The Self-Help Empire

Summary

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Mind Games, Episode 4: "The Self-Help Empire"

Podcast: Mind Games
Host(s): Kaleidoscope (Zoë Lescaze & Alice Hines)
Date: February 10, 2026

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the rise of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and how it became the backbone of modern self-help, influencing figures from Tony Robbins to Jordan Belfort and NXIVM’s Nancy Salzman. Hosts Zoë Lescaze and Alice Hines explore NLP’s origin, its dramatic journey into mainstream culture, and the thin line between “mind control” and hype. Relying on interviews, personal experiments, and archival audio, the episode exposes both the promise and the peril of a movement that convinced millions that instant change was within their grasp.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Tony Robbins Origin Story – NLP Hits the Mainstream

• Tony Robbins' Showmanship & Early Days
  • Narrative Reenactment: Tony catapults to fame by “curing” a woman’s snake phobia in front of a live audience ([02:45]–[05:43]).
  • Emphasizes rapid, miraculous change:

    “Changes you thought would take years or months could be done in minutes or hours.” – Tony Robbins ([04:37])

• Miracle Cure, Spectacle & Branding
  • Robbins recalls carrying out increasingly dramatic interventions at events, positioning himself as the architect of rapid, transformational self-help ([05:43]).

From Therapy Hack to Empire Building

• NLP Moves from Therapists’ Offices to Corporate America
  • Zoe and Alice track how NLP’s therapeutic techniques morphed into sales and coaching strategies embraced by Fortune 500s ([07:26]).
  • Tony Robbins becomes the genre’s super-celebrity, working with world leaders, celebrities, and corporations ([08:21]).
• Self-Help as 1980s Survivalism
  • Explains the cultural context of the self-help boom amid economic uncertainty, layoffs, and Reagan-era “pull yourself up” philosophy ([13:14]–[14:21]).

The Mechanics & Magic of NLP

• So What Is NLP, Really?
  • Tony: “If you have strategy—that’s how-to. The better strategy will get you the result faster. That’s what NLP really was.” ([15:00])
  • Tony recounts his DIY initiation: fixes his own nail-biting using “swish patterns”—a core NLP visualization ([16:02]).
• Signature Stunts (Firewalking, Board Breaking)
  • Describes how Robbins used activities like firewalking to dramatize the possibility of radical change, and how changing physiology became central to Robbins’ pitch ([17:01]–[17:51]).
  • Alice & Zoe frame these moments as group rituals that blur the line between therapy, placebo, and motivational theater ([18:11]–[18:47]).

Experimenting With NLP — A Field Test

• Alice Tries NLP on Zoe’s Mom
  • Alice uses NLP visualization (the “swish” technique) to help Lynn, Zoe’s mom, overcome her anxieties about biking ([23:34]–[32:14]).
  • Vividly recounts blending guided imagery with exposure—e.g., switching from memories of fear to memories of joy:

    “Tricking your brain to switch from a state of anxiety to a state of confidence is an NLP technique... you can change your emotional reactions by manipulating your memories, specifically the sensory details associated with a memory.” – Alice ([25:17])

• Results – Placebo or Substance?
  • Lynn experiences some improvement but the fix isn’t instant or magical; the hosts reflect on the blurred boundary between NLP and mainstream therapy (“exposure therapy”) ([32:14]–[33:03]).
  • Lynn pushes back at NLP’s instant-cure hype:

    “But to tell a poor innocent person who is struggling to get over something, this is easy… Let me just say that that is not true. So you end up feeling bad and you end up feeling that it’s your fault.” – Lynn ([33:03])

• Limits and Accountability
  • Tony asserts limits are mostly “beliefs,” but critics note that systemic impediments (economic, societal) are often ignored by the self-help world ([33:26]–[35:05]).

    “If you want to argue for your people’s limitations, you’ll create them. I think it’s bullshit… The most successful people on earth started with disadvantages.” – Tony Robbins ([34:33])

Unpacking NLP’s Proliferation – Gurus, Copycats & Controversies

• From Robbins to Wolfe of Wall Street to Cults
  • Documents how NLP spread into sales culture (Jordan Belfort), corporate training (Nancy Salzman, future NXIVM leader), and beyond, mutating into various self-help and even cult-like systems ([39:11]–[40:37]).
  • The “rapport” technique—mirroring posture/breath to build trust—is discussed as both benign and manipulative ([37:46]–[39:11]).
• Copyright Battles & Rebranding
  • Founders Bandler & Grinder lose control of NLP, leading to lawsuits. Tony Robbins rebrands his NLP as “Neuro-Associative Conditioning” to distance himself amid trademark drama and critiques about “programming” ([41:44]–[42:39]).
  • Tony’s debt to Bandler is acknowledged (“Richard is a wild man... will do just about anything to get the outcome.” – Tony Robbins [43:06]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Phobia Cure Showdown:

  “Bring me somebody you’ve never been able to change. I said, I’m sure you’ve got plenty of those.” – Tony Robbins ([03:52])

• Group Ritual Transformations:

  “Firewalking is funny to me because, like a lot of magic tricks, it seems physically impossible but is actually not at all.” – Alice Hines ([18:11])

