Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Mark Zuckerberg

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

What happens when a Harvard dropout builds a global empire on the idea of connection... and then becomes one of the most emotionally disconnected figures in tech? This week, Amanda and Chelsea are joined by Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards (@bastardspod) to unpack the cult-like control of Mark Zuckerberg, the boy wonder turned code-powered control freak. From the chaos of Facemash to the calculated calm of Meta, we trace the evolution of Zuckerbergs’s leadership style and how his obsession with efficiency, rating systems, and surveillance shaped one of the most influential companies in the world. We’ll explore employee testimonies, bizarre office rituals, and the cognitive dissonance of a CEO preaching human connection while undermining it at every turn. Subscribe to Sounds Like A Cult on Youtube!Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod, @amanda_montell, @reesaronii, @chelseaxcharles.  Thank you to our sponsors! Start earning points on rent you’re already paying by going to https://joinbilt.com/CULT  Find exactly what you’re booking for on https://Booking.com, Booking.YEAH! Head to https://www.squarespace.com/CULT to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code CULT No matter how you say it, don’t overpay for it. Shop data plans at www.MINTMOBILE.com/CULT.   Please consider donating to those affected by the Los Angeles Fires. Some organizations that Team SLAC are donating to are:  https://mutualaidla.org/ https://give.pasadenahumane.org/give/654134/#!/donation/checkout https://shorturl.at/SGW9w   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It was the kind of weirdo that came up with the idea of making a website to rate how hot his female classmates were, right? And that's not a thing that a guy

who has a healthy social life invents. Imagine being in college, just trying to pass sociology 101, and you find out that your picture is on the website being raided by incels that you would not let touch you with a 10-foot pole. It was like in the blink of an eye, he went from Jesse Eisenberg to this opportunistic, violent, amoral Mother Zucker.

If Mark Zuckerberg has one hater left on Earth, it's me. opportunistic, violent, amoral Mother Zucker. If Mark Zuckerberg has one hater left on earth, it's me. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host Amanda Montell and I'm the author of the book Cultish, out May 27th in paperback. And I'm your cohost, Chelsea Charles,

an unscripted TV producer. Every week on the show, we discuss a different zeitgeisty group that puts the cult in culture, from Lululemon to Harry Potterheads, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if so, which of our three cult categories does it fall into? A live your life, a watch your back, or a get the fuck out?

After all, in 2025, cultish influence falls along a continuum. Cultishness is in the eyes of the beholder, and it doesn't always look the same. For example, some modern day cults seem super niche and fringy and ritualistic horse girls. Anybody listen to that episode? Jeep owners? Hello. But that style of cultiness doesn't necessarily mean those groups are super destructive, right? And then you've got cult leaders whose influence is so omnipresent that we often don't even stop to scrutinize the chokehold it has on us. That is what this show is all about,

analyzing and even poking a little bit of fun at the ways cultish influence shows up in places you might not think to look. Like a tech empire built on algorithms, virtual realities, and the dream of a connected world, all under the guidance of one hoodie wearing code crunching visionary. We're talking Mark Zuckerberg. This motherfucker, this mother, this mother Zucker.

This mother Zucker. I am so excited to get into it. It is finally time to call him out as the cult leader that he truly is. Now, I want to say up top, it is high time that we address Mark Zuckerberg on the show, and I'm glad we did it now because, oh my God, he is so much more evil, allegedly, than we even realized. And there are so many fucked up aspects to Mark's personality and leadership style at Metta that we obviously weren't able to cover them all in the space of an hour. But to help us break down today's episode, we have invited a very special guest to join us.

He's a journalist. He's an author. He's the host of the podcast behind the Bastards, Robert Evans. Evans is renowned for his in-depth reporting on global conflicts and online extremism. He's reported on war zones in Iraq, Ukraine, and Syria, focusing on Middle Eastern conflicts and far-right extremist groups. And as the creator and host of the podcast Behind the Bastards, Evans delves into the lives of history's most notorious figures, offering detailed analyses of their actions and impact. Welcome, Robert, to Sounds Like a Cult.

Thanks for having me. I love talking about cults because it's kind of like the central organizing premise of the United, like American culture, right? Like the cult is the atom of Americaness. It truly is. It is like the nucleus from which all matter stems. I don't know, I shouldn't be talking about biology.

So let's open with a question because Robert, you have covered Mark Zuckerberg on your show. You've spent years digging into some of history's most powerful and notorious people. So when you look at Zucky, what do you think makes this guy more than just a CEO, but potentially a cult leader, particularly with regard to the way that his image influence and ideology have been sold to the public.

You know, there's a couple of answers I have for that. I think the first one is that I do believe there is an extent to which, if we're talking about like Mark Zuckerberg is a cult leader, we have to go back to Steve Jobs and the very fact that tech founder is a position that means cult leader and everything but name, right? Like that is how you get the job of a tech founder and it's how you do it well because the whole point of that gig is there is going to be a long period of time during which there's no guarantee that this thing that you're asking people to throw billions or tens of billions of dollars into is ever going to return a profit. And you have to get people to have faith in the project in the same way that like,

you would get a group of people to believe it like, yeah, no, the comet's coming to end the world and we need to like do this and this and this, right? Like it is the same set of things. It's this reality distortion field, which is the term people used for jobs. And so there's an extent to which Zuckerberg especially got his career started

as kind of very much being formed in that image. And I don't think it started necessarily with him. Cause if I think, if you look at how Mark worked in the early days of Facebook, he was a schemer. He was a little bit of a con man, right? When it came to the people that he was starting this project with, but he was not personally himself. I don't think he had it in him to orchestrate himself as a JobZian type figure.

