply he'd been in gangs since he was a kid and even told some people he'd once been knifed so badly he could basically only eat meat.

[Alice Hines]

What? He could only eat meat.

[Zoe Lascoz]

He could only eat meat.

[Alice Hines]

I don't get it.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Yeah, I don't think this is real, but the idea is that he got stabbed in the belly and they had to operate and take out some of his intestines. So now he can't digest certain vegetables.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Richard did allude to his highly dramatic past, making a big deal out of taking some medication that he had in his pocket that he needed. Said he needed because of doing other things in his past.

[Zoe Lascoz]

I know that Richard had very difficult upbringing. And so we often say people who can act like a bully are usually the most wounded. They're the most vulnerable. And Bandler was vulnerable. According to one magazine, he would stuff Kleenex in his lunch bag when he was in elementary school so other kids wouldn't know he didn't have any food. The same magazine reported that his mother tried to shoot him a couple times. More recently, Bandler told a reporter for the Guardian that his stepfather physically abused him. But he said he got revenge. When he was 10 years old, Bandler deliberately electrocuted his stepfather.

[Alice Hines]

Bandler said he rigged a booby trap that shocked the guy and he ended up in the hospital for months.

[Zoe Lascoz]

I find it so perplexing, Alice, that Bandler would go around telling this story. Because if it's true, I mean, isn't this the sort of thing that you stuff in a box and bury the box and hide the box and hope people never ever find out?

[Alice Hines]

Unless violent threats are part of your therapeutic Persona.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Despite all the wild stories out there, everyone we spoke to agreed on two things. Bandler was brilliant and Bandler was unpredictable.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

He was very funny and he could be very empathetic. And he could also be meaner than a snake.

[Zoe Lascoz]

You know, there are a few things we know for sure about Richard Bandler. He was born in New Jersey in 1950. His dad does seem to have been a jerk and left by the time he was five. His mom remarried and at some point in the 1960s, the family up and moved to Sunnyvale, California, which is a sort of middle class suburb in what's now Silicon Valley. That's where Richard Bandler went to high school. I wanted to understand where he came from, so I traveled to Northern California to talk to people who knew him in his 20s. Sunnyvale isn't far from Palo Alto. And that's where Bandler met the family who would change his life forever. The Spitzers.

[Alice Hines]

All right, let's meet the Spitzers.

[Zoe Lascoz]

The Spitzers were a pretty out there family, Alice. Bob Spitzer was one of the first psychiatrists at Stanford, experimenting with LSD. In 1967, he spent 10 days in jail for blocking the Oakland Draft Center. His kids grew up going to rock festivals like Altamont, where the Hell's Angels fatally stabbed a member of the crowd. One of those kids, Daniel, wanted to play the drums, so Bob hired a local teen to give him lessons.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I was, I think, his first drum student. It was really fun. He took a totally different approach to teaching drumming.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And guess who that teenage teacher was? Richard Bandler.

[Alice Hines]

That tracks.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Yep. So does the fact that Bandler showed up to the lessons with a whole bunch of knives.

[Alice Hines]

He actually carried them in his pocket,

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

and he showed me a few at different times.

[Zoe Lascoz]

He had a buck knife, a bowie knife, a switchblade.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I didn't really know what to make of it.

[Zoe Lascoz]

I'd never seen a fighting knife up

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

close at that point in my life. It seemed more like a pose.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Bandler was an unorthodox teacher, but he got results.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

He had this kind of brash, bold way of approaching a lot of things. And I was, I think, his first drum student.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Daniel looked up to Bandler, which is why he found it odd that Bandler, this older kid, was working so hard to impress him.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

He had a chip on his shoulder, and most of my buddies in the sixth grade didn't have chips on their shoulder like that. And I was surprised that an older guy felt the need to impress me. And some of it impressed me, and some of it made me wonder what was going on with him at the time.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Daniel's parents also began to wonder about Bandler. They sort of adopted him.