• Limits of Self-Help:

  “This is the problem with self help in general, right? It promises the world and that’s empowering. But when it doesn’t work, people end up blaming themselves.” – Zoe Lascaz ([33:26])

• Emotional Salesmanship:

  “Selling is the process of finding people’s pain, disturbing them, stirring up their pain, making them feel the hurt, and then healing it... it’s a hurt them and heal them business.” – Tony Robbins ([38:53])

• The Placebo Debate:

  “Which is one of the reasons why NLP techniques do sometimes work, because people believe they will. Maybe that’s not such a bad place to start...” – Zoe Lascaz ([18:50])

• On Professional Copycats:

  “If Bandler was upset about people learning NLP and making it their own, hypnotically ruining their sex lives was pretty much all he could do about it.” – Zoe Lascaz ([41:44])

• Accountability Gap:

  “According to the Federal Trade Commission, Tony’s franchised NLP seminars misrepresented to people how much they would make selling the seminars…people made way less.” – Alice Hines ([36:19])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment/Topic | |--------|--------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:45 | Tony Robbins’ live “snake phobia cure” anecdote | | 07:26 | NLP goes from therapy to sales/self-help | | 13:14 | Socioeconomic forces behind self-help’s 1980s boom | | 16:02 | Robbins tries an NLP technique on himself | | 17:01 | Firewalking—the signature group ritual | | 23:34 | Alice’s NLP experiment with Zoe’s mom, Lynn | | 33:03 | Lynn critiques the “instant cure” promise of NLP/self-help | | 34:33 | Tony Robbins addresses critics and limits of NLP | | 37:46 | How “rapport” powers persuasion and sales tactics | | 39:11 | NLP’s spread into sales (Belfort) and cults (NXIVM) | | 41:44 | Bandler’s loss of copyright control—Tony rebrands | | 43:06 | Tony’s personal reflection on Bandler and the NLP legacy |

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Tone & Style

The hosts maintain a skeptical yet open-minded tone, mixing investigative journalism with personal storytelling and cultural critique. The use of archival audio from self-help icons, as well as candid exchanges and field experiments, gives the episode energy and authenticity. The balance between fascination with NLP’s power and concern over its excesses or “monster” side is a running motif.

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Summary

“The Self-Help Empire” draws listeners into the strange, pervasive world of NLP—from its quirky, controversial founders to mega-gurus like Tony Robbins, through tales of hyped-up workshops, firewalking, and the trappings of instant self-improvement. By blending interviews, participatory experiments, and sharp commentary, Zoe and Alice show how a fringe psychological toolkit morphed into a billion-dollar industry—promising, sometimes perilously, that a better you is just a visualization away.

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Transcript

[Narrator/Host]

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[Alice Hines]

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[Narrator/Host]

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[Tony Robbins]

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[Alice Hines]

Kaleidoscope.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Picture this. It's 1983, and you're driving in your car when you hear this young guy come on the radio. He's maybe 23 years old. That thing you hate about yourself, he can fix it.

[Tony Robbins]

I don't care what your problem is. I don't care if you've had phobias for years. Come see me. I'll handle it. In one hour. I am the one. Stop Therapist, right?

[Zoe Lascaz]

People start calling in with questions like, could he cure anxiety, binge drinking, procrastination? The answer is always yes, of course, Absolutely. And then a skeptic comes on the.

[Tony Robbins]

Air and he starts attacking me, saying, people like you are charlatan. You're a liar. People like you should not be loud on the radio. You can't wipe out a phobia in that time period. And I said, well, you must be a scientist. Then. He said, of course I'm a scientist. I said, well, a scientist would never assume anything. And I said, as a scientist, you can come up with any hypothesis you want. If you're truly a scientist, isn't it true you have to test your hypothesis? And this is what launched my career.

[Zoe Lascaz]

He throws down a gauntlet. He's holding an event the next night at a Holiday Inn.

[Tony Robbins]

So I suggest the best way you prove your hypothesis is bring me one of your patients. Bring me somebody that you've never been able to change. I said, I'm sure you've got plenty of those.

[Zoe Lascaz]

They go back and forth. But eventually the doctor admits he does have this one patient, a woman with a snake phobia.

[Tony Robbins]

I said, how long have you treated her? And he said, seven years. And I said, well, bring her down. That should take me 10 or 15 minutes. And the guy just lost it. What? You know. And the radio guy says, we'll see you tomorrow night at the Holiday Inn.

[Zoe Lascaz]

It's on. The young miracle worker was expecting 30 to 40 people at the free event. 500 show up. There aren't enough chairs. He gets up on stage and introduces himself.

[Tony Robbins]

Hi, I'm Tony Robbins. I'm here today to share with you how you can have, you know, more change at a more rapid pace than you probably ever thought possible. Changes you thought would take years or months could be done in minutes or hours. And right as I finish over, literally the side door bursts open.

[Zoe Lascaz]

It's like high noon in an old Western. In walks the psychiatrist and his patient. Tony brings her up on stage, and.

