Michelle Dowd reveals her escape from The Fields, a 1931 cult founded by her grandfather near Pasadena, where children faced brutal physical training—like tackle football at age five—and punishments such as the "SWAT machine" (spankings or beatings). The group’s apocalyptic focus, including shelter-building and demonic survivalism, left her isolated until foraging and yoga reconnected her to nature. Rogan compares cults to online mobs, warning that absolute claims—whether religious, political, or even about dreams—threaten critical thinking, while Dowd’s book Forager offers tools to break free from indoctrination. Both stress humility over certainty in life’s mysteries. [Automatically generated summary]
He came from a family where he was the only child that lived out of his particular mother who was married to a man who was a second marriage and his first wife had died and then you know he had a bunch of kids or whatever so he had a bunch of half siblings but no full siblings and apparently now this could be lore too they kind of excommunicated him he compared himself to Joseph You know, like, of the multicolored clothing and everything.
So he was, like, put down a well, he liked to say, and he escaped, and he came to L.A. in the height of, I don't know, the silent films, things like that.
He said he was in silent films.
There's no chance that is true, but he said he was, and he got some sort of probably church education when he got here, and he declared to everyone he was the prophet of God.
He was going to live 500 years, and he was going to lead the army of God in the Second Coming.
So the Cult Awareness Network was on to him because also family members were calling in.
Hey, we lost our children.
They're with this guy.
And he's crazy and, you know, they got the people in the woods in L.A. And so he moved out to Austin and had his followers build him this theater where he could dance in front of them.
Is he a good dancer?
He was a very handsome guy.
And he was very charismatic.
And he was ripped.
He was a yoga instructor.
He had a six pack.
He was a beautiful man.
And he also was kind of exotic looking.
So he had this guru thing going on.
And then he was also a hypnotist.
So he's really good at manipulating people's consciousness.
I think we have a very narrow idea of what hypnotism is because of the term.
I think the term – you lock on the term like, oh, I want to quit smoking.
I'll go to a hypnotist.
And they sit here and the clock tick-tock, tick-tock.
But I think there's like states of mind-melding that happen with people where you all get sort of locked into a state of consciousness.
And I think it happens in riots.
Definitely.
You know what I'm saying?
Like the madness of the crowds.
There's something real about that.
If you've ever been in a chaotic public environment where fights break out or something like that, there's a very strange feeling in the air that leads people to do things that they would never do before.
People that would never pick up a shopping cart and throw it through a Starbucks window will do that now.
It's like everybody just loses their fucking mind.
And I think it happens in concerts when people are jamming out together.
You all get in the same mind frequency.
And I think a really good cult leader does that too.
I think they get these people and they lock them into this way of thinking.
And we don't want to call it hypnotism, but I think there's a lot of states that are very similar to hypnotism in that context.
Something happens where you enter into an altered state of consciousness that's probably accessible somehow or another, but you don't know how to get there.
But then this song brings you there or this person brings you there with their talk about the impending apocalypse and we're all locked in, you know, and it gives people like a sense of belonging and purpose that you're locked into this frequency that everybody else in the room is locked into.
And, you know, when I watched the reenactment of the Waco one, which is not the documentary, but did you watch the one that came out maybe five years ago?
And one of these former members who I won't name, I hadn't seen, I didn't recognize him at all.
I just hadn't seen him since I was a little kid.
But several of them have come out who knew my parents and of course knew my grandfather before I was born and then maybe knew me when I was a little teeny girl and they have lots of stories.
Anyway, he was on one of these things we called the TRIP with a capital T. And what we did on the trip, I mean, there were different things in different years, but this one was in the early 1970s.
And he was, you know, doing all the things you do on the trip.
But one thing they required, which my father required of us at home too, is to run every morning.
First thing in the morning, which you can say there's some good things about this, but you slept together in tents and then you'd get up and you'd run and you'd have to beat your time.
And my father used to time us as a kid, so I had to beat my time every day, which is really hard to do, of course, because at some point you're not going to be able to beat your time, right?
You can't always get better.
But at this point, he was 19, and he was beating the time he said in that time was in relation to the fastest runner.
And so if the fastest guy was going really fast, you had to keep the same ratio of distance.
So anyway, he didn't make his time.
There were three guys who didn't make their time, and they had to go through the SWAT machine.
So my grandpa often made boys go through the SWAT machine.
And the simple version, which was done at the actual location of the field, was you'd crawl through the other boys' or men's legs, and every boy would spank you.
They're little – well, we won't even get into all the things you can think about that.
But there was a different version that was only done when the boys were separated from their parents.
And so when they would go on these trips – and my dad was the original driver.
He started driving – by the time he was 18, he was driving all around the country taking my grandfather's boys.
So, again, my father was not his son.
He was just some dude who joined this cult.
And my father would drive these boys around, and he would time them when they ran and did all those things.
And so in this particular case, they did SWAT machine where you have to hold on to a fence pole, and you face the fence, and then all the guys come and they hit you.
So they're not just spanking you, but they're hitting you.
And so he was getting kidney punches and all this stuff, and he was saying he fell to his knees, and he almost died.
He was so bruised up, and he did not want anyone to know this story.
He hasn't spoken of it because he's so shamed that potentially someone might think, why didn't you fight back?
And of course I said, but you were trained.
You were trained that you deserved this.
And then apparently one of my uncles was really worried, wanted to take him to the hospital, but couldn't or didn't because they had no insurance.
And this young man, who's no longer a young man, said that he could never tell his parents.
And he never to this day ever told his parents or anyone.
He and his brother have never spoken of their time in the fields.
It is like this big taboo.
He got out maybe a year later, but he was...
I mean, that was only one of many, many, many stories he told me, but that one just really struck me to feel ashamed of that, you know?
Like, I... I guess for many years I too did not tell people where I came from because you feel like you must have done something weak to be a follower.
And that's just not true.
I mean if someone gets a hold of you as a child, they can program you to think almost anything, especially if they're good at it.
The friends I went out with, I mean, I'm calling them friends now, but I haven't seen them since I was a little girl.
They were saying, of course you would drink the Kool-Aid when people use that expression.
I would have been first in line.
I would have signed up for that.
I mean, we all would have, and I mean that, and I was born there and indoctrinated, and I would have completely taken anything that my grandfather or my parents told me was going to kill me.
I would have felt that that was going to take me to heaven quicker, and everyone I knew would have done that.
And the reason you don't hear about a lot of cults, by the way, is because they didn't end up in flames or mass suicide.
But that doesn't mean that they didn't prey on, you know, dozens, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of people, depending on the cult.
And he was raised, you know, we were all raised collectively, but we were also raised separate from each other.
And my biological siblings, we all had different experiences because they don't let you bond.
They don't want my sister, who's just a little bit younger, she and I, we loved each other deeply, but we weren't allowed to speak to each other sometimes for weeks or months at a time.
And they were just strongly against you forming what they would call allies.
They didn't want friendships that could turn into anything that would be a little bit...
Probably culty, but no.
Like anything that would form a clique, they used to call it.
You're raised there, you think this is reality, and you think that the world outside reality is all a bunch of evil demons or whatever it is.
But if you're an adult, like you're a grown adult, 34-year-old man, and you meet this dude at the auto repair shop, and he hands you a pamphlet, and the next thing you know, you're on a farm somewhere.