I think once Facebook took off, there were a lot of people with money involved in that project who were like, we know what Americans expect from a tech founder and we have to try and orient you in that image in order that you can draw in the kind of capital investment that's necessary to make this work. I think Mark has sort of evolved in that direction. Obviously, Facebook culture evolved with him at the center of it, in this position where he can't be questioned. He has to have complete control. A lot of the dynamics of how Facebook has worked as a company up until the present day

were almost crafted in such a way as to like ape cult dynamics in order to ensure that there was this atmosphere of absolutely no accountability and no reality that can kind of sneak in around the cracks of that image. Oh my God. Okay, so you've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about this man, but Chelsea, I don't know about you, I have only just started

thinking about Mark Zuckerberg again. If I were to ask you the same question but Chelsea, I don't know about you, I have only just started thinking about Mark Zuckerberg again, if I were to ask you the same question, Chelsea, like what first comes to mind when I ask what makes Mark Zuckerberg in particular a cult leader? I think it's the cognitive dissonance that we all experience when we talk about Mark, right? Because we all know what his personhood represents. It's digital manipulation, privacy,

erosion. We know that, yet because of his innovation and how it's so integrated in our lives, we're willing to turn a blind eye. And we see that with cults all the time. Specifically cult leaders, they never have this promise of being good people and having good character. It's about what they can sell you. You know what I'm saying? And so for me, it's like, everyone's just like, well, fuck, he invented Facebook. So whatever. He can't be that bad. That's honestly the first thing I had against him was that he invented Facebook. I started following this guy critically because he cost my friends and I like all of our jobs

during like the whole big Facebook digital media scandal where they convinced everyone to pivot to video with kind of like false metrics about how well that was working and nuked a sizable chunk of the writing economy as a result of that. They were telling people that there was a lot of money and traffic there that they were making up.

They were juking the numbers. They've paid money as a result of this, right? that they were making up. They were juking the numbers. They've paid money as a result of this, right? Like they were found to have been fraudulently representing how profitable this was in order to get more people on and reliant upon their network. And again, it's this fact that we don't talk about that the same way we talk about the way cults lie to people in order to get them in, in order to get them like hooked and addicted

and locked into these kind of social relationships that stop them from leaving. But there's not a meaningful difference both in how social media operates or in how harmful these things are to people. And in fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a cult in world history that's done more damage than Facebook.

You know, I mean, among other things, we can talk about the Church of Scientology all day long, but I can't name any ethnic cleansings that they played a key role in, whereas I know people in Myanmar who lost family members to the ethnic cleansing that Facebook helped to enable. That is such an important point, and we do want to address some of the specifics

of those horrors that you're naming a little bit later, but across the board, the level of deception that Mark're naming a little bit later, but across the board, the level of deception that Mark Zuckerberg is clearly okay with connects to what you were saying, Chelsea, which is the extreme division in space between like the atrocities that Facebook has enabled and the sort of mild passive self justification that anyone who has a Facebook account or an Instagram account engages in every day. I mean, when we did our Cult of Amazon episode,

I said that that was probably the most far reaching and omnipresent cult that we'd ever covered on the show, but I think it actually might be Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg because they are like so intertwined. I guess as a sort of foundational question, I'm curious, Robert, do you think that the cult of Facebook could exist without Mark Zuckerberg, or do you think it's one of those cults

that requires Mark's fingerprints and his existence to thrive? I mean, I think that you have to have a person being formed as the cult leader. I don't think Mark would naturally on his own have had kind of the instincts to establish a cult. I think there were a team of people around him that saw that as necessary and helped to form it. I do think when you look at kind of structurally what Facebook has

done that kind of mirrors cult dynamics, a lot of it is in how the actual organization is set up and functions in order to hire and maintain employees and in order to keep employees kind of competitive with each other. One thing I'd like to bring up, so when we talk about like foundational American cults, a lot of people know about synanon, right? Which is this kind of cult that comes out

of the self-help movement, you know, 50 something years ago. And a major aspect of what they did was called the game, right, and the synod on game is, you get a bunch of people in a circle and you have them one by one curse and like ridicule and make fun of and attack each other, right? It's both this awful experience where people are having the worst things

they've ever had said to them done in this circle, but it's also deeply cathartic. So you get this sense of like trauma bonding with the group and people become addicted to that. And it you get this sense of like trauma bonding with the group and people will come addicted to that. And it also produces a lot of like compromising information that allows you to, you know, basically threaten people if they leave, or if they try to do anything that would be damaging to the organization and Facebook found

a way and they're not the only people who do something like this, but again, this gets into how there's a lot of things that mirror cult dynamics that you see in the tech industry that don't get described that way. Facebook has a thing that's called stack ranking, right? And this is the way their maintenance of their entire like employee population works. So basically Facebook employees don't just have to, you know, every year

they get evaluated, not just by their managers, but by their peers. Every employee has to find five coworkers to evaluate them as part of the review process. And this plays a major role in sort of formulating your score. So you're constantly forming alliances and figuring out who is going to give me reviews and how am I going to make collaborations with people. But also, the reason why they do this is that 15% of the company is basically

in danger of getting fired every year if the stack ranking goes badly. So you create this kind of circular firing squad for the company that both kind of bonds people together in this continual traumatic experience and also has everyone constantly at the edge of feeling like they're about to get pushed out. And it has this really deranging effect on people. There was about five or six years ago,

a series of articles that came out after one of the early books about Facebook that quoted a number of employees. There's a good CNBC piece that interviewed like a dozen former Facebook employees who all did describe working for the company as a lot like being in a cult. There's a quote that I found in one CNBC article

from an employee talking to Sheryl Sandberg during a town hall meeting for the company. The pressure for us to act as though everything is fine and that we love working here is so great that it hurts. There shouldn't be this pressure to pretend to love something when I don't feel this way. That does not sound wildly different from some of the stories that you get from people

who are in these organizations like the COS or Synanon. It is so validating to me to hear someone else make this comparison between a tech company slash social media and Cinnadon slash the Cinnadon game, because I feel like I've been tinfoil hat style making this comparison for so many years because my dad grew up in Cinnadon. Oh shit, I didn't know that.

Oh fuck, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. It's a small piece of the lore and participated in the Cinnadon game against his will. And I grew up on those stories and seeing how even just something that we can all relate to like seeing how battles of wits play out in Instagram comment sections sometimes where it's cathartic But it's also a lot of self-disclosure and violence and trauma sometimes all

Ultimately for the benefit of this organization, that being Meta, Facebook, Instagram, whatever, has always reminded me so much of the Synodon game. So thank you for bringing that up out of the gate. This podcast that you're listening to right now is brought to you by none other than Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website building platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

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Upfront payment of $45 for three month, five gigabyte plan required, equivalent to 15 bucks a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra, See Mint Mobile for details. So, okay, this is an episode ultimately on the cult of Mark Zuckerberg and we will continue, I think, to try and distinguish where Mark Zuckerberg ends and Facebook begins while analyzing the cult that he has created sort of opportunistically and accidentally.

