Nick Kemp Explains: What is Neuro Linguistic Programming? Part 2

Excerpt of Nick Kemp's 2007 interview with Richard Bandler Co creator of NLP

I originally trained in NLP with Richard Bandler in the 1990s and have interviewed him a number of times over the years as well as regularly assisting on his events between 200 and 2003. Below is an extract from my 2007 interview with him, where he talks about NLP, DHE and NHR as well as his thoughts on Frank Farrelly, the creator of Provocative Therapy.

Richard Bandler - I've always talked about NLP as an evolutionary tool. You know, because certainly at the bottom line, people do it to get rid of a phobia or they do it so that, you know, they can motivate themselves a little better. But as soon as you start thinking about your thinking, then you have a whole other level of consciousness that didn't exist. Because now, when you start making choices about which tone of voice you talk to yourself in and where this picture is, and if you have a belief you don't like, the fact that you can dissolve it... Cos if you can get rid of one fear with a phobia cure, you can get rid of five.

And then you have to do something else, because it's not enough to just take something away; you have to put something in its place. Which brings us to design human engineering and the swish pattern. And as soon as you start thinking about, 'Well, if I'm going to take this away, then I'm going to put this up,' you start building propulsion systems and, of course, what are propulsion systems? They're designer states of consciousness. And as soon as you design new states of consciousness, then you can have new thoughts and therefore people get more freedom.

You know. Ultimately when people first - Like this practitioner group that's going on downstairs. These people are - All the notes they give me are about, 'How do I get rid of this pain?' When you start getting to the Master Prac by the end of that, after people knock out most of their pain, then they start going, 'Well, what can I do that's good?' They start going: 'Well, I'm much smarter.' Cos like you said, where you could never conceive of being so successful as an NLP trainer. I remember when you started. You were not a man of confidence! [Laughter] You know. You were one of those guys that starts out that, you know, you got a lot of crappy messages when you were young and weren't so sure of yourself and stuff, but as soon as you start doing things that work, you start sitting up straighter. You start asking the question, 'Well,' you know, 'I didn't used to think I could do this and now I can.' And you start going, 'Well, how crazy could I get?' [Laughter] You know, you're on TV for 27 weeks, you got clients coming out of the wall, you got all this stuff... And it's not just you: this is going on all over the planet.

I grew up in the first age of information. As Gregory Bateson, you know, said to me once- You know, because when- All of his students obviously attacked me, because they didn't know Bateson and I were friends. And when the Structure of Magic was sent to people, even Jay Haley said, "No-one's going to be interested in this. And obviously you don't understand Bateson's work." And Bateson said, "We succeeded where they failed." It's in the introduction of the Structure of Magic. Because Bateson, [Laughs] unlike his students, wasn't attached to his theory. He looked at me and he said, "Why didn't I do this?" and I said, "You couldn't have, Gregory, because the mathematics hadn't been invented yet." There was no cybernetics; there was no information science. Given what he did in those years, it was absolutely a genius step. I mean, he was a brilliant man. He invented the field of heuristics. If it wasn't for him, I couldn't have come along. But the tools that I had at my disposal - the fact that I knew how to program and model human behaviour so a computer could do it - meant that I could model human behaviour so another human could do it. And, you know, coming from a scientific background instead of a psychological or a sociological background, I wasn't looking for causes. I was looking for solutions, and it's a totally different thing. Who cares why a computer can do something? It either can or it can't. And if it can't get to the end, it freaks. It just doesn't get to the end. It doesn't go to the end and lie to you and go, 'Well, it really is the right answer,' even though it's not working. It either works or it doesn't.

Nick Kemp: Mmm.

Richard Bandler: And, um... And that whole model of things to me, you know, I'm not attached to a theory. And that gives you [Laughs] tremendous freedom, because I understand that all mathematics is a behavioural science. Math is more about people than psychology is. Psychology was built upon theories and defending theories. It's what's called a pseudoscience, because in science when a theory doesn't work, we throw it out. [Laughter] Sometimes. Although there are some theories and some scientists that I consider to be psychologists because they're holding on to theories when obviously they don't work. But, you know, when it comes to things like superconductors - you know, understanding things like the Hubble telescope, looking across the universe in ways we never thought we could - the people that envisioned these things and built these things had only one criterion: it's either going to work, or it ain't going to work!