I will say that the unusual thing about the field is you have to join as a child.
There are no adults who join.
Really?
It's kind of like a pyramid scheme.
Most people join when they're five or six, and they are indoctrinated, and then they play sports.
So, for example, they play tackle football at age five, and so they teach everyone how to...
Play a game, but it's only the people who are really good at the game that they continue to court, I would say.
You could call them groom, whatever.
But there's a lot more kids there than will ever get into the inner circles.
And it's a little like the mob or something.
Like, I was born in the inner circle, but there are plenty of people who came out of that cult who honestly weren't harmed by it because they got out young.
So as long as you get out by the age of 12, you're probably okay.
But they don't keep you unless you're really fully indoctrinated.
And most of the people who stay really don't have a family to go back to.
And they separate you from your family.
And so they do more and more separation as you become a teenager.
By the time you're 18, you're signing a commitment for life form.
And parents were used to their kids being gone all the time.
And I think that that was not something unusual.
Because one thing I hear for kids who went there, people say, well, how did your parents allow that?
And I mean, parents, like, they sent them off to the sports place, and then their kid got really into it.
And then at some point, their kid became a teenager and didn't want to come home anymore.
And I mean, they're like, well, I don't think my kid's doing drugs, or I don't think that they're, like, in prison, so it seems like they're doing pretty well.
But it also seems like, societally, there was a shift at some point in time where, what was the year where more women entered the workforce, and more women started getting jobs?
I mean, it obviously was starting to happen in the 60s, but there was a lot of women at home in the 60s.
Around 1973 to 1979, you had a huge exodus of women out of the home.
The women I come from, I mean, like my grandmother who had my father who joined this cult, she was always a working woman, minimum wage working woman.
She didn't have more than eighth grade education.
She worked because her father, excuse me, my dad's father, her husband, had been in World War II and got pretty severe PTSD or whatever, was an alcoholic and beat her.
And so she ran away from him.
She just had one child, which was my father.
She was living in a chicken coop near LA just with this one son, and she was the first woman to get hired in a factory.
But this was in the 1940s.
So there were always women, of course, and lots of women of color who were working, but it wasn't the middle class women who were working.
It's like everybody looks at themselves as who they are today.
So if you're a 35-year-old man and you're listening to this today, you're like, I wouldn't get sucked into that.
You can't say that because you're not a five-year-old boy.
If you're a five-year-old boy, you don't know what the fuck is going on.
You're a child.
By the time you're 18, you sort of get a, especially if you're a little streetwise, like, all right, some people are shady.
I know what the fuck's going on.
Listen to this guy.
He's trying to rope me in.
I remember there was this Christian group when I was in college that was trying to indoctrinate people, and they were like young, good-looking people And there was this beautiful Puerto Rican girl, and she was always trying to get me to go to parties with her.
And I was like, wow, did I hit that jackpot?
Like, eventually, I'm going to get a date with this girl.
Like, this is amazing.
You know, I was probably 19, 20, I guess.
20, 21, maybe.
And...
One day, she invites me to go to this retreat on the weekend.
Like, they have some crazy Christian retreat.
And I'm like, oh my god, a retreat?
Like, she's not telling me it's a Christian retreat.
She's telling me it's like this fun party and this whole thing.
And I said, I can't.
I have plans this weekend.
I go, but if you guys ever do another one of those things, that sounds like fun.
So Monday morning or whatever the day was, I'm in school and we're all in the cafeteria.
And it was the day that Trump's airplane, the landing gear, failed to open.
And so we all sit down at the lunch table, and I had just seen it on the news.
I said, did you see this thing on the news about the plane?
It's crazy.
The landing gear didn't go out, and so the plane, just on the belly of the plane, skid across the runway, and there's all these crazy sparks.
And all the other people, all the other people that this fucking dude 2,000 years ago convinced.
But some religions are really beneficial and they might in fact be based on some kind of true story.
I think it's a game of telephone.
That's what I think.
I think if you tell me a story and I tell Jamie the story and then Jamie tells someone out in the lobby a story, by the time it gets to me all the way again, it's gonna be screwed up, right?
It sounds a lot like if you would tell the Big Bang to your kids and your kids would tell it to their kids, and you're going to do this for a thousand years.
At the end of it, you're going to get some real...
People are gross.
They always like to, like, twist things around and make things...
You know, they add their own little spice to a story.
Like, if you ever have a friend that tells a story, you're like, hey, bro, that didn't happen that way.
Like, you didn't say that!
You fucking ran for cover.
Like, everybody's got their own version of a story.
And then when we read the King James Version of the Bible, I mean, you know, the king pronounced it to be so.
And so anything that was left out, I mean, there was a lot left out, right, in what was canonized because it was perhaps dangerous to the particular regime that he was running.
My problem is purely with human nature and what we know about humans.
If there was a way that you got religion through some sort of non-human source, Like if you achieved your experience through a non-human source, I would go, okay, well maybe there's a place that you can go and you could actually go meet God.
There's like a portal you walk through and you meet God.
But as soon as you're doing, you're letting people tell you a story.
People are full of shit.
They're just generally at least a certain percentage are full of shit.
And the people that want to control people have a much higher likelihood of being full of shit.
Because to really do that correctly, if you want to be a president, you've got to lie.
You've got to lie.
It's really important.
So the people that are good at that job are generally full of shit.
And so then you have a problem with the interpretation of the past, right?
And you're seeing that right now in universities, like people are trying to reinterpret certain events because of the way people feel about sociopolitical issues today.
So they're trying to reinterpret history, take down statues.
There's a lot of like craziness that's going on today.
Well, that's like a microcosm of the ancient history of human beings.
Yeah, it's a little weird because it's all black, and so it kind of blends in, especially if you're like us and your eyes are probably going as time goes on.
And that's why I asked because a lot of it is kind of tedious history.
And there's a lot of he begats and there's the whole line, you know, of Christ, all the ancestors and the whole delineation of all that.
And Where I come from, we were encouraged to read a verse of the Bible, but they would always tell you what it meant.
And so I kind of went against, I used this little pin light and did it late at night, but I read the whole thing cover to cover when I was eight.
And if you read every single book in order, you start to find that there's a lot of really beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Like what stuff?
Well, there's, for example, I mean, this one's taught a little bit, but David, King David, I'm sure you've heard of him like as of David and Goliath, but then he became a powerful king.
And he saw this woman who this woman is often talked about Bathsheba.
He sees her bathing on a roof.
And where we came from, we were taught like she shouldn't have been bathing on the roof.
No, I don't know.
Right?
Anyway, he demands that she come to him, and she is the wife of a soldier of his named Uriah, a top soldier.
And he commands her to lie with him, and she becomes pregnant.
And then King David, who is the same guy who had the slingshot of David and Goliath...
She decides that he's got to figure out how to get her husband back so that her husband can go sleep with her.
And her husband won't do it because he's loyal to the army.
And he comes back, but he sleeps like at the floor of the castle, you know, trying to...
And so then David sends him to the front lines to have him be killed so that he can marry his wife and get away with that child not being a bastard child.
I mean, there's something I talk a little bit about in the book Forager, which I encourage everyone to read.
But in that book I talk about as a kid that I looked up this whole long, you know, he begat, he begat.
And there's only four times that it mentions a woman who a child came out of.
Like, it's all the male line.
