Transcript for:
Cults and Mind Control Insights

Check us out at skeptic.com, and if you want to support the show that way, you can go to skeptic.com slash donate and find us there. Okay, my guest today is Dr. Stephen Hassan, a mental health professional who specializes in helping people to recover from mind control, as well as helping loved ones to exit without coercion. He's been helping people leave destructive relationships and organizations since 1976, after he was rescued from the infamous cult. the Moonies.

Hassan directs the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a counseling and publishing organization outside of Boston, and has taught at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's the author of Combating Cult Mind Control. Wait, I have his books here.

Let's show those. Here is Combating Cult Mind Control and Releasing the Bonds, Freedom of Mind. Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs, and his latest book is The Cult of Trump.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. We're going to get a lot of interesting feedback on this.

And here's a book that doesn't need promotion, but I just interviewed you, Michael. Great book. Yeah, I have a stack of them right behind me there. I noticed. You win.

I only have one. All right, Stephen. I've known you a long time. We've known each other since like the early 90s, I think.

Uh, decades. Yeah. James Randi era. Yes, exactly.

Well, cults have always been on the, the radar and in, in the wheelhouse of, of skeptical movement, the rationality movement, humanist movement, and so on for obvious reasons. Um, and so, but let's, let's just start with your own personal journey, how you got into it because your, your story, and I'm sorry to ask you to repeat it for the 2,787th time in your career, your, how you got. roped into the Moonies and how you got out and all that?

Very briefly, yeah, it goes back to another era before cell phones and the internet in 1974. In fact, Michael, I was recruited the same month Patty Hearst was abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a very infamous political terrorist cult. But my story is I was a Upper junior at Queens College, a creative writing major from a conservative Jewish family, liked to play basketball, liked girls, not interested in groups. My girlfriend dumped me. I was start of the spring semester.

I had gotten my books for classes and three women started flirting with me at the. cafeteria, asked if they could join me at the table, proceeded to lie their faces off. Of course, I didn't realize it at the time, but they said they were students and they said they were part of an international youth movement to make the world a better place.

I remember asking, are you part of a religious group? I don't know why I asked, but it must have been on my radar. They lied. They looked me right in the eye and said, no, not at all. And two weeks later, I'm learning that they believe Sun Myung Moon is the Messiah, this Korean billionaire industrialist.

And I got hooked. A whole series of incremental recruitment things. And really, several things. One is, I was curious. Two, I was horny.

Three, I was... The real psychology. You know...

I have what my friend, law professor Emeritus Alan Sheflin likes to call the myth of an unmalleable mind. I thought I was too smart. I was an extra honors student, skipped eighth grade, yada, yada.

I bicycled cross country when I was 16, so I wasn't worried that somebody could trick me and co-opt. my ability to think for myself. But in fact, I had a radical personality change.

And within a few weeks, I was dropping out of college, quitting my job, donating my bank account, believing the Messiah was on the earth and that World War III was going to happen in 1977. And my family, dear family and friends were like, Stephen, it's a cult. What are you doing? And that, of course, I had been programmed to resist persecution and attacks. So that just kind of validated in a weird way that I was doing something really revolutionary and wonderful. Um, and, uh, and I basically was promoted to a leadership level.

Not that I ever had any power, uh, cause it's a racist organization. They think the Koreans are the master race, but they needed Americans who could be front people for them here, which I succeeded to do that for them. And I kept getting promoted. Uh, and then I got out because I fell asleep due to sleep exhaustion.

and I should say to your listeners, I was sleeping an average of three or four hours a night. Maybe because they kept you up with various projects? Yeah, well, and they also basically said, I need to be a small Sun Myung Moon.

I need to think like him and feel like him and walk like him and talk like him. And father only sleeps three or four hours a night because he's so concerned about saving the world. So. I worked my butt off seven days a week, 18 to 21 hours a day, no pay, doing recruiting, indoctrinating, political activities, fundraising.

And I was a true believer. And I fell asleep at the wheel of a fundraising van in Baltimore, Maryland, nearly died, was in the hospital away from the cult. Remember...

before cell phones, so the cult couldn't keep talking to me and keep me programmed as cults today can do and do do. And I reached out to my sister, who I was always very close with growing up. I have two older sisters. I reached out to my sister, Thea, and I said, I had an accident.

My leg's broken. I've been in the hospital. I need surgery.

And she's like, come and visit. I'll take care of you. you have a nephew you haven't met yet.

I want him to know his Uncle Stevie. And I made her promise not to tell my parents, because they were satanic, but thank God she did. And they had hired some ex-moonies, and they confronted me by taking my crutches away at my sister's house and said, we want to talk to you about your involvement. And honestly, it wouldn't have worked, except that my father did a very... powerful technique that I teach my clients and have for the last 45 years.

He said, how would you feel if it was your son who met a group of controversial people, dropped out of college, quit their job, moved out, and you didn't hear from them? How would you feel? And when he did it, a tear came down, and I never saw my dad cry except when my grandmother died.

I saw a tear. But it touched me. I could see he genuinely was worried. I was absolutely convinced I wasn't brainwashed. I was doing God's will.

I knew everything. So I said, you know, I said, I thought about being him and what it must have looked like from his point of view. That's a powerful technique I talk about in Freedom of Mind, switching perspectives. And I said, I'd probably be doing what you're doing now.

believing at the moment my father was brainwashed by the communist media that was against the church. So I said, what do you want me to do? He said, we just want you to talk to these people for a few days with an open mind, hear what they have to say, and if you want to go back, I'll drive you there myself. But at least your mother, here's another line I love to tell my clients.

But at least your mother and I will be able to sleep at night knowing we did the responsible thing. So for me, it was a challenge. I want to prove I'm not brainwashed.

I want to prove this isn't a cult. I can listen to these people. And it was a very, very bizarre, weird experience of deprogramming. But they weren't beating me. They weren't torturing me.

They were nice people. I had recruited one of them into the cult who had left, so I knew her and liked her and trusted her. And they didn't just attack me or attack the group, but they asked me, what do you think of this? And what do you think of this? And are you interested in learning about Chinese communist brainwashing?

Because the Moonies were very anti-communist, still are. So I was very interested in that. And then we went through Robert J. Lifton's eight criteria in his 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, and they all fit the Moonies.

And that was a source of dissonance because we were God and they were Satan, but we're doing the same Chinese communist brainwashing techniques. That didn't. really mesh, but I still was programmed, so programmed to block negative thoughts, negative questions about the group.

And the final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, Michael, was they handed me a speech published by the cult where Moon was talking to congressmen and senators, talking about how surprised he was that Americans could believe that he Reverend Moon, a Korean, could brainwash American youth because he likes Americans so much. He respects them. And no American is so foolish to be brainwashed.

And the people in the room were like, I was that foolish. I was that foolish. I was that foolish.

But the critical thing was, I thought for the first time in two and a half years, what a liar he is. Wow. That was the first critical thought, because I had heard him personally say how stupid Americans were, how pathetic Americans were, etc., and how the Koreans were the master race.

So when I had that one negative thought, I realized he can't be a man of God if he's a liar. I can't trust someone who's a liar. Why have I been...

dedicating my life to this man and to this group. And it felt like a house of cards going plop, plop, plop, plop, plop. And it's described in the literature way back in the deprogramming area snapping, like the light turns on and you're like, what happened? And how long did that take? What's that?

How long did that take, the deprogramming? That was five days, but I was two weeks away from the group. first with lots of sleep and food and away from the group. And that's another critical piece.

I did a TEDx, how can I know if I've been brainwashed? And that's one of the other things that I say, you know, if you want a reality test, step away from whatever you're surrounding yourself with constantly. Sleep, eat, listen to good music, go in nature, like remember who you were before, and then learn about.

different models of brainwashing and mind control, including my bite model of authoritarian control, seek out, deliberately seek out critics and former members and listen to what they have to say, thinking I'm intelligent and I can discern if somebody is telling me facts and that are persuasive. Because when you're in a mind control cult, you're programmed to disbelieve anyone. who's an ex-member or a critic. Like automatically they're non-people or the media is the enemy of the people, to quote DT.

And then reality tests. Take the models, take the critical information, go back in your mind to when you first heard of the group and think, was I deceived or did I have informed consent? What were the steps that were applied that...

That got me to start thinking differently and apply the behavior control, information, thought, and emotional control variables and think back. Were there times when you were thinking of leaving or questioning it? And if you were, what happened that kept you back, kept you in? And what if you knew then what you know now?

Would you have ever gotten in in the first place? And if the answer is no. I would never have joined in the first place, then it's time to leave.

Right. So telling somebody you're in a cult doesn't work because no one thinks that they're in a cult. No one, as I like to say in the history of the world, has ever joined a cult. They join a group that think it's going to be good. They believe in, or it's going to save the world, or make the world a better place, or help your personal life, or your love life, or your financial life, or whatever.

I always like to use the example of Jim Jones. who started off pretty ecumenical with this open church, interracial, accepting of blacks in the Bay Area to his church, manning the soup kitchens, helping the poor. That seemed like a pretty progressive thing to do when he started.

And so people, you know, they didn't join a group to go to Guyana and drink, you know, toxic poison. But nor be raped by him, women or men, or believe he was Jesus on Earth. So in that first week or two when you were becoming indoctrinated, the factual claims being made, you accepted them based on what?

You're just young and who knows if it had been... Christian, you're Jewish, so if it had been a born-again evangelical at your door, maybe you would have become Christian or something like that. No, if they had said we're with the Unification Church, I would have said not interested. They said they weren't religious.

They were just a group of students from all over the world that want to make the world a better place and fight ecological destruction. And we... People should have harmony.

No, so the truth is... When they told you that Sun, Moon, and Moon is the Messiah, didn't that trigger something? Like, wait a minute.

Oh, I was way a program before that came out. I see. Yeah, no, if they had said, oh, we bow to an altar every Sunday morning at 5.30 and recite a pledge to fight with our life and dedicate it to Sun, Moon, and Moon in Korea, I would have been like... what are you insane? I know about the Holocaust and Hitler and like, this is my childhood education.

