We’re extremely pleased that someone who isn’t a Boomer — and is younger than us — is making a serious but accessible contribution to this golden age of cult literature. Linguist Amanda Montell joins Julian for an engaging interview about her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines the power of language in high-demand groups, from The People’s Temple to the local Young Living dinner party. In a debrief, we discuss not only Montell’s study, but also our own run-ins with spiritual mumbo-jumbo.In the Ticker, Matthew wonders what Sayer Ji does when he loses his Facebook privileges and is relegated to the armpit of Telegram. Why, he goes full Satanic Panic, of course!Show NotesDeplatformed for Anti-Vax Propaganda, Sayer Ji Turns to Satanic Panic ContentAmanda Montell’s website
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, including Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
We are all also on Twitter on our individual feed, so you can find us there.
And you can also support this podcast for as little as $5 a month and get access to our Monday bonus episodes at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Conspirituality 53, learning cultish with Amanda Montel.
We're extremely pleased that someone who isn't a boomer and is younger than us is making serious but accessible contribution to this golden age of cult literature.
Linguist Amanda Montel joins me for an engaging interview about her new book, Cultish, the language of fanaticism, which examines the power of language in high demand groups, from the people's temple to the local young living dinner party.
In a debrief, we discuss not only Montel's study, but also our own run-ins with spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
In the ticker, Matthew wonders what Sayer G does when he loses his Facebook privileges and is relegated to the armpit of Telegram.
Why, he goes full satanic panic, of course.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
First story, I just want to briefly point to an article that I posted to the Conspirituality Report at Medium.com.
It'll be in your show notes.
The article is called Deplatformed for Anti-Vax Propaganda.
Sayer G turns to satanic panic content.
So, if you've been following along, Sayer G., founder of the pseudoscience clearinghouse GreenMedInfo, has had a really busy spring.
He lost his Twitter account and his Instagram account back in March.
He was named, I think on March 24th, as one of the Disinformation Dozen.
So, one of 12 influencers in this world responsible for 65% of the anti-vax content circulating on the internet, which is kind of extraordinary.
He also sent out a newsletter to his email list of 450,000 people.
Supporting Layla Centner of the Centner Academy, which we reported on a few weeks back.
She's the multi-millionaire, if not billionaire, director of the Centner Academy in Miami, where Kelly Brogan's kids are students, and she has said that she's going to be firing teachers who are vaccinated.
So, very busy times for the Gee and Brogan household.
The day that he gets booted off of Facebook, losing access to about a half million followers, he posts an interview.
Now, I say interview reservedly because he really just lets the subject gishgallop for about 55 minutes.
And the subject is Kathy O'Brien, who is a conspiracy theorist with a very harrowing and tragically non-credible story that she has been telling for a quarter of a century now.
Her book is called Transformation of America.
It came out in 1995.
In it, she sort of puts herself at the crossroads of every major American foreign policy decision and historical event, you know, since the 1960s.
As she describes being passed as a sex trafficking victim amongst heads of state.
There's no documentation provided for any of her claims.
There's no forensic evidence.
There's no journalism that has supported any of these claims.
The book is incredibly painful to get through because it is absolutely, utterly fantastical.
And in his introduction to this interview, Gee notes that O'Brien has been a beacon of courage for both himself and Dr. Brogan, and his framing As he introduces the interview, kind of positions him as a confessor or, you know, an interlocutor of the traumatized.
So I think this is a little bit of a job shift as well.
You can read more about O'Brien's claims, which I don't want to spend any more time on, they're in the article.
And I really, I feel very bad for her, actually, because she has this story that she cannot verify, and she's been able to put it out there through self-publishing and disposable income, and that's her right to do.
But G, in this instance, is her publisher and her platform.
And as her platform, he is responsible not only for the veracity of that story in terms of what the public deserves, he's also responsible to her.
Because to exploit a story for money that leaves the storyteller vulnerable to accusations of fraud or delusion is a really harmful thing.
Now, if the storyteller is a grifter and they know what they're doing, it's not a big deal, but there's no way of knowing this.
If they are traumatized and acting out, it's on the publisher.
If someone is speaking delusionally, you just don't make money by handing them a microphone.
Okay, moving right along.
Next story.
What happens when anti-vaxxers think they are helping cult members escape the mind control of public health?
So, I want to play a clip for your consideration here.
It doesn't matter who this influencer is.
It's a fairly small account.
I think that naming them would be punching down, but This is someone who gives an extremely precise example of anti-vax, COVID denialism discourse getting smart enough to mimic what people like us are trying to do on this podcast.
Somebody I saw the other day said to me, you're the only one who thinks, sees any positive in this situation.
And I said to her, I believe that it's because I am able to Get this gift of the Akashic Records and see it from a different perspective, because when I get triggered and angry, I'm not able to see things from a higher perspective either.
So, but believe me, I'm still human.
And of course, I sometimes worry about the direction our society is going in.
But when I said that to her, and then I went back in the Akashic Records, it was really just patience and waiting for people to wake up at their own pace, knowing that this is part of their soul growth, this is part of their development.
The mental conditioning is so deep, the programming is so deep that when they will need help, they might come to us, but if they have a memory of us, of a negative interaction with us, or a lot, you know, us being angry at them, they might not come to us, or they might not, it might even prevent them from awakening as much as they might otherwise.
It's hard to watch.
It's hard to be around.
We're all in a state of trauma.
We're all in a state of suffering.
So that's my message is really trying to hold that place of trying to understand where the other is coming from, where people who we may think are completely in the programming, completely just believing the narrative.
It's sad.
It's hard to watch.
It's hard to be around.
Remember, if we can truly try to understand, okay, a lot of us used to be that way.
I used to be in the narrative.
I was completely brainwashed.
I did all the things I was told to do.
That's what I was taught.
And so remember, how did you used to be?
And how could you understand how they might believe what they might believe?
Knowing that they're believing that, even though even some of it may seem still hard to believe with some of the medical apartheid stuff happening.
But even then, how do we have patience?
How do we have empathy?
How do we try to help them just as Jesus would have done?
Alright, so a little background.
This person is a life coach and a medical hypnotherapist.
I'm not quite sure what that means.
But they sell readings of the Akashic Records.
Now, this phrase has been buzzing at the periphery of my awareness like a gnat for decades, so I finally took the opportunity to look into its origins.
And I published another article on it to the Conspirituality Project page on Medium.
And here's the long and the short of it.
The Akashic Records refers to a vast Theoretical library written in some inner dimension or in outer space.
There's some people who say that it's in the Pleiades somewhere.
I don't know if there's an actual building floating around or whether it's just a collection of sounds, but apparently the records describe and predict everything that have or will occur.
So, containing everything, the records are the ultimate divinatory tool for the adept who could learn to read them.
Now, the idea seems to date back to Madame Blavatsky, none other than the founder of the Theosophist movement.
This is in the 1880s.
1880s or so that she starts speaking and writing about this stuff.
Charles Ledbetter follows suit and also Alice Bailey goes on about the Akashic records.
So these are all theosophists.
Then it makes its way into the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.
Then, Then Edgar Cayce, known as the Sleeping Prophet, also a quack healer.
He's a favorite of Christiane Northrup, by the way.
And also, Cayce was the way that I first heard about the Akashic Records, because he has a kind of tangled history with A Course in Miracles, even though I think he died about 30 years before Helen Schuchman started taking dictation from quote-unquote Jesus now Goop is into the Akashic Records.
They've got a goop reader and also More recently, we see people talking about the Akashic Records as a kind of idealized precursor of the internet, a kind of limitless source of data on demand that they can, you know, make to say anything.
Anyway, so that's what this influencer is on about.
But what I want to point some attention to is that if you listen closely and imagine replacing just the nouns, you'll hear that she's talking in a way that might give her a seat as a co-host here on the pod.
So I've made some keyword changes.
I'm just going to read the transcript back and you can see what I mean.
Somebody the other day said to me, you're the only one who sees any positive in this situation.
And I said, I believe that it's because I'm able to access the work of disinformation experts, scholars of conspiracy theories, and cult recovery experts, and see this from a different perspective.
Because when I get triggered and angry, I'm not able to see things from a higher perspective either.
But I'm still human and of course I sometimes worry about the direction of our society.
And when I said that to her, I reviewed the things that I'd learned from cult recovery therapists like Rachel Bernstein and remembered it was really just patience and waiting for people to come around, to sober up at their own pace, knowing that this is part of recovery.
This is part of rejoining consensus reality.
The mental conditioning is so deep, the programming is so deep, that when they need help, they might come to us.
But if they have a memory of us, of a negative interaction, or of us being angry at them, they might not come to us.
Or it might prevent them from reintegrating with society.
It's hard.
We're all in a state of trauma.
We're all in a state of suffering.
So that's my message, is really trying to hold that place of trying to understand where the other is coming from, where people who we may think are completely in the programming, completely just believing that conspiracy theory, and it's sad, it's hard to watch, it's hard to be around.
However, if we can truly try to understand, okay, a lot of us, Used to be that way.
