Two of this podcast’s hosts have been involved in destructive cult dynamics. Matthew’s three years with Michael Roach and three years at Endeavor Academy are at the root of his cult research and journalism. Julian’s six years in the inner circle around what he describes as Ana Forrest’s incendiary and manipulative approach to yoga left him with repressed memories. Those experiences also left his family deeply scarred by some of the same Satanic Panic themes prevalent in the QAnon movement. His ongoing work advocating for critical thinking and community health is part of his recovery.
Derek describes himself as being “cult-adjacent”—not uncommon for a lifelong wellness industry professional. In this episode, he’ll interview Julian and Matthew about their cult experiences, the recovery process, and cultic dynamics in modern yoga, Buddhist, and New Age communities informing the growing field of conspirituality.
They’ll also discuss cultic organizations being ideally positioned to sell “Disaster Spirituality” (props to Naomi Klein) in times of crisis. Cult leaders understand the power of charisma, the attractiveness of transcendental ideology, and what it takes to make vulnerable people feel like every question is answerable with jargon, intrusive eye contact, and deeply deceptive shit. Matthew will ground the discussion with a synopsis of cult research, basic concepts, and useful definitions.
Show Notes
The David Wolfe video about pedophilia and Trump
United States of Conspiracy | PBS documentary
QAnon Casualties: stories on Reddit
Steven Hassan’s “Influence Continuum,” which is helpful for assessing the health of influence
Great podcast about James Arthur Ray and the question of undue influence
Tony Robbins’ PR defends him when people are injured at his firewalking events
Excellent podcast series on Heaven’s Gate
The conviction of Keith Raniere
Peter Georgiades on the legal barriers to cult litigation
Daniel Shaw on “Traumatic Narcissism“
QAnon Anonymous
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And you can find us on all major podcast providers and as well as our website, conspirituality.net.
We are on YouTube at youtube.com slash conspirituality, Facebook at slash conspirituality podcast, and we are also on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you can support us at different levels and get access to subscriber content if you are interested.
And I also want to announce that we just launched a new page on conspirituality.net, which is our red pilled page.
And we are tracking wellness and yoga influencers, people in this world that are posting QAnon specific content.
And you can go to the page to find out more.
Right now it's up at conspirituality.net slash redpilled.
But we are crowdsourcing for this.
About half the page was actually sent to us by people sharing with us.
But we think it's important to track this information as it's QAnon adjacent or these people are moving into Thanks, Derek.
So, episode 11.
And we want to keep track and tabs on this so everyone has a resource to look at if they're wondering if someone they really appreciate is starting to espouse some of this rhetoric.
Thanks, Derek.
So episode 11, welcome to Cults and Disaster Spirituality.
So two of us on this podcast have been involved in destructive cult dynamics.
My own three years with Michael Roach and then another three years at Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin are at the root of my own cult research and journalism.
Now Julian spent six years in the inner circle around what he describes as Anna Forrest's incendiary and manipulative approach to yoga and repressed memories and he says that it left him and his family deeply scarred by some of the same satanic panic themes prevalent in the QAnon movement.
His ongoing work advocating for critical thinking and community health is part of his recovery.
Now, Derek describes himself as being cult-adjacent, and I don't think that's uncommon for a lifelong wellness industry professional.
In this episode, he's going to be interviewing both Julian and I about our cult years, about recovering from them, and about how cultic dynamics in modern yoga, Buddhism, and New Age communities are plainly visible in the growing field of conspirituality.
We're also going to discuss how cultic organizations are ideally positioned to sell what I'd like to call disaster spirituality in times of crisis.
Cults understand the power of charisma, the attractiveness of transcendental ideology, and they also understand how to make vulnerable people feel like every question is answerable with jargon, with intrusive eye contact, and often some deeply deceptive shit.
I'll ground the discussion with a synopsis of cult research, basic concepts, and useful definitions.
It's important to remind people that our analysis of conspiritualists is not personal.
I'll admit, with some of the more out-there posts that I see, I'm not always going to hold back my personal feelings.
Bullshit is bullshit.
But context matters, and I'm a firm believer in both the power of shame and, at times, the power of sarcasm.
That said, this week I want to focus on a video by David Wolf, someone who I used to know.
We were never close.
I DJ'd a few events that he was involved in and we hung out a few times, but we were around the same scene for a number of years, so I got to know him a little bit.
Now, later, as Matthew said in the intro, I'll be moderating the discussion on cults, and I have been cult-adjacent a number of times, but I'm also a lifelong skeptic and somewhat of a cynic.
Now, when it comes to David, I could agree with him that chocolate has wonderful health benefits and I enjoyed his products, but when he once told me that chocolate resonates on a direct frequency with the sun, I could only smile and not reply because, honestly, not every point is worth debating.
He would talk about goji berries and yacon syrup as magical superfoods.
Now, I enjoyed eating them, but that's as far as it ever went.
But I do have a problem with his recent video, which is linked to in the show notes.
It's shot in his car after an anti-mask rally in Calgary.
David calls the mask mandate that Calgary just implemented an absolute abomination and totally absurd, and that there's no way I'm wearing a mask.
Now, the efficacy of masks is debated even among health professionals, though most agree they provide some amount of protection.
But when the issue revolves around freedom instead of health, it's really hard to take seriously.
Now, but here's the bigger point.
David pivots from that statement to a supposed pedophilia symbol posted on Twitter by Governor Newsom.
And that's really why I'm discussing this video today.
How do we get from masks to pedophiles in two sentences?
There wasn't even a transition.
David then calls these politicians totally corrupt and then adds they're satanic actually.
Then he says the only thing standing between us and total tyranny is, strangely enough, Donald Trump.
He concludes with a random hit on Joe Biden and says we have entered World War III and that it's a war to save children.
Totally pilled, pilled, pilled.
Yeah.
There was a PBS documentary on conspiracy theories last week and it's in the show notes and you can watch it online for free and I highly suggest that you do.
It's all about Alex Jones, but it gives a really nice context about what we're experiencing right now.
Now, there was one part where Jones's ex-wife talked about what happened when Alex started making money for the first time.
He became consumed to the point where the only thing he could think about was making more.
And I can't help but to think that this thread of more runs through a lot of conspiritualists.
In his book, Reefer Madness, the journalist Eric Schlosser dedicates a chapter to pornography addiction, and he points out that in the early VHS days, porn was relatively tame.
Porn addicts get acclimated to the missionary position and oral sex, and once that's no longer risque, they move on to more perverse scenes.
And at some point, what was previously unthinkable becomes the only way they can get off, sometimes to the point where sex with actual humans becomes unfulfilling.
And really, that's what this QAnon rabbit hole appears to be.
Remember, it started with the ridiculous Pizzagate scandal and has only gotten crazier.
On Tuesday, shortly after the explosion in Beirut, I jumped over to Q Twitter and it only confirmed what I already knew.
The explosion was being labeled as a conspiracy before news agencies were even reporting on what caused it.
And then you have Trump suggesting it was an attack, something no other politician said, because he has to stay one step ahead of the crazies.
He knows that's where his votes are.
The more confusion and discord he can sow, the more doubt he'll cast on the system as a whole, which is the only way he's going to win this next election.
So I'm sorry, David Wolf, but if this is your dude, you have some serious self-reflection to do.
You were a very influential voice in the health community.
At some point, people figured out goji berries aren't really much of a thing in Tibet.
And so you have to stay one step ahead to stay relevant in the way that you think that trends are moving.
I really can't help but think that so many of these wellness influencers are really only using QAnon as a way to up their profile.
Like all these Republican Senators and Congressmen who've stayed quiet during Trump's reign.
They're certainly going to write memoirs about their silent resistance when he's gone.
We have it on record.
It's why we started the Red Pill page on Conspirituality.net.
You can't erase the internet.
And if your only concern is getting more followers today, you're going to pay a much bigger price in the long run.
Yeah, let's certainly hope so.
I mean, it's that whole idea of the Overton window, right?
if you can introduce into public discourse a completely unthinkable notion to the point where it becomes part of everyone's, you know, everyday lexicon that they're exposed to, it starts to seem less bizarre.
I wrote that entire piece thinking of the Overton window.
I didn't mention it explicitly, so thank you, but that was in my mind and that's exactly what happens with situations like this.
This might be, I don't think we can answer this question really, but Derek, did you get the sense when you were chatting about the chocolate that David wanted to share some sort of like internal, I don't know, revelatory experience with you that he thought you might bond over?
Or did he want to convey data that would convince you that there was another reason to buy the chocolate?
I think he really believes a lot of what he says.
I've always got that sense.
But as I mentioned in that, I'm always been cynical and I think it's just growing up with a father who has a very strong bullshit detector.
I've had one too.