[Tony Robbins]

I walk behind her to the back and There was a table there and I had a little knapsack. And I reached in the knapsack and I'm walking behind her. I reach out and I pull out this little gardener snake. I put the snake in front of her and of course she jumped back at first, but I just held it there. And then her whole nervous system just calmed straight down. Everyone could see it. And I said, how do you feel about snakes? She said, they're not very attractive. I said, okay. And I said, would you be willing to hold it? And she stated with a little more intensity, it's not very attractive. You know, leaned back but didn't shake, didn't spit. None of those overreactions. And I said, think of what it would feel like to just hold that snake and conquer that fear. And the audience is going, hold it, hold it, hold it. You know, it's like a movie.

[Zoe Lascaz]

The woman reaches out and grabs the snake in front of everyone.

[Tony Robbins]

This is part of why my career grew, because I did crazy things.

[Zoe Lascaz]

That day. 23 year old Tony Robbins cured a phobia and launched a self help empire.

[Tony Robbins]

What if your worst day was actually your best day? What if the most painful day in your life could be converted into your best day? It can. This is a new beginning for your life. This is taking your standard to a new level. This is embodying it at a whole new level. It's all happening for us. My friends got to us. This is you Unleash.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Take a deep breath in.

[Richard Bandler]

And breathe out. Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak privately with your unconscious mind.

[Zoe Lascaz]

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this is Mind Games episode four. I'm Zoe Lascoz.

[Alice Hines]

And I'm Alice Hines.

[Richard Bandler]

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

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

State.

[Richard Bandler]

And you're out of.

[Alice Hines]

Last episode we looked at how the co founders of nlp, Richard Bandler and Jon Grinder, discovered hypnosis and used the techniques they learned to market NLP as a persuasion technology.

[Zoe Lascaz]

What began as a set of therapeutic techniques became a series of sales hacks. And from there, NLP became the essence of a new self help industrial complex.

[Alice Hines]

Bandler and Grinder successfully smuggled psychiatric techniques out of the therapist's office and into the business world. But it was Tony Robbins who made these self help hacks inescapable. He and other gurus sold self help to corporate America and NLP got into the water stream big time. Even if you've never heard of NLP You've probably heard of Tony Robbins, maybe from one of his many infomercials like this one from 1990.

[Narrator/Host]

In the last year, over 50 million people met a remarkable man named Anthony Robbins. Since then, his Personal Power Audio program has helped hundreds of thousands of people master their finances, improve the quality of their relationships and achieve peak physical performance.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Today, at 65, Tony Robbins is the world's most famous coach. He's worked with corporations like AT&T, Procter Gamble, Xerox, American Express, IBM and Dow. Celebrities like Andre Agassi, Serena Williams, Hugh Jackman, Pitbull, Princess Diana, they have all been clients.

[Narrator/Host]

Bill Clinton called you the night before 1998 and said, Tony, they may be impeaching me in the morning. What should I do? What an extraordinary position of responsibility you have.

[Tony Robbins]

I'm not the only person he called.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony brought NLP to a new league of elite customers. But his greatest success was building an audience of millions of ordinary people with a message of inner power and resilience.

[Tony Robbins]

Anybody can be in a good state when things are going your way, but if you can stay in a beautiful state when things don't go your way, then you're going to have a beautiful life.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Or maybe it's the millions of dollars he's made in the process. He's not shy about his success.

[Tony Robbins]

I'm Tony Robbins. You know, I'm a business specialist and performance coach. I use a variety of techniques and tools. I have 114 companies across about 12 different industries. We do today about $9 billion in business.

[Zoe Lascaz]

I reached Tony over Zoom at his home in Palm Beach. He said he's ambivalent about the modern world of gurus, frauds and get rich quick schemes he helped create.

[Tony Robbins]

And so I feel like I helped to father an industry that quite frankly is a monster. And they're called a monster because there's no quality control, right? It's like, you know, somebody goes some class, somebody gives them certification who made it up, and then they go out and coach people and charge people. I think it's great that it's there, but it's like, unfortunately, like most industries, there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of great people, there's a few really great people, and there's a lot of terrible people out there. And so when I hear a life coach, I squirm. Even though, you know, I started with this.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Interviewing Tony Robbins can feel like Talking to a YouTube video playing at double speed.

[Tony Robbins]

My nature is I'm passionate, I talk very rapidly. I Talk loud. I project to an audience, so I'm wired that way. Well, our culture tends to give more credibility to someone who speaks more like President Obama, for example, than someone talking to this particular tempo or talking to.

[Zoe Lascaz]

A runaway philosophy machine.

[Tony Robbins]

I know it sounds corny, but the ultimate technique is love and caring for that client. I have a simple philosophy. I know every person I meet, Zoe, you included. And I mean this sincerely. Every person I meet I know is gonna be superior to me in at.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Least one or more areas or a dictionary.

[Tony Robbins]

And if you don't give up and you're relentless, which I am, I'm not persistent. Persistent is that steady consistency. I am relentless all in until we get the outcome.

[Zoe Lascaz]

But Tony is also disarmingly nice. He was generous with his time and happy to talk about his NLP roots.

