00:09:01.920But I think I can't think of anything that I've done in my life that is not is equally rewarding as seeing people who have been victimized by cults freed and seeing just horrible, I would say evil cult leaders put away.
00:09:22.360and and keith ranieri is now in a lockdown uh kind of isolated protective custody place where
00:09:31.280sex criminals go and he raped children he raped a 12 year old he raped a 14 year old
00:09:38.060and so recently another sex offender who didn't rape children uh punched him out beat him up
00:09:45.900and he complained about it. But even in prison, there's a kind of code, and somebody who rapes
00:09:52.900children, they're at the very bottom. And that's where Keith Ranieri is now. And I'm happy to say
00:09:59.120I helped to put on that. Have you seen an overlap in personality between all these cult leaders?
00:10:05.380Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember one time talking to the psychologist and cult expert,
00:10:11.760margaret singer who really was probably the leading cult expert of the 20th century and i
00:10:18.140asked her i had dealt with a cult leader by the name of david koresh who was the leader of a group
00:10:24.160called the waco davidians and i had helped people leave the davidians help the number of families
00:10:29.720i was uh working with the batf and the fbi and doing analysis for cbs news and someone said
00:10:38.580that they could deprogram David Koresh. And I said, how can you deprogram him? He's not
00:10:46.260programmed in the first place. He's a psychopath. And that person said to me, well, I don't think
00:10:54.060he's a psychopath. And so I asked Margaret Singer, what do you think? And she said, Rick,
00:11:00.200They're all psychopaths. And I think the basic threshold requirements to be a cult leader is, number one, be at least a sociopath with no sense of right or wrong, no conscience. You don't care who you hurt. What a cult leader cares about is what's in it for me, what's good for me is good, and what's bad for me is bad.
00:11:24.920and they have no innate kind of morals or ethics or anything like that and then typically they're
00:11:32.280just intensely narcissistic i would describe them as malignant narcissists very extreme
00:11:39.940they have little if any empathy they seem to only have sympathy for themselves and they're they're
00:11:47.640very uh pathological in their pattern of lying and misrepresenting themselves so i've met a number
00:11:56.620of cult leaders over the years you know i've testified against them in court i've met them
00:12:01.240face to face and uh for example keith ranary and to me they they're all the same they're almost all
00:12:09.120the same and i feel like i'm meeting the same person with a different skin suit over and over
00:12:16.160again i mean because they just they behave the same so these aren't people that maybe start
00:12:22.860thinking that they want to change the world for the better you think these are just bad people
00:12:27.580to begin with or do they have this grandiose idea that they're going to improve things and it just
00:12:31.600devolves into chaos i think it's possible for them to have good intentions though it's been
00:12:40.000argued that that they usually are born pretty much bad some of them seem to be hardwired that
00:12:47.900way Ranieri was harassing little girls when he was 10 and he was recognized as a predator
00:12:54.500um Charlie Manson you know the Manson family the Tate LaBianca murders uh in the in 1970
00:13:04.3401969, that family was active. And, you know, Manson was definitely a psychopath, but you could
00:13:11.740argue that because of his very unhappy childhood, and the fact that he was raised basically within
00:13:18.760juvenile facilities and prisons, that he was influenced to be bad. But there, in my opinion,
00:13:29.000there very often innately bad. There was a leader, Charles Diedrich, who started an intentional
00:13:36.020community for drug rehabilitation called Synanon, which was very popular in California.
00:13:44.480Synanon would be going back to the 80s. Eventually, Diedrich would be prosecuted for
00:13:51.360criminal offenses, and the group would be taken down. I think originally, it seemed like there
00:13:58.840were good intentions that is to get people off drugs to get yeah live a sober clean life
00:14:06.060but it just went off the rails because in my experience when you don't have checks and
00:14:12.760balances and transparency in the hierarchical structure of a group you know absolute power
00:14:20.480corrupts. I mean, people become corrupted by not having anyone to answer to. And I think Diedrich
00:14:29.520got worse and worse until he was arrested. And I think that many cult leaders seem to have started
00:14:36.980out not so bad and the situation escalates. Jim Jones would be another example. Jim Jones was
00:14:45.660very popular within Democratic Party circles. He was very good friends with Governor Jerry Brown,
00:14:55.260State Assemblyman Willie Brown, when Rosalind Carter visited San Francisco. She did a photo
00:15:00.900op with Jim Jones. He would later be responsible for the murder of a thousand people, including
00:15:07.740over 200 children in what was called the Jonestown murder-suicide. But at one time,
00:15:15.700he was the head of a very big church in the Bay Area, and they had a branch in LA. And there were
00:15:21.320thousands and thousands of people that thought he was fantastic. He was a liberal mover and shaker
00:15:28.560who basically created programs to feed the elderly, drug rehabilitation. The church was very
00:15:38.700multiracial, multicultural, and he was seen as kind of an icon of change in the 70s. But in 1978,
00:15:48.240he ended up with a thousand of his diehard followers in English-speaking Guyana. And after
00:15:55.080he murdered a united states congressman that came to investigate what was going on in that community
00:16:01.020which was isolated in the jungle where where jim jones controlled everything uh he reckoned that
00:16:09.220the authorities were coming for him they were and so they mixed what what was referred to as kool-aid
00:16:16.020with poison cyanide and uh phenobarbital and sleeping you know pills and the end result was
00:16:26.000a thousand people dead and jim jones as well and that's where we get the phrase oh you drank the
00:16:33.480kool-aid that's an allusion to jonestown uh though the kool-aid company wants us to know it really
00:16:39.580wasn't cool it was it was flavor aid it wasn't their kool-aid it was a different one but uh that
00:16:46.740was a big shocker for everybody in 78 i think and people said who are these cults what are they
00:16:54.320doing a thousand people are dead 200 children their bodies are being moved out of guyana what
00:17:01.420is this how could they be there where did they come from they're americans what what are they
00:17:07.280doing in a compound in the middle of the jungle and so that was the beginning of uh cult awareness
00:17:13.760and in my book cults inside out i really get into that history and i show the uh evolving of of you
00:17:21.860know cults beginning in the 70s to today is this something that was like were cults very i guess
00:17:29.440not popular but were there were there more cults in the 70s than there are now is this something
00:18:04.060And this is led by an African-American by the name of Legio Bishop.
00:18:08.260He also went by Nature Boy was at one time his nickname.
00:18:15.920And so he would recruit on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media.
00:18:20.160And then he rented an Airbnb online in Costa Rica.
00:18:26.100And some people would give him money online.
00:18:28.420And then some people were pulled into the Airbnb.
00:18:31.600be and it became a little cult compound the costa ricans kicked him out the panamanians later
00:18:38.380kicked him out the mexicans kicked him out and he ended up back in atlanta where he was from and
00:18:44.440he's now in jail uh facing charges of uh sexual abuse and and you know criminal exploitation of
00:18:53.020people in the group but the group wasn't that big there were maybe 30 40 people in the community
00:18:59.300at the most. And he could make money and pay for the Airbnb and everything online. And so you have
00:19:07.300groups that are streaming online, that there are certain leaders that may even have hundreds of
00:19:14.420thousands of followers online. There's a woman by the name of Teal Swan, who's quite popular.