And there was always, always an element of salesmanship.
Because whatever he was talking about at that time is something that his company was selling.
Right.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, and those kinds of statements from him and other people like him, you know, there's always a sensationalist kind of sales pitch angle and those sorts of things are not just said in private, they're said from the big stage.
They're said, you know, to large groups of people that I have found the secret.
I'm realizing just listening to you say that, that actually wellness influencers are ideally situated to actually take up QAnon rhetoric and sell it really well, because they've developed the charismatic strategies over the years.
They're going to be better performers.
You know, I know that one of the reasons, I'm sure that one of the reasons that Plandemic did so well is that Mickey Willis is really good at setting stages.
And, you know, at the sort of, you know, back room level or dark armpit level of QAnon communications, I'm not seeing that same kind of performative staging.
One thing too I noticed about David, getting to Julian's point, is that it didn't matter if we were sitting at Pure Fruit & Wine.
I remember he took a bunch of us out once for like 12 to 15 people or something and took us all out.
And when he was performing there, or whether he was performing on a stage, or whether I was talking one-on-one, It was always the same level of engagement.
It didn't really change on, and that's not always the case with some of the figures that I've dealt with, but it would definitely seem to be with him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What you got Julian?
What's up this week in conspirituality?
I'm quoting.
Postponing death as long as possible at any cost is written into our response to COVID-19.
But who's to say it's worth it to not have weddings and dances and group hugs and carnivals and concerts and all the things we used to do that we've sacrificed on the altar of safety?
That's Charles Eisenstein.
Oh, really?
At it again.
He has a new promotional video announcing a nine-day course called Political Hope.
And I want to suggest to our listeners that we are witnessing the emergence of a shiny new COVID-era grift.
I'm going to call it Know-Nothing Populism.
I know that sounds unkind, it sounds mean, but it's based on the express idea that science and reason are not reliable paths to truth.
Eisenstein is somehow sure-footed in the slippery stance that essentially Wisdom lies in not knowing anything.
I'm quoting again, wisdom is only possible when we let go of identifying with being right.
So take my new course and learn how to unlock polarized conversations by letting in new truths that unravel your entire worldview.
Now this pitch is going out for a course on a website that links yoga, alternative medicine, and political activism, and it speaks pretty clearly to a demographic that tends to be overwhelmingly socially liberal.
I think of these folks as the Obama voters, who are now vulnerable to conspiritualist COVID denialism, doubting the veracity of science as ever being apolitical, and who lately are learning to savor Q-infused ingredients in their immune-supporting smoothies.
Charles says his 15 or 20 years contemplating the question, what is the origin of the wrongness in the world, have apparently revealed deeper answers about what has to change that are beyond the reach of a mere partisan victory.
The bigger terror, he intones, is not what happens if my candidate loses, but what if my candidate wins and nothing changes?
Now, the course is being offered on the website OneCommune.com, where founder Jeff Krasnow also interviewed him for their podcast.
From listening, my sense is that Krasnow is giving Eisenstein a platform based on a perception of him as a legitimate intellectual.
He asks thoughtfully framed questions around geopolitics, science, and the pandemic crisis, and gives him generous opportunities to differentiate what he is saying From the most outlandish conspiracy theories only to be met with Charles's thin analysis and weakly argued talking points.
But how do you know those are just conspiracy theories, says our poster boy for freshman skepticism.
Eisenstein, recently quoted by Second Lady Ivanka, stakes out the oddly relativist and indeed alt-right position that the left has now become authoritarian.
In its embrace of quarantine and insistence that they are following what he calls a dogmatic angle on what is essentially unknowable science, based merely in narrative warfare.
True to his style, reality must be somewhere in the middle.
And because the supposedly religious dogmas of science have failed to create utopia, now our new hero of know-nothing populism can arise.
Surely, he reflects, it is grasping at straws to explain Japan's effectiveness at containing the pandemic with the boring old go-to explanations about contact tracing and cultural collectivism's ability to follow the rules around masks and social distancing.
Of course, says Eisenstein, we don't really know what is going on here.
He borrows from Chopra and Sheldrake in claiming that science has grown into an arrogant protection of quasi-religious dogmas.
Good luck, he says, from within the scientific establishment trying to study UFOs or to find evidence for alternative cures.
For coronavirus, you'll find hostility if you come up with a study that demonstrates that Artemisia, as many African nations are saying, is an effective treatment for COVID-19.
He goes on to repeat Trumpian talking points, complete with the opening, some people are saying, if you test more people, you're going to have more cases.
Some people are saying if you test more people, you're going to have more cases.
So, so he continues, I asked doctors I know, and more of them are saying the numbers are inflated by overreporting.
I saw a graph from Florida with plummeting death rates.
So who knows?
I don't know.
Let me just say.
I am increasingly skeptical of the official narratives.
My worry is that this is conspiracy light.
It's perhaps even QAnon light, and it is a gateway drug.
If the problem with liberal politics, remember this free course is called Political Hope, is that we are not open enough to take right-wing talking points on board and have our worldview unravel in a kind of fetishized Spiritually profound revelation of knowing nothing, rejecting the science, and just asking the questions, then where is any inoculation against the deluge of conspirituality and political obfuscation?
The lines are blurring between right and left, asserts Eisenstein.
Well, Charlie, that's partly because of the giant eraser you're holding gleefully with both of your opportunistic hands.
This week I noticed, too, a real increase in Yoga Wellness Circle posting about pedophilia and child sex trafficking.
These, of course, are hugely important concerns, right?
Who's not in favor of cracking down on this abomination?
But make no mistake about the drive to frame this election around Trump as the hero who saves and supports these kids and the Democrats as either criminally negligent or Or in cahoots with the elite, pedophile, satanic, child blood drinkers, as we have heard David Avocado Wolf now claims.
Ivanka and Fox News and 45 himself all sent out the same tweet on Tuesday about budgeting $35 million to 73 organizations in 33 states to provide resources for sex trafficking survivors.
How wonderful.
But this is deliberately delivered red meat to the Q loyalists?
And it's an attempt to keep influencing the politically naive into seeing 45 as a heroic figure finally saving the children when supposedly the Democrats don't care, even though funding for all of those kinds of initiatives went up under Obama and we're at higher levels than they are now.
Or even worse, the grotesque and ludicrous slander that the Democrats themselves are involved in satanic, blood-drinking child sacrifice.
Meanwhile, POTUS publicly wishes actual child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell well as she awaits trial in the Southern District of New York.
Maxwell, of course, the decades-long intimate companion of Trump associate and friend Jeffrey Epstein, for whom she allegedly procured, groomed, and trafficked the underage girls photographed at parties with Donald Trump himself.
There it is.
Isn't it amazing that the week before they were going to donate $35 million to this cause, that Ivanka and Jared were shown to earn $36 million in 2019 from their White House roles.
So I found that number just very interesting.
And I also wonder, Julian, was this a play off of the Know Nothing Party, the American political party?
No.
Okay.
I mean, they preceded the Whigs.
So the Know Nothing Party, they were formed in the 1850s.
They were anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and they started as a secret society.
And that party lasted for, they were an alternative, a political party, a real one for a while, and they became the Whigs after a while.
But when you say that, I always think of that party.
I always wonder about the commodification of the self-regulatory techniques of meditation that we see, I think, in Eisenstein's work, because, you know, there's a long history, a 30, 40 year history now that's seeped its way into various forms of psychotherapy, but it's come mainly out of mindfulness movements and then the institutions like
You know, IMS and Aropa University and so on that teach these personal techniques for evaluating the ways in which, you know, the superego or your internal morality is dividing up your world in ways that might be anxiety producing, right?
And so I really wonder the extent to which Eisenstein is like bootstrapping what's essentially like an internal technique of self-regulation into an argument for some sort of new political paradigm or discourse that Can't really have any result because it's not really about the external world.
It's about, I mean, the entire, what you're describing is that somehow the world will be better if we figure out how to be more internally regulated, right?
And certainly, you know, self-regulation is helpful, but, you know, are you hearing anything about Public schools versus vouchers in the States or about, you know, the abortion issue or the Voting Rights Act or does he, I mean, is there any, is there anything that's not abstract in this course portfolio, Julian?
You know, what was interesting in listening to the podcast is that I made a note of the minute in the podcast where I first heard some kind of gesture towards a substantive political point and it was 47 minutes in.
And at 47 minutes in, but it's, but it's, it's deeply conflicted, right?
Because at that, I was conflicted hearing it at 47 minutes in, he says, he says that if you really want to make the world better for black and brown people, instead of focusing on things like bringing down monuments, right, and Black Lives Matter protests, you really should be addressing third world debt.
And it's like, okay, you know, this is a six of one, half a dozen of the other.