[Tony Robbins]

I got involved with NLP when I was very young, when I was about, gosh, 23 years old. I was kind of obsessed at a very early age of anything that could make a difference in people's lives.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, as he's fond of saying. His home life was chaotic. His mother was addicted to alcohol and prescription pills, and he left home at.

[Tony Robbins]

17, one of the most loving human beings you can imagine. But when you mix those drugs, you get a different personality. So I became a practical psychologist out of how to figure out how to manage her moods and her emotion. Quite frankly, very early on in my life was a requirement. But that led to me also just wanting to see how to help people get out of pain. I think primarily because I experienced so much of myself.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony discovered the world of development gurus as a teenage door to door salesman.

[Alice Hines]

This was the late 1970s, and motivational speaking was an increasingly crowded feat. There was Werner Erhard and his EST trainings.

[Narrator/Host]

Rather than doing more in the same box, or even doing better in the same box, or even doing something different in the same box, it's about creating new boxes.

[Alice Hines]

There was Norman Vincent Peale with his Church of Positive Thinking.

[Narrator/Host]

Don't tell me that positive thinking doesn't work wonders.

[Alice Hines]

And there were eat or be eaten guys like Jim Rohn.

[Tony Robbins]

Every single day, you wake up with a choice. You can choose to be weak, to give in to your excuses, to let your fears control you, or you can choose to be strong.

[Alice Hines]

A lot of these gurus styled themselves after evangelical preachers, and many had a background in direct sales. They used a lot of the same techniques. Aphorisms, visualizations, and long, vague stories of miraculous transformations that were impossible to fact check. Forget science. Anecdotal evidence spoke for itself.

[Zoe Lascaz]

There's a reason these gurus suddenly appeared in the late 1970s and early 80s. They were capitalizing on a period of profound economic uncertainty in the US Inflation soared and wages stagnated. Companies were downsizing and jobs were increasingly outsourced overseas. Then, under Reagan, there were sweeping cuts to social welfare programs like food stamps, education, and Medicaid. All of this meant there was much fiercer competition in the workforce. As people groomed themselves to get ahead. A new social Darwinism set in.

[Alice Hines]

And no one bottled and sold this survival of the fittest mentality better than motivational speaker Jim Rohn. Jim challenged his students to take charge of their lives, kill the weak parts of themselves and and banish limiting beliefs.

[Tony Robbins]

Let me tell you something. That weak version of yourself, the one that's always complaining, always procrastinating, always settling for less, that version needs to go. It's time to kill it off once and for all.

[Zoe Lascaz]

It was there at a Jim Rhone seminar that Tony found his calling. He began working as Rhone's assistant and then as a salesman, flacking Roan seminars to businesses around LA. By the time he was 19, he was head of his own sales office. Tony got his drive to banish weakness from Rhone, but his techniques, the skills that made him a star, those he got from nlp. Let's go back to when you first learned about nlp. Can you give me a fuller picture of what was going on in your life? Because, as you say, you were no stranger to motivation programs. You'd worked with Jim Rohn. What stood out to you about NLP versus other methods?

[Tony Robbins]

Well, Jim Rohn was not my motivational speaker, per se. I mean, that's the term people overuse. I hate the term because to me, it's like a warm bath. I mean, obviously you need some motivation, but it's not enough. You have to be a strategist, which is what I am. He was more of a business philosopher. So I look at life as you need both philosophy and strategy. If you have strategy, that's how to. And the better strategy will get you the result faster. That's what NLP really was.

[Zoe Lascaz]

He was about 23 when he went to an NLP training. John Grinder was running near the Los Angeles airport. Tony stuck out from the crowd at the time.

[Tony Robbins]

You really had to be a therapist to go do the training in those days. And I basically went to John and said, look, you know, all these therapists, they've been trained to take forever to make change. And it really annoyed me to see somebody, you know, working with somebody for seven years on a problem that I knew could be done in a matter of weeks or months. And once I met Grinder, I knew it could be a matter of sometimes hours or minutes. And so I kind of talked my way into this six month training class and I was obsessed.

[Zoe Lascaz]

First, Tony tried NLP techniques out on himself myself.

[Tony Robbins]

I used to bite my fingernails down to the quick and, and they'd even bleed. And sometimes, you know, I put something on there so if I bit it would be bitter. Nothing seemed to stop it. And I did this simple swish pattern that I picked up from one of the books. You know, I never bit my fingernails ever again. So I was like, this is phenomenal. And I was, I was on fire at that stage to want to master every aspect of it.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Nail biting down, he craves something more ambitious.

[Tony Robbins]

I started really thinking about, you know, NLP is a great set of techniques. And I thought, I don't want to just learn a bunch of techniques like a dog. Anybody can do that. I certainly want to use those too. But I'd like to learn deeper about what makes the human psyche work. I'd like to understand more about how to create global change.

[Zoe Lascaz]

John Grinder gave him an assignment.

[Tony Robbins]

I want you to come up with something else that's seemingly impossible to. And I want you to go model it and come back and show me you have done.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And that's when Tony decided. Tonight we have a firewalk to walk on fire.