I mean, I used to be in a cult as well.
I was completely brainwashed.
I did everything.
All the things I was told to do.
That's what I was taught.
And so I remember what that used to be like.
And then you can understand how they might believe what they believe.
Knowing that they're believing that even though some of it may seem still hard to believe with some of the reverse contagion anxiety happening and so on.
But even then, how do we have the patience?
How do we have empathy?
How do we try to help them?
Just as a good therapist or social worker would do.
So I guess I introduced this as a news story but it's not really a news story.
I just actually want to say this is a super sophisticated defense and I'm kind of at a loss because at this level of mental gymnastics, it's going to be really hard to change the channel.
Amanda Montel, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Conspirituality Podcast.
Oh, it is truly my pleasure.
This podcast is so buzzy.
Everybody's talking about it.
I love it.
Well, everyone is talking about you and they will be doing so even more when your new book comes out.
Let me tell anyone who does not yet know that Amanda is a writer whose work has been featured in Marie Claire, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Nylon, The Rumpus, Birdie, and Who, What, Where.
She has a degree in linguistics from NYU and is the author of the critically acclaimed Word Slut, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language.
She currently has a show based on that book in development with the TV network FX.
Congratulations, by the way.
Oh, thank you.
But even more than all of this in terms of why you're here with us today, the reason we wanted to invite you is that you have a new book we're previewing coming out June 15th titled Cultish.
This is true.
So I want to, yeah, so I want to start by quoting you to get us into the conversation, if that's okay with you.
Oh, yes.
My ego will enjoy that.
So in reference to our attempts at making sense of the infamous cult mass suicides that happened in Guyana, where 909 members of Jim Jones's People's Temple died in 1978.
A lot of people know about this fairly unique historical event.
And then the 39 deaths in San Diego with Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate.
That was in the 90s.
I'm forgetting the exact year.
Yeah, 97.
97.
So you had this to say.
Using systematic techniques of conversion, conditioning, and coercion with language as their ultimate power tool, cult leaders like Jones and Marshall Applewhite were able to inflict unforgettable violence on their followers without personally laying a finger on them.
And I thought that was just so on point.
How do you think they did that?
Well, I will say that the answer that the popular media tends to give for why people wind up in groups like the People's Temple, aka Jonestown and Heaven's Gate, is that they were brainwashed.
They were mind-controlled.
But I learned very quickly in doing my research for this book by talking to scholars like Rebecca Moore, who's a scholar of new religions, and Eileen Barker, who's a sociologist at the London School of Economics.
That brainwashing, and I can't believe this wasn't clearer to me sooner, but it's not clear to a lot of us that brainwashing is nothing but a metaphor.
It's like this pseudoscientific concept.
You can't prove that brainwashing doesn't exist.
It's really just a metaphor and a belief that's often used to morally divide us, right?
Like, you're brainwashed.
No, you're brainwashed.
And when the idea for this book occurred to me, I was actually, I was, I was standing in a graveyard.
This is weird.
I was standing in a graveyard with my best friend who was about to get married and then quickly divorced.
I'm not sure she would like me to broadcast that on the internet, but whatever.
And she had recently gotten sober and had started going to AA and was using all of the, you know, AA jargon is so distinctive.
And, you know, this vocabulary had really taken hold of her, and it was improving her life, you know, her cult affiliation.
She still had one foot out the door, you know, she wasn't putting, like, her whole entire life and her whole entire value and worth into Apollox Anonymous.
Some people started to do that, but I just, I had to, it came to me in an instant, like, I have to understand how language works to get someone from a seemingly normal member of society who has a variety of group affiliations but isn't wholly immersed in one thing to go from that to someone who can't even speak to their best friend because they're using this special jargon.
So when I say that destructive cultish leaders like Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite were able to cause such destruction without laying a finger on them, I mean that they were able to get their followers to a point where They were inflicting harm upon themselves, or they were almost quote-unquote brainwashing themselves.
They were allowing our ingrained human desires for community and connection, and then of course all of these innate human reasoning flaws we have, like confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy, to get them to that really destructive place where, you know, so many people died.
And the ways that they got those people to that point were these techniques with language, this cultish language that I describe in the book.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm so glad that you actually gave us a little preview, and I wanted to do this by hitting you with this cold open, because it's a fairly intense place to start, right?
I want to come back around to brainwashing a little bit later, but let's go back to the beginning.
And one thing that really stood out for me in reading your fantastic new book is that it's very much a cultural examination of cults, but through the lens of language.
You talk about the power of language to persuade, exploit, create loyalty, and in-group affiliation to elevate beliefs, brands, and personalities and experiences into holding exalted levels of meaning and purpose.
Expectations by coining this term, the title of your book, cultish, like English or Spanish, right?
As a name for this type of language.
And you point out its ubiquity in everything from spiritual groups to fitness brands, to email marketing and pyramid schemes.
I'd love to hear from you a little bit about this intersection.
You know, in terms of your own journey, you have this passion for words and then this fascination with cults and persuasive language, it seems like of all kinds, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm really interested in the intersection of language and power in many different ways.
Well, I was always a very wordy child.
I don't know why.
Some combination of nature and nurture has produced this language-obsessed person that I am.
But I, yeah, so I have this interest in language.
I was always fascinated by how the ways that someone speaks can affect how they move through the world, how they access spaces, how they cultivate a personality, how they access power, how, you know, even something as simple as like how Americans are so obsessed with British accents.
Why is that?
Like, I always have those questions.
I also grew up on these stories that my dad would tell of his childhood.
My dad had an extremely unique childhood, including his four teenage years.
Well, I guess there are more than four teenagers.
His four high school years were spent in this quite notorious cult called Synanon that some listeners might be familiar with.
It was this uh socialist utopia quote-unquote that started as a sort of alternative drug rehabilitation center for uh so-called dope fiends that later came to accommodate so-called lifestylers aka people who were just interested in this counter-cultural way of life in the late 60s and early 70s and my dad's Absentee father who was a card-carrying communist and fancied himself quite the intellectual.
He wanted in on this Synanon movement.
And so he forced my dad to move on to the compound with him and his new replacement family.
And my dad was always very generous with his storytelling and I grew up on these fascinating stories of the Synanon game.
This was this horrifying ritual that was like the centerpiece of life in Synanon.
And by far the most interesting piece of these stories that my dad would tell me was the language.
The special buzzwords and euphemisms and chants and mantras and naming tactics that they would use in Synanon.
It really helped to create this world, to do all of those things that you just said, to construct an ideology and assemble people around it, to establish an us and a them, to really reframe worldviews in people's minds, to give them license to believe a really extreme version of kind of what they already wanted to believe, I guess.
Um, and my whole life, like, I've heard that sort of style of Synanon language everywhere, you know?
Not just in sort of, like, exploitative religious or spiritual communities.
I see no sharp difference between religion and cults, you know?
Um, but also in, like, the secular world, in our In our cultural groups, that can be, you know, quite culty for one reason or another.
I, yeah, I never saw these really, like, hard lines between religion, cult, and culture.
I kind of was, like, hearing Synanon-style language everywhere.
And then, yeah, the idea for this book, like, snapped into focus when I was in that graveyard.
But, yeah.
As often happens, right?
Well, it's funny because at the beginning of your answer, you talked about Synanon and you went from drug rehab to lifestyle, like you wove several things together and you were putting them all in quotes, right?
And then you had an AKA, so you were indicating the whole way through that little sentence that all of this is like ways of using language specifically.
And immediately into my head, because I'm reading your book, popped the phrase, everything is everything.
Oh, everything, CrossFit.
Which comes from CrossFit, right?
And this way in which I think whatever angle the doorway of entry is for these different types of language games, the tendency to want to take whatever the new belief or concept is that you're convincing someone is of primary importance, then there's this Very deliberate kind of overlapping it into everything.
This has to do with everything about your life.
You're going to see everything through this lens.
And if, and then later on, if you have any objections to the ideology or the behavior of the leaders or what happens in the group, well, everything is everything.
So you're going to need to look at yourself because there's no problem with the ideology or the teacher.
The problem isn't in your inner world that somehow you haven't fully come to the right reckoning that would make you see this ultimate truth, right?
That's right.
So that is an example of a language technique that I described early on in the book called a thought-terminating cliché.
Beautiful.
And once you know what a thought-terminating cliché is, you'll start hearing it everywhere because it's really not exclusive to quote-unquote cults.
But yeah, so thought-terminating clichés This is a term that was coined in the early 50s by this psychologist named Robert J. Lifton, and it describes these catchy stock phrases, easily memorized, easily repeated, and they're aimed at shutting down independent thinking or questioning.
That's right.
So language would be used to create this world, to create this reality, if you will.
And people were willing to do it because language, you can't see it.
It's seemingly commitment-free.
It's also really fun to learn a new secret code language.
It fills you with this sense of superiority, of intellectualism, of this sense that you're doing something right.
We all remember being kids on the playground learning Pig Latin, or coming up with secret code words to ostracize other kids.