These things have to necessarily be in contradiction with each other.
But in any case, like he actually entered into a material discussion at minute 47.
Right.
Okay.
Exactly.
Exactly.
The rest of the time, and I'm so glad that you actually mentioned that, Matthew, because I'm providing some material for our Patreon supporters this week.
And what I did was a 20-minute video going into more depth on exactly what you're saying.
Right.
On how the combination of extreme postmodern relativism and a sort of misapplication of non-dual philosophy from the Eastern traditions has.
Has brought about this sort of lens through which to try and see everything as if the answer to all of our political problems is to overcome the duality of disagreeing with one another and a sort of higher consciousness in which everything is included.
I would love to see an economic analysis of why that happens and how it grows because my gut is saying that once people saturate the mindfulness and self-regulation market, it's very difficult to grow beyond that without creating a new application for your little meditation technique.
And so I'm just interested in how does anybody bootstrap meditation and non-duality into a political discussion as though they're the same category of, you know, reality or discourse at all?
And there's got to be something in there around There's a way in which there's enough people who are enculturated into the language of mindfulness that they believe that the next step in their self-regulatory process is to somehow make that into a political system or something like that.
There's nowhere for it to go.
There's nowhere for it to go.
Like, I've often remarked that the wellness industry and the yoga industry actually has no product, right?
Like, it's a how many billion dollars?
I keep forgetting.
Is it a four billion dollar?
Forty.
Forty billion dollar U.S.
industry and it has no product except for the aspirational self, right?
Like, the only thing that yoga and Buddhism can actually provide with its consumer Materially, is the projection of an improved personality and improved, you know, internal regulation.
But I think there's some people who feel like that's not enough, right?
That there's got to be something else there.
And maybe we can imagine that there's going to be a political paradigm that emerges out of my calm breathing technique, you know?
It's bizarre.
It's bizarre.
I think it has something to do with there's nowhere for the industry to go when it doesn't actually make anything.
And you also, and this is a point I've mentioned before, but you also need a public that hasn't really had to struggle politically for that to work on.
Because if they had struggled, they wouldn't fall for that.
Because we're seeing it, we're seeing evidence of it right now.
This is the first time a lot of people have been truly asked to sacrifice on a societal level, and they can't deal with that.
everything becomes anti-sovereign, anti-freedom when they're just like protect older people, to protect children.
Like that's, you know, that, so you need that public in order for a $40 billion industry to even exist. - Yeah.
All right, well, I still have a cognitive migraine from the interview that you did, Derek, with Imran last week in episode 10.
Especially the realization that engaging with conspiritualists, like out of empathy, out of the yearning to mend or restore, you know, some sort of sane relationship, it actually increases the engagement of their content.
So the most generous thing you can do in terms of attachment behavior, which is to try to stay present with a person that you're undergoing conflict with, that is actually exploited by the algorithm to keep the controversial content active and your eyeballs on the screen.
I think I understood that social media was engineered to capture attention and manipulate emotions.
I mean, that's not new.
I think all three of us grew up pre-digitally and we recognized what television ads were doing.
You know, obviously they're capturing us emotionally, but what I didn't understand was that the attention economy Just by its very nature is actually set up to exploit not just the emotions but emotional relationships, but the bonding itself.
So it's like structurally technologically abusive.
Like your friend gets pilled by QAnon or something even milder and if you try to stick it out with them because it breaks your heart and you know it could damage her family and you do it on Facebook because that's where she's acting out, Mark Zuckerberg is, like, eating popcorn and watching the money pour in.
So, like, fuck that guy.
And Jack Dorsey, too.
I had no idea that... It was just revelatory to realize that the basic drive to be empathetic and to reconcile itself feeds into the attentional dollars.
So, you know, I guess on a side note, It made me think too about how the friends and the friend or the family member who get pulled into Conspiratuality or QAnon And they're not in conflict.
They find their group.
They find their people.
They think they've found new friends.
But they haven't.
What's happened is that they've formed really fragile and volatile alliances.
That will betray them as soon as there's some sort of human need for generosity or nuance or as soon as, you know, one person in a group wants to speak outside of the ideological rules.
So, you know, it really reminds me of most of the relationships that people form in cults.
The trust really isn't in each other.
It's manipulated by the leader or their needs.
Or in the case of QAnon, it's manipulated by the social contagion of this leaderless and highly manipulated meme.
So, yeah, I guess one other thing that's on my mind for this week in conspirituality is a little bit unfocused, and you've referenced it a little bit, Julian, but I'll put it out there.
I know this is going to come up again as we talk about cults and your experience.
And I'm going to give a big trigger warning because it too refers to the core panic at the heart of QAnon, which is ritual child abuse.
Now, in conspirituality, the language around ritual child abuse is domesticated, it's softened down, and the appeal is to child trafficking, and that's what you were referring to earlier.
And as you said, it's obviously a real problem, and it's dealt with by real social workers and real investigators.
But then when BS happens, like the recent Wayfair conspiracy theory, when that starts flying around, those same workers get overwhelmed with reports that children are being bought and sold through furniture boxes.
And that's not cool for them.
It actually obstructs their work.
So we've posted an article about that from Reuters in the show notes.
Just as with the satanic panic of the late 1980s and the early 90s, Fictional fantasies of a pandemic of strangers abducting and abusing children obscure the very real fact that the overwhelming percentage of abuse happens within families.
So now we have all kinds of conspiritualists and QAnon adjacent people Posting this widely cited number from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
It's a U.S.
nonprofit that has recorded that 800,000 children per year go missing in the U.S.
But when they post it, they imply that all of those 800,000 are trafficked and somehow they permanently disappear.
But that's not the truth.
When Reuters looks into that, they show that within that stat, 200,000 of the 800,000 are abducted in child custody battles.
Also very tragic.
A bunch of them have run away.
58,000 of them are targeted for sex exploitation by friends of the family.
That's very important.
Friends of the family.
And 99% of them make it home alive.
And of the 800,000 children who disappear, only 115 are stranger abductions.
So that happens.
It's horrible.
But catastrophic fantasies about how it happens and how much it happens really don't help.
And this is what I'm getting to.
Fantasy is a good word here.
The zeal with which this theme is zipping around social media really has the feeling of people wanting it to be true.
And that was a big part of the landscape that generated the satanic panic of the 1990s.
Lots and lots of zealous therapists Some of them earnestly wanting to help people, but deluded or, you know, totally mistaken.
Wanting to help adults elucidate memories of having been abused.
Now, some of those memories would be real, and some of those memories would turn out not to be real.
But they had a theory about what was ailing everyone, and for whatever reason, they really wanted that theory to be true.
So now we've got paranoid fantasies about the amount of child trafficking and abuse as a core theme of conspirituality in QAnon.
Then we have, I'm going to put this together with something else, then we have the equally potent fixation on vaccines as a form of child abuse.
And in my social feeds, what I'm seeing is child abuse, vaccination, child abuse, vaccination.
It really seems like the other stuff, the other themes have less traction.
Like, I don't know, do you think I'm right?
Like 5G has kind of fallen off the map, right?
Yeah, that's something that MROD had mentioned.
They tried it, it worked for a little, and then it failed.
Exactly.
And then trying to prove that Fauci created the virus in Wuhan didn't really go anywhere.
That popped up for a couple of days.
Hydroxychloroquine.
Hydroxychloroquine is a suppressed treatment.
I think carries probably too much baggage of Trump recommending it.
And now it's got the Dr. Stella promoting it as well, and she's been dragged too.
So if there are two keynotes in conspirituality and QAnon land, it's child abuse and vaccination.
And if we're talking about the definition of conspirituality, that's the conspiracy part.
Child abuse and vaccination.
And the spiritual solutions on offer there, then, are the transcendence of normal human relationships and medication-free, vaccine-free natural living.
And both themes, vaccination, child abuse, contain factual basis.
Child trafficking happens.
Vaccine injury happens.
And in the bizarro world that this podcast is dedicated to, both are mobilized as propaganda.
And I've been feeling this connection between the two and my gut says that they're playing off one another.
Like why have they both been sustained in this kind of mutual dance for so long?
And in one of those like Liminal moments when I'm falling asleep, they kind of came together in two layers.
And this is what I've come up with.
The first layer is simpler.
There's an obvious relationship between child abuse and vaccination.
Eula Biss talks about it.
You know, there's this thing about both being forms of penetrative violation and pollution.
And a lot of conspiritual people have linked the two.
And in the UK anti-vax movement back in 2015, there was a whole ad campaign about it that compared vaccination to rape.
And of course, public health there went bananas and asked for it to be taken down.
And the conflation is not just imaginal through forced penetration.
It also plays on the tensions of belief.