[Tony Robbins]

Getting yourself when you're scared to snap out of it and storm through that is a perfect metaphor for the fire of your life. Now let me show you how to walk on fire. Make your boo. Make your boo. Say yes. Say yes.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Fireworks are Tony's signature. They're often the big adrenaline soaked culminations of his multi day seminars, which cost a few thousand dollars and generate millions annually. After long days of group therapy, everyone charges across the coals cheering each other on.

[Tony Robbins]

I certainly know the power of energy. Without energy, nothing changes. Low energy, you're not going to change. So I use high energy and then I use the tools. That's one of the reasons I think I did better than most people. I changed their physiology, which to me was one of the fundamental tools that I learned from John Grinder.

[Zoe Lascaz]

In the Tonyverse, physiology is key to changing someone's state and by extension, their lives. Tony's not a sit down, talk out your problems sort of therapist. He gets people to break boards, punch the air Hug strangers and dance around in conga lines. There's also a lot of yelling.

[Alice Hines]

Firewalking is funny to me because like a lot of magic tricks, it seems physically impossible, but is actually not at all right.

[Zoe Lascaz]

The coals are very hot, but as long as you keep moving quickly, you won't get badly burned.

[Alice Hines]

The whole point is just to hype you up.

[Zoe Lascaz]

If you can walk on fire, Alice, what can't you do in your life?

[Tony Robbins]

But the point was to get yourself to take that step. Because it's just like life. You take that first step, especially in firewalking, you're going to take the second, third, fourth and fifth steps.

[Alice Hines]

Honestly, it seems to be basically getting people in an emotional state where they'll.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Believe anything, including that change is possible.

[Alice Hines]

And I guess that's the placebo effect, right?

[Zoe Lascaz]

Which is one of the reasons why NLP techniques do sometimes work, because people believe they will. Maybe that's not such a bad place to start working on something you're resistant to and think you could never ever, ever get over.

[Tony Robbins]

Metaphors were very helpful. The metaphor opens the door. Then you gotta really develop the skills and you gotta shift the beliefs in people. Beliefs can create and beliefs destroy. And when you learn not just nlp, but you learn how people structure what they value and what they believe, and you show them how to change it for themselves. Not tell them what to believe, not tell them what to do. That's a cult. I have people ask them what do they need and then show them how to basically shape themselves.

[Alice Hines]

I was actually feeling inspired by Tony Robbins. So I tried some of this recently.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And who was your willing guinea pig?

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[Alice Hines]

Okay, I know you already know this. Okay, so it's Zoe's mom, Lynn. She wanted to figure out how to get over this really specific hang up. That's after the break.

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[Alice Hines]

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[Narrator/Host]

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 available at public.comdisclosures Now I'd.

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[Alice Hines]

When was the last time you were at Governor's Island?

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

I've never.

[Alice Hines]

You've never been?

[Narrator/Host]

No.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Oh, cool.

[Alice Hines]

I'm with Zoe's mom, Lynn. We're heading out to Governor's island in New York City to find a calm place to practice bike riding. I also rented us bikes that are, like, upper. That's what I want so we don't have to do city bikes.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Oh, I'm so happy.

[Alice Hines]

Lynn is in her early 70s. Before we met up for our bike ride, I visited her at her home to do a couple of NLP visualization exercises.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

The bike riding images are kind of a composite of flying through Times Square.

[Alice Hines]

In her younger years, she was a.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Fan, fearless bike rider, feeling invincible with my favorite pair of green high heels in the basket, and just the exhilaration and the freedom I felt.

[Alice Hines]

But these days, she's way less confident on two wheels. Part of her problem is physical scoliosis changed her center of gravity.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

So it's like I've lost my power.

[Alice Hines]

Right.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

I'm not the one in control.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Right.

[Alice Hines]

You feel like you're kind of I'm.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

The little kid, you know?

[Alice Hines]

Yes. And part of it is mental. She gets extremely anxious when making turns or in traffic, and she psychs herself out. And she hates feeling this way.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

I hadn't figured out the physical element in it, so I thought, my God, this is what getting old is. Your world shrinks. Fear replaces confidence, and you just sort of dwindle down. You kind of fade off. Hell, no.

[Ad/Promo Voice]

Hell, no.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

That is not what I want.

[Alice Hines]

You are gonna crush it today, Lynn. I had Lynn remember a situation where she felt confident on a bike. She mentioned riding to a lighthouse on Fire Island. So I gave her an NLP visualization technique. We're gonna try to trigger that feeling of wobbliness and instability and apprehension was.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

I think, the word you used, and out of control.

[Zoe Lascaz]

So.

[Alice Hines]

Right. So we're gonna try to trigger that without it actually happening.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

I'm getting tense already.

[Alice Hines]

There we go. So your mind's doing it for you. And right now, practice it. Can you see the lighthouse? Tricking your brain to switch from a state of anxiety to a state of confidence is an NLP technique. They call it swish S W I S H. It's what Toni used on the woman with the snake phobia. Right at the heart of it is the idea that you can change your emotional reactions by manipulating your memories, specifically the sensory details associated with a memory. What colors are part of the memory? Is there a specific palette?

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

How did you feel? Exhilarated? Powerful.

[Tony Robbins]

Confident?