Thank you very much. Right now. So what happened, Michael, is a series of things.

It was a free dinner and a lecture and we're going away this weekend. It'll be so much fun. We'll, we'll go up, you know, we'll hang out, we'll get to know each other. And I was working as a waiter at a Holiday Inn on Long Island every weekend as a college student.

That's how I made my money and pay for gas and take women out on dates and whatever. And I worked every weekend. So I said, I can't go.

I work. And they were like, you got to come. It's really important. And they kept pressuring me.

And they got me the point of me saying, well, if I don't have to work some weekend, I'll go. That was my mistake. And then two days later, I called my boss up on Friday.

I said, what time do I have to report? Because I was doing banquet waiting, so it was different every weekend. And he said, you won't believe it, but the wedding was called off.

Take the weekend off. Uh-oh. So I had the synchronicity, you know, trying to connect dots on the discontinuity. That's a Zimbardo concept of discontinuities.

We like to fill in the blanks. Maybe I'm supposed to hang out with these nice people for the weekend. And then when we're driving, and so we go in a van. I made another mistake.

I didn't take my own car. I go with the van to an undisclosed location. It turned out to be a multimillion-dollar estate in Tarrytown. And as we're driving in, it was dead of winter, winter snowstorm.

They said, oh, by the way, this weekend we're going to have a joint workshop with the Unification Church. And I went, excuse me, nobody said anything about a workshop. No one said anything about a church.

I want to go back to New York. Really? And they did the typical mind control maneuver. What's the matter, Steve? Do you have a problem with Christians and being open-minded?

What do you think? We're going to do something to you? This is going to be a very...

Yeah, so it was... Wait a minute. Anyone who lies is not someone I want to trust. That is not someone I want to spend my time and energy with. But they tricked me again.

But anyway, I said, I want to go back. And they said, oh, we're not going back tonight. Well, you can go in the morning. Just, you know, bring your bags in.

Guess what? In the morning, the van left. So sorry. Oh, and the phone is broken. So sorry.

Why don't you stay for the first lecture and see what you think? And they kept prolonging it. Now, these were these young women that were recruiting you.

So the whole system, and I've learned this with lots of other cults, is a lot of sexual seduction techniques. Flirty fishing, isn't that called? Flirty fishing? Well, that was a term by Moses David Berg of the infamous Children of God sex cult. Right.

But that was where he was telling women to be happy hookers for Jesus. And yes, make money and go out and have sex to bring in the flock. But no, this is more like bait and switch. Like, oh, Michael, you're so smart in the love bombing. Oh, you're so smart and you're so handsome and you're so accomplished, you know, and get you in the door and then the next person takes over.

But that. person passes on the information they've gotten you to disclose about yourself to the next person so that they wind up doing thing what lifton referred to about the chinese communists as mystical manipulation techniques what we know as, you know, warm readings where they find out, oh, my parents are this and my sisters are that, and somebody is psychic and they just happen to know everything about me, but not connecting the dots that I told so-and-so and they passed it on and they passed it on. Okay, so you get to the end of this weekend and you go back to New York and then what? Yeah, so... I did two days.

I'm like, we got to go back. I have class in the morning. They're like, oh, no, there's a third day. You don't want to miss the most important day.

And I'm like, yeah, I need to go to class. I want to go. And then they keep pairing you off with different teams of people.

And they did persuade me to stay the third day. And I really felt like my brain was mush. By the end of the third day, I felt very overwhelmed and confused. And then they said, well, you're going to stay for the seven-day workshop that starts in the morning, aren't you?

And then I got angry and I said, if you don't take me back, I am going to make such a stink. You'll never, you know, you'll regret it for the rest of your life. So anyway, they drove me back to Queens and they kept me up for three more hours trying to persuade me to stay. And I just kept getting angrier, like, I'm going home now.

And I'm six feet tall, and I worked in my father's hardware store, and I had muscles back then. I'm an old fogey now. But I got really angry.

I went home. My parents were like, where have you been? Where have you been?

You know, you look like you're on drugs. Were you taking drugs? And I'm like, I don't think they gave me any drugs.

Well, where were you? I don't know. I was with this group of people, and I'm really confused. And is the Messiah supposed to come back on earth?

This is not part of my Judaism. And my mother's reaction is, let's go talk to the rabbi. Let's go talk to the rabbi.

I'm like, sure, let's go talk to the rabbi. And I agreed. Next day, we drove to the rabbi.

Rabbi knew nothing about cults. He thought I was interested in joining a Christian church, which it wasn't. And what he should have said is, Steve, I've never heard of this group, but I can assure you if it's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. Promise me you'll take a few weeks and not have anything to do with them while we research it together.

That would have rescued me. But he was clueless and that didn't help. So they had gotten the idea in my head. What if?

And this is, in fact, the third the end of the third day, Michael is. There's a what if, what if, if it's true, could you betray the Son of God? Let us pray.

Oh, dear Heavenly Father, open up Michael's heart and Stephen's heart. They're such good people, and the world needs them, because the world is such a dark place, and goes on for 40 minutes. Later, I learned about hypnosis and altered states, and I learned about the power of suggestion, the power of framing. So all these techniques started to make sense. As a cult leader, I just did them because that's what was done to me, and it worked.

And I was told to, you know, surrender myself and be like Moon. But my whole journey for the last 46 years has been... understanding how the mind works and how we have these biases, unconscious biases, and how social psychology works, and language and hypnosis. And so I've been trying to make it accessible to the public to understand it's not stupid people that they want.

It's not people with deep emotional problems either. We wouldn't recruit those because they're not controllable, and they take a lot of time and energy, or sick. people or just people with disabilities don't want them either we want smart talented extra honor students presidents of classes you know who have talents you mean because they're better at fundraising for the group and or getting you more recruits and so forth you you want workers who are going to really produce and i and i was one of those people who uh if you tell me it's This is really important. You know, you have to jump three feet. I'm going to jump three feet if I believe the authority and I'm asked to perform and show that I'm smart and I'm capable.

But Michael, I was a shy, introverted, kind of bookwormish guy. I was reading books, and I didn't like groups, and I didn't like public speaking. And in English class, when I had to read a poem to 20 people, it was very intimidating to me. And there I was in the cult being put on stage to talk to hundreds, if not thousands of people at a time. And I learned platform skills in the cult, because people say, Did anything good happen?

It's like, yeah, actually, I learned how to run a business. I learned how to public speak. I learned how to this and that. I learned how to fast for seven days with just water.

I learned how to work 18 to 21 hours a day. But there's no reason why you would have been prepared for that, because at that time, and still now, there isn't that much literature on it. There just wasn't that much known about it.

Why would you as a 19-year-old know anything about this? Because it's almost like we need a… class in high school. Like, before you go out in the world, here's things you need to know. And I would add with that some basic economics, how the stock market works, things like that.

But also, what about sex and male and female differences in psychosocial sexuality and skepticism 101. You know, how to think like a scientist. So that that Whatever the claim is that you're going to encounter, and I don't even know what it's going to be in 20 years or whatever, but you know how to think about any particular claim. So, you know, you mentioned Lifton. That's 1961. Really, I mean, Milgram, Zimbardo. I mean, the whole kind of guerrilla theater social psychology wasn't until really the late 60s, early 70s when that took off.

So, you know, there's still so much not known. You know, if you look at the entire idea of brainwashing mind control, that's really 1950s, the concern that the... Chinese and North Koreans were getting ahead of us.

So the CAA started its MKUltra program to study mind control and dosing U.S. citizens with LSD and things like that. So, you know, it's all so new. It's not a surprise that these groups figured it out long before the scientists and the activists and government officials or whoever figured it out. Well, I'm going to connect some dots for you and your listeners, if you don't mind, and say that.

When I first got out of the cult, I brought all these internal documents out with me, and there was a congressional subcommittee investigation, foreign affairs investigation into Korean CIA activities in the United States, and they came to interview me, and they wanted my documents. And I was naive in 76. I thought, oh, they're going to shut down. down the Moonies, they'll expose them, it's so obvious they're malevolent.

You know, Moon said that democracy was satanic and we need to abolish the Constitution, and all these things that are being said right now by radicalists who want to destroy the United States. In any case, right after the report, the final report of that investigation came out, Jonestown happened. And then Senator Dole asked me to come to D.C.

to be part of a panel to discuss cults. I get to D.C. and I'm told, nope, you're off the panel. So is the ex-member of the People's Temple who lost her son there.

And I saw Moonies protesting, saying, elect Bob Dole president, repeal the First Amendment. And I'm like, what? And so I said, what happened in this investigation? Because I read the 80 pages of the 430-page final report.

It was all about their illegal activities and activities with the KCIA. And I wanted to read. So I read 11 volumes, Michael.

And I listened. And I read the deposition of the founder of the Korean CIA who said, I organized and utilized the Unification Church for use as a political tool. Really? Which then got me talking to ex-CIA agents, because you mentioned MKUltra.

Well, it wasn't just that. They wanted to operationalize armies of cult groups to do their bidding. and use them as proxies. So the Moonies wound up being a counter-brainwashing program in South Korea to counter North Korean brainwashing, so there wouldn't be a third coup.

Because in that period, anti-communism was the big fear. So the ends justify the means. So what I'm trying to say to you and your listeners is intelligence agencies have never given up researching how to manipulate minds.

Please, do you really believe that? Do you really think China doesn't know how to manipulate minds? They have Uyghurs by millions in programs, but they're also using high tech. And that's a whole other piece I want to discuss. Because you mentioned the future.

But no, so the Moonies were brought to the U.S. when Americans were leaving the Vietnam War. What does that mean, they were brought to? Meaning, let's bring the Moonies over and fund them and set them up on college campuses to recruit young Americans to say, we need to fight commies, we need violence. You mean the KCIA did this? CIA set up the Korean CIA.

