Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 218: The Aum Shinrikyo Death Cult Part I - Mountain Wizards

Episode Date: April 1, 2016

It's a return to cults with one of the most bizarre we've ever covered, the Aum Shinrikyo death cult of Japan! In this first part we cover how the group started as a fairly innocent scam focused on increasing the psychic powers of nerds and how leader Shoko Asahara was able to turn that into a full blown cult bent on Harumageddon.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? That were then these hostages for the cult. Got their eyes plucked out, they got a bandage raptor on their head, and then they all had to fuck the sow woman and calm. The whole thing was just like, will you not open your mind to me? Which meant, will you come inside this woman with a goat's head, a place on top of her head, and then she leaned over some railing and a fucking baby fell out of her guts?

And then this weird, wispy-headed woman came and picked it up and went like, and it was like licking its face. I was sitting there last night and I turned it off and watched Mr. Robot. Alright, welcome to the last podcast on the Left, everyone. I hope you're keeping all of that in. Marcus, Henry regalied us with the movie that he watched alone. Baskin, the story of how ice cream can really fuck you up. Is that what it's about?

I wish. It was a Turkish horror movie that is about a bunch of police officers stumbling into a hell realm, not unlike Event Horizon. Okay, very cool. It's cool, it's awesome. It's great for when your girlfriend leaves town. Because you just drink a bunch of scotch and watch it alone. Oh, that's exciting. Alright, I'm Ben Kissel. This is the last podcast on the Left. That's Marcus Parks.

Hello. We have, I guess, Lonely Henry Zabrowski, or what are you doing with your life right now? Stag party, Henry Zabrowski. No, it wasn't a stag party. That's what I do. That is what a happily coupled man's stag party is. I watch all the things that are too intense for my girlfriend to watch when I'm alone. It sounds like you watched a Turkish snuff film.

It's very similar, but it had a real guy with a deformity in it. That's cool. That's open. They're really celebrating diversity over in Turkey, except for women have to walk behind the men, and most of them lose their virginity to prostitutes. The men, that is. Yes, and they fuck chickens. They fuck a lot of chickens. I don't know if that's always true for Turkish people, and also maybe I don't know how good it is because I've never tried it.

The story with chicken pussy, I don't know. It just seems like a bunch of claws scratching my inner thighs while I got a dirt-covered screaming bird kind of lurching up and down on my cock doesn't really make me want to shoot roads. Castle, how do you feel? I don't know. I mean, every creature has its purpose, and God gave them to us to use. So you think a chicken's purpose is to be come inside and then slaughter underneath? I did not say that. Cows are meant to be eaten. That's all I am saying. You can infer what you will.

I think cows are meant to be tipped. They wouldn't stand so stiff. Oh my God. That brings me back to some good Wisconsin cow tipping memories. Oh my God. Okay, so today we're covering a cult. Yeah, we're coming back to cults. And remind everyone, I do want to remind people, I have a Wisconsin tongue,

so this will be difficult. The name of the cult is Um Shinrikyo. Um Shinrikyo. Um Shinrikyo. Now what we're trying to do here is a new approach to big hitters. I feel like a lot of the times we're going to always go back and do your classic serial killer, but this is a time to really cover an entity that's killed a lot of people. Um Shinrikyo is a group that was a terrorist group in the very beginning

being a totally awesome cool anime based cult, and I would have joined. An anime based cult. And now Marcus, just really quick, in context, Waco, Texas, David, Koresh, they have nothing on this guy. Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, because Waco was, I mean, comparatively fucking kindergarten. Yeah.

Waco, they had some guns, but they were trying to protect themselves, and they were just losers. They were a bunch of Texas boondoggle losers. I'm sorry. Oh, leave him alone. Um, but these is a group, this was a very, this is a nefarious group, and it had a gigantic corporate structure. By the end, it was worth almost a billion dollars. Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Um Shinrikyo death cult, otherwise known as Um Supreme Truth. Woo. That's a fucking cool ass name. He's good, you could say what you want about Asahara, but he's very good with names. Absolutely. People operate to this day, although it's salad days were a span of 10 years from the mid 80s to the mid 90s.

And that's not the funky Greek salad days. Those are the, those are the very refreshing side house salad days. Yeah, yeah. They were led by the charismatic and chubby Shoko Asahara. The cult's apocalyptic visions came to fruition in 1995 with a deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, killing 11 and sickening over 5,000. It's really interesting how you can really see the apocalyptic visions come to light when you make them happen.

Right. Using billions of dollars and manufacturing your own chemical warfare agents. It is something that you can just kind of bring on yourself, huh? It's like how I want to like, oh, I have a dream of learning to play the guitar. You know what I mean? Yeah. Hey, I got fingers. I should put them to the strings.

Yeah, absolutely. Same time what I've been doing is I pay a little boy to play the guitar and then I just pipe that over me playing it on video. Do you, do you pay him though? Oh yes. Oh, I'm a job creator. That's good. Now, although that death toll, 11 killed, 5,000 injured, that seems high, but the attack

fell far short of what they hoped to accomplish. If they would have been successful, the death toll would have dwarfed that of the 9-11 attacks. Literally. Wouldn't even have come close. Well, I mean, it's kind of interesting. It's almost like, you know, when an election goes into, you know, like next day you have to wait for the results. There was 5,006 people, 5,006 people.

Yeah. I mean, they were crossing their fingers and being like, if 2,000 died, we got ourselves a hell of a death. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Chizuo Matsumoto. Now, is it Chizuo or is it Chizuo? Chizuo. I am also not going to do an Asian accent. You aren't? I am not going to do an Asian accent this entire series. No, you have to do an Asian accent. Maybe I don't have to.

This is one of the times you can do it. Maybe I don't have to can do it. Haha, we'll see. What will come out of my mouth? Alright, now Chizuo was born in 1955, the fourth son of a weaver who spent his days manufacturing tatami, the straw mats that are traditionally used as flooring in Japanese homes. They sound uncomfortable.

They sound extremely uncomfortable, like most things Japanese. And Chizuo grew up dirt poor in a dirt floor shack with the family subsisting mostly on sweet potatoes. Like most of East Los Angeles. Now, Chizuo was born blind in his left eye and was only partially sighted in his right. He was indeed bullied by neighborhood street tufts as a child, but when he was sent to a state school for the blind as a teenager,

the tables owe a turn. Because his parents got a discount. You basically, it's the truth. You get a check from the government if you send your blind to the blind school. Because the Japanese blind schools, it's like, you know, they're teaching them to like fade into shadows and shit like that. It's all like, what's his name? Stick. Yeah, from Daredevil.

Stick is doing all of the teaching over there. So it's all stuff about not disturbing the bells. It's very intense schooling over there. But the truth is, is that he was kind of lumped in with his truly blind brother. So he was the living embodiment of the man with the one eye in the land of the blind is king. And the land of the skunks, the man with half a nose is king. Oh, that movie. It already worked, great movie.

Yeah, since Chizuo could kind of sort of see, he had a huge advantage over his classmates. They pretty much became his servants. He would make them go out and buy his noodles and his cakes every day and he'd never pay them. Chizuo was a bastard. And this is what we're going to learn later on too. He is probably the world's largest dickhead that ever was. He's, if Charles Ng went Super Saiyan, to be totally Asian about it. I do like that he's on the noodle and cake diet, very similar to Jared Fogle's prison diet, which is kind of nice.