But first, I feel like we should probably get the origin story on the birth of this tech cult leader. Mark grew up in a very cushy, brainy household in Dobbs Ferry, New York. It's a fancy suburb right outside of New York City. His dad was a dentist and his mom was a psychiatrist, and they made sure their kids had a very educational advantage. From a young age, Zuckerberg was a total computer nerd. His dad taught him how to code, even hiring a tutor to help him level up. And by middle school, he had already built a messaging system called ZuckNet

that his dad's dental office used, which was similar to like AOL Instant Messenger before AIM was even a thing. Zuck went to the ultra prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, where he crushed it in science, math and fencing, but computers were his real love. While we were likely giving our family computer an incurable disease from limewire, Teenage Mark was building music software so good that big tech companies like Microsoft and AOL

wanted to buy it. Instead of cashing out, he headed to Harvard, where he'd soon cook up an idea Microsoft and AOL wanted to buy it. Instead of cashing out, he headed to Harvard, where he'd soon cook up an idea that would change the internet forever. So when Mark Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard in 2002, he wasn't exactly a social butterfly. Robert, I know you've got some insight to this, so can you talk a little bit about how Mark was perceived by his peers and how those dynamics might have given birth to cult leader characteristics?

Yeah, I mean, he was not the most popular guy. He was a bit of a weirdo. And he was the kind of weirdo that came up with the idea of making a website to rate how hot his female classmates were, right? Like that's what Facebook is. It's a book of faces of your female classmates that you and your fellow bros rate based on hotness.

And that's not a thing that a guy who has a healthy social life invents, right? Not that guys with healthy social lives in college aren't problematic sometimes too, but they don't do that, right? Cause they have parties to get to. Mark did not. I have to say, obviously one thing

that notorious cult leaders from history, including Chuck Diedrich, the leader of Synanon, and Charles Manson, and Jim Jones, have in common with tech megalomaniacal leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs, and Elon, or whatever, is the stick it to the man attitude. Like that we know. And I am not the man, yeah.

And I am not the man, yeah. And I am not the man, L.L. fucking L. But something that I think makes Mark Zuckerberg interesting and distinct as a cult leader figure from someone like Elon or Charles Manson even, is that he has this endearing millennial underdog origin story that was romanticized by the film, The Social Network. Like this was so weird confronting for me

just in preparation for this episode. Like I realized that for a long time because of The Social Network, I was like out here rooting for Mark Zuckerberg. Oh girl, absolutely. High key for me. Yeah. Yeah, because well, I don't know if Zuckerberg. Oh girl, absolutely. High key for me. Yeah. Yeah, because, well, I don't know if this was it for you,

for me it was like, cause I was rooting for Jesse Eisenberg the actor who played him, who I love. But like that's who I pictured. I literally pictured Jesse Eisenberg, the hero of this story, and then flash forward 10 or 15 years, and Mark Zuckerberg is like all smooth skinned appearing in like weird AI ass looking uncanny ads for the metaverse

and now he's like jacked and announcing a fight with Elon Musk and for me, it was like in the blink of an eye, he went from Jesse Eisenberg to this like opportunistic, violent, amoral mother Zucker. And the weird thing is that a synonym member, for example, like a member of a sort of classic cult witnesses the deterioration in ethics of their leader slowly.

But I feel like I witnessed it in the blink of an eye because I stopped paying attention. Because as followers of the cult of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were not as active and knowing and willful as members of a cult like Synanon. So I'm like passively out here thinking I'm like putting money in Jesse Eisenberg's pocket, but no, I'm supporting this guy who like started out as an incel basically ranking women. It's so creepy. Sorry, I just had to voice that. It's interesting you say it

because I had the opposite experience of where I wouldn't watch Jesse Eisenberg movies for years because I hated Mark Zuckerberg so much. I finally changed my mind with a real pain where I was like, all right, okay, this guy's okay. I just hated you because I hated Mark Zuckerberg, which is kind of a compliment to your acting when you really think about it.

Yeah. But yeah, I had the opposite experience. All right, so you already knew, you had the foresight. If Mark Zuckerberg has one hater left on earth, it's me. I've been very consistent about this for a long time. You need a T-shirt. I wanted to piggyback a little bit about Robert's description of Mark.

So Mark hung out with a tight-knit group of friends and lived in the Kirkland house, where Facebook was essentially born. He'd host brainstorming sessions in his dorm room. One of his earliest experiments was Face Smash, a site that let students rank their peers attractiveness. Fucked up. Then came Facebook.

Facebook was not just a social network. It was an invitation only revolution. It spread through Ivy League schools like a digital secret society where getting an account meant you were somebody. And from the jump, Zuckerberg made it clear that he was in control. The clearest example, early chat logs

where he casually called users dumb fucks for trusting him with their data. Cambridge Analytica has entered the chat. Yeah, there we go. I love the Cambridge Analytica story because when it broke and it pissed off enough people, he had to like make this big public post being like, we screwed up.

And if Facebook, if we can't be trusted with your data, then we don't deserve to be your social network. And you know, that's what he said in public, but every private communication is like, again, there's this famous Mark quote where he's like, you can be unethical without breaking the law. And that's how I live my life. Ha ha.

Like, it's like, fuck your data, fuck you. There was this great story that came out. It was based on how much of leaked documents to NBC in April of 2019. The article is Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked document show. And it's all shit from around the Cambridge Analytica scandal as he's being like, can't believe this happened.

We have nothing that's more important to us than our users data. And all these leaked documents was him being like, guys, we gotta be using our users' data to like illegally bribe companies with giving them information about our users that they don't know that we're giving out in order to get things that we want from them.