I see. And George Bush Sr. was the head of the CIA during this investigation, this Koreagate investigation that I was just telling you about. And the staff director who was in charge of that investigation, his name is Robert Boettcher, said that Bush did everything in his power to obstruct the investigation. Is that why you were taken off the panel?

Well. why is the Cult of Trump book not like on every TV show when all these pundits are talking Cult of Trump, Cult of Trump, Cult of Trump? There's a whole dark thing, and some people don't want the general public to understand how this works and what the agendas are, etc. And I don't know, here we are openly talking about all this.

Oh, I wrote about it. And your book is published by... I'm in a major publishing house, right? That's Simon & Schuster. Simon & Schuster, it's not exactly a secret.

No, but I outed William Barr, then Attorney General, and his relationship with Opus Dei, which is a right-wing Catholic cult. I outed The Family, which Jeffrey Charlotte did two New York Times bestselling books about that cult. Michael Pence was in, is in that cult, was recruited by Charles Coulson of Watergate fame. So there were all these...

There's all these groups. Hang on for a second, Steve. So you're calling them cults. You know, a member of Opus Dei's Catholic would probably say, well, that's not really fair.

Catholic Church is not a cult. Well, so my definition is any group that's a pyramid-structured group that uses deceptive recruitment and controls people's behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions to make... them dependent and obedient, that undermines their conscience, that tells them they can't read critical literature, talk to former members, are not allowed to question, is an authoritarian cult. See, I think of cults along a continuum.

I think there are healthy cults, like people who are really into, you know, skepticism. They go to the meetings. They like to read the book.

They like to talk about it all the time. I think that's healthy. I think that's productive. But from some view, it could be, well, they spend a lot of time. But nobody's following anyone blindly.

Nobody is saying you shouldn't use your analytic critical thinking capacities. In fact, you're encouraging that, right? The Catholic Church before the Vatican II was...

... pretty mind-controll-y. And there's a group in Catholicism right now, I blogged about it, that think the Pope is satanic. That thinks the Pope is wrong to say that we should take care of immigrants or poor people when Jesus explicitly says the opposite.

Okay, but back to the Moonies. You claim that the KCIA or the CIA brought them here as opposed to Moon just set up camp here so he can make more money. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, that this is. Is there a paper trail for this? Do you have evidence? I think so.

I mean, I was sent down to D.C. to fast for Nixon during Watergate because God wants Nixon to be president. This is what the Moonies told you. Yeah, this was this was 74. And did we not hear this with Trump and all the new apostolic reformation?

People who think that they're doing God's bidding and that the Democrats are traffickers and Illuminati members and all of that. And the Moonies were at January 6th, by the way. You know, I thought the Moonies went out of business.

I thought he got busted for fraud, tax fraud or something. Yeah, he went to jail for 13 months for conspiracy to fraud the U.S. government. That's true. But his two sons, he died in 2012. His wife has the main organization.

Two of his sons are here in the U.S. One has a AR-15 Colt called the Rod of Iron Ministry. And he wears a crown of... golden bullets and he calls himself king he thinks he's inherited his father's uh role and the other one has a gun factory that makes ar-15s and and and automatic weapons and they have two compounds that i am aware of one in tennessee one in texas to train people for civil war in the streets okay well Sorry to be a downer. No, no, no.

I didn't think that they were that influential anymore. The Washington Times is the Mooney's paper. Oh, it is.

Oh, yeah. They own it. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that.

After 30 years. And the Washington Post estimated $2 billion having spent in a newspaper that never made money. Like, that's interesting. Why would anyone spend that amount of money on a business?

Doesn't make money, except you're doing propaganda and intelligence work. Yeah. But my concern about the very broad definition of a cult is that almost everything can be considered a cult if you don't narrow down the specific definitions. Again, I don't think the Catholic Church is a cult.

You could leave. You can criticize the Pope all you want. Oh, I don't think it is either. What is that?

So this is my influence continuum. It's on my Freedom of Mind website. Here's conscience, informed consent, love, you know, free will, and here's authoritarian cults. My work is about authoritarianism, where people are given, in my professional opinion as a mental health expert, a dissociative disorder, which is actually in the APA's Diagnostic Statistical Manual since 1980. brainwashing and cults. And what happened, well, way to think about it is there was Steve Hassan, the young Jewish kid from Queens, and then Steve Hassan, son of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Chahan, the true parents of the universe.

So I was operating from him for the two and a half years. He was suppressed. He wasn't erased, but he was suppressed. And then I had my deprogramming and that happened. But all my programming was still there.

And so triggers would happen. Someone would say, hey, did you see the moon last night? And I'd be like kneeling on a concrete floor in front of the Korean Messiah. What, this was a trigger word?

Yeah. Like a post-hypnotic suggestion. Moon was, for me, when I first got out, it was a trigger.

But part of what I teach my clients is how to neutralize triggers. So you're... We have lots of anecdotes of people that fall for these things.

But what kind of data do we have? Like how many recruitments, efforts are made by Moonies and what percentage of them actually go away for the weekend or join or turn over their bank accounts or whatever? I mean, is there any reliable data on this? You know, I mean, we hear about the Mormons, for example.

They all have to go out and do their two year missionary. But what I'm told is like they convert almost no one. Right. It's you know, it's like.

0.01% or something. I mean, it's not a really fast way to recruit, to build your religion. It's better to have more babies that way. That's the tendency, grows religions.

Yeah, but it's an indoctrination because they're paired up. They can never be alone. They're away from their family.

There's very much B-I-T-E. That's very much enforced during that thing. I've done a bunch of- Okay, you better, since you just brought that up, you better give us the explanation for your I'm sorry.

So I have a model where I've- kind of like created a laundry list of behavior control variables, like controlling a person's physical reality, their clothing, their food, needing to ask permission, rigid rules and regulations. But the goal of behavior control is obedience. And so the more information control is deceptive recruitment, is spying, using information on you, against you.

Different information varies at different levels within the group. So there's all of those variables. Then thought control, the ideology is typically all or nothing, black and white, good versus evil, us versus them.

You're taught thought-stopping techniques, which is a behavior modification technique. So, for example, when my father, this is a true story, my father called me up one day, I was in the Moonies, and he said, this is before I cut off contact because he was satanic, he said, hey, Steve, I read in the newspaper that Moon had an M-16 gun factory in South Korea. What kind of messiah has an M-16 gun factory? This is my dad.

Yeah, good question. My response? Crush Satan, crush Satan, glory to heaven, peace on earth, true parents, true parents, in my head.

Oh my God, so they have you. Automatic. They programmed you to repeat things. Okay, but just call this. Well, it's called thought stopping is the technical term for it.

So I wouldn't allow evil energy and spirits into my body. But again, okay, so what you've described here, I'd say would fit fundamentalist Mormons, you know, the polygamist groups that live on the border of Utah. Done a lot of those. And all that stuff.

But not the Mormons. I mean, I know a lot of Mormons. The Mormon Church doesn't strike me like this at all. Well, it's very interesting because I did a very high-profile intervention with two 15-year-olds who had run away from the FLDS. That was the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints.

And then I get a call from someone at the Utah Attorney General's office to do a training with that. And then I get an invitation from the Ex-Mormon Foundation to come to Salt Lake City to talk to 250 fifth and sixth generation mainstream ex-Mormons to present my model. And at that time, I was what you were just saying. Oh, no, the Mormons are not just the fundamentalists are.

And they're like, come and meet us and carry your model and hear our stories. So walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, feathers like a duck. OK, so if you're just a regular old Mormon, you're a Mitt Romney, say you could you can't leave the church. You can't question the leadership.

No, you you. Yeah. Lots of people leave.

In fact, I'm friends with a man who was excommunicated by the Mormons, a psychologist, John Dillon. I think he was sixth generation Mormon because he was defending gay rights and saying we we we're not treating. These folks, well, he was in the New York Times front page on being excommunicated because he was daring to challenge the policy of the prophet, as a living prophet in the Mormon church.

Right, right. And he has a Mormon Stories podcast that's been running for years with stories after stories. How about just like a regular Protestant or Baptist who says, you know, I think Jesus died for my sins.

After I die, I'm going to heaven. I think it's fine to have... That's not a cult. The thing is, I think about cults along the continuum. The issue is, is it an authoritarian cult that undermines your ability to think for yourself, that tells you who you can date, who you can't date, what you can eat, what you can't eat, etc.

So there are Jewish cults, Christian cults, Muslim extremist cults for me. And... And so I don't walk around judging people immediately. I'm a human rights guy.

So I'm like, here's my story. Here's what I've learned. I've written these books. Now I've done a course for mental health professionals and others who want a deeper dive in understanding the psychology of indoctrination and how to undo it.

But I think, going back to your suggestion, everyone should get educated about these fundamental things, how to protect. themselves, how to reality test, and it's just not happening at the level it needs to. Well, let's just go through your five different kinds of cults, religious, political, psychotherapy slash education, commercial, and personality cult.

So we've been talking about the Moonies, so it's religious. What would be a political cult? Well, the Moonies are political, too. Oh, I see.

A cult of Trump, Putin, Kim and North Korea. Yeah, but what if people don't really... believe in Putin, but they can't do anything about it.

They're going to be killed or locked up. They don't really believe it. It's so interesting, isn't it? Well, so there's a whole range.

I want to tell you a quick anecdote, true story. After the Soviet Union collapsed, I was contacted by a psychologist in Moscow who had read my books, and they're in Russian. And she said, well, you come over and do a workshop for psychiatrists and psychologists on cults, because every cult in America is coming here. And we don't know how to make sense of it or what to do with it.

So I went there and I'm proceeding to explain Lifton and Singer and my bite model. And they're like, Dr. Hassan, do you understand you're describing the whole system of pedagogy of the Soviet Union? Really? Dr. Hassan, do you understand you're describing Kamsumo and Young Pioneers? Do you understand we would put dissidents in psychiatric hospitals for criticizing the regime?

And I'm like, if the shoe fits. And then they're like, oh, you are counseling us. And I'm like, if it works, fine.

