The Jordan Harbinger Show - 237: Steven Hassan | Combating Cult Mind Control Part One

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Steven Hassan (@CultExpert) is a a licensed mental health counselor who has been educating the public about mind control, brainwashing, and destructive cults since 1976. He's the author of Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults and the founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center. This is part one of a two-part episode (part two coming soon). What We Discuss with Steven Hassan: How to use Steven's BITE model to tell if you or someone you love is involved in a destructive cult through control of behavior, information, thought, and emotion. The four types of destructive cults most prevalent today: commercial, religious, political, and self-help. How cults have weaponized the Internet and social media to fill their ranks and thrive as never before possible. Why it's the people who believe themselves immune to (i.e., too smart for) cult indoctrination who are most at risk of being targeted and recruited. How Steven has refined Ted Patrick's invasive cult deprogramming tactics of the '70s into a more effective strategic interactive approach. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/237 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people

and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Recently, we've been hearing more and more about cults, from documentaries on Netflix to exposés of Scientology to woo-woo yoga and self-help seminars. But what is a cults? How do we know if we're being recruited by a cult and what tricks are cults using to control our behavior and our mind?

Today, cult expert and former cult member, an author of cult mind control, Stephen Hassan, joins us on the show to explain how cults recruit, and there's a certain set of tools and deception that seem to be very pervasive here. We'll also cover the types of techniques used to control and enforce cult-mandated behavior. Some of this is advanced hypnosis, and some of this is just good old-fashioned blackmail. We'll also uncover why intelligent people, especially those we think would never fall for this type of mental programming, are actually some of the most susceptible to cult influence. Of course, we've even got some cult self-defense techniques that you can apply for yourself, and we'll provide some wisdom about what to do if you suspect you or someone you love is being recruited by a cult. This is a two-part episode because there was just so much here that I thought was important. I really hope you enjoy what we've got in store for you here today, and I really hope you know.

never have to use it. If you want to know how I managed to book all of these great, fascinating people, how did I meet Stephen Hassan, for example? Well, I've got networking systems and tiny habits, and I'm teaching you how to do this for free in our course six-minute networking. That's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests here on the show, they actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in some smart company. And without further ado, here's Stephen Hassan. I would love to start with the definition of what a cult is. What is a cult? Because Because when I talked about this research, when I was looking into what you were researching, people said, well, what is it called?

Because now if you do CrossFit, you're in the cult. Right. And I've been interviewed about CrossFit. And I'm by the way in a book called The Cult of Mac. Yeah. Sure. And when the guy asked to interview me and he said he was writing a book about computers, and I said, what was the title? And he told me, I said, ha, I'll do the interview, but I have to disclose.

only used Apple since 1982. Right. I have five Macs, four iPhone, three iPads right now. Too bad he didn't keep your 1982 Macintosh. Yes, really. And I have all of, I went, I've literally grown with the company. Anyway, so I think about, um, an influence continuum from ethical, healthy to destructive. And so you can have cults that where people are total fanatics, but they're free to join.

They're free to leave. They can read whatever they want to read. They can talk to whoever they want to talk to. It's not about fear and control and dependency. It's about being a part of this thing, whether you're into a rock band that you just are fanatical about or a sports team or whatever. That's not a destructive cult. The groups that I'm worried about undermine people's human rights and enslave them psychologically. Right.

So despite the fact that I might be dependent on my iPhone here, if I buy an Android, I don't have somebody showing up on my porch with a video camera. They're not trying to out me online as somebody who's cheats on their taxes or their wife. Exactly. They just, and they don't care what websites I visit. Exactly. Gotcha. Yeah, so I have a whole laundry list of concerning behaviors. I call it the byte model, which stands for behavior control as the B.

information control is the I, thought control is the T, and E is emotional control. And so you can go through those four areas, they overlap in some cases, but you can get a pretty quick snapshot of where on the influence continuum from healthy and ethical to destructive a group will be. Most of the cults that I've worked with in the last 43 years after being rescued from the moon cult myself were really. religious cults, political cults, therapy cults, cults of personality with a person controlling another person or a small group of other people. That's what you're in right now if you're listening to the show.