Like in order to like make better ads or get people on scam apps that let women rate them and they date or whatever. It was such like a skeevy thing. And all these docs or people from Facebook being like, Mark, this seems deeply unethical what we're doing. Like, should we be giving user data to Amazons that they can advertise to people

while telling them that we're not doing that? And Zuckerberg's being like, anything we can do that makes people feel more comfortable is really good. Mark Zuckerberg is such an early example of a phenomenon that we see all the time. It's like dime a dozen now, where if you're starting an online cult, you don't actually have to have that much charisma.

Like Mark Zuckerberg is such a dweeb, right? Like no matter how much media training he gets, no matter how much crossfit he does or whatever his workout, count, hold of choices. He is like still just this dweeb and this is why I think it's interesting to tell his whole origin story. But yeah, like you see this all the time now

where like an influencer will start a cult of sorts online and spew like misinformation or gather like incredibly fanatical supporters by the millions. But IRL like they're super shy or dorky or like can't really put their money where their mouth is. That happens now constantly. But Mark Zuckerberg was sort of like an early example of the cult leaders that we would then continue to see for, you know, the whole rest of the digital age and that we're continuing to see. I want to dwell on this face mash thing a little bit more though, because this was,

I guess you could call it like a beta version of his longstanding cult of hierarchy that he would create. So as Robert and Chelsea, you both hinted, Face Smash was Zuckerberg's brainchild. It started as a late night dorm room stunt that turned Harvard students into contestants in this hot or not game that they never signed up for or consented to. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he created it, it was 2003, and already he had a very ethically murky conception of privacy and security. The site scraped student ID photos from university databases and let users rank classmates looks side by side.

And while direct quotes from other students are limited in public records, according to a 2003 article in the Harvard Crimson, comments on the email lists of both Fuerza Latina and the Association of Harvard Black Women immediately blasted the site. They were like, this is cult shit. This one young woman named Leila R. Bravo, who was the Fuerza Latina president, class of 2005, said, I heard from a friend and I was kind of outraged.

I thought that people should be aware. So there was some immediate backlash and that's important to give voice to because I mean, when I think of Face Smash, I think of its portrayal in the social network where it was kind of this like hilarious jovial. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at him.

He's just boys being boys. Exactly. This like stick it to the man and sell boys will be boys celebration. But our question for you Robert is what plot points during those early days Do you think contributed to the structure and vibes of the particular tech cult that he would later build? I mean a lot of it again As I said is the dynamics of what has to happen in order to get a startup like this off the ground, right?

of what has to happen in order to get a startup like this off the ground, right? You have a long tail period in which there is going to be no money coming in and nothing but money going out. And you have to convince people often without or with minimal evidence that this thing is going to somehow be monetizable, right? And Facebook ultimately was, but there was a period of time in which you're just getting people to throw money behind a guy. And so you have to create this kind of image of him as this apocle genius. And that requires a degree of, again,

that kind of cult leader magic. It's like L. Ron Hubbard has to convince you that he has the ability to make you magic. When the only thing L. Ron Hubbard has ever done is sell copies of a book that like basically fakes psychology training, right? You have to be able to convince people that Mark Zuckerberg has a map of the future in his brain.

And so there were all these stories, there's shit from like 2009. I think he was on stage with Kara Swisher when he like takes off his hoodie and it has this like cryptic sigil underneath it that he put on the hoodies for every Facebook guy. And she makes a comment about it being like and there's all These about it being like a cult symbol and there's all these articles about the secret symbol

Facebook's putting on all of their hoodies and the reality is like, you know, it's like what fucking frats have It's like a little fucking symbol that he got on this thing for his employees to wear But it's this attempt to create this mystique that paints this guy as something other than what he is Which is kind of like both a dude who stole in part some of the better ideas of his friends in order to get rich and then built this company around never being able to lose power himself and always being unaccountable to his mistakes,

which is what Facebook has done, right? It's impossible to acknowledge or spend any time sort of looking at, well, for example, the billions that were thrown away on the metaverse, right? As Facebook lays off people for, oh, you know, this team wasn't efficient enough, this team wasn't efficient enough. What about the, what was it?

Four or $5 billion a year that they were lighting on fire to fund the metaverse, a thing that no one even believes is going to happen anymore. And if you really want the clearest example of how culty a lot of startup and tech culture is, you look at how seriously a lot of the media treated this metaverse shit just because Mark was talking about it when there was never any evidence this was real.

As a consumer, I'll speak for myself. I was like, this is the creepiest, dumbest thing I've ever seen. I don't want this. Why would anyone want this? He's just so out of touch. Chelsea, do you remember when his metaverse ads started coming out? I do. I'm just so curious, Chelsea, to hear your take on Mark Zuckerberg

as a cult figure coming from your reality TV producer lens. I feel like this idea that I don't know, he positions himself as the all-knowing creator of this like utopia with the whole metaverse thing. And I find that to be the cringiest thing about his personality. I don't know, I think he's just the cringiest person ever. And I didn't get to say this earlier, but imagine being in college, just

trying to pass sociology 101 and you find out that your picture is on the website being rated by incels that you would not let touch you with a 10 foot pole. Like the audacity of you to think that you are like the self appointed litmus test for who's considered worthy or attractive. I don't know. I just, he's a creep. Yeah, he is. That is just exactly it. He's this cringe guy that we've just allowed to be. I mean, this is such a theme in power abuse in America right now. These cringe motherfuckers that everybody around them just enables until we look around and we're like, what have we done? Okay, so it's so hard to tell Mark Zuckerberg story in a linear way because he has been himself the

whole time, I guess. But at this point in the story, I feel like we should talk about the cult of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg as a cult leader from the perspective of those who worked at Facebook in those early days, because that feels like a cult story, too. Some early employees of Facebook genuinely felt, due to all of these cult leader techniques that we're already describing, like they were a part of this world changing mission. So according to a Time article entitled What This Early Facebook Employee Learned from Mark Zuckerberg, Trisha Black, one of Facebook's first big hires, its first vice president of advertising sales was instantly enamored with Mark's vision. She said, quote, he always believed Facebook could change the way the world communicated.

