"Stop Procrastination" Betty Lee Randolph "Subliminal PLUS" #40S weird 1980s subliminal self-help tape
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"Stop Procrastination" Betty Lee Randolph "Subliminal PLUS" #40S weird 1980s subliminal self-help tape
- Publication date
- 1986
- Topics
- Subliminals Plus, The Randolph Tapes, subliminal, motivation, self help, snake oil, placebo, 1986, cassette, tape, Betty Lee Randolph Ph.D., easy listening, light jazz
- Language
- English
Subliminal self-help tapes were a fad for a few years in the mid to late 1980s, the idea being you'd be fed motivational messages buried under light instrumental music or ocean noises that were supposed to improve your life and health. Whether they actually did or not is wide open for debate.
One of the bigger publisher of such tapes was "The Randolph Tapes Inc." operated by Betty Lee Randolph Ph.D., which there seems to be barely any information about today. (It is not related in any way to the similarly-named cache of off-air reels of "Doctor Who" radio dramas recently discovered in England.) Apparently from what little I could dig up this chick was an hypnotist based in California who also did speaking seminars about motivation and success. In fact, thsese tapes (and the occasional one that surfaces now and again on Sleazebay) and a brief quote from Betty Randolph defending the tapes and the concept in a newspaper article (see below) are the only evidence I've ever found that these people and their company even existed!
If you listen closely (really need decent headphones for this) you can hear Betty's and that other dude's "subliminal" babbling in the background, and sometimes not that far in the background. Gotta love Dolby companding at mastering.
Liner notes: "No longer do you 'do it tomorrow'! It feels so good to 'get it done now'! You are surprised at your capacity to produce results. This tape helps you GET GOING! This tape is GREAT... AND SO ARE YOU!"
It's taken me almost 20 years to get round to transferring and posting the tape here, so I'll leave it up to you to decide how effective it was.
If anybody knows what any of these songs are (title/artist), especially that awesome Mantovani-like bed behind their jibjab at the beginning, please post up in the reviews.
(Pictures stolen from E-Bay and edited since I don't have a scanner right now. I do have the complete documentation for this tape and someday it will be scanned and posted. I do it now, I do it now, and it feels so good to get it done right away and all that rot...)
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HIDDEN MESSAGES
Don Oldenburg, The Washington Post
3 April 1990
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1990/04/03/hidden-messages/ba8d239f-955a-4fa3-80ab-8c0cff93f33d/
The premise is nearly irresistible: You can accomplish in a few weeks or months what many people are unable to do in a lifetime. Best of all, it requires no greater effort than to shove a tape into a cassette player, sit back and listen for an hour or so every day to soothing music or perhaps the dreamy sounds of a tropical beachside.
You don't even have to listen carefully. This is elevator music for the inner mind -- just push the button and hidden messages automatically begin to transport your life to heights you never imagined. No thinking or willpower necessary. Put on the earphones and take care of chores, drive your car, do your job, cook dinner; you can even sleep, that'll work too.
And the promises are no less inviting: Lose weight, quit smoking, overcome alcoholism, stop procrastination, reduce stress, increase self-esteem, attract wealth and prosperity, resist junk food, manage time, gain confidence, improve memory, be happy, be a magnet of love, achieve peace of mind, win the lottery.
But wait, there's more: Achieve good health, renew vitality, look younger, end migraines, beat depression, overcome sexual dysfunction, speed recovery from injury, release natural healing forces, prevent diseases.
These are only a sampling of claims being made by manufacturers who design and market self-improvement tapes that borrow from the controversial psychological phenomenon called subliminal suggestion. Based on the concept that what we don't hear might nonetheless affect us, subliminal perception has been poked at and prodded for decades by scientists trying to determine whether information presented below our threshold of awareness speaks convincingly to our unconscious mind. If laboratory testing hasn't been conclusive, it has at least cast doubt on mass-produced applications for subliminal messages.
That hasn't deterred a growing number of big-name publishers, pseudo-scientists, researchers with respectable vitae and, some contend, bunko artists, from making and marketing easy-listening tapes that promise the best of all personal worlds. According to one such marketeer who tried to organize a "subliminal science council" inside the industry, about 2,000 individuals and companies in the United States and Canada now produce these slight-of-sound products for retail sale. Americans bought more than 5 million of the tapes last year, according to other estimates. With sales branching beyond alternative direct-mail catalogues and New Age-type magazines and into mall bookstore chains, cable TV ads and mainstream publications, both critics and tape makers figure the subliminal business to boom in the '90s.
