140: Surviving Larry (w/Daniel Levin & Zach Heinzerling)
Today, Hulu releases a 3-episode doc series called “Stolen Youth,” directed by Zach Heinzerling.
The pole star for this low-dopamine, low-cortisol, non-true-crime, survivor-centred documentary is Daniel Levin’s painful and radiant memoir, Slonim Woods 9. In 2010, Levin was drawn into an extended-family domestic abuse group led by Larry Ray, the father of one of his friends at Sarah Lawrence College. It took him years to leave, years to begin to recover, and years to become the de facto subject coordinator for this film.
Matthew talks with Zach and Daniel about what it takes to really listen to survivors of group abuse, and how the arts of memoir and documentary can be doorways to reconnection and integration.
In an interview debrief, Julian and Matthew discuss why reviewing Stolen Youth is such a relief in the current Wild West cultsploitation landscape.
Well-told stories in this zone—and we need more of them—educate, de-sensationalize, and de-stigmatize. They humanize every step of the journey: from recruitment, to enmeshment, to complicity, to recovery, to creativity.
Show Notes
Slonim Woods 9 by Daniel Barban Levin
Rough Cut: What do filmmakers owe their subjects? w/Souki Medhaoui
Larry Ray and the Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence
How Did Larry Ray Run a Cult at Sarah Lawrence?
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We'll do another one this coming Monday.
Conspiratuality 140, Surviving Larry with Daniel Barbann Levin and Zach Heinzerling.
A warning before we get started.
This episode centers on how 63-year-old Lawrence Greco, popularly known as Larry Ray, spent over a decade controlling the lives of a rotating circle of his daughter's friends who met at Sarah Lawrence College.
It involves descriptions of coercive dynamics, including domestic violence, sexual and physical assault, trafficking,
and financial abuse.
So this episode is dropping on February 9th, and it's the same day that Hulu is releasing a three-episode documentary
series called Stolen Youth, directed by Zach Heinzerling, one of our guests today.
We both encourage you to watch it, but you should be aware that this episode will contain spoilers for the documentary, although almost everything about the case is already in print.
So we'll include links in the show notes to all of the relevant reporting on the case, And at the top of that list will be the book that inspired this low-dopamine, low-cortisol, non-true-crime, survivor-centered documentary.
It's a book called Slonim Wood 9.
It's Daniel Levin's painful and radiant memoir of his time in the clutches of Larry Ray.
Levin is also with us today.
So here's the thumbnail of this story.
In 2009, A group of first-year students at Sarah Lawrence College, which is about 15 miles north of Manhattan, formed a network of friendships radiating out from a 19-year-old woman named Talia Ray.
Talia spoke ceaselessly about her dad to whomever would listen.
He was brilliant, she said, and hard done by.
A marine hero.
A diplomatic genius.
He would be getting out of jail soon, she said, after serving time on trumped-up charges cooked up by the FBI and corrupt New York City officials, especially former police commissioner Bernie Kerrick.
He was a hero, Talia said, and was on a mission to enlighten the world, just as he had saved her from her abusive mother.
Previous court findings, however, showed this to be untrue.
It's unclear now if anything Larry Ray ever said was true.
In the middle of the 2010 spring term, Ray, who was 51 at the time, was released from jail and moved into a student townhouse with Talia and her friends, and he camped out on the common room couch.
At first, he played host and housekeeper.
He cooked lavish dinners that outshone the campus cafeteria food.
He cleaned up after everybody.
And he basically hung out and hung out and hung out.
He played the role of listening dad, but then counselor, and then life coach.
He started calling house meetings and giving New Age-style lectures with PowerPoint slides in something called Quest for Potential, which he picked up from a self-published pseudo-philosopher and diamond dealer named David Birnbaum.
Sounds legit.
Yeah, we want to play a clip here from episode one that really encapsulates Larry's pitch.
Now, you're going to hear Max, one of the students at the time, set it up.
Daniel will also give a top-level summary, and then a student named Santos, also featured in the documentary, he'll describe one of the reasons that it was so appealing.
One day, Larry spreads the news to everybody, house meeting later tonight, we're all going to gather in the living room.
He unveils to us his philosophy called Quest for Potential.
where you're going, you miss moving, and they call surprise, right?
He unveils to us his philosophy called Quest for Potential.
Larry told us, you have a person that you're capable of being,
a true self.
That person, your potential, is held back or restrained or clouded.
you Have the courage.
Just the courage to ask yourself, who am I?
Sounds silly at first.
Try it.
You never know.
You might learn something interesting.
He could take away the things that were in the way, resolve the confusions and untie the knots, and then you could just be who you are.
Really what it translated to was just like, this is how you have clarity because you guys don't have it right now, and you don't have it right now because of all this gunk in your head from your parents and how you guys grew up.
The child was born like all other children.
That baby needed care, it needed protection.
I mean, beside love, babies need functioning guardians.
He could help identify, articulate, and then process repressed memories, trauma, abuse.
If we went through that process, we would be healed.
That's what it means to have clarity.
You've got your whole life ahead of you.
You don't want to make mistakes now.
You do have issues.
So then why not just deal with them thoroughly?
As a 19-year-old, it was attractive because, like, oh, look, there are answers.
So, Julian, we've been around the block with this stuff a little bit.
What are you hearing in this?
Well, I mean, the first really common setup is pathologize the human condition, invent a problem that people have, which they can, through a set of Barnum statements, identify as, yes, that sounds like me, and then present yourself as having the only solution as someone who's on the other side of those problems.
Even more troublesome in terms of repressed memories.
Slowly, the bull sessions started to intensify and narrow down into claustrophobic moments of one-on-one pseudo therapy.
One at a time, Larry would get one of the kids alone for an hours-long love bombing and trauma bond session in which he would make them feel like no one else in the world had ever understood them, and that he alone could figure out how to heal from their supposed childhood abuse.
And in many cases, it took just one session to hook them into years of emotional bondage.
For one young person, Isabella, this wound up escalating into overnights in her room while they're in the student dorm.
And the premise was that he was helping her with her allegedly traumatic childhood, but this closed off more obvious questions.
Within a year, she was helping Larry lock Daniel into the group, and eventually she became a cash collector for Larry, assigned to pick up sex work earnings from another woman under Larry's influence.
And years later, Isabella would stick by him as a lieutenant, even after his conviction for racketeering and trafficking.
Larry knew, to some extent, what he was doing.
He was so confident in his ability that when he mesmerized Daniel in a Starbucks over a six-hour meeting, he made four of the already recruited young people wait outside in the street in an idling stretch limousine.
We're never clear on how he's paying for anything, at least at first.
The takeaway, he's so sure of himself, he's willing to risk the boredom of four 20-year-olds sitting in a limo for six hours.