Now, a lot of people say they use that as a compliment, the cult of personality. Of course, I'm not really controlling anything. Well, but that's the whole point. I mean, it's a normal human thing to look to models, people who are heroes, people that are looked up to. as inspirational, that's healthy. Yeah, we should be so lucky to be considered that way, right? Well, I've watched a number of your shows. I think you're doing some really good work,

which is why I agreed to do this interview. Oh, I'm glad. I'm glad. Look, some cults are really obvious. When we watched, we talked before, Wild Wild Country, the documentary that you said wasn't really that great. About Rajneesh, that's been renamed as Oshow, told through the eyes of two former top officials who were both true believers and think that Rajneesh was an enlightened master, I think he was a malignant narcissist, destructive cult leader.

To me, but it also seemed like they cut out a lot of things and they made him look like a guy who just didn't quite know what was going on. He was just busy with this spiritual stuff. By the time I have 19 Rolls-Royces, you got to think something's wrong. I think it was 92 and one location in Oregon, Antelope, Oregon. But he was a sexual abuser and he was using hypnosis on people and they were blaming women who got pregnant and forcing them to have abortion. Oh, wow. That was not in the document.

Creamating, you know, remains of suspicious activities, wiretapping the entire compound. I can go on and on. Yeah. That wasn't in the documentary. No. They sort of like hinted it at it. kind of a few, maybe the wiretapping thing. But they only said, oh, they turned it to be wiretapping me.

They didn't say we're everyone. Yeah, so I've counseled a number of people who were involved with that group. And it was so extreme. Like in Puna, India, his original ashram, it was a sign, leave your mind with your shoes outside. Like, it was that overt. Oh, wow. And so if you were a Sanyasin and somebody came over to you and said,

Jordan, I want to fuck you. And you were like repulsed. Right. Maybe it was obese male, for example. And you didn't like it or didn't want to. The rap would be you are too attached to your ego. So you really need to submit to it. That is so.

But that was the culture of that cult. Right. Rape and breaking bones if you wanted to, if somebody reminded you of their per sexual. perpetrator and you wanted a whale on them with your fists that would happen in workshops. That's so crazy. Yeah, it was really bad. That's really bad.

Yeah, they make it look like kind of hippies that created a utopia. And then it got a little bit. They put a little pressure on the town, which wasn't right. And there was a little bit of craziness. But they left out a lot of the absolute ridiculousness that we're hearing about. Yeah, it was really. So I'm for spirituality. I'm for growth.

I'm for meditation. I'm for people practicing. love and non-egotism. Like he was an egomaniac. Yeah. He said he was greater than Jesus. Yeah. And Buddha.

Anyone who says that, Winning, one-ming. Yeah. And the burden is on them to prove it, not on you to disprove it, which is what I say to all my clients. It's like,

look, there are thousands of people walking around on the earth claiming to be Jesus or better or Buddha or Muhammad or whatever. What are they, How are they living? Mm-hmm. Right? And the real deal is always humility, compassion, kindness, charity, love.

Right. Right. 92 Rolls Royces was, I mean, we're talking about people who have vows of poverty that were in the biblical time. If you're going to go down that road and then someone to go, well, I need 92 rules of Royces. I mean, how many starving children does that feed? I think he was competing with Saibaba, who was like a, a nice. other god figure from India that had millions of followers, actually.

And he was doing phony magic tricks to convince people he was manifesting Rolexes with serial numbers out of the ether through his magical powers. Yeah, it's pretty sad. It is sad. And we have more casual exposure to cults than we probably think. I mean, look, obvious the KKK, Scientology, Wild Wild Country. but then we have other things like yoga cults and some kinds of therapy and personal growth and even certain martial arts I think and I was at a hotel I can't remember where now is this is a couple years ago I turned on the TV and on three channels was some guy dressed up in crazy garb sitting on 8,000 pillows and they're showing different live video streams from different Asian countries I think and they're all live streaming this guy who's just kind of moving. slowly and mumbling, and everyone's like crying.