Because the struggles for sexual assault victims to be believed is, in these campaigns, implicitly compared to the struggle of the vaccine injured to be believed.
And of course, sexual assault victims don't lie in the vast majority of cases.
So the conflation between rape and vaccination carries with it the message that not believing children are harmed by vaccination is akin to advocating for rape culture.
Not believing the children is like not believing women.
That's what we're being presented with.
And there's a creepy side note here.
There's one anti-vax person who came onto my Facebook page and implied that I was abusing my children by having them vaccinated.
So where my brain went with that immediately was, I don't think it would be a leap for this person or somebody like them to believe, even if they don't say it, that I'm abusing my children in other ways as well.
Here's the second layer.
It's a little bit more murky, and it comes out of this bit of alarmist pseudoscience I've been hearing from the anti-vax crowd.
They say that vaccines change your DNA.
Now, there's some qualified truth to vaccines interacting with your DNA, but these folks are talking about it as though, you know, a vaccine is going to turn you into a GMO tomato.
It's kind of compelling that with one jab, the vaccine will change your DNA.
And DNA really is secular pop culture poetry for your eternal soul.
So, my brain made this leap.
Wasn't the entire satanic panic exactly that?
An implantation of a toxic memory that changed everything about you.
That made the person believe their dad was a Satanist.
And when we're talking about changing our DNA, we're talking about reorganizing the past and the future.
Anti-vaxxers are panicked about vaccines changing their children's DNA.
But what happens when they combine this belief with the fantasy of 800,000 children per year being trafficked?
So, my armchair psychoanalysis that I've come up with is that if you hold the belief that vaccines are child abuse, you're going to need an awful lot of children to become sick.
You're going to need a whole world full of sick children.
The more sick children, the better.
The more traumatized they are, the better.
You're going to need lots and lots of sick children to validate your story.
And who are those children?
This is crucial because you need it to be other children who are sick.
Never your children.
Other children who are abused and traumatized while you keep yours in homeschool and you don't vaccinate them.
It's never your children.
And you can see how this begins to harmonize with tribalism and fascism.
And what better way to destabilize a future generation of children, not your children, than to spread the story that some huge number of them is being targeted, kidnapped, and abused by strangers.
If you really believe that vaccines change your DNA, then it makes total sense to get right into that cultural memory bank and create traumatic memories.
But the tragedy is, we have way more than enough trauma to deal with already.
Can I bring up one point that's related, but it really made me think of it right now?
Yeah.
It has to do with languaging and you really brilliantly brought that up in this, but the language that we use defines our reality.
I mean, language is a communication tool.
It's our way of expressing our reality.
So we all, even though we're all speaking English, we have different ways of expressing and understanding reality because of that.
And I'm reading a book right now called Chemically Imbalanced, which is about Psychiatric medication and Davis had interviewed 80 volunteers who have been on it or have had mental health disorders and he talks a lot about the language used and when psychiatry went to clinical neuroscience and started borrowing that language, it really changed people's perceptions of their problems.
So instead of their past or I mean the the satanic panic the the 90s incident is a great example of that but Of people placing memories in instead of the working through the past or working out your issues that you may have.
Psychiatry has really gone to a place where people go in expecting a script and what they're being sold is that you have a chemical imbalance.
Now, Robert Whittaker, who I've talked to and you've talked to, has shown that drugs like Prozac actually create chemical imbalances.
They don't address them.
But it's the language that really interests me.
Because if you go in thinking, well, this is genetic, this is something, I'm wired wrong.
That's way different than saying, well, I've had some past trauma that I need to work through.
It's very disempowering in a sense.
You're giving over your power.
And those threads that you're connecting just remind me of ways that people give over their power instead of actually As the QAnon will say, do your research, but actually understanding that if there's 800,000 children going missing every year, but only 115 of them are actually what they're addressing, then there's a real problem with languaging that's happening.
Right, for sure.
Now we're going to talk a bit about cult indoctrination.
And I've mentioned and Matthew mentioned me being cult adjacent.
I just want to briefly explain what I mean by that is that I've been around people who, if given the opportunity, would start a cult or actively trying to.
The two biggest examples that come up in my head are when I was in yoga teacher training.
I believe the person I studied under Would take that power I don't think he was actually that ambitious But he was definitely trying to and the manipulation came through because during my program He was arrested for sexually abusing one of the students in the program and there are other issues that we don't need to get into and the other one I think is interesting culturally is is veganism which I was vegan for a few years and I by no way think that I Even most vegans are cultish.
I really think that there are a lot of health concerns that people are addressing and food distribution supply chain concerns that are valid.
But having been in that environment, I will definitely say that some of the languaging of this is the only way to live for purity definitely invades that.
So I've seen cults In a sense, I've seen the way that propaganda takes over people's consciousness to where they think that that is the only way that they can live.
So, Matthew and Julian, as mentioned, have both been involved in varying levels of what they believe to be cultic experiences.
Matthew has explained His past many times before, but Julian has never actually publicly explained his experiences.
And so he's going to start talking a bit about his indoctrination process and what it did to his family.
And then we're going to go into a broader discussion about being in a cult, recovering it, helping people get out of them and things of that nature.
Thanks, Derek.
Yeah, you know, getting into this topic, it's still something I'm unpacking and making sense of all these years later, and the only way I knew how to get into it was to tell you a story, so bear with me, dear listener.
My hands were never doing it right, you see.
In fact, she would tell me often to stop doing that weird thing with your hands, Julian.
Sometimes with my arms raised in Warrior One, sometimes in Cobra with my hands on the floor.
Make your hands flash.
Stop doing that with your wrist.
I was not alone in this nitpicking.
This was her gift.
This is why we came.
A small group of insiders, which usually included at least two or three celebrities, crowded into a heated yoga room that was small enough to be packed mat-to-mat at 25 students, a big class in L.A.
in 1993.
We came because Anna could see everything.
Like an eagle out of the Native American tradition, she claimed it was as if she hovered above the room, exerting unflinching control, eyes missing nothing.
She knew when you checked out and stopped being present in your body.
She knew when you failed to complete your inhale.
She knew about your injuries, how to heal them, and what you should never ever do so as to protect you from the injuries you didn't even know that you might one day develop.
But more than this, she knew what your injuries represented in terms of a trauma history you had clearly repressed, but that she could accurately perceive, because Anna Forrest could see energy.
I was 23 when I started my informal apprenticeship, and those 7 a.m.
two-hour classes in the 85-degree room above a laundromat were an initiation for me.
We did full-on roars during Lion's Breath.
We sobbed.
Sometimes someone would scream and be carried by her from the room in the middle of a flashback.
Otherwise, except for her voice, it was dead quiet in there.
Just the sound of super focused ujjayi breathing like a giant bellows.
We would do long standing pose sequences facing her as she guided us through, enduring deep holds as she smiled like a coyote.
Cajoled, encouraged, and scolded.
More often than not, the emotional outbursts were due to a combination of staying in these standing postures until we were trembling, and having her verbally correct every physical, technical detail, whilst also, from across the room, naming the searingly personal reasons she believed each of us might unconsciously have
Boundaries were not her thing.
We became friends.
She and I spent time together, talked on the phone.
She was open about her torment, her self-loathing, her complicated and frankly weird romantic entanglements.
Through this odd mixture of power, insight, and deep brokenness, her courageous authenticity inspired me.
Anna held community ceremonies for Solstice and Equinox each year, and this is where I learned to love and fear the power of the sharing circle.
We each took turns exposing our hearts to the room, and it was often beautiful, moving, and inspiring.
The emphasis was on telling the truth, and really stepping into owning the work we were doing to heal, and asking spirit and the community to support you.
For me, it was a refreshing departure from the Venice Beach light and love New Age stuff I found so lightweight and disingenuous.
Anna always shared in these circles, too.
As it turned out, her life had been an absolute nightmare, and there were seemingly more horrific details each time we gathered, sold into prostitution from age six.
Kept high on drugs so she could be used in grotesque sex rituals.
Every bone in her body broken by abusive adults.
It went on and on.
Surely, if someone like her could heal from this approach to yoga, all of us could too.
Each time we gathered, the ante was upped.
Who would have a more gut-wrenching trauma tale to tell?
Who would expose their most shameful secret this time?
Anna set the tone, and we all followed suit.
This tradition continued on through my teacher training with her and even intensified, as did her self-proclaimed gift as being the one who could see all of our unresolved and even unconscious pain and suffering.
As I got to know her better, I found out that she had recovered her abuse memories not only from this life, but also from her previous horrific incarnations, too, via hypnotherapy.
She confided in me that the yoga studio was actually a healing center and it drew people in energetically with repressed sexual trauma whether they knew it or not.
Now during teacher training I had a romance with a young woman who lived in Northern California.