There's something in us that really wants to do that, to divide us.
Even profanity, right?
Yeah, oh exactly.
We want to divide ourselves linguistically, and this is clear.
So yeah, so you adopt this language very quickly because it represents this new identity, it's granting you access to this community that's making you feel very special, that's love-bombing you, etc.
And then, if and when you start to express doubts, or you're like, hmm, why is this policy or procedure in place?
Or, huh, why is it that I was promised that this would be a hierarchy-free community, and yet it's so obvious that there are hierarchies here?
Why do I feel this cognitive dissonance now?
The higher-ups of the cult will, or in the cultish group as I like to call them, they will have these stock phrases ready to go to shut down those questions and to assuage your cognitive dissonance.
So in a sort of conspiritualist circle, you might hear thought-terminating cliches come in the form of a phrase like, dismissing valid fears or concerns as limiting beliefs.
Or don't let yourself be ruled by fear.
Or even, you know, of course, you're familiar with people who will say, like, well, you just need to do your research or I've done my research.
Do the research.
Yeah.
Or that's just the mainstream media.
You can't trust them.
Right.
Exactly.
Big Pharma would say that.
But Big Pharma would say that.
And, you know, using the mainstream media as this piece of profanity, really, as this, like, you know, villainizing piece of them terminology, you know, us them terminology, is something that, you know, like, Every cultish leader in all of history has has done from from Jim Jones to, you know, your average like social media conspiritualist momfluencer.
So that's just a classic one.
But yeah, the thought terminating cliches pervade our, yeah, our fitness spaces, our daily lives.
They come in the form of phrases like, well, it's all in God's plan, you know, or boys will be boys, you know.
It's interesting to me because it seems like the thought terminating cliché has multiple functions, right?
And two that come to mind right away.
You've already been describing one of them, which is how to control people and sort of head them off at the pass when they go down the road of questioning certain things that might lead them to start breaking their loyalty.
But it seems, too, that I'm very interested in this concept of spiritual bypass and how we often get drawn into various forms of spirituality as a way of managing not only cognitive dissonance, but emotional pain, trauma, existential disorientation around the world that we live in.
And so it seems like, you know, I think of thought terminating cliches like, everything happens for a reason.
You create your own reality.
There are no victims.
So the moment you get in touch with an emotion that the ideology doesn't really know how to address or wants to sort of steer you away from, then there's this thing.
Well, no, you know, everything happens for a reason and there are no victims.
So just come back into the fold or get involved with this group because these issues that you're having in your life, we have answers for them.
And these answers are these stock kind of phrases that keep pointing you back in the direction of you just need to do your affirmations, you need to meditate harder, you need to fully commit to becoming a sannyasin and putting on the robes and the beads and changing your name, and then you'll see the higher truth.
And then later on, those same cliches are a way of stopping you from confronting some of the things that might be toxic in the group.
Completely.
And also, you're bringing up a point that is, you know, huge in the book is that what a lot of these groups, particularly new age groups, will do is they will co-opt language from scientific fields, psychology, neuroscience, astrophysics, you know, name a very complex field and they're like, Ooh, I want to seem as though I'm an expert in that.
And they will take words like trauma, which has a clinical definition, and they'll slowly and deliberately twist the meaning of these words to have a new metaphysical definition.
So trauma for uh but you know an accredited like PhD psychologist or whatever like a licensed therapist who is behaving and conducting themselves in you know like an ethical peer-reviewed manner um has has a bad It's actually a pretty complicated definition and trauma can be all kinds of different things.
I don't claim to be an expert in trauma, but for a conspiritualist or for a new age cultish leader, trauma is exclusively like childhood wounds.
Everything from abuse to COVID to anything in the world can be pinned on childhood wounds.
And when you're invoking a phrase that sounds kind of fancy, like trauma or, you know, New Age conspiracists love invoking, you know, quantum physics, quantum field.
The Cosmos, whatever.
Like, they'll invoke these absolutist maxims that involve scientific-sounding language, and the average, you know, follower, and I mean that, you know, capital F and lowercase f, Um, you know, doesn't have a background in these technical fields.
And so they're just, you know, they hear this person waxing, you know, confidence about like God and government and all these things.
And so they're just, you know, they're going to defer to that.
But yes, that is a great point.
Thought-terminating cliches are used, you know, sort of initially to kind of reel you in and suggest that, you know, this group has this rare wisdom.
And if you affiliate yourself with this group, then you will have access to that transcendent wisdom as well.
And then they're used later to shut down any questioning that may come up.
Yeah, what's the title of that whole, uh, that whole section of your book?
Uh, so, you know, welcome to the next level of evolution beyond human or something.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's, uh, congratulations.
Uh, you have, oh God, what even is it?
It's a long It's a long-ass part.
The book is divided into six parts, and each part is dedicated to a different category of cult, and so this is the part of the book that's dedicated to suicide cults.
Congratulations, you have been chosen to join the next evolutionary level above human, which comes from Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate ideology and rhetoric.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Okay, good.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, you talk briefly about Teal Swan, just as an aside, I didn't have a prepared question on this, but what you were just saying about trauma made me think about it, right?
Because there is this whole, like spiritual bypass is a concept that came into the whole language around personal growth and meditation and New Age spirituality, I'm going to say probably like 20 years ago.
And then you have people like Teal Swan, who, as you were perfectly describing, have repurposed this notion of like, Oh yeah, you can't bypass your trauma, but I have this way that's much better than all the therapists and the stupid suicide hotline that won't help you at all.
Exactly.
And it's funny because I did a bunch of research on Teal Swan, and this leads into something else I want to ask you about.
Because I was researching her stuff, Now, every time I watch a YouTube video, I get a little ad from Teal Swan before the video starts and it's Teal Swan direct to camera saying something like, how many more years are you going to say positive affirmations and wallow around in your pain and suffering before you realize that you can be happy right now?
And it's just like, whoa, she's, she's got it down.
You know, she's just going directly at that particular niche.
Totally.
Algorithms are so disturbing.
I mean, the algorithm is like the ultimate cult leader, right?
Because it's just going to like figure out exactly what interests you.
And sometimes it will.
And I actually, I write about this very briefly at the beginning of the last chapter of the book, because I had been researching, you know, cultish groups from Scientology to SoulCycle.
For a year and a half.
And so by the time I sat down to write the final part of the book, my algorithm didn't know if I was, like, an anti-vaxxer, like, what I was.
And to have briefly stumped the algorithm was, like, kind of fun.
But, you know, ultimately it got right on back to, you know, feeding me Instagram ads of, like, cozy pajamas.
And I was like, God damn it.
You figured me back out.
Cozy pajamas and feminist literature, right?
Yes, those are the cults to which I belong.
They're kind of solitary, so I guess they're not the cultiest groups in the world.
Well, feminist literature can be.
But then, right, so the algorithm sort of sends you down the rabbit hole that you kind of already want to go down.
And then sometimes there's a glitch and it'll serve you something that you were just sort of researching in like sort of a rubbernecking like, oh, what is this horrifying train accident?
Kind of thing.
Totally.
But yes, Teal Swan, she does what, you know, what a lot of it, she was kind of the OG, but she does a lot of what these New Age influencers will do, which is to combine the language of the DSM with New Age vernacular, talk of vibrations and frequencies, etc.
In order to suggest that they're tapped into a power much higher than science and psychology, and particularly with Teal Swan and people like her, they have this sort of like divine Earth Mother vibe to them.
And so, you know, we accept the cult leader that we want To see.
So, like, she's not claiming to be a prophet.
She's not claiming to be a political leader.
She's claiming to be, like, your self-actualization mommy.
And so, to that degree, people are like, oh yes, I'm going to put the stake of my mental health into this person, this, like, beautiful 35-year-old white woman.
Yeah.
As opposed to, you know, I'm going to put my political beliefs or life and afterlife in the hands of a dude who looks a little more like Jim Jones, you know?
Yeah, yeah, totally.
At one point, I thought this was really fun, but also it also It plays into this beautiful job you do of going back and forth between the layers of how cultish language and influence, you know, is present, is ubiquitous, right?
You write about searching your email inbox for the word cult, and then you list some makeup company direct marketing copy that says things like, this next cult phenomenon will send beauty junkies and makeup fanatics into a frenzy.
And then later on in the book, right?
Later on, you devote several chapters to the hashtag boss babe niche around multi-level marketing groups.
And it's something actually, by the way, I've noticed a lot with coaching around female empowerment and sexuality and abundance as well, right?
These things are all sort of woven together.
I was struck by how, while this is nothing new, as you detail, you go all the way back to Amway and Mary Kay and even Norman Vincent Peale.
And, you know, I often think, just as an aside, like the obsession with quantum physics is like the new science.
And it's like, do you realize quantum physics comes from the 1920s?
And then same with like new thought, right?
This is the new age, new thought science of mind.
It's like, actually, that goes back to like the 30s and 40s, if you really look into it.
But nonetheless, there's a new piece of it, which is the Internet and social media kind of ushering in this incarnation of blending spirituality, commerce and the promise of wealth and power.