[Alice Hines]

I'm struck by the fact that this family adopts Richard Bandler, who, even as a teenager, seems like kind of a weirdo.

[Zoe Lascoz]

I get the impression they were kind of in the habit of taking in talented strays. And Daniel's mother reportedly had a huge heart. She saw right through Bandler's tough guy antics and recognized how bright he was and basically wanted to nurture him and his knives, knives and all. Bob owned an important psychology press, and Bandler began working in the warehouse. He also got a new place to live, the Spitzers commune in the Santa Cruz mountains.

[Alice Hines]

Of course, these people had a commune.

[Zoe Lascoz]

They had a full fledged commune. There were artists, there were musicians. It was also the headquarters of the guerrilla midwifery movement.

[Alice Hines]

Fascinating.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Yeah. This one radical woman who lived there, Raven Lang, helped launch the home birthing movement in California when that was essentially illegal in California.

[Alice Hines]

Okay, so all of these people are living together on this property.

[Zoe Lascoz]

They're living together, they're raising chickens together, they're farming together. So when we bought the place, it

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

was actual a commune. It was a nudist colony. And I remember being 13, and I'm like, yeah, Daddy, buy it.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And all these naked people left. It was too bad. Bob Spitzer's daughter Mandy showed me around the property, pointing out geodesic domes and former gardens. Walking around, it was easy to imagine this gaggle of renegade geniuses all living together.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

This was his magic place where he would come and smoke dope. And he had wonderful ideas, my father did. Some of them came to fruition and really did great changes. And then other ones just kind of

[Zoe Lascoz]

spun out and got a little too

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

out there for anybody to grab onto.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Like what?

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Like the university for becoming more fully human that was gonna take place. He had a group of young men here that made pretty terrible music. And they were called the Mysteries. And another guy, Jupiter was his name. And he just flung paint everywhere. Yeah, and my dad sponsored a lot of this.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And Richard was one of those ideas.

[Alice Hines]

So this place was basically a startup incubator for every out there New age Trend of the 60s. All paid for by this guy, Bob Spitzer.

[Zoe Lascoz]

What's crazy is Bob somehow juggled this menagerie of wacky passion projects with his official role in the psychiatry world. He was friends and colleagues with all these luminaries rethinking what therapy could be at the time. And for Bob Spitzer, Bandler wasn't just another larky experiment. He was a protege.

[Alice Hines]

And that's how Bandler got into psych. It's how he started nlp.

[Zoe Lascoz]

It's nuts. Of all the families who could have semi adopted Bandler, the Spitzers were the rare people who could give him some tools to deal with his issues and introduce him to giants in the field. They basically gave him a new identity,

[Alice Hines]

which was becoming a therapist.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Yep. Tortured kid and alleged cowboy turned after school drum teacher, slash knife enthusiast Richard Bandler reinvented himself yet again this time as a therapist. For better or worse.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

You know, they wouldn't give me a

[Ryan Seacrest]

license to do therapy because I'm not qualified. I think that's wonderful. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It is stock up savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Goldfish, Keebler, Doritos, All M M's, Drumstick, Outshine and Kellogg's. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more en savings on top of savings. When you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pickup or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Support for the show comes from public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index, and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures [e-mail] disclosures let's talk about modern home shopping.

[Alice Hines]

It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens you've never seen or backyards you haven't even stepped foot in. All from the comfort of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin flips the script with listings that update within minutes and tours you can book right from the Redfin app. You can see your dream home the moment it appears. Now liking a listing is easy, but actually landing it? That's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over 2200 agents with local expertise and Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you win, not just window shop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait. This could actually be home. So become the newest neighbor on the block. Visit redfin.com to start finding and start owning. That's redfin.com Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I don't know if you knew this,

[Alice Hines]

but anyone can get the same Premium

[Zoe Lascoz]

Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.