You know. You heat up gold, it melts at the same temperature every time and we don't really care why. [Laughter] Now, there are lots of theories, you know, about the periodical chemical chart and atomic weights and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yadda, yadda, yadda... But as scientists, we really know that we don't know. We can have a theory why, but it doesn't tell us things. All we need to know is what temperature and how hot, and then stuff melts, and when it melts you can shape it in different shapes, and then when you cool it up, it stays hard. But like the laws of Ohms and amps and, you know, resistance and electricity, those laws apply perfectly to a certain temperature and then they cease to exist. That's what a superconductor is, when we found it out. Well, all the rules apply till you get through threshold, and then they don't apply any more.

Now, I was smart enough to go and take all these different advanced mathematics, since they are about the experience of people. They're not about the universe; they're about the way we perceive the universe. So when I took things like threshold patterns back; when I took things like catastrophe theory - you know, which is the way you blow out compulsions - and all of these things and brought them back in, and built behavioural technologies out of them... Because for four decades, that's what I've done, is build behavioural technology.

And, you know... And it's, you know- Just like we went- We used to have program chips that had, you know, compilers in them and then somebody said, 'Well, that's a lot of fuckin' work. Let's have a blank chip and drop an operating system in.' And so, instead of having a small amount of RAM and a lot of hardware to support it, we made massive amounts of RAM and just dumped everything in, because every time you want to change it it's easier, because it's not there. And, um, this meant that the constrictions of chips opened up, and therefore what computers could do, they could do 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times better. And, um, you know, this made possible things like, you know, all the CGI graphics stuff and, you know... So now we're sitting in theatres with our children watching cartoons that could have never been created because somebody said, 'Well, this is the way it was done. Let's just not do it that way!'

Now in behavioural...psychology and things like that, they're so attached to the theories that they didn't step outside and experiment to find out what happened and so, you know... I mean, literally, you can't believe the crap that I was told - you know, if you suppress a symptom, it has to come out somewhere bad. They had all these, what are called pseudo-rules.

And even in hard science, I spent a lot of time breaking the rules. I mean, I proved the law of entropy is nonsense. Physicists hated that, but it's just nonsense and, you know, now we've proved it by what we can detect in the Hubble telescope and other things. The universe is not falling apart. It's spreading out, but of course it may not be the only one. Space is pretty vast; this we know. [Laughter] And, you know, people say- You know, people get mad at me cos I- You know, I make jokes about UFO stuff and about how they don't want to stop on Planet Earth cos we're one of the few planets that's constantly shooting itself! Every time they have an atomic test, people from outer space must look at Planet Earth and go: "Good God, they're suicidal! They tried to kill themselves again!" [Laughter] So if there are aliens dropping by, I would think it would be for the water, because this is the water planet and the fact that they don't want to talk to us doesn't surprise me terribly - I wouldn't want to, either! And, um, when scientists say to me, 'So you believe that there is intelligent life in the universe?' and I always think to myself, 'Somewhere there must be.' [Laughter] But if we're going to become intelligent, we have to do it on purpose. And, you know, the tools I've created are not about repairing human beings; they're about making human beings smarter. Because if you get smarter, if you get more intelligence and if you think on purpose... You know, the little exercise I do where I have people find the submodalities of confusion, the submodalities of understanding and I have them switch things so that it goes into understanding and when they go through the exercise, they actually end up understanding more than they did, even though nobody's told them anything else.