Now, there's a main bit of content here that overlaps with a familiar theme on our show, which is the paranoid pathologization of children.
In conspirituality world, all the babies are poisoned by vaccines.
They just can't remember.
The children are all neglected by narcissistic parents.
They just can't remember.
All the little sweethearts are sex trafficked.
They just can't remember.
There was a satanic cult they just can't remember.
So it falls to the charismatic healer, in this case Larry, to see everything, to understand everything, to have the answer for everything.
And he was extremely persuasive, especially to young people wandering through the ennui of what the fuck will I do with my life.
Persuasive enough, in fact, that he not only hooked them emotionally, He was able to push them towards an unlikely political landscape.
This is another thing we're familiar with, that this persuasive self-helpiness often carries with it and disguises an extremely rigid reactionary worldview focused on self-responsibility and performances of strength and courage.
Larry assigned them hundreds of push-ups every morning.
They listened to Vietnam-era rock and roll.
He was obsessed with male sexual performance.
He had a repetitive, Tony Robbins-style banter about success.
But it was always defined in uber-capitalistic terms.
Yeah, and as things spiraled out of control, we begin to see that Larry is a mega-consumer and a hoarder with this obsession for having and protecting top-shelf products.
So, a Patek Philippe watch, a Williams and Sonoma set of pots, extremely expensive woodworking equipment and cashmere sweaters.
It was as if, like, Gordon Gekko was a life coach.
He used these objects mainly to make claims of damage.
Against the group members.
At one point, Daniel really imperceptibly scratched a skillet while making eggs.
Or maybe he didn't.
Larry demanded he pay for a whole replacement set.
Santos apparently bent the handle of a new gas range.
Or maybe he didn't.
This was all part of the scam.
Larry was recouping money for objects from people he was treating as objects.
But did he steal the objects to begin with?
Yeah, it's never clear where these things are coming from.
And a few of the housemates see this happen, and they worry.
We hear from people in the friend group, Raven, Max, and Gabe in the documentary, and they all remember watching this strange acceleration of bonds and being very alarmed.
So, we want to hear Raven describe the snowball effect.
This clip begins with her flagging that in the process of caring for Claudia, Larry has suggested that she is schizophrenic.
I said, this is ridiculous now.
You really gotta stop listening to Larry.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
You're fine.
She was like, telling me that I'm not schizophrenic is only harmful to me getting better.
And she just insisted, and she started saying, ever since I was little, this, and all my life, this.
Stuff I'd never heard her say before.
Everyone at the beginning thought he was weird.
And then one by one, he would get them alone, have these conversations, and suddenly they're like, oh, he's not so bad.
To, actually, he's pretty great.
Actually, he's saving my life.
Actually, he's the best thing that ever happened to me.
Actually, I'll never not listen to him.
Actually, fuck you.
I'll never listen to you if you talk bad about him.
And it happened steeply.
And it shocked me.
Yeah, so I can only imagine watching that, not being susceptible to it, right?
And watching it happen to someone you care about where not only are we now talking about, I can see your problems because I'm a sort of a wise elder advisor to, I can, I can help you recover your repressed memories.
Now I can make pretty much the most severe psychiatric diagnosis and convince you that you should identify with this.
And you know, Raven at this point is either 18 or 19 years old.
And yeah, she's not susceptible.
She's skeptical.
She's trying to step in.
She's trying to raise the alarm.
And there also, at the same time, there aren't any tools.
I mean, for somebody with a lot of experience with this, there wouldn't be a lot of tools to intervene to be able to say, you know, it sounds like he really has a lot of influence over you.
I'm concerned.
I mean, maybe she did say these things as well as she's retelling it.
She's speaking about the sort of conversation in a more confrontational sense, but I just wanted to flag the fact that it's incredibly difficult to watch this snowball turn into an avalanche and find yourself sort of standing downhill of it and try to figure out what to do.
It's a really amazing dilemma.
Yeah, and I want to just point out here too that so often in the broader discourse, you hear the term schizophrenic used in inaccurate ways, right?
To talk about like maybe being of two minds about something or having self-contradictory emotions, right?
Right, exactly.
So, Larry's grip on Claudia gets so tight that several years later, he's convinced her that she has been spreading rumors about him being abusive.
And so, to remediate this, he pushes her into high-paid sex work, and then he collects all the money, a reported $2.5 million over four years.
And this is where the real money seemed to come from.
He conned another group member, we heard from Santos earlier, into extorting about $300,000 from his immigrant parents.
Santos told them he would kill himself if he couldn't pay Larry back from a made-up bill about personal objects he'd allegedly ruined.
So I also want to flag that Raven and Daniel were in a sophomore relationship at the time, and that Larry actually encouraged Daniel to break up with her during that six-hour meeting in Starbucks.
He phoned her while they were walking to the limo, and that led to their estrangement.
But in Daniel's memoir, he thanks her for trying to raise the alarm.
So Raven, and Daniel's parents, and Isabel's mom, and friends like Max, and Gabe, and Julianne, all of whom Heinzerling got on screen, knew something was up.
They might have been picking up the fact that Ray had previously been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.
This is the illness where parents sicken their children in order to be their saviors.
All of this is according to court documents related to custody issues involving Talia, dug up by New York Magazine for their 2019 reporting.
Now, you'll hear in my discussion with Zach and Daniel that they really didn't want to focus on Ray so much in the flow of his survivor's testimony that would distract from it.
But Julian, his diagnoses bring up this old discussion we've had on this podcast about the extent to which we should learn about and acknowledge the role of mental health issues in situations like this.
Yeah, I mean it goes both ways and obviously it's important to be very cautious about generalizations and armchair diagnoses, like certain things are going to be necessary but not sufficient.
I think we can safely say that there's some kind of lock and key fit that is probably necessary between the strategies of someone like Larry Yeah.
and the vulnerabilities of someone who's susceptible to that.
In this case, age seems to be a huge factor that Ray was exploiting.
Of course, as we just noted, he himself is deeply unwell, and this is evidenced by everything
we see in the documentary as well.
I think we see in Daniel's escape and in Raven's initial reactions as contrasted with those
who get more deeply sucked into that really toxic situation, an indicator of having some
ability to still access their own critical thinking and emotional intelligence in the
face of what seems to me like a really brutal psychological manipulation that understandably
took the others down.
Yeah, and then there's just sort of Grace and chance and luck as well.
I mean, there's a point in the memoir, I think, where Daniel describes the moment in which he just leaves the apartment building.
And then I think maybe in the third episode of the documentary, Santos describes just leaving, just getting into the elevator and going downstairs and leaving the apartment building As though suddenly the elevator was working.
Suddenly there was an outside world to go to.