He would also play this game in blind school called Pro Wrestling, where he would take two blind kids and teach them how to do wrestling moves. And if he felt they weren't doing them hard enough, he would stop them and show them himself. And that is true and he used to come in and literally be like, ah, most important deathlock you are doing, young sapien. Oh, I see that you are not doing it with enough veracity. I will show you how to do it with most mercilessness. Right, and one of those students grew up to be Haku from the WWF. No, Chizuo, he could not have been given a better education on how to scam people. The upper hand that he gained from having just a little bit of sight enabled him to hone his bullying and manipulating skills in ways that he couldn't have done anywhere else.

What he would do is he would offer his services as a seeing eye boy. And this is the truth, is that he would go and he would say, do you want to go to the barber? And they go, oh yes, very much a Chizuo. And he says, oh, then one can only trust the way I lead by shoulder, hand to shoulder, young sapien. And he says, oh, thank you, young master Chizuo. And they go and he would lead them out to the street and then he would drop them off to his haircut and then he would get his traditional Japanese bowl cut because he had to get it or he were clogged by a police officer in the street. And then he'd come out of the barber shop and literally be like, Chizuo would like wait on the curb and be like, how does young sapien get home, I wonder. Chizuo wonders aloud and says it to young sapien.

And he says, oh, how I thought there was kind of a part of the deal that you were going to take me home when I was done with my barber shop court that the guy's bowl was very accurate today. I can feel it with my hands. He's like, oh, young sad sapien. It is quite slanted. Your bangs today. But no, no, no, no, you must pay me money for me to lead you back. And that's what he would do again and again. You know, it seems like he's actually offering quite a service.

I got it. I mean, I think he deserves some money. He deserves some money, but he tricked him into it. Yes. He didn't tell them that they would need to pay him. Well, then they could just be blind and stand on the street. I mean, I like this guy. He's an entrepreneur. That's the most true Fox News interpretation you've had in the story so far. It really is. The freer the market, the freer the people, huh?

Yeah, no, that's the end of the blind. The man with one eye is the entrepreneur. No, I mean, this man really is a, like, he is a success story. He is one hell of an entrepreneur. Well, he grew up saying he wanted to be prime minister. Yeah, yeah, he had a career in politics, or at least he had his sights set on a career in politics first. He was also very, very good at math. Yes, and then in school, what he would do is that he would give candies and sweets,

and he would run for class president every year, and he'd never win. And he went up to his teacher and he said, you have been telling students falsehoods about me and smearing my name. And she's like, no, the only one's voting you for class president because everyone is afraid of you. Yeah, that's the truth. Yeah, they were absolutely terrified of him. And his math skills combined with his con artistry, when he graduated high school, he had $30,000 of cash in his pocket. It's very impressive.

I came to New York with $750. Now, within a few years of graduating high school, Chizuo had moved to Tokyo, and soon after, married a homely, but rich woman named Tomoko, and eventually fathered six children with her over the years. And using his wife's money, Chizuo opened the Matsumoro Acupuncture Clinic and began a long career of bizarre, and most importantly, expensive treatments and cures. My question, okay, so now he's in the normal world, let's say. Well, he's in Tokyo.

He's in Tokyo, but he's not started by blind people. Who's going to get acupuncture done by a guy who can kind of see out of one eye? Isn't there a bunch of needles involved with that? It seems like you didn't yelp enough. But actually, the truth is that in Japan, the blind do a lot of these jobs. The blind a lot of times work in the massage and acupuncture industry, because they do it by feel. It's sort of sensual in a way.

Can you imagine, though, it's kind of sexy to be with like a blind Japanese woman who's just like, where'd you stick pinion kisser? Are these two anacondas? Oh, no, these are your... You made it 13 minutes. Not bad. No, I liked it. That was getting into the fantasy.

Marcus, why did you ruin my fantasy? My eyes were closed. I forgot it was Henry. You weren't even thinking about it. No. What were you going to do with my anacondas? The fantasy has been broken. Yeah, Marcus.

Did I become a slender young Japanese woman to you for a second? No, you weren't slender, but you were young. The first bogus, bizarre, expensive medicine that Chizuo created was called Almighty Medicine, which was simply tangerine peel in an alcohol solution. But his con artist skills were more than on point, for he was able to convince people to pay for orange peel in alcohol, $7,000 for a three month treatment. See, now we call that mixology in the Lower East Side. Right.

And just the money would not be enough for Chizuo. For 1984, Chizuo would found the organization that would eventually evolve into his death cult, the Ohm Association of Mountain Wizards. The Ohm Association of Mountain Wizards. It's cool as fuck. I don't know if it's cool as fuck, Henry. I think by definition it's nerdy as shit. It's like the best Prague rock name of all time.

That is what you want your Prague band to be called. And technically it is just a conference room full of stinky bearded Japanese men. I'm fairly certain if you just went up to a Japanese person and called them a mountain wizard, that would be a racial insult. I just feel like Mountain Wizard has some weight to it. Thank you, Mr. Kissel. Most honorable title you have bestowed on to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

That was my intention. I dip my head in honorable mention to you, oh, giant of Mount Fuji. Very nice. Now, Chizuo's first move was to take out ads in Japan's Twilight Zone magazine, extolling the psychic powers one could attain by joining the Ohm Association of Mountain Wizards. No, this is not Rod Serling Twilight Zone, this is Golden Earring Twilight Zone. Yeah, Chizuo claimed that he himself was blessed with the powers of perceiving past lives, reading minds, passing through walls, meditating for hours underwater,

and of course his ace in the hole, Levitation. This was his bit. Yeah, I could see him doing the passing through walls thing, if he just constantly like tries to find the door by walking into walls, walking into walls, going right, and then finally he makes it through the door, walks right through, he's like, I walk through the wall. Technically he's blind, he says no. He doesn't know.

He doesn't really know, and the problem is also he's blind, so people are like, bless his father. Bless him. Every time he's just, he can be like us. They are just as strong as we are. Every time he walks through a door, I just walk through the wall. That is just, he lives, it's like his whole life is a fairy tale. Now eventually Twilight Zone magazine did a full spread on the fledgling Mountain Wizard, which showed a photo in which Chizuo appeared to levitate a few inches off of the ground,

and now Chizuo managed this, is actually almost as impressive as actually levitating. Using an expert yoga technique, Chizuo was able to use his thigh muscles to propel himself from the ground, high enough for the photographer to take a convincing picture. No. That's what he did. No, he just had strong legs. He could flip himself up in the air, and they took a really quick flash shot to catch him mid-air, like what they used to do to prove Larry Bird could jump.

Yeah, he couldn't really do it. No, but this was the 80s, right? The cameras were slow. It took like two seconds to get a good shot. No, it's not the 1920s. No, it's not a long exposure, 1920s. It's like moving, it blurs. I don't remember the 80s.

You know nothing about photography. You know what though, I didn't expect him to, and that's not on you. Thank you. Thank you so much. No, this levitation picture worked like a charm. Soon, the studio apartment where the mountain wizards began could no longer handle the volume of students coming to learn from the master, and separate branches began to open up in major cities all over the country. This is where he will get his first kind of like validation.

His first taste. Yeah, that if we can use the media to present ourselves, like he became very savvy at marketing. Yeah, sort of the Lucille Roberts. I don't know who Lucille Roberts is. Oh, one of the most successful gym companies of all time. It's like the least, it's the gym where women are least groped at. Yes. And so it's very popular.