But occasionally they'll say, so-and-so, you know, Boaz through Ruth, or David's the father through Bathsheba.
So Bathsheba ended up having a child who became Solomon, who we know, a lot of people know at least, of being the wisest man who ever lived, and he wrote Ecclesiastes and...
And so there's four women who are named.
And as a child, that was really interesting to me.
And I would ask, you know, why are these four women in the line of Christ?
So as was the custom in the time and perhaps the law, she married the brother of her dead husband.
And that man would not give her a child because he didn't want to have a child in his brother's name.
And so they're allowed to have more than one wife.
But this woman was not allowed to have a child.
So he does something they call Onanism.
So he spilled his seed on the ground instead of inside of hers that she couldn't have a baby.
And so God gets really mad because Onan will not impregnate her.
And so Onan gets killed too.
And so then her father-in-law decides not to marry her off to the youngest brother because two of the brothers are already dead, right?
And he doesn't want to lose his only son.
So he just banishes her and she has nothing because what does a woman have at the time is She doesn't have a husband or a child.
She has no ability to make a living in the world.
And so this man, the father-in-law, is really unkind to her in a way that she decides she needs to take something into her own hands.
And so she dresses up like a prostitute and goes to the side of the road.
And as he's traveling on the road, she puts herself in front of him and offers her services.
And he sleeps with her.
And he does not have payment on him for some reason.
And so he gives her his staff, which is a token of his word or something.
So at least he's paying his prostitute.
And she gets pregnant from this.
And he orders her when he finds out she's pregnant to be stoned to death, to be killed and executed because she's not allowed to have a baby outside of wedlock.
And she said, okay, but let me just return this staff to you that I got from the father of the baby.
And so then he ends up protecting her and she gets to have the child and that child is in the line of Christ.
It's just, if you're being honest, and if you believe in God, but you also know that people are full of shit, you have to put all this stuff through a filter.
And one thing that I say all the time when I'm teaching, which is a really common thing as a yoga teacher to say, is...
Whatever I am giving you right now is a suggestion.
So listen to your body, do what's great for you.
If this doesn't feel right to you, please don't do it.
And then you offer modifications, etc.
And what high control religion does, and I'm not saying all religion, I'm saying the culture religion, doesn't give you the option of listening to your body or opting out of anything.
This is the interpretation of the Word of God.
And the one thing I will say is I don't know why Tamar did what she did or why Onan did what he did.
You know, I don't know whether or not the stories were transcribed accurately or not, even if they were.
Like, if there was no internet and no independent journalism, and they never had to account for the fact that Iraq never really had weapons of mass destruction, if the people in charge, if we're living in 1963, how long does it take before people figure out that Iraq didn't have those weapons?
There's so many Marys in the Bible, like when people talk about Mary Magdalene or Mary and the other Jesus, or, you know, that it perhaps is just the translation for woman.
There's people that say that there's absolute evidence for Jesus, but then there's people that say, do you know, like, how much historical record we have on people that lived thousands of years before Jesus?
You know, there's people that lived that they know what they said.
They know where they ate.
They know where they went.
They know so much about them.
But the Jesus one is kind of – there's people that say yes.
There's historical documents that show he existed.
And then there's a bunch of documentaries that you can watch.
They're like, boy, the evidence is kind of sketchy.
It seems to be a thought, like a reoccurring thing in many religions.
It seems to be like Hercules, right?
There's a bunch of these that are like real similar to that, like the child of a god that comes down to fix everything.
Well, I think the first one, now I feel like I am not a historian here, but I think the first one was like 100 years.
And so you have Apostle Paul who wrote, but he only saw Jesus after, like he was on the road to Damascus.
And so he saw Jesus after Jesus had been crucified and risen.
So what he saw was a ghost of Jesus.
But the other, you know, Gospels were not written by anyone who had seen Jesus in that way, even though they were the versions like of when you have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these are the versions that they were told.
Yeah, so this is where belief hits for people that are listening to this right now.
Because there's going to be a certain percentage of people right now that have their hackles up because someone might be insinuating that maybe all this Jesus stuff is not legit.
And that's not what anybody's saying.
What we're saying is these stories were written down a hundred years after he was alive.
And people are full of shit.
That's it.
It doesn't mean that he didn't exist.
Because if someone did exist...
Like, if the early emergence of humans in the world...
Let's imagine what they mean by this story.
If the early emergence of humans in this world...
We're put down here to figure it out on their own like a bunch of lock key kids, like latchkey kids from the 1970s.
Figure it out on your own.
I'm gonna give you ways to live your life.
Tell everybody.
But I'm hands off.
I'm hands off.
I'm an afterlife type of guy.
I'm not going to come down and explain it again, pop out of the clouds and freak everybody out.
I did that once.
I did it once.
I'm done.
You guys killed me.
So I'm just saying, live your life this way.
If that was a real thing, what would be any different than the Bible?
What would be any different if a real event like that actually happened, where the Son of God came down and explained to mankind what they're doing wrong and lived this amazing life and taught so many people and they spread his wisdom and they spread his information, it wouldn't be any different than the Bible.
Because even if it was very clear what he was saying and very clear what he had done and the impact and how they all knew he was the Son of God, By the time a hundred years go by, people talking about it, who the fuck knows?
Jesus told a lot of parables, and those are easier to remember.
So if you listen to, like, his Sermon on the Mount or, you know, these various things, it's possible that some of these stories, which they can be interpreted more than one way, but, like, you know, to say that, have you heard the expression, casting pearls to swine?
Well, in the story of the prodigal son, there was this, and Jesus tells this story, right?
So there's these two brothers, and one brother stays and does everything that his father wants him to do.
And the other brother says, give me, you know, the son, he says, the younger son says, give me my inheritance now.
I don't want to wait till your dad.
Just give me my inheritance now.
I want to go experience life.
And the father gives his younger son his inheritance.
And this young man who is raised well goes out and Hires prostitutes, does all the things, right?
And lives this loose life and he finds that he runs out of money.
And he is in a pen of pigs and he is willing to eat what even the pigs won't eat, like the leftovers.
And he is face down in the mud, according to the story, in the pig pen and says, even if I was a servant from my father, I'd be treated better than this.
And so he goes back, etc.
And his older brother is really upset because the father brings the son back and treats him, you know, he's just so grateful his son's returning to him.
And his brother says, you know, or an expression like, you're casting pearls to swine.
I mean, like, my brother is a pig.
My brother is like, you know, from the pig pen, and you're giving him something that he doesn't deserve.
And that whole story, I mean, you can interpret it any way you want, but this idea that you tell stories like this and someone could say God is willing to take you back, and perhaps even better if you have experienced life and that just being obedient isn't the only way to live a life.
Maybe that's the—I don't know what the real interpretation is, right?
But, like, when you read a story like that or you hear the story, Jesus didn't write it down, but if he told that story, then now people come to that and they think— What does that mean?
Does that mean when I find myself in a pig pen that I can repent and go back?
And then lots of people believe that other people are demons.
There's a lot of like real funky beliefs that people hold on to.
And if someone Like I said, if someone was a charismatic leader and they pretended to be the son of God versus someone who is actually the son of God, a hundred years later, it's going to be very difficult to parse out what's what.
I think there's universal truth in all that stuff.
I think the source of it is fascinating.
Like, what are the universal truths?
