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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Introducing: Mind Games

Meet the Hosts

Alice Hines and ZOË LESCAZE

Alice Hines is an investigative journalist, documentary film producer, and an Emmy-winning news correspondent. Her stories are known for holding the powerful accountable and shedding light on unseen subcultures.

As a writer, Alice has contributed articles to The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and New York Magazine, among other publications. Her cover story for New York on incels introduced “Chads” to the pop-culture lexicon.

In 2023, Alice executive produced the documentary series Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe for Prime Video about an accused internet cult, based on her reporting for Vanity Fair. You can read reviews in Rolling Stone and CNN, and stream the series here.

In 2021, Alice won a News Emmy for her work as an on-camera correspondent for Vice News. Her segments uncovered abuses within the US foster care system, broke the story of a national drug lab scandal, and embedded with conspiracy theorists. Alice’s 6-episode show on Vice TV, Fanatics: The Deep End, explored obsessions from rare plant collecting to airsoft to freediving.

Zoë Lescaze is a writer and editor based in New York. She’s known for stories that bring unlikely intersections of art and science to light.

She is the author of Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past, the most comprehensive book to date on the wild ways in which artists and scientists have imagined dinosaurs and the primordial world. She lectures widely on what images of extinct animals can tell us about ourselves. You can read coverage of Paleoart in the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, and London Review of Books.

A regular contributor to the New York Times and T Magazine, among other publications, Zoë has covered climate change, invasive species, polar exploration, gory medical diagrams, collective intelligence, and food scarcity through the lens of art, culture, and society. In recent profiles, she’s explored voluntary death and the fraught history of botany.

Before earning a master’s degree in the History of Science from the University of Chicago, Zoë served as editor in chief of The Tortoise, an annual conservation magazine focused, perhaps unsurprisingly, on reptiles. She lives with a rescue python named Daisy.

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