[Alice Hines]

Manipulating a memory. Playing with the color, speed, music, or volume, even playing the memory backwards, helps you gain more emotional control. You can dial back the vividness of a negative memory or train yourself to replace it with a positive one. And so imagine yourself on that boardwalk in Santa Monica. That feeling of wobbliness and apprehension. Can you feel it?

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Oh, God, yes.

[Alice Hines]

Okay, now I want you to make it small. Switch the two images, okay. And make the image of the lighthouse big, full color, purposeful, confident.

[Tony Robbins]

Whoosh. Do this. See this? Whoosh. Do this. See this. Do this. See this. Do this. See this. Do this. See this, do this. Until when you see the old thing of, like, wanting to bite your fingernails, it triggers in your mind the whoosh, the new thing, which is, no, I don't need to do that. This is who I really am.

[Alice Hines]

As Tony Robbins suggests here in his VHS tape, unleashing the power within, this becomes automatic. The idea is eventually you'll react that way in real time, too. On Governor's Island, I gave Lynn a guided meditation. I asked her to think of the bicycle as her first friend. And then another one where I had her envision herself on a bike confidently moving towards her destination. And you're going to come out in three, two, one. Open your eyes.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

That was very interesting. Several things happened when I was on the bike. What gave me the most confidence was imagining I used to take Zoe to school on my bike, and with her on there, I had to get her safely to school. So, yeah, there's traffic and stuff, but there was Zoe. I dropped her off, and after I did that, I could head for the lighthouse.

[Alice Hines]

That's great, Lynn.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

It really worked. That one really worked. Okay.

[Alice Hines]

And with that, we pushed off.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

That was pretty good, right? People on one side, car on the other. Tracker instrument of doom. I know, right? Like, ooh, I was going to stop is what I was thinking. But then he. It was just enough room.

[Zoe Lascaz]

I'm really curious why this worked. Not only because she's my mother, but because I've tried all sorts of stuff to get her back on a bike.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah, like getting her drunk, tipsy.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Oh, my God. I can't believe she told you this.

[Tony Robbins]

Yes.

[Zoe Lascaz]

I figured a drink would help take the edge off. So we may or may not have gotten a cocktail at this bar near my house and biked around my neighborhood.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah, when she told me about that, I think she said she didn't like the pressure.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Okay, fair. But I have seen her ride perfectly well for miles at a time quite recently and seen her just fixate on the one little thing that goes wrong. So I do think this whole problem is mostly in her head.

[Alice Hines]

Okay. So at the end of our day on Governor's island, she was still a bit wobbly and nervous, but she stayed on the bike, so I was happy about that.

[Zoe Lascaz]

That's great. I'm really happy to hear that. But how much of it do you think was the nlp?

[Alice Hines]

That is what I'm on the fence about. Practicing riding a bike in general maybe would have helped just as much. So I'm not sure how much the guided imagery played a role. There's a technique in clinical psychology called exposure therapy, which is honestly kind of identical to Tony's phobia cure.

[Tony Robbins]

You look at his neck, and when his tongue flickers out at you, you know, he's saying, I just. I'm a little bit scared. Please support me. And how does that feel as he starts wrapping around you?

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Not bad.

[Alice Hines]

Here's Tony doing the snake phobia cure that launched his career in that same VHS tape.

[Tony Robbins]

And how would you make it feel good? If you could make it feel good now, what would you do? What would you say to yourself, or what would you picture?

[Zoe Lascaz]

I'd sing to the snake.

[Tony Robbins]

What would you sing to it?

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

I'd sing Happy days are here again.

[Tony Robbins]

Okay, so hold the snake in front of you and sing to his face. Go ahead. Happy days are here again look at them looking at you moving around, and enjoy it.

[Alice Hines]

Licensed therapists also give their clients visualization techniques like this. NLP may have cribbed it from them. Basically, if you give a woman with a fear of snakes a snake, or even have her think of snakes, all in a safe situation where nothing bad happens. It's called exposure therapy.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And Tony is also doing these cures on stage, where there's an audience and all this pressure to make some crazy, miraculous breakthrough in front of the audience.

[Tony Robbins]

You'Re gonna have lasting change. You gotta understand the whole human being. And to do that is, you know, it's not quick sometimes. Right. You know, unfortunately today a lot of psychiatry and psychology is using techniques from a hundred years ago. You wouldn't use a phone from 20 years ago. You think you're an idiot. But they're still doing that because it's what they've been trained to do and they're not trained in results. And that's the biggest difference. I think my obsession is if you can't produce the result consistently for people, then what good is it?

[Zoe Lascaz]

So it's been a few months since you went to Governor's island with my mom, Alice. Did these sparkly new techniques stick? I've been deliberately not asking her about this whole experiment.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah. So she's been practicing on her own, and I recently called her up to check on her progress.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

The thing I do like about this approach is it makes you feel that it's possible that you, your brain, which has been driving yourself crazy, can be kind of tamed down and used. And that's a huge inspiration for somebody who thinks they can't do it.

[Alice Hines]

Lynn's been improving for sure, but it's been slow.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

Doom, catastrophe, I can't do this. Freak out, physical panic. And of course then I do it and I'm looking at my body, which is working fine. It's making the turn, and then there's my brain.