But we have to look at things through a filter of reality.
And the filter of reality, we know human beings are full of shit.
So you have to put that in there.
You have to put that with everything.
You can't just say they wouldn't lie about religion.
Stop!
That's nonsense.
It doesn't mean that God's not real.
It doesn't mean that Jesus didn't exist.
Look, maybe Jesus is the ultimate...
It's like, this is the last word, and then we're gonna let you guys figure it out on your own.
And maybe if God exists, okay?
Let's just as a thought experiment.
If God exists, why would God engineer an animal to be at the top of the food chain That is so filled with greed and wants so much power that it's willing to take over enormous swaths of land with giant machines and murder anybody who gets in their way and it's all justified in the name of nationalism.
Why would God universally impart that kind of sensibility on a species.
Why would God tolerate it?
Why would God tolerate crime and murder and all the horrible things that we see today?
Why would God want any of this stuff to go on?
If God is so all-powerful that he created the universe, is this just a first draft?
That's the answer to it, is that in the garden, when Adam and Eve didn't know the difference, and then they partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that by the choice to do that brought sin into the world.
And once there's sin into the world, then humans always have the choice to follow the light or follow the darkness.
I don't know if it was taught in schools, but kids read it for a year.
I don't know when it came out in the 70s probably.
But she says in an interview later that she thinks that in the end that God is waiting for every single person to choose to believe.
And to choose to follow.
And that the light, so in A Wrinkle in Time is a story, there's science in it and a lot of things, but that when you see the light and you're drawn to the light, that you might be tempted by the darkness, but when you really know what light is, that you'll always choose that.
And so at the end of the day, that we're all going to see the light.
But even if you don't believe in religion, if you know, like, good experiences and bad experiences in your life, and when you're happy with yourself and when you're upset with yourself in your life, you generally know, like, there's a direction that you really want to be moving in.
And the more life experience you have, the more stupid things you do, the more you learn.
And so the more you get a better database to draw from to understand what each and individual choice means in the greater The greater picture of your existence.
And as you go further and further, you go, if you're living a harmonious life, you go almost naturally towards that direction.
Trying to be nicer to people, love your neighbor, have more peace in the world, don't be murdering people.
You know, and that's generally like how most religions want you to believe.
It's like the origin of it, there's some sort of a guidebook for being a human.
That's the origin of it, it seems like.
They were just trying to like – you can't just let people be feral.
You got to give them some guidelines.
And one of the best ways is to – someone's watching all the time.
There's a dude in the sky.
But maybe he really is.
Maybe there really is something that watches everything.
It might not be watching, but it might be like integrated into the entire existence of the whole thing.
You know, he goes and has all these experiences, find himself, like, making every mistake possible, and then sees the light and goes back to his father.
And these people that lived and were writing things down on animal skins while they were engaging in wars with spears, you know, like, these are fucking wild-ass times.
And if you go back 2,000 years before him, when people started writing all this stuff down, Well, people had a lot stronger ability to concentrate, obviously.
I don't remember, but I remember there was this Thai restaurant I used to go to on Ventura, this great Thai spot, and right above it was this fucking billboard that was giving you a very specific date, like, repent, the end is here, and it's going to be this time.
I'm like, is this the most brilliant album release?
You know what I'm saying?
Some rock band has figured out a way to make something go viral before the internet.
I guess the internet was around then.
It was not that long ago.
I want to say like maybe eight years ago, ten years ago.
Well, you know, when they give these dates, like when my grandfather gave the date of 1977, they can also say anytime it doesn't happen that the calendars are wrong.
But the point is, like, oh, well, you know, with the Star of Bethlehem and all this, like, maybe that was redated because Herod didn't want us to know, like, when Jesus was really born because he was killing all the babies and he didn't really know the date of Jesus' birth.
That's why he was killing, you know, all the young boys as opposed to just that one and et cetera, et cetera.
The original Hebrew word from which the name Lilith is taken is in the biblical Hebrew, the book of Isaiah, though Lilith herself is not mentioned in any biblical text.
In late antiquity, and how do you say that word?
Mandean?
How do you say that word?
Do you know?
Mandean?
Medellin and Jewish sources from 500 A.D. onward, Lilith appears in Historalist, incantations incorporating a short mythic story in various concepts and localities that give partial descriptions of her.
She is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud, Nadah, Shabbat, Bava Batra, and the conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan as Adam's first wife.
And in the Zohar Leviticus 19a as a hot, fiery female who first cohabitated with man.
Wow!
Many rabbinic authorities, including, boy, there's another word, Maimonides and Menashem Mary reject the existence of Lilith.
There is something really healing about looking at the stars, and there's also the ability to literally not be lost if you know how to read the stars, right?
So that is something I was trained by my uncle, who was, you know, somewhat of an astronomer.
But to look at the stars and to always know where you are.
And if you know how to read the stars, you can never be lost.
I don't know if I could do it very well from a boat.
But I could do it because I know how to put like a stick in the ground and to see the difference in the way that the sun goes so that you can see where you are.
Because you've got to know where the North Star is, obviously.
And the idea, though, is that some people are left behind in order to try to win the last people, like all the evil people, sort of like Noah's Ark, right?
Like Noah's left and he gets on this ark and like it's his job to, I mean, why didn't God just take Noah to heaven, right?
But like he gets this boat and he has his family and all the animals and he gets to like stay clear from the flood.
Or you have Sodom and Gomorrah, you have Lot, the only good person left, and he wants to like help the people.
In the town or Jonah and Nineveh where he's told to go tell the people they're bad and then God saves the people anyway.
So there's a lot of stories of God changing his mind.
So if you leave some people behind who know how to lead the army of God, you can then proselytize and bring people into true faith and righteousness.
It's also kind of like, I don't know, a way to keep people a little bit isolated if you're trying to teach them to do something that other people don't know how to do.
And I was very ashamed of knowing like that kind of thing.
So it's the kind of thing I talk about in Forager is like I spent a lot of time really feeling like I couldn't acclimate to the regular world like later because I, you know, it's like if you're always looking at, I'm sure Navy SEALs feel this way, but you know, like you're always waiting for disaster.
Well, you know, I walked in your lair and I'm like, okay, there's all dudes here.
Where's the exits?
Like, no.
No, but I mean, to some degree, I mean, I'm not actively preparing, but I feel like I, yeah, I mean, it makes it really hard to trust people when you've been trained that the people that you think you can trust are going to betray you.
I had a friend who was a Mormon and when they left she was like in her 40s and she said she became really susceptible to any kind of like spiritual people, spirituality, like con people.
She just had this trusting nature from being like a strict Mormon her whole life.
Because if you're only around people who are homogenous and that, like, you're taught, which I was, that, like, everybody in your group is trustworthy, you don't see the signs.
You don't know, I mean, you don't know the red flags, as people would say.
And if that had been consistently perpetuated onto you, you wouldn't know.
So there's a story we were raised with, which is a really common biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and Abraham is told to kill his son, his only son, and he's told to, like, take him up on an altar and slaughter him, and the way that you would slaughter an animal.
And Abraham, like, makes Isaac do this hike up to this mountain where he's going to kill him.
And he, God has told him he must do this.
And so he, like, ties his own son on this altar and brings up the knife to kill him.
And like, very dramatically, you know, the story.