00:19:21.640She's been called a cult leader. She would say, I'm not, I'm just holding forth online.
00:19:28.380and she has hundreds of thousands of people who follow her online and these people become very
00:19:34.440wealthy and then they extract some people from their online following to become their inner
00:19:40.820circle or community teal swan has that uh dr phil and i at one point exposed a woman by the name of
00:19:50.440amy carlson and she headed a group called love has won and you may have read about her she probably
00:19:57.920had no more than 30 or 40 followers but at the time of her death she had a half a million in cash
00:20:03.820about a million in real estate paid for and people were vying for who's going to control the assets
00:20:10.640of this group and they couldn't accept amy carlson's death they called her mother god
00:20:16.220so they took the body and they decorated it with glitter and light and they basically worshipped
00:20:23.380until the authorities knocked down the door and arrested people for essentially violating a dead
00:20:30.200body. Wow. Okay. So I've got a few questions then. What's the average type of person that ends up
00:20:37.880in a cult? Is there an overlap there? There is a kind of narrative thread that you could pull
00:20:44.560through a lot of people, but it could be anybody. They could be any race, any socioeconomic level.
00:20:50.820They could be rich. They could be poor. They could be young. They could be old. They could be highly educated or uneducated. But what I've seen, if I were going to pull a consistent thread through many of the cases that I've dealt with, it would be somebody who's not happy at a particular point in their life.
00:21:09.260And they're feeling like, I'm just really unhappy with my life. I'm depressed. And at that point, they have the bad luck that someone they know could be a family member, friend, co-worker. They approach them and say, hey, you want to come to this meeting? You want to go play volleyball with these friends of mine?
00:21:29.840I mean, it could be very innocuous. It could seem very innocent because the group is not going to tell you what their agenda is or disclose anything that might put you off. So a lot of it's about deceptive recruitment and just flat out lying.
00:21:47.180Some of these groups have multiple names.
00:21:49.580You don't even know who you're being recruited by.
00:21:51.820You find out later, oh, it's that cult that I read about, but now they're using a new
00:21:57.100front organizational name that I didn't know about.
00:22:00.580So many of the people that I work with are just amazing people, really smart.
00:22:06.540For example, not long ago, I was working with a young woman who had recently graduated with
00:22:14.440I also worked with a young man who was attending Penn, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, on full scholarship, graduated from his class as a valedictorian, went on to MIT, and is now a civil engineer.
00:22:31.040But at one point, he was lured into a cult on the campus of Penn. A lot of these groups do recruit on college campuses, because I'd say their main target group is 18 to 26.
00:22:44.440but five of the people that I have worked with are medical doctors. I helped to deprogram
00:22:53.960and bring out of a cult an orthopedic surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a gastrointestinal specialist.
00:23:02.840These people were not dumb. They weren't illiterate. They were sophisticated,
00:23:08.120well-educated people. So I think if we think that we're not vulnerable, we're not really being
00:23:15.960honest with ourselves, anyone can be had given the right set of circumstances and timing. And
00:23:23.100that's why I think it's so important to be aware that these groups exist so that you know what to
00:23:28.920look for and you can be prepared. And if the group approaches you, you can say, hey, you know what?
00:23:35.460you seem kind of weird. You seem like some kind of cult group and you do your due diligence and
00:23:42.400you drill down and find out more and you realize, hey, this is a cult. Okay. So I guess we could
00:23:49.000start with how do people identify when it's a cult? What are the signs? Well, you go to the
00:23:55.520meeting and you see a big portrait of the leader on the wall. That's a real, real red flag. And
00:24:02.940Everybody is talking over and over again about how great the leader is, and the leader says this, and the leader says that, and you realize that the leader is what it's all about, and that they worship the leader, and that the leader is the core defining element of the group.
00:24:21.940And then you realize that everyone only views the leader through a positive lens. They're not critical. No one ever disagrees with the leader. And you also realize that there's no accountability in the organization.
00:24:38.960For example, a democratically elected board, financial transparency through published budgets distributed to all contributors, things like that.
00:24:51.760You know, you go to GuideStar, you know, or another website online and you find out, boy, this is kind of shady.
00:25:00.160They're not really showing me where the money goes.
00:25:02.360and you you feel like there's no legitimate reason to leave and that anybody who leaves
00:25:09.360is characterized in a negative light uh and and you also recognize that people are becoming isolated
00:25:18.000socially isolated and they're kind of cocooning in this group and they're not really uh in touch
00:25:25.500with maybe their family, their old friends, things like that. And when you begin to see
00:25:33.820these warning signs over and over again, you begin to put together a picture of a very authoritarian
00:25:39.900group. Everything is black and white, nothing in shades of gray, and people are just agreeing
00:25:47.720constantly with whatever is said. And you might be there thinking, God, you know, they just said
00:25:53.460something that's really weird. Why is everybody like nodding their head? What is this, a bunch of
00:25:58.660head bobbers or what? You know, I mean, is anybody thinking here? And so the group kind of creates
00:26:06.040an environment where everything the leader says is reinforced and nothing is ever questioned.
00:26:13.620Okay, that sounds pretty stereotypical, but that sounds good. You spoke a bit about thought reform
00:26:20.700and influence techniques. Could you describe what kind of influence techniques cult leaders use?
00:26:26.580I write about this in a chapter in my book called Cult Brainwashing. And probably the seminal book
00:26:32.940on influence techniques is the book Influence by the professor from ASU, Robert Cialdini.