[Alice Hines]

From Lynn's perspective, it's not as easy as advertised. She's frustrated about how these tactics are at times marketed as simple instant fixes.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

But to tell a poor innocent person who is struggling to get over something, this is easy. You just close your eyes and you spend one second, no more than one second on a bad image, and then you replace it with a good image, but for one second. So anyway, let me just say that that is not true. So you end up feeling bad and you end up feeling that it's your fault.

[Zoe Lascaz]

This is the problem with self help in general, right? It promises the world and that's empowering. But when it doesn't work, people end up blaming themselves. I asked Tony about the miracle cure claims surrounding nlp. What are the limits of nlp?

[Tony Robbins]

Well, I don't think you should limit it to nlp. I think you should think of it as neuroscience. You should think of it as psychology. You should think of it as, you know, Eastern practices. Like if you limit yourself to one set of techniques. Yes, there's limits. You'll always bump into limits. I think the limits are our own belief systems. In most cases, are there limits like, you know, Physical limits of how much heat you can deal with, like firewalking. Of course there are. Right. But the limits we think they are are rarely the real limits. And so I think it's really about extending beyond that.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Well, I ask in part about limits because people have criticized NLP and other forms of self help because they tell people that they can radically change their lives when there are systemic societal problems that mean that not everyone is playing on an even playing field. What would you say to those people?

[Tony Robbins]

I'd say, well, if you want to argue for your people's limitations, you'll create them. I think it's bullshit when you tell people that they have all these disadvantages. Not that there aren't disadvantages, but the most successful people on earth started with disadvantages. But what happened is they didn't let them stop it. They didn't buy that story or that excuse. Right. Because everybody has some injustice in their life. Some more than others for sure. But some of the people with the most injustice, whether they be societal or whether it be physical being born blind or losing or going through something of that nature, and they be some of the greatest contributors to society in the world.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony's built his brand on this idea of sheer determination. Infomercials like this one, Personal Power brought Tony and NLP into the homes of millions of Americans.

[Narrator/Host]

Call now and order the complete Personal Power 30 Day Success system. For only 179.95, you'll receive 24 audio cassettes, each containing life changing information that Tony Robbins teaches in his live seminars.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Through the infomercials, Tony sold a crazy number of cassette tapes, over 120 million copies in the first five years they aired. But he also sold Tony.

[Narrator/Host]

There's no question about Tony Robbins skills.

[Tony Robbins]

In teaching people success principles.

[Narrator/Host]

The only question that a person listening can have is can I do it?

[Tony Robbins]

My number one job in life is really to be the destroyer of limitations. I took on everything you could imagine. I had a, you know, woman who hadn't, you know, had an orgasm in 10 years, obviously didn't touch her and had an orgasm on stage and guys were coming to tell me, can you teach me how to do that when I'm tired? So it just expanded and then gradually I started applying all the things I learned into business and built businesses.

[Alice Hines]

Tony is without rival the most successful NLP practitioner. His courses teach success, including financial success. But it hasn't always worked out for other people. I did some research into Tony's organization in the 1990s. He franchised his seminars, but apparently that wasn't always as lucrative for the folks taking the courses or selling them. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Tony's franchised NLP seminars misrepresented to people how much they would make selling the seminars. Apparently, in some cases, if you went to one of these events, like from a franchisee, you just sat in a room and watched videos of Tony. No.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Yeah.

[Alice Hines]

And the agency said that Tony promised that people doing this would make between 75 and 300k a year. But in fact, people made way less. Tony paid $200,000 to settle with the FTC in 1995, though he maintains that some franchisees did make what he claimed. Tony didn't comment on the settlement. Today, Tony has expanded beyond NLP trainings. He told us he has 114 different companies around the world. Thousands of people are attending fire walks every year, and some even pay more than $80,000 for a membership in what he calls the Platinum Lions. Basically an elite club where you just get to hang out with Tony.

[Zoe Lascaz]

He learned these human persuasion technologies from NLP techniques like rapport.

[Tony Robbins]

There is something that always works to get rapport, and it's something called matching and mirroring.

[Zoe Lascaz]

This is from a Tony Robbins YouTube clip on how to forge a sense of connection with anyone. In the video, which was posted in 2016, Tony claims people like people who are like them and then teaches a room full of students to match their breath tone and body language to someone else's breathing.

[Tony Robbins]

Breathing is very powerful, one of the most powerful. If you breathe at the exact same pace as another person, you will feel what they are feeling, period. But you got to be from the same location, the same tempo. And breathing is magnificent because it really hooks you to this person.

[Zoe Lascaz]

This supposedly can create instant trust.

[Tony Robbins]

So you start bouncing your foot like this back and forth. Can I bounce my foot at the same tempo? If I do, you'll feel totally connected to me.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And that trust and connection can be used to sell. As he explains in one of his trainings, Mastering Influence, we don't do things for logical reasons.

[Tony Robbins]

We do them for emotional reasons. I think this is really the truth, that selling is the process of finding people's pain, disturbing them, stirring up their pain, making them feel the hurt, and then healing it through new sets of choices, usually in the form of your products or services. It's a herd them and heal them business.