Most people just wait for understanding to happen, and if you do it on purpose, the name of that is called thinking. And what the great minds - the Linus Paulings and the Buckminster Fullers - did that other people weren't doing is that they took the strategies inside their mind and they put things in them and ran them through, and when they wouldn't go through, they thought about it differently. And that's why guys like Buckminster Fuller and all the great brains that I met all had one thing in common: they did tons of stuff. They all played a little music, they did a little art, they did a little architecture, you know. They wrote some poetry. You know, they had an interest in film-making, they played chess... They did different things that, to them, it wasn't different. They didn't- You know, there's a real mono dimensional to the way, you know, that... When I- You know, it used to be that there was philosophy and then they broke it into all of these fields--

Nick Kemp : Yeah.

Richard Bandler: And, um... And neuro-linguistic programming is a meta-disciplinary: it's about everything else.

And it doesn't matter whether you think as an architect or you think as a schizophrenic; you're still thinking out of the same raw materials. And if you think differently, you can accomplish different things, and that's true whether you're an architect or a schizophrenic. And as soon as you apply these principles to themselves and- Like I am, because I don't think it's cast in stone. As I took neuro-linguistic programming and flipped it over to design human engineering, and then flipped both of those over into neuro-hypnotic repatterning and then said, 'OK, what's the hardware equivalent of that?' So now I'm building machines that do what these things did.

And ultimately I want to take CGI technology and be able to make it so that we can literally, you know, put on a pair of TV glasses and a brain wave machine and try on somebody else's brain. In fact, I want to make it so that you can actually go in and make up brains that nobody's ever used and try them. Because what will happen is, as we experiment with our own thought processes and our own ability to make feelings and things, we're going to gain control over things. Like, right now the big question people ask in introductory courses: can you control stress-related illnesses? Well, the truth is, you are! You're either [Laughs] making them worse or you're making them better.

So the trick is, is now we need a feedback mechanism in there, so we know which one we're doing. And if we can get, you know, specific, we'll be able to do things. You know, the resistance to studying stem cell technology, I think, is absolutely insane. You know: this is going to offer us great feedback. Our ability to manufacture things with stem cells and to influence things - you know, to give people with spinal column damage back nerves and things like this. And not just that. I mean, there are probably people that are growing nerves because they don't know any better. Cases of spontaneous remission. If we found out what states people are healing themselves better in, and we have a technology to get people into those states, all that's going to mean is not that we have a new way of doing it; we have another adjunct. So if we could take people going in for their chiropractic session, take the best state of consciousness of the best chiropractor, get other chiropractors to go into that state, get the client that heals the best to go into the best healing state and then keep increasing the technologies of medicine and chiropractics and natural healing and all of these things so that it builds into something bigger than the sum of the parts. And all of my work has always been about building new parts and then building something that's more than the sum of all the parts. And, um, I don't intend to stop doing that, not in this lifetime or the next! [Laughter]

Nick Kemp: [Laughs] We talked briefly before about Frank Farrelly. I remember you discussed a couple of years ago and you mentioned this very thing, that people who had a lot of interests- And he's definitely somebody who's interested in singing, interested in music, films, and I wondered how you first came across Frank back in, was it the late 70s, early 80s?

Richard Bandler: Well, I didn't actually come across Frank; I came across his book.

Nick Kemp: Ah, right.

Richard Bandler : I found his book in a used bookstore in Berkeley, California. And, uh, I just liked the name. Cos I don't read books about therapy that much, you know.

I'd pretty much read all the psychiatric books that were out there and stuff, but I would peruse through just to see if anybody was up to anything and, um, the word "provocative" and the word "therapy" just struck me as interesting. [Laughter] So I gave it a read and, um, then I met, uh, one of his students. Um. I think his name was Rusty Palmer.

Nick Kemp: Rusty Palmer, yeah. //That's right.