They really were. And then I was asked to speak to a group of high school guidance counselors from Siberia. And I was told. They were visiting Moscow. They'd never met a Westerner.

Would you like to talk to them? I'm like, I'd love to meet them. So I'm in front of a room, hundreds of people. Of course, I have a translator. And I said, is it true I'm the first American, the first Westerner you've ever met?

Duh, yeah. You must have a million questions for me rather than me give a speech. Why don't you ask me questions?

Right. Well, so let me. And then someone said, you don't understand. You lecture, we take notes.

I see. They're not used to that. But you were asking me about people in mind control countries, political countries.

But I mean, take that North Korea, you know, that scene when Kim Jong Il died and those video news stories about these hysterical people just sobbing, you know, for days on end. Now. Everybody can see that they're faking. They know they're faking.

The regime has to know they're faking. And so everybody knows the whole thing is a fake. I'm not sure that everybody knows they're faking, and I'm not sure they were faking. I think when Moon died, there were a lot of Moonies crying.

Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

No, but I mean, in North Korea with the Kim regime, how do you know if they believe it or not? I mean, maybe I don't know either. You don't know until they're out of the country and safe and learning about brainwashing and mind control.

And then they may say, I always doubted it, but I couldn't tell anybody because they would report me. Yeah. Well, let's back up and do kind of a bigger picture here in terms of...

I'm enjoying this, Michael, by the way. ...an ongoing debate in cognitive psychology. So whatever your opinion is, there is no right opinion at the moment. That is to say, to what extent are we naturally rational or irrational? Are we gullible or are we naturally skeptical?

Do we default to just believing most people or do we default to being skeptical of most people? So you have like on the one hand, you have someone like Danny Kahneman, Kahneman-Tversky team, showing how irrational we are, how gullible we are falling for these cognitive heuristics and biases. And there's just pages of them.

There's like 220 cognitive biases on the Wikipedia page alone. Thinking Fast and Slow won a Nobel Prize. Right.

Pulitzer Prize. In any case... But it was a Nobel.

So they have a huge body of literature showing how often we get it wrong when we're presented with a problem to solve. Now, on the other side, Gert Gingrinser, the German cognitive psychologist, he says, hang on for a second. If you present these problems in a way that's ecologically natural, instead of a logic puzzle, you know, if P then Q, then not P, then not Q, and... and you go down this rabbit hole of logic problems, people are not naturally good at that sort of thing.

They kind of go, what? But if you present it in a way like the famous Wasson test, you have four cards in front of you. Which ones do you turn over to test?

People usually get this wrong. But if you say, look, you're a bartender, and you have people sitting there, and who should you card? The person that's under 21, the person that's drinking alcohol, the person that's drinking Coca-Cola, the person that's obviously over 21. But people get that kind of problem correctly because it's kind of more of a natural way to think about it. And then I like to talk about Hugo Mercier's latest book, Not Born Yesterday.

So Hugo makes the point that all the anecdotes, just say the ones you've been recounting here and you do in your books, they're just anecdotes. Most people don't fall for cults. Most people that go to self-help groups, they don't have sex with the guru. They don't turn over their bank accounts. It's kind of a law of large numbers.

If you recruit millions of people, most of them say no. or most of them don't go down there. They don't go away for the weekend or whatever. And they just keep trying and trying and trying. By the time you get to these people, they're gone, right?

And so they're the handful that fell for it. But what we don't know, this is why I was asking, what kind of data do we have? What percentage that are subjected to these recruitment techniques actually go for it?

So Mercier's point is that it takes a lot of advertising to get somebody to take up a new brand of cigarettes or... to buy this car instead of that car. And he says, you know, research shows that most advertising fails. It's not effective at all. And that these companies spend just way too much money.

I mean, Tesla's never run an ad, right? And they're one of the most popular cars in the world. How did they do that?

Right? The advertising doesn't work. He even has a whole section on Nazi Germany in which he says, although anti-Semitism was rampant in Germany and out throughout most of Europe, you know, for centuries before Hitler.

That's why Daniel Goldhagen called his book, Hitler's willing executioner. There was a certain amount of it already there. But that most Germans were not exterminationist in their anti-Semitism.

But by the time the Holocaust was kind of getting ramped up in 40, 41, too late for anybody to do anything about it. You know, you could see your neighbors being hauled off to the KL system. And so it's like, well, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut. And well, how about the newspapers? There are no free, there's no free press in Nazi Germany.

Right. So you have the problem of what's called the spiral of silence or pluralistic ignorance, where everybody thinks everybody else thinks something, but they don't. But there's no way for me to find out what you're thinking because I can't talk to you. You can't speak out. There's no press.

There's no social media. There's no cell phones, whatever. So the whole thing could be kind of just floating in the ether for years without anybody being able to do anything about it.

Everybody thinking everybody else believes it, but the fact that they don't. So here's what I'm getting at. What is your sense of, like any of these groups, Scientology, the Mormons, whoever, to what extent do—I mean, I've seen the Scientology. They're out there on Hollywood Boulevard with their booth in the cans, and they give people the personality test.

How many millions do they have to go through before they get somebody that says, here's your bank account, $100,000 or $1,000? Is it one out of 1,000, one out of 10,000? And actually go for the whole thing, as opposed to most of us, most people walk by and go, nah. No, thanks.

So my experience is that if we were going to look at the Moonies in the time that I was there, I would say the recruitment was maybe 10% of the people who went to the initial three day workshop and then another smaller percent of the seven day workshop and another smaller percent. of the 20 day one day workshop. Once the group was known and there was media and there were books and articles, it made it harder to recruit. So they had to make more front group where they didn't use that name and they needed to try lots of other types of techniques. Um, but I can say that, uh, I never would have been attracted into a Christian cult, but an attract.

woman telling me that I could, you know, do a multi-level marketing thing and make a lot of money and not have to be a waiter for the rest of my life, I might have been suckered at least to go to some of those programs in the beginning. So what I'm trying to say is that it's so many types of cults everywhere that you, the percentage of it... a particular cult being successful at getting you, it requires a number of variables. The people who don't wind up getting sucked in have family friends that they talk to, and they say, hey, I just met this really cute chick, and she's inviting me over for dinner. I'm not sure if I should go.

And the friend goes, well, you should learn more about her, or you want me to come with you, and we'll not let anybody... split us in the evening, those people are going to be okay. In fact, that's what I say today with internet and such, like create a trust pod of people with diverse opinions, but have at least one or two scientists, a lawyer, maybe an accountant in there, because you can reality test with a group far better than a single person.

And you can also do research on a particular thing, because there really is a lot now that can be known. I definitely think we're emotional. I definitely think that we are rationalizing beings as opposed to rational. I think that we go in and out of altered states all day long, but we are not maybe educated or self-aware that we're spacing out or that when we're spacing out, it's an opportunity if someone has a hidden agenda to put an idea in your head. that you're not even aware of.

And the thing that I've been researching the most in the last few years, Michael, is online recruitment and indoctrination of cults. And I started in earnest in 2015 with ISIS recruitment online. And with the cult of Trump, it's accelerated.

And you made a comment about, what are the cults in... several years going to be doing. They're going to be doing AI, you know, metaverse goggles where you're not, they're going to be getting all of your information of all your likes and dislikes, all the images of all the people you trust and putting them in, you know, imposing them attributes so that you're not even aware that you like these people for reasons that your unconscious is getting tweaked. and your conscience isn't.

That's my worry. If you're a Democrat, are you in a cult? Or if you're a Republican, are you in a cult?

If you are not... Forget Trump, just whoever's president. Yep.

Biden's president, I'm a Democrat, am I in a cult? So the thing is that you would need to answer that question by the criteria. If you are, you know, blindly... going to the polls and checking and you don't care that the person lied about their credentials or, you know, is a cheat or whatever. I think that's a problem.

That's a fundamental problem with democracy. I think we need to really go back to values and find trustworthy representatives who aren't just bought off or paid off. And I think that That's why so many people become independents, because they're fed up with this two-party system that seems to be so corrupted over decades.

And do I— Let me read you my summary of Hugo Mercier's arguments here. Mass persuasion, for example, is extremely difficult to pull off, and most attempts at it fail miserably at large scale. This is because when scaled up from two-person communication to large audiences, trust cues do not scale up accordingly.

Most preachers, prophets, and demagogues are lost to history, but because of the availability bias, we only remember the biggest names in the genre, such as Jesus and Hitler. But even these examples flounder upon further inspection. In his own time, Jesus was a disappointment at starting a new religion, which might not have been his mission in any case. And even the Apostle Paul barely got Christianity rolling.

It wasn't until the 4th century that the population of Christians was in the range of millions. This sounds impressive until we consider the power of compound interest as a result of which a small but steady growth can yield an enormous figure given enough time to invest a dollar at a constant yearly annual rate of 1%. In the year 0, if the dividends are reinvested by the year 2020, the investment would be worth over $2.4 billion. Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, estimates that Christianity's growth rate at 3.5% over the centuries. This means that even if each Christian only saves a few souls in a lifetime, the religion could easily compile tens of millions of followers in a matter of a few centuries or over 2 billion by today.

So the point here is that all the techniques you're talking about do work on a handful of people, but not the masses. I disagree. You disagree.

Okay. Go ahead. Expand on that.

How do we have 70, now it's less, 40 million people still thinking that the election was stolen in 2020 if mass persuasion is not real? That's a lot of people. That's interesting.

Yes, I agree. I wrote about that in Conspiracy. So here's my answer to that question.

Maybe I'm wrong. It's that it's a tribal thing. This is our team.

The leader said, historically, this has never happened. To be sure, Trump is unusual, so I'll grant you that. We're going to fight to the bitter end. The Democrats defended Gore all the way up to the bitter end until the Supreme Court said that's it.

And when the Supreme Court said that's it, it's over. Then Gore said, OK, I concede. And that's always what happened.

I mean, Hillary eventually conceded in 2016 and so on and so forth. And then the team then goes along with it. Yes.