At this point I was already teaching so Anna was my boss but we also interacted like friends in a lot of ways.
And she was my teacher and mentor, a very powerful one.
So, of course, she asked me over the phone now how it was going with this young woman I was having a romance with, smirkingly asking if she had figured out yet who had raped her.
She had not.
It was also during that training that I briefly had a rash in my groin area from all the weekly hours in a heated room wearing sweaty clothes.
On another phone call, Anna suggested to me that I close my eyes and just ask my body, given that we were in deep ceremony during the training, what past trauma this rash might be somatizing for me?
And I don't, I honestly don't remember exactly how we got there, But I ended up entertaining the thought that my father had perhaps bitten my genitals when I was very young.
Oh no.
Yeah.
This began a two-year period in which I was obsessed with trying to figure out if my father had molested me.
Surely this would explain so much.
Perhaps all of my emotional pain, my insecurities, my imperfections, could be organized around this one repressed or awful truth that, if discovered, could finally set me free.
Perhaps it would explain the deep sobs and moans that would come out of me on the yoga mat, the massage table, or the ways my body would spontaneously move when I did deep cathartic breath work.
I also sought out off-label psychedelic therapy, as you do, right?
So as to try and blow open Whatever defenses were stubbornly keeping me from finally remembering.
Eventually, I accused my father, told my mother she had to face the truth with me, and demanded that they pay for therapy.
Looking back, at some level, I believe I thought this was what I needed to go through to become like Anna.
Perhaps to win her approval.
Perhaps to also become a powerful teacher and healer.
Perhaps to feel I too had gained mastery over the worst kind of ordeal and could now be a warrior for truth.
Truth.
The truth is my dad is a recovered alcoholic.
He was 23 and my mother 18 when I was born.
Two years later came my brother.
Dad was unstable, drunk, he cheated, he got in bar fights, he was unpredictable, explosive, angry, domineering, insecure.
He drove dangerously with us in the car when drunk and angry, yelled, threatened, and even on a few occasions hit my brother and I. He has owned up to all of this and expressed his remorse.
It took the better part of the first two years of intensive and legitimate therapy, which my parents did pay for, to recognize that there had in fact been no sexual abuse.
I still had a lot of work to do to unpack all the real trauma, the wounding of my developing sense of self, the complicated layers of my pain and inadequacy that did not actually reduce to one terrible repressed memory.
The sexual abuse was a preoccupation I had formed in that community and under the influence of that teacher, which ate me alive with the obsession of trying to heroically tear back the curtain of denial so as to become my true self.
It took the better part of 10 years to rebuild my relationship with my parents, but it's really good now.
Sad to say, even 20 years later, my brother is still scarred.
and angry, he cannot make sense of any of it or truly forgive me.
I taught out of Anna's studio for 11 years, and I'll never forget the last time I ever took a class with her.
Ever more famous now and in demand, she had been leading trainings and workshops out of town a lot for the previous few years, and she was in now for a big local teacher training The practice sessions of which were open to us forest yoga teachers and other advanced students.
She rented a much bigger space to fit everyone in.
I remember lying on my mat, listening to her nasty and harsh tone of voice and the way she was berating the group and then picking on certain individuals.
I remember thinking, wow, she's having a really bad day.
That's amazing.
It's amazing, Julian.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
where came the real previously repressed thought.
I don't ever have to be in a room that she is teaching in again.
And I haven't been. - That's amazing.
It's amazing, Julian.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
That's just an incredibly riveting and harrowing story.
I can't believe, I didn't know that.
I didn't know that about you.
And I didn't know about the impacts upon your family.
And that's just incredible.
That's 10 years of stress and, yeah, interruption and confusion.
I'm sorry that it's not, that your brother, that you're not mended with him.
That sucks.
That's terrible.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I mean, I think what's so complicated about it is how much How much real psychological work did need to happen, how dysfunctional the family actually was, and how going down this bizarre kind of fantasy, satanic panic, repressed memory kind of avenue actually hijacked.
It was a distraction.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
There's our theme, right?
And what, when you were being verbally abused, like when you were being told you weren't enough, you were doing it wrong.
What did you think you were getting out of those, that, her teaching in that sense?
Well, it's really interesting, right?
Because in the last few years, there's been more and more, uh, Revealing of how both Iyengar and Potabi Joyce were actually very, very insulting, very physically abusive, very demeaning in terms of their teaching style.
And it was thought of as sort of the norm.
I feel like she had taken that on in a certain way, even though she was very critical of them, which is part of how, part of why I trusted her.
She really saw them as abusive cult leaders and what she was doing is different.
I felt that I was learning how to do it right.
That she was a tough teacher because she wanted us to get it right.
That she was the only one who knew how not to injure yourself.
That her idiosyncratic set of cues that were very different from what was taught across the street at Yoga Works were the real cues that were going to keep you safe from injury and help you to do it correctly.
But deeper than that was the sense that she was She was trying to hold us accountable for our rackets, which was a word that she used that comes out of the est lexicon, the ways in which we were fooling ourselves, the ways in which we were hiding our true feelings and our repressed memories.
And so, yeah, I think I felt like I was being supported in becoming a better version of myself.
The idea that those people over there are cult leaders, I'm not, and I have the right way to do this.
Matthew, is that something that you experienced with your indoctrinations?
Well, explicitly with one and not explicitly with the other, Michael Roach wouldn't say that.
He would imply that there had been some sort of lost magic in the transmission of and the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism that nobody else was getting, and that his particular take on, you know, emptiness theory was, you know, in actual fact what the entire thing was about, and that he had the personal experience to back that up.
But he also had a kind of etiquette around that, that really restricted him until he really went off the rails from stating that explicitly.
The other guy in Endeavor Academy was, his name was Charles Anderson, he died in 2008, and he was completely obsessed with other spiritual leaders and other cult leaders, and he always wanted to
Talk about how full of shit they were and how they were delusional and how they were dreaming and how and how they hadn't woken up and that was that was a deep part of his shtick but with both of them they they both had the
To varying degrees, the charismatic certainty that allowed people to think that somehow they were being looked through and that, as Julian was describing about Anna, that they could be seen by her or by Michael or by Charles in ways that they had never been seen before.
Some of that was purely a ruse, right?
Like when I showed up at Endeavor Academy in 2000 or maybe 1999, you know, Charles Anderson walked into the session room, which was like a big Darshan thing, and he would start doing his teaching and he singled me out of the crowd and he took off his sock.
And he hit me over the head and he said he said well it looks like the Buddhist has arrived because of course I just come from a Buddhist cult and I thought that he had intuited that and and that that moreover that hitting me with the sock was kind of reminiscent of Marpa hitting Milarepa with his sandal and I so I thought there was some really interesting weird stuff going on and I was kind of taken aback and and
And that was part of the sleight of hand that I hadn't seen behind the curtain of because, of course, he had informants who told him where everybody was coming from.
But what Julian describes in terms of, you know, Ana being able to see into everybody, into their inner beings, into their past, even into their past lives, this is a very common thread within charismatic leadership.
A shaman once spit on me during a peyote ceremony and all I got was really mad.
I've had better shamans.
That one was a little rough.
But when you were telling your story, Julian, one thing that jumped out at me was talking about the emoting that happened in class.
One thing that I remember from taking your class a number of times, is that there was this space where, especially there were predominantly women in that class, were very free to emote verbally during the class.
Whether that was a sigh, I wouldn't say there was any yelling, but just sighing, like this deep thing.
What I really appreciate about it, though, was the way you positioned yourself in that class was you were never really front and center.
You were always out on the sides and letting people have their experience.
And I wonder if you took things from Anna's class and realized the value of some of it and perhaps changed some of that.
Was that conscious?
Am I just extrapolating too much here?
Because there seem to be some threads.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, she was the biggest influence on me.
I taught at her studio for 11 years.
I was studying with her for probably three or four of those years after I had begun teaching.
And there were aspects of the intersection of somatic psychology as it was, I think, understood in its early forms and yoga practice that I think she was Dabbling in, that also influenced me.
And yet, the authoritarian, demanding, physically precise, that very kind of clinical, like, we're in this space and it's completely quiet and we're breathing really intensely and she's correcting every cue in this exacting way.
All of that, I found myself, I was never really drawn to teaching that way.
But over time, I was definitely asking myself, how do I not do the things that she did that I felt had not been beneficial to me?
And yet there was still something there around wanting to hold a space in which people felt permission to feel and to sigh sometimes if they wanted to sigh and that emotions are perfectly natural and they might come up.
But thank you for your Your observation, I definitely did start to feel that I wanted to be more of a space holder and a facilitator than someone who had all of the attention focused on me.