00:26:41.500And I'll give you a few of them. One would be liking. Liking. We're more apt to go along with
00:26:48.980somebody that we like than somebody we don't like which is the key to celebrity endorsements
00:26:54.860i'm gonna buy that car because uh that athlete or that celebrity is pitching it so that's why
00:27:03.200they have celebrities do that is because if you like that celebrity it will influence you
00:27:08.880you buy the product so in a cult you you experience what's called like love bombing
00:27:15.060which means you get into the group and this is another warning sign and everybody's just
00:27:19.920loving on you they're all just going oh wow it's so great to meet you you're oh wow you know uh we
00:27:28.180you know they're just saying a lot of effusive praising things and it's because they want you
00:27:35.140to like them and they want you to feel kind of reluctant to to not embrace them because they
00:27:43.660are so nice so the principle is liking another one would be social proof which is a big one
00:27:51.940so you look around you to see what other people are doing and then you determine what you're going
00:27:57.580to do when you're at the airport going in the lines going through tsa or whatever you're looking
00:28:04.360are they taking off their shoes or what you know i mean do i need to take off my shoes so that is
00:28:10.520what we call social proof. So if a group can cocoon you in a, what I would call a false
00:28:20.280social proof, where everything is really controlled, and you're getting this feedback
00:28:25.960that everything is normal, even though it's not, you feel that your doubts, your misgivings are
00:28:32.720misplaced. And so you kind of go, well, nobody else is acting like this is bad, so I'll act like
00:28:38.940it's okay as well so social proof would be another one and another one would be authority
00:28:44.640so you are more likely to be compliant with someone who represents authority than someone
00:28:51.320who doesn't so if a uniformed police officer approaches you and says uh let's i want to talk
00:28:58.640to you about the situation here you're going to be more attentive than it's some guy in cutoffs
00:29:04.840and a t-shirt you know so if the group projects authority and they may do that by for example
00:29:12.460invoking god invoking the bible saying everything i say to you is in this book the bible when in
00:29:20.740reality they're they're very likely twisting scriptures out of context for their own purposes
00:29:27.620but but if they can invoke the authority of the bible that's a big one in the u.s and and western
00:29:35.240europe so you say i i'm not speaking for myself but jesus said the bible says you know moses said
00:29:44.460so then you're gonna kind of thinking well i have to go along with this because of the authority
00:29:49.900of scripture because of who they are quoting and so on and that can be manipulated in many different
00:29:57.740ways so before i jumped on the podcast i was doing a bit of reading and i looked up the most popular
00:30:03.900cults in america right now and it looked like a huge percentage of them like maybe 80 percent
00:30:10.460had something to do with like somebody's version of the bible which shocked me that a lot of them
00:30:18.540were considered cults. So that was interesting. I didn't know that. Are cults more prevalent in
00:30:24.780America, or is this something that really occurs worldwide? It occurs worldwide. My book was
00:30:31.280translated into Chinese and Italian, and I've lectured abroad as well as across the U.S.
00:30:38.560And really, in the U.S., though, because of the First Amendment, separation of church and state,
00:30:46.900And because of the relative ease in which a group can say, look, we're a religious group, give us 501c3 nonprofit religious status, which really gives them kind of almost a license to steal at times because they don't have to pay taxes.
00:31:05.320They don't pay property taxes. And religious organizations in our history in the U.S. are given more protection than, let's say, another nonprofit, like an educational nonprofit.
00:31:20.820it so the religious uh cult or or some type of spiritually based cult will say well look you
00:31:29.900know we're religion and if you criticize anything our leader does if you criticize what we're doing
00:31:36.440even if it's former members that are saying they were ripped off or they were hurt they were
00:31:41.300exploited that's persecution so you better be careful because we're protected by the first
00:31:48.100Amendment. So I think a lot of groups come from overseas, quite a few, and they set up shop or
00:31:55.300they set up a branch in the U.S. because this is where they like to have their money. This is where
00:32:00.780they might make some investments because of the protection that our country affords people through
00:32:07.800the First Amendment separation of church and state. Do you know what the cult that's around
00:32:12.160currently that has the most members is? Or in the past, the largest cult? I would say one of
00:32:17.860the largest groups that was called a cult would be a group called the International Church of
00:32:24.160Christ, which was founded by a guy by the name of Kip McKean. In fact, Kip is still out there doing
00:32:30.320his thing, but the group has fallen on kind of hard times. But at their peak, they went from 12
00:32:36.960members in 1978 to about, I would say, about 250,000 by 1998. And then a number of scandals
00:32:48.880occurred, and Kip McKean kind of fell from grace. It was a Bible-based group, and it was a break-off
00:32:56.360from the Independent Churches of Christ, though the first people to blow the whistle on Kip McKean
00:33:04.080was in fact the independent churches of christ they said this guy is not good he used to kind
00:33:10.480of be with us and he broke away and they were very critical of him and um he is still out there
00:33:17.900i mean he's like now what is kip he must be in his 70s and he's still preaching he's he's probably
00:33:25.040down to maybe he's just got maybe 5 000 or less actual followers at this point and of course
00:33:33.080people often think that Scientology, which has been called a cult, is really big. And the
00:33:40.520Scientologists will always say, oh, we have millions, we have millions. Probably based on
00:33:45.800what I know, they probably have less than 50,000 members globally. And that they've been kind of
00:33:54.160losing members over a period of time uh the founder L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986 and his
00:34:04.200successor was his former secretary a man by the name of David Miscavige whose best buddies with
00:34:11.020Tom Cruise uh in fact he was Tom Cruise's best man when Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes uh I
00:34:19.020don't i don't think he i don't think he was at the divorce settlement though but any anyway david
00:34:25.240miscavige is now the absolute leader of scientology and what i think is significant about
00:34:31.860scientology is how much money they have uh between their real estate and their and their cash it's
00:34:39.320been estimated that scientology is now worth more than three billion dollars and it's been said by
00:34:47.100some inner circle people that left that they have a billion just in cash. And so if you go to
00:34:54.420Clearwater, Florida, they own a chunk of downtown. If you go to Hollywood in Los Angeles, you're
00:35:02.240going to see a lot of buildings controlled by Scientology. So their real estate portfolio is
00:35:08.320awesome. I mean, it's a very, very full of these properties that they don't pay taxes on by and
00:35:16.660large because they get religious non-profit status is the government after these people like mad
00:35:23.500no you know i think it's it boils down to you you if they're doing weird things if they're
00:35:31.800indoctrinating people and people are believing in science fiction stories or whatever which is the
00:35:38.360case with scientology it's just an issue of criminality you know so so for example danny
00:35:45.860masterson uh you know from that 70s show he's facing rape charges and the allegations are
00:35:54.020that he took advantage of scientologists women and that because they were all in scientology
00:36:00.940they were essentially kept from uh speaking out they were you know they they were dealt with
00:36:09.320internally by scientology and that danny masterson got away with things because he was
00:36:15.080you know, a Scientology celebrity. And now Masterson is facing trial in the coming months