And I asked a friend, who is that? And she goes, I don't know. So it wasn't a world leader that she would have known from her country. This wasn't somebody. She just goes, I don't know. My grandma watches that. And I went, oh, this is some kind of strange religious cult that probably is predominantly in Southeast Asia and has people streaming in from the Philippines and Malaysia and

Indonesia. Yeah. So we live in the age of. influence. You know, we've thought we're in the age of information. We passed through the industrial age. We're in the age of influence. And with digital, you know, means, people are able to take advantage of other people on large scales. And the universals are power, money, and sex is what they're after. Many of the cult leaders that I've dealt with are not just con artists who say, hey, I want to make money.

but they actually believe their delusions. Maybe they were in a cult. Maybe they were in Rajneesh left, never got counseling, never understood mind control, and got a revelation one day that they're enlightened. So now they set up shop. And the problem is epidemic. There's different kinds of cults that you outline in the book, cult mind control that you have many books, but the one I'm referring to is cult mind

control. And one is commercial, the other religious that seems to be the one that we most normally think of political, which you're doing some stuff maybe in the future that we can't talk about yet? Well, Lyndon LaRouche is one of the more famous political cult leaders, but I have been interviewed about Donald Trump, but I can't talk about at the moment. No problem. We tend to stay away from politics on the show just because you can, you're either a snowflake or

you're alt-right. There's no in-between apparently now, so I'm just going to choose to opt out of that whole thing. I'll get into politics when I, when I buy an. updated bulletproof vest and hire someone to take abuse from me on social media instead of answering it myself. But the self-help cults are the ones that are so much more insidious. And I've seen a lot of these lately, even I've gotten sort of duped into going to what you might call a leadership class. And I show up and there ain't nothing about leadership going on here. It's some guy from Mexico who's a charismatic speaker ripping open everyone's childhood.

wounds. Half the room's crying. The other half of the room is feeling some sort of weird shame imposed on him because they showed up two minutes late. You can't go to the bathroom. And if anybody goes, hey, I'm a surgeon and I'm on call while you're being uncoachable and they kick him out of the room and they make a big embarrassing show out of it. And then nobody wants to stand up and be the next person to be shamed in front of 300 strangers. You're describing the bite model. Yeah. Controlling people's behavior, emotion, thoughts. I found this incredibly strange. And what was even stranger was I was looking around the room and I went, okay, I'm not the only person that thinks that this is crazy, right? And so I'm trying to make eye contact with people and talk with them.

And, you know, I go up and I stand next to the surgeon and he gets kicked out in a few hours. And so then I'm like, crap, who else is there? And then some other woman stands up and goes, hey, this is day two. You said this ends at 10. We got out of here at three. I have kids. So I start sort of going up to her and I'm like, hey, so I'm not the only one that thinks this is weird, right? And then 20 minutes later, she's getting kicked out because she went to go to the bathroom without permission. And I'm losing my friends here left and right. And I just thought, am I crazy? I'm the crazy one. There's nobody else in here who seems to be willing to resist this. And the truth is, is that everybody is having doubts and having these thoughts, but they're suppressing them. And people,

unless you understand this frame of destructive mind control, social psychology, which I know, you're a student of unless you understand that frame and i suspect you were there not to work on your stuff but to just get the experience of what was being done to people yeah most people do not have the assertiveness to say excuse me why are you guilt tripping everybody why are using social psychology principles to manipulate people to get people to be obedient to you yeah and if you did you will be kicked out right oh yeah i i wanted to take notes and they said, hey, what are you writing down? I said, this is fascinating. And they said, you're not allowed to take note. Anything important, you'll feel it. And I'm, me as a,

yeah, that's a warning. Yeah, red flag, right? Because wait a minute. I'm going to, I'm an attorney. We write everything down. What do you mean if it's important? I'll say you're in the attorney. That would. Oh, yeah, no. They did, the disclaimer document that they gave us beforehand was 20 pages of you will name your first born child after this piano. I mean, there was no. And there was an NDA also. There was. There was. It couldn't disclose. Luckily, what I did was I struck everything out and then I drew circles in the signature

box and wrote, I do not agree in very messy cursive and then handed it in. Everyone should go to law school and learn that stuff. But even then, I think it would be like, well, you're under contract because you stayed and all this stuff. I was less worried about that, but it was absolutely ludicrous. And all of the employees, quote, unquote, were there for free. They were all, air quotes, volunteers. The only person who was getting paid was, I think, the guy on stage and maybe his assistant, but something tells me that that person was working for the benefit of his all-knowing guidance.