Well, also somebody who's holding space is not somebody who's commodifying the emotions of other people and manipulating them, because that's what you're describing in this kind of fake group psychotherapy in which she's encouraging oversharing and confessions and elaborations upon confessions.
And then she's modeling that in your description by saying that with every group circle, she's adding something to her personal story.
And I just wanted to point out that, you know, saying nothing about the veracity of her claims, the pattern, the storyline of the ritual abuse that I was involved in from the age of six,
It really follows some of the key literature that comes out of the Satanic Panic era, especially Michelle Remembers and things like The Courage to Heal.
So I'm just wondering if that was a cultural influence that was in the air as well.
And did you have access to that?
I know Derek's supposed to be interviewing you, but sorry.
Absolutely.
That's OK.
Very open conversation.
Absolutely.
I think that that was a huge influence on her.
I didn't have access to it.
I didn't know anything about it.
Actually, it took my parents in the mid-90s saying to me, hey, are you aware of this phenomenon called false memory syndrome?
Are you aware of all of these court cases of all these people who claimed horrific sexual trauma and satanic abuse?
And I said, no, I don't know about this.
And that was part of actually what helped me to slowly break the trance.
But the other thing I'll say in terms of those circles, Is that we even had a circle with her during teacher training where a group of us got together and said, we want to request that you be kinder, that you be less harsh, that you be sort of less insulting in terms of how you give us feedback while we're in the room together.
And we all took our turn saying, you know, very from the heart, expressing how this is painful and we understand that you're just trying to be a good teacher, but may we make this respectful request?
And she listened.
And when it got around to her, she said, I have to tell you that I've had this conversation several times before, and each time I've asked Spirit if my healing gift can come through with more kindness, and Spirit said no.
This is the way it has to come through.
Oh wow, so it's Spirit's fault.
You have to take it up with Spirit.
I just was reading somebody talking about, because with the psychedelic combo, there has been a lot more murder of frogs to get this poison, this toxin that makes people hallucinate.
And somebody who is a combo practitioner said that the pact between frogs and humans was made long ago.
And the frogs agreed that it was beneficial for humans to take the toxin off of them.
And obviously, there are sustainable ways of doing it.
It's not a rip on the medicine.
I've never tried it.
But the ways that we transfer, I do want to ask this.
I want to ask both of you.
And Matthew, we could start with you.
But Julian, I'm also interested if while you were fully involved and drinking the Kool-Aid, let's just say, you were fully in there.
Was anyone in your group skeptical?
And if so, how did you feel about their skepticism?
So I just want to point out that I'll say something about drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit later when I do my Cult 101 rundown.
But I would say that there was the, in Michael Roach's group, there was the veneer of appreciating feedback and skepticism.
That had a particular limit.
In fact, he would use the Buddhist adage of, you know, don't trust what I say, you have to test it for yourself over and over again, but he would do it in a way that actually didn't allow you to test it for yourself because he was the only one who gave you access to the material.
You know, it was much more effective at Endeavor Academy to have the leader and the lieutenants suppress skepticism and name it as being delusional or resistant to spiritual transformation or even like borderline demonic.
And so we've had a mixture of those two things, of those two responses.
But in both cases, very effectively, dissent is not really countenanced.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, yeah, on my end, I think most of us who were drawn in and who stuck around Didn't have enough ego strength to really raise those kinds of questions or to be skeptical in a healthy way, a way I would consider today to be healthy.
There were people from time to time who would object.
There were people who would really try and make a stand around some of what she was doing or some of what she was saying.
And I remember uniformly that her response was, I refuse to talk to your sickness.
Wow.
It's your sickness that is saying that because you don't want to look at what I am saying about you.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, in the context, there's is important in the sense that that some of the objection can be raised within the economic or professionalized context of training, right?
Like you are working at a place.
You might have the feeling that, you know, there you go in with some understanding of labor law and you might apply that to the way in which you're you're being asked to volunteer obscene hours or something like that.
And also you're paying her a certain amount of money for a certain package of training.
And I think it's important to understand that I think yoga cults can often institutionalize according to almost middle class labor values.
And so confrontation Can happen on that basis, but if it doesn't go anywhere, you know where the control is actually held, right?
So, yeah, it's fascinating.
I won't talk to your sickness.
Last question for both of you.
We'll start with you, Julian.
When did you realize that you were going to break free of this experience?
And can you just describe a little bit about the emotions and what it took for you to finally detach?
You know, I think I had an unusual kind of experience because Anna really supported my career and she supported me being a teacher at the studio.
And I really succeeded as a teacher at that studio.
And during the period of time where I was becoming more established and more successful in that new role, She started traveling a whole lot more, and so she was in town less, we were under her influence less, and to her credit, I think she also, she grew and she matured to a certain extent, and some of the dynamics just felt different over time.
Maybe a lot of it is explainable by her not being around, and her having other arenas in which to express her ambitions and her dynamics.
Um, so by the time, by the time I took that class where I lay there and thought, wow, she's being really nasty and taking it out on everybody and I don't know that I ever need to, I've gotten anything I could get from this and I don't need to come back.
By that point, I think I had separated myself psychologically and individuated it enough that I could feel that way.
Um, I was doing most of my yoga practice at home at that point, but I will say, Derek, Because it's a really good question.
There were waves a few years after, and then a few years after that, of really reflecting and reconsidering and looking back and going, wow, you know what?
I've actually been recovering or having to do a lot of work to recover over these in between years from a lot of what went on in there that actually did me harm.
And that took a long time to come to and that is still emotional and still confusing because I still feel complicit.
I still feel like it was my fault or she never really said that I had been molested and so it was my own conclusion.
Yeah, it's tangled.
But were you socially rewarded for coming up with that?
And did you tell her?
Did you disclose that memory?
Of course I did.
So you told her, this is what I thought?
Did she approve?
Did she reward you for that?
Yeah, I mean, there was an implicit sense within that inner circle of people That, and so maybe I was reading into some of this, but that if I or anyone else finally got to that point where you had uncovered the repressed material, that that was a huge step forward.
Yeah, it's a huge step into merging with her as well, right?
Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.
Yeah, and you know, I mentioned the off-label psychedelic therapy.
To his credit, that therapist, about three psychedelic sessions in, looked at me at the end of a session and he said, you know, maybe you weren't sexually abused.
Maybe you're searching for something that's not really there, because there's plenty of other stuff going on in your childhood that would explain some of this deep emotional pain you have.
Maybe just consider that, because it feels like you're chasing it.
He was really frank in that way, and I think that was a big piece for me too.
I mean, I've said before that my wife is a psychotherapist, and I'm in a family of psychotherapists, and what I understand about The industry or the discipline's response to satanic panic in the past decade or so is that any leading questions or any sort of inferences made about particular memories or childhood experiences are really off the table.
It's like the power of suggestion has been fully exposed by that particular disaster in psychotherapeutic history.
And so I just want to make that point for people who might be engaging therapy that way.
I'm not a therapist, but I have an authority that really, you know, if you go into therapy with no memory whatsoever of being abused as a child and you come out convinced of particular things that have happened, there's something very serious to look at there and to ask some questions about for sure. - Yeah, and for anyone who's not familiar with that whole satanic period, I'm so glad that you talked about it today, Matthew.
During that period in the late 80s, early 90s, there were all of these huge news stories, there were all of these huge court cases and it all centered around, usually the pattern was fairly predictable, There were accusations of some kind of sexual abuse, which sometimes had happened and sometimes hadn't happened.
And then there was this, these police psychologists often, who would get into these questioning styles, often with very young kids, and ask them, leading questions, quite sincerely, because they were convinced that this terrible epidemic of satanic abuse was happening.
And you'd have these kids, you know, very dutifully claiming to remember all sorts of horrific ritual abuse scenarios that it later turned out had never happened, even though people went to jail on the backs of these kinds of interviews.
And this was related to using hypnotherapy to recover repressed memories.
And the memories were not only around ritual abuse, they were also around things like alien abductions.
I can't say the word.
Abductions, yeah.
Alien abductions.
Okay, so I wanted, for the benefit of the pod and for our listeners and for everybody who would find this useful, to give a little bit of a cult primer from the research that I've done to give a little bit of a cult primer from the research that I've done and the writing
This will be Cult Facts 101, some useful models, the issue of consent and how problematic it is in cult discourse, and then also I'll talk about applying a famous list of cult techniques to various conspirituality celebrities that we've seen.
So let's start with the 101.
These are really the basics that I have lived, studied, taught on, and written about for the last six years or so.
So, number one.
No one joins a cult.
People delay leaving organizations that misrepresented themselves.
Uh, so that is a direct quote from a cult theorist named Kathleen Mann, uh, who kind of, uh, changed my life by uttering it over the phone one day.