I'm just curious your thoughts about the through lines there and sort of who gets targeted by what sorts of memes.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh gosh, where to begin?
Well, maybe let's begin with my email inbox.
Because in a past life, I worked as an editor at this beauty magazine, and I felt quite out of place.
I was like, I gotta get out of here and write about cults.
Yes, but that was the inbox that I searched for the term cult because I remember it was constantly used as a piece of marketing lingo.
And this is the wide range of meanings that the word cult can have now.
It can be used as this incredibly damning accusation implying violence and destruction and exploitation.
Or it can be used as kind of this, like, cheeky marketing buzzword.
And so many things in between.
And that, like, really says something about our culture's incredibly, like, fraught, confused relationship with spirituality and identity and community.
And it really, like, the history and etymology and many meanings of cults directly correspond to our culture's relationship with these things.
It's quite interesting, and I do document it in the book.
But yes, there are just too many categories of cults to even address.
This was actually a struggle in the book.
When I originally pitched the book, I wanted there to be 12 parts, and I wanted there to be a section on fraternities and sororities.
We're on music superfans, people who go and follow Phish and stuff like that.
But ultimately, I decided to narrow it down.
But with the multi-level marketing stuff, that... Oh, gosh.
Where to even begin?
I mean, it was fascinating to learn that You know, multi-level marketing, we can drag that whole industry to filth and we can say like, oh, these hopeless dunces who are getting, you know, like hoodwinked into being a part of this pyramid scheme.
How silly are they?
But the rhetoric that is used in the multi-level marketing world, as you point out, Is not that different from the rhetoric that is used in our more dignified labor market.
You know, sort of empowering people in this really lofty, grandiose way that they are boss babes and entrepreneurs or mompreneurs if you're talking to women.
A lot of, you know, pseudo-feminist sort of commodified feminist language.
And then, you know, in really, like, strongly encouraging, like, bootstrap theory and meritocracy, this idea that no success is unearned and no failure is undeserved and you should, you know, like, don't be afraid to throw people under the bus as you climb the corporate ladder.
Like, these values are stressed to an extreme in the rhetoric of the multi-level marketing industry.
But They're also very much a part of startup culture and corporate culture.
And that is because, as you were talking about Norman Vincent Peale, the history of the multilevel marketing industry and the history of just our regular labor market are derived from the same Protestant capitalist ethic and the same exact history.
And the multilevel marketing industry took it to an extreme.
But yeah, I sort of forget your original question.
No, there's so much there.
There's so much there.
Uh, yeah, at one point you talk about Amazon and, and I think that the, the, you know, cross-referencing between say like, uh, doTERRA essential oils and then like Boss Babe, you know, recruiting you into my special feminine empowerment and abundance coaching mastermind.
Well, mistress mind, right?
Whatever the essentializing of gender and sort of pseudo-feminist language is around, we're going to suck you into this thing where you're going to be hot and wealthy and all of that.
But then you're like, hold on a second.
This is the same routine that Jeff Bezos is using.
Yes, so the multi-level marketing industry is incredibly nimble.
You'd think such a scammy industry by now would surely have died, especially because we have the internet and anti-MLM YouTube, anti-MLM TikTok are so robust.
You don't have to search very hard to find just the most damning information you could ever need about the multi-level marketing industry.
But it is so flexible and so insidiously clever
That whatever is, like, whatever trend is appealing to the lowest common denominator of these people who might otherwise not be able to make a very good living in this country, whether it's, you know, stay-at-home wives and mothers or immigrants or, you know, college students who aren't qualified to do much, the multi-level marketing industry will, you know, find those people and market to them.
And right now, A lot of those people are stay-at-home wives and mothers, but they're not the wholesome Susie homemakers of the past.
They're these natural wellness micro-influencers.
And this is where you get the convolution of the MLM industry and the coaching industry.
And conspiritualists, truly, I mean, I follow, like, all these women who I went to high school with.
It's always people you went to high school with who, like, moved to Florida.
That's, like, the MLM people in my feed.
But they all, yeah, they all sell, like, Young Living essential oils.
But it's not, it's not called Young Living anymore.
It's like Oily Mamas.
They've rebranded.
And it's all about, you know, like natural wellness and, um, and that, you know, and, and now it's, it's a spooky time because when I see someone hawking essential oils in the past, I would have thought like, Oh, you know, they're a part of an MLM.
That's, that's, that's shady.
And like, Oh, they, they, whatever.
They're kind of a hippie.
They love essential oils.
But now I'm like, what rabbit holes has the algorithm sent them down?
Is this person in QAnon?
Yeah.
Essential oils are such a red flag.
Actually, I posted this Venn diagram to my Instagram the other day where I was finding all of the different cults that overlap on essential oils.
It's like MLM salespeople, goop readers, Boho Karens are in the middle of those.
Then you've got doomsday preppers.
And rural Mormons are where doomsday preppers and MLM salespeople overlap because no one loves an MLM more than a Mormon.
Yeah.
And I forget the other the other little section there, but like essential oils are a conspiritualist red flag for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I understand why you're why you're having these brain moments, because we're getting into territory where there where there are these Venn diagrams.
Right.
And it's so it's we could go in so many different directions through these fractal doorways.
Literally, like my brain, unless I have like, this is probably why I'm a writer is because I need to focus myself.
Yeah.
Because otherwise my brain will just become, it'll just be floating in the cosmos like a conspiritualist.
Well, you'll, you'll have your great awakening, which will be wonderful.
Yes, yes.
When you talked about Amazon, I had not, and this is especially topical with Nomadland having just come out and, and you know, we did, we did a piece on the podcast about appreciating Nomadland, but also saying, Hey, the movie didn't go to the places that the book went, especially with regard to a lot of the Amazon stuff.
And you shared some stuff about Amazon I hadn't come across yet.
other people may have, but just in terms of like the, the, this group of statements that everyone has to learn and recite, there's a very like prosperity gospel, you know, uh, uh, a Lululemon it's like, wait, this is like the Lululemon story, right?
Totally, totally.
Sorry.
You asked a question about Amazon.
I went down a whole other train of thought, but yes, there are these 13 leadership principles that, um, Amazon employees are required to memorize.
It's sort of their version of the Ten Commandments.
And it really is like this prosperity gospel, like God, a.k.a.
Jeff Bezos, shines down on those who deserve it.
And those who, and I thought it was so remarkable that, you know, you have to memorize these leadership principles and recite them aloud.
And those who do it perfectly earn the right to, to proclaim the phrase, I'm peculiar, which is like the highest It's very odd.
It's so culty.
symbolic rhetorical Medal of Honor that Amazon employees get to claim when they've done something right.
Like I'm peculiar.
It's very culty.
It's so culty.
And that immediately makes me think of what you shared about about Heaven's Gate and all the different like science fiction language they had for the house.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, what's funny about leaders of new age cultish groups like Heaven's Gate and Scientology is that these guys were really just sci fi nerds.
They were big sci-fi buffs.
They loved space fantasy.
A lot of them wrote sci-fi stories.
Marshall Applewhite was like a theater nerd.
And of course L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer.
And instead of just, like, stopping at, like, J.R.R.
Tolkien level, like, oh, I'm just gonna be a prolific writer.
Instead, they were like, No, I think I'll turn this into a religion.
I'm going to get people to believe it.
Yeah, like I'm going to get people to believe it.
Ron Hubbard literally has some quote like that.
Like I would have I forget what it is, but it's something about how there's no money in sci-fi writing.
You've got to start a religion for that.
Yeah, yeah.
And that makes me think, too, of you didn't cover him in the book.
I don't believe.
But the guy who started the cult that that CNN documentary Holy Hell was about.
Yes.
And he was, he's like a, like a former ballet dancer and then like a B-list actor and then a porn star and then a cult leader.
Yes.
Well, that's the thing is like these people always try on so many different identities.
Like Keith Raniere, for example, he was a pyramid schemer before he was this guru.
Um, so I... Sex trafficking guru.
Yes.
So they always, they, you know, it's like how entrepreneurs, like actual entrepreneurs, they always, like, it's not that they had one genius idea for a product and the product didn't work out.
And so they were like, Oh, okay, well, I'll think I'll just sit around and like, regather my thoughts until I get a new idea.
They just like have to be an entrepreneur.
So they're just going to keep trying until something sticks.
You take that to an extreme, slap some narcissism and a whole bunch of other things on it, and you've kind of got a cult leader.
Yeah, yeah.
You write at some length in the book about high-profile cults, which we've mentioned, like Scientology, Jim Jones, the People's Temple, Heaven's Gate.
You mentioned the Rajnishis and the Munis, the Branch Davidians, more recently NXIVM.
But also about how underneath all of those sensationalist headlines that we're really drawn to lies a very much more everyday cultural and psychological set of drives and questions, right?
About belonging, structure, meaning.
Someone tell me what to do.
Someone tell me what it all means.
Someone give me a place where I feel at home.