00:36:22.960for what he did. So if a group doesn't do something criminal, if they don't actually
00:36:29.580break the law, then the authorities are not going to go after them. So it could be tax fraud,
00:36:35.300it could be money laundering, it could be sex trafficking, it could be racketeering in some way,
00:36:43.020or it could be something like, for example, violation of copyright. There was one leader,
00:36:50.660his name was Keith Hamm, and he built a huge temple in Virginia. And it was like the Krishna
00:36:58.520temple, the Hare Krishnas. And Hamm also liked to sell counterfeit Disney paraphernalia. And one
00:37:06.160of the things that he was busted on was counterfeit counterfeiting goods uh later it was he
00:37:13.120also was involved in a murder conspiracy because there were people that were leaving the hari
00:37:18.960krishna movement that were very critical of this guy and he wanted them taken out and so there were
00:37:25.260people that were killed so if the cult doesn't do anything illegal if all they do is believe in
00:37:31.360weird stuff and uh that you can't really you know you can't prosecute them for that and sadly if
00:37:39.620they break up marriages they break up families they isolate people they compromise their education
00:37:46.760their career none of that is criminal i mean because the cult will just say well you know
00:37:53.940this is what we all shared this and this person made this choice on their own. But I would argue
00:38:02.180that they were under undue influence and that that's why they made choices that were not in
00:38:07.700their best interest. What does cult deprogramming look like? Oh, it looks like a surprise to start
00:38:15.200off. Yeah. Because you don't like send somebody an invitation and say, gee, you know, would you
00:38:21.420please attend this deprogramming because they're going to they're going to immediately text
00:38:28.820their their leader their associates in the group or they're going to email them or call them
00:38:33.960and they're going to say what should i do and they're going to tell them no way so first of
00:38:38.900all it's like a drug or alcohol intervention it's a total surprise and so the person typically they
00:38:46.500they're with their family for a visit, they're on vacation, or the family may come to their
00:38:55.020home. It could be the adult children having an intervention for their parents. It could be the
00:39:02.880parents, more typically, doing an intervention regarding an adult child, or it could be a
00:39:09.980spouse so you start off it's a surprise the person who is the focus of the intervention
00:39:16.480is probably kind of pissed and they're saying you know why are you doing this you you know
00:39:22.480you like blindsided me so you have to kind of work through that and say look we're here because
00:39:29.380your family's very worried about you they're concerned about you and then you begin this
00:39:34.800discussion with the family or the loved ones present, and you're talking really about four
00:39:43.400things during the intervention. Number one, defining what is a destructive cult or a destructive
00:39:50.280authoritarian group. What are its core elements? Does it match up with the group you're involved
00:39:56.440in? Number two, what is coercive persuasion? What are these influence techniques that you think
00:40:04.940have been used to gain undue influence over me? And then you discuss all of the particulars,
00:40:12.600the criteria of what constitutes coercive persuasion or thought reform. And then third,
00:40:19.320why is my family worried about me? And so the family is going to say, well, you know,
00:40:24.100you're not taking your insulin because you think the group can cure your diabetes i've been involved
00:40:30.000in three interventions like that where people almost died uh because they believe that the
00:40:35.900group had a cure for diabetes which they did not and they they were in and out of the hospital
00:40:42.560trying to cure so so that would be uh one concern of the family their physical well-being their health
00:40:49.880Or it could be their financial well-being, that they're giving everything to the group, or that they're not paying attention to their children, that they're neglecting their family, that they're becoming increasingly isolated, and so forth.
00:41:05.320So the family is now saying, this is why we're here. This is why we brought this guy, Rick, to come and sit with us and talk about this stuff. And then the next thing would be, what is it that the group is hiding from you?
00:41:19.880is the group hiding anything from you? Do you know everything about this group? So then comes
00:41:26.980out the research. Did you know that the leader was arrested for spousal abuse? Did you know the
00:41:34.720leader has a secret getaway that a million dollars was the price tag? Did you know that the leader
00:41:42.540is basically enriching himself and his family from the money from the group, which is supposed
00:41:49.100to be a charitable nonprofit. You want to bring out all that. And then the person ultimately is
00:41:56.500going to make their own choice. The intervention might take three days. So you're going to agree
00:42:03.500to meet again the next day. The next day, you might talk for five, six, eight hours a day
00:42:10.460with the family and the person that's involved. And then ultimately, though, it's up to them.
00:42:17.980Do they want to leave the group? Do they want to take a break? Do they just want to say, forget it, I'm going back. About seven out of 10 people that I sit down with will decide to take a break or leave the group at the end. But about 30% will say, I'm leaving in the first day, because I don't like what you're talking about. I don't like it. And that is their choice.
00:42:42.880so you basically go in there and try and untangle people from a narrative well does this narrative
00:42:49.720make more sense and then they have to think about it if they're willing to i think what you're i
00:42:54.120think what you're doing is you are explaining to them how they got to where they're at that they
00:43:01.440become basically a pawn for the group in most situations yeah they have subordinated their
00:43:08.380value judgments, their thinking to the leaders in the group. So to the extent that, that it's
00:43:15.120negatively impacting their life. So what you want to do is rewind the entire recruitment process,
00:43:22.540the indoctrination process, and say, how did you get from where you were, you were an independent
00:43:28.580functioning person to where you are now, where you're so dependent upon the group
00:43:33.600and the leader to make decisions for you i mean uh for example what give me an example of something
00:43:42.380that you disagree with the group about i mean typically people can say oh i don't like uh this
00:43:49.440about my church or i don't like this about the club that i'm in or the fraternity or sorority
00:43:55.500that i'm in i think that person's a jerk this is kind of ridiculous that they do you know and i'm
00:44:02.260not up for that. But cult members are more like locked in, and they can't think of anything
00:44:08.460significant that they disagree with the group about. So you want to ask them, how did you get
00:44:13.940here? Let's look at the recruitment process that brought you through. Let's look at the
00:44:20.420indoctrination process that nailed you down. And were you tricked and kind of trapped in this group?
00:44:28.140or do you think that the group was fully transparent and honest with you so what you're
00:44:33.820really doing is rewinding that process so that they can uh slow motion it and and freeze it at
00:44:41.820different points and examine it and then decide is this what i really signed up for i mean is it
00:44:49.340i in my experience most people that are in cults if they knew what they were getting involved in
00:44:55.460from the beginning they would not have gotten involved i mean if scientology had had said to
00:45:02.300tom cruise in the very beginning what they fully believe you know regarding uh their origins you
00:45:11.000know which is a science fiction story written by l ron hubbard about a a galactic overlord named
00:45:17.100who sent overpopulated beings to this planet, and then they were killed, and their spirits are still residing in our environment, and they attach themselves to you, and they would say, Michaela, you have body thetans on you, and the only technology that can get those BTs off is Scientology.