And as he's plunging down the knife, an angel comes and grabs his wrist and stops.
And God said, I just wanted to make sure you'd really do it.
And this is the story I was raised on, and both my parents and my grandfather were very big on, like, you will kill your child if God asks you to.
That's what you're supposed to do.
And I said this in the book, and my brother, who, you know, we really haven't talked about this, or we have now, but at the time we hadn't really talked about this.
This was like all of a year ago.
And he said when he read it, he thought, no, it's not that our parents would have sacrificed us.
They did sacrifice us because they believed that...
Somebody else would take care of us.
And we were raised very, you know, I don't know if community is exactly the truth because there wasn't necessarily anyone who was checking.
But there was random people who, in my case a lot of men, who just raised us because our parents had more important things that God told them to do.
And so there's a lot of ways to sacrifice kids.
There's a lot of ways to think that, you know, God is talking to you.
So apparently there are, and I didn't know about this until the last year.
There's a whole huge group of people who have come out of like Hasidic Jews, like Orthodox Hasidic Jews.
But there's also Steve Hassan.
He's a doctor who spoke on Megyn Kelly when I was on that show too.
And he has something called the Bite Method, which is just basically says that there's like these really four major ways of control that cults do.
They control your behavior, your information, your thoughts, and your emotions.
And so he has these deprogramming systems and counselors and people who can help you if you've been in that kind of high control group, even if it wasn't religious in nature.
What was the experience like of like all of a sudden you go from being this incredibly controlling religious cult that thinks the end of the world is coming to regular world?
I had a childhood illness, an autoimmune disease, which was probably, I mean, there's no genetic nature to these diseases, but where your body attacks itself.
So it's quite probable that my body was just like, I can't take this anymore.
And I didn't drink or smoke or do any of those things because I was so afraid of losing control.
I was so afraid that if I... I also felt like I was in a huge hole that I had to dig my way out of in order to find a way to live in the outside world.
And so I couldn't afford to, like, I didn't know who to trust and who not to trust.
And I Have you ever seen those Middle Eastern guys all sitting around an enormous plate of food, and they're all just sitting, cross-legged, just digging in with their hands and eating with their hands?
Maybe, you know, if you go to an inn and everybody's eating chicken legs and drinking beer, they're going to have crazy stories.
It's going to get uncomfortable.
Just keep people, make them where they're nice as clothes so they don't want to get messy and give them a fork and a knife and keep everybody proper and everyone's trying to impress everybody else with how proper they are and how much they know about fine dining.
May I see this sommelier to make a wine selection?
I remember the first time, you know, someone came to pour this last wine or whatever, and then the guy is supposed to, like, take a sip of it to tell the guy if it's okay.
And I'm like, what kind of culture is this?
Like, I mean, also, and what are you going to say if it's not?
The traditional method is to blend fresh cannabis leaves, plain yogurt, a pinch of sugar, and nuts like almonds and pistachios, along with spices and ginger powder, fennel seeds, cardamom, and peppercorn, and water.
They do, but their workaround, you know, we can joke about their workaround, but the thing their workaround does means that when they associate with outsiders, they don't stick to their own custom.
Right, but they participate in it, and because they participate in it, they don't keep themselves as narrow-minded.
I mean, cult people, they're definitely, no matter who pours you that glass of wine, you're not allowed to drink it.
My dad was in the military and he was just like – I mean he was drafted, but he was like, you're not – no one could get me to drink a sip of alcohol, et cetera, et cetera.
Like there – he was very proud of his ability to be separate.
And so it's really difficult to have friendships in a cult, by the way.
You think that it's so great because you're all in unison.
But one of the things that people who have gotten out and maybe they still have family members there is that the people who are left there, they don't have any real friends because anybody would report on anybody.
There's no loyalty.
You can't tell a joke.
You can't laugh at a joke.
There's really a lot of things that are forbidden that are, I think, required for friendship.
And so I had to learn that when I got on the outside.
And I look back and I think, I was really impoverished by knowing people and moving in unison and having comfort, but not really having the experience of trust.
I feel like there's really good ways to do this, and I did not do any of them.
I mean, I was in college, so I, you know, whatever.
I learned things academically, but what I didn't learn is, like, in my body.
I feel like I had four children really quickly, really young, and then I think I raised myself with them.
I used to do this thing when my babies were little where I was reading about other cultures because I didn't even know what an American culture really was.
And so I read about Japan, for example, which at the time they were saying basically you don't say no to a child until they're five because you want to give them a sense of autonomy.
And then you start putting the structure there.
So anyway, I had these index cards, and I put them all over my house, and they said that they had the values that I wanted for my kids, like resiliency, humor, agency, whatever.
And then on the back, I would put the techniques.
So for example, I didn't put restraints.
Like I didn't use playpins or whatever.
I just tried to create a safe environment, and then I did these things like they should be able to find me, but I shouldn't always be present.
So I would say, hi, I'm going to be working right here in this room, like to a one-year-old, right?
Right.
Anytime you want me, I'm right here.
But then, like, remove myself in sight so they felt that they were in control of the relationship and just all this stuff.
Well, just the fact that the way you communicate about it, you're so open about it.
And I mean, I can't imagine what that's like.
I can't imagine what that life is like, what your childhood was like with being 17 and just being out in the world on your own trying to decipher what the fuck the outside world does.
I felt like I was this adult body who just had an infant brain and I think it just took me so long.
So I feel like I don't come from an era too, kind of like the way that the movie is depicted.
It felt like there was no music.
I don't relate to the music of my generation because I never heard it.
And so people, you know, like people our age is sort of like everyone should sort of like the same kind of thing and I don't have, it never, I didn't go to concerts when I was a teenager ever, I never.
So I didn't have any idea what that felt like and so I don't associate with that with youth, for example.
And so I didn't start listening to popular music, though.
It took me a while to acclimate even once I got out.
I knew that other people were doing it, but the first time I maybe bought a CD, for example, I think I was 30. Wow.
Like, I just didn't.
Because I had babies young, I just didn't.
I did all that.
In my early 20s, I had all these little kids, and I was doing, you know, the mom thing and trying to get myself educated so I could, you know, make good money and take care of everybody.
It just felt like there wasn't time for that.
So I didn't have a youth.
And so I met a music critic when I was in my 30s.
I'm actually putting this in my next book, which is actually called Prodigal Daughter.
And he introduced me to the songs of, it was in the early 2000s, and he introduced me to the songs of the 90s and taught me the derivations of the beats and the lyrics.
And he had come from a pastor father, so he understood religion in relation to music.
And it was just this wonderful music education.
So I did all that.
I mean, I really think I came into understanding music in my 30s.
It's shocking to me how long it takes to figure it out.
You know what it is.
I could learn to code switch and I could learn to be presentable on the outside.
I could learn which fork to use really quickly.
That you can learn.
But you can't learn to feel the other things that other people feel.
And so you're always just a little bit disconnected.
It's like being kind of in a bell jar or something.
There's always a distance between or there was for just a long time between me and someone else.
So, for example, my brother, who loves you, as I told you, I went to his birthday party recently, and they're like, you have a sister?
Like, he never even talked about his family.
They didn't even know.
And he's like, yeah, she just wrote a book.
You should, like, read it so you can figure out where I come from, you know, because he never told his very best friends, who he had been, like, friends with for over 20 years.
Like, he never told them.