And it seems very mysterious the point at which people are able to gather the strength and wherewithal to do that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the important thing for me in this kind of discussion is to recognize that the factors that make one person able to resist or to escape or to wake up out of something are multivariant.
They have nothing to do with like, you know, judgments on their character or some essentialism.
They're circumstantial.
There's just so many things at play.
And it does sound to me very much like Someone realizing they need to leave a toxic romantic relationship.
Right.
And one day I just walked out and then I kept walking and then the longer I was out of it, the more I realized, holy shit, that was crazy.
One of the really interesting things you'll hear in this interview is Zach describing the choice to not include his own footage with Larry Ray.
He basically says, You know, it would be like playing interview footage with Donald Trump about January 6th.
I mean, he doesn't say that, but that's the general feeling.
And playing that with a hope that you would gain insight into what really happened on January 6th.
Because the months and years drag on, and the veneer of Larry Ray's fraudulent care just melts away, and this reveals an almost near-constant rage that's inflamed by methamphetamines, gum disease, insomnia, apparent sex addiction, and intense hoarding.
Like a big part of every day for him is spent with his laptop in the apartment toilet claiming to be working on top secret defense stuff for the CIA or whatever.
But it feels like chances are pretty good it was like nonstop Pornhub and Adderall.
Isn't that far off politically?
In the interview, you'll hear Daniel talk about how conservative and right-wing many of Wray's actual behaviors were, but he successfully cloaked his politics in a kind of anti-authoritarian ambivalence while playing the authoritarian himself and the arbiter of truth.
Sound familiar?
Right, yeah, and one thing that I didn't have time to ask Daniel about was whether Ray's satanic panic style intrusions into their lives, because he's telling them they are all victimized by their parents of terrible crimes and abuse, whether those ideas carried with them other conspiracy theories like You know, things like 9-11 trutherism, or did he opine about chemtrails, or underground military bases, or, you know, the faked moon landing, or the Kennedy assassination.
So I wrote to Daniel and I followed up and I asked, and here's what he wrote back.
Larry was definitely focused on unveiling to us things about how the world and government worked, which we'd never heard of, as a way of making it feel like he was opening our eyes.
I think he might have intentionally avoided conspiracy theories that we'd have been aware of and would immediately dismiss, or that we might parrot to other people who would identify them as conspiracy theories.
It was all about not being able to pin anything down.
He had me read Noam Chomsky's book on 9-11, which isn't a truth or book per se, but it's more about the ways the US government has manipulated perception for years and plundered other countries for resources.
Similarly, he had me read Smedley Butler's War is a Racket about the banking plot ahead of World War II.
These are all texts I wouldn't say I dismiss now completely.
I do think there are serious problems with capitalism, but Larry was using these texts to further undermine our confidence in the structures by which we had understood It's amazing because this Trump-like figure could actually use center-left or leftist texts to sort of pick apart the epistemology of the people that he's entrapping, right?
Oh, and I've experienced this directly.
I've experienced people who've gotten red-pilled saying to me, you know, I thought you were someone who appreciated Noam Chomsky.
Anyway, it's an amazing story of a dumpster fire of a man who somehow weaponized his severe mental illness to ensnare a group of vulnerable people in his paranoid control fantasies.
Stolen Youth as a documentary tells it well, but I think Zach Heinzerling also got lucky in terms of its timeline because the doc was actually able to show many of Ray's survivors coming out on the other side.
Coming back to Earth, recovering, going to therapy, knowing that Rey was in prison and in some cases they had helped put him there.
And the film also shows that reconciling with families after tragedies like this might be possible.
And it's really a huge gift in that way because it didn't leave me in despair.
It didn't leave me in the anxiety of perpetuating an anti-cult crusade.
In fact, Zack even says that it's more like a domestic violence situation in which the perpetrator simply expands his family's targets.
And so, even that, I think, desensationalizes the experience.
I can't recall seeing anything quite like this.
Can you, Julian?
No.
And I think it's, yeah, it's a special piece of work.
Let's go to the interview now and when we return, we'll do a debrief on why this doc works so well
and why it's so important to get these stories right.
Zach Heinzerling, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast. Hi, thanks for having me.
And Daniel Barbann Levin, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Hi, thank you.
Daniel, starting with you, because I think that this project in a way starts with your 2021 memoir, it's a riveting read.
It's pretty rare in occult literature, and I think that's for three reasons.
I mean, first of all, it's written by an MFA in poetry.
Secondly, it covers this arc of wandering, induction, oppression, and the beginnings of a recovery.
And I think it bravely depicts something that's rarely seen and understood, which is the sexual abuse of a male group member as part of the coercive process.
So, now that the documentary is out, how are you feeling about the book as it is its skeleton, really?
When I first got out of this abuse of cults, The primary feeling that I was feeling was total isolation and feeling really incomprehensible to other people and to myself.
So I think writing the book was the beginning of a process of feeling almost a compulsion to make myself understood.
And I hoped that by extension that would help my friends be legible to the broader world.
I think that it felt really destructive for many years to have gone through sexual abuse as a man to have been inducted into a group like this and to not be able to understand what happened and to feel as if no one else would even begin to understand.
So the documentary for me felt like an extension of this journey of trying to make not just myself and my own experience but to make my friends Comprehensible to other people and to themselves.
Well, you actually dedicate the book to the friends I could not reach.
Now, this is published in 2021.
Maybe that dedication is written prior to that.
Have you reached some of those friends now, especially through the film?
And if so, how are they feeling about the book and the film to your knowledge?
I think it's part of the story that is maybe hard for people to imagine is that when we started all of this, I was the only person who was out of Larry Ray's grasp at the very beginning.
So when I first started writing this book, I was trying to figure out how to tell this story well.
Respecting the agency and privacy of my friends and mainly they were my audience.
You know, I was aware that they were the people who might read this and I hope that it might do something for them over the course of making the documentary.
I mean, Zach has an incredible ability to make people feel safe and to achieve access in ways that I.
We're sort of beyond my hopes.
So he was able to get in touch with people and then for legal reasons as this Larry Ray was arrested and indicted and so I wasn't able to be in touch with them directly throughout the whole process of making the documentary.
So now, since he was convicted, I've been able to finally reconnect with Santos, Felicia, Yali, who goes by Lee now.
Claudia, everyone, including the people who weren't directly involved.
So it's been really amazing to get to see them come back together as a family, to be back in touch with all of my friends.
It's been a dream.
Zach, did you read an early draft of Daniel's book?
And if you did, what did you think?
Yeah, when Daniel and I first met, he had just started working on the book and he sent me, I think, the first few chapters as kind of an introduction to his point of view.