He was very open to saying, Hey, Trisha, you've been doing online advertising for the last 10 years. Teach me everything I need to know about it. And that kind of seemingly collaborative, open-mindedness created this kind of work cult charisma at that time that made certain people feel like they were a part of something truly special. But as Facebook grew, so did the cracks in that culture. Some former employees went on to say flat out

that the vibe turned cult-like. And one reason had to do with Mark Zuckerberg Some former employees went on to say flat out that the vibe turned cult-like. And one reason had to do with Mark Zuckerberg continuing to be who he always was, the cult of hierarchy that Robert, you pointed out, out of the gate. The company instituted a performance review system where coworkers rated each other like face smash all over again. Just like you said, this meant that if you weren't constantly on, it could actually fuck with your livelihood. So a lot of people felt pressure to

keep things fake positive, even when they had real concerns, which may have contributed to a cult like suppression of questioning, allegedly in our opinion. So Robert, could you talk a little bit about what you think is culty about Mark Zuckerberg's continued fixation with engineering rating systems? Yeah. I mean, so there was a survey that came in 2018, 2019. So this is again, right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook started launching a series of like internal surveys to rate employees, not unlike what do you think we should be doing or how do you think we should be doing

or how do you think we could avoid problems like this in the past. But like one of the big questions they asked was has Mark Zuckerberg devalued Facebook? Should Zuckerberg remains as CEO at Facebook? And they got like what they claimed was a decisive majority answered yes, that he had diminished Facebook,

but only about 900 of the 12,000 employees surveyed actually answered that. And on the second question, a bunch of people said like, no, he should remain CEO of Facebook. And about nine times as many answered that as his answer to the question about whether or not he had devalued the company. So you get these ratings that are like purported to show he still has overwhelming support that are very much like juked in the same way. Because people are like clearly scared to answer

for the most part, unless they're giving the right answer. And I'm really interested in like what happened to the careers of the 900 or so people who did give a negative answer about him on this. But like, it's this attempt to control the narrative even inside of the company and this act at anyone who speaks out that is very much familiar with like the Scientology fair game policy. If you're familiar with the most recent book, Careless People, which is a book

about Facebook that was published earlier this year by a former executive turned whistleblower named Sarah Wynn Williams. She accuses Joel Kaplan, who is, you know, the Republican lobbyist who has become a major like right arm figure to Mark Zuckerberg in the last couple of years of some very, very bad behavior and talks in general about Mark and the leadership of Facebook and in a way that I think feels true to life. And she has been attacked by the companies the same way as former Facebook data scientist and whistleblower Sophie Zhang, which is again, it's very familiar to this kind of fair game policy where they're saying like these people have ties to anti Facebook Activist groups these people are making unfounded allegations

This is like a continuation of these like activist attempts to damage the company It's like there's this conspiracy against us and anybody who works here and winds up with anything negative to say about the ways that we're Hurting people is a part of this conspiracy. There can be no real legitimate criticism from within Facebook. It has to be something orchestrated from the outside by a shadowy network. Oh my God, why do you put it that way? It is, it's so Scientology-esque.

Yeah. Because we were talking about how those rating systems, they always create a sense of competition where people are trying to earn the approval, again, positioning himself as the all-knowing and the one that it's important that you have his approval. And I feel like that makes for a very, very interesting working dynamic at the metaverse. Oh my God. It's like, it's exactly like what you were saying before. You're like trying to pass sociology 101 and then you find out that like all these dudes that you would never talk to have positioned themselves as the adjudicators of your hotness. Like as if

Mark Zuckerberg's opinion of any of these people is important, but he has constructed a situation where it is. And the way he's done that is so cult-y to us. Yes, absolutely. This episode of Sounds Like a Cult is brought to you by Booking.com. It is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the universe, actually, as far as science can tell. That makes it the place to list your vacation rental if you want to earn more with consistent bookings, reach new markets, and turn hosting into a steady income.

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I wanna fast forward a little bit to talk about the big pivot. And it's when Mark rebranded Facebook as Meta and went all in on the metaverse. Zuckerberg's vision for the metaverse was a fully immersive 3D digital world where people could work, socialize, shop, and play through virtual and augmented reality. It aimed to be the next evolution of the internet, essentially a digital universe that would eventually replace much of our physical interaction and online experience. Because I immediately did not take the metaverse seriously.

I actually have never scrutinized it that carefully, but yeah, I mean, the vision to replace real life. Well, and to replace real life with a version of life that Facebook controls and is entirely oriented around sitting in meeting spaces with your coworkers, right? A thing that nobody wants to do. People don't like to do meetings and we have to do meetings. We would prefer they be over the internet in such a

way that no one can see our faces and we can like not really be entirely engaged because we have other shit to do. I mean, this was right around the same time as the NFT craze, right? And they both, again, there's this reality distortion field to both of them, which is there's a degree of similarity to what's going on now with AI, where they really have to try to brute force into you. Like this is inevitable.

This can't be fought. This is the future. This has to happen. And you're the one who's crazy if you don't see the world the way that our leader has decreed things are going to be. The gaslighting. Yeah.

I was like, oh my God, I'm missing the wave. This is the next Bitcoin. I can't miss it again. But I'm like, where the, bitch is not real. This is not a real thing. No. Proud to have missed every wave of Bitcoin. You know what I mean?

So at the infancy of Marx introducing Metaverse to the world, the way he talks about it is borderline religious. We see that behavior in many cult-like structures, isolate from the old world, promise a utopia and position yourself as the one and only who can lead people there. Meanwhile, Meta employees were being pushed hard

to get on board with the vision. Some employees expressed frustration. In a Business Insider article, one internal memo revealed concerns about the company's virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds. Vishal Shah, Meta's VP of Metaverse questioned, why don't we love the product? We've built so much that we use it all the time.

This sentiment exemplifies the disconnect between the company's ambitions and the actual engagement from its own employees. Another senior software developer reportedly commented, "'The metaverse will be our slow death.'" Famous last words, I don't like that. "'Reflecting fears that the company's intense focus on this new direction could be detrimental.