[Ryan Seacrest]

It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have

[Zoe Lascoz]

one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

[Ryan Seacrest]

I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail]

[Zoe Lascoz]

Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3

[Alice Hines]

month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees Extra default [e-mail] I've been researching Bandler's early influences in psychology. What happened was that Bob Spitzer introduced Bandler to his friends and colleagues in this alt psych movement. And it's here that Bandler found a new identity. He began to imitate famous therapists. Some of them lived at this place called Esalen in Big Sur just down the road from Santa Cruz.

[Zoe Lascoz]

It was the headquarters of the human Potential movement.

[Alice Hines]

That's a new age effort to remake mankind for the better.

[Zoe Lascoz]

It was basically a therapy commune.

[Alice Hines]

Therapy cult.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Therapy commune.

[Alice Hines]

Therapy cult.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Okay, I think this might be a yes and let's go with cult adjacent therapy commune. Okay.

[Alice Hines]

So one of the therapists at Esalen was Fritz Perls. Bandler began listening to tapes of Pearls therapy sessions like this one.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

What do you feel physically? Hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Right there.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Can you exaggerate this? Hammer, hammer, hammer. Make noises. Feels better.

[Alice Hines]

Here Pearls is treating a student with stage fright. He tells her to talk to different parts of herself, to reintegrate them. That was the cornerstone of Gestalt Pearls school of therapy. It was designed to heal the so called fragmented self.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Shiny. I want to crack my toes. I feel confined by the sandals. Now let your toes talk to the sandals. I feel confined by you.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Let me go.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Sandals. I will move again. Let me go. Scream it. Let me go again. Let me.

[Alice Hines]

Bandler became obsessed with pearls and techniques like this one. He started imitating Pearls German accent and mannerisms. But Bandler didn't stop there. He also began mimicking an experimental psychotherapist named Virginia Satir. Satir's big thing was role playing. She called it family reconstruction therapy. And she'd guide groups to dramatically reenact family issues.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

And I wonder how you would feel just moving up to this son of

[Zoe Lascoz]

yours and saying to him, thank you. Gotcha.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Now to take both his hands and to tell him that I'm not gonna let you see your mother anymore, Aaron.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Cause she hurt you.

[Alice Hines]

Satir got seemingly magical results. Families who'd been fighting for years or were traumatized, rebonded. Bandler was dazzled. Here Satir is on a public access show called thinking allowed in 1988.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Well, you focused quite a lot in your lifetime on human potential, on dealing with people who come, you know, from tormented families. You feel very hopeful that a person's life need not be conditioned by their past.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Let's think that the human being has countless number of little jets. And if our energy were free to flow, then these jets were all open and are our possibilities and that when we allow that to happen, then we become in a totally different place because we then can have harmony, moving and we have the total force of the energy that's possible. And that's all I've done with people is open.

[Alice Hines]

You can see how these ideas that abuse doesn't define you and that feelings can be transformed to unlock new human potential would appeal to a young Richard Bandler, and they helped form nlp. Bandler would start putting all of these radical psychotherapy influences together as an undergraduate student. And he added his own special sauce.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Richard Bandler arrived at Kresge College in the early 1970s. The school was brand new. It wasn't just some place to get a degree. It was a radical community experiment. I've been researching Kresge and went there on my trip to California. At the school there were no grades or academic honors. Some teachers wore jeans, walked around barefoot, and others taught cross legged on top of their desks. Everyone participated in mandatory T groups, unstructured forums for sharing and conflict resolution. It was weird, even by Northern California standards. Other colleges at UC Santa Cruz called it the Touchy feely school. It looked different too. The campus was designed like a little village on a winding path through the redwoods. Most students lived in apartments. Others got lumber to build their own dorms. Naturally, there was no hierarchy at Kresge, which may explain why an undergraduate with no formal training or certification in psychology was allowed, maybe even encouraged, to practice therapy on his peers. Bandler began running gestalt therapy groups after hours, cribbing heavily from Fritz Perl's and Virginia Satir. He got surprising results. Fellow students cried and had big life altering breakthroughs. But Bandler had no idea why. And that's where linguistics professor John Grinder comes in. We heard he had been in the CIA, or at least that he consulted with them. Grinder had been a Special Forces captain stationed in Europe during the Cold War. But he also seems to have been

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

some kind of spy while he was in the military. You know, he was one of those guys apparently, that would, you know, parachute in and get somebody out on the skis and what?