And I think that, you know, and he looks really normal, you know, like he has, but he didn't have the ability, I think, to really maybe gauge the way that it affected him.
Yeah.
And we, as a family, you know, the siblings all kind of went different directions because, like, it's painful to go back and relive it.
And you don't, it just feels like you're always going backwards if you try to be around where you come from.
And you just want to, like, live in the world and, you know, find a new identity.
I mean, just, there's so many things that can happen to a child when they're young that will screw them up forever.
But the fact that you had no understanding of the outside world, and you fully believed all this stuff that you were being told, you learned how to forage and survive in the woods, and then you get released.
And then you're out in the world because you went to see the color purple.
I was in a rush for everything because I didn't think I was going to live very long because it was still inside my head that I was A, breaking.
I mean, even now, like, to be honest, writing about this, this is what the former field people have to say to me all the time, is like, nobody's ever talked about this publicly.
We were trained, you know, like, once you're in the field, you're always in the field.
Like, it's like being a Marine or something.
Like, these are our brothers and sisters in arms, and you never allowed to talk about this.
So to come out with the book, it was the first time that anyone has spoken publicly about this particular cult.
And I was raised, of course, to believe I'd be struck dead by lightning if I ever talked about it.
And so there were so many years that I think it was just so painful to even think about, I think, you know, where I come from.
I mean, I'm kind of going around a circle to answer that question, but it felt like it's been very recent that I can own that as being an essential part of my identity.
So biophilia is the love of living things, and it's not specifically environmental.
It was coined in 1973, I think, by Eric Fromm.
And it is the love of living things.
So it's not just humans, but it's animals, plants, whatever.
And so I think that because I was raised understanding the natural environment, I really feel like when I've been lost in the world, or you think you're lost, I don't know if we can ever truly be lost.
I think that we're just learning what's around us that isn't working.
That's always information that can...
If you know what to look for, there's always information that can get you where you want to go.
You just need to know where you want to go, right?
So I feel like putting my feet in the dirt So, you know, kind of like, you know, but like being in my body and being on the earth.
And I think yoga helps with that, even if you're not doing it on the grass, although I do teach outside sometimes.
But like if you can find yourself like what you're connected to, that feels solid.
We forget that, I think, sometimes in our contemporary culture, that everything comes out of the earth.
And so I think that one of the practices, I do meditate, but I meditate before I came here today, but I think that if I can be under a tree and on the earth in some way, then I feel like...
I guess it's that neuroplasticity thing.
I can always grow.
There's no point at which I'm separate.
And I think there's that part of practice of being like, no, I'm truly connected.
And all the things they taught me was a way of keeping me separate.
Yeah, I think when we're talking about the sky and the light pollution being a spiritual deficiency, I think we have that also from the forests.
I think there's something that connects us when we're in the wilderness.
There's a feeling that you get.
There's a humbleness that comes about you, a humility that you have to accept, that the wilderness is so vast and powerful and amazing that It puts you in check.
It gives you like this feeling of connectedness to everything.
We think when we're living in cities and we're getting Ubers and we're going to restaurants, we think we're disconnected from nature because we've kind of set it up that way.
We set our own little hamster wheel up over nature.
And another thing about going deeper in the woods, humans are prone to circular movement.
So if you don't know that, you will just keep walking in circles.
And so you could see the north and you could keep walking kind of towards it, but you're going to veer slightly and you're going to find yourself right back where you came from.
You really need to create a shelter and come up with a plan.
Just walking around, you're not going to get out.
Yeah, people have died.
I mean, you've probably heard this, but on the Appalachian Trail and stuff, they'll go off the trail for 10 feet or something to pee.
But it's like in a bush or whatever.
And then they lose track of where the trail is.
And they will die 20 feet away from the trail because they moved around and they exerted all their energy and whatever.
If they had just stayed put and waited for the sunrise and didn't, you know, whatever.
And then they figured out a system like by watching the sky or if they had your...
We should all download all the maps.
Make sure we have GPS on our phones.
But, you know, people just...
I mean, there's all these stories.
My daughter was telling me that one of the nurses, and she's so capable, she and her sister took her daughter, so it was like the two sisters, so the aunt and the mother and the teenage daughter, and they were staying in a KOA.
They were camping.
went just on a little hike out right next to the campground.
Her husband knew which campground she was at.
They died just 100 yards away because they didn't have any idea how to do basic survival.
Wow.
Actually, the teenager lived because the mother and the aunt gave her all their clothes and they covered her and everything.
And it's interesting that the disconnect from nature that we get with cities enables people to create things where you don't need nature anymore.
Supermarkets, trucks, all those inventions, everything's coming out of cities, and it's all getting constructed, built, put together by a group of people living in cities.
I feel like a lot of the high control group culty things is as far removed from nature as possible, too.
I mean, my mom was really an exception in this way.
My dad didn't learn the survival stuff.
It was just my mom.
But there's this idea, I think, that if we could understand our true nature, we'd be a lot less susceptible to all sorts of control, right?
Because we would understand that we don't have control and that no human...
Right.
You know, who professes to have the ultimate wisdom could possibly have it because we would be so attached to—I mean, the cycles of nature, like, everything is prey and predator and, like, everything's part of a much larger system.
And if you saw yourself as part of that, it would be really hard to fully believe any one person could be the son of God in today's age, you know?
Like, if they profess to be the prophet or whatever, you would have a lot more cynicism, I think, if you understood nature.
But there is such a thing as a cult directory, which you had mentioned, too.
So when I was on, I did a local television right at the beginning when the book came out, Frank Buckley, and the woman who was his producer, he was asking at the end, it's like, oh, you know, I didn't know this cult existed.
How did I not know, etc.
And she said, well, I did my fact checking before we booked her, and it's in the cult directory.
And he's like, what?
There's a cult directory?
And the field is actually in the cult directory.
And I didn't even know that.
I was like, Whoa.
So it's been reported.
So I think a more interesting question actually is why are these cults not shut down?
I mean, there's a bunch of them.
Like you said, someone told you there's just tons of them.
They're active in California.
And I don't know if it's like freedom of speech that we have going on.
Because Scientology has tax-exempt status in the United States, which indicates that it's a legitimate religion.
Because they sued the IRS. And they won.
They swore.
Thousands of dudes threatened to sue the IRS and they filed lawsuits and I guess the IRS caved and said, all right, we don't want to deal with all this.
But also if you declare yourself a religion, then you do get tax exempt status.
But I think what makes a cult is, yeah, I mean, there's like the Steve Hassan thing that we talked about, but you know, this is really, really high control.
But the question is, unless the abuse is reported in real time, it's really hard to find.
And the people who are in the cult, A, don't recognize it's a cult because nobody's in a cult calls it a cult.
I don't think you can come up with a legitimate reason why.
And in all these groups, Scientology and Mormonism too, there's these inner circles that are much, much more devout.
So there's plenty of people who define themselves as Mormon or Scientologists who aren't living this really narrow life, but the people at the center are.
Well, it would be really hard to argue, especially when you're dealing with something like Scientology, when you have a science fiction writer who is, you know, he's the most prolific fiction writer of all time.
L. Ron Hubbard, he wrote more words down and had them published than any human being that's ever lived.
And I didn't know that it meant, like, I didn't know the whole story behind the volcano where, like, the aliens throw the fucking frozen souls at the volcano, all that crazy shit.