And then we're drawn to the sensationalist headlines because we want to understand what can go so horribly wrong.
And then as we talked about at the beginning, you debunk the word brainwashing.
Brainwashing is the explanation.
That's why these people were able to do such terrible things.
As well as, you also debunk the popular myth that members of destructive cults are either unintelligent or just psychologically unstable, damaged people.
And you point instead to research that shows that actually curious, optimistic, resilient, and trusting people with like a trusting pro-social temperament are often drawn into cults.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, this is one of the main things that I wanted to communicate with the book is that All of our prevailing wisdom about the type of person who would join and stay in a destructive cultish group is totally wrong.
And this became clear just sort of like anecdotally as I started interviewing these cult survivors of the most notorious groups of all time, from Jonestown to Synanon, etc.
They were incredibly bright, service-minded, funny people.
And one of the experts that I talked to for the book was this guy named Stephen Hassan, who is a pretty well-known cult expert.
He wrote this book called The Cult of Trump a couple years ago.
Yeah, we interviewed him for that book.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, exactly.
And, um, you know, he, he was, he's an ex Mooney and he used to recruit people to the Moonies.
And he told me, you know, it's like we, so he knows a little something about the type of person they wanted to join.
And the way he explained it to me, he was like, we didn't want someone who was desperate or had some sort of, you know, intellectual problems or something like that, because they would be liable to break down quickly.
And we put a lot of effort into these people.
We wanted people who were Resilient, optimistic, to a fault, like idealistic enough that even when things started to go wrong, they would stick it out for the long haul.
And this is what I consistently found is like, these folks were, you know, the children of teachers and activists and public servants who just, you know, desperately wanted to find a community that could solve the world's problems. desperately wanted to find a community that could solve the And when someone with a great deal of charisma was love bombing them and making these promises that they so badly wanted to believe, It didn't take much.
Again, it's like this confirmation bias was at work.
It was easy for them to discard the red flags and just focus on the positive.
Somebody who was like a curmudgeon or who had trust issues, they would probably not wind up in a group like this because they would be like, No.
This is impossible.
Too good to be true.
Too good to be true.
And I talk in the book a little bit about Daniel Kamen's like thinking fast and slow logic about like system one and system two thought processes, which is sort of like the social science of gullibility, like why some people are more sensitive to scammy sounding rhetoric, which is not quite the same as cultish sounding rhetoric.
But yeah, I wanted to sort of illuminate that none of us are above cultish influence.
It really is everywhere.
And when we devour those sensationalized headlines and watch cult documentary after cult documentary, I cannot believe I watched every single episode of "The Vow." It was too long, but I watched every single one because we're hunting for that explanation for why people end up in these groups.
And more importantly, we're scanning for threats to see whether or not these groups are a risk to us.
Are we susceptible to this type of thing?
And we're willing to take any suggestion that we are not.
Like, no, these people were disturbed.
These people are mentally ill.
These people are desperate.
But those are myths.
That's not really what causes someone to wind up in a group like that.
And one of the most illuminating things that I learned while writing the book is that why people wind up staying in a cult for so much longer than really makes any sense is largely the same reason why people end up in a toxic relationship for a very long time.
All the same psychological drives are at play, like you, you know, denial, listlessness, like, you know, inertia, fear of the repercussions if you leave, you know, you know, doubt that anything really, anything better exists on the outside.
And most of all, that sheer hope, that optimism that if you just stay a little bit longer, it will get better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As part of debunking the concept of brainwashing, I'm going to quote you to yourself again.
You say, cultish language isn't a magic bullet or a lethal poison.
It's more like a placebo pill.
I thought that was also a really interesting way of framing it.
Tell me about that.
Oh my gosh.
You know, that line I put in really late in the game.
I had been writing and editing this book for like a year and a half, and I was like, I need a line that sort of like sums up what I'm talking about in kind of a metaphorical way.
It sort of means what I've been saying before.
It's like you cannot brainwash something, sorry, you cannot brainwash someone To believe something that they on no level want to believe.
Like, you cannot actually turn someone into some kind of mind control minion.
But what you can do is give someone license to believe what they already want to believe And then use language to do all of those things that we've describing, to deceive them, to shut down their independent thinking, to trigger really strong emotional responses.
And by that point, exactly like what we were saying before, a cult leader does not have to put a gun to your head.
They just have to serve you a thought-terminating cliche, or a mantra, or a buzzword, And that's a trigger for you then to tell yourself, like, oh, no.
This is right.
I need to continue putting my faith in this.
Or, oh gosh, anything to avoid being labeled as that.
Or you'll be filled with a true physiological response when you engage in some kind of religious chant.
Neuroscience studies have shown that people who engage in religious chanting are filled with feelings of transcendent bliss, their cortisol level goes down, their dopamine goes up.
It just feels so right.
It just feels so right to be engaging in a spiritual group linguistic ritual with other people doing the same.
It is like so human and it is not necessarily bad but when you are putting so much faith and giving away so much so much power to a potentially pernicious ill-intentioned leader it just it gets real dicey.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask you this because following on from what you just said, one of the classic sort of groups of thought terminating cliches or unrealistic new age beliefs is that your thoughts create reality and what you speak comes into being, right?
And if you say it enough times or if you say it in the right way, the way you use language, it's this kind of NLP thing that if you use Language in the right ways, then your consciousness will manifest things.
You say something that I know is totally different, but it's related, right?
At one point, you say with words we breathe reality into being, and then you talk about how the performativity of language means it does not simply describe or reflect who we are, but creates who we are.
So unpack those, sort of, how those things are similar and how they're different for me.
Well, this is the danger of New Age groups and all kinds of different cultish groups is that they're not, everything they're saying isn't 100% wrong.
Of course not.
Or else it wouldn't, it wouldn't suck you in.
Right.
It wouldn't, there's gotta be bait on the hook.
100%.
It's like in new age groups, you know, meditation totally is valid.
And, you know, your beliefs about yourself really do influence outcomes.
And, and Big Pharma has made mistakes, you know, like, All of these things are true.
And so, right, so when a New Ager says that all you have to do is, like, speak it, breathe it into the universe and manifest, that puts a hyperbolic and unrealistic spin on a theory that I don't think most of these conspirituals are familiar with.
But it's a linguistic theory called the Theory of Linguistic Performativity.
Um, which says that language does not simply reflect reality, it actively creates reality.
Um, and there's a related theory called the Supir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that while language does not determine your thoughts, it does influence them.
And those are related concepts, but we make sense of the world with language.
Language is how you manufacture ideology and beliefs.
Without language, there are no beliefs at all.
There are no cults.
Um, so it is true that if you reframe something with language in your mind, like, you will start thinking about it differently.
However, you cannot simply Say, you know, use words a different way.
And if you still think differently, expect change to come.
And language alone is not enough to affect really big factors like disease.
You know, this is what New Agers do.
It's like they take these things to an extreme.
And it's like, you can't just speak that you would like that COVID is a myth.
Yeah.
Ta-da, it's a myth.
You cannot just speak that you would like not to be impoverished and ta-da, you are not impoverished.
It's not quite like that.
The theory of linguistic performativity at its core is really talking about the power of language to consummate real actions.
So the simplest example would be, you know, an umpire calling you out or a, you know, minister at a wedding saying, you know, I now pronounce you married or whatever.
Um, but, but perform, but all language is performative in that, like you, you with your words are like really can change outcomes.
You really, really can.
It is powerful, but it is not so powerful that you can cast what is essentially a spell, um, with your language and then have the, you know, have the COVID pandemic disappear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Uh, following up on that, tell me about Jim Jones as a code switcher.
Oh, gosh.
Yes.
Well, Jim Jones was a special, a special case.
When you look at these sort of charismatic middle-aged white male cult leaders throughout history, they're charismatic to an extent, but a lot of them not even really.
Like, I mean, take Donald Trump as a perfect example.
He has stage presence, but he's a dingus.
Like, he's a buffoon.
Our standards for his charisma were quite low.
And that's the same for Marshall Applewhite.
He was, again, like a theater nerd with Spooky eyes like he I would not follow him off a cliff.
You know what I mean?
I wouldn't give him directions at a gas station.
The guy is fucking terrifying He is so terrifying looking um, but Jim Jones he truly truly was a smart dude and And everybody that I talk to, like, a lot of people don't know this about Jonestown, and I didn't know this before I started researching it.
Most of the people who moved to Guyana, where Jonestown was, and who died in the massacre, were black.
And I didn't know this, because a lot of the people who come forward and talk about Jonestown in the media, a lot of them are white.
And, you know, that probably has something to do with the fact that so many of those who perished were Black followers.
There are Black survivors who have talked to the media as well.
But every survivor I spoke to, from all different backgrounds, you know, white, college-educated, sort of progressive, hippie types, to middle-aged Black women who were active in the San Francisco Pentecostal church scene, they all told me that The moment you had a conversation with Jim Jones, it felt like he was speaking uniquely to you.
It felt like he was speaking your language.
He was widely read.
He would go into the back of church services helmed by Father Divine or political rallies.