[Zoe Lascoz]

When Grinder quit the service, he got a PhD and his politics did a 180. NLP trainer Robert Diltz got to know Grinder as one of his linguistics students.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

And so according to John, he went

[Zoe Lascoz]

from being a CIA agent to the president of the Communist Party. The following year, Grinder organized anti war demos in downtown Santa Cruz and streaked naked across campus at least once. But he drew the line at therapy, Bandler and Grinder met in one of the mandatory T groups and immediately bonded over their mutual disdain for talking endlessly on and on with no structure or concrete goal.

[Alice Hines]

They thought psychiatrists had no real incentive to cure their patients. The longer the therapy took, the more they got paid. So people never got better.

[Zoe Lascoz]

But Bandler knew the rapid results he was getting were unique and that they might even appeal to Grinder's Marxist principles. And it was trying to get John to come to these groups. And John kept saying, oh, you know, that's bourgeois. You know, people just wallowing in their own problems. Bandler finally convinced Grinder to come see what he was up to. But when he saw what Bandler was doing, he was impressed because he could see that he wasn't just having people wallow in their problems, that he was actually influencing them and their behavior and very, how do I say, you know, very powerful way. Bandler needed Grinder, someone who could analyze his ad hoc experiments and therapy larps and turn them into a codified method.

[Alice Hines]

John Grinder, the linguist, looked at what Richard Bandler was doing and identified the structure.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Grinder began analyzing what Bandler was saying, how he was saying it, and what he was doing physically to identify effective patterns.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Richard was my first real therapist.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Deborah Cantor Morton was a student and one of their first guinea pigs.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I actually did quite a bit of my personal work with the both of them that was extremely powerful.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Deborah experienced therapeutic breakthroughs with Bandler and Grinder. But by the end of her time, I plotted revenge.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I thought of suing them. I thought about putting sugar in their gas tanks.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Devra first met Bandler when they were both volunteering at a peer counseling center and Bandler was the trainer. Richard Bandler was in there training you. You're both undergraduate students. How did he get in the position where he was training anyone to work on people with real problems?

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I have no idea how that happened. There must have been some kind of supervision. God, you'd hope so.

[Zoe Lascoz]

What were the trainings like?

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

It was. I used the word wholesome, but I used the word wholesome in contrast to where I feel like it went later. When I met them, they knew what they were doing.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Jody Bruce met Bandler and Grinder when she enrolled in a linguistics course they were teaching together. They were developing it with us.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I mean, they were doing their research with us.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Jodi joined the workshops. Bandler and Grinder were running off campus. The students would arrive and chat a bit, but it wasn't a party. They were there to work Bandler and Grinder would make a dramatic entrance and ask the group, who wants to make a deep change tonight? A few volunteers would step up. They were the patients. Everyone else became their doctors.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

That's who we worked on.

[Zoe Lascoz]

We worked on ourselves with each other, which was pretty brave, now that I say that, when I think about it, you know, just these other people, these other students who happened to be interested in the same thing, we were suddenly

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

baring our hearts to each other.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Therapy is everywhere today. But in the 1970s, therapy was still controversial. So it was pretty radical for these kids to be working on each other, exploring new forms of care.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

And we did do a lot of sharing.

[Zoe Lascoz]

The big phrase that comes back to me as I think about NLP is what stops you from doing that. So if I said I feel afraid,

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

that would be dissected into who I

[Zoe Lascoz]

feel afraid of and how and what. I can't tell my father that I'm mad at him.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

What stops you from doing that?