"We're talking about a multimillion-dollar industry that's getting bigger and bigger every year," says Timothy Moore, an outspoken Canadian psychologist who disputes the effectiveness of the tapes and reprimands the scientific community for not speaking more forcefully against them. In Toronto recently, Moore filed a complaint with the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) against a fellow psychologist who deals in subliminal tapes.
"The ways in which these products are marketed and advertised are in clear violation of the ethical guidelines of the CPA and the American Psychological Association," says Moore, a York University professor who has conducted subliminal research. "I don't think these claims can even come close to being supported. You name a problem, you can find a tape for it -- breast enlargement, pregnancy, adult survivors of sexual abuse ... It's fraudulent."
Hearing Between the Lines Yes! Books, a District bookstore that specializes in New Age and alternative publications, carries dozens of subliminal self-improvement tapes. Floor manager Deidre Schwiesow says sales are good -- and so is the customer feedback.
"I haven't known anybody to come in and complain," says Schwiesow, 23. "They don't say that it was worthless. The people who tend to buy them do tend to be repeats ... One woman was listening to one of the tapes for over a year, and she had to buy another copy 'cause I guess it wore out."
Schwiesow has tried a tape or two herself. "When I sat down and listened to this one with really pretty music that was for self-esteem, it really made me feel better ... ," she says. "I find they are very relaxing." But perplexing. She hasn't determined what it is about these tapes that changes people.
"How do you ever know if something subliminal is working?" she asks. "So much of that sort of thing is going to be the power of suggestion. Just the fact that it is supposed to do something ... who's to say that isn't true about a whole lot of medicine in general?"
Last July, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had a say in the controversy. In what one prosecutor described as "a test case on subliminals ... right out there at the lead of what this whole thing is about," the FDA's Los Angeles office demanded that Success Education Institute International correct "misleading claims" about its subliminal cassettes.
In a regulatory letter (an FDA spokesman described it as "basically a threat") to the San Diego-based company, the federal agency charged that promotions of certain tapes as being effective for alleviating pain, relieving depression, kicking addictions, strengthening and activating immune systems, and preventing and fighting cancer, AIDS, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, were "false or misleading or otherwise contrary to fact."
Betty Lee Randolph, a counselor and hypnotherapist who is president of Success Education Institute, says she "begged" the FDA to inspect her products so she could sport an FDA-approval statement on them. Thomas Sawyer, FDA director of the compliance branch in Los Angeles, would not confirm the circumstances of the inspection, but it did find the violations, he says.
"We don't want any inference to anything that may be medical," says Randolph. "We never say 'lose weight' or anything like that. We say 'see yourself at your ideal weight.' And then we got the regulatory letter, which was really surprising."
Randolph insists her promotions "never claimed those things" listed in the FDA action. She argues that the FDA "selected words" out of context. Still, she speaks proudly of her tape that "can strengthen immune systems" and helps fight AIDS and cancer. "We have a tape and it does give hope to these persons," she says, "{because} if they go into depression, {AIDS} works so fast, they go fast."
The company has since notified the FDA that it will comply with the regulatory letter and change its promotions. "We eliminated anything that would let a person think there was anything medical," says Randolph.
Meanwhile, the Texas attorney general's consumer protection division has been conducting a nine-month investigation of subliminal self-help companies who peddle their products there. "Claims were made which would make the tapes medical devices, claims that they could have an effect on the human body, such as weight loss," says the state's assistant attorney general Robert E. Reyna.
So far, he has asked several tape companies to volunteer proof supporting their promotions. His investigators have reviewed the research and found "no published studies that would document the safety or effectiveness" of the tapes, he says. "The thing that has concerned us is that in some of the televised ads and package labeling, they claim to be proven techniques."
Hearing the whisper in the wind, some companies such as Mind Communications Inc., a Michigan firm owned by chiropractor Paul Tuthill, are preparing for challenges. "We're not trying to hide anything; we're trying to be up front and that's what you need to be," says Tim Berry, director of media relations for Mind Communications, one of the companies contacted by Reyna. "People are starting to believe in subliminals, and one wrong move and that would ruin it for everybody."