And he would learn to speak in the style of that person who is commanding a room of hundreds.
And he just had this ability to meet people on their linguistic level.
Not to actually, you know, relate to them or to make them feel seen or anything like that.
It was always to access power.
And this is the power of language.
Like, with your words alone, you can access people that Yeah, you talk about, excuse me, I hope you don't mind me interrupting, but you talk about his ability to influence black folks at that particular time in history, right?
When there's all of these different cultural Things going on in terms of black liberation and the struggle and how he was able to speak to them in this religious and political way, but also able to play that game where he knew the right things to say that would disidentify him from being just another white man trying to speak their language.
Like he was playing at such a high level in terms of getting on the inside And then he could totally just switch from that depending on if he was talking to someone else who had a different cultural or ethnic background.
Completely.
And then when he was giving speeches, say, to the entire congregation, when he would blend the political language with the religious language, The audience's confirmation bias would do the work for them, for him.
They would just tune out what they didn't want to hear and tune in to what they did want to hear.
But yes, the late 60s and 70s have something in common with our culture now.
It was a time of incredible social turbulence.
Now we obviously have The pandemic and we're incredibly politically divided, etc.
Then, obviously, you had the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassinations.
You know, people felt really unsteady and mistrustful of mainstream institutions, much like now.
They were looking to alternative sources of support and community, much like now.
And there were people who were especially vulnerable, and I'm leaning on the work of this scholar named Sikivu Hutchinson here.
She is a black feminist scholar who has done a lot of work on the People's Temple.
But she noted that, you know, with the people In the People's Temple, there were a lot of unique promises that appealed particularly to black women who had largely been left out of the civil rights movement, whose leaders were mostly men, and the second wave feminist movement, whose leaders were mostly white women.
And with the People's Temple, Jim Jones, who had relationships with All the right people.
You know, Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, so many organizations that really legitimized him.
He was promising, like, here is a place where you will be heard.
You're being silenced everywhere else.
Here is a place where you and your problems will be addressed.
Um, and of course that turned out to be a lie.
Um, but yeah, he was, he was an intelligent and incredibly manipulative person.
And he, he had this really Machiavellian way of code switching.
Yeah, the thing that I had not remembered to say a moment ago is that he would then turn around and talk to college educated white folks and quote Nietzsche.
Exactly.
Slip back and forth.
And then and then really, it sounds like how he was presenting his utopia to people was it was very much like a socialist, social justice kind of kind of, you know, space where we're going to we're going to make a better world.
Totally.
I mean, the media paints it as this freaky place where all of these brainwashed acolytes lined up to drink their Kool-Aid, but it wasn't that at all.
I mean, by the time the tragedy actually happened, a lot of those people had lost their faith in him and wanted to escape and they couldn't.
And so it wasn't really this, you know, this mass suicide that it's painted to be.
It was really coerced.
Yeah.
More like murder.
But yes, so he, yeah, he had this incredible ability to appeal to all people from all walks of life, which is like, you know, a good skill in general.
It's just that his intentions were incredibly nefarious and He, you know, and these dudes, you know, they're megalomaniacal, and when things don't go their way, in the most extreme examples, if no one catches them first, they think, well, if this ship is going down, it's not just gonna be me, and they take everyone else with them.
So that's the explanation behind so many of the cult suicides that we're familiar with.
That deeply, deeply narcissistic sense that the whole group is now an extension of my identity, right?
And so if I'm going down, they're all going down with me.
It reminds me of the family killings that happen where the father loses his job or has some terrible thing happen and takes out the whole family.
That's right.
How would they go on?
That's right.
Yeah, no, an abusive family, an abusive family is really just a small cult.
And just like an abusive relationship is a cult of one, you know, but that is, that is very similar.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, we could obviously talk about this stuff all day.
I wanted to end on a, on, on this note, you spend some time in the book talking about cultish yoga and fitness brands, which is very much in our wheelhouse.
And I noticed that when you talk about that stuff, you have some advice on questions people can ask themselves if they're sort of wanting to evaluate, like, how healthy is this very, like, inspiring group that I've gotten involved with where I have all of these goals I'm achieving in ways that I'm feeling better about myself, but I have questions.
What are some of those things that people can check in on?
Yeah.
Well, I spoke with this amazing fitness historian named Natalia Petruzzella for this part of the book, and I think she has a book coming out at some point.
I know she has a Spotify podcast about Chippendales, so that's a whole other thing.
But yes, so the main thing to look out for in these cult fitness communities is, you know, what are they promising?
Are they promising you a good workout for an hour that's going to inspire you, and then they're letting you, like, tap out and go live the rest of your life?
Or are they promising that your life is going to dramatically improve overall?
You know, you're gonna be able to cure your cancer or do whatever if you come to this workout enough.
Like, if you really come every day and become a cult fan of this cult workout, Then your life is going to dramatically improve overall.
Do they allow you to participate only casually, or is it really an all-or-nothing sort of thing?
Are there toxic power dynamics within the Cult Fitness studio between, say, instructors and all of their adoring acolytes?
But largely it really is just the question of like, what is this group promising?
And it is completely fine to get a sense of community and temporary transcendence from your workout space.
You know, obviously a lot of us have moved away from traditional religion.
We don't believe in God, you know, we need some place to feel that sense of surrender and release or whatever and a fitness studio is a perfectly fine place to do that.
But you just need to have that like vigilant twinkle in the back of your eye reminding you or in the back of your mind reminding you that this is just a fitness class.
And if they're asking things of you that go beyond that, you know, particularly if they're, you know, Requiring more of your time, free labor, emotional labor than you probably initially signed up for, then that could be a red flag.
Oh, and of course, all the chants and mantras and buzzwords will Yeah, it's funny.
I've always been a little bit of a fish out of water.
As someone who's been in the world of yoga professionally and as a participant for about 30 years, I've never been comfortable with the in-group jargon, with the use of special terminology and language and mantra and everything that then gets ascribed to this.
It's kind of like Orientalism, right?
Cultural appropriation, I think, has lots of different angles on it.
And there's a piece of cultural appropriation that always sort of felt wrong to me about I'm going to recite these chants.
Like, as a non-religious person, I'm going to recite these chants because they come from another culture and I don't really understand what they mean, but they supposedly have some magical power because of their sound vibration and their ancientness.
And yet, really, if you look at translations, I may as well be sitting in a Sunday school, you know, traditional Christian kind of setting reciting some aspects of a biblical story, it just never appealed to me.
But the mystique of that way of using language, I think can be very compelling too.
Oh, for sure.
And I mean, at the end of the day, like if you do have the ability to decide, okay, I do not actually want to participate in this ritual, or I don't want to use languages this way, and that's allowed, that's probably a good sign.
Oh, but the worst in terms of like the appropriate cultural appropriation of yoga languages, when you see like the yoga moms in their racerbacks that say like namaste and like om is where the heart is just like any sort of sanskrit pun makes me want to just get out of there I love it.
I love it.
Listen, Amanda, this has been fantastic.
I know you have a new podcast coming out to coincide with the book.
That's true.
Yeah.
So tell me anything you want to about the book, the podcast, and how our listeners can find you and just keep benefiting more.
And I encourage everyone to go get the book.
Believe it or not, we've barely scratched the surface on how much you get into in the book.
So go buy it, people.
Yeah, I really packed a whole bunch in there.
Yeah, so the book Cultish the Language of Fanaticism will be published June 15th.
You can get it wherever books are sold.
I encourage you to patronize your local indie bookstore if you can.
And you can find me on Instagram at Amanda underscore Montel where I post fun culty content.
And then, yes, I'm launching a podcast to coincide with the It's called Sounds Like a Cult, and it's about the modern-day cults we all follow.
And on the podcast, my co-host and I pick a different zeitgeisty group each episode and attempt to figure out, this group sounds like a cult, but is it really?
And if so, how bad is it?
So, you know, we go over groups from Peloton, to fraternities and sororities, to New Age spiritual influencers, to the Royal Family, to the Bachelor franchise.
It's fun.
That was a great interview, Julianne.
And I'm really glad that Amanda is tackling this, because I think as our show notes said, the average age of cult pundits has got to be over 65.
I mean, it's appropriate that they're doing that work because boomers kind of broke the culture with cults, I think.
I didn't have time to read all of the book, but the parts that I did read, I can see it's super well-written, it's snappy, it's conversational, it's accessible, primarily, and I think that's really important.
I think it's going to expose a lot of Yeah, it's always interesting reading about subject matter that you're familiar with through the lens of understanding that a lot of people who will be reading it will be reading all of it for the first time.
Yeah, and I should say that right off the top here, you know, my opening quote that I chose about Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite being able to inflict unforgettable, you know, drastic harm on their followers without lifting a finger.
It's a tricky one.
It's a tricky one.
And I know that it landed kind of oddly for you when we talked about it behind the scenes.
Yeah, I mean, she contextualized it really well.
I think that the hook of the book is the power of language, and I think that one quote, it doesn't stand alone in the sense that we have to know that Jones actually also physically and sexually assaulted his followers for years and years, but that context is really rich in there.