Uh, and it's really a profound statement because in two sentences it deconstructs, uh, I think the most harmful narrative around cult recruitment that we have.
And that is that adults freely choose to be indoctrinated and exploited.
Like, no one chooses that.
And if they appear to choose it, they have been coercively influenced.
Now, the most pertinent comparison I think we can look at to drive this home is the question of why people stay in domestic violence situations.
They're not choosing it either.
Over time, they are groomed into confusing abuse with love while losing outside perspective and resources.
And those losses can be gradual or they can be instantaneous.
So if we replace a few key words in man's statement, we go from no one, we get something like, no one wants to be in an abusive relationship.
People delay leaving relationships that presented themselves as loving and safe.
And I'll say more about the notion of consent from a legal point of view later because it'll show what the cult studies people are up against when it comes to communicating this as public information and education.
Okay, second main point.
There are no solid, clear predictors for who is recruited to a group or who stays in a group beyond something that is called situational vulnerability.
Now, situational vulnerability sounds like exactly what it is.
It is a temporary disturbance or obstruction or difficulty that one has in one's life.
A divorce, a sickness in the family, you've become sick yourself, you've moved, Let's say a pandemic broke out and now you are vulnerable in some way.
You've lost social connection.
You might be struggling with mental health difficulties.
You might feel isolated.
You know, as a side note, if you want a detailed report on the emerging diversity of the QAnon cult and its outreach appeal, we're going to link to the last QAnon Anonymous podcast, which is excellent, because they went down to a QAnon Save the Children rally on Hollywood Boulevard last week, and we have this like picture from them of various levels of vulnerability that people are displaying, and also the fact
That the group is so diverse that there's nothing really that connects them together socially or culturally, except now this cultic pursuit and association.
And the fact that there's nothing that holds them together in terms of prior social status or culture or race or even interest, Is a really clear indication that situational vulnerability is at play.
Okay, next major point.
The content of the cult is not the point.
Cults are political.
They can be spiritual.
They can be economic.
That's what's going on with the Enron group back in the 90s.
They can be military.
They can be therapeutic.
They can be based in self-help principles.
And the reason that this is important is that if we focus on the content, we distract from the mechanisms.
Also, if deception is the gateway into a cult, it's never really about what the cult leaders or the lieutenants say it's about.
And I'll talk about deception a little bit later.
So, according to this framework, somebody like Sogyal Rinpoche, who was the founder of Rigpa International, wasn't teaching Buddhism.
Even though he wrote, well he didn't actually write, he had a ghostwriter for it, the Tibetan book of living and dying, and he seems to be a Buddhist master, what he really wanted to do was to eat steaks and sexually abuse women.
And Buddhism was the cover for that.
We can say the same thing about Bikram Chowdhury.
He's very interested in his hot yoga, you know, as we all know, but what he really wants to do is to exploit those around him for their cash and the women for sexual abuse.
Now, Lyndon LaRouche wasn't seriously running for president.
And if you don't know who he was, we'll link to him in the show notes.
He was running a high demand group as a personal vanity project.
And Tony Robbins isn't selling self-help or business success.
He's selling an emotionally manipulative Ponzi scheme that you have to keep buying into and buying into and buying into.
So if you don't get this part about the difference between content and mechanism, you wind up wasting time on something that we can call harm calculus, which is, well, you know, I got these good things out of it, but then there were these nasty elements to it.
You'll also start thinking in terms of the need to separate the teacher from the teachings.
And these are really understandable ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance, but they ultimately really delay recovery time for people who have been in groups like this.
The next point is, who are the leaders?
You know, who is Anna Forrest?
What's going on with somebody like her?
If we're going to take Julian's story as an example, we don't really know because they never submit themselves to psychological evaluation that anybody would have access to.
Some of these people might be diagnosable with, you know, various issues, bipolar, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, or what Daniel Shaw calls traumatic narcissism.
But the fact is, we just don't know.
In general, they have something about them that we can call charisma, which is not so much a property of them personally, so much as a product of the social feedback loops of reward and amplification that they generate.
So, it's not about the personality, which is why some people just can't get enough of Tony Robbins, and other people would rather gnaw their arms off than listen to him.
Robbins is not universally attractive.
His success depends on a social and structural contagion.
So it's not about the person, it's about the network.
Another main point is that there are spheres of influence that radiate out from the center of a cultic organization.
And, you know, Hannah Arendt called them transmission belts.
A lot of cult theorists called them front organizations or front projects and initiatives.
So, you know, let's say that there's a particular charismatic leader who happens to be a professional yoga teacher.
The offering, the professionalization offer of training into a particular method so that a person can become a teacher seems to be a legitimate business proposition, something that you would pay for.
And in cult theory, we would look at that in terms of whether or not that arrangement was actually fronting for deeper involvement within the group.
Now, this is where disaster spirituality comes into play because cults are really good at offering apparently safe havens in times of crisis.
And they're going to reach out and they're going to do it through You know, socially acceptable means.
So one of the things that I'm not getting to this week that I said I'd get to last week, which is Michael Roach's theology and how it actually is plausible and how it might provide some relief in the time of COVID.
That's all locked and loaded and ready to go when the lockdown hits.
And so he has, you know, in the can this content that he can offer.
And as he offers it, it will be through what in cult studies we call a front organization.
Or a front project that is selling something on one level, but on another level, it's actually functioning as a transmission belt that draws a person closer into the center of the organization.
Okay, next main point.
The mechanisms of cult dynamics exploit the tender parts of human relationships.
They exploit the best parts of you as a human.
Your altruism, your yearning, your hope.
Julian had to go because he's got childcare to do and so, you know, I hope he doesn't mind me, you know, referencing his story in his absence.
But I just want to reflect on the fact that he shows up in that room at the age of 23 and he really wants to work on himself.
He really wants to dig in and to go deep and to figure out how he can become a better person.
And that drive is exactly What gets monetized, it gets commodified.
It's a yearning that becomes the product of the actual yoga training.
Now, another main thing that I want to say is that cult involvement can be traumatizing.
It can cause significant psychological and cognitive impairments.
It can destroy families.
In more severe cases, the group works members into illness and destitution.
In my own cultic experiences, I watched two people die because neither received adequate social or medical care.
And in Rocha's group, a young man I once knew had his mental health issues exacerbated by the cultic pressures that he was subjected to and he was eventually thrown out into the desert and he died there of exposure.
His name was Ian Thorson.
And in the very worst cases, members are ordered to murder their opponents, or they are murdered themselves.
And I'll talk about Jonestown in a moment.
On the whole, everyone who's recruited into a cult is defrauded of time and energy, often during periods in life when they would be otherwise doing crucial development.
Cults break up families.
They often break up marriages to reassign emotional investment to the leader alone or to their lieutenants.
This is why cults are obsessed with sex as well, either pro or anti, right?
If you can screw around with your members, so to speak, sex lives, if you can prevent them from having sex, or if you can force them to be polyamorous or to, you know, partner swap or to, you know, or to be transgressive sexually.
What you're doing is you are violating or you are encouraging people to violate or to damage very intimate bonds that pose a threat to the bond that the member is supposed to have with the leader.
And so that's a very sort of clear pattern in most of the groups that we examine.
And on that note, we have to say, and this is where I'm going to refer back to, you know, the terrible news from Imran Ahmed, recovery from cults is relational.
And so, you know, the way that you're going to come back from being enmeshed in a high demand group It's going to be through the renewal of, or the creation of, healthy social relationships.
And so Derek asked Julian, and you didn't get to my answer on this, about when did you figure out that you were going to leave?
Julian said that, you know, he had this moment where there was a number of social circumstances that he named where, you know, Ana had started traveling and, you know, she was, you know, maybe trusting her lieutenants with higher degrees of professionalization.
Maybe she wasn't being as controlling as she was before.
You know, he said a lot of things like that, but then we really focused on, or he focused on the moment of, oh, I'm relating to her as another human being in the class.
Now, I had two moments like that as well.
I won't describe them here because I've got some more stuff to cover, but what we have to understand is that you can have within a cultic environment the realization that the leader is a fraud or the realization that something is off or something is toxic.
And it may take you years after to actualize walking out the door, because the main thing that you need is the establishment or the restoration of actual healthy relationships in order for you to find a place to land.
That's why deprogramming people from Scientology by actually kidnapping them doesn't work because the person goes from one hostile environment into another.
And that's why it was so special to hear Steve Hassan talk about the fact that When he was welcomed home by his family after two years in the cult of Reverend Moon, you know, his parents just loved him and his neighbors brought over cookies.
So recovery is relational.
Okay.
So in the show notes, I'm going to give a bunch of resources that will help, I think, with some basic definitions from the literature that have been very useful to me and are standard within the discipline.