Richard Bandler: Rusty Palmer. I met Rusty Palmer, who really... You know, who told me stories about what he had done. And, um, then I was going to do a conference and, um, they- It was supposed to be about innovative psychology and they wanted me to keynote it and they had a couple of people picked out and one of them wouldn't come because I was coming. I think his name was Salvadore Menuchen [Laughter] and he was offended that I was going to model other people, and he felt that he was the smartest person on the planet and that I was getting credit for being smarter than him [Laughter] and I was only 25 or something at the time, so he was really offended by the whole thing. So they asked me, they'd said, 'Well,' you know, 'who do you think we should replace him with?', and I thought, well, this is an unprecedented opportunity, so I recommended that they get hold of Frank. Um. They were upset cos he was only a social worker and they wouldn't actually give him a real client, um, which was ludicrous because, you know, psychiatric social workers actually do some of the most difficult therapy there is.

I mean, Frank had been stuffed away with lunatics, psychotics and schizophrenics and that's OK if we're going to work with him in the hospital, because he's under the supervision of a psychiatrist - who probably never leaves his office, but once a year goes in and signs scripts, you know.

I went in one of these mental hospitals. It was one of the dreariest places on the earth and I actually was hired by the parents to try and get somebody out that had been locked away there for seven years. As she said, 'Every time I go to visit my nephew, he's so much worse that I can tell how much worse he is.' And she goes: 'Sometimes I come in and he's close to being a vegetable. And sometimes then he's kookier than he was before,' and she goes: 'I don't know what they're doing to him but...' You know. She goes: 'I don't know if it's being locked away there or what.'

When I went in, I asked- I had to get the permission of who was running the place and they kept saying, 'Well, you have to make an appointment,' and I said, 'OK. Make an appointment,' and they'd go, 'Well, we, uh... We'll let you know.' And then they wouldn't call me and they wouldn't call me and they wouldn't call me, so finally, being the kind of guy I am, I just went in and I said, "I'm here for my appointment," and they said, "Well, we don't have you on the list," and I said: "So you made an appointment with me and now you won't let me in?? I've flown all the way from California!' - which actually wasn't even true, but... Um. So I finally said, "Well, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind," and went and kicked his door open.

And when I went in, he was tied off and shooting up. And I don't know what he was shooting up, but I could tell by the way his eyes were rolling back it wasn't methodoraine, that's for sure. I mean, this guy was so depressed. You know, cos when I started out, psychiatrists had the highest suicide rate. He was sitting back there shooting up some equivalent of smack and, you know, no wonder nobody ever saw him, you know. And when I caught him, you know, I closed the door and I went: "You're going to let me do what I want or I'm going to tell on you!" And [Laughs] he went- Well, he goes- And at that time I guess it wasn't illegal for them to take their own drugs but, you know, he was somewhat embarrassed by it, but he goes: "What do you want?" And I said, "I want to fix one of your clients and take him home." And he goes: "Nobody ever leaves here." He goes: [Laughter] "Maybe for a month or two, but then-" And he goes: "Once they get in this facility, they're just done for." And I said: "Does that include you?" And he went... [Laughter] And then he started off on this whole thing. He told me about his suicide attempts and, I mean... He was a really unhappy man.

And when you think that this is the guy that's in charge of somebody like Frank Farrelly... You know, Farrelly had to be one of the most courageous people on the face of the earth to do the wackiest things he did. He probably took flack. Me? I didn't get much, because when I went in, you know, typically I had the support of lawyers. I had the support of the insurance companies. I found if I could get the insurance company to realise they wouldn't be paying the bills for these private hospitals, you know... I got so many referrals from insurance companies after I was successful with people that they thought they were going to be paying for forever. Cos a lot of these private hospitals are extremely expensive.

I mean, we're talking 30,000 or 40,000 bucks a month that an insurance company's paying to keep somebody in one of these places, you know. And if I could go in two or three days and, you know, do an exorcism here and a little of this and a little of that and drag somebody out and get 'em back to work and off the disability, these people from the insurance companies - they weren't going to resist!

And when I got these guys like this doctor involved in the wacky shit that I did with this guy, what happens is, is that, they started going, "Well, I got this other one that's even weirder!" [Laughter] Because it was, like, the most fun they'd had in years!

Nick Kemp: Yeah.