[Alice Hines]

Tony wasn't the only one putting his own spin on the techniques. In the 1990s, Jordan Belfort, aka the Wolf of Wall street, taught an army of cold Callers how to use rapport. That's according to training materials from his investment bank that I found years later. Belfort came out as a fan of nlp. Here's him talking about its power for sales in some YouTube videos from 2021.

[Tony Robbins]

I had the benefit of studying directly with. With Dr. Richard Bandler. Imagine if every time that you were about to walk into a situation of influence, you could feel as confident and as clear as the moment you felt after you closed the best sale of your life.

[Alice Hines]

As NLP grew, seminars churned out, licensed trainers eager to start new businesses. Nancy Salzman, who we met in our first episode, was another enterprising young NLP whizzy. In the 1980s, Nancy was a nurse specializing in hypnosis for chronic pain. By the 1990s, she was an NLP trainer and had secured new gigs teaching NLP to corporate employees at a Con Edison nuclear plant. Rapport would later become one of the methods NXIVM taught their members in order to recruit new people. We're going to get into NXIVM and some other wild applications of NLP in future episodes.

[Richard Bandler]

It took me 20 years to figure this stuff out. But I don't know, you know, they go to a seminar and they go home and they sleep, and they wake up the next morning and it's in their mind just like that. Now, I wouldn't want to be real impressed with the psychological technology and try to steal it from the person who developed it.

[Alice Hines]

We don't think Bandler's talking specifically about anyone here, but about the number of people borrowing from his toolkit. It seems to be getting to him. This is from Richard Bandler's tape, Creating Therapeutic Change.

[Richard Bandler]

I mean, I get this a lot of times in seminars with people that try to come up and use my techniques on me, and they don't realize that this will piss me off, right? I had one guy come home from the practitioner course, and he called me on the phone and told me he was having a certain sexual problem. And he did. I think there was any relationship between the example I kept giving him over.

[Tony Robbins]

And over and over again.

[Richard Bandler]

And I said, nah, it's probably a coincidence. And he bought it. That's what I love.

[Narrator/Host]

He bought it.

[Richard Bandler]

I hung up the phone and I went, jesus Christ.

[Zoe Lascaz]

If Bandler was upset about people learning NLP and making it their own, hypnotically ruining their sex lives was pretty much all he could do about it. Because Bandler and Grinder never copyrighted nlp, it got away from them. Decades later, they were fighting over ownership.

[Alice Hines]

In 1997, Bandler sued Grinder, his old collaborator, along with a bunch of other high profile NLP trainers and 200 John and Jane does for tens of millions of dollars. He claimed unfair trade practices and trademark infringement, among other offenses. A ton of people stopped using the term NLP because they were so afraid they'd get dragged into this lawsuit.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony had already stopped using the words neuro linguistic programming. In 1991, he said in an article he was icked out by the word programming and began calling what he does neuro associative conditioning.

[Alice Hines]

Okay, yeah, sounds familiar.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony's rebrand may be a big part of why relatively few people have heard of nlp. Even though Tony is a household name these days. Tony does mention NLP on his website, and he hosted Bandler at a Platinum Lions event not long ago where he talked about his debt to NLP and to Bandler.

[Tony Robbins]

And that's what made me want to honor him. I thought more people need to know about Richard.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Actually, I asked Tony specifically about Bandler.

[Tony Robbins]

Well, Richard is a wild man. He's brilliant, and Richard doesn't give a shit what people think. Richard is willing to do just about anything to get the outcome.

[Alice Hines]

Next time on Mind Games.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Am I a better shot than Richard Bandler?

[Alice Hines]

Yes.

[Lynn (Zoe's mom)]

What?

[Zoe Lascaz]

You heard it here first.

[Narrator/Host]

And you're a better shot than Tony Utah.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Tony to shoot too. Mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with Iheart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me, Zoe Lascaz and Alice Hines. It's produced by Ryder Alsop and Dara Luk Potz. Edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan.

[Alice Hines]

Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone. Fact checking by Eamonn Whalen from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oz Wolosian, Mangesh Hatikador and Kate Osborne. From iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etor.

[Tony Robbins]

Foreign.

[Narrator/Host]

This podcast is supported by FX's Love Story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette. The new limited series from executive producer Ryan Murphy. It explores the complex courtship of the iconic couple considered to be American royalty, whose love story captured the attention of the nation. Their fairy tale romance would unfold in front of the public eye where their private love would also become a national obsession. FX's love story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette premieres tonight on FX. Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers.

[Alice Hines]

This episode is brought to you by Kleenex Lotion Tissues Cold season has a way of showing up like an unexpected plot twist right in the middle of big moments, good stories and days that are already full. That's why it helps to keep a little comfort close. Kleenex lotion tissues help protect, soothe and moisturize your skin, giving you the support you need right when you need it. Whether you're commuting, binge, listening to your favorite show, or managing a little family chaos, Kleenex lotion tissues are made with coconut oil and aloe. For whatever happens next, grab kleenex.

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[Alice Hines]

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[Zoe Lascaz]

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[Alice Hines]

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