That's where they go. But is Lucille Roberts like a half blind, huge woman sitting in the background being like, yes, maybe we should provide spin classes every two hours. Yes. So that both people without jobs and with day to day jobs couldn't draw spin class. That's why she's the best. The best gyms in the city. Yes, master Lucille.

Now, at first, Chizuo was a fairly affable guru, soft spoken as as David Kaplan says in his book, The Cult at the End of the World, which much of the research on this series is taken from. Chizuo knew just as much about mystic forces as he did about baseball. Now, did he know a lot about baseball? He knew a shit ton about that. Like he was the cool guy in the neighborhood. He's blind. Right, it's a different neighborhood.

It just sounds like a bomb. You listen to the radio. Well, baseball, in your head, it sounds like a... Hey, he's got it around in the bases. And he's just sitting there like, what are bases? Are bases turtles that they allow to stand still? And the same woman just being like, your life is just poetry and emotion. It is.

Yes, it is turtles if that's what your imagination wants them to be. It should be. See, the most important thing to remember about Chizuo's followers. Most of his students were being directed to the Ohm Association of Mountain Wizards from one place, Twilight Zone Magazine. Put simply, nerds. Yep. Absolute and total nerds.

And it was here that Chizuo realized who the bread and butter of his cult would be. And although he would eventually attract some of the most brilliant scientific minds in Japan, he essentially started off with extremely lonely otakus. Now what does otakus mean? An otaku is somebody who pretty much lives in an inner world. It pretty much started off as a term for like computer nerds who really lived in the computer world. But it's kind of expanded to somebody who pretty much lives in their entertainment. And seriously, is it autism?

Is that what that means? I mean, I'm not even making a joke. Are they like, is it a type of autism? No, it's a very Japanese thing. It's a very Japanese term because in Japan, you've got to realize, Japan is one of the most crowded nations on the planet. They've got four times the population of California living in an area of the exact same size. Tokyo is, I guess you could call it like a mega-opolis.

It's like Tokyo is like New York on top of New York. Exactly. And so people in Japan, especially in the cities, they very much value what they call their inner space. And they value their private time. Yeah, their private time. They value their home and some Japanese people go even further into it. And they just live inside this fantasy world even more so than some people can hear in America. They have a word for it, a taku.

They're dedicated and they're strong and they work hard and they're a little bit more obsessive. And also specifically the people he got into the beginnings of this cult. And it's also true, what she's going to use more later on, is that he's going to put the sexy chicks up forward. He had one woman named Hisako Ishii that became sort of the prototype of all of the women that would be in Omshinrikyo later on. And she was a very hot woman that was a devotee to him that started in this first cult and the Mountain Wizards cult. She would show up and do all the tax work for him.

And so a lot of these nerds saw a hot chick out front. And they're literally like, oh, I go in there and then oh, then I can make the pushy pushy with my stinky stinky. Any time I like because she gets me. I see. I think that was unfortunate because later on they were not allowed to come anymore. Yeah, I mean these were anime nerds, manga nerds, computer nerds. One observer described it as quote, a world that combined primeval fear with a computer controlled version of reality.

Virtual reality made real, but it wouldn't be long before this collection of dorks and dweebs looking to escape the drudgery of modern life in Japan would turn into something very, very different. While meditating on a beach on Japan's Pacific coast, Chizuo received a message from God saying, I have chosen you to lead God's army Chizuo. Later that year, a man he met in the mountains told him, Armageddon will come at the end of this century, only a merciful godly race will survive. The leader of this race will emerge in Japan. And that is when a big fucking light bulb went off in Chizuo's head.

When he returned from the mountains, he changed his name from Borenold Chizuo Matsumoto to the much more impressive sounding Shoko Asahara, and he officially declared himself as the leader that will emerge in Japan and lead the new godly race through the other side of Armageddon. This is why I don't let my friends change their names. No, never. I'll never buy it. Never.

You'll always be Ben Kissed on me. I don't care when you go. No, I want to be Harry Shearer. Oh, I think I'm going to go with Harry Shearer. Yeah, I want to be Harry. Let's take it. There's a person named Harry Shearer. Quite famous.

Yes. When I was talking about it, so when he went up on that mountain trip, he showed up. He was just like, I'm going to learn how to do it. Because at this time too, Shoko was kind of bouncing around in Tokyo. Before he had, as he had started the beginnings of the New Cult, he had tried to become a lawyer for a while because his idea was still to become Prime Minister. But he sucked at anything that was normal.

And then his Acure Puncture School, that first school that he was at when he was doing the Matsumoto Action Puncture Academy, got sued because people realized that he was bilking them and he lost $7,000 in some big fucking to-do and it bankrupted him. Yeah, because they found out that he was just rubbing a pineapple on their backs. Pretty much. And he didn't even know it was a pineapple. No, he thought it was a needle. So he took this retreat up this mountain at the beginning of the Mountain Wizards cult

and kind of went up. And then two days ahead of schedule before it was over, he comes, bounced down the mountain being like, I've become enlightened. And all of the gurus that are there are being like, no, I don't think you have been. But I mean, we can't tell you not because inherently we're groovy. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think you're enlightened. No, absolutely not.

And this is when guru mode goes into fall effect. And from now on, we will be referring to him as Shoko Asahara. And Asahara, he cultivated a heavy beard, became a heavy man. I don't like- I like the way you write cultivated. He didn't shave. No, you got- Cultivated.

You can cultivate a beard. This is not cultivated. You can totally cultivate a beard. This was not Park Slope, like beard balm, like cultivated beard. Every time I'm drunk for a week, I'll just be like, no Marcus, I was cultivating a beard. Sounds like you're cultivating a drinking problem. Could be that too. He also became a very heavy man and started wearing the ivory white robes of a holy man.

Soon after, he also changed the name of the organization from the Om Association of Mountain Wizards to the much simpler Om Shinrikyo or Om Supreme Truth as it translates to in English. And he went full religious with it. But those who stayed were all in and the true madness was just beginning. Now to truly understand how the Om Shinrikyo cult was able to dupe so many people, you've got to understand religion in Japan in the 20th century. Well, we're looking at- In the 1980s in Japan, it was very similar to the 1960s in America.

And also the 1920s in America, where we had gigantic spiritual movements. This is the very peak of one of these waves. Yeah, well it kind of started by the 1930s, like Buddhism and Shintoism, which for hundreds of years had been Japan's main religion. They had been all but stamped out and replaced by state Shinto in which the emperor of Japan was worshiped as a living deity. But after we spanked their pants off for the two of our big ripplin' big knuckly knuckles. Twice.

Nagasaki Hiroshima, we fucking dropped those bombs in 1945. Woo, go true, man! I think it's horrible what we did. The ripples of that has affected us from then on. Yes, you could argue it ended the war quicker and saved thousands of lives. Absolutely not. The Russians, they were about to surrender. The Russians weren't going to surrender.

No, not the Russians. The Russians were going to conquer the Japanese. The Russians were coming in. So now we've got Russia out of Japan with our sushi. The whole world's off kilter. Yeah, we've got bear in our sushi. The Russian contained the Red Scare. That's why we dropped the bombs.