So I just thought it was a self-help book.
And back then, I was really into self-help books.
I bought, like, Anthony Robbins audio cassettes and all that shit.
Making decisions based on truth rather than based on what you want to believe.
And just the accumulation of life experiences.
Like a life well lived and then psychedelic drugs.
Those have been very effective.
Those are the big ones.
The psychedelic drug breakthroughs are the ones where you...
I always say that it's like Control-Alt-Delete for your brain.
And then your brain reboots with a fresh desktop.
But now there's only one folder in that desktop, and that folder says, My Old Bullshit.
And you have a decision.
Either you open up that folder and start behaving exactly how you used to because you have a pattern that you're accustomed to.
Or you try to re-engage with the world, re-interface with the world with this newfound experience as a guide.
I think that's what the heart of all religious experiences are.
I think there was people back then that experimented with psychedelic drugs and they had profound experiences and they might have even experienced entities.
They might have even had interaction with God.
It might be a real thing that you could do with the right stuff.
And I think people have been talking about it and writing it on cave walls and depicting it in many religious texts and drawing images of it on the fucking ruins of Egypt.
I mean it's everywhere.
It was in the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece.
It's everywhere.
Psychedelic drugs have been everywhere throughout human history.
I think they probably shaped a lot of the way people formulated their ideas about religion.
And I think that a lot of people believe that it was the foraging of those mushrooms that led to psychedelic drugs that led the cultivation of communities that were religiously based.
But that they really came from just looking for food initially.
And then they'd have these experiences and they could see something bigger than the life they were living.
But the thing about psychedelics, though, that is so beautiful compared to cults, and cults don't do these because they tap you into yourself and you have your own unique, or someone unique, but, you know, you have your own individual experience of what it means to you.
Well, some of them might have gravitated towards that with that intention in mind, right?
Like they might not have been born true of the shamanistic spirit.
They might have entered into it at a point in life like as a con artist, you know, which does happen.
It does happen.
Like people infiltrate certain kind of groups of people if they feel like, It's a bunch of vulnerable people in those groups and a bunch of easily influenced and open to interpretation.
You can just tell them that you're connected to God in a very unique way and also you're a guru.
Yeah.
There's a lot of those guys, too.
I mean, that was the wild, wild country guy.
You know?
He was like a legit guru.
Said some, Osho, said some brilliant things, but also was fucking crazy.
Well, that's the really scary thing to think that if the Son of God really did return, if that is a real true thing, how the fuck would we ever believe that?
And the government's lying to us about that they're from another planet, you know, which is, you know.
They lie about everything.
Like, if they're telling you something, these are off-world crafts, I'm like, oh, when did we make these?
Like, shut the fuck up.
When did we make these?
You're saying they're out from another planet?
For real?
I don't believe you.
I mean, it could be a case of crying wolf.
Like, maybe they're telling the truth, but boy, seems a little suspicious.
And that would be the same thing with the Jesus thing.
Like, if Jesus really did come back and there were some fundamentalist Christians that were in government That wanted the world to know.
So they had a press conference and we have definitive proof that Jesus has returned and we need to listen to him.
Everybody was like, get the fuck out of here.
No one would believe it.
That's what's crazy about today.
If Jesus came back today and the world was in the middle of chaos, if we're in the middle of World War III and Jesus returns, there's a real likelihood that they would crucify him again or something similar.
I think for individuals, the most important thing is exercise.
It's one of the most important things, I should say, because you can induce enough stress voluntarily that the regular stress of the outside world is mitigated because you've already experienced a higher level of difficulty in your day by choice than the world can impose upon you.
So if you have rigorous workout schedules, if you like to run, if you want to lift weights, if you want to do yoga, like you want to do something like jiu-jitsu, do something that's physically taxing, that's what you should do.
Do something like that and the physical act of forcing yourself to do something extremely difficult that makes you uncomfortable for a short period of time but makes the rest of the day much easier.
A lot of the people that I know that terrorize people in mob mentality, they're extremely unhealthy.
They look terrible.
They get addicted to it.
They get addicted to interacting online, on Twitter all the time, and gauging...
You know, the temperature socially of how people think about them based on this like verbose bullshit they just typed on Facebook.
But it's like it becomes this integral part of the way they engage with other human beings and it's very non-human.
It's very recent.
It's very non-human.
It's too limited in the way you interact with it.
You can get good information online, and you can get interesting discussions on Twitter, but you could also get, like, you're dealing with legitimately mentally ill people.
And I don't use that term lightly, okay?
I'm not saying schizophrenic.
I'm not saying manic-depressive.
But if you are a person that has a gambling addict, Addiction.
If you're a person that has an addiction to betting on the horses, you're mentally ill.
You have this thing you're sick with.
If you can't stop smoking cigarettes, you're mentally ill.
You have this thing that you can't stop.
You're physically attracted to it, you're physically addicted to it, but you're also mentally ill because you don't recognize that you should stop before you get fucking lung cancer, right?
That's the same thing with everything, I think.
I think these are just like normal patterns and I think people that are addicted to arguing with people on Twitter, they're mentally ill.
This is serving the same thing as online poker.
This is serving the same thing as, fill in the blanks, whatever you like to do that you probably shouldn't be doing, scratch tickets, lottery, whatever it is that you just can't get out of your head because you got locked into it.
You're mentally ill.
You're mentally ill.
Just like when you have a cough, you're physically ill.
Yeah.
When you're online 12 hours a day arguing with people, you're mentally ill.
And maybe you're mentally ill and having good discussions.
Maybe you're mentally ill and engaging in sometimes productive conversations.
But you're also...
You're heightening your levels of anxiety and this bizarre, non-natural way of interfacing with other human beings.
And you're living in that most of the time.
So you're...
You're going to suffer in the way you interact with people on a regular basis.
And you see that bleed out, too, right?
You see people act like they're on Twitter into people in real life.
And people are like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Why are you acting like this?
Because they're so used to communicating like that on Twitter and on Facebook and Instagram that they think it's normal to just be completely rude to people.
If you talk to people face-to-face the way people talk to people just constantly on Twitter, you'd have fistfights everywhere.
People would be just fighting.
They'd be pushing each other and hitting each other.
You'd have murders.
It's just a shitty way to talk.
So if you're doing that, you're mentally ill.
So if you have gangs of mentally ill people that are just constantly engaging with other gangs of mentally ill people online all day long, arguing over everything cultural, everything environmental, fill in the blanks.
I would say that the same, I guess, impulsives that make people do everything you're describing are really the same things that keep people in cults.
Like there was a lot of the similar traits of people who become mentally ill because they are constantly only focusing on one person's definition of anything.
And so if cults were online doing that to each other, that's what they would sound like.
And if you have a good system set up where everybody polices everybody else, like woke people on Twitter, and then you have a good system of the person who's in charge and the underlings and all the other people, and people are benefiting from it in a good way, yeah.
You can get a bunch of businesses going.
You could infiltrate corporations with this nonsense.
You could get in the Supreme Court.
You could do wild things with it.
You just need to have a strong structure of support from the other members online.