I had read the article, but I think Seeing, you know, a window into a perspective of someone who had actually, you know, gone through this and wanted to talk about it in a different and honestly more artistically driven manner where some of the kind of bigger ideas that are introduced and themes are handled in a way I really appreciated, which is
To say, you know, Daniel's an artist, he appreciates art, and I think really wanted this project to be imbued with the same sense of care and kind of wonder that someone who was 18 or 19 and in a liberal arts college You know, would have.
And I think really putting audiences in the shoes of what it is like when you're at that age can help you understand how this happened and help you empathize with the survivors, which was always kind of the goal.
But I think to really understand that mindset, you kind of also have to make sure that the storytelling mechanics and format and style, you know, are in line with that kind of spirit of that age.
And so that was something that the book, I think, did beautifully, you know, because it is a memoir and it really kind of puts you on that campus environment and the things that are funny and, you know, thought provoking and curious in that time period are You're so different than how, you know, we might view things as older looking back.
So, I appreciated that about the book and appreciated what Daniel was trying to do and I took that same spirit into how the documentary was made.
Well, I have to say that it is very true that the first, it must be 30 or 40 pages of the memoir are prior to Larry and they establish a kind of Metaphysical floating through what shall I do?
What is this world about?
Who can give me guidance?
What is the meaning of things?
How will I organize my relationships?
And it's actually I was wondering when he was going to show up because by the time he does, you've really opened yourself as young people do to the possibility of being taken in a particular direction.
And then he gets his hooks in.
If we're kind of talking about the structure of the book and the structure of my experience, it felt important to me to depict The feeling of being a teen and coming into the world, to me, I always felt as if I had missed a day of class on how to be a person, and I just didn't understand.
But really, I mean, if you're looking at it from a wider lens, it's kind of not having a structure to understand life.
It's not quite nihilist, it's not quite existentialist, but there's kind of You're looking for some lens.
Larry sort of provided a very conservative, very black and white structure.
And then by the end of the book, you know, I kind of land on the other side of that.
And I think that's sort of the message at the end that I'm sending to my friends is that I think that if anyone tries to provide you with black and white answers to how to be a person, what's right and wrong, and how to be good, then they're lying.
Zach, you've said that you wanted to approach this project from a survivor's point of view.
What were your priors for that objective?
Like, who gets this right and who gets it wrong?
That's a good question.
I mean, I think with this story in particular, you know, there have been a new, the New York Magazine article was a front page article and it really generated a lot of buzz and there was a lot of attention, you know, and Hollywood was sort of hungry for this story that had all the makings of a salacious, entertaining, you know, you have a college sex cult.
What could be more sensational?
Sensational, let's say.
Yeah, right.
And I think, honestly, that's what kind of, and I can let Daniel speak more to this, but what Daniel told me was, you know, he wanted to protect the wishes of the survivors and harbored some real responsibility for how this project would, you know, be presented and wanted to do it in the most responsible way.
So immediately that was kind of part of the fabric of this whole endeavor.
You know, and I think there are examples of projects that have zero consent from the subjects that I find extremely interesting.
And then there are examples of projects where it's completely driven, you know, by the kind of first person narratives of the subjects.
And those are interesting as well.
I think with this project, though, you know, it's a story about individuals who have been exploited, taken advantage of, manipulated.
Their stories have been written for them.
I mean, essentially what Larry did was, you know, tell a version of themselves back to them in a way that they could believe in.
I mean, they didn't necessarily, you know, have the life experiences and Perspective, you know, sort of be able to challenge that.
And I think when you talk about representing these individual stories in media, you know, you basically want to do, you know, the exact opposite.
You want to make sure that this is a scenario in which people feel comfortable, listen to You know, trusted and that they really have a desire themselves to do this project because it's they have to they have to come to it with their own desire or needs or wants to get something out of the experience themselves.
It can't just be for entertainment's sake.
You know, for a three and a half hour project, there's probably five or six individuals that are interviewed in the project.
So it's quite a small number of people talking.
And for each of those Individuals, you know, they each had a kind of unique reason for wanting to participate.
I think it stems from Daniel really being a champion for the ability for someone to state their story in a way that feels good and in a way that feels authentic and not judged.
And I think, honestly, the feedback I got was, you know, as some of the survivors began to open up, you know, it really kind of galvanized their own understanding of themselves, right?
The camera or The documentary became a kind of a mirror for them to sort of reflect on who they were and who they were announcing that they were and reclaiming that identity that Larry had stolen from them.
So in the best of worlds in documentary, you know, you get a situation in which the participants are really collaborators and an experience and they really feel like they're getting something out of the process and that you as a filmmaker feel that you're making something compelling that audiences will want to see.
And hopefully, you know, I feel like with this project we succeeded in that.
Daniel, were you aware of the problem that Zach is flagging right up front that an essential part of Larry's manipulation was to steal all of your stories?
And so, you know, your challenge from the outset is to make sure that you don't replicate that in any way.
Was that on your mind right from the beginning?
Yeah, very much so.
I mean, as Zach's referencing, I was in a I was put in a position once the story became public where
there were a lot of other people who wanted to tell this story and they wanted to do it whether or not the victims
were involved, whether or not survivors had any say.
I've seen some of them.
You have to remember that I was alone and my friends were still actively being abused and controlled and I thought
that if the story was told the wrong way and they saw it while they were still there, there was a real risk of
serious harm.
You know, who knows?
I just felt like there was an imperative.
If someone was going to do it, it had to be someone who knew what actually happened, how it felt, and how to protect the most vulnerable people involved.
Zach, getting to the nuts and bolts of making sure everybody felt safe, were there specific things that you did to ensure that the interviewees were giving fully informed consent?
Did you use a subject coordinator?
Did interviewees have the opportunity to pre-screen and review the footage?
I worked with a occult therapist, Dr. Rachel Bernstein.
We had weekly meetings where a lot of the discussion was just how to speak responsibly to survivors of this kind of psychological trauma.
You know, I think that In the industry right now, there's a real push, which is, you know, so necessary and great for a real understanding amongst the filmmaking community of, you know, just how to deal with this kind of subject matter.
I was new to it, so it took a lot of, you know, effort and time on behalf of the crew to get to a place where we felt like You know, we sort of understood it well enough.
I mean, I think, you know, Daniel, because he's had more time than some of the other survivors to process what happened, you know, Daniel is an expert himself.
And so I think in talking to him about You know, what are the ways in which, you know, Daniel was very open about, here's what makes me feel comfortable when I'm speaking about this kind of thing.
Here are the things that would make me feel better during the interviewing process.
And you should definitely extend, you know, and early on we had a lot of those conversations about, you know, whether I was You know, doing it in the right way or not.
And Daniel was really open about, you know, sort of giving constructive feedback on how to approach these interviews in a more responsible way.
So it was definitely a process.
In the end, it's really time, right?