Thank God. So the emperor, after the bombs were dropped, he surrendered both the country and his godhood, which kind of left Japan in a kind of like spiritual lurch. It's kind of crazy that you can retire your godhood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He actually did have to come out and say on the radio, I am not a god. So the 1970s ushered in what David Kaplan referred to as Japan's spiritual rush hour. And with Japan being the world's second largest economy at the time,

hundreds of new religious groups set up shop to take advantage of all of this disposable income and none more so than Om Shinrikyo. Om Shinrikyo's basic business model was actually modeled after an existing Buddhist cult named Aganshu who recruited followers from magazine ads and used a cable TV station to beam out, quote, healing psychic power. Asahara took everything that he knew from beginning guru lessons from the leader of that group. He was a part of that group. And he was in there and he was just like, oh, I can do this.

I can flip this. He literally was just like, oh, this guy's not doing it wrong. He needs pizzazz. I got pizzazz because I only got one eye. And it's true because it's a great marketing technique as a guru to be blind. Yeah. So it was sort of like the tech boom in a way. And he's the Google.

He's the one who lived. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there was a spiritual boom. And he was the one that survived throughout. But even more important than the psychic powers and the cable TV ads, the most important thing that he really learned was Aganshu's insistence that all cult members cut ties with their families completely. Perhaps the most essential technique in the cultist handbook,

because it insulates followers and it narrows their worldview to the point where the church is their entire world. It's a term called ideological totalism. This is from a book that I read. This is also detail-heavy and but very, very interesting. It's an academic book called Destroying the World to Save It by Robert J. Lifton. It's about Aum Shinrikyo. Thank you Midtown Scholar for sending so many amazing books on this subject.

It's incredible. And this book is really, really good. But this kind of, he breaks down the idea of the totalistic, the totalistic community. And this one, the most basic tenet is this tenet, which is called Milo control. Or Milieu control. Milieu. Milieu. Milieu control.

Milieu. And which all communication, including even individuals inner communication, is monopolized and orchestrated so that reality becomes the group's exclusive possession. Yeah. So the idea is that you literally, you can control their outside world by keeping them in a place. You take them physically away from their families. You feed them only a certain amount of food. You let them sleep in only a certain amount of hours per night.

And then what that does is break down your own inner dialogue then as well. Yeah. I mean the micro is an abusive relationship, right? Where the guy cuts off all the relationships with the woman's family. But we have something together that's just us. And of course it becomes very toxic, very quick. Absolutely. And it also allows the cult leaders to create a new normal for these people.

So if they have this worldview narrowed down to a pinpoint, then eventually the cult leaders can convince them that anything that they say is normal. It's like, yes, this is the life. This is our life. This is how it is. Now as far as the actual religion itself goes, Om Shinrikyo was a lot like a lot of the New Age religions that's flowed around over the years. Buddhist, yoga, meditation, etc. But Om Shinrikyo had a twist. At the center of it all was Shiva the destroyer.

The Hindu god who in certain interpretations is responsible for the death of all things. And you add to that the Judeo-Christian concept at the end of days. The Asahara picked up from a cursory reading of revelations. And you've got what the Japanese call Harumageddon. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And he will use this as the elite motif of the entire cult.

Like Charles Manson did with the race war and Jim Jones did with the governments going to shut down our perfect society. He is using the Harumageddon as the storyline of the entire Om Shinrikyo cult. And we're going to see how he wrote the ending himself. Yeah. Now Asahara's apocalyptic predictions began in 1987 based on what he said was astral vision and intuitive wisdom which he combined with a healthy dollop of Nostradamus profit. He was obsessed with Nostradamus.

Yeah. Because Nostradamus had just been translated into Japanese in the 1970s. Yes. Which is also very interesting because it's another connection to Jim Jones. Jim Jones was also obsessed with Nostradamus. And he was looking at Nostradamus. He saw the passage that said after the big destruction that the next leader was going to come from the east.

And as soon as he saw that passage he's like I'm going to use this as my high school like English paper reasoning as to why I am the guru. I am the I am the savior from the east. Nostradamus. Nostradamus. Let's go with Amadeus. Now Asahara predicted that nuclear war was going to break out somewhere between 1999 and 2003 and the only way to stop it was to insert a Buddha into every nation on earth.

Oh that's so generous so he's going to have a different Buddha in each country. That's incredible. Well he's going to have a different Buddha in each country but he's the biggest Buddha. Oh he's the guy. Oh it's him. It's all him. Now there are Buddhas like think of it as Buddha franchises. Oh like Santa Claus in the mall.

Like Lucille Roberts. So if before 1999 if every country had a Buddha with Asahara serving as the central Buddha ruling from Japan World War 3 could be averted an Asahara a guarantee. And that's an Asahara guarantee. Oh wow. And he was actually quoted as saying that. He's like World War 3 will be averted. I guarantee it.

That's what he said. He said I will base my religious future on this prophecy. Like the dudes from Men's Warehouse. Yes. You're going to love the revolution. I guarantee it. You're going to like how the seals are open. I guarantee it.

And this would be one the first of many apocalypse solutions that Asahara would put forth over the years. Now the apocalypse that would be the through line of everything but the details would change. That's where he got real Robin Williams with him. Where he was just blowing it out. You just throw whatever worked. You're going to keep it fresh.

Now as far as credentials went, Asahara claimed to have the personal blessing of the Dalai Lama. And amazingly he did actually meet with the Dalai Lama which apparently was not that hard to do in 1987. You could just show up. But the Lama said that Asahara was much more interested in how to structure a religious organization than he was in reaching enlightenment. And in the words of one monk who remembered a visit from Om Shinrikyo, Asahara and his

followers were quote, very unpopular. Which is very difficult in the Buddhist world because I thought Buddhists inherently don't care about anything. Yeah. But what's also interesting is that he would do this throughout the history of Om Shinrikyo where he would show up with world religious leaders and world leaders and just get a picture taken with them. And then he would pop it out and then have followers write articles about these leaders

telling him how proud they were of his service to the world. I have a totally different picture of this guy now. We see these people all around the entertainment industry. Legitimately. If you ever go on somebody's Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and it's just them with pictures of celebrities, they don't know those celebrities. They do not know them. They just get the picture and the celebrity is like, thank God that creepy creeper is gone.

Yeah. And then they boast about how they knew all these people. Yeah. It's very creepy and just a little sad. Om Shinrikyo and Asahara, he was totally of that ill. And it works. You know why? Because again, he's dealing with nerds.

Yeah. And so they see these pictures of him with the Dalai Lama and they're like, man, he's pretty cool, isn't he? Right. They don't know. Now after that trip to see the Dalai Lama, Asahara wrote and released the first of many books, the secrets of developing your supernatural powers. And in a hook that would catch many a gullible fish, an ad for the book said, spiritual training

that doesn't lead to supernatural powers is hogwash. That is very strong language for a publication. My goodness. The book did promise plenty of supernatural powers. How to read the future. Read people's minds. Develop X-ray vision. Levitate.

Take trips to the fourth dimension. Hear the voice of God. Read more. But you can imagine all of this instead of them as being suggestions that they're orders. Yeah. Read people's minds. Develop X-ray vision. Which just sounds like Asahara's father.

As people started showing up, so did the money. After he started releasing his book, that's when shit really starts blowing up for him. And Asahara started off comparatively cheap compared to the money he would eventually make, charging just 350 bucks a pop for psychic sessions that promised not only miracle recoveries from injuries, but also a 90% win rate on all future mahjong games. He would have made a killing in Boca Raton. Yeah. 90% win rate.