OK. You know, because Democrats always think elections are rigged when they lose. And then they usually stop the conspiracy theory within a few weeks.

As soon as the candidate says, all right, you know, we concede, then then the flock follows. Right. But Trump.

never conceded. So even when Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump-appointed lifelong Republican, says, I took the Department of Justice resources and we looked into it and we found no fraud. Now, normally the tribe would go, OK, then we concede.

Let's concentrate on the next election, see if we can win. But because Trump never conceded. So is that brainwashing? Is it just kind of tribalism? I don't know.

So the thesis of my book is that there are a lot of cults, authoritarian cults, in the cult of Trump, and they all were persuaded to join together behind this person and this platform for their own particular reasons. The biggest threat, in my opinion, is what's called New Apostolic Reformation churches and groups. And the media has gotten it incorrect, in my opinion, by calling them mainstream Christian evangelicals. Mainstream Christian evangelicals say these people are not Christian because they have self-appointed apostles and prophets who claim they speak directly to God.

They speak in tongues, which, as you well know, is glossolalia. There's zero evidence that it's an ancient tongue. whatsoever, and people are standing next to them interpreting them. Jesus says, you should be humble.

So you're saying that these people are influencing... They cast out demons, they do faith healing, but they do B-I-T-E, behavior, information, thought, and emotional control, and they convince people that unless they follow blindly the apostle, Satan's going to invade them. So this phobia, it's a major factor of mind control, is what I call phobia indoctrination, where people, and I was brought to see The Exorcist in the Moonies.

That was part of my indoctrination. And Moon gave a lecture after the Moonies were, we were all brought to Greenwich Village to watch the movie in the theaters, went up to Tarrytown, and Moon said, God made The Exorcist movie. This is a prophecy of what will happen if you leave the Unification Church. I was afraid of being possessed by demons.

I'm Jewish. I don't believe in demons. But I really believed in demons because I... Back in 2015, had it not been Trump that got the nomination, had it been Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, would there be a cult of Cruz, a cult of Jeb Bush, a cult of... Because of these groups?

The Christian right, in my opinion, the Christian right has been at this for decades. The there are these special interests that want a theocracy. They don't want a separation of church and state. They don't like gay rights.

They don't like women's rights. They think, you know, the Bible says that that women should be subjected. They're for corporal punishment, etc. They they don't like liberals.

They don't like they feel like it's a threat. to their model of reality. And so, yes, they were going to go with Cruz.

Uh, and you know, Trump didn't one Corinthians, you know? Yeah. But I'm asking it had, had it not been Trump, had it been Cruz, would you have written a book to Trump of Cruz?

Sorry. I don't know. I, I, to be honest, when my, when my, my agent and, and said, I really want you to write the cult of Trump. The only thing I, knew for sure was Trump was a malignant narcissist, which is more than a narcissist.

It's the psychopathological piece, thinking you're above the law, pathological, lying, sadistic, paranoid. There's a list. I put it up on my website.

I knew that that was the stereotypical profile of a cult leader. And I presume that he ran his families and his businesses like a cult of personality. But until I started to really dig into it, I realized, well, I did chapter three comparing him with Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, and Hubbard with direct, you know, quotes of each and creating parallels. But I did not understand Putin's influence. I did not understand what the family was.

I didn't know what the Council for National Policy was, a secret society that's been heavily funded, that's operational. Ann Nelson wrote a great book called Shadow Network that I highly recommend to your listeners about them. So there are all these entities that are all anti- Democratic and anti-separation of church and state. And you, atheists, you're definitely a threat, by the way.

Yeah, we're on that. We actually, in our latest issue on naturalism, have a Catherine Stewart article on that. Love Catherine Stewart's work. On Christian nationalism. Yes, it's a problem.

It's there. Homeschooling because they don't want science. How big is the problem? I mean, is it tens of millions? Yes.

But let me back up. So. let's say Cruz wins or whatever, what would have happened between 2016 and 2020? Most of what Trump did, any of those guys would have done, right?

Lower taxes, deregulate business, goose the stock market, help my rich friends get richer, pretty standard, tighten up the borders, foreign policy. I would agree that that's a good guess. This is what Republicans do. I mean, that's their job. It's literally their day job.

There's nothing Trump did there. Even the Supreme Court justices, all three of them. You know, Cruz would have picked probably those same three. Oh, the Federalist Society put forth six of the nine judges that I'm aware of.

Is the Federalist Society, which we know makes these lists and tracks these judges from law school all the way to the Supreme Court recommendation, are they a cult? Are they part of a... Well, Leonard Leo was on the Catholic Information Center Executive Board, along with Barr, and he was... Leonard Leo was the founder of Federalist Society. Federalist Society.

Yeah. And he got a billion dollars recently as a gift for the future, for him to continue his work. Whoa.

From who? You mean some rich billionaire? There's a lot of... very wealthy billionaires who I believe have been influenced to think that unless they donate to these causes that America will be lost. And they don't believe in principles of democracy or representative democracy.

They don't believe in equal rights. They kind of exist in a social Darwinist reality or an Ayn Rand. Selfishness is good, greed is good, altruism is evil, ideology, or, you know, I've made a lot of money, therefore I'm superior to everyone else, and therefore it doesn't matter if everyone gets wiped out by global climate crisis as long as I'm making my money selling oil and such.

And not to mention the people who say, oh, we don't need to worry about global climate because Jesus is coming back and God's going to remake the earth. Have you encountered those folks? That's dangerous.

Well, they were kind of bigger in the 80s and in the 90s than now. But I take your point. But my point is this, you know, 74 million people voted for Trump. You can't possibly be arguing that 74 million people are in a cult. So I say in my book, you know, that.

Um, not everyone who voted is a mind control authoritarian cult leader. A lot of people just vote always the party. They just, you know, mindlessly. My parents always did it. I've always done it.

I'm going to keep doing it. Um, are they in an authoritarian cult? I don't think so, but that's not a behavior that shows thinking and reality testing.

So. Are people who go crazy because their team wins in soccer, are they in a cult? Yes, they're in a cult.

Is it an authoritarian cult? I don't think so. But if they try to hurt their mother or their brother because they were rooting for the other side, then I think it's going over a lot of lines that I would find concerning.

I mean, again, a lot of social proof that as we look to our fellow group members. to figure out what's true because no one has the time to know everything and check everything. Usually the group gets it right about those things. This is one of my criticisms of the social psych experiments, like the smoke in the room.

We replicated this for the Dateline NBC show in which we had a bunch of actors filling out forms and we had one subject. who just kind of went along with it. We're pumping theater smoke underneath the door and this poor guy's sitting there.

And he's looking left, he's looking right. And like, well, everybody else is just sitting here. So I got to all just sit here and finish my form because I want to be on this NBC show called What a Pain. Anyway, and so on.

But normally, if there was a fire in a building and there was smoke pouring in the room, people wouldn't just sit there. They'd do something, right? So I- I'd like to think that, although what I've learned with social psychology is you should always act- Act as if you're alone, as opposed to looking for clues in the social environment. The bystander thing with somebody pretending to collapse, you're walking alone.

Almost everyone goes to help them. 30 people walk by quickly. Most people don't think I should go and check that person unless they understand, unless they do that empathy thing. What if it was me that just collapsed?

Would I want someone to? Ask me if I'm okay. If the answer is yes, I do it. But people need to, in my opinion and yours, because that's what you do for so much of your energy, is trying to encourage people to think and to critically evaluate and reality test things. And in my world, because I trained in hip...

hypnosis, and I've watched a lot of covert hypnotic manipulations that are completely unethical. I feel like it's my job as a mental health professional to say, wait a minute, this technique is being used to sexually assault people where they would never have agreed to have sex. Right. So let's talk about some of the other kinds of cults. So you had, I want to ask about commercial.

cults and personality cults. So take someone like Tony Robbins. You know, is that a cult? It's a self-help group.

You know, he has endless anecdotes of people who changed my life and I make more money and I'm happily married and I have a great career and, you know, and so on. And occasionally you hear the horror story, somebody got burned during the fire walk or, you know, this happened or that happened, but it's pretty rare. And he, you know, he engages with millions of people and, and so on. So is that a cult? But is engaging in millions of people or consulting presidents, is that the criteria of whether someone is ethical and healthy or not?

I don't think so. I mean, well, my first interactions with Tony Robbins was the firewalking before he got big. And he was charging outrageous amounts of money to people who couldn't afford it on the belief that the more you pay, the more you expect. some great benefit and such. The thing that I want the public to know about Tony Robbins is he learned neuro-linguistic programming, made a deal with Grinder and Bandler not to call it that, and has been teaching that ever since and making a fortune.

You better give us a little breakdown. What is that? Sure. So neuro-linguistic programming was a model that was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. It's something...

I learned about first in 1980 and got very interested, got very deeply involved with it, to the point that John Grinder invited me to be his apprentice, and I actually moved with my first wife to Santa Cruz to be with him. It was all based on the work of a psychiatrist, Milton Erickson, who is the founder of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and a consultee to the MK Ultra project, I might add. And Erickson did a revolution in hypnosis, whereas before Erickson, it was very direct suggestion, using your authority, your eyelids are getting heavy, heavy, heavy.

And people who complied, they were hypnotizable. People who said, screw you, I'm not closing my eyes, they weren't hypnotizable. Erickson came along.

And he basically said people are going in and out of trance states all day long if you just observe them. And if you ask people questions that demands them to go into their memory, for example, or to construct a new image, they're not fully thinking anymore. They're in an experience. You mean like if I'm driving along and I kind of space out and I forget where the last five miles went, that's kind of a trance state?

Is that what you mean? Yes. Okay. Yeah, so there are features like time distortion. When you're doom scrolling, you go on social media and you say, I'm going to go for five minutes and an hour later, you're like, what happened to my time?

That, I would argue, is a trance state. And there's nothing wrong inherently with a trance state. I'm into trance states.