It's the time that you spend with people so that, you know, they really understand You know, that you're in it, you know, that for the right reasons and that you, you know, you really want to understand that this sort of more complicated aspects of this that other people are sort of blow by because ultimately it's like a headline kind of driven
Industry.
And I think in this instance, you know, we, this was a three year project and some of the people who I had talked to in the beginning, you know, didn't agree to speak on camera until, you know, years later.
And, and really after, you know, the trial and a lot of the, you know, legal issues kind of had to work out, which, which of course, you know, was delayed and delayed and, and, So I think it was important for us to get it right, and we had to wait for that.
But I think in the end, everyone's so much happier that we did wait.
Rachel Bernstein has actually been a guest on our show a couple of times.
We're really familiar with her work.
But you opted against putting her on screen.
It's a typical convention to do talking head stuff, to have expert commentary.
There is one shot, I don't know whether it's while you're filming Felicia or whether you're filming Dan, where you can see Steve Hassan's book in the frame, Combating Cult Mind Control, but that's a pretty sort of light touch.
How did you make the decision to not go with the talking head route?
Yeah, I think it just originated from, you know, from really like Daniel's, the first conversation with Daniel and the idea that, you know, this was going to be a first person account, a survivor's account of what happened.
Not to say that in a survivor's account, you can't have kind of outside perspectives, but it felt like the story being told by these individuals was so kind of, you know, It took on a kind of character of its own.
And I felt like to sort of cut to some outside perspective would sort of break a bit of the kind of almost like, you know, it's a sanctuary that's kind of created when you have first person accounts.
You know, I look at the The documentary about the survivors of Michael Jackson is an example where, you know, the survivors' stories are really all that really matter in that kind of film.
And I think we tried to do something, you know, similar.
Of course, we had a bit more, you know, more characters and kind of a, you know, longer and more complicated timeline, but Yeah, I think in the end it's really about, it's a choice you make, and I think because the film, or the series I should say, ultimately ends, well I shouldn't give away parts of the ending, but with some of the survivors kind of
Reuniting, it just felt like using them to carry the story, you know, would preserve kind of the essence of what, you know, we had sought to do from the beginning.
In a way, I think you were fortunate with the timeline because you were able to show a kind of recovery arc that really kind of, it obviated the need for any kind of expertise outside of what the, you know, the figures themselves were going through because they were able to share what they needed as they recovered, as they came to know themselves again.
I wanted to ask about the people who you weren't able to speak to.
So, for instance, you know, April 2019, Ezra Marsh got to interview Larry Ray himself for 10 hours.
That window, I think, was probably always closed for you, I might be mistaken.
But if it had been open, how would you have approached that, or would you have approached that, and what would your questions have been for him?
Oddly enough, there's a long story I could tell, but I met Larry Ray and I did have the opportunity to interview him.
I did an interview with him, actually, early on.
Ultimately, I feel like at that point, and this was a few years after, I guess, or maybe a year after Ezra Marcus and James Walsh spoke to Larry.
You know, even in their conversations, you know, Larry is sort of a broken record.
You know, this is a Larry that this wasn't the same Larry that that Daniel and Felicia and Claudia and Santos knew.
This was a Larry who had, I feel like, really devolved into You know, someone who was reciting the same story, self-promotional, you know, I know Gorbachev and I rescued missiles in Kosovo, but not in a believable or compelling way.
You know, his speech pattern was incoherent.
I think he, you know, because of his constant amphetamine use and you know just trying to uphold this insane delusional like fantasy lie for so long was really kind of a shell of a person and not someone who would give you any indication of the kind of charismatic you know chameleon type that met these individuals when they were students at Sarah Lawrence.
So It really didn't serve the narrative to use that interview.
I think, you know, we also chose this not to be a kind of dissection of who Larry is.
I think that there's probably another investigation into that.
You know, certainly in my work on this project, I did learn a lot about Larry.
But again, we kind of wanted this, we kind of wanted to protect this as a survivor's narrative and Not necessarily go into like a giant like who Larry is, but I also will say that if Larry were interviewed for that version of the film, you wouldn't get any more insight into who he is.
I mean, honestly, you know, as is evident in his in the sentencing, which happened a few weeks ago, You know, he's so lost in this delusion that nothing that he says really speaks to reality.
I did have the opportunity.
I could tell you what answers he would have to every question.
It would be the exact same.
He would just continue to lie and continue to say that this is all a conspiracy against him.
And it doesn't really serve any purpose of insight or value for the project.
It's a fascinating problem, because not only does it not serve the narrative, but it also diminishes his actual power in the moment, because as you say, by the time we get to 2021, he's been 10 years into this, at least, at least since the last release from prison.
And, yeah, so he's not the person who is cooking nice meals at Sloan & Wood.
He's not the person who's cleaning up after you, and, you know, Hosting and so on.
And I was going to say that it does seem like constant amphetamine use, insomnia, would really hollow a person out to where, what would be left to put on screen, really?
And for the sake of a survivor-driven story, I mean, we were trying to show the Larry that they knew then.
So much of this is all, you know, so much of the I feel like public obsession with cults ends up in a really ugly and judgmental attitude towards the victims.
And I think our whole goal was to understand this from the perspective of the victims.
Understand who this person was when they met him.
Understand who they were when they met him.
And let that be the story.
And I know, you know, Daniel knows so much about this because of the experience of writing a book.
But I think it's interesting how this kind of obsession with this kind of world has almost led to less understanding of it as opposed to more.
And hopefully this project, you know, does give more understanding into what's actually going on here.
What does it mean to be in a cult?
Which is, in a lot of ways, more akin to a domestic abuse situation than it is some kind of Kool-Aid drinking group.
I'm so glad that you used air quotes around the word cult because I think that what the project does actually, with its survivor-centered perspective and by not relying on packaged expert commentary, And showing character arcs.
I think you actually do that.
And the claustrophobia of the actual experience really is captured through some harrowing footage that you have on archive.
Daniel, I understand that some of that footage comes from Larry himself.
Some of it is taken by Isabel.
How did you come to decisions about what to include, especially the more violent depictions of his actions?
So when that footage came out at trial and it was accessible for the documentary, I had actually pretty strongly encouraged Zach to use the footage, at least of me.
I think for better or for worse, my feeling was really this desperation for people to see.
You know what happened i think experiences it as a male survivor of sexual abuse of this kind of trauma there is this fear for so many years of not being believed of not being understood and so i think i felt when i saw that footage is like finally you know because it wasn't a shock to me it happened.
And so I just was like, I need people to know that this actually happened this way.
And I think that Zach does a great job cushioning and contextualizing that footage to make it not salacious, to make it make sense.
But, you know, I wanted people to understand, as Zach said, you know, there's a There's this way in which it feels like survivors of cults are somehow dehumanized by media representation, and at the same time these cult leaders are sort of uplifted.