[Zoe Lascoz]

Jody Bruce attended the groups with Jim, her boyfriend at the time.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

He was a lot of work because

[Zoe Lascoz]

he would just, he was always trying

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

to therapize me, you know, and sometimes

[Zoe Lascoz]

I would get frustrated and just say,

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

look, we're just going to have an

[Zoe Lascoz]

argument, okay, just how it goes.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

And this is, I don't want to be a chapter in your book.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And so I think there was that. There was that part of it that maybe that's where the word culty comes in, is that for some people, for this to work, it needed to be a way of life. Like, I couldn't just say, I'm tired,

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I'm checking out right now.

[Zoe Lascoz]

You know, it would be tired of what?

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

How, you know, checking out, of what to go to where.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And those probing questions, what stops you from being awake? Yeah, what stops you from being.

[Alice Hines]

Exactly what was the point of these questions? It sounds kind of pushy.

[Zoe Lascoz]

It honestly sounds so invasive. They would grill you about why you feel the way you feel about your biggest hang ups and issues in front of all your friends. But there was actually a point. And the point was to help you realize that you actually have way more options for how you might feel about something then you might know.

[Alice Hines]

This is the whole control your emotional state thing. Nancy Salzman, who we met last episode, is a mega fan of this technique. She used it to get herself through prison.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And this is where it all began. The idea that the way you're feeling is just one way you could feel about it. But if you back up, you could choose from a whole range of reactions. I asked Devra what exactly they were working on. She said it was not light stuff. It was serious psychic pain, insecurity, and trauma.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I remember really stumbling on believing that my father loved or approved of me at that time.

[Zoe Lascoz]

To help Devra, Bandler and Grinder performed a family reconstruction. This is one of the techniques they got from Virginia Satir, where basically you have people pretend to be the patient's family members, and then the patient can say things to them they might be too afraid to say in real life.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

John was sitting in front of me. He would tell me that he loved me. And then Rich would ask, well, do you believe? Do you believe John? No, I don't. Well, is there something that he could do that you would believe him? And it became pretty clear to me that it was the fact that I wasn't believing what he was saying. And the possibility is that maybe my father was telling me that he loved me in lots of different ways, that I wasn't perceiving. And it was quite an aha moment. After that therapy, I called up my dad and I told him that I realized that he did love me. He opened his heart.

[Zoe Lascoz]

At that point, people like Deborah were getting results. And somehow this experimental therapy clique became cool.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

They had a community of followers. I think there were quite a few women that were enamored with them.

[Zoe Lascoz]

But another NLPer, Dawn McCormack, said they were kind of insufferable.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

When there was a small group of

[Ryan Seacrest]

us who were into this, that's all we talked about. And we laughed about how we were losing all our friends. We became unattractive people to be friends with.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Jim Eicher, another early NLP guy, remembers the group had a certain mystique. By the time he arrived at Kresge in 1973, people came out of sessions raving about the revelations they were having. Wow.

[Ryan Seacrest]

What just happened? That was the most amazing understanding of behavior I could ever imagine. Like learning how speech is so pattern, and it reveals how I think and how I learn.

[Zoe Lascoz]

NLP trainer Robert Diltz said the confidence Bandler and Grinder exuded was infectious.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Whatever they would suggest, we would go try it.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And there was definitely this feeling you could go in and clear out the psychiatric ward of a hospital. So it was very much that kind of feeling that what you're doing here is life changing and world changing.

[Alice Hines]

That's exactly what Bandler and Grinder tried to do. Bandler and Grinder actually brought their experimental therapy to Napa State Hospital, a psychiatric facility with thousands of patients.

[Zoe Lascoz]

This is Pretty shocking. They were given free reign to test their ideas out on extremely vulnerable people.

[Alice Hines]

At the time, one of the problems in these facilities was that doctors would just slap diagnoses on people, and then if the treatments didn't work, the patients were deemed incurable.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Right. Movies like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest captured the general consensus at the time that psych wards and institutions were essentially prisons. When I asked this one early NLP guy who was involved in these experiments, but who's now a licensed therapist, if he thought what they were doing was, you know, a little unethical, he was basically like, hey, at least we were trying something new instead of just giving up on these people.