I do self-hypnosis when I had cancer. I saw a clinical hypnotherapist who was helping me to reduce my anxiety and stress, etc. I'm all for sports. I could visualize my free throws going in. and negatively hallucinate the distractions, the noise, and the visual.

That's hypnotic. All the top performers are trained in these techniques. The issue is, is there someone or some group that has an agenda that isn't you about making your decisions that wants to co-opt you, get your money, get in your pants, get you to work slave labor for no... pay, that's where I have a problem with hypnotic techniques.

And if you look at the documentary about Tony Robbins, Tony Robbins, I am not your guru on Netflix. If you think about that for a minute, there was a woman who said, I sold my last things to come here. I was raising the children of God.

And he said, I'm not your guru, you know, right? That's how the title. And by the end, he's inviting her to work for him.

Did you catch that? Yeah. No, I did not catch that.

That was a little obvious to me. But you can see a large group awareness training where everybody's getting up and clapping. Yeah, yeah. But so, yeah, I saw that. And so I'm at a group dinner years after I saw that.

I was recounting that incident where the woman stands up. You know, he's like, you know, anyone who has a relationship issue. hands go up he picks this one woman and she goes oh i'm in this relationship and he's not as committed or whatever and he and he says okay call him right now and break up with him now and she's like what now he goes yeah so she flips her phone whatever kind of phone it was and she calls this poor guy at work it's like the middle of the day during the week right and and dumps him right there on the on the phone on the spot with the cameras and all that stuff and my criticism of that was okay that's That's interesting. Of course, she got love bombed for that.

But what happens like a week later? We have no follow-up. Does she go back and go, oh, I made a hell of a big mistake here? But anyway, at this dinner was somebody who was one of the producers for Tony Robbins.

And this woman said, oh, well, we work the crowd. We study the crowd all weekend. We figure out who's the one that we're going to highlight in the show. They're the most vulnerable, the most susceptible.

And it's a little bit like how hypnotists work. You're like Darren Brown. He's a hypnotist.

He knows NLP. Would that be a case of, again, back to the law of large numbers, you have a room of 100 people. There's probably two or three that are super hypnotizable, whereas the rest are not going to be so good.

And so you kind of work your techniques to find that's the guy right there. We're going to bring him up on stage. Yeah, that's stage hypnosis.

So the typical thing is I want everybody to stand up. So he's watching who's going to comply and who isn't. And of those people, I want you to clasp your hands and clasp your fingers.

And I want you to press really hard. And I want you to imagine you have super glue in your hands. And I'm going to count to three. And when I count to three, you're not going to be able to open your hands. And most people go like this on three.

Some people go like this. And some people are like this. These are the people he wants on the stage.

Right. So he grooms, he does some tests, and he wants the most responsive and compliant. The other technique is just to say, who's been hypnotized before?

Because then you can say, remember the deepest chance you ever did with so-and-so, and people will do it and not think, who is this person? They're a stranger. Why would I ever want to do anything on a stage?

That what people are going to laugh at me. Right. Like as a therapist and a hypnotherapist, this is immoral to bring people on stage and use them as guinea pigs.

I've seen this where they give them a post-hypnotic suggestion. You'll not be able to say or remember the number seven. And then they wake them up. Okay, count to 10. And, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10. Okay.

So Darren Brown does something very similar in his Netflix show Miracle. Yeah, I like Darren Brown a lot in terms of showing the impermissible stuff. Right, but he's kind of using the techniques you're talking about, but in an ethical way because he's basically saying right up front.

This is going to look supernatural, and it's not. It's just a magic trick. And I'm an atheist, and I don't believe any of this crap.

But he does get these people to do that. It's just like he said, you will not be able to read these words or whatever, however he says it to the person. And then he holds up a newspaper headline, and the guy can't read it. It's gibberish. Yeah, or people are told, you know, you're going to need to pee when I count to three, but your feet are going to be glued.

to the stage and people are like squirming with their hands in front of their crotches and people are laughing and the poor person is like really in pain right and that's terrible that's manipulation but again i don't like it this kind of of course it's i agree it's unethical but my larger point is that this does not work on most people it really takes concerted effort See, I would fight a little bit with you on that because I'm just going to quote something out of my doctoral dissertation on the bite model of authoritarian control. I use a model from Alan Sheflin, a law professor emeritus, for experts to argue before judges and juries. And I know you do expert forensic testimony, Michael, yourself. But he basically says you have to look.

look at the influencee and their unique vulnerabilities. You have to look at the influencer and their authority and their skill level and are they malignant narcissists, etc. And you need to examine the techniques, the BITE techniques. And so if you have someone who's the president of the United States telling you we have to go and be wild on January 6th, it's not the same as even a fox. Fox News person that you like a lot telling you to go, right?

And the point that I wasn't totally agreeing with you on is that some people are highly skilled. So you can say, I'm not hypnotizable. And then someone really skilled can do maneuvers and double bind you so that you get totally... confused and disoriented.

In your model then, how would you explain something like this? Milgram gets 65% of his subjects, 67% to go all the way to 350 volts. But if there's another shill in the room that says, you know what, I'm not doing this, this is wrong, then the obedience to authority plummets. So what happens to all the internal, inside the head, psychological stuff going on? The moment somebody next to you says, this is wrong, I'm not doing it, then person suddenly doesn't do it.

Yeah, so it's about, you know, I remember back to the 70s when I was an undergrad, Darrell Bem's self-perception theory, where we have to look outside for cues to tell us, like, what is real or what should we do? And when we have a conflict, like, I don't like that I'm flipping a switch and somebody's screaming in the other room and you believe they're actually God-elected. electrodes when they don't.

But you have this authority figure. You don't know they're a high school teacher who's moonlighting for a few extra bucks saying you have no other choice. You made a commitment to science. You must continue. A lot of people don't know how to assert themselves and say no to the authority figure as if there's someone in the room going, I don't think that's good.

Now, all of a sudden, you have permissibility to voice it because you're not alone. And in fact, someone's looking at you, going to judge your decisions. I've studied complex systems theory a good deal. And there is contagion network effects where, you know, people are looking up and other people start looking up. and then more and more people are looking up and there's nothing there.

Or what's known as mob mentality happens where... Again, normally if a bunch of people are looking at something up in the sky, there usually is something there. So, you know, the human mind is so interesting. All I can say is...

I'm still learning. I know that you are a lifelong learner and you love to, you know, explore and understand more things. I do want to come back if I may and just say, you were mentioning commercial cults.

The biggest body are trafficking. Sex trafficking and labor trafficking. We're talking about tens of millions of people around the world.

And with sex trafficking in the United States, the average age is 12 to 14 years old when kids are being groomed and recruited by traffickers. How is that a cult and not just a criminal ring? So I'm using this model.

Forgive me for being repetitive. But for me, it's about controlling a person's sense of self, their identity, their information, their feeling states, their ability to think, their access to family and friends or critics or former members. And if you're given a phobia, so have you ever met anyone with a phobia of an elevator or a phobia of a dog?

Not those. I bet people with minor phobias. Okay, so let's just take elevators as an example.

I've worked with people who've had decades of phobia about they would never get in an elevator because they immediately think they're going to crash, plummet to their death, or be trapped for eternity. They can't visualize riding safely and comfortably and having a positive experience. So they're rational.

They're functional, except in this context, they're imprisoned. But they're cognitive behavior therapy, then. And when you're in a mind control cult, you can't imagine leaving and being happy and fulfilled. Or if you're in a religious cult, you think you're betraying God and Satan's going to invade you, or you're going to go to hell or whatever, even if you didn't believe it before, if it's been installed in you and you accept that.

But the counter examples are meeting former members who are out and happy and fulfilled. And the believer is like, wait a minute, he's an ex-moony. He should be, you know, an evil person.

There would be social proof that it's OK to leave. All right. I want to ask you about that Netflix series.

Don't pick up the phone. I don't know if you had a chance to watch it, but let me let me cue it. I haven't. Listeners, you have you have. I haven't.

So this is a lot of people our age will remember when this happened. Oh, I know that story because you had asked me before. McDonald's and the other fast foods.

All right, let me cue it up here. Please. A manager at a McDonald's in, I think it was in Kansas, gets a call.

This is Sergeant Brown. We're over here at headquarters here, and we have a serious charge against one of your employees. Do you have a so-and-so working there?

Yes, we do. She's like this 21-year-old woman, young woman. And then the manager is. she's like 45 or something. Okay.

So yes, I do. Well, you know, we have a report that she, she stole $50 from one of your customers. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Terrible. What do I do? Okay.

Now we're going to come over there in a little while, but you know, we're here. We're going to go over to her house. We're going to investigate this whole thing. You got to call her into the back room. So she gets this young woman in the back room.

What's going on? Well, we have a report from the Sergeant. He's right here on the phone.

Right. And he says, you stole, you know, there's a report that you stole 50. Oh my God. poor girl's crying and I didn't do that.

I would never do that. Yeah. They all say that, you know, and so on. Now you have to keep in mind, this phone call goes on for like three hours.

So I'm going to truncate. It makes it sound ridiculous. Right. Even happen.

But you know, then it's like, okay, we're coming over there in a little while, but in the meantime, I need you to just check to see if she's got the 50 bucks. I mean like check her purse. Okay.

Check the, nothing in the pro. Okay. Check like her shoes, you know, maybe, you know, and then so on and so on pretty soon you got to, okay.

Check her jacket pockets. Take, you know, all right. Take her shirt off, take her pants off. Pretty soon, this woman's in a bra and panties.

And okay, sometimes they hide it inside the bra. So you got to take the bra off. And mind you, this guy's on a pay phone. This is before cell phones, right?

He's not watching any of this. So that's weird. And then the manager is a woman. It's not some guy doing this, right? So it's like, okay, this is really bizarre.

And so finally, this poor girl is dead, stripped naked. Right now. OK, sometimes they hide it. Maybe she hid it in her vagina or whatever. So have her do jumping jacks.