I think your story is very important for people to hear, and I'm really happy that you had the courage to say it, because I would imagine it would be very, very hard to tell that story, very hard to explain the vulnerabilities that you experienced and what it was like to be this 17-year-old kid who's still a kid,
who's just becoming a woman out there in the world, And you just escaped from a cult where you couldn't even see movies and all you sung was hymns and you thought the end was near and then you're out there in the world just interacting with all these people that went to like normal schools and had normal childhood American experiences and you have to kind of relearn everything.
And there's a lot of excommunication that still goes on in terms of, it's my family of origin.
Every single cousin I had was raised there.
I did not have any cousins on the other side.
100% of my relatives were raised in there.
And so, yeah, you have to be willing to, in a sense, step away from the acceptance that you get, which I think could relate to many, many, many, many people who have nothing to do with religion.
But yeah, all the different types of cults in the world.
It's like being willing to stand back and say, wait, I don't believe this.
I think this story, your story is really important too for people that may be vulnerable.
Maybe they don't have the tools to discern.
Maybe they're being courted by a group.
They don't have the tools to discern.
Just fundamentally, if someone's telling you that they have secret information that only they have, and it comes from a mystical source, either it comes from aliens or it comes from God or...
Probably not.
It's probably not.
I mean, it might be Jesus.
Again, if Jesus came back, who's going to believe him?
But most likely, you're dealing with someone who's full of shit.
So, at least today, we know that.
You know, in 1930, when your grandpa first started, I mean, he was just...
I feel like there's no simple answer for that, but in my grandfather's case and in many other of these young men cases, they were outsiders in some way and they had some bone to pick and they wanted...
I think they maybe started out of wanting belonging, but then they got really drunk on the power so quickly.
Yeah, I had David Holthouse on the podcast the other day and he did that documentary series that's on Peacock about the Hare Krishnas and about this one guy that created this sect of the Hare Krishnas and it was all child molestation and murder.
They're killing people and it's just, it's a crazy, it's a really good doc, he's a really good director.
And the documentary series is really interesting, but it's just like, goddamn, that pattern just repeats itself over and over.
Waco, holy hell, up there, wild, wild country.
It's like everywhere.
The same sort of pattern repeats itself, and it always, almost always at least, falls apart.
It's not like people are good at organizing businesses.
It's like crazy people.
Like wild, crazy people.
But there's this inclination to get people to follow you and to tell them what to do and to tell them how to live life and to make them worship you.
It's fucking strange that that's...
Just some sort of weird evolutionary response.
Because in tribal cultures, there was always a leader, and that leader was generally the wisest person who had the most life experience, who could tell you, hey, this is the plant you can't eat.
Don't go over there, they'll kill you.
This thing runs faster than you.
Get away from it.
That snake's poisonous.
You had to know how to make an arrow.
This guy knew.
So that was your leader.
And if you listen to him, you're going to stay alive.
And if you don't listen to him, you're going to watch people die right next to you, and you go, oh, they didn't listen.
And you're going to experience that at a young age where people die, because they used to die all the fucking time.
Yeah, just infant mortality was like 50% back then.
And then you're like, what are the odds you're going to live to 30?
Not so good, bro.
There's jaguars in the fucking trees.
Like, you're fucked.
You're in trouble.
And that's why we had tribal leaders.
And then as we expanded...
Into these societies and cities and large groups of human beings, we still have the desire to have one individual leader because we have this primate genetic imprint in us of the alpha who runs the people.
To the point where we'll pretend that someone's alpha.
Like, we'll pretend Joe Biden is really running the country.
We'll pretend.
And so many Democrats are all in on it.
Like, the most culty of cult members, the wokest of woke, are the ones who are the most likely to try to fucking gaslight you that he's fine, and he's doing great, and he's the best president ever, and just look at the economics, and look at the economy's doing better, and look at the...
You know, he's on top.
He's never been sharper.
Like, what are you...
Shut up!
You're in a cult!
You're in a cult, just like if you were in the Moonies, just like if you were in the Holy Hell cult.
It's the same thing.
It's just patterns of belief, and we all have them, and we're susceptible to them because life is a massive mystery.
It's a massive, scary, weird mystery with a lifespan.
It's got a finite lifespan.
You have a certain amount of time here, and you never think like you have enough time, and you never think you did enough, and it always feels weird, and you never even know what the fuck is going on while you're driving your car or sitting on the bus.
The whole time, you're like, what is this?
What is this all about?
So anytime you can get some relief from that, someone comes along and they go, I've got the answers.
There's so much weirdness just in the observable universe that the whole thing is a crazy mystery.
And to not approach it that way and to approach it with some bizarre confidence that you have the answers, you're not doing anybody any good because you're full of shit.
You're full of shit with yourself.
You're full of shit if you believe it.
You're full of shit with yourself.
You're definitely full of shit with other people if you're telling them you believe it.
You can't know.
We have guidelines, and there's ways that we can live that are going to be better for everybody, and we should definitely go that way.
Definitely don't try to harm people.
Definitely try to be nice as much as possible.
Try to be cool to your friends.
Try to enjoy your time here.
Try to leave people with a smile.
Try to do your best.
Do all that stuff.
Like, if we do all that stuff, we're good.
But as soon as someone comes along and tells you, no, you have to do this because this is the Word of God, like, Be suspicious.
And if you don't say that, if you don't have the humility to say that this is, at the very least, a massive mystery, We know so much.
I mean, we know so much more than we've ever known before, and thank God there's people out there that are trying to figure the world out.
Thank God there's people out there that are doing the work and doing the fucking theoretical physicists and all the quantum mechanics people and all the people that are trying to make rocket ships.
Thank God you're out there.
At the end of the day, this is a crazy mystery.
That you go to bed every night, you close your eyes, and you disappear.
Hopefully for eight hours, if you get in your eight hours, Michelle.
And then that alarm clock goes off, and then you re-engage with reality and assume that this is the exact same world that you went to bed eight hours ago for.
You assume.
But you just re-engage with reality.
We look forward to it.
Everyone's scared to die, but no one's scared to sleep.
And we do it every night.
No one's scared.
No, I don't want to shut the lights out.
I don't want to go to sleep.
No one's scared to go to sleep.
Everybody's like, oh my god, I can't wait to sleep.
Can't wait to sleep and be recovered.
And then you get up.
You have to do it.
It's a requirement.
You have to go out.
You have to stop.
If you don't, you'll die.
The universe requires you to stop interfacing with it for long stretches of time.
Yeah, but that alone is a strange, strange one that we've just accepted because if that didn't exist and all of a sudden everybody said, listen, we have found a new thing.
Instead of just being awake all the time, if you can just go to sleep.
You'll live longer and you'll be better.
Like, what are you talking about?
Like, you're just going to shut off for eight hours.
There's something about wolves because they're intelligent and they operate in packs and they have some sort of nonverbal communication where they understand each other in some very weird way.
I mean, he used to be a wolf if you go back 20,000 years ago or whatever it was when they started taking these bitch-ass wolves who were willing to come by the forest fire, or by the campfire rather.
But the wolves that live and operate in the wild are these ruthless, majestic creatures who are intelligent.
And it gets inside of you, and I think that's the thing about muscle memory, right?
And I believe in exercise, by the way, too.
I mean, I was trained like that, so I can't not exercise.
And I think that just like exercise, like I'm sure you feel like shit if you don't exercise, and as do I. But I also feel like when it gets inside of you, like what survival is, you feel, I think, without doing some of those things, that you're not really fully human.