Yeah, and I'd like to just say for anyone who heard the interview and wondered about that, if you read the book, she does go into some detail about the violence and the guns and the threats and the coercion and everything that was going on beyond language, but because her emphasis is on the power of language, that sort of snappy sentence works if you have the bigger context.
Yeah, and I think it's a really smart hook to approach cult dynamics through language, because all of the language is out in the open, even now more so in the internet era, because you can read what these people are saying everywhere, and the internet never forgets.
You know, seeing things in print in social media feeds makes, you know, cultish language really, really clear.
How much of an impact, Matthew, would you say that the two cults you were in, did language play a role?
And when you were listening to the interview or reading through the book, were you noticing specific themes tied back to your own experiences?
She really nails the principle through Robert Lifton of the thought-terminating cliché, and that's very clear and easy to identify after a while, and certainly in retrospect in my two experiences.
But language in both places was used in different ways.
Michael Rocha's language was much more evocative and, you know, elusive and poetic.
And pseudo-intellectual and also pseudo-scholarly, it was always offering a carrot of some kind of deferred meaning.
You know, you were going to find out the truth of the next level of Tibetan Buddhist revelation in the next course or in the next, you know, in the next meditation series or something like that.
And the language at Endeavor Academy was much more emotionally coercive.
You know, I think that what's really good about Montel focusing on language is that, you know, it's the easiest part of the public-facing aspect of any cultic group to be able to see and to be able to identify.
It's a lot harder to talk about the power dynamics within cultic groups that are established prior to language.
that are established through these palpable somatic cues, what you feel in your body when you walk into an oppressive or controlling room.
Those are a lot harder to articulate.
So I think that it's really good to focus on the language aspect because it's all out in the open.
I know for myself, there was a difference between, and this isn't a cult in any capacity, But listening to Krishnadas on record and then meeting him and befriending him for a while when I was working on my first book and spending time with him and being in the room with him, because I'm not really a fan of Kirtan, but in that environment, I was.
I was very taken by it.
And you mentioned somatic, so I wonder, I want to ask you the same thing, Julian, with Anna Forrest, because she's a very poetic person who is very embodied.
I mean, I've never studied with her, but through some of her teachers I have, and it's a very challenging form.
And so, did you have similar feelings when you were talking to Amanda from your experiences?
Gosh, I'm not sure even how to put my finger on it, but yes.
The thing about working with Anna is that there's a very intense experience that people have of entering into her space.
And she runs that space in a very, very specific way that is quite controlling and quite domineering.
And she is very frank about that if you ever talk to her sort of offstage in a way.
She's very frank about that she's the alpha and she handles things that way.
In terms of language, yeah, there's a whole vocabulary around what it means to not bail out, what it means to be a warrior and to really stand in your power and to breathe.
And to breathe in a way that is saying yes to life.
To really fill your chest with breath instead of living like a half-dead person.
There's a lot of that kind of language that I remember.
It was a long time ago.
The sense of how we could all be...
Indoctrinated into being on the same journey together and following her lead as the heroic abuse survivor who was going to teach us how to be powerful like her, it relied very heavily on language.
Language as reinforcement to the sort of felt power dynamic that you encountered when you entered the room?
Or would you say that language was part of the induction process as well?
Like, you were attracted to Anna because you heard of something that she had said to somebody else, or you read an essay by her or something like that, and so you went.
I think it's more that in that induction process, there's an ideology that is being delivered.
And in many ways, this is just normal, right?
This is how it is to whatever kind of human situation you're in, is that there is a language that encodes a set of beliefs and ideas that everyone is sort of staying on board with if they stick around within that context.
Matthew, we've talked about this before, but I think it's a good time to revisit and explore it briefly, because I really love the conversational aspect between you and Amanda, Julie, and it just flows so well when two people are on the same page and can really think about ideas in that manner.
I wonder, you opened up by saying that most cult researchers are over 65, but we've talked about how the digital world is opening up new opportunities for indoctrination.
I mean, again, the anti-vaccination thing, QAnon, all of that is indicative of that.
So, have you noticed any changes?
We've talked about staring into the camera and using that technique, which is done in person, but have you noticed changes in language that people have had to use because they're not in person anymore and the people can't see the same pantomimes and feel the presence in the same way?
You know, I think that it's almost like a McLuhan question about the intensity and the length of particular portions of content.
I think that, like, Julian, when you did your bonus episode on Adi Da, you played a couple of excerpts from these really long lectures that he would give.
And there's something about that format that I don't think would play in the TikTok era.
I think there's a reason that Christiane Northrup limits herself to 12 minutes.
I think there's a reason that Lori Lodd limits herself to 8 minutes or whatever it is.
I think there's a reason that Phil Goode almost always hits the 7 minute mark or something like that.
Well, it's because 7 is a magical number, though.
Well yeah there's that but I mean there's also but so there's also there's some kind of like compression going going on that has to do with competing with other sources of visual stimulation yes and also and also a sense of urgency so I what I would say is that is that that when people are using cultish language in the digital era, they have to extrovert out of the screen in order to really capture your attention in almost a spiritually pornographic way.
Whereas if you were attracted somehow into Anna Forrest's room, you came to the room, you were there, and then you were a captive audience.
She didn't have to go out and get you.
But I think that people like Elizabeth April have to literally leap out of the screen at you in super high D nuclear visuals and incredible makeup and filters and lighting and shit like that.
And they have to basically dominate your visual field.
And that's quite different.
So the performance aspect has to go up.
And it also has to be snappy.
And if you noticed, if you open up Phil Good's, you know, his selfie sermons, they start with this very quick.
So I just wanted to jump in.
to jump on here and tell you about, you know, what I heard from the channels or what I heard from my sources or something like that.
Like he's passing on a secret.
I think we've said this before about Lori Lott from the next room.
It's like, I was just taking a crap and the, and the, and the Lemurians told me that I had to come out and I did, I hardly had time to wipe my ass.
I'm like, are you kidding?
Okay, I have to do it.
I have to accept this assignment.
But you know what else it's like, Matthew?
It's an aside.
It's a breaking of the fourth wall.
It's like I'm in my life, which is this amazing movie, and I'm just going to pause and look right at the screen and tell you this thing.
It's very postmodern that way.
And actually, that's a really good model to look at it from, actually, because when Anna Forrest, or when Michael Roach, or when Charles Anderson are running a room, they are on stage, they are the center of attention.
They can break the fourth wall, but they're not going to do it with irony.
They're not going to do it because they are competing with other sources of stimulation.
They don't have to.
They know that they've got that capture going on, You mentioned Elizabeth April, and I remember in one of her videos where she was talking about sickness being part of the spiritual transmission.
She's not the only one, but I specifically remember that.
And ironically or not, just before recording, I was reading an article on National Geographic where the word nausea, nause, comes from C because of seasickness.
And seasickness is compared to carsickness.
It's all about motion.
Well, new research has shown that scrolling through social media produces the same cognitive effects as seasickness.
So, I wonder how much that plays and if there's any length of the videos or if there's any sort of process, if there's any cognitive disassociation happening with that sickness that happens when people are tethered to their phone for so long that makes them more vulnerable to being indoctrinated.
And then the person on the screen says, I know what you're feeling right now.
You may be experiencing this.
And let me explain it to you.
It's symptoms of ascension, right?
Right.
And ascension is about moving upward the same way that the scrolling.
It's kind of funny.
The thing that I wanted to return to a little bit about what might be primal or beneath the language that becomes its own aspect of administration and control and reinforcement in the cult is The body sense of being around people who are scared and who are in deference.
And, you know, there's this funny thing, you know, listeners might know that I did this bonus episode, but it was kind of a cancelled bonus episode because I had written about a wellness influencer that I was But then I decided not to because it felt like it was punching down.
But one of the ways in which I was trying to rationalize this essay about this person was by focusing on what they had to say about not having friends.
And one of the things this person kept saying as she went on and on about not having friends was that she had no patience for and no idea of how to do small talk.
And at one point they talked about how you know if you came over to my house we would go deep and we would not talk about anything like superficial and we would and you know and you know I don't even know how to do to to do small talk.
It sounded like a complete nightmare like you would be cornered by somebody in in a bar or something.
And I think what they were also saying was that they couldn't use anything but cultish language.
They didn't know how to use anything but charged terms, but thought-terminating cliches.
And it made me think, I had this realization, which is that The opposite of cultish might be small talk.
Because you can't do small talk in a cult.
Because the focus of small talk is not ideology.
The focus of small talk is not figuring out where you are in the dominance hierarchy.
I mean, it might be in some respects, in some circumstances.
That's not the main thing that's going on.
It's about easing social anxieties.
It's about beginning to explore, you know, your relationship and your possible shared interests.
And if you do that in a cult, that happens outside of the shadow of the leader.
And so small talk might lead to a kind of unsanctioned intimacy between two people, and that threatens the power structure.
Yeah, I also hear someone like that saying, I don't know how to have a conversation with you that is not about influence or control or indoctrination, right?