For the people who were working for free, they were getting more indoctrinated, as well as recruiting and indoctrinating others. It was incredible to watch because it really was, and I feel bad using this word, but it was genius in a way. It was evil genius. I mean, somebody would say, I'm late because of traffic, and they would get eviscerated in a way that actually made them cry. And I'd go, wow, that man is crying. So, and it wasn't just about them. I thought, why you spend so much time on this one person? It wasn't.

That was for the benefit of the other 299 people in the room. Exactly. And everybody who showed a shred of assertiveness was gone. And the example that really amazed me was at the end, they said, who wants to upgrade to the advanced class, which is next. week and twice the price and you have to take time off and all this stuff. Half the room, maybe three quarters of room gets up and leaves. Then he's talking to this room where there's all these empty seats. I'm surprised they'll let anyone leave.

Well, they, that's not genius if they really knew what they were doing. They went to go sign up in another room. Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry, they didn't leave the conference. They went to go give their money. Got it. So they're doing transactions. Then everybody else who was left. So they got the sheep going and then they working on the goats who were not ready to

understand that they have to come. commit to saving themselves on the planet. Right. If they don't do this, right. Their life is meaningless. It was basically that. Hey, you've already made it halfway. But it was so stereotypical.

Then everybody who was left, he said, oh, I don't want to have to shout. My voice hurts. Everyone move in to the middle. And then how many aren't signing up because you feel like you don't have the money or you can't get the time off work? And then a certain number of people raised their hands. And then they went to a different room where there were volunteers that were trained, essentially to handle that objection.

Oh, we'll help you negotiate with. your boss. Now you're getting negotiation lessons along with your spiritual BS. Well, they can sign up to be slave labor. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, we'll hire you. Join the C.org for a billion years. Yes. Commit the rest of your life here and all your future lifetimes, the Scientology, slave labor. It was just an exercise in social pressure. And then, of course, the fewer and fewer groups he was able to sort of whittle off of us for various objections, there were maybe 20 of us out of hundreds.

And he said, come up. Everyone sit in the front row. And then he would get down and lean in and go, what are you, why are you stopping yourself from signing up? And sure enough, like half of us went and went, well, okay. Because if you're going to be in my psychological space, I'll whip out my credit card. I mean, it was just like an exercise in weak-minded BS. And let me predict that they also gave a rap about how there's no such thing as a victim.

and that there's no such thing as an accident and that if bad things happened, you need to understand what your soul was trying to create this experience for yourself. Oh, that's so interesting. It wasn't that exact words, but I remember one of my friends, she was abused sexually by an uncle or something, and he said, what part did you play in that? And I was horrified because she was, I think, four or six when this happened. What part did you play in that? I mean, I wanted to punch somebody in the face.

Never did I want to punch somebody in the face so hard in my whole life. The back belief system is that you are God and you create your own reality. And if you think that, then you're like El Ron Hubbard, O.T. 15, presumably, where you're controlling matter, energy, space, and time. And you're beyond your body. And everything is your whims. Reality is just the creation of your whims. That's just not what reality is. But what it does for a lot of people being indoctrinated with this notion that there's no such thing as victimhood, where there's no such thing as coincidence, it takes away their ability to say, you've lied to me.

Right. You manipulated me. I did not know this was going to happen. Lack of informed consent to use lawyer language. Well, that's exactly what it was. And I'm going to keep my experience as minimal here because I don't want to, you're the expert. But what was strange for me was this was presented as a leadership course by another person who's a very big influencer now on Instagram. It's also got a podcast.

But it wasn't nothing of the sort. All the sort of learning games we played were all designed to make us feel stupid or weak or to take our critical thinking skills and sort of flush them down the toilet. and then say, oh, I'm not good at this. I got to look to this leader guy for support in this. And it was all sort of like tricky logic games that you couldn't win. So when I was first deprogram from the Mooneys in 1976 and started studying this seriously, this, meaning brainwashing mind control, I read a 1961 book called Courseries by Edgar Shine, who was one of the people with Robert J. Lifton and Margaret Singer and Lewis West. studying Chinese communist brainwashing of the 50s. Cool.