00:45:45.020if they had told that to tom cruise from day one when mimi rogers his girlfriend then wife
00:45:51.840kind of brought him into scientology i think he would have said god you guys have got to screw
00:45:57.340loose i'm not i'm not interested in that sci-fi stuff but they came to him and they said look
00:46:03.720you've got dyslexia we have study technology we're a self-improvement uh organization uh we're here
00:46:13.440to help you realize your potential. And they painted a different picture. Now he's pushing
00:46:20.20060. He's three for three, three marriages, three divorces. And I would argue that every one of them
00:46:27.680was a direct result of Scientology. Mimi Rogers, her parents left. She was raised in Scientology
00:46:35.560and she wanted to continue with them because Scientologists routinely disconnect or cut off
00:46:42.760a family member who leaves Scientology. They're labeled what Scientology calls a suppressive
00:46:49.460person, an SP. And so Mimi Rogers, I think, though she's never really talked publicly about
00:46:56.880this in any depth, that she wanted to continue to be part of her family and her parents. And so
00:47:04.640she left Scientology and that made her an SP or at a bare minimum, what Scientology would call
00:47:10.960potential trouble source, a PTS. So Tom Cruise divorces her. He marries Nicole Kidman. Nicole
00:47:19.020Kidman for a while, I think he really loved her and she really loved him. And she tried to kind
00:47:25.640of wean him off of Scientology and it backfired. And Scientology sent in one of their enforcers,
00:47:33.340a guy named marty rathbun who basically broke up that marriage and uh and and it was about
00:47:41.300scientology and then katie holmes i think really loved tom cruise and i think he really loved her
00:47:47.960i believe him when he was jumping on the couch and saying at oprah's show and saying i love this
00:47:53.920woman i think he really did and they had a beautiful child that he hasn't seen for years
00:47:59.660his daughter siri and it it why because katie holmes i would say did not want to have her
00:48:08.140daughter raised in scientology and she did not want to be in scientology so here's this guy
00:48:13.820that's gone through decades with scientology three divorces he's a really smart guy i mean look at
00:48:21.660his career amazing career so how do you figure it i i figure it that he was in my opinion tricked
00:48:30.620and trapped in scientology and that he can't imagine a life outside of scientology though now
00:48:39.340he doesn't talk about it very much yeah because he doesn't want to um put a negative uh you know
00:48:48.500element in his rollout of his movie projects. And I think that's smart. But he's really been
00:48:56.860damaged, I think, in my opinion, by Scientology. Yeah, I'd say so. His credibility for sure.
00:49:05.280Have you dealt with a lot of people who were trapped in cults? So when you did an intervention,
00:49:12.140they said, okay, you're right, but I can't leave because I don't know, they're blackmailing me or
00:49:19.060something like that? I dealt with a really sad situation once with a man who had left the
00:49:26.620mainstream Mormon church, and he had become a member of a polygamist cult, the one that we all
00:49:34.100have heard about, the FLDS led by Warren Jeffs, who's now in prison for molesting and raping
00:49:40.560children uh so this man became involved he was uh deeply involved he had four wives uh by the
00:49:49.920time i met him but he was becoming very disillusioned as many of the people in the
00:49:55.380flds have have become uh and many have left uh this uh cult at one time controlled the towns of
00:50:05.480Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. The police force, city government, schools, everything.
00:50:14.200It was like a cult town. And so this man became disillusioned, but he has all these children. He
00:50:21.760has four wives. I met with him. I talked with him because his sister, who was a mainstream Mormon,
00:50:29.300felt sorry for him. He was visiting with her and he was very sad. And she said, why don't you talk
00:50:35.140to this guy who knows about groups like this and maybe you can see a way to resolve this and
00:50:42.340I would love for you to leave and and come back into the fold with our family which you've been
00:50:49.360isolated from from for years and at the end you could see that there was just no way because he
00:50:57.320had all these wives all these kids i don't know how many kids he had probably 15 20 and it's a
00:51:05.600family unit that he built over a period of decades and he could not see walking away from that and
00:51:14.080that that keeps a lot of cult members anchored and and i write about that in my book is i would
00:51:20.600call it exit costs what are the exit costs yeah of leaving the group are you going to lose your job
00:51:28.340are you going to lose your family are are you going to feel that after years of devotion
00:51:35.400that you have nowhere really to go with your life that maybe you're too old you've been in a group
00:51:41.880for a really long time i once worked with a man who joined scientology when he was 22
00:51:48.240and he left when he was almost 50 and the family did an intervention he had been in Scientology
00:51:55.860for 27 years from the age of 22 to 49 and I write about him in my book and he had a terrible time
00:52:05.860coming out of Scientology he did and the way that I think he could do that was because his wife
00:52:13.180wasn't really that involved she she and he loved her and they'd been married many years he had two
00:52:18.820adult children going to college and they weren't really involved so he had a family to be with that
00:52:26.900loved him but all of his friends were Scientologists every single one of them practically
00:52:32.760and for him to leave that kind of subculture and start over again it was tough but he did
00:52:40.100He managed to do it. But that is one of the reasons that people stay. They just can't imagine a life after decades of being in a group. And some people will leave a group called a cult very relatively soon, like in the first year to five years.
00:52:57.800but there are many people who stay for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. For example,
00:53:05.260Alison Mack, the actress that was in Smallville, you know, that series about Superman growing up,
00:53:14.440you know, she had a great career. She was very well liked by many people in the entertainment
00:53:20.160industry. And she ended up with Keith Ranieri and NXIVM for, I guess, 20 years, pretty much.
00:53:29.560And by the time it was over, she had lost most of her money, her career, her reputation. And as we
00:53:37.880speak, she's in prison. She's going to be serving out a three and a half year prison term. And she
00:53:44.260sacrificed it all and uh very very sad very sad that that that happened to her but she was involved
00:53:53.500in this torturing of women uh she was directly and physically involved and so they had to send
00:54:02.240her to prison uh but i think if she were talking to you right now she'd probably say she has some
00:54:08.360serious regrets about how long she stayed in NXIVM. Is NXIVM the most brutal cult that you've
00:54:16.320studied? No, I think the Waco Davidians, that was a pretty brutal group. I mean, David Koresh
00:54:22.800raped children. Some of them bore him children when they were children. One girl I met, he raped
00:54:31.420when she was 10. The group was heavily armed. They were militaristic. They were violent. I think
00:54:41.400that was a really bad group. I think that Amshin Rikyo, Shoko Asahara, who had members of his group
00:54:48.880that were physicists that were working on weapons of mass destruction. They were testing the poison
00:54:56.300gas on the tokyo subway system as a prelude they were also hoping to to build a nuclear device
00:55:05.100i think shoko asahara and am shinrikyo were a terrible group and uh there have been oh uh
00:55:13.900various groups like jim jones jonestown the 1000 people that died there definitely worse than
00:55:21.140nexium there was a group in africa movement for the restoration of the ten commandments led by a
00:55:27.440man by the name of joseph kibwateri and that group kibwateri predicted the end of the world in the
00:55:34.260year 2000 and when it didn't happen and people were starting to want to leave and rejoin their
00:55:40.640families this was going on in uganda kibwateri just started killing them by the time he was done
00:55:47.300there were 750 bodies recovered. That was a really bad group. And I don't know if you remember
00:55:54.060Heaven's Gate. That was a small group led by a man named Marshall Applewhite. 39 people were
00:56:01.820found dead, including Applewhite, in a mansion they leased between Los Angeles and San Diego
00:56:08.740in the general area of La Jolla. That was in 1995. And then there was also a group in Europe
00:56:15.240called the solar temple and that group uh ended in mass murder suicide about 80 90 people died
00:56:23.660along with their leader luke jure who was from canada and they ended up in in chalets in
00:56:31.140switzerland and france where where they died in deliberately set fires so there have been just
00:56:38.080of many, many groups like this. And I would want to point out also groups that do not believe in
00:56:45.820medical care. There are a number of groups in the United States, for example, General Assembly
00:56:52.860Church of the Firstborn, and Christ followers, or excuse me, followers of Christ, that do not
00:57:01.940believe in any kind of medical care. So members in those groups routinely die, many of them
00:57:08.800children, and only recently have the courts begin to strike down religious exemptions for parents
00:57:17.400who don't want to take their children to a doctor. So a number of them have been prosecuted,
00:57:23.600they've been sentenced to prison, and children have been saved by court order. But many children
00:57:30.300have died. There was one group, Faith Assembly, led by Hobart Freeman in Indiana where there just
00:57:38.200were so many children that died in that group because they could have been taken to a doctor
00:57:45.480and about 80% of them could have survived. I mean, only a small percentage were incurable.