Maybe the 50 bucks will fall out. And so all this is on a CCTV video. There's no sound, but you can see what's going on. Yeah, I'm familiar with this.

It's astonishing. And, you know, go get go get your boyfriend to come and watch her. The fiance comes and he participates and he's in there for like an hour and a half doing.

And then the guy's got her. The girl's. draped over this guy's lap and he's spanking her because he, he must impose authority on her or else she won't confess to stealing the money. And so finally they, you know, this poor guy, the boyfriend, he realizes, Oh my God, I've been had. So he leaves and he calls a friend.

Like, I think I did something really bad. And you can kind of see the wheels turning like I just realized I fucked up big time. I'm probably going to jail for this, right? Excuse me. Anyway, turns out this is not a one-off.

This guy did this over 70 times. Right. So this would go more to your point that actually this is not super, super rare. If you have the right sequence of how this guy walked them through this step by step for hours.

Again, if you just called somebody up and said, call in this young girl and tell her to strip off all her clothes right now. Right. They'd go fuck off and hang up, right?

Right. But, you know, the authority, this is Sergeant so-and-so, we're over here, we're coming over there, right? You got to do all this stuff. And three hours later, the woman's doing naked jumping jacks.

Yep. Astonishing. How does this happen?

Well, so I don't know that the caller was on a pay phone. That's new information for me. But he...

wasn't seeing and all we couldn't hear what he was saying but we could hear what the manager was saying and we could see the video but my when i was watching it i was like this guy knows nlp like this is not a typical thing and he's testing his abilities like he's having fun to see how far he can get these people to go and whether he's doing it on a bet or he's just trying to have fun at other people's expenses. But he replicated it over and over and over again. So I think he was using hypnotic methods, but he was also calling the manager late at night. She was busy. It was a context.

He called for the authority card. I'm a police officer. Now, what I tell people when I've often shown that.

excerpts of that in my cases, by the way, to teach people, because part of what I want to do is inoculate them for the future. I say, what are you going to do if somebody knocks on your door and says, this is the police? You're going to just open up the door? Or are you going to say, what precinct are you with?

And call and verify the badge number and the person before you let them in the house. Oh, I would. I would feel really awkward not letting the police officer in. Okay, but are you aware that it's possible a real police officer would want to verify their credentials?

What the manager should have done is say, you're a police officer. What precinct? Call me back in 15 minutes. I'm going to check on your credentials. He would never have called back.

Right. Yeah, there's a couple other Netflix series. One's called the Tinder Swindler. And this is a guy who seduced women, though it wasn't exactly cult-like, it's just a guy who wants to get laid by as many women as possible, so he's just using all these seduction techniques in which he first, on Tinder, posts a picture of him next to a private jet or whatever, and they're like, whoa, rich guy, and he's a decent-looking guy.

And then, so he somehow, I guess he rented the jet or borrowed the jet or something, because he actually took these women on a date on the private jet, and they fly off to some city, they stay in this really five-star hotel. They have a great dinner and the whole thing. Of course, he has sex.

And then at some point, he's convinced them over the course of several months that he's really wealthy. But he's in a little bit of trouble at this particular moment, and he needs $10,000. By now, they're almost engaged. They're almost going to live together.

He's taking these women down the road. So my guess is he must have done this hundreds of times, and he's got just like the hoax collar. And if he did it 70 times successfully, enough that it was reported to the police, he probably did it 500 times before he got the exact pattern down.

The right, the words, the intonation, to your point, the kind of hypnosis sort of thing where it really works on more people than not. Yep. Yeah. And, you know, people believe what they want to believe. So and that's another thing to.

be careful of when people are overtly flattering you and they're a stranger and they're like telling you how smart you are and how impressed they are with you and how you've accomplished this and that. And you, you need to be like, Hmm, like what is this pattern going on here? Um, but I, I want to state something categorically for you and your listeners, uh, this body of knowledge of hypnosis. is everywhere.

You can go online, you can go on Google, hypnosis plus sex, and there are websites where you can give your credit card and they'll teach you techniques for storytelling inductions, confusion techniques, anchoring techniques, etc. And nobody's enforcing this as a crime because the law doesn't recognize hypnosis or undue influence if you're over 18 or you're elderly and without dementia. And that's why I did my doctoral dissertation, because the law needs to have criteria that's fair and measurable that judges and juries can evaluate. Hmm.

This is not okay. This person was taken advantage of. And back to Opus Dei, there's a lawsuit, a trafficking lawsuit right now with 43 women who claim they were labor traffic, that they were lied to, told that they were going to get an education, and they worked slave labor seven days a week for decades for no pay. Wow.

You've been following the NXIVM cult. I know it very well. That was an NLP cult. Salzman was trained in NLP.

That guy, I remember seeing Elizabeth Vargas on ABC News did a special on him. I'll never forget her asking these women, because they've been showing pictures and videos of this guy, and she says, I've got to be honest with you, this is the dweebiest, goofiest looking guy. Who would want to have sex with this guy?

And the women are like, well, we did, rather embarrassingly. I was a guy like that. He claimed to be the smartest man on earth and fudged McGinnis' book of world records. He claimed to be a martial artist, which he wasn't, or a concert pianist, which he wasn't.

But he was doing hypnosis on people. People reported meeting with him for three hours and coming out of the meeting and not remembering anything that happened. Really? That's called hypnotically induced amnesia. But now these women were doing it just for business, right?

For improving their business. So he was shut down for doing a multi-level marketing cult called Consumer Byline by 20 attorneys general. And they said, never, you're not allowed to ever do an MLM pyramid scheme again. So he recruited Nancy Salzman to start this coaching.

organization that was an MLM. So it was about teaching people empowerment and women's empowerment and workshops and got some very bright, talented people to spend a lot of money and a lot of time. And ultimately, if your listeners don't know, there was a sub cult where he was having women brand being branded without anesthesia near their genitals with his. his initials and Allison Mack's initials.

And you're right. He's ugly and he's pathetic and he harmed a lot of people and he's in jail for 120 years for trafficking. But my point is that the women who joined, they didn't join that group. They joined a women empowerment group.

What's wrong with that? Other women recruited women into this subsect. And they were literally saying, I will be your slave. Whatever you tell me to do, call me at three in the morning and tell me to walk down the road naked for an hour.

I will do it because I've committed to you, old master. That's another question I have about Harvey Weinstein's methodology. Because he had, and I'm not seeing any of the women being charged as accomplices, he had these female employees bring these actresses up to his hotel room.

And then they would leave after a few minutes. Yep. They must have known what was going to happen, right?

Yeah, I don't know enough about Weinstein, but certainly Ghislaine Maxwell was helping Epstein recruit underage girls for abuse. But I would argue if someone was recruited by a pimp at age 12 or 14 and convinced that... that the pimp was their lover and loved them better than ever, gave them a new name, new clothing, new language system, cut them off from their family and friends, and down the road not only told them to recruit other women, but helped the pimp kill somebody, and then the woman is arrested as an accomplice, I would... be willing to consider advising as an expert witness, would she have ever done that if she hadn't been recruited when she was vulnerable and indoctrinated into this other identity and cut off from her family and friends? It's a case-by-case basis, but...

I definitely think Trump should be held accountable for all the violence on January 6th. I think there's a lot of other media people and politicians that should be held accountable, too. And I'm worried that they're not going to be held accountable, that just the poor people, you know, there were the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. But aside from that, the rest of the people were just incited through lies.

Right, they believed it. They believed their country was being stolen. Or they were in cults where their leader, like the Moonies that showed up there, their leader said, God wants us to do this, so we have to go and do this. You mean like the Proud Boys?

No, the Moonies were there. Oh, no, no. The Moonies brought buses. Oh, the Moonies were there on January 6th?

Yeah, and then there were a lot of people in these New Apostolic Reformation that showed up that were quoting Jesus and holding the Bible up along with the noose. For Pence, they were really thinking they were going to do God's will. But why would they turn on Pence? He's, you know, Mr. All Good.

Because he didn't certify. He didn't agree to not certify Biden. It's not religious beliefs.

It's just pure politics. We want power. But you have to understand, if you're in one of these groups, and you think you're following an apostle or a prophet who gets direct revelation from God, and God tells you to go, go.

Even though the context is political, like I fasted for Nixon for three days on the Capitol steps. I hated Nixon before I was in the Moonies. I used to fight with my father because he voted for Nixon and I voted for McGovern.

I was like, he's a crook. He's a crook. And I called my father from the Capitol steps thinking he would be happy that I was supporting Nixon. And he said, Steve, you are right. He's a crook.

I'm like. dad, you don't understand. God wants Nixon to be president.

He said, Steve, he's a crook. Now I know your brainwash. Didn't Mike Pence say God chose him to be, wants him to be president? Yep.

He's probably going to run in 2024. I don't think he's going to win. Yeah. Coke wants Pence, I believe.

So on the, let's just kind of wrap up with a bigger question here on, even bigger question that I've been asking on free will and determinism, you know. To what extent? So you have influence. OK, so tobacco companies or car companies or whatever, they're trying to influence me to buy their products. That's just normal capitalism.

You know, then you have the concept of undue influence. OK, again, that's your spectrum. Right. All the way across to to cults or whatever.

You know, where's the culpability of the people on January 6th? Shouldn't they be? Well, they are being held accountable. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

But I would argue if the tobacco company knew that smoking caused cancer and they hired propagandists deliberately to spread disinformation, that they were doing undue influence on the public by lying to them and using all the social psychology techniques and money to advertise it. So, but again, it's a... it is a continuum and a judge or jury or a person can evaluate for themselves what fits and how much. But a big question that we need to ask is, this is why I call my company Freedom of Mind. It's like, it's your mind.

You should control it. You should have an internal locus of control if you're an adult. You shouldn't be looking outside for someone to tell you what's real or what's true or who to vote for or what to do with your life, in my opinion.

And teaching people skills as you do, and I admire you for it, of how to reality test and understanding the different social psychology unconscious biases that we have. The Cialdini's six points and the framing. The more we know, the more we're empowered to be our own people, to be true to ourselves.