I got comments on my book frequently where, you know, people are talking about All they're really interested in is seeing more about Larry.
You know, all they want to know about is Marshall Applewhite and Manson, and they don't understand this focus on the survivors and the same people.
It's pretty brutal feedback.
And.
You know, and I've seen people on, I saw a friend of a friend on Instagram recently who went to a party that was themed cult chic, you know, and she was dressed up as a, as a Heaven's Gate member, you know, so I just feel this like imperative, like we need people to see that this isn't just some like fun, you know, crazy thing that's happening.
Like I'm a human being, like a regular person who went through this and I need you to feel a little bit From the safety of your screen, how real this is.
Zak, there are three people who stand out as... I guess it's two.
Claudia opted not to participate.
But of course, in order to really convey the depth of Larry's abuses, you had to disclose quite a bit about what she went through.
Now, was she okay with that?
Well, Daniel actually might be better at answering this question.
And I'm not sure how much, you know, we should...
dive into it just to sort of protect quality in this situation.
But essentially, you know, Daniel, again, sort of took it upon himself to, you know, ensure that the documentary was made, you know, responsibly and gave that assurance to those who decided not to participate.
It sounds, Daniel, like you actually did the role of subject coordinator in a way.
I was triangulating a bit between the projects, between the folks who were preparing for this trial and Claudia and other survivors who were figuring out What they wanted to do and Claudia, we talked about it.
She gave me the go ahead essentially to make judgment calls and to tell the story.
I think she trusted me to make sure that the story was told in a way that was honest and respectful.
It's an amazing position to be in because everybody's at a different stage of being able to speak, different stages of recovery.
What about Talia?
Did she answer any of your requests to participate or did you try to reach out to her?
Yeah, she didn't want to participate.
Yeah, and I think, you know, she's obviously in a difficult position, you know, at points in the trial, you know, she was referred to as a co-conspirator, but charges weren't, you know, she was never indicted.
And so I think it just was more complicated for her.
So, you know, she declined to be involved.
I mean, of all of the people in this story who are stuck, deeply stuck, she really stands out to me.
And according to the Marcia's reporting in New York Magazine, like Larry is coaching her from the age of 15 into lying about her mother, her mother's family.
Well, like from birth.
She becomes his prophet to your friend group, his most steadfast supporter.
And also, Larry's excuse, because so much of his rage about your, like, not true destruction of his property is hidden behind this claim that he's only trying to protect his honey girl.
And you don't say it directly, but there's some evidence that Larry is abusing her in profound ways, because you report watching her emerge from his bedroom in the morning alongside Isabel, who he considered one of his wives.
Do you have any idea how she is doing now and what kind of care do you think might help, Daniel?
You know, I had my own experience with Larry Ray for just a few years, my friends for even longer.
I cannot imagine the experience of being born into Larry Ray's reality.
I certainly can't imagine.
You know, I was worried enough about my friends having to face Let me say this when I came out, it was very shattering to have to reframe what had happened and to go from.
Maybe, you know, this was for good or I was kind of being trained or something to being like, this was abuse.
I am a survivor of abuse.
I had sex that was non-consensual.
You know, I'm a man who's had that experience, like having to reframe your whole reality.
And for me, just those last few years was so challenging to my psyche.
For Talia to have spent so many years proselytizing for her dad, Defending him, really putting herself out there.
She lived in homeless shelters rather than go be with her mom because Larry claimed that her mom was abusive.
All these things.
I don't understand how you integrate after that.
So, you know, I don't know very much about where she's at right now or what she's dealing with, but I have to imagine it's quite challenging.
Daniel, at a critical moment in your memoir, you write the following, quote, One way of dealing with a memory you can't bear is that you begin to build a box.
The box is the same shape and has the same dimensions as the real room you're in when the memory is made.
The box's walls overlay exactly upon the walls that are really there, made of wood and sheet metal and drywall, filled with plaster and rats and gypsum dust, the voices that echo up from downstairs and the firebreaks to stop the whole place from burning all at once.
The main difference is that in the real world, there are doors to get in and out.
In your head, there is only more wall, so whatever happened is sealed up inside.
Then the box and everything in it becomes very small.
and you tuck it away on a shelf inside of you. You can put it to your ear like a seashell and
hear something happening inside, but it sounds very far away. A whisper of an echo of something
that happened to someone who isn't you, but is a lot like you. So I guess I wanted to ask,
how do the boxes feel at this point? Yeah, I think that something very unique about the experience I
had writing this memoir and making this documentary is that, you know, like any survivor of abuse,
I struggled with knowing what was true.
And particularly in this experience, you know, this was someone who was trying to damage the part of me that determined what was real and false and what I remembered.
So what writing the documentary became about was stating that I believed myself, you know, and starting there.
And then an FBI agent called me and that FBI agent at the, you know, after a series of conversations, read my book and went through and validated and corroborated every single thing I'd written down.
And then there was video evidence, you know, so, But to speak to the metaphor there, yeah, I think that seeing this experience narrativized in this documentary with all of my friends, to take these memories that I tried to reconstruct and depict and now to be able to see them, it feels like those boxes now are sort of made of glass and I can take them down and sort of walk around them and look at them.
They don't feel as tucked away anymore, but they still feel like something that I can kind of hold in my hands, and that feels empowering after living just inside of them for so long.
You know, one of the people I think in your memoir that I just want to flag up because I think she was very important was Cassidy.
Who I think was able to look inside or help you look at those boxes a little bit, because you describe going into town, going into Manhattan to go to the Natural History Museum, and you basically enter into a trauma response, I think, remembering being in the city, remembering the apartment.
And she finally stops you, I think on the street, and says, so are you going to tell me what happened?
And you begin in a way that you're able at the time, but she really reflects back to you that there might be another way of seeing these things, that there might be another way of framing what happened to you.
And that's an amazing moment.
That's not the FBI.
That's somebody who knows you and really cares for you, and that's an amazing thing that happens.
Yeah, part of what I had hoped with the book and with the documentary, you know, given that these things were going to happen regardless, was that my friends might be able to exit the abusive experience into a world that already had a framework for understanding what had happened to them, hopefully gently.
You know, and I didn't have that.
And so my experience was a serious, you know, that encounter with Cassidy was just one of so many experiences where I would have a memory or say something that had happened to me that had been framed for me as completely normal.
So I really felt without Thinking too critically about it, that my friend's dad hitting me was fine because we had been doing this kind of marine boot camp type thing.
Right.
And I said something almost offhandedly about that to Cassidy as we were walking.
And looked back and realized she wasn't with me because she was standing on the street crying, you know.
And I think that seeing someone who cares about you look at you from the outside and react, quote unquote, normally, right, to what you've experienced, it helps you to see yourself.
It holds a mirror up.