90% win rate. Yeah. That's great. So by the end of 1987, Om Shinrikyo boasted a membership of over 1,500 members spread across every major Japanese city, and recruiters were told to believe any and all supernatural stories that a prospective member might tell them. Like they would ask them, has anything spiritual or paranormal ever happened to you? And when someone would tell them any sort of bullshit story, the recruiters would say,

you were most likely a trainee in a previous life. You are innately at a higher level, and if you were to just come and train with the Om Shinrikyo organization, your supernatural powers will increase and all of your dreams will come true. And that's also a Scientology trick as well. Yeah. I mean, what else did they have going on? I'm in Japan, it's the 1980s, I got nothing happening.

Why wouldn't I go join this cult? I don't know. I mean, seems like a hell of a time. Yeah. Do you have a minimum amount of $700? I can't do it this week. You know what? Isn't that, I was thinking about it, but I'll wait to levitate next year.

Also one of his head trainers was a boy that basically grew up within Om Shinrikyo. His name is Yoshihiro Inoue, and he was 18 by the time he came to, he became a trainer, became one of the inner circles very, very quickly, and they said that he had this ability that he'd walk in rooms and light bulbs would explode. And like lights would go all this weird shit, and he was known as like the boy that was like the poster child of being like, you too can be like me. As you see, I sit above this chair, oh no, no, no, certainly not sitting on toothpicks I am.

I am levitating. Because he walked into a room and threw a bunch of pennies at the ceiling and popped all the lights out. Now like I said, the minimum amount to join the cult was $700 with larger donations coming with gifts such as personal photo sessions with Asahara or private lessons from their leading disciples. The highest level set at $2000 got members two gallons of Shoko Asahara's dirty bathwater. If you just, I want you to stop the podcast and look up a picture of Shoko Asahara.

This man's feet in the water that you are going to be sucking down and you have to go oh thank you, thank you. Strands of his long dank hair. You could do whatever you wanted with it. You didn't have to drink it. You had to drink it, that's what he said. In the end, that's what they insinuated, they're like oh you could just keep this round, but if you drink it sometimes it gives you a boner.

I got to give him credit for just having the ego to be like they will buy my bathwater and they did. For two grand. And by the way, if you would like to receive your very own bone fragment from my family's ranch, go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the line. I'm also going to start, I'm going to start collecting the shower water that drips from my stomach. So that'll be about 5k an ounce.

Oh, kissle. There was nothing, there's no limit to the money I'd spend for just the thimbleful of your belly drippings. You're going to get it. Of course, the entrance fees were only the beginning. The early moneymaker for the cult came in the form of so-called initiations, the first of which was called the blood initiation. All of which came with a bump to the initiates quote unquote spiritual level.

Which is, it's appealing to nerds, it's points. Yeah. So for $7,000, as many as 30 people at a time would participate in a mass ritual in which they would all drink three spoonfuls of what was supposedly Shoko Asahara's blood from a wine glass. And that blood was supposed to give them quote unquote magical properties. You can throw up at any time. Yeah.

They never actually said what the magical properties were. Of course, that's how you do these things, that you stay vague with all of it. We saw a TV appearance I sent it to you on YouTube of Shoko Asahara explaining how he can transfer energy into a woman and how it gives you spiritual powers and how spiritual powers are the meaning of life. He would say sentences like that make no sense like all the time. And so what he did was, is a woman laid down on the ground, he's on the news, and he was just like, I'll show you what I can do.

He took his thumb, put on her forehead, and she just went, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Like in a porno film. Oh, I see. And just jiggled her bits a little bit, and they didn't blur any of it out, which thankfully I didn't feel like a pervert after watching it, as I feel every time I watch an Asian porno. And she kind of just flipped around on the ground, and then popped up, and the TV announcer

was like, so how do you feel? And she's like, I feel good. Yeah. It was just like the laying of hands. Like you've ever been to a four square or Pentecostal church or anything like that. It's just like when they lay hands on people and they start crying and talking, speaking in tongues. Yeah, yeah.

It's all the same bullshit. And the Catholic Church just got too large to use real blood for communion, so they had to switch it up to wine. It doesn't travel well. And this blood initiation, it was only the first of the 20 initiations the cult offered. The holy hair initiation involved drinking tea brewed with Asahara's hair, and Miracle Pond was, again, Asahara's used bathwater, and that was sold for up to $800 a court. I gotta give this guy credit.

He is his own business. Yeah. He's just farming his body. Yes. He takes his hair. He uses his bathwater. No collateral. No collateral.

There's no water. There is no product. No overhead here. He's not making anything. What's really interesting too is that one of his initiations, so we would do, again, in order to get to this inner circle, you had to have, the only way you could get true enlightenment was one-on-one with the guru. And so you could spend something like $8,000, so you're going to hang with him, and you

have this, like, what you did not know was an LSD initiation, where you would sit and share a cup of tea with Shoko, and he would hand you a cup of tea, and he's just like, I'm going to take you on a trip you've never even imagined. She's like, what? He begins to play Steppenwolf, but like, yeah, but literally the tea was placed with LSD. They had no idea what they were drinking. They took it, and all of a sudden, like, one guy was saying about how my hands turned into rubber balls.

I became incredibly confused, but I was filled with the guru's energy, because the guru was just sitting there a little being like, yeah, man, don't worry, man. Let your anxiety go, bro. No, don't worry, man. Dude, row with it. Ride with it, dude. Yeah. All colors have reasons.

That's true. Yeah, and he'd put his hands on their face, and he would stare directly into their eyes, which is that still same like cult technique where, you know, that worldview is narrowing. You're tripping balls, and you're staring at this chubby man for an hour, two hours. That's how I've got. That's how I got Natalie. Yeah. Now, the entire model of this cult, this was a brilliant move on Asahara's part.

The entire thing was modeled after the Japanese school system. The constant initiations replaced the constant exams. The levels of enlightenment replaced grades, and most importantly, the all-knowing, all-powerful teacher was replaced by Asahara himself, because the number one rule in Japanese schools is never question the teacher, ever. Never think critically about anything he says or anything that you're taught. It's a complete and total, like, rote memorization educational system. The school year lasts 240 days, a full third longer than America's school year.

Every night is spent doing homework. It's just constant work. And Asahara modeled his entire cult on that. And that's why they got tinier phones than we do. Yep. All that work put in. And also, reason why we got a little thing called Unit 731. Think about it.

Yeah. And even though Omshin Rikyo, they never got more than two dozen Americans to believe in their bullshit. Of course not. Well, because we're fourth, right? We're lazy. That's why. How much education will it take?

George Washington crossed the Delaware. He didn't follow a chubby man into a stinky room. No, no, no, no. Before you get all fucking high and mighty on this bullshit about how much more clever we are. Oh, the cleverest. Yeah. No, the only difference between American cults and Japanese cults are the religions

that they base themselves on. Right. You know, like Scientology excluded, most cults are hodgepodge's of different religions and belief systems that are cobbled together into something that appears new on the surface. You know, it's the answer that, you know, these people that are lost, they're frustrated. A lot of times they're grieving. They hear this answer. It's somewhat familiar.