This was in the M.K. Ultra era of like everybody wanting to know, how do you control minds? Right. MK Ultra being the CIA program. Correct. The LSD hypnosis, shock, etc. Anyway, Edgar Schein used a model from Kurt Lewin, a change model where he talked about unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. Oh, this is interesting. Yes.

Well, it's what you were just describing. I'm just giving you the paradigm, the academic paradigm. So to become a leader, first you have to take the person and destroy them. Break them completely down to nothing. That's the unfreezing. So you can overload the person with too much information, with emotionally upsetting material, to all kinds of group dynamics, sleep deprivation is always a typical thing. Is that why these things go to?

2 a.m. Oh, we just have so much context. Exactly. We're starting at five, though. So, I mean, we need seven to nine hours of sleep to function optimally, critically, with our frontal cortex where we have critical thinking. And if you sleep-deprived people, they're not going to be clear-minded, period. Anyway, so break people down, unfreeze them. Then change is the indoctrination of the new beliefs, the beliefs in the image of the leadership of the cult. And then you refreeze that new identity that's in the image of the cult.

So that's the leadership training is that they don't want you to be you. They want you to be him or her in that cloned image, which in if, are you familiar with the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-5? Kind of. I mean, I know what it is. Anyway, it's a book of listings of so-called mental illnesses or whatever, mostly for insurance purposes. I was just teaching this at a human trafficking conference in Texas. There is a category 300.15 that's a dissociative disorder.

And it explicitly talks about brainwashing, thought reform, coercive persuasion, as in cults, sex. And so what we're talking about with mind control is a creation of a pseudo-self that suppresses your real self. That when I was in the Moonies and I was a leader in the Moonies, I thought I was being my true self. But I was really being a small Sun Myung Moon, thinking like him, feeling like him, walking like him, talking like him. So it's kind of what would cult leader do? How would they behave? Because they're the superior leader, right? They're geniuses and they have all this money and power and et cetera.

But it's taking people away from their authentic selves. It's taking people and telling them not to trust their own judgment, their own thoughts, their own feelings. It's taking people away from their own free will. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Steve Hassan. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit jordan harbinger.com slash deals.

Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Steve Hassan. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free.

It just means you get all the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Steve Hassan. What is cult recruitment like now? Because you wrote, people don't join cults, they're recruited. There's a subtle distinction there.

Why is that important? It's hugely important. I guess I want to take a minute and just explain another academic idea called the fundamental attribution error. Oh, yeah. It's the single most important principle of social psychology. It's a bias that people carry with them when they're trying to understand other people's behavior.

They over attribute personality variables. individual variables, and they underestimate the social, environmental, or contextual pressures. So why do people join cult? Well, you must have been looking for a father figure. You must have been weak. You must have been, you know, this, that, as opposed to my girlfriend dumped me, true story. Three women were flirting with me at Queens College cafeteria lying their faces off and inviting me to a dinner. Right.

Right. So they didn't say, hi, we bow to an altar with Moon's picture on it. We think he's the greatest man in human history. Drop out of college, quit your job. You know, Moon will assign you to your perfect mate, and you will not have sex from four years, and he'll tell you when you can. Would I have joined? No, I would imagine no guy in college would have ever done that.

So I don't know anyone who says, yeah, sign me up for exploitation, vulnerability, cutting me off from my own friends, family. I was a creative writing major. Take all your original poetry and throw it in the garbage. Right. I remember you threw away like 400 pieces of writing. All my body of work I threw out to demonstrate my love of God and my commitment to the group.

So people do not join destructive cults, but they get lured. And so the Mooney's have, I have. a list on my website of 71 pages single spaced of different names of front groups, of the Mooneys, depending on whatever interest you might find. And these days with Google and search engine manipulation and burying bad information and such, people really need to understand that if something's legitimate, it needs to stand up to scrutiny and the last thing they want to do is rush into getting involved, going to a place, giving money without doing really thorough independent investigation.