Richard Bandler: And when I put on groups - I used to do weekly groups - I had all these psychiatrists that would come to it, and they would drive all the way from San Jose and Palo Alto and they'd drive all the way to Santa Cruz. This is a good hour and a half drive in those days. You know, they didn't have the big four-lane road like they do now; it was a little two-lane road. And they would come every Wednesday and sit there for five hours doing wacky things I came up with because it was fun. Now, having attached fun and learning together since the beginning - which is the other thing I liked about Frank Farrelly.

It was obvious that he made sure that he made people do new behaviours while they were enjoying it. That meant when they did them again, they weren't frightening; they were fun. If they'd thought about having their problem again, they would laugh. Um. He was probably the first person to really do neuro-hypnotic repatterning...to tell you the truth. Um. He didn't think about it in the formal sense that I did. To tell you the truth, when Frank Farrelly described to me his theory, he was as wacky as Virginia Satir and as wacky as all the rest of them. What he did was really great; his understanding of it was nuts! But- So I don't listen to his theories. I looked at his behaviour. His behaviour worked, and for that I have tremendous respect. Virginia, I think, was probably the best clinician I ever saw in my life, but Virginia's theory of what she did? Just gibblygook! You know. I mean, I'm sorry. It was the way she got herself to do things, so for her it was a good theory, but anybody else [Laughs] who tried to operate with it wouldn't be able to generate her behaviours.

Cos her behaviour and the connection to her theory was tenuous at best. My job was to build, not a theory but a description, so you could understand what it was that made it work and whether... You know. And it's not simple. There are language patterns, behavioural patterns, states of consciousness, shifts in submodality... There are, you know, an infinite number of complexities, just like there is in any calculus. But, they're learnable. You can learn 'em piece by piece. You can get better. I mean, you know, you've been through a tremendous amount of training over the years and you wouldn't be able to do the kinds of things that you're doing in the environments, whether it's on TV or in your office or with a group of people--

--unless you had all those skills. But, um, it used to be when I started out, even if somebody had skills like that, people would watch them do it and they couldn't recapitulate it, so they would justify it by going, "Well, he's very intuitive." [Laughter] But you can't say that about me. You know. Because I make you have the same intuitions I do. And just like we teach our children to speak the same language we do, I teach you to understand the same language that I do. And I don't ask you to agree with me about anything.

I ask you instead to use your senses, and I teach you to see the same things that I see and to see the same things that Frank sees. So that if you're going to learn from Frank, once you've been around me, you can't help but repackage what he did so it's doable. And I wanted to make it- I started out, my goal was to make it so that people watched Virginia. When they were done, they would go: 'I know how to do that.' Maybe they'd have to watch 20 times, but when they'd see her do something, they wouldn't go, 'Well, it's just Virginia. It's her intuitions. It's blah-de-blah...' They'd go, 'OK. I gotta start by doing this stuff.' People watched Virginia and didn't even realise her intonation pattern was important, you know. They'd go- Well, they didn't want to imitate her. They'd go, 'But we don't want to imitate her.' They'd watch Milton work and then they'd try to do hypnosis with a whiny voice and they'd go, [in whiny, nasal voice] 'I'm doing the same thing as Milton.' And Milton - you couldn't even understand him, so you had to listen [Laughs] really closely! [Incomprehensible growly voice] Grumbling along, you know. But the rhythm of his voice... I sat down and took music notation the very first day and he got all upset about it and started telling me how tone-deaf he was, and I said, 'Well, that's a good thing, because I'm not.'

And then I showed him the sheet music, and the next time I started doing it, he started talking about falling into a trance, when you feel a pencil against the paper, [Laughter], you know, and Richard wrote, "utilisation". Because as long as you're operating at the meta level, you don't look at what people are trying to justify, like all this Freudian nonsense. I mean, what a lot of crap! I mean, at the time that Freud did it, it was very innovative, but you can't get stuck. You can't get stuck with what I do. When I'm gone, I should be gone and what I leave behind that's useful, people should use. And part of the reason I don't have books full of theories is cos I'm terrified that people... I mean- Because I have experienced it.

