Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to erase negative thoughts, win every argument, and close every sale? Travis and Brad take you through the sordid tale of a self-help movement that’s equal parts psychotherapy, entrepreneurial success tool, and mind-control technique. A movement that inspired the likes of Tony Robbins, NXIVM, the Landmark corporate cult, and even pick-up artistry. A modality used by IBM and McDonald’s, the U.S. Army and the CIA. A quasi-religion that was poised to be as big as Scientology, if it hadn’t been for a series of self-inflicted wounds. Your brain is a computer, and we’re about to install the story of Neuro-linguistic Programming.
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Rachael: https://apocalypse-confidential.com/
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
It might be spiders or snakes, open water or enclosed spaces, germs or globalists.
Anything.
Got it?
Now close your eyes.
Picture the last time you felt that fear.
Feel the panic growing and rising up.
Now take this scene and throw it up on a big movie screen, right in front of you, as if you're watching from the first row.
Now turn that anxiety-inducing image to black and white.
Mute the sound on it.
Make it look like an old, beat-up silent film.
Now shove that screen back, far, far away, until it's a tiny speck.
As the screen shrinks, notice how that fear you're feeling is shrinking too.
It's almost pathetic how small it is.
Now think of a place where you feel invincible.
It could be your bedroom, a beach, or a mountaintop.
It doesn't really matter.
But feel that power.
That unshakable confidence.
Intensify it until it's overflowing from within you.
That's good.
Take that supercharged feeling and drag it back to the scene of your fear.
Overlay that feeling on top of it.
Realize you're no longer the victim.
You're in control.
Practice this and dominate your fear.
You're in charge now.
How do you guys feel?
I feel like my Elden Ring build slayed a very scary looking spider.
Ready to conquer the world.
I have no fears.
Julian is a t-shirt from the 90s *laughs*
*music* If you're hearing this, well done.
You found a way to connect to the internet.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Premium Episode 252, Neurolinguistic Podcasting.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Brad Abrahams, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Have you ever wondered what it'd be like to erase negative thoughts, win every argument, and close every sale?
Travis and I are about to take you through the sordid tale of a self-help movement that's equal parts psychotherapy, entrepreneurial success tool, and mind control technique.
A movement that inspired the likes of Tony Robbins, NXIVM, the landmark corporate cult, and even pickup artistry.
A modality used by IBM and McDonald's, the US Army, and the CIA.
A quasi-religion that was poised to be as big as Scientology.
If it hadn't been for a series of self-inflicted wounds.
Your brain is a computer, and we're about to install the story of neuro-linguistic programming.
Mindfucking 101.
We claim that if any human being can do anything, so can you.
John Grinder, co-founder of NLP.
I was reading about the origins of NLP and what really struck me was still how strange it- I didn't understand why people thought this was a good idea even at the time, so I found it really helped to provide some context by understanding the sort of like, you know, the social circumstances and sort of the inspirations for it.
Neurolinguistic programming was born out of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Human Potential Movement itself was a response to the changing American culture after the end of World War II.
The economy boomed in the post-war years, leading to the cultural dominance of the white middle class, but some psychologists, religious thinkers, and cultural critics saw a downside to this Prosperous but conformist culture.
They argue that large, vertically-structured institutions of power, such as universities and corporations, encouraged American selves that were diminished and inauthentic.
Influential social scientists, such as William H. White Jr., David Reisman, and C. Wright Mills, warned that the American middle class was becoming a body of conformists who wanted little more from their lives than job security, peer approval, and cheap, mass-produced entertainment.
They feared the rise of Jake.
Well, and other Jakes like me.
They call them undecided voters.
Reisman, in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, argued that the changing economic and social order also changed where people looked in order to guide their lives.
Reisman claimed that while pre-modern society was tradition-directed and the 19th century had a social character that was inner-directed, the middle of the 20th century was increasingly defined by conformists who were other-directed.
This is best exemplified by the white-collar corporate climber.
You know, the modern American self, therefore, according to Reisman, or at least the white middle-class male American self, was in decline and submerging itself within groupthink.
Wow.
It's so funny to be like, yeah, I'm doing the Cold War stuff.
I fear communism, but like in a smart way, man, not this stupid way that everyone else is doing it.
I'm not doing groupthink by having a fear of communalism.
I'm actually very individual by fearing it.
My fear is different.
My fear is a little bit more smart than his fear or their fear.
There was vape smoke coming out of your mouth at every point of what you just said.
It added to it.
It added to it, yeah.
That's the point.
That's the non-conforming way of speaking, is to have your lips unable to be read because they are obscured by a plant-based vapor.
Yeah, you're doing performance art.
So, if the problem, if you granted the problem was that the mid-century society was diminishing the American self, then what was the solution?
According to some, perhaps the solution was to find some method, some therapeutic technique to allow the individual to reach their full potential.
The main popularizer of the Human Potential Movement was the journalist and editor of Look Magazine, George Leonard.
Leonard, after writing about the education system, wanted to learn more about enhancing human potential in the mid-60s, so he sought out experts on the subject.
Through this, in his own words, he became convinced of a common myth about brain activity.
When I was finished, I had interviewed 37 experts on the subject of the human potential.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, brain researchers, even theologians and philosophers.
Not one of them said we were using more than 10% of our capacity.
In later years, I came to realize that was a very conservative estimate.
We're using about 1%, I would guess.
Maybe less.
This is coming from a guy whose magazine is called Look.
I mean, Look Magazine is heyday.
I was very influential.
You know, they sold, they had a circulation, I think, in the millions.
Yeah.
But here, George Leonard is promoting a variation of the popular but false claim that humans only use 10% of their brains.
Not true.
But despite his confusion on this point, he sought out people who were working towards finding a way to maximize human potential.
During the course of his research, Leonard met Michael Murphy, a co-founder of the growing SLN Institute.
And this was a retreat center based in Big Sur, California.
Leonard and Murphy became close friends, and together they put forth the idea that there should be a Human Potential Movement.
The other co-founder of the Human Potential Movement was a man named Richard Price, who was influenced by a lecture he heard from Aldous Huxley titled Human Potentialities.
So this emerging human potential movement, which was primarily nurtured by the Esalen Institute, was inspired by these new humanistic psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow, who described the hierarchy of needs, Carl Rogers, who developed client-centered therapy, and Fritz Perls, who developed Gestalt therapy.
The process of human development in this model included approaches such as encounter groups, self-help seminars, mindfulness practices, and holistic health practices.
According to L. Michael Hall, a cognitive behavior psychologist who has published extensively on neurolinguistic programming, these are the basic ideas and assumptions of the human potential movement.
That people are not innately broken and defective.
That people have within their potentials the resources to self-actualize and to become authentic as persons.
That we do, quote, people-making within our family systems.
That how we use language fundamentally affects and influences how we frame and can reframe things.
That meaning is a function of our framing.
That sometimes shifting a small variable in a system can have system-wide generative change.
We cannot not communicate, etc.
As Dr. Hall acknowledges, these also happen to be the basic presuppositions of neurolinguistic programming.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA.