And I like to think reading my books or looking at some of my free videos on freedom of mind.com will give people a consumer's mindset of what questions to ask. Well, we'll go down that road in a bit because I'm curious and I want to put them in the worksheet. We do a worksheet for every episode. I want to throw this in the worksheet. but we see now cults are more active online social media youtube um Skype even people are asking for money through PayPal I mean it's no longer show up at this basement YMCA or the VFW on Friday

this is like you can be in a there's a there's someone online that is allegedly I think I have to say doing cults her name is teal swan have you ever heard of this person I certainly how yeah and she presumably trains people to help people with psychiatric illnesses and suicidality. Very dangerous person. I actually was interviewed for a podcast about her. Oh, really? I think I, I think that's where I found out about her as well. It was a podcast. I can't remember the name, but it was done by that journalist who was very good, creative. Honestly, I can't remember either. Yeah. But what I do want to say, and people really need to listen to this, when I was a recruiter for the Mooney's in the 70s, I was dependent on asking the person questions to find out everything about their background,

or I was dependent on talking to friends of theirs to gather data. Now you can go on the dark web if somebody wants to get you and find out all kinds of things about your interests, your likes. Every time you like something on Facebook, that data is available for purchase, presumably, on the dark web. And if people want to manipulate you, there are formulas for understanding what's going to motivate you, what's going to be your weak spots, wear your buttons, what kind of attractions do you have? And it's such a different and AI is being employed. And a lot of the bad groups have the money to use AI faculties. Absolutely.

The data is not only available for purchase something. the dark web, I think you can get personality profiles. I'm sure they're quote unquote anonymized, but you can easily, if you know what you're doing, find this. And intelligence agencies use this to find out about people. So if intelligence agencies are doing it, then, of course, other people, commercial groups can buy this and use it to target you. What they do is they target these anonymized audiences with ads just like you would if you were selling a blanket or a mattress. And then you just find vulnerable people online that want to take your stupid self-help cult seminar or something, and then suddenly you've got a list of leads that would have taken you

years to generate with on-campus recruiting or anything like that. And we'll link to that podcast that talks about Teal Swan and the show notes. We'll find it. It's not that hard. My wife probably knows what it is. That was particularly troubling. And of course, now what's also troubling to me is the fact that right now, I would imagine almost the majority. And I know this because I was one of those people and I shouldn't even say was am one of those people who says I'm not going to fall for this I'm smart I listen to Jordan show I have good critical thinking skills I'm a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher I am not going to fall for this BS you come and tell me that this Korean guy is the Messiah and I'm going to go to Korea and work in this fake I mean come on stephen this is

ridiculous you're not and that's what I said at age 19 right I bicycle cross-country when I was 16. I've worked in my father's hardware store. I'm an extra honors student. I skipped eighth grade. No one's going to manipulate me. And the Mooney's used that line on me. Sure. Hey, Steve, like, you have a self-confidence problem? You think somehow we're going to make you believe something that you're not ready to believe? No, of course not. Ha. Yeah. Yeah. We only want smart people in our health. Right? Ha. So I want to add a whole other dimension, which I don't know if you were prepared for, but it's really important, two things. Surprise me.

So there was a six-week trial that ended a few weeks ago in New York City of Keith Ranari, head of a cult called Nexium. Right. He was that podcast, too. Convicted on all counts of conspiracy, racketeering, sex trafficking, and voluntary servitude, on and on and on. Two billionaire heiasts, the Bromfman's, Allison Mack, the actress was in that group, pled guilty. And Lauren Salzman, excuse me, Nancy Salzman, Lauren's mother was trained in something called neurolinguistic program. NLP, which was created by John Grindr and Richard Bandler. I was actually trained in NLP in 1981 and 81 by both of them and the founder.

They developed that based on the work of psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who was one of the MK Ultra experts that the CIA was going to to understand covert hypnotic techniques. Tony Robbins, who does a lot of large group awareness trainings, was trained in NLP. He doesn't use that term. Apparently he had a financial arrangement with Grinder and Bandler, but that's what he's basically teaching.