In a way, she's able to have the feeling for you.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Zach, thank you so much for your work on this film.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today.
Yes, no, thanks so much for having me.
Appreciate it.
Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time.
I mean, you have your MFA now, you've been teaching writing.
You're not going to go back into this material, I assume, for whatever you're working on next.
What's coming up for you?
I have a number of private students and I'm teaching a class in the spring for Stanford's Continuing Education Program for folks.
It's focused on figuring out how to translate your most difficult memories into writing, into memoir.
And I'm working on trying to figure out how to depict the experience that we're talking about where you have a traumatic I think that'll be helpful to a lot of people, Daniel.
of memories in your past and you're living in a world that doesn't know about it. So I'm working
on writing about that. I think that'll be helpful to a lot of people, Daniel. I hope so.
You know, Matthew, the main thing that stands out for me here is just how different this project is
from other cult documentaries we've looked at.
Yeah, indeed.
It's very intimate.
It's very personal.
It's low-key in its approach.
You know, and also the color palette.
Everything is sort of muted and sepia toned in many of the interviews.
There's also this retro feeling to it as well as people are speaking about their memories like with Eames furniture in the background and weird 80s technology.
So there's some choices there too that really kind of focus in on the intimacy of memory.
Yeah, and it perhaps mirrors the interpersonal microcosm of undue influence, control, and abuse in such a contained group.
It had me wondering, I think, in valuable ways about how to accurately define and deploy the term cult.
In nuanced ways.
I mean, the fact that Daniel and Zach came at the topic with such bare bones honesty and curiosity, perhaps free from both what are to us becoming the familiar cliches of a cult discourse that is perhaps wearing a little thin, and also from this streaming era media sensationalism that feels increasingly exploitive, and that felt refreshing.
Right, okay, so let's get into it.
You know, I have to be honest to say that I was a little surprised when Hulu PR reached out to us with a screener for this one, because maybe they missed the fact that the last Hulu cult genre doc we looked at on the pod was John Casby's The Deep End about Teal Swan.
We were pretty acidic about its sensationalism, its deceptive editing, and the fact that the production team openly fraternized with members of Teal's group, which, gave them the impression that the documentary was gonna show the group in a good light, and that's probably why they consented to being filmed.
Yeah, since reviewing The Deep End, and then in the lead-up to learning about Stolen Youth, we've been discussing behind the scenes your emerging awareness of the cult documentary world as being a bit like the Wild West, with seemingly very few standardized or best practices in place.
Yeah, there's a lot to report on here upcoming, but just a couple of things to mention that are already public record.
There's a podcast out on the podcast Rough Cut with a woman named Suki Madawi, and she's a filmmaker who worked with Kareem Amer and Jaheim Nojaim, who are the producers of The Vow on HBO.
And she recounted on that rough cut episode her really cursed experience of working on both sides of the camera for that production.
She had been a member of DOS, the master-slave organization within NXIVM.
But then in order to be an interviewee for The Vow, which she was working on, she was tasked with hiring the director of photography who would film her.
And then, she says, the interview itself about her experiences happened after she socialized with the producers with whom she worked very closely.
She was inebriated, she said, and unable to make clear choices about what she wanted to disclose and how.
So let me just underline that.
We have on-record evidence now that The Vow producers interviewed at least one reluctant DOS survivor while she was inebriated.
Matthew, you said to me as we were preparing for this episode that it was a bit of a relief to review Stolen Youth because we've been discussing how in this gilded age of cult documentaries that tilt on the edge of morbid entertainment, it's really important to get things right.
So, what do you think counts as getting things right?
I think, first of all, it means never exaggerating anything or publishing things that can't be corroborated.
Cultic groups are built on conspiratorial paranoia, on exaggerated sensations and stories.
Giving them evidence of untrustworthiness in media, like, only strengthens their hold over members.
Yeah, I was especially touched by Daniel's awareness of not wanting to misrepresent his friends who were still involved with Larry, because he knew that could ultimately make things worse.
Yeah, and he effectively acted as the subject coordinator for the project, which I think is extraordinary while you're also trying to work out your own recovery.
Pretty extraordinary position to be in.
I also think it means getting super clear with survivors about the nuance of their experience.
I think it definitely means not fraternizing with interview subjects who you might then go on to betray.
Yeah, not getting them drunk, maybe?
Yeah, maybe.
Deceptively earning the trust of people in order to show that they've been manipulated by someone else into unwarranted trust.
It just reeks of malpractice.
Yeah, I mean, it also means not dramatizing toxic but predictable dynamics in a way that makes them seem extraordinary or even metaphysical in nature.
I think getting it right means staying away from the dopamine and the cortisol of true crime energy.
I think it means humanizing everyone from the whistleblowers to those who are still struggling to emerge to those who have not and may never come to terms with their complicity.
Yeah, it makes me wonder, you know, maybe as a sort of orienting question, does the storytelling on a big platform serve the journalistic discovery of truth and some kind of individual healing process and cultural insight?
Or does getting to tell the story on a big platform supersede those values?
Yeah, that's a question for the people who are paying the money, right?
Yeah.
And what they believe their audiences deserve.
We've argued that if you don't get things right, there can be some really crappy outcomes downstream of your streaming success.
Yeah, such as you can make cultic dynamics like mysterious, titillating, sexy, this does not inform the public.
You can derail the healing process of group members who are all too familiar with being exploited and having their stories stolen from them.
You can create a false dichotomy between victims and perpetrators instead of helping people explore the Mobius strip that often makes the two somewhat indistinguishable.
If you caricature the members who remain, you will throw up additional and perhaps insurmountable barriers to their return to the consensus world.
And it's hard enough coming back from hell, but even harder if your vulnerability has been made into a punchline.
And I'll give an example of what's at stake here.
You can look around and listen to the remaining people who are faithful to Keith Raniere and NXIVM.
And if you listen to them closely enough, you'll hear that they raise allegations about how the producers of The Vow not only fraternized with but also colluded with the NXIVM detractors who are cast as heroes in the story.
And that ended up both provoking and allowing for the filming of the implosion of the group, while also making it impossible for remaining group members to feel safe in talking to the media.
So, whether that story that they're telling is accurate, or whether it's highly motivated, or somewhere in between, the effect is the same.
Because now we have very vocal Ranieri supporters who believe that all media is lying.
And who do you imagine is going to hand them the microphone to make their case and air their grievances and conflate their devotion to Ranieri with other culture war issues?
Hold on, let's think about that for a moment.
Who might do that?
Right-wing podcasters.
Yeah.
So I've been thinking about this lately as opportunistic contrarianism, and it's opportunistic because it exploits and then contributes to the chaos wrought by the misinformation crisis.
