Mind Games

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Science Society & Culture

Latest episode

4 episodes

All In Your Head
03/2/2026 | 41 mins.
Could a few words really change your mind–or your memories? Zoë tests hypnosis on herself, trying to unlock memories of her late father. Alice experiments with NLP to calm her anxiety around giving birth. Meanwhile, they chart the spread of NLP from therapy groups into corporate America, where it made its founders rich. But does NLP really work, or is this just the placebo effect?
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The Drummer with the Knives
27/1/2026 | 39 mins.
1970s Santa Cruz, California–a world of barefoot psychology students, mountain communes, and underground therapy sessions led by a charismatic but troubled young man: Richard Bandler. We go back to the moment Neuro-Linguistic Programming was born, and meet a teenage misfit rocker whose talent for persuasion came with a dangerous edge. We hear from the Bandler’s early followers, including one woman who ended up tied to a burning cross in a therapy game gone wrong. As the origins of NLP come into focus, another question emerges: how did a fringe experiment in an alternative college town grow into a global force for both transformation and manipulation?
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The Guru’s Guru
20/1/2026 | 42 mins.
What if someone told you that you could skip years of therapy with a few mental tricks? It sounded impossible… until we found Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP is a form of hypnosis beloved by everyone from sex cults to the U.S. military to fortune 500 companies–yet almost no one knows it exists.
Long before she co-founded NXIVM, hypnotist Nancy Salzman encountered NLP as a radical method for reprogramming the mind. Her story leads us to its inventor, Richard Bandler, a volatile, self-made guru. As we dig into how it took hold in so many places, we face an unsettling possibility: NLP might actually work.
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Introducing: Mind Games
12/1/2026 | 2 mins.
Mind Games tells the story of NLP and its crazy cast of disciples, including the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune, took it to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and whose gruesome murder trial did little to stop its rise. The biggest mind game of all? NLP may actually work.
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About Mind Games

What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or…. secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything you want? That’s the promise of NLP, which emerged in 1970s California and then took over self-help… in spite of its connection to a gruesome unsolved murder in the late 1980s . NLP is the secret sauce connecting life coach Tony Robbins, Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, pick-up artist Ross Jeffries, as well as NXIVM, the most infamous sex cult of the 21st century. Journalists and best friends Zoë Lescaze and Alice Hines investigate the controversies behind NLP, put the techniques to the test on themselves, and ask the ultimate question: is mind control real? Mind Games tells the story of NLP and its crazy cast of disciples, including the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune, took it to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and whose gruesome murder trial did little to stop its rise. The biggest mind game of all? NLP may actually work.

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