[Alice Hines]

But others felt Bandler and Grinder sometimes did more harm than good.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

It was a game for them to see how they could manipulate and control people, and they could share that laugh with each other. When they could do an induction on somebody when they didn't know that they were being inducted, I could tell that they thought it was fun to have that kind of power over people.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Devra had her criticisms of Bandler and Grinder, but she clearly wasn't completely immune to the confidence they gave off. Both Deborah and her friend developed a crush on Bandler, and they made out with him together after one of their sessions.

[Alice Hines]

Okay, so just FYI, making out with a client as a therapist is a huge ethical breach.

[Zoe Lascoz]

It does seem like almost everyone in these therapy groups was somehow romantically entangled. We all spent so much time together,

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

we were very aware of the dynamics of each other's.

[Zoe Lascoz]

The sex lives, the partying, whatever else. Devra, one of Bandler and Grinder's early guinea pigs, was down for the atmosphere. For the most part, consenting adults and all, she was looking forward to the group's 1974 Christmas party.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I made the assumption that it was just a regular Christmas party, so I got myself ready for that by taking some mushrooms beforehand.

[Zoe Lascoz]

But this was the night it went way too far. The night Debra walked away from Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and what would become NLP Forever.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

When I got to the party, I found out that it was not the kind of party I thought it was going to be.

[Zoe Lascoz]

The party was just for the people in Bandler and Grinder's therapy clique. And they had prepared an unusual gift for each guest.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

Each person was called up to the front to do some work with John and Rich, and they had a certain task that they had to do.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Most of the gifts were playful. Bandler and Grinder had Devra's Friend who's a little cocky, chant om. And when his mouth was open, they both pied him in the face. He thought it was hilarious. But when it was Devra's turn, they blindfolded her. Bandler and Grinder stood on either side of Debra and began speaking simultaneously into both of her ears.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing. Don't ask for help unless I really need it, because sometime I might really want it.

[Zoe Lascoz]

And then they led her, still blindfolded, outside. She felt them lift her about four feet above the ground. Her legs were loosely bound and her arms were tied outstretched to something wooden.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I still had my blindfold on, and I opened my eyes. Eyes. I was standing up there with my legs and my arms strapped onto a cross. I said, this is Christmas, not Easter. And I think Richard said, for whom? And I had kind of one of those icky feelings passing through my body at that time.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Remember, Devora was tripping throughout this. Somehow she got her blindfold off, and what she saw freaked her out.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

All of the people that were in the training workshop were standing below me in a half moon, holding candles.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Freakier still, they were placing logs below her feet and dousing them in lighter fluid.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

So I was prompted earlier in the evening, trust somebody to keep something that I would need.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Later, Devra picked someone she didn't even know. And Bandler and Grinder gave that person

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

her gift, which was a knife.

[Zoe Lascoz]

A knife. Someone struck a match and set the logs on fire. Just then, Deborah managed to cut herself free.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

And I was angry, just incredibly angry, that I'd been put in that position by people that I had trusted, that maybe I shouldn't have trusted. I met with John and Rich afterwards, and I expressed my anger to them about them putting me in that position. And they maintained that it was an expression of caring and thoughtfulness that they put me in this position because this was what they had intended to help me therapeutically, to take me out of my victim position and to give me the knife to cut myself out of the victim position. I was angry at them for doing that to me. Ethically, it didn't seem right. They took my permission, as my therapist, to go too far.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Devra left the group. She never went back. Although she became a marriage and family therapist, she says she's never used any of the techniques she helped Bandler and Grinder developed.

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

I decided that I was tired of the hijinks and the threat to my personal safety, and I decided not to have anything further to do with either of them.

[Zoe Lascoz]

It should be noted this is Debra's version of events, although Terry McClendon, who was there that night, wrote about it in his own book and he told me about that evening during my interview with him. Bandler didn't respond to questions about this incident, nor did John Grinder, but NLP was just getting started. What began as one more New Age alternative therapy would grow and change and in some applications and in some hands, evolve into something more sinister.