Back in the early 80s, there was a revolt in my company because I started- I opened up an R&D company. I had lasers and labs and scientists running around everywhere, and in the other room I had all these magicians doing card tricks [Laughter] and I was building a model about the structure of illusions, because I felt that people had huge illusions in their life and they needed to be able to be broken to move on. So I wanted to build holograms, which are real illusions, [and] study the way illusionists built illusions so that I could build a better technology. The people that worked with me when I started coming out with the model of submodalities all flipped out and went: "Richard's not doing NLP any more." Well, excuse me, I made up the word so that it was the name of everything that I did! [Laughter] I taught them to do what they did, and they were very successful at it and a lot of them are still making money, but they still don't believe the things that I did after they stopped learning are NLP. That means that they missed the attitude, and to me the attitude is the most important part.

You constantly have to think: there's a better way to do things, a faster way to do things. And the fact that I go after it as a scientist - and I don't mean that in the sense of a behavioural scientist at all. I don't study rats to find out about people. If you want to know about rats, you study rats. If you want to know about people, it's easier: you just ask 'em and they'll tell you! And if you have something like the meta model so you can ask really good questions, then you get pretty good answers. And if you ask them consciously and then put them in deep trance and ask them again, and then wake them up afterwards telling them they'll be smarter, they'll even give you better information.

And I've used every skill that I've learned from everyone, including Frank Farrelly, to be able to do that. What I respect about Frank is that he stuck to his guns. No matter how much they told him therapy should be boring or how much they told him he was over the edge, what he noticed is he made people better.

Richard Bandler: And... They put out a tape, by the way, that had, um, Frank's session that I saw.

Nick Kemp: I have that.

Richard Bandler: You have that tape?

Nick Kemp: Yeah.

Richard Bandler:And they couldn't fit us all on, so they sped it up so we all kind of sound like Micky Mouse doing therapy! [Laughter] But if you have that, on that session there are three people that I modelled, but the only one that helped the client get better was Frank.

Nick Kemp: Yeah.

Richard Bandler: And, you know, the other two are incredibly famous people. The psychoanalyst that's on that tape is like the father-figure of all Philadelphia. He also looked exactly like Sigmund Freud. [Laughter] I mean, he must have had plastic surgery to look like Sigmund Freud! I've never seen anybody- The pictures in the book, that guy - they were exactly the same! And, um... But the difference is that, you know, over the years, I haven't seen that many clinicians who could consistently get people to be better.

Richard Bandler: And every time I've seen Frank - cos I've been on workshops for Frank. I had him come out to Not Limited, the company I had put on workshops. And I have to admit, he's funnier in the sessions than he is at lunch but, you know, he's not working at lunch, so I understand that. But at least Frank sticks to his guns and sticks to trying to do the things that work. And to him the test of whether somebody's not catatonic is by whether or not they're not catatonic!

Richard Bandler: He doesn't do that crap where they're getting better but you can't tell. Um. People that don't set good standards for themselves don't develop good things. Virginia had super-high standards. Milton had really high standards. And Buckminster Fuller: high standards, high standards, high standards. And, I mean, right up to the end of his life - cos Bucky and I travelled together for a long time - Bucky would come into my room in the middle of the night when everybody else was asleep and he would build things. He would bring in all this stuff - tinker toys and fishing line - and sit there and construct- He constructed the movement of the way air moves around inside of a basketball with little wooden sticks and strings. And one night, he was doing it in my room and explaining it to me and I finally said, "Bucky," I said, "why are we doing this?!" [Laughter] And he said, "It's the building of the future." And I said, "Another geodesic dome?" cos I don't really like geodesic domes. He said, "No." He said, "Because," he said, "if we can only"- He said, "We don't need the skin of the basketball." He built this and it bounced just like a basketball - little sticks with fishing line between them. And then he put a little platform in the middle of it and he took my glass that had a drink in it and he put it on there and bounced the thing and the fluid never moved. And he said: "If we can put this structure inside of a building, it wouldn't matter whether the building was square or round, because the way it moves on the inside, that it bounces - the directions of the bounce - is what dissipates the energy inside the basketball and keeps it from exploding." Now, the fact that he was famous for geodesic domes and he'd moved way beyond it, meanwhile there are people out there proselytising how everything in the world has to be a geodesic dome. Buckminster Fuller is still asking the question, "What's next? How do we make it better? How do we make it safer? How do we make it stronger?" And, um, to him, you know, he was a thinker.