00:57:54.100It could be something as simple as the use of antibiotics. So children died, they died in pain from these faith healing groups is what they're often called. And of course, there are quite a few of them in the United States. And then of course, we have the polygamist communities and the abuse of children. In those communities, there are about 50,000 people in North America that are involved in polygamist groups.
00:58:22.960This is wild. I think the cult that I'd heard of, I'd heard of Jonestown, right? That's what that was called. I'd heard of that. And Scientology, of course. What about the Moonies? Can you describe who they were? And are they still around?
00:58:38.740They are still around. Reverend Moon started, what, back in the 50s, the 60s, and he created what was called the Unification Church. And he built it originally in South Korea, and then he started building branches in Japan, in North America.
00:58:56.140and they were known as the Moonies because they worshipped Reverend Moon as the Messiah.
00:59:02.540Reverend Moon would teach them that he alone would redeem the world and that basically Jesus
00:59:09.600had flunked and that he was going to fulfill what needed to be done. And they would recruit
00:59:15.900young people on college campuses and then they would persuade them to go to these retreats,
00:59:21.740these camps that were scattered around the United States where they would be intensely
00:59:27.300indoctrinated and isolated for periods of weeks. Many people would call this being brainwashed.
00:59:34.980And then the Moonies would go on the streets. This happened in the 70s and the 80s. And they
00:59:40.680would just be oftentimes deceptively shilling for donations. They would give different names.
00:59:49.360They would not identify themselves correctly. And they even fake being disabled to get money. And so Reverend Moon at one point had thousands of people in the United States hitting the streets daily shilling for him.
01:00:04.200And the average Mooney would make about 200 bucks a day, and they'd bring it back to Reverend Moon. On that basis, he built a financial empire that is now valued at over $1 billion.
01:00:18.720dollars. Reverend Moon died at the age of, I think, 92 a few years back. His family now runs the group.
01:00:26.700At one point, they own one-third of the American fishing fleet, and they were accountable for,
01:00:34.640I think, as much as 50 percent at one point of the wholesale sushi market. So in big cities like
01:00:43.820new york and chicago the unification church would pretty much control the sushi business
01:00:50.080and reverend moon created a real estate empire the family still controls the new yorker hotel
01:00:57.180in manhattan and they bought land in south america their mansions i mean it was a very successful
01:01:05.060group and most recently when you read in the news about the prime minister of japan
01:01:11.780abe who they just buried him in a state funeral he was the prime minister of japan he was assassinated
01:01:19.540by a young man uh 41 years old who was unhappy with abe because of his connection
01:01:27.380to reverend moon in the unification church what the young man's mother in japan was bilked out
01:01:34.600of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and it decimated the family bankrupted them and the
01:01:40.900young man suffered his family suffered and he in he blamed abe because abe was uh influenced by the
01:01:50.760unification church he he he would you know go along with things help them in different ways
01:01:57.460uh he would be a speaker at some of their activities and so uh so the man made a gun
01:02:04.620and shot the former prime minister of japan who was recently buried and it really caused all the
01:02:11.840japanese to come forward that were hurt by the unification church many of them and they would
01:02:18.500say yes this happened to me and different uh cult experts in japan would also come forward and say
01:02:25.340yeah, this is really a problem. And the group is still very much alive and well in Japan,
01:02:31.060and they have quite a following in the U.S. Wow. Okay. I didn't realize they were still around.
01:02:37.840What's your view on QAnon? Is that a cult? I think of it as a cult, but it's a very unusual cult.
01:02:45.820um the the leader is anonymous so who is q is q an individual is q a collective we don't know
01:02:55.420i don't think q is actually a high-ranking person uh in the established uh you know
01:03:03.780intelligence community as as portrayed and then there are factions within the q anon
01:03:10.620movement that are classic cults there's one woman she calls herself the queen of canada
01:03:18.280and she leads a faction of q anon people and she's an object of worship and there was another man
01:03:25.160with a group of followers not long ago in dallas texas who also is a charismatic leader of a
01:03:32.200faction and they were waiting for jfk to make himself uh jfk jr i think to make himself known
01:03:40.040in dallas and of course nothing happened but in a sense the q anon group is classic because
01:03:47.040they they're very they're kind of cocooned online and they're very kind of socially isolated
01:03:53.200and no matter how many times q's predictions fail they just hang in there and that's what's called
01:04:00.240cognitive dissonance in destructive cults that is if you believe something like i believe what q
01:04:06.660told me and then it doesn't happen and then the group spins it they say well it didn't happen
01:04:13.400because of this that and the other and then you being cocooned online and all of your social
01:04:20.120interactions are with other q anon people to a large extent whatever the spin is it's reinforced
01:04:26.440by the group and so you then reconcile the conflict between what you have been told to believe
01:04:33.200and what actually occurs. And that's a very eerie kind of cult-like feature of QAnon is that there's
01:04:41.200kind of an alternate reality going on with those folks. And no matter how many times there are
01:04:46.900these failed predictions, they just keep hanging in there. Do cults always take money? Like if you
01:04:54.120have a relative and they join something and you're like, eh, is that person in a cult? It's
01:04:59.220kind of getting culty vibes over there. Can you identify it by the cults asking for money? Or are
01:05:05.060there cults that ask for something else? Well, they typically want something. I mean, because
01:05:11.180the leaders that I've dealt with are not very anti-materialistic kind of folks.
01:05:19.760They want a nice car. They want this. They want that. And they feel they're entitled and they
01:05:25.500want all the members to help them so it could be labor that the leader makes money off of like i've
01:05:31.520seen groups that have lawn services maid services and the leader provides cheap housing no health
01:05:39.220insurance very little money and the leader then bills it out by the hour for these services and
01:05:46.140makes a very substantial profit so it could be free labor it could be just cash i've seen leaders
01:05:53.400that have cheated people out of real estate one intervention i did with a so-called psychic group
01:06:00.080led by this psychic woman she was working with a doctor who by the time the children
01:06:07.440of the doctor brought me in she had given 650 000 that they knew of by by bank records to the leader
01:06:17.240So typically, yeah, they're out to get something, they're out to enrich themselves. And of course, there's a cult-like aspect, I think, to multi-level marketing. So that's when you sign up for something like Amway or Herbalife or Lule Row or whatever.