I wanted to share some interesting, unconventional work practices that were implemented at Meta via Mark. So first was the walk and talk. So Zuck is, oh my God, ew, gross. I can't believe I just called him that because that's what he prefers to be called. Zuckerberg was big on- Oh, he prefers to be called. Zuckerberg was big on-

Oh, he prefers to be called that? Oh yeah, no, he really likes you to call him that. Yeah. Wait, I didn't realize that. Yeah, yeah. Because it rhymes with fuck. Yeah. But he likes that because he's never had sex,

and I get it. Yes. Okay, so- So you got it, you're following, yes. So Zuckerberg is big on walking meetings. Why sit in a comfy chair when you can speed walk through campus? Supposedly it keeps things casual and egalitarian.

What a weirdo. I am trying to keep you abreast on what's going on with the company's finances, and you got me out of breath walking and talking. I just, I hate you. Because he's so uncanny, that's the thing. He just doesn't know how to person. Exactly.

Exactly, okay, so Zucktown. What the fuck? Metta tried to build a literal town, like homes, stores, the whole sim setup right next to HQ. They called it Willow Village, but everyone else just called it Zuck Town. And fun fact, I worked at an animation company

about six or seven years ago, and I can't say the name on the mic, but I left right before they broke ground for the exact same thing. And I'm like, what makes you think I want to go to work for eight hours a day and then my next door neighbor is Susan from Accounts Payable? And they try to frame it as if it's a morale boost or some type of incentive. You don't have to drive to work.

You can just live right on campus. But a lot of those big companies do that as a way to get your ass to be working 24 seven. Not cool. Because if half the point is Severance wasn't that fucking living next to your coworker, it's a terrible idea. Yeah. I was literally just about to say,

like this is what Severance is about. God damn. Yeah. Hell no. Your Audi is deactivating her Facebook account. Exactly. So the next one is would I work for you? And Zuckerberg once said that he only hires people

who he'd be willing to work for. And to me that screams, I'm only hiring people who are my little minions and who their work philosophy mirrors mine exactly. And that just doesn't make for, I don't know, a collaborative workplace. How can you be an innovative company if you want everyone to think the same,

everyone to behave the same? It's just, I don't know, he's weird. It speaks to his desire for conformity. Yeah. Again, positioning himself as he's the, I don't know. He's like the standard. Yeah, well, he's the arbiter of reality. Exactly. Of what is real and what isn't real.

Exactly. And then my last one is that he famously works at a desk, just like everybody else, no private office, just vibes and a hoodie. The open floor plan was supposed to say, we're all in this together. Everyone's equal, we're a flat hierarchy. Yes, I'm obviously in charge and I make all the money

and I can never be fired, but we all sit in the same bullpen. So clearly we're equal. That linguistic reframing of hierarchy just in order to abuse power the same way reminds me a great deal of Shambhala Buddhism. It's a sort of Buddhist cult sect that has been the subject of much controversy, of Shambhala Buddhism. It's a sort of Buddhist cult sect

that has been the subject of much controversy, New York Times, expose, sexual abuses, all of the cult things. And I interviewed a former hardcore Shambhala devotee for cultish and she was describing how there was obviously an intense sense of power hierarchy there and you couldn't skip rank, but they would always emphasize

that it was not a hierarchy, it was a mandala. It was concentric circles or whatever. They just made it sound like it was egalitarian, flat, whatever, but really it was just the exact same thing. And that is such a pattern, whether you're talking about like a spiritual sect or a tech sect. Okay, so there are two other phenomena

that we feel the need to address when it comes to picking apart the cult of Mark Zuckerberg. And one we've made mention of already, but it's of course the scandal that all of his antics would lead up to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So everyone can remember earlier in the episode when we were talking about Zuckerberg's famous dumb fucks insult to all the people

that trusted him with their data. That was not just a sort of one-off cringy moment of college arrogance and hubris. It was major foreshadowing. So here's a little breakdown in case people don't recall these events or purposefully block them out of their mind. Millions of Facebook users had their personal data harvested

through a loophole in the platform's API. And Facebook didn't exactly sound the alarm. This scandal would be named the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It went down in 2018. During that year, the aforementioned compromised data was utilized to construct detailed psychological profiles aimed at influencing voter behavior during pivotal events like the 2016 US presidential election

and the Brexit referendum. And in response to the revelations about this, Facebook faced global scrutiny over its data policy practices. The company acknowledged the breach, apologized, and implemented measures to enhance data protections, allegedly. CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress addressing concerns about user privacy and the platform's role in political manipulation.

Question for you, Robert. Obviously, the Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted a breach of trust and privacy in the cult of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg while revealing the powerful psychological influence that Mark's favorite kind of data manipulation can have on voters and consumers. What do you think Mark Zuckerberg's handling of this crisis says about him and his belief

that you've continued describing that he is untouchable and above reproach. Well, the whole plan, the whole reaction to that was attempt to pretend that something different was going on than was going on, right? Not that Mark himself had made top level decisions to say we will do whatever we want to do with these people's data and we will not tell them, right?

We are going to monetize it however we can and fuck them. Fuck them if they hand it over to us. We're stewards and we screwed up, but this is not the way that we truly are. There's such a degree of disrespect for the basic nature of reality and for the ability of other people to even comprehend what's happening to them there, that I find really deeply upsetting. And kind of at the same time, what I see as sort of emblematic of how he treats the world is what's happened since, right?

Since Trump got elected, how he's now been going on and doing sort of this podcast round table discussions about how angry he is at the unfair reaction, how angry people got at him and his website. And it's become very clear that ever since then, a huge motivating factor for him has been doing whatever he can to not have even that. And he did not deal with any real accountability

as a result of it. People stopped liking him, right? He clearly got himself convinced at one point that he had a chance of being the president and was trying to do this like media tour right at the start of the Trump administration to kind of like set himself up as a potential figure for that and everyone fucking hated him. And there's this massive degree to which his inability to maintain a cult outside of the actual like walled garden that is the Facebook corporate life is clearly something that eats

at him. And I think a big part of why is because it's evidence that on his own, he doesn't have the juice. He's only got the juice because he's literally unfirable and in direct control of the company and people want money, right? Like this is not a thing, ultimately talk about how he uses the tools of a cult leader,

but at least L. Ron Hubbard got people to voluntarily hand their lives over to him. Mark has never done that. He's just gotten people to work for him and pretend to like him as long as they have to do that. Ooh, you just dropped the bar. The fact that he has to... Oh, yeah, I guess I never really thought about it in that way. The fact that he has to, like, scheme.