There's going to be an excerpt from a book by Michael Langone in which he describes the model of the three Ds.
So he says that the necessary components for the cultic organization are deception.
They have to lie to you and to the public about what they're doing.
Dependency.
They have to create dependency amongst the membership and then dread of leaving.
These are the values.
One is a gateway and then two sort of mechanisms that ensure that the person stays.
You know, to talk about deception, let's just review a little bit back into our podcast history and realize that when we're talking about Judy Mikovits and Mickey Willis in Plandemic, They're lying.
She's lying about her employment history.
She's lying about the court case.
And he's lying by putting that, you know, b-roll footage of some SWAT team somewhere as though it's representing the moment that she was being arrested.
That's not true.
There's deception in the credentials of America's frontline doctors.
There's Del Bigtree lying his ass off on Highwire and finally getting taken down off of YouTube.
And then there's like subtle forms of deception as well where, you know, somebody like J.P.
Sears is cherry-picking science for his comedy videos without, I don't know, really caring, I guess.
I'm also going to put in, I think we did this before, but I'm going to put in again Steve Hassan's Bite Model.
I'm going to look at, I'm going to offer to a link to Kathleen Mann's Mind Model.
So manipulation, indoctrination, negation of self and deception.
And then also we'll include a link to Janja Lalic on Bounded Choice.
That's her model where she describes the cultic organization as being built on charismatic leadership, transcendent ideology, and systems of control and influence.
Okay, so last little bit here.
I want to talk about consent, because the pop culture perception of how people get involved in cult organizations is a real problem.
And I'm also going to talk about the legal framing of consent.
And I'm going to refer back to Kathleen Mann, who I started with.
In her review, you'll see it in the link, of the concept of manipulation, she alludes to something that is both promising and vexing at the same time.
And this is the problem of undue influence.
Now, a lot of cult discourse gets stuck on the problem of whether members are consenting to belonging, whether they are independent adults making clear decisions.
So we hear this all the time.
And as a culture, we generally want cult members to be seen that way, because then we don't really have to ask the really hard questions about who is influencing who, and whether that influence can in some cases overpower an adult's capacity to consent.
Now, more importantly and materially, lawyers who defend cult leaders, just like lawyers who defend sex predators, typically use arguments that either discredit plaintiffs or make them out to be willing lifestyle participants.
So a good example here, again in your show notes, when James Arthur Ray was on trial for killing three people in his bullshit sweat lodge in 2009 in Sedona, His lawyers took exactly that line, that the victims had willingly participated in a risky process.
They were adults who, for whatever reason, displayed terrible judgment.
Quote, they could have left at any time, unquote, they argued, despite the fact that Ray was standing at the door to the sweat lodge, screaming at people to stay, after he kept them awake in the desert for something like 36 hours without food or water.
Now, Tony Robbins' PR strategy argues the same thing when threatened with legal action after people get serious burns at his firewalks.
And in general, I can say, as a cult survivor, that it's this idea that's the top obstruction to understanding how cults work.
It's like this knee-jerk response to cult stories to say that the members were gullible, that they were stupid, that they used their unimpeded judgment to do stupid things, that they had daddy issues, that they have death wishes.
Like, some may, that might be individually true psychologically for some participants, but that's not a predictor of membership, and nor is it a cause for being manipulated.
So, let's think for a moment about the pop culture phrase, they drank the Kool-Aid, which Derek used a little bit earlier.
So, I'm going to say something about that.
You know, what this phrase does, not that anyone means it to because the, you know, origin story has faded into history, is it kind of communicates a contempt for the 900 plus victims of murder in Jonestown.
It characterizes cult members as children who want a kind of sugary high, and they'll willingly swallow poison to get it.
But in actual fact, the Jonestown victims were forced to drink the mixture at gunpoint.
And it wasn't Kool-Aid, if you're interested in that, it was something called Flavor-Aid.
And it's pretty much assured that all of the 300 children were forced to drink it by their parents.
Or they were injected with it, or they had it squirted into their mouths with syringes.
So we have to ask, is it possible that the parents of 300 children could be acting of their own free will if, all together, in the space of an hour, they murder 300 children?
There's no way.
Are the 600 adults all going through the exact psychotic break?
It's unlikely.
There's no answer for this.
But, you know, my gut says that the majority of them simply felt like they had zero choice in the matter.
And that paralysis was intense enough that they were able to watch their own children die in front of them.
Anyway, not a great phrase.
It's kind of like this socially acceptable victim-blaming phrase that's in common usage.
And so I just ask people to not use it.
Now, the problem is, There are other events, mass murder events by suicide, or by poisoning rather, that are described as mass suicide.
One particular one is the Heaven's Gate members dying in 1997 in San Diego.
Now, they believed, although I'm going to say they were unduly influenced into believing, that they were going to ascend to the next level of existence by shedding their bodily vehicles, i.e.
their bodies, and catching a ride on a spaceship that was following the Haley-Bopp comet.
So, we'll link to an excellent podcast on that history, and it includes a long discussion of whether the members really consented to it.
And here's the thing, there's this religious studies scholar featured as an expert on the podcast, and he swears up and down that this was all voluntary, that it was a chosen religious practice, that people who had become like family members to each other all engaged with full consent.
And this points to a big conflict in the history of cult studies, because religious studies people, or some of them anyway, really want the event to be about religion and personal choice.
But what this misses is two crucial things.
That the cult's content is a cover for its real objectives.
And number two, that the claim that Heaven's Gate is a religious practice undertaken freely ignores the lived experience of being indoctrinated over a long period of time to believe things that you wouldn't have believed outside of the context of exploitation.
So, from a survivor point of view, Heaven's Gate members were coercively influenced for years before they swallowed those pills and that vodka.
The fact that they looked like they were engaged in a religious ritual says everything about the effectiveness of the indoctrination and very little about their authentic beliefs, which we don't really have access to.
What we have access to are their performed confessions and goodbye notes.
But we have to look at them through years, and in some cases, more than a decade of indoctrination.
Now, two examples of how the law has dealt with this stuff.
In the James Arthur Ray case, the jury didn't buy that he was totally innocent, and he did a little bit of time.
And more recently, Keith Raniere of Nexium was convicted of a bunch of stuff.
Sexual exploitation of a child, child pornography, sex trafficking, attempted sex trafficking, identity theft, Trafficking, forced labor, conspiracy to alter records, sex trafficking conspiracy, racketeering conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy.
Now, he was not convicted for undue influence or for taking up, you know, people's time and their life energy for 20 years.
The law has a really hard time defining the real heart of the human wastage in the cult experience.
And both James Arthur Ray and Keith Renier in their convictions show that the primary thing that the cult does, which is to destroy relationships and indoctrinate people against their own interests and their own safety, It's just not covered by most legal instruments.
It's like the fact that Al Capone gets put away for taxes instead of running a murder cult.
However, Kathleen Mann does point out that undue influence is a legal concept and a mechanism with a long history.
Usually it's applied to property disputes and wills.
So, you know, if an elderly person hires a younger caregiver who lives full-time and gets them somehow to sign over their will or their assets to them, and therefore the family is going to be left out, that's what undue influence has been used for in property law so far.
And there's a lot of legal experts that are looking at, well, how can that be used to apply itself to the crimes that cults commit that aren't really defined yet?
So crucially, this mechanism provides the reasoning that lets the questioning, the question of an adult's agency, or their apparent free choice to do something against their own safety, to be really interrogated.
So, I said that I was going to go through a list of cultic techniques and apply them to various conspirituality celebrities, but I'm going to leave that second part off, but I'm going to put it up onto the Conspirituality Facebook page and I'll let people comment on it.
But here's the quote, the definition of the cultic mechanisms that I'll read from Dr. West and Dr. Langoni.
It comes from 1986 from a paper called Cultism, a conference from scholars and policymakers.
And it's a standard definition that's been used for years.
And I don't think it's been improved upon.
So Langoni and West say that, quote, a cult is a group or movement exhibiting great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing, and employing unethical, manipulative or coercive techniques of persuasion and control.
And here's the list.
Isolation from former friends and family, Debilitation, that implies like physical wearing away or mental exhaustion.
Uses of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience.
Powerful group pressures.
Information management.
Suspension of individuality or critical judgment.
Promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it.
And all of these things, they say, are designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.
So I hope that definition is helpful.
As I said, I'll put it into the Facebook group and you can find us there.
And we can run all of those mechanisms by the conspirituality influencers that we've studied so far and see how they check out.
I think there's a lot of overlap.
And also there's a lot of overlap with the discourse in general, like how people are speaking within this field, What are the types of jargon that they're using in their sermons?
What kind of somatic affect are they presenting in their videos and whatnot?
So I'll leave it at that and I hope it's helpful.
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