[Alice Hines]

Only a few years after NLP developed, it spread beyond the mountain communes of Santa Cruz and it found a new home in the business world.

[Zoe Lascoz]

Bandler and Grinder began marketing NLP as a persuasion technology that could be used to read people and manipulate them. How do you recognize how people organize their thoughts and then work with their language in a way to modify their thoughts?

[Deborah Cantor Morton]

That's sin.

[Zoe Lascoz]

That's next on Mind Games.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It is Stock Up Savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tax to earn on eligible items from Smart Water, Healthy Choice, Continental, arrowhead, Red Bull, St James, Tillamook and Special K. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for eas easy drive up and go pick up or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 2020% year over year. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures [e-mail] disclosures let's talk about modern home shopping.

[Alice Hines]

It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens you've never seen or backyards you haven't even stepped foot in. All from the comfort of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin flips the script with listings that update within minutes and tours you can book right from the Redfin app, you can see your dream home the moment it appears. Now, liking a listing is easy, but actually landing it? That's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over 2200 agents with local expertise, and Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you win, not just window shop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait. This could actually be home. So become the newest neighbor on the block. Visit redfin.com to start finding and start owning. That's redfin.com hey, it's Shelly Rome on Z100. I'm someone who really likes to understand why we think the way that we do and not just how to relax. That's what pulled me into the Waking up app. Created by neuroscientist Sam Harris, it combines meditation with real science and thoughtful storytelling about the mind. I use it after my late night shift to slow things down and gain much needed perspective. If you're looking for a clearer way to reset, explore waking up for 30 days. Free with my link wakingup.com roam Mind

[Zoe Lascoz]

Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart podcast. The series is created and hosted by me, Zoe Lascoz and Alice Hines. It's produced by Ryder Alsop and Dara Luk Potz, Edited by Kate Osborne Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone Fact checking by

[Alice Hines]

Eamon Whelan from Kaleidoscope Our executive producers are Oz Wiloshin, Mangesh Hatikador and Kate Osborne from Iheartra. Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etor.

[Ryan Seacrest]

This is Julian Edelman from Games With Names. I want to take a second to talk about something that's personal to me. I've had the privilege of working closely with Robert Kraft for a long time, and one thing I've always respected is how seriously he takes up standing up to hate. As a Jewish athlete, my identity is something I am proud of, but I also know what it feels like to be singled out for it. That's why this new commercial for the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate that aired during the Big Game really hit home. It's about showing up for someone when they're targeted, even if you don't have the perfect words. And sometimes standing next to someone is enough. And you can show support by sharing the Blue Square hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It is Stock up Savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for store wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tax to earn on eligible items from Smart Water, Healthy Choice, Continental, arrowhead, Red Bull, St James, Tillamook and Special K. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pick or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions.

[Alice Hines]

Hey, it's Shelly Roam. So working late nights on the radio gives you a lot of quiet time with your thoughts. And sometimes your mind just won't slow down. I've always wondered why our minds do what they do, why they race, why we get stuck in the same loops, and how we can actually work with our thoughts instead of fighting them. That's what led me to the Waking up app created by neuroscientist Sam Harris. Waking up is so much more than meditation. It blends neuroscience, philosophy and guided practices that help you really understand your mind. You learn to notice your thoughts, slow them down and gain perspective, which makes all the difference when you're really feeling overwhelmed. I use waking up after long nights to reset, feel calmer and start the day with more clarity. If the new year has you thinking about a smarter, more meaningful reset, explore waking up free for 30 days with MyLink wakingup.com Rome it really changes the way you think about your thoughts.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Are you a fraud paying American? 1 in 4 tax paying Americans has been a victim of Identity Fraud with LifeLock. If your identity is stolen, they fix it guaranteed or your money back. Last year billions in refunds were stolen. Could be from your salary, overtime or second job gone. But this year you don't need to stay a victim because this is this tax season. Fraud paying American is something no American should have to claim. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com iheart Terms apply.