You know, because this is all against all of our will, you know what I'm saying? As opposed to any other, most other cult leaders, you know what you're signing up for and you willingly become a part of something. At least you know what you're signing up for at the time. Exactly. And then there's the bait and switch of it all, but we don't even know what we're signing up for at the time.

Yeah. Now you sort of touched on the crossover between the cult of Zuckerberg and the cult of Maga. And I wanted to continue to touch on that ever so briefly. So I came across a Guardian piece titled Mark Zuckerberg has gone full MagGA by Siva Vedyanathan. And this article was about Mark Zuckerberg rolling back his fact checking policies right before Trump took office. The subhead of this article said, it's a mistake to describe the Meta CEO's move

as a retreat from fact checking. It's a retreat from limiting harm to users. So to summarize what went down, essentially right before Trump's second inauguration, two weeks before in fact, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be rolling back this huge fact-checking policy, which the Guardian piece that I'm referencing here argues

was not an act of pandering to Trump out of fear, which a lot of people interpreted it as, but rather something much more opportunistic and cult leader-ish that another Guardian reporter, Chris Stoklewalker, called, quote, an extinction level event for truth on social media. The Guardian analyzed Mark Zuckerberg's decision to do this as follows, quote, Zuckerberg, as anyone who has studied his actions, mind, and statements over the past two decades would tell you, is firmly committed to the principle that he knows better than the rest of us and that his

company services are good for us. The more we use them the better we will live he believes. The more we encounter messages that challenge us or trouble us he believes the more likely we are to forge better decisions for ourselves. The more we post, the more we encounter, the more we mix it up, the more we argue, the more we work toward a better society. Zuckerberg believes against all historical evidence to the contrary. He is not acting as a mercenary capitalist. He is acting as a megalomaniacal ideologue as usual. Zuckerberg's self-regard is beyond the limits. Perhaps only Elon Musk among his peers has more self-regard. Zuckerberg is less insecure than Musk, so he sometimes tries to come off as chastened and innocent.

That was the sort of the Guardian's pieces summation that I felt the need to read verbatim. Robert, do you think this analysis of Mark Zuckerberg in the context of this fact-checking rollback during the second Trump administration is accurate? And I guess what do you think of Mark Zuckerberg as a cult leader in comparison with Elon Musk? You know, I think the only issue I have with that summary is that it acts as if the recent final sort of pullback from fact-checking, the complete dropping of pretenses, is a shift rather than growing more honest about what the policy had always been, which is that fact-checking at Facebook had never worked. It had never really even mitigated harm in a significant

way. It was a smoke screen that was deployed in order to make people feel like something fundamentally different was going on. And in order to make people feel like the reality was different from what it is, which is that disinformation has always been central to Facebook's business. Period. From the jump, it has never been different. Likewise, the idea that they are now willing to harm their users at scale for profit is, I think, an inaccurate summation of what's happened because Facebook's business has always been harming and taking advantage of their users at scale for profit. That is the only thing that has ever made Facebook profitable.

So, I don't disagree with any of that analysis. My issue is that what's happened is that we've dropped the pretenses, right? Or Facebook has dropped the pretenses. Not that there's been any overall shift in what's going on there. Boom. So what the fuck can we do as members of this cult who don't want to support it, but also personally, I'll speak for myself, I don't know how to defect.

Oh, I mean, I don't really get on Facebook anymore, but the problem is that like, you can't individually defect. There need to actually be legal consequences to operating the way Mark has done. He needs to be in prison. There have been ethnic cleansings around the world carried out as a result of the use of his services.

He has effectively sold arms to dictatorial regimes and they have used it to kill thousands. That needs to be the kind of thing that gets you locked in a hole. This isn't a thing of where like, oh, well we just need to get him out of there. Facebook needs to be in the hands of a better board of people.

No, Mark Zuckerberg needs to be in a cage. Can you talk more about that? Because I think this is a jokey podcast, but I think it's important for listeners to hear more details about what you're referencing. A couple of key details. One of them, if we're talking about like the harm of Instagram on Facebook on children, Facebook had internal details about like how the rates of eating disorders skyrocketed with kids as a result of the way that like Instagram pushed content to them and they continued to exacerbate that,

knowing that it would make these problems worse because it would also keep people on the site longer. Facebook knew that the military junta in Myanmar was using their tools in order to spread propaganda about the Rohingya that played a significant role in the ethnic cleansing being carried out there. You can also see similar things happening in India under the regime of the current president in order to provoke anti-Islamic pogroms among the Hindu nationalist population. All of these things have been well documented.

All of these things Facebook was warned about and all of these things Facebook failed to take action on, notably making decisions with good information in a very similar way to how the tobacco companies did, that they knew would have a cost in human lives that is measured in acre feet of mass grave space. And they chose to make those decisions. They chose to make those decisions

because they were profitable. And it's not really something that you convince words about and talk about ethically. Yeah, it's like Severance, where we're all macro data refinement and there's like, well, unlike Severance, an actual human life and thousands of them on the other side. And many of us are complicit,

but like you're saying, what can we as individuals do? I guess the awareness is step one, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good.

It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good.

It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good.

It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. or a notorious cult leader from history. And this game is harder than it sounds. Okay. Okay, so first things first.

Sanity is a small box. Insanity is everything. That's a cult leader. Yeah, you're correct. It is the infamous Charles Manson. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, second quote. Connectivity is a human right.

Oh, that's Mark. Yes. You're good at this. The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks. That's also Mark. Damn, you are correct.

The next quote goes like this. Let me clarify this very definitely. This is not an authoritarian organization. I feel like that's also Mark. That was L. Ron Hubbard. Ah, that was L. Ron Hubbard. Okay, okay, okay. That also scans.

Exactly. Right, because I guess like in addition to like the Sinanon game and Chuck Diedrich, the one comparison that has come up the most has been Scientology throughout this episode. So the next quote is, when you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place.

So what we view our role as is giving people that power. I think I'm gonna go with Mark again. Yep. I know I've defaulted on that a lot. The way that you read that, Chelsea, like your delivery almost sounded like him because he has this eerily placid corporate delivery. It's like, well, da, da, da, da, da.