It takes advantage of a tantalizing, accelerated pathway to online fame, influence, and riches for those willing to reflexively say the opposite, and these are those podcasters, of whatever can be framed as the mainstream narrative, while acting as if this often superficial, misinformed, and sometimes deliberately misleading contrarianism is brave and insightful-based truth-telling.
Right.
Yeah, it's the heroics of being an asshole.
And so, in the hands of these people, all cultural critique is framed as just being the woke agenda that you can dismiss.
Scientific consensus?
Well, that's just the corrupted conspiracy that naive people believe.
Attempts to identify and combat actual propaganda and harmful misinformation?
That's media and government collusion in underhanded censorship and election interference is the latest version.
Right.
Here's where this gets interesting in terms of what we're discussing today, though.
You were just observing how some NXIVM holdouts have taken an increasingly right-wing turn because of the exact dynamic you've been describing.
But guess what, Matthew?
I have a tweet from this week I want to just read and see if you can guess who this is from.
I know you didn't see this.
Here goes.
I just want you to know that whatever the mainstream says is correct.
The majority opinion is always accurate.
Always is in all caps.
Let's marginalize fringe ideas.
In fact, let's otherize them out of existence.
Analogous thought is the highest ideal.
Can you guess who said that?
Well, first of all, it's sarcastic, right?
So the person is taking the pill.
Okay.
Oh, I don't know.
James Lindsay?
I'll give you a clue.
This is someone who I recently shared with you had liked an anti-vax tweet from David Avocado Wolf, and he is the guy behind the very out-of-the-box, brilliant, paradigm-shifting documentary called What the Bleep.
No!
Wait a minute!
So my whole theory that if the people who remain in a cultic environment are sort of not treated well by documentarians, that they'll tend towards the right wing, that's totally bunk.
Like, actually it's everybody who ends up getting a platform is just going to sort of trend right?
I mean, this is Marc Vicente, who is the guy at the center of The Vow, who probably is the one who's benefited the most from the documentary and who has done some good work.
But, you know, there's a lot of discussion around, like, how do we view his particular role in all of this?
Right.
And I'm just observing, wow, he is trending in the same direction as we were just describing some of those who have stayed loyal to Ranieri.
Right.
Yeah, that's amazing.
I mean, because, yeah, you don't actually want to believe that everything that the mainstream says, like, let's say a documentary feature on HBO is correct, right?
No, no, the other mainstream.
The other mainstream.
Alright, one more thing we have to talk about, and I'm sure this will sort of carry over into future episodes as well.
I think you've flagged it up above a little bit.
We have to have ongoing discussions about how diverse this cultic phenomenon is, and I just want to discuss Four leaders and their differences for a moment to give a sense of what we're trying to grapple with here as we categorize.
Okay, so we have Larry Ray, which we've just heard enough about today.
Keith Raniere.
We have people from our past, personally.
We have Anna Forrest, who you were involved with, and we have Michael Roach, whose group I was in.
These are very, very different people.
Very different profiles.
Very different functions and skill sets.
Very different constellations of relationships and bonds.
I mean, Larry Ray really is, I think Zack describes it correctly, he created a sort of non-recruiting domestic abuse situation with an extended family, an extended chosen family.
He replaced people, but he couldn't really recruit people.
Keith Raniere maintains a tight inner circle of people who are bound to him at various levels and intensities of servitude, but then there's this enormous front-facing Very mainstream organization, actually, that allows him to sort of recruit but also move in more or less normal society to the extent where you can get like an audience with the Dalai Lama.
And then Anna Forrest, I mean, she also has this very front-facing presentation, but then there's an inner circle aspect as well.
Yeah.
I mean, what would you say about Anna with regard to this list, these dynamics?
Well, let me just say, I think you're right about the diversity here.
I'd add Teal Swan to that list, and she has her own particular brand of this as well.
The commonality they all seem to share is some kind of claim of secret knowledge held by a very special person who then is able to exert power within their realm of influence in controlling ways.
But the details, the scale, the specific beliefs, the effects on people in their orbit, the extent of actual corruption and abuse, these are all quite varied.
And so with regard to my experience with Anna Forrest, I would say she qualifies as the very special person who has the secret knowledge.
And is going to present herself as the one who is going to help people to recover their repressed memories and grow into the potential of who they could really be, which in her case is some kind of yogic warrior.
Who has courage and who has been able to look at the reality of almost satanic panic level perception of how widespread the most horrific abuse really is.
But beyond that, is she engaging in the kind of intense corruption and abuse of some of these other figures?
No, not really.
It's its own kind of self-contained mechanism.
I mean, I just think that the variance is key, because I'm actually speaking with a couple of other colleagues about my memories of Michael Roach, and I'm doing that as I'm preparing for this episode on Larry Ray, and I'm realizing that I've been using the same kind of theoretical framework to look at both of these figures, and it's really inappropriate, actually.
Something that was very interesting to remember about Michael Roach's group was that he really didn't scare us about the outside world.
In fact, the evangelism of his particular kind of, I would say, delusional, aspirational Buddhism was that he was going to be able to change everything through the power of meditation.
But it wasn't that, you know, everybody was out to get him.
It wasn't that if we didn't do practices, we were going to be condemned to hellfire.
It wasn't that, you know, it wasn't that... I get the sense in listening to you talk about Anna Forrest that if you didn't do the work of recovering your memories, you would be sort of condemned to a kind of tortured psychology for the rest of your life.
Yeah, but it wasn't held over us as a stick.
It was more just like, there may be a disparaging judgment, but there was no like, you can't leave, or no one will ever have you, you'll be doomed to a life of delusion.
It's just like, yeah, this is what we do here, and the deeper you get into it, the more committed you are, and the more you identify with the particular ideology.
And then if, you know, everyone, you will have listened to us describe the Larry Ray story, you will have listened to Zach and Daniel in the interview, and you'll know that Larry Ray isn't giving any of that kind of wiggle room whatsoever.
People literally don't believe that they can leave.
They believe that they depend on him for their very life.
If they leave, they're going to die.
So, it just seems to me like the variance in these stories is really key, because it's only when we grasp the differences that we can begin to understand how the recruitment happens, and also how the purported benefits are felt by the people involved.
Because if we really use a kind of lumpen discourse to describe these groups, we won't really get a sense of why people were attracted, why people were recruited, what potential benefits they actually derived from being involved.
And if we don't understand that, then we kind of make the entire problem very abstract instead of something that's actually quite human.
I wonder if part of what we're fumbling our way towards is some kind of set of qualifiers, that when we're using the word cult or we're describing something as being cultic or cult-like, that there are qualifiers in there that make it a lot more specific and precise, as opposed to just like, well, you know, I've checked three things off of this list, so that sounds like a cult.
All right, here's to the qualifiers.
We will develop them next episode.
Thank you for listening, everybody, to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