With $10 million in sales last year and freshly inked contracts with several regional retail chains to carry its line of products, Mind Communications has gone so far as to have notary publics certify the subliminal contents of some of its 350 different titles. And, Berry brags, Tuthill has now "joined the environmental crusade." He has created a tape called "Earth Day Every Day," designed "to reinforce environmentally sound behaviors." It's free.
None of this certifies that subliminal messages can change human behavior, of course. "There are a lot of outlandish claims by some of these companies," acknowledges Berry. "This industry is going through a shake-up period where a lot of the sham companies are going under. People are starting to realize which ones are for real and which one's aren't."
Panacea, Placebo or Put-On? Ray Hyman, a University of Oregon psychologist working on a National Research Council subcommittee to examine subliminal claims, says the hundreds of titles now available are limited only by the imagination -- and certainly not by scientific proof or common sense. "We've come across a subliminal tape to help you get a divorce, and another one from the same company to help you not get a divorce," he quips. "We wondered what would happen if the husband got one and his wife got the other."
While major publishers such as Bantam and Warner Brothers stick mostly to profitable vices in their subliminal lines, other manufacturers sell tapes for almost any problem or improvement.
Except for its claim of using time-compression technology to bombard the unconscience, Psychodynamics Research Institute, in Zephyr Cove, Nev., is typical of the industry. Its $14.95 titles include: "Winning at the Track," "Fear of Flying," "Control Spending Habits" and "Programmed Weight Gain." Tapes for kids? There's a potty-training tape for toddlers 18 months to 3 years and "Good Study Habits" for 6 years and older. Send $229 and it'll custom design a tape "to your own specifications."
Credence Cassettes takes the idea to greater heights. According to its ad, the Kansas City, Mo., company offers "subliminals of faith," created by New Age author Louis Savary to address "distorted, simplistic or even hostile attitudes toward God."
But if all subliminal tape firms come up short on sound science, most of them are long on testimonials. Psychodynamic's glowing reports are identified only by initials and home states: R.L. from Pennsylvania took nine strokes off his golf handicap after one week of subliminals; "unbelievable" is how G.K. from Florida described results from the "Sex Appeal-Attraction" tape; A.J. from Illinois wrote just to say "our society would become a more sane society if the entire population would use your products."
Skeptics think otherwise. "They don't work," says James V. McConnell, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "There have been literally hundreds of studies and not one has shown them to be effective in changing behavior."
One of the earliest researchers in subliminal persuasion, McConnell has conducted many such studies. In 1959, he subjected participants to subliminal messages about eating cake that showed "no effect." A later study attempted to sway closed-circuit TV viewers to choose a particular brand of beer and showed results no better than chance. "You get much better results," says McConnell, "if you simply put the message out where everyone can see it."
Yet Paul Fessler's experience is not unlike that generally reported by people who've dabbled with subliminal tapes. Other than gender, he fits the profile of tape buyers according to one industry survey: He's between 35 and 45 and has completed at least two years of college. The 41-year-old systems analyst for the federal government bought his first tape to improve his poker game, but its music was too awful to listen to.
Soon after, he received a catalogue from the Gateways Institute, in Ojai, Calif., a manufacturer that runs hour-long "info-mercials" about its products on cable TV. He ordered tapes for happiness, weight-loss and procrastination. He followed Gateways' prescribed schedule, listening to them every day for 30 days, even playing them some nights while he slept. Friends teased him that every other message on the tape was "Buy More Tapes." Subliminal phrases crept into his daily expressions. Altogether, he bought more than $800 in Gateways tapes.
"I lost a tremendous amount of weight -- 30 pounds," says Fessler, adding that his outlook took a turn for the brighter as well. He doesn't attribute the benefits solely to subliminals (Gateways sets include meditation and audible affirmations), but he does believe they supported his desire to lose weight and to change his attitude. "I was able to put food in its place," he says. "The ground for losing weight was made fertile by the tapes."
The intriguing concept of effortless behavior change has showed up in some therapists' offices and and in professional uses as well.
A Connecticut physician specializing in pulmonary and internal medicine says he has "urged" his patients to use Betty Lee Randolph's "Success Express" tapes "as part of a comprehensive therapeutic program." He's convinced the tapes have helped some asthma patients gain control over their conditions, and has enabled others to "reduce and even eliminate various medications."