01:06:36.840And you probably are not going to make much money. And you're probably maybe likely going to lose money. And yet you see this group of people that are like a community and they're all, yeah, yeah, we're going to, yeah, the product, you know.
01:06:54.380And really, it's kind of a process of indoctrination to believe in the dream that the group proposes will be your life.
01:07:07.380You know, you're going to be rich like this distributor.
01:07:16.860So the group really is not so much selling a product as they're recruiting distributors who then buy the product and then also pay up in a multi-level scheme.
01:07:31.240And there's a very small group of people at the top that actually make a lot of money.
01:07:37.280And so how do you get people to do that?
01:07:39.980I would propose that, in my opinion, you gain undue influence over them by isolating them socially within your community, and you just hit them with this false social proof and all of this liking and authority and whatever, and the end result is they become deployable.
01:08:02.620They become your pawn. And they lose money. And that's how the people at the top make money. And I think that many people in multi-level marketing seem like they've been had, they've been conned, and that the real currency of the multi-level marketing scheme is, how do I gain undue influence over these people so I can exploit them?
01:08:28.720So they have training seminars, community gatherings, all kinds of things.
01:08:34.800You know, they're online, they're getting together online, and they're following each
01:08:42.360other on Facebook, on Twitter, on TikTok, and they're streaming.
01:08:47.920I mean, this is what's going on with multilevel marketing right now.
01:08:51.780And so I think people get caught up in it and that the currency of multilevel marketing,
01:08:57.380in my opinion, is the technology of being able to break people down and change the way they think
01:09:05.900so that you can take advantage of them. I wonder if it also gives people a community,
01:09:10.820like lonely people, right? People who are already isolated, then they think, oh, there's this group
01:09:16.500and they're my friends. I'll help them out. And then even if there's a part of you that knows
01:09:21.880you're being taken advantage of, well, you have this group of people and they look like they care
01:09:27.000for you, right? I assume they get a lot of isolated people involved in those kind of schemes.
01:09:32.740It's sad. That would be a vulnerability. I mean, someone who really never fit in, who is looking
01:09:40.400for a community acceptance, maybe they have family issues where they don't feel loved. And then these
01:09:47.980people love them, or so they think. What I often tell people is, ask yourself this. If you said,
01:09:55.160i don't want anything to do with this scheme this group this leader would they still love you and if
01:10:01.100they won't is that what what kind of love is that i think that's highly conditional love is that what
01:10:07.900you really want because that's kind of fake is that what you want and there are people that will
01:10:14.860say you know i am so lonely so depressed yes i i will take that i remember one young woman telling
01:10:23.700me that i i don't care about what what you've told me i agree with what you told me the group
01:10:32.820is a cult but it's the first time i've ever felt accepted the first time i've ever felt loved
01:10:37.360and and i said well yeah but that's highly conditional it's predicated on your compliance
01:10:43.440with the group and obedience to the leader and she said i don't care i want to be with them
01:10:50.160they are my family they are my community and this was a very socially awkward young woman
01:10:56.700who had never really had a boyfriend never really had good friends and felt always odd person out
01:11:05.660and this group they loved on her big time and she was willing to take that so but usually people
01:11:15.320will say, no, if it's not genuine, if they really don't care about me, then I'm going to leave
01:11:22.020because I don't need that kind of fake stuff. I'd rather go out and find something real.
01:11:28.980Yeah. Have you seen any overlap recently in affiliation with political parties and
01:11:34.560cult-like behavior? Well, I'm going to tell you that I think that the word cult is being overly
01:11:41.140politicized. So you've got people on the left saying, oh, you know, Donald Trump is a cult
01:11:50.880leader. He is not a cult leader. He is a elected president of the United States who won an election
01:11:58.260and he was president. And he then went through a process as president where he was accountable to
01:12:04.940the courts. He was accountable to the United States Congress, the Senate. They would confirm
01:12:11.000his appointments. There were checks and balances. And Donald Trump did not brainwash anybody.
01:12:17.560The people that follow him, that believe in him, they were predisposed to be in agreement with him.
01:12:26.700And he knew that when he came out and he said, do you care about these issues? And he would tick
01:12:32.560them off you know uh immigration uh you know uh china taking advantage of the united states and
01:12:42.420trade or maybe you're not a fan of nato and you feel like our nato partners aren't paying enough
01:12:48.600or whatever there was already an audience for that there was already a group of people very
01:12:54.600large group about 70 million that said you know we really like what this guy is saying and he
01:13:00.960is you know he's charismatic he's he's a a very glib speaker and he won them over on the flip
01:13:09.720side i don't think you can say that uh black lives matters or antifa are cults because i can identify
01:13:18.640that absolute authoritarian leader that is the defining element and driving force of those
01:13:25.300groups that's an object of worship so i think it's really important for people on the right
01:13:31.440and on the left to not vilify and use the word cult as an invective to tear down somebody
01:13:40.840because it has very specific meaning and when i testify as an expert in in in court that's always
01:13:48.100tested and i have to withstand cross-examination and so if i use the word destruct the words
01:13:55.380destructive cult i'm going to be very clear about why that group is defined in that way
01:14:02.240or destructive authoritarian group and i i don't think that we should politicize the word and i
01:14:09.160think it is being thrown around in a way now that is not uh helpful and also i would say it
01:14:16.020diminishes the genuine suffering of cult victims because there are people that have been brainwashed
01:14:22.860that have been victimized and hurt very badly by destructive cults and i think when we just glibly
01:14:29.580say oh you know this guy's a cult leader uh the maga people are a cult the the uh bernie bros
01:14:38.220are a cult uh bernie bernie sanders is a cult leader not really not like any cult leader i've
01:14:44.740dealt with. So I think we should just chill it out there and just kind of dial it down and not get
01:14:52.900into that, not point fingers and call people a cult leader when they're not. That was a fantastic
01:14:57.580response. How often are cult leaders women versus men? Because you've mentioned a number of female
01:15:03.940cult leaders, and I'm surprised. I think mostly I've heard about male cult leaders. Well, it's
01:15:08.080mostly a man a man's job it's mostly men but there have been some very uh very famous uh cult
01:15:16.680leaders that were women uh elizabeth claire prophet who led the group church universal and
01:15:22.780triumphant she's now dead but at one point she bought a ranch in um uh i think it's in uh wyoming
01:15:31.480primarily uh in and perhaps partially in montana from malcolm forbes the the owner of forbes
01:15:41.460magazine and this was a huge ranch it was a huge compound and she was a very formidable leader with
01:15:48.680thousands of followers and millions and millions of dollars in assets and at one point she was
01:15:54.460predicting the end of the world i think she her prediction was around 1990 and so all these people
01:16:00.620started moving into the compound and they actually had uh underground bunkers for
01:16:08.020waiting for the end and it didn't happen surprise and so some of them left and elizabeth claire
01:16:17.900prophet eventually died then there's a woman in uh spindale north carolina her name is jane
01:16:27.060Whaley. And she has presided over a group called Word of Faith Fellowship for many years. And she
01:16:35.060has been called a cult leader. And then there, let me think, well, we talked about Amy Carlson.