It's got somewhat of a structure that they're used to and they think that it's going to give their life meaning, but it's, you know, it's the same old bullshit as always. It's like how Hollywood producers put together network sitcoms. It's a little something for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little something for everybody and it's all familiar. But that's how you do.

But that's literally how you grow your base. At this point, what he knows is that what you need at this point is numbers in order for Aum Shinrikyo to have any sort of impact you need as big of a group as possible. So you toss in all the elements and eventually you're going to see he starts putting anime, fully putting on sci-fi shit in there in order to for people to like get attracted to it and be like, I want to be a member of Starfleet. And it's the truth. I want to be in Starfleet.

Yeah. I'd be the class clown. But sadly that class clowns never allowed on the enterprise. No, he doesn't get that posting. What are you talking about? Oh, but you got to keep the, what about the mentality? Oh, put him on the Pegasus. No.

I want to be the person who says, sir, I don't think we should. That'd be kind of fun. No, we all know that no good doomsday cult is complete without a compound. And Om Shinrikyo began construction on theirs in 1988 in the foothills of Mount Fuji outside of Tokyo. And unlike Hitler, he had the balls to build his above ground or lack of common sense. Lack of common sense. Yeah.

It started off as just a ramshackle collection of windowless warehouses, wooden shacks, prefab trailers surrounded by 10 foot walls, and the place was fucking filthy. It was constantly infested with roaches because Asahara said to kill the roaches would be to accrue bad karma. Well, it's a part of their, that's a part of their isolationism, though, is that that's what he said is basically that they also have no bathing. Yeah. That's true.

No, no personal maintenance. It was like a lot of, it was pretty rank in there. It sounds about right. Pretty live in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like the fucking, I don't know, like a Mumbai playground.

In another master stroke of profit, Asahara charged $2,000 for weak, long meditation seminars in which participants were made to sleep on dirt floors and were served only one meal of boiled vegetables a day. Choco rations. That's what they called them. Yeah. They either called them choco rations or home food. Boiled vegetables.

That's not bad. That's good. Technically, it's very healthy. Yeah. Technically. They give you three meals a day. I go for three. I want three meals of boiled vegetables, but the boiled vegetables themselves.

That's not terrible. That's not terrible. Now, while casual Om Shinrikyo followers could get away with giving only a few thousand dollars of their cash, the priesthood was required to give the cult every single asset that they had, which ensured the faithful that they had absolutely nowhere to go. They were locked in, man. They cut off all ties with their family. They give Om Shinrikyo.

They give them all of their assets. They sit even down to postage stamps they gave to the cult. There's a lot of doubles in there. There must just be a room full of lamps and chairs and couches. I mean, doesn't everyone kind of have the same thing? They liquidate it. They sell it off. Yeah, they're not keeping the pinball machines.

Oh, okay. Man, I would be so upset if I had a whole line of vintage pinball machines, and I was being like, well, I guess you could sell the King Khan one, but that took me like three months to get on eBay, not just, you know, let me just kiss it one last time. Yeah. No. Hideki, I need you to listen to me most forthright, all right? Listen to young Sapien here, how I changed his life.

Oh, I can't see, but I have shoes now. That's nice. Now, Asahara also began using other classic mind control techniques. Like Henry said earlier, he limited adherence to a twice daily diet of unprocessed rice, seaweed, tofu, or again, you know, ome food. It was just a vegetable stew. No sleep, physical labor, they were kept awake for hours at night. It was five hours a night, maximum.

Yeah, and that's how you break somebody's personality down, is that you make them literally so tired and weak that they're willing to have their life be taken over. And also, this was based off a thing called Guru-led yoga. This is a thing that has been around for a long time, they are used to the Guru lifestyle. That's the other thing I think that's different from the East than the West, is that here it's like, in order to, you know, American, and like our mentality is this like, you know, we're individuals, I'm the furthest boy who's ever been, I got a flag, I got a derringer. Prison industrial complex, think about it.

Yeah, it's like all of this shit, but in the East, they already have kind of a built-in world where they're used to having like a guy that they talk to, like a sensei. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that they did to really give them a literal hive mentality is they built pretty much a honeycomb of tiny plywood boxes stacked on each other that these people would sleep in. So they were kept in these tiny confined spaces. They were sleeping five hours a night, maximum, and that was the drones.

Those are the people on the ground doing all of the bullshit work. The priesthood, they got even less. They only got three hours to sleep a night. And then there were the beatings. The smallest act of disobedience resulted in what Asahara called karma disposal, which was an on-the-spot dumping of spiritual baggage achieved through beating the victim with wooden sticks. It was a concept called drop karma that he would call, which is the karma, the bad karma

you came in with, and everybody in the group had bad karma except for Shoko. And so what he would do is this thing called forced karmic removal, where he would beat them in order to make them good again. Yeah, why not? You see, and they would do things where they'd hang them upside down for hours, and they would dip their heads in cold water, and they'd spank them a bunch. And some of these men, it was very erotic. Yeah, it sounds actually kind of hot.

Yeah, but for the rest of them, they were pretty upset. Well, you look at what Johnny Cash's father did to them, very similar. And he turned out to be a great musician. He did. Well, he's pretty talented musician. Weren't you beaten by your father? I turned into a great podcast, an overall entertainer. Okay, he's got a beautiful smile.

There's hardly, there's a, I'd say there's a standard two shadows behind his eyes, but not anything too big. No, you can watch me on the Netflix special, The Characters, my lines were cut, but you can see my face. I kept you in it. I kept you in it. Another thing that they did too, which I found this, this is a concept I really liked from destroying the world to save it, was this concept called loading of the language, which

you would do this for, for Alam, they would use truth versus defilement. And they would talk about how within the group, it's how you basically create megalomania within a group, which is this basically being like, we're better than everybody else. So while all this is going on, he's telling you, we are the truth. Everybody else is riddled with defilement. When I beat you, when I punish you, I am squeezing the defilement out of your toes, my little boobies. Right.

And everybody else is, and I'm, and I'm putting truth into you. Yeah. And it was also a very twisted version of karma. Like it was pretty much the opposite of karma is that he- He was making shit up. He was making shit up, but he flipped karma completely, where he would say that causing pain to others would actually accrue you good karma. Like that he would tell both the people that were being beat and the people doing the beating

that they were accruing good karma because they were bringing themselves closer to enlightenment. And it's what he'd eventually use to validate the terrorist attack in 1985. It's a concept called POA. It's from a fringe version of buddhism called Vajrayana. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it. I don't think it is. Vajrayana. But I'd order it with pork.

Vajrayana. I got it. I get it. Yeah. In esoteric buddhism, POA is a spiritual exercise transformed when one is dying, sometimes with the aid of a guru, a transference of consciousness from the bodily earth plane to the after-death plane that enables one to achieve a higher realm in the next rebirth or even passage to the pure land, the step prior to nirvana, the waiting room for nirvana.

And so he took that concept and flipped it and said, what you gotta do is it's opposite. It's not like helping someone when they're dying, it's make them die fast. Hurt them. If you hurt them with good in your heart, you're doing good for them. Yeah. And you're keeping them from going down on the wheel of karma. You're keeping them from going to hell. You're actually ascending them.

It's a brilliant rationalization. It really is. Now serious offenders, the ones that broke the rules the most at the Om Shinrikyo compound, they were locked away in tiny rooms for days on end with only a television playing a tape of Asahara speaking at deafening volume to keep in company. And this punishment had no age limit because one thing, I don't know if we've made this clear here, but this compound was also full of children. Because he'd take whole families.