Exactly.
And they even admit it's totally exhausting.
And so I rarely find people who are willing to go there and be exhausted with me totally.
I'm like, holy fuck.
Yeah, it's totally exhausting because you're talking about domination and control like all the time.
Anyway, I also realized that my aversion, I thought this was temperamental, that I have this aversion to small talk in my neighborhood.
And I think that it's not temperamental.
I think it's partly related to these cult experiences, which trigger feelings of shame or embarrassment when I'm talking to someone without a clear objective.
So it's kind of like a nasty social injury.
I don't want to lose that video thread though, Matthew, because a few weeks ago on one of the episodes, you had mentioned, oh, we should put a trigger warning for this clip in and we ended up doing it.
And I have to say, out of everything that we've looked at in this year plus now, that video was one of the most disturbing to me.
And the reason is because there was a part of me that genuinely felt sad that a person Couldn't make friends, because my life is my friends.
I mean, I'm close to my family, but my friends, I know the value of friendship.
And yet, at the same time, there was such a certainty that being like, I only go deep with people, it's all I need to, there was such an ego that was there, that disgust came up at the same time as that sadness.
And I just, I actually left that video not knowing how to feel because it was too confusing.
Those two conflicting things were in me.
The empathy of being like, wow, that's really sad not to have friendships, but then to think that you're above everyone else so that you can't make small talk was pretty disturbing.
Yeah.
I mean, one thing that I'd also say about Cultish in its sort of performance Like, Amanda does this amazing job of breaking down what the, you know, words and phrases are, how they can be repetitious, how they can empty out of meaning, or they can have these totalizing meanings that nobody's quite sure of.
But the way it feels in the moment is relentlessly pressurized.
So, it's not just that people are using repetitive phrases, but that they're high octane.
And there's always a sense of urgency behind them.
You have to get it.
You have to understand what I'm saying.
It has to be repeated.
And you have to repeat it back to me.
And it doesn't matter if you don't understand what the fuck it means.
In fact, if you don't understand it, that calls for more anxious repetition and engagement.
Because what you must understand is that the stakes could not be higher.
Exactly, and that means that you are signing off on every verbal exchange, and that, of course, is very exhausting.
And I think this points to what I believe is just a basic law of cult life that Montel's book really opens up for me.
She doesn't quite say it this way, but I feel it there in the margins, which is that the first law of cultish language is that it has to be exciting.
As soon as it bores you, it's not cultish anymore.
In fact, being bored is illegal in cults because, like, it makes me think of, I don't know if you guys, I don't know if you know the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
He's got a book called On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, which is one of my favorite books ever.
And he defines boredom as the paradoxical desire to have a desire.
And the last thing that a cult wants is for you to be left alone with your own spontaneous desires.
I had a couple things that came up in reading the book and in the interview that I wanted to ask both of you about.
One was, you know, she has this moment where she says, you know, brainwashing is basically a bullshit term.
Unfalsifiable kind of claim, and that that's not really what happens, and that we actually do people who've gotten involved in cults a great disservice by sort of saying that they've just been brainwashed and taken over in some kind of way that has rendered them a completely different person.
And the other is the sentence, cultish language isn't a magic bullet or a lethal poison, it's more like a placebo pill.
Let me take the second quote first.
One of the things that I think the book is really valuable for is that it tries to bridge this precipitous gap between how Jim Jones uses language and how Young Living Oils use language.
And to make connections and to do this in such a way that it's a difficult task and it runs the risk of making the definition of cultish so broad that it may well apply to anything, but I think she takes on that challenge really well.
Like, I had a basic question that I think she's pulling on throughout, which is, okay, well, what's the threshold between the relatively beneficent and the harmful?
Like, where are the indicators?
Can they be found in the language itself, or are there other forms of social control that have to come into play in order for, you know, Tony Robbins' clients to go from, you know, relatively satisfied customers to people who are completely entrapped in his pyramid scheme.
I think part of it is to what extent is the language and then the way that the situation is set up, the way that you interacting with the group or with the leader is set up, To what extent is it colonizing the rest of your life?
To what extent is it saying this thing that we do together, this way of thinking, this way of practicing, this way of experiencing, has to now translate into every other aspect of your life?
Or is it something that you show up for and it's like, oh, that was great.
Thank you very much.
And then you, you know, kind of are free to go.
Right, and I think, I guess I would imagine that Amanda's argument around cultish is that the level of danger increases by the overreach of the promise or the demand of the language to address all areas of life or to try to solve all problems.
Or to claim that if you get this in this space, it will solve all these other problems out there, which can go from like, you know, your relationship problems to your money problems to what's everything that's wrong with the society and the world.
You know, one thing that she brought up a couple of times in the interview, and I saw it in the book too, that I wanted to provide another point of view on is that And it's kind of related to this question.
It's related to the question of the vulnerability of the cult member.
The idea is that somehow the cult leader tells the follower what they want to believe.
And I think, you know, I've been puzzling that out, and I think sometimes it's true.
You know, we can definitely see it in aspects of Jim Jones and his fake social civil rights scam.
But then when I think about my own experience in the two cults, that formula of me being told what I wanted to believe, it applies to one but not at all to the other.
So with Michael Roach, I wanted the data that he was pretending to offer.
But with Charles Anderson at Endeavor Academy, I had no interest in the content at that point, but I was extremely socially vulnerable.
I also, it's hard to count the number of cult survivors I've spoken to who got recruited socially and they didn't have a clue what the content was.
But they underwent some kind of cognitive coercion via love bombing or isolation or, you know, intensity rituals or something like that.
And so they wound up believing shit that they had no precedent for.
Right.
They wound up that was just and that's why when you talk to their families, they say the person changed.
They believe something totally different.
And I think if we're starting to look at, you know, at how people get red-pilled in the QAnon era, Yeah, there are going to be some probably psychological predictors of who is vulnerable to the ideology, and there's going to also be, you know, a shit ton of stories, and they're all available on QAnon Casualties right now, of people who just overnight started believing shit they had no background in.
That also happens a lot in Christianity.
That's the whole idea of proselytizing and doing mission work, missionary work.
I've known people who weren't necessarily religious and then what happened was they were befriended and these people were very kind to them and took them in and maybe there was some vulnerability there and then all of a sudden the Bible is the way and I've watched that process play out.
You know, I mean, you know, the definition of, you know, there's the old idea that the definition of a religion is only a cult that has reached some sort of, you know, mainstream acceptance, which is true in this case.
I mean, the thing about proselytization in a sort of like Jehovah's Witness or, you know, an evangelical sense is that the proselytizer comes to a brick wall.
where the person who didn't formally believe in something is for some reason put in or through some technique put against a wall emotionally or otherwise and told, you know, are you going to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
And they may have no precedent for believing that.
So, they didn't want it.
They didn't want it.
They were socially vulnerable.
They were, you know, they were a villager who got better access to water or something like that.
And and so, yeah, the notion about wanting to believe something I think is true in some cases.
And then there's something else going on.
And that's really hard to that's really hard to suss out because it happens.
You know, it happens through It happens through economics, it happens through other forms of social relationship, it also happens through just brute somatic influence and dominance.
Yeah, yeah, and then there's that interesting piece too, which is that perhaps you got involved with the cult because you were lonely and you were vulnerable and you needed some sense of belonging and maybe you were at a difficult transition in your life, and then even if you don't know what the sort of ideological content or religious content of the group is necessarily going in, or you can't even really give a good exposition of it once you're in, nonetheless there may still be language games around the in-group identification
Well, that's why I think the notion of reinforcement is kind of interesting, because it may not be so much that the person's pre-existing beliefs are being appealed to, but once they are socially ensnared in the belief that they're being cared for, but perhaps really trauma-bonded to the group,
What they might be doing with language is using the language and the belief system as a way of strengthening those relationships.
Aside from what the content actually says, they might not actually existentially give a shit about the content.
The other, one other thing I want to say is that, like, beneath the level of language, we also have to acknowledge that, you know, sometimes leaders are speaking total gibberish.
And, you know, like, Reverend Moon could hardly speak English.
Now, he had a lot of lieutenants who were speaking English and they had their specialized language.
But then I'm thinking about, like, Patabi Joyce.
Who, whose English was complete crap.
Now, his, his, uh, the, the, the cultic dynamics that formed around him, they did have their specialized language that was based upon, you know, misunderstandings and sort of neologisms that they sort of picked out of thin air by hanging around him.
Um, but on the other, you know, another example would be my old guy, Michael Roach, is not popular in English speaking countries now.
He's popular in China.
He's popular in Russia.
He's popular in Mexico.
So, so language, language is important for sure, but it's, it's got it.
You know, there's also, I mean, he might be teaching in English with a translator into Mandarin or Cantonese or something like that.
And I would be very interested in figuring out the level to which the passion of his translator is communicating the content versus his height and his capacity to be impassioned or to break into tears at the drop of a hat.
Because there's a clear instance in which the language is actually separated from the performativity, right?