Free will comes in for you that if you're aware and you're self-aware and you're aware of the influences acting on you by the environment and people, then can you just choose, volitionally choose not to be influenced? This is the big question. The determinist would say everything you said, Steve, today is true.

But it's all hypnosis. It's all cults. It's all undue influence everywhere.

We're just bombarded by that. We really don't make free choices. No, so one of my mentors for my doctoral dissertations, a behavioral scientist, he says there's no such thing as free will. We're all biological beings.

And he will argue that. That doesn't fit for my experience. And I'm open to being persuaded, but I also want to be true to myself and my experiences. And honestly, and I don't know if this is true.

Maybe you can tell me, Michael. But someone told me, someone asked Einstein what was the most important question he ever asked. And he said, is the universe a friendly place? You ever heard that one?

No, I haven't heard that one. Well, I heard that one a long time ago, and I never validated it because I've read books about Einstein. But it made me think, do I want to believe that the universe is a friendly place or not?

And I started thinking about, if I did this assumption, how would that affect my choices and my life or this? And I decided that it's friendly because I'd rather it be that. But so here's the determinist would ask, could you have done otherwise?

Now, so let's rewind the tape and you're young Steve Hassan and the girls walk up and go, hey. And, you know, we're having this weekend thing. You ought to go.

And could you have done otherwise? Now, if it's literally a read-only memory tape and we rewind it, it's going to happen exactly the way it happened because it's already recorded. But if it's not that, if it's like rewind the tape or let's play the conditions again.

But you have a little bit of, you know, you could have done. Degrees of Freedom, it's called. You could have done this. There's maybe three different things you could have done.

You chose this one. Could you have done two or three? I think people make the best decisions they can at the moment based on their information, their experiences at the time. But I want to use this opportunity to tell you a healing technique that I teach my clients, which is a redo.

technique, where you take the knowledge you have now, go back in time, re-enter that scene, what would you have done differently? And if they said, oh no, we're not religious, I would have said, you're lying. I happen to know you're lying. I happen to know you're not students.

Get the hell off the campus. I'm going to call security. Or at the point that Moon said, we're going to change the Constitution and kill everyone that doesn't follow what we say.

I rewound that tape and instead of going, yes, father, I said, are you nuts? You're like a Hitler. You're going to do genocide. I'm out of here.

You're a maniac. You're dangerous. But I know that I didn't say that. But the me of today. In terms of the old Steve?

Yeah. Feels better. But we can't do that because you now know, just like none of those women would join NXIVM today, of course, because they already know. Right?

So if you take it back and you don't know anything, but in other words, could they have done differently? Now, again, this is one of these free will determinism problems that there's no solution. I don't know, but I can tell you, in my opinion, if my boss said, come on. Saturday morning for the wedding, I wouldn't have gone to the workshop and we wouldn't be talking today probably because it was just one of those weirdo things. But I thought, because it was so out of the ordinary for me not to work and because I had met them, the what if, you know, maybe it's meant to, maybe I'm supposed to, you know, hang out.

And anyway, I'm lonely and they're cute. Uh, you know, it's like that was the formula, the 19 year old hormone formula. Right.

Well, the way I think about it is that, you know, this idea, well, um, you know, could you have done otherwise? And if we, you know, just replicated the conditions exactly the same, you, you would do the same, but you can't replicate the conditions exactly. Nothing is ever exactly the same.

There's a, you know, a gazillion little bifurcation points along the way. You just happened to pick that one, but on a different day, you wouldn't have. And so there's some volition in there in as much as you can be aware of all these things that are happening and then incorporate those into your behavioral choices that you're making. Exactly.

And you can learn to ask questions, direct questions. Or if you find out someone lies to you and you call them on it. you exit you don't wait to hear a rationalization or justification of why they lied why would you want anyone in your life that you can't trust is what i related to this topic is social media uh again there's none of these netflix documentaries so the social dilemma this Tristan Harris and, you know, this massive influence that social media has, particularly on teenagers and so on.

OK, I'm aware of all this. But back to the volition and, you know, where's the the free will to just choose to do something else? Don't go on Twitter. Right.

Why do we need the government to come in and break these companies up or regulate them? Or am I wrong? Is this truly undue influence, in your opinion, that is social media?

I do think we need regulation. I don't think. capitalism and billionaires should determine for the profit motive, no matter how many people are killing themselves or having depressions or anxiety, or people's attention spans.

I interviewed a psychiatrist, Karl Marcy, who wrote a great book. You may want to interview him called Rewired. He's a Harvard professor.

There's scientific evidence of what it does to our brains. And he says that young babies and young toddlers shouldn't even be on TV screens, much less given iPad babysitting, for at least three years. Why?

Because the young brain needs human interaction because it's learning all the time from humans. It's learning cues. But given it's a reality of our social life, what do you recommend to parents of, say, teenagers? I mean, limited screen time or no Facebook or... You know, when you do it, young kids will find a way around it because no parent can keep up with it.

It has to happen way earlier. I love The Social Dilemma. I love The Great Hack, as well as people you may know.

There are three documentaries I think are must-watches. The People You May Know is on Amazon. It's about a company in Colorado, a Christian company, that buys your personal data on the dark web and sells it to churches to recruit vulnerable people.

If you've googled, you know, depression, anxiety, or you're going to those sites, that's all getting collected in the cloud, and it's getting aggregated, and it's being sold to to cultic groups to find vulnerable people where people will knock on your door and invite you to a volleyball game or a free dinner. I know that happens. Catherine Stewart's tracked some of that, but it wouldn't, wouldn't Jerry Falwell Jr.

Has Trump come speak at Liberty university and again, if that had been Trump, he would have had Jeb Bush or Cruz or whoever there. Isn't that just kind of normal politics and we want our guy in there. Let me just tell you a story. So I debated Dinesh D'Souza quite a few times over the years.

Last time we debated on science, it was like religion and politics and morality or something like this. Anyway, it was like 2018, 2019. As you know, Dinesh is a huge Trump supporter. And it's at a church in Michigan, big church, right? So I think, OK, I'm going to take this opportunity to just lay it out for these Christians. How could you possibly support this guy?

I mean, he is the least Christian person on the planet, much less president ever. Right. And, you know, three trice married, you know, affairs on all three of his his wives and sex with a hooker and pays them off.

And a porn star and, you know, in defrauding his customers, not paying his bills. He lies incessantly. He lies even when he doesn't need to lie.

And I just kind of laid it all out. And their answer was basically, we know all this. We don't care about his character.

God works in mysterious ways. God gives us messages through weird characters in the Bible. And more importantly, this was the take-home message for me, he's getting us the judges we want to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that's what we care about.

Yeah, well, agreed. But the key is, in the terms of the people in the audience and the flock, they're following the apostle who's telling them what God wants them to do. Now, Is there an advantage if you want to destroy the separation of church and state to put six Supreme Court judges that want to overturn Roe v. Wade and get rid of gay rights, etc.?

Sure. I don't think that's going to happen now in the gay rights thing, thankfully. I know some good things are happening and more good things need to happen.

But the critical thing that I want... people to understand is that the Christians that I know who went to seminary and read the Bible and they really believe in the blood of Jesus, they don't think politics should have anything to do with it because Jesus said, don't have anything to do with politics, right? But if you're following a prophet who's telling you Satan is in the Democrats and they're harvesting adrenochrome from little children in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizza Parlor, you're going to believe it, unfortunately, unless you understand about cults and mind control and how to reality test. And I did an...

Another person you may like to interview, Frank Schaeffer Jr. Do you know who that is? No, tell me about him.

Well, Frank Schaeffer, his father, is the most well-respected Christian, Protestant, evangelical, sold millions of copies of books and whatever. And he actually talked his father into being against abortion. Protestants, Billy Graham, Falwell, were all for abortion. Until they made it a political wedge issue to motivate people. You're killing babies.

How can you kill babies? Don't you love babies? What's wrong with you? In any case, Frank Schaeffer Jr. was a big evangelical force, and he regrets it all now. Really?

He's written books about it. Wow. I got to talk to this guy.

You'd love to talk with him. Seriously. He's a... So fascinating.

Is his change then similar to your own, like coming out of the cult? He wasn't deprogrammed, but he realized that it was Christianity that he was raised in was getting corrupted by politics and money. And he was in the room when big shots like Graham and Fall and whatever were meeting with the Father. How do you do it?

How do you? recruit young people. We want to understand your techniques.

Who's that group? Is it the family that has those prayer breakfasts for politicians? Exactly.

It used to be Douglas Coe. I'm not sure who's running it now. But Moon was brought to see Nixon at one of those prayer breakfasts.

The last big prayer breakfast, Marina Butina, the Russian agent, had brought all these Russians there. A little clue. that there was something weird with that? That was weird, almost like a flirty fishing kind of thing.

But I'm so glad you did. You're letting people know about Catherine Stewart's work because, you know, we need education. We need to learn about science and medicine and history and how to think. We need to be exposed to people with different points of view and not just be homeschooled where we're only hearing.

Black and white, all or nothing, good versus evil, and no sex education, anti-gay, etc. And there's a lot of people leaving those groups now. They're calling themselves ex-evangelicals. Oh, really? Ex-evangelicals, like the ex-mothers?

I interviewed one of the more prominent people from that. There's even a book or two that you might be interested. Anyway, I love your work. Perfect. Thank you, Steve.

Thank you for your work. No, your work is really super important. And so what's the next big project or book or web series or whatever?

Thank you. I just put online my website, freedomofmind.com, a foundational course aimed at mental health professionals, but coaches, former members, or anybody. It's a little over nine hours, but it's yours truly teaching what I feel people need to know. So that's...

That's happening right now. You sent me that link. I'll put that in the show notes.

Yeah, that would be great. And frankly, I want to teach people how to talk to people in cults in an effective way. And it works, but it takes time.

And you need to be patient. You need to learn how to listen. And you need to know your stuff.

Yeah. All right. Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you, Steve.