01:16:43.900Then there was a woman by the name of Renee Julison. Renee and her husband, but she was the
01:16:51.740real leader ran a group called victory church in grand forks north dakota and i did an oprah winfrey
01:17:00.140show uh back in 1992 exposing the group and bringing out former members that actually had
01:17:07.860tape recordings of renee julison abusing them on the phone and they were played on oprah and that
01:17:15.340was the beginning of victory church which had hundreds of members including three medical
01:17:22.860doctors two of whom i worked with personally to get them out of victory church but at one point
01:17:29.760it was one of the biggest churches in grand forks north dakota and it was a big story because oprah
01:17:35.480winfrey exposed them in fact they threatened her with a lawsuit they said we're we're going to sue
01:17:43.480you and and you can't play those tapes they're confidential you can't play them yeah and oprah
01:17:49.900said watch me and she had her lawyers and she played them on the air and boy they were very bad
01:17:57.600for the leader renee julison she ended up in orlando florida leading a bible study in a
01:18:05.080condominium condominium clubhouse and then then her i think she split from her husband and now
01:18:13.600they they died in obscurity but at one point they ruled over a very large church in grand forks
01:18:21.680wow that's wild okay that that's very interesting it's very interesting how there are people
01:18:30.220who kind of take off of christianity because you said after the cult kind of fell apart she started
01:18:37.200leading a bible study group in florida it's interesting how you get people who are reading
01:18:44.160the bible and then creating their own churches to take people's money well to not not categorize
01:18:52.540everything is christian based there is a group called summa ching hai and you can find them
01:19:00.160online big group and it's led by this woman who's originally from vietnam she now lives i think most
01:19:07.800of the time in california and she leads a group of thousands she would say much more she has a
01:19:16.200television show she has podcasts she streams and she's now 70 she's been doing this for years and
01:19:25.840she owns the largest largest chain of vegetarian restaurants i think in the world there are
01:19:32.160hundreds of them they're called loving hut and she insists that she is supreme master suma ching hai
01:19:39.980And that she leads a group that is based kind of on Buddhism and meditation, and they're intensely vegetarian, vegans.
01:19:50.380And that's a group that really doesn't identify as Christian, led by a woman, that is pretty big.
01:19:58.460Hmm. There it is. Loving Hut is a chain of vegan restaurants.
01:20:04.900OK, so if you if you start making friends with people and someone is calling them some themselves supreme leader, that's a sign that that would be a giveaway.
01:20:14.380Oh, my group is just like a regular group.
01:20:17.980But the name of our leader is Supreme Master.
01:20:21.360So the members would say we have Supreme Master in us all.
01:20:28.500But then what I would say is, yeah, but your leader uses it as a title.
01:20:33.760so why does she use it as a title and then i will ask members uh i recently was involved in an
01:20:40.860intervention i'll say can you think of anyone else that would be the equivalent of suma ching
01:20:46.900high as a supreme master and it's like no i can't you know because no one is her equal on the planet
01:20:55.200yeah you know and so people buy her jewelry they buy uh paintings of her they typically might have
01:21:04.140a large painting of her that they paid a lot of money for hanging over their living room couch
01:21:10.320you know and that's a giveaway you know when people are that caught up in the leader that
01:21:17.100you know they're basically memorializing the leader as an icon in their living room but uh
01:21:23.660most groups are not that obvious. And would you have put, just out of curiosity, would you have
01:21:29.520put somebody like Stalin in the group of cult leader? Now, there was a lot of art. There's a
01:21:36.740lot of Stalin going around. I would say the leader of North Korea, Kim, is a cult leader.
01:21:43.240I would regard that as a quasi-religious political cult that was started by his grandfather and then
01:21:49.940his father and now him i would say that adolf hitler was definitely a cult leader they weren't
01:21:56.800saying heil germany they were saying heil hitler and they talked about him as the father of the
01:22:02.400fatherland the fuhrer you know i was just watching a movie with tom cruise valkyrie in which it it
01:22:11.720it follows the attempted assassination of adolf hitler by a man by the name of stauffenberg
01:22:18.120and the way that you see the people uh you know worshiping you know photos of hitler
01:22:26.280portraits of hitler the fear the palpable fear that they have of him as if he were supernatural
01:22:33.280that's a cult it's not just a political party it's a cult and i would say stalin yes i would
01:22:41.140say so i would say also that lenin became a kind of charismatic cult leader i mean look they've
01:22:47.500got his body embalmed, and people go to Red Square to see his body. And to some extent,
01:22:54.360you know, Chairman Mao was also, could be called a political cult leader. They also have his body
01:23:03.140enshrined in Tenement Square. And then I think we could also, oh, we could look at Ayatollah Khomeini,
01:23:13.420who at one time was, I think, worshipped in Iran in a way that no other religious leader was
01:23:22.000his equivalent. I can remember when he died, there were people literally throwing themselves
01:23:29.000against the coffin as they were going through the funeral service. So I think he became an
01:23:35.620object of worship. So I think at times a political leader can be a cult leader.
01:23:40.760But I think we must be very, very careful about how we use that because these leaders that I've just described were all dictators with absolute power. They have no and had no accountability. And they were literally an object of worship. And I think if we don't see that kind of extreme expressed in a political group, we shouldn't label it a cult.
01:24:07.660I think that's fair. It's the same thing as throwing people into the Nazi category,
01:24:11.880just casually. Or comparing everything to the Holocaust. I mean, the Holocaust was millions
01:24:18.400of people dying and over 2 million children, many of them infants, that were murdered. So I think
01:24:25.960when we compare something to the Holocaust, we better choose our words carefully. And when we
01:24:30.980call somebody a Nazi, which was behind the Holocaust and the apparatus for genocide in
01:24:37.900Germany and Europe, we need to really think about that because that's a very harsh label.
01:24:44.440Can you let listeners know who are interested in learning more what they should read and where
01:24:49.920they should go online to find you if you have a presence online?
01:24:52.940Yes, they can follow me on Twitter, Rick Allen Ross, and they'll see breaking stories about
01:24:58.560cults in my Twitter feed. Same thing with Facebook. They can find the institutional
01:25:04.180Facebook page for the Cult Education Institute. There's a YouTube channel. They can find that
01:25:11.000through culteducation.com. There's a message board, a public message board, very big one,
01:25:18.540attached to the Cult Education Institute that they can also find through culteducation.com.
01:25:24.820And then if they really want to dig in and drill into the subject of cults, they can read my book, Cults Inside Out, which is available in paperback.
01:25:37.340They can download it through Kindle on Amazon, or they can get the Audible version.
01:25:41.920And it's a very comprehensive book that not only has the history of modern cults, but
01:25:48.520really delves into what makes them tick with over a thousand research footnotes and an