Yeah, he'd take whole families. One 10-year-old boy said that he was locked in this room for days. And was also very convenient that he'd separate the men from the women and the women were not allowed to sleep with what used to be their husbands anymore. And Choku, for some reason, I guess he wants to come to him in a vision so that he could fuck all of them that he wanted in order to make more of them. Now it's definitely easy to assume that these people, just a bunch of gullible idiots, right? While they were all definitely gullible, many of the rank and file were actually some of

the most brilliant scientific minds in Japan. They were engineers, computer scientists, biologists, doctors. He stole people from the Japanese space program. Yeah, I mean, he was really bringing in these absolutely brilliant minds, but the one thing about them, though, they were book smart. They were all book smart nerds. Look at Ben Carson. He's a neuroscientist, and the man is, he's borderline, you know, he needs special ed treatment.

That's a problem. It's just like, you know, as much as, because what does he really need? Technically, he needs a whole clan of pickpocketing orphans that are willing to do it. That's what I want. That's what you want. Oh, with the foot clan. But the problem is the foot clan is hard to organize. Yeah.

They're not listening to rules. And they're not going into the small room again. Now, this, you know, these are book smart nerds. These are, more importantly, sci-fi nerds. They're anime nerds, manga nerds. Like these are fantasy nerds, and that's where the foundation comes in. And the foundation is a six-part sci-fi book series by Isaac Asimov, published in 1951. The basic plot is that a brilliant mathematician predicts the ruin of civilization, but the

galactic government fails to heed his warnings. So the protagonist gathers the best minds of his time to save humanity from itself. And once that plot line was added to the religious mix that he already had going on, Om Shinrikyo's apocalyptic vision was finally complete. And another, the animated television series actually also the voyage of the space battleship Yamato, about a massive spaceship named after a huge imperial navy battleship that in the last days of World War II, made an essentially suicidal foray against the American fleet. Now, in this show, this is also a thing that he started building into their entire storyline.

Is that the show set in the year 2199 when the Earth already inundated with radiation pollution in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, we did that, is being rebarred by meteors and attacked by evil aliens from the mysterious planet, Gamilis, Earth's only hope is for the Yamato and its crew to venture into space to obtain a Cosmo Cleaner, a technological wonder device to counter nuclear pollution. And he basically said, we're on Yamato. This is Yamato. So Yamato got it all.

So he's got some nationalism tied in there as well. Oh, absolutely. Because if you look at Japanese pop culture and Japanese, the comic books and the manga and all of the television was still reeling from how what we did to them. Oh, they were still upset about that? It's interesting is that they didn't get so much upset as they got like shamed. They were beaten. So they are a beaten nation, and so they infused it into all of their pop culture.

And so you're basically watching a bunch of people like, this is technically the most American, like Shoko Asahara is like an American in Japan, who shows up being like, we will get revenge. And the way we'll do that is by wearing special space suits and I'll be fucking all the women, but you guys are going to make some chemical war fairings. Right. Yeah. And so from, of course, like the anime that Innery talked about and from the foundation

and all this stuff, like he finally had the Harumageddon blueprint. He finally had the plan. He finally had what he was going to tell people. He said, listen, Harumageddon is happening sooner rather than later, and only you, only Omshinrikyo will rise from the ashes of nuclear destruction. Also I've seen Yamato and it's very boring. I'm just going to put that out there and also read all of the foundation books and they're also a little dry.

Yeah. I think that's why Isaac Asimov is a little dry. Read Philip K. Dick. I like Asimov short stories are better than his full-time books, but that's me. Read J. G. Ballard if you want something really interesting. No, as soon as scientists were established as the ruling class in Omshinrikyo, light human experimentation would not be far behind. Light.

Light. Just dabble. Just a little bit of a dabble. No, their first project was a device called the Perfect Salvation Initiation or PSI for short. PSI was a skullcap that every few minutes sent a six-bolt shock to the brain of the person wearing it. By the way, you'll be happy to know that the ones that the children wore, they only got

three volts. I'm not happy. The Mormons are still doing this to bring them young to gay conversion therapy. It doesn't do anything. No. Why do we think this shit does stuff? Yeah. Electricity is not good for the brain.

No. The fact that these shocks synchronized the cultist brainwaves with that of Shoko Asahara's and would induce the, quote, blissful meditative state that the master himself feels every second. No, the reason why he feels a blissful meditative state is because he's fucking ripped up on LSD 24x7. And he's sitting in a bathtub and he's just like, I'm sitting in gold. He's like, Scrooge McDuck, when he swims through his panties, he's literally sitting

in money. He's surrounded by money, getting blown all the time. He has a fleet of scientists that are building a spaceship for him. Yeah. You know what? I think I'm going to start cultivating my ass hair. Now, this stupid fucking skull cap, which was just pretty much a- It was a flappy hat.

It wasn't even a hard helmet. It wasn't even a Daft Punk cool helmet. It was a flappy thing. Yeah. It was a flappy thing, like covered in electrodes. It would be the cult's number one money maker. Now full-time monks who'd already given up their entire lives to the cult, they got theirs for free.

Naturally. Nice. Nice. They got them for free. But the lower ranking members, they had to rent the hats for $7,000 a month. Rent it. Rent it. You don't even buy it.

If you wanted to buy it, outright, $70,000. Wealthy were his followers. They seem to have unlimited amounts of money. Well, like I said earlier, Japan was in the middle of an economic boom. Remember in the 80s, when we all thought the Japanese were going to eat us alive? No. Okay. Well, I mean, we all thought-

I remember. No, we never thought the Japanese were going to eat us alive. No, we had one. We were into the Japanese. We were absolutely into the Japanese. Economically, we were terrified of the Japanese. So there was a ton of disposable income going around Japan at the time. Also, we didn't really bring up, but it's the truth.

When the emperor fell, at that time, the Japanese, the scientist class was one of the most like- It was the highest class in the country. It was like they were making good cash. They appreciated their scientists, not like us, where we pay scientists like we pay teachers. No, I feel terrible for really smart people in this country because it's dumb. You're not going to make cash. And the other thing about the cash and the disposable income, since everybody had all of this cash and it was somewhat new, how Asahara was able to kind of flip that around

is he would tell them that the reason why you feel empty inside is because you have all of this wealth. This wealth is giving you nothing. This wealth is what is making you empty. You're spending all this time working on cash. But for what? When you could be working, building 10-foot walls in my shitty compact. Wow.

So he Kurt Cobain'd them. Kurt Cobain'd them. He got in there and they were like, oh, now that I'm a rock star, I hate it. Yeah, that's true. I don't think Kurt Cobain really took any- Well, I guess he took a little bit of money. Yeah, he took a fair amount. Oh, I'm sad, Carton.

Yes! I'm glad you said. This is the worst you've ever done. So by 1988, the cult's devotion to Asahara had reached a fever pitch. And there was no greater sin than a member could commit than trying to leave the guru's love. And those who wanted to leave were deemed merely confused and in need of guidance. Oh, you see me and hung upside down and electro-shocked and beaten a bunch.