The last quote sounds like this. What is success? Success should not be a goal. Success should be a process. Success is measured as the years go by. That's a quote later. Yes, that is Rich DeVos, the founder of Amway. That makes sense.

Yeah, I would have guessed Rich DeVos. When you're as familiar with the vernacular of these various pockets of American cultishness, you start to get better at that game, you know? Cause there's like the new age vibe, there's the sort of fundamentalist extremist vibe, of course, ha ha. Then there's the corporate vibe.

The MLM vibe is its own thing. Yeah. Robert, thanks so much for joining us today in analyzing the cult of Mark Zuckerberg, allegedly. Happy to do it. Can you do us a favor and tell our listeners where to find you? You can find me at the behind the bastards podcast or it could happen here a daily news podcast about the world falling apart Beautiful sir. Thank you so much Robert

All right, Chelsea out of these three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. I wonder, which of these cult categories do you think the cult of Mark Zuckerberg falls into? Listen, I do not care how many AI photos come out making him appear to be hot when he's not. Mark still falls under. Get the fuck out. Straight up period, point blank.

Bro, this discussion was harrowing. Yeah. Harrowing. Yeah. I am horrified. Like we were talking about this before we started recording this verdict, but like I already felt cognitive dissonance being a 17 year follower of the cult of Mark Zuckerberg, meaning just a Facebook user.

Right. Robert, our guest, is someone who has been carefully, critically paying attention to Mark Zuckerberg for all of that time and knows things that we all as cult followers should know, but learning about Mark Zuckerberg's role in suppressing us all from knowing that shit. I'm like speechless. Yeah, I'm speechless and I can't say that I'm embarrassed, but I'm a little shocked that this type of information is not, I'm speechless. And I can't say that I'm embarrassed, but I'm a little shocked that this type of information is not, I guess, common knowledge to all of us. But what I

will say is, I am so thankful for this podcast because of the consistent and reoccurring ego deaths that I have every time I'm humbled by a guest with knowledge that I simply did not know. Because I don't know everything. You don't know everything. None of us knows everything. Yes. But it is up to us to have these hard conversations that would force us to pull back the veil a little

and dissect and scrutinize the brands that we blindly follow. But I guess that's what we continue to talk about every episode. It's up to us to do our digging to decide, is this what I align with? Is this something that I wanna represent? Is this the legacy that I wanna be a part of leaving behind? But then it's like, what are we supposed to do?

Because even Robert was like, he just needs to be thrown in jail. And I'm like, well, I don't know. I don't have that kind of handcuff. Right, right, exactly. So I will say like the stuff about Facebook knowing about the havoc it was wreaking on teenage girls and the uptick in eating disorders and body dysmorphia

and other mental health suffering and deciding to double down. That is one teeny tiny little piece that I knew, but not from just like vibing out in the world. That was something that I knew from research for a piece I was writing. And I don't know what your Instagram algorithm has been like lately,

but if I were a teenager right now, my brain would be completely colonized by like the horrible messaging about women's bodies that is like in my, for you page, kind of whatever it's called on Instagram. But I didn't know how involved Mark Zuckerberg as a cult leader was in doing all of that shit on purpose. Right, I thought it was just kind of like an effect

of the platform. I had no clue that he knew, he knows, he knows everything. It is super, super horrifying. I mean, it's like that Guardian piece said, like he's not pandering out of fear, he's causing harm for profit. Yes. It's the most hardcore GTFO.

All right, well, another one bites the dust. Here's a question for you. What's a cult that you've been engaging with lately that's a live your life and that brings you joy and ritual and tranquility, Chelsea? It's the one that I feel like I'm forever gonna be a part of. The cult of reality TV in a sense of love on the spectrum.

Love on the spectrum. Live your life, honey. Oh my God, I'm obsessed right now. I'm obsessed. Me too. What's yours? Definitely that. It's my favorite.

That show brings me so much joy So there's that you know what this is a cult that I have like one toe in But all other nine toes out. Thank God the cult of the wedding industry. It's so bad I have been swatting scammers like it's a full-time job Putting this shit together you already know as. As soon as you say that word, you can't even start, you just added $10,000, okay? Exactly, exactly.

It ain't right. No, it's really not. I mean, we're doing our own flowers. We are doing our own tablescapes. We're doing it millennial DIY, let me tell you that. Cause the wedding industry is such a fucking cult. It's a cult. So yeah, but that's a watch your back, I would say.

Mark Zuckerberg, hardcore get the fuck out. I do have one really, really important question. Yeah. Who do you have in a squabble? Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk? Oh, that is dirty money. I don't know. My money's on Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah. Like in a physical fight? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Elon's like off in a K-hole somewhere. Like he can't, he's pranked. He can't fight.

What about you? My money is on Mark as well. You know, he's been training. He's been training. But there is just one thing that just makes me say it could be Elon. Elon could have it, but I don't know. My money's on Mark.

Wait, what's the one thing? I dare not say. I dare not say. Oh my God. Okay, well offline about that. We will most certainly not get into a metaverse meeting about that. Oh my God. Okay, well offline about that. We will most certainly not get into a metaverse meeting about that. Oh my word.

Well, that is our show. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Sounds Like a Cult was created by Amanda Montell and edited by Jordan Moore of The PodCabin. This episode was hosted by Amanda Montell and Chelsea Charles. This episode was produced by Chelsea Charles. Our managing producer is Katie Epperson.

Our theme music is by Casey Cole. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave it five stars on Spotify or Apple podcasts. It really helps the show a lot. And if you like this podcast, feel free to check out my book, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, which inspired the show. You might also enjoy my other books, The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality and Wordslet, A Feminist feminist guide to taking back the English language.

Thanks as well to our network studio, 71. And be sure to follow the Sounds Like a Cult cult on Instagram for all the discourse at Sounds Like a Cult pod or support us on Patreon to listen to the show ad free at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult. This episode of Sounds Like a Cult is brought to you by Booking.com. It is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the universe, actually, as far as science can tell. That makes it the place to list your vacation rental if you want to earn more with consistent bookings, reach new markets, and turn hosting into a steady income.

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