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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Even after the book Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors was linked to a triple murder in 1993, the true identity of the author has remained hidden. Rex Feral’s actual name can’t be found in court documents, it’s been redacted from case files, and it’s never come out in public. Until now.

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A young radio producer in Afghanistan is given an impossible task: to create a brand new, revolutionary talent show in just two months.

To purchase original Afghan Star artwork visit www.awastudios.com/afghanstar — proceeds go to support The Noor Initiative, who are on a mission to ensure every Afghan girl has access to education and opportunity.

Music at the end of this episode from Afghan musician Qais Maroof, contestant on The Voice of Afghanistan.

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What is it like to shadow Elon Musk for two years? To sit courtside as he builds a rocket? Or tears apart an engineer? Or couch surfs at the homes of billionaires? And how on earth do you make sense of it all? Walter Isaacson is the biographer of giants: DaVinci, Franklin, Doudna, Jobs...and now Musk, former enfante terrible, rocket launcher, electric car innovator, and Twitter—er, X—disruptor, to put it gently. In this four part series, author Evan Ratliff (Mastermind, Longform Podcast) sits down with Isaacson to draw out the behind-the-scenes stories of this epic biography, and what the writer has learned as an outsider inside Silicon Valley.  

Listen here or on the iHeartRadio app. 

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After a rumored sighting, the team chases Vassilis deep into a remote mountain range, where everybody is hiding something.   

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As Vassilis plans one last score, things start to fall apart. Meanwhile, thanks to a surprising tip, George and Christina come face-to-face with Vassilis’s older brother, Nikos.

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Nobody thought it was possible to escape from Greece’s toughest maximum security prison, until Vassilis did it. With a helicopter. 

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We send Kaleidoscope’s Costas Linos along with investigative journalist Nick Niarchos on an adventure through anarchist enclaves, island retreats, and isolated monasteries to find out why Greece embraces outlaws like Vassilis.

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Vassilis spends his loot seeing the world, until he and Nikos stumble into a new idea: kidnapping.

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A mysterious manuscript gives us an inside look at Vassilis’s first prison escape, and explains how his moral code took shape.

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