That was their favorite method of guidance. Ah, yeah, yeah. They dunked these people's heads in freezing water because they said it would, quote, remove heat from the head, which interfered with their mental acuity. They killed a guy. Oh, no way! It wasn't long before this method turned extremely deadly. The first death that was on their hands that we know of, at least, this guy, they dunked

his head in water over and over again. He developed hypothermia and he died. You can't just play human popsicle and have everybody live. Yeah. Human popsicle is a fun game when you're in Wisconsin and everyone's used to the cult. Right, that's true. No, these are people also who are looking at their physically weak. Yeah.

They're literally underfed. They're underslapped. They're literally exhausted. And they're nerds. They started off as nerds. They're weak. They already had wedgie calluses. They got weak blood.

Yeah, it could be. It could be. Yeah. And so after this guy died, one of his close friends at the compound, he got pissed off. This is, like, way not cool, yo, so I'm gonna, like, tell somebody about it. Well, he was one of the mountain wizard holdovers. Yes. Yeah, so he was already, these guys were already starting to get disillusioned with where this

whole cult was going. So what happened, so they let this guy leave the cult, right, and go talk to the police about what happened there so that they would have a clean slate? Strangled him with a rope. Oh. All right, so the first death, to be fair, was on accident. It was an accident. Yeah.

I'm like John Wayne Gacy. No, I think, well, yes. Yeah. And so, but you know what? So it took four members of Almond Shinrikyo to strangle him with a rope. And do you want to know why? Because also they were so physically weak from having been eaten is that they couldn't strangle him long enough to kill him.

Jesus. He was thrashing. They tied him in a chair. The first guy who was one of the most loyal thing, they were like, I will, I will, I will to power you. Because that's what he said. Basically, anytime he wanted to get rid of somebody that was from now on, he'd be like, power him.

Yeah. Like, release his karma. And so they would go in the room and the first guy was his most loyal servant, try to strangle him. And it was like, like Peewee Herman, where he was like, his wrists were too weak to strangle him. And then they all took turns strangling him till finally died from being exhausted by being strangled for too long.

Yeah. Just get on with it. Yeah. And after they strangled him, they stuffed the victim's body in a metal drum, covered the body in gasoline, and left it to burn. And Asahara, the entire time this body was burning, Asahara, he kept coming and checking on the status of it. He's like, is it burned yet?

Is it burned yet? Understandably paranoid, because they had just committed their very first murder. Wait, let me do the hand check. If you touch the innermost part of your palm, it means it's at a medium rare. You get closer to the tip of your thumb. It is welled. Oh, it's just a burning skeleton. Good job, my sapiens.

This reminds me of a family story. May I tell it? Oh, is this about, is this not your German grandfather? No, no, it's not. I was fishing with my father in Lake Dubay. Okay. So we caught our first fish and it was a keeper. So we kept it.

We brought it home. He laid it down in the front yard and it kept on flapping. And my dad was just like, it's not dead. What do I do? So he would go inside for 20 minutes, come out. The fish was still flapping. He's like, what do I do? He felt so bad.

You got, you got to beat it and cut his head off. That's what you do. But he felt so bad. So it took about two hours. This was a very dramatic Sunday. Going in and out of the house, looking at the bird, or the fish, he's still flapping. We ended up burying the damn thing in the backyard. What are you talking about?

I swear to God. My father could not kill. He just, he just killed the fish for nothing? Yeah, I mean, that's the sad thing. We buried it. Did a little prayer. Unbelievable. He was so stressed about the fish that was flapping, you got to cut its head off, but

he couldn't do it. Oh God. He was, you know, trying to be different than his father. Yeah. That's true. So this guy's body, after 10 hours, it finally burned away. So they scooped up the ashes and unceremoniously dumped it underneath a bush. This man would be the first of dozens to be killed in the name of Ohm Supreme Truth.

Yes. They definitely killed, they killed up to 80 just personally. And we're going to get into the, hey, hey, hey, hey. Amazing. All right. That's the first episode. I have to, I have to look up the name again here. It is Ohm Shinrikyo.

Yeah. Pretty good. You're really doing good. You're really doing good. Um Shinrikyo. See, I've been practicing it all week. So I can make sure I say it. No, I was practicing it.

Yeah. I was on the subway. I was like Ohm Shinrikyo. Ohm Shinrikyo. Ohm Shinrikyo. All right. Part one. There's so much of this information in my head for the last couple of days.

And so again, we're going to get, there's a really great documentary called Zero Hours, a documentary series. And one of these is about them releasing the sarin gas. And so I watched this and it was reading about what happens with the sarin gas. So you're going to get to this, you're going to, we're going to get to this point and say, and it's fucked with sarin does to people. They turned him inside out. Yeah.

It's terrible. Um, I was reading all of this and then I go to get on the train. I'm just like fuck. Like literally I get on the train and be like, God damn it. Like I'm just. You forgot your sarin gas. Yeah. Oh no.

I'll never get the true leader's love. Yeah. Awesome. All right. That's part one. Yeah. I very much have to thank research assistants on this one. I got to thank Meg Beaverhausen.

I got to thank new research assistant April Bennett. Yes. Who really kicked ass on this one. I also got to thank George out at Midtown Scholar and everyone over at Midtown Scholar for sending us these amazing books. Yeah. This book is the shit. But you got the good one.

You got the storybook one. I got the technical one. Yeah. And it is driving me nuts. Yeah. I got notes written in this thing. I've been doing homework. Yeah.

It's good though. Yeah. I get the cult at the end of the world. Yeah. What's yours called? Destroying the world to save it. I have the cult at the end of the world. Yeah.

Very cool. Oh, and also I want to thank Dustin Graham for sending us the amazing old magazines. Like he sent us an old life magazine that has a bunch of JFK conspiracy theories in it. Yeah. And I also want to thank a sound of thunder, the metal band that sent us a couple of copies of the record. Oh, you're wrong.

The lesser key of Solomon. Woo. I love the way the record looks. That's awesome. If it sounds half as good as it looks, I'll love it too. One miniscule clawed from the ranks of slime, condemned to pay for every mortal crime. A soul so loathsome, even demons tremble. His name is misery depraved divide.

I'm afraid that's going to make me shoot up my school. Well it will not. And also thanks Sarah Richard who sent the lovely drawings that we got in the mail the other day. They were very sweet and nice. Very sweet and nice. Yes. Thank you all for everything.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's good, right? Thank you all for everything. He sounds scary. Yeah. It's just like you say that just before you jump off a building. His final words were thank you all for everything. And if you guys want to help us out, go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left

to give. We've gotten such an amazing response and I will go ahead and say this. This week, thanks to everyone's help, I paid off my credit card debt. Ten years I've been paying off that piece of shit. I should do that. Nah dude, it's overrated. Marcus is being a nerd. Well, you heard they were bringing back debtors' prisons.

Nah, they'll never do that. Debtors are the funnest people. And even if they do, all the debtors are else. Yeah. So it'll be a groupie good time. We'll change the, yeah, we'll just change where the cool people are. Yeah. And if you want your very own last podcast on the left t-shirt, go to cavecomedyradio.com

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Push it. Thanks so much for supporting Abling. It's top at for the political news. Follow that roundtable of gentlemen. If you want to feel like you're getting drunk with some friends, page seven for entertainment news. Yeah. Me and Jackie.

Jackie Zabrowski doing page seven. With finger guns. With Molly Neville. Yeah. I'm doing finger. Well, I do finger phases when I'm happy. Page seven is a wonderful show. It's with Molly Neville and Jackie Zabrowski and I also do a mental health advice show

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