And, um, what I want to do is create loads of thinkers and the best way to do that is to take the best thinkers - the Frank Farrellys, the Virginia Satirs, the Milton Ericksons, the Moshe Feldenkrais, the Buckminster Fullers - take their brains and build a whole generation of people that have the raw materials for it. And I think that's what Kate Benson is up to. And I think that's what the Mind Spa people are up to. And loads of people are up to this in various ways because, you know, I was one neuro-linguistic programmer, but now there are hundreds of thousands of them, and in various degrees. Some of them know very little and some of them know a whole lot. But, you know, we're not all that's out there. There's also a generation growing up that's smarter than any generation before it, so there's going to be loads of new stuff to model, you know.

I'm sure Bill Gates has neuro-linguistic programmers climbing through the window all the time trying to get in his brain. [Laughter] But, I mean, he's not only a great business man, you know; he's a guy that makes really cool decisions. I mean, when I heard that they weren't going to immunise children in Africa cos it was too expensive and Bill Gates goes in and goes: "How much is it going to cost?" And they go: "Sixty million," and he writes a check and goes, "We better take care of that."

Richard Bandler: I'm glad he's a really rich guy. I wish more really rich guys were like him, so that they're not building foundations so that they look like good people, but they're actually making decisions that will influence generations and generations of people and make their lives better. When you get to a certain point with money, you can't spend any more of it.

And, you know, just acquiring it for no reason, you know, there've been lots of entrepreneurs that have done that and they don't necessarily die happy people, and that's a shame, you know. They end up with relatives that are like sharks waiting to eat up their cash. You know. Um. I've had tons and tons of them refer me their children because their children are all screwed up by money. Because the ones with values- Cos I'll bet you Gates' children grow up with really good values because he does really good things. And he's never stopped thinking that his company could be better, or his company can grow better or his employees could do better. Um. Certainly he's tough on the competition, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

I think that we should all be tough on our competition. I think you should be tough on your competition. I'm sure every time you do one of these TV shows and you get people over phobias in 10 minutes--

Nick Kemp: Radio shows, actually. [Laughs]

Richard Bandler: Radio shows?

Nick Kemp: I just made it on BBC radio.

Richard Bandler: Oh, BBC. Well, be it radio, TV, it's all the same.

Nick Kemp: Yeah.

Richard Bandler: You put it out there. When Paul McKenna did that TV show and he took three clients and he fixed them in two or three sessions and, um, you know what happened? Psychologists and psychotherapists started calling Paul going: "You gotta stop doing this. My clients have been seeing me for two years and they're coming in going, 'Hey! Paul fixed this guy in three sessions. Let's get on with it!'" [Laughter] And Paul would have to say to them, 'Well, the other choice is for you to get some training so you can do it.' [Laughter] And their response was, 'Well you can't fix every client in a few sessions.' And the truth is, if you can't fix them in a few sessions, you really can't help them at all.

Nick Kemp : Mm.

Richard Bandler: So you're better off passing them on, or learning to do this better.

My focus has been on the end user, and I think that's where it should be.

Nick Kemp: Mm. Well, I thank you very much for the interview.

Richard Bandler: Did I get through them all?

Nick Kemp: Absolutely.

Richard Bandler: All right!

Nick Kemp: Absolutely.

Richard Bandler regularly runs seminars worldwide and more information can be found at www.richardbandler.com. This article is copyrighted by Nick Kemp 2007 and not to be published without permission. The full audio version of the interview can be found at www.nlpmp3.com.

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