Paul Van Ness, a District clinical psychologist, whose "Playback" column in Common Boundary magazine reviews therapeutic and psychological audiocassettes and videotapes, hasn't used subliminal tapes in his practice yet, and he's not certain they can be effective, but he has told clients that listening to them "can't do any harm and they might do some good."
CareerTrack, a direct-mail catalogue, publishes a lengthy list of career-oriented courses and career-skill tapes. Two of its titles are subliminal tapes, each sold in six-cassette sets for $49.95. Its catalogue provides this explanation, under the headline, The Truth About Subliminal Tapes: "Is this a bunch of baloney, you ask? Not according to scientists. In study after study, it has been shown that subliminal messages work quite effectively to change beliefs and behaviors."
Winsor White, director of new product development for the Boulder, Colo., firm, says that CareerTrack decided a year ago to sell the subliminal tapes because of popular demand. "There are some people who feel they're worthless and others who have reasonable credentials who feel strongly that they work," he says. "If they produce results, they produce results. And we've had people who tell us they do."
Critics don't deny some people who use subliminal tapes can benefit from them. They credit motivation and expectation with powering the behavior change -- not subliminals. "Have you ever heard of the placebo effect?" asks McConnell. "You test people with any sugar pill, and a significant number of them will show improvement.
"What people who use these subliminal tapes get is a placebo effect. They think its going to work and expectation filters in and they get better. But they could buy a blank tape and listen to it and it would work ... If you think it is going to work, the odds are well above chance it will."
Says William Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud: "Seems to me that if this works, every kid who ever fell asleep in class got more out of it than he ever thought he did."
-30-
TRANSCRIPT
MALE: While you listen, you will be receiving dynamic messages for success. The more often you play this tape, the more effective it becomes.
FEMALE: You do it now.
You get things done, successfully.
You schedule your time well.
You set your priorities.
You feel good being organised.
You concentrate on getting things done.
You find it easy to do things, to start and to finish.
You enjoy challenge.
You have ability, capability and creativity.
MALE: You aim high.
You are self-disciplined.
You can do it.
You do it now.
You get it done successfully.
You do it easily.
You get right to work.
You finish ahead of schedule with excellence.
(god, this has got to be one of the longest writeups I have ever posted on here....)
FEMALE: I do it now.
I do it now and I feel so good being organised.
I enjoy challenge.
I get right to work.
I want to get it done now.
I set my priorities and I get things done.
I plan ahead.
I am organised.
I do it now.
I like getting things done ahead of schedule.
I schedule my time.
I am decisive.
I do it.
I go to it.
I am excited and enthusiastic.
I plan, I start and I finish.
I am successful.
I focus my attention.
I am attentive.
MALE: I pay attention to detail.
I am for excellence.
I am ahead of schedule.
I write it down and do it.
I am a doer.
I think, I do it.
Today is the day I do it.
I get it done.
I am energetic.
I like setting and acheiving my goal.
I have the ability and capability.
I concentrate totally.
I make good use of my time.
I am self-disciplined.
I do it now.
FEMALE: Every day in every way I am getting better and better and I always do it now.
Now, throughout the rest of the programme, these same messages are subliminal.
--end--
Notes
DOWNLOADING
When downloading this recording e.g. for local listening or to post elsewhere, please select only the original PCM ("WAVE") or MPEG AUDIO (MP2) option. The FLAC or lossy VBR MP3 derivatives are acceptable for immediate listening in the built-in Web player above but I do not guarantee their fidelity or integrity, and cannot provide any technical help if you download these derivative formats. Master files are in 2-channel 44100 Hz 16-bit PCM ("WAVE" option) format. The FLAC files listed are derivatives.
Since the A- and B-sides are the same recording but with slightly different head and tail ends, there is also a "one-file" MP2 of all the tape's unique content edited together as one approximately 48-minute block, for the convenience of those who want it. It is called "Stop Procrastination Sub Plus 40S one-file.mp2" ("MPEG AUDIO" option). There is no PCM option listed for this version because it can be easily built, using copying and pasting, from the existing master files if one desires.
LICENCE
Do whatever you want with it; I don't care. If you enjoyed it, great. If you want to reuse and remix it, more power to you. Republish/remix freely but do not sell or monetise. If we meet someday and you think it's worth it, you can buy me dinner in return.
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