And then there are websites. of people who are going to teach you how to have covert hypnosis for sex. That's funny because I know exactly who you're talking about. I'm not going to mention their names because I don't even want people to find it. But spoiler alert, it's ridiculous. And for this sex stuff, it would probably, anybody who would fall for that particular type of hypnosis, I think, probably is not the type of person you would want in your life. But you'd also be surprised.

So I wrote a blog. about a divorce attorney in Ohio who is using covert hypnosis and sexually abusing his female clients and giving them amnesia so they couldn't even report the crime. Unbelievable. Until he did it to the wrong woman who wound up recording her molestation, bringing the tape and the police did a sting, and he had recordings of all of his molestations, and he's in jail. So there are levels of expertise regarding hypnosis and for people to say, no, it's a matter of intelligence. Right.

It's not a matter of intelligence. And people who understand the techniques and the methods are going to have a way to protect themselves. And people who think they're invulnerable are incredibly vulnerable. The person I'm thinking of is a very strange person that has, honestly, is one of the weird. You wouldn't even get around some of these people naturally. You have to find them in their natural environment, if you will, where they're on a stage and they already have status. Because if you meet them face to face in normal scenarios, they're actually pretty low. A lot of them are pretty low status, not that charismatic or interesting.

Right. So that's probably what attracts them to this power struggle in the first place. But it's very akin, and I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far. It's very akin to the online influence space where people are showing this highlight, real, oh, I made $100 million by the time I was 30 and then you kind of go, who was this person four years ago? And it's the biggest dork you could possibly point out of a crowd. And you go, ah, you wanted status and power.

You've invented a mythology about yourself. You're using advertising to spread that mythology about yourself on Instagram. You've found a couple other guys and gals that are doing this. You pair up and you promote one another to give each other legitimacy. And here we are suddenly with a stadium full of 2,000 morons. and perfectly smart people who got suckered into it by their stupid friends. And now you find yourself signing up for their drop shipping or their Amazon business programs so that you can be the next rich, influential 20-year-old with no job or whatever.

Right. No, it is sadly a growth business because there are so many people who are frustrated, feeling hopeless, about the climate situation, about political institutions and leadership, about the economy. People want to have some hope. And so they're going to be more susceptible and look outside,

especially to family or friends who have been suckered in themselves. And people will often, because it's a family friend or a family member or a friend that says, please, Jordan, check this out because this has really been wonderful for me. And you care about them and you have a curiosity. But unless you have the skill set that you have or I have and you don't, and you do understand the techniques that are being done systematically, we're human beings, especially if we're sleep deprived.

Exactly. And then suddenly you find yourself at a three-day firewalking. baloney seminar and you're looking around and going, why are all of these other smart business people clapping their hands and jumping up and down? What planet am I on? And that's why I don't last I went to something like that that I thought would be reputable. I don't want to mention the person's name because I'm sure they're litigious as heck. And I'm looking around going, I'm here with a bunch of smart entrepreneurs and we're all jumping up and jumping around. I'm not learning anything. I don't need dancing lessons. I came here to learn. I don't want to clap and run around. I don't

want to, you know, pretend him a fighter. I don't want to walk on hot coals at 2 a.m. This is ridiculous. Why am I in a stadium? And I just couldn't wrap my head around it. But sure, my wife's cousin, she couldn't get enough of it, you know, and she's not a dumb person. Ironically, what you wrote about in the book was that the most, the type of person that's not susceptible or less susceptible to being recruited by a cult is somebody who just escaped from one. Maybe.

Maybe. Or they could be more vulnerable. because people do cult hop. But the bottom line is education. If you really have a clarity in your mind, and I think you're going to add this to your notes, the influence continuum of ethical influence to unethical with particular themes,

and then the byte model with the list of the characteristics of destructive mind controllers, you can have a frame to go, uh-huh. And ethical groups don't do these things and unethical ones do do these things. And why would you want to pay or put your body or spend your time in an ethical, unhealthy environment? I don't think you would. I found that a lot of people who join these also want to run their own. It kind of goes in line with the whole influencer mentality.

Oh, I'm an influencer in the fitness space. I'm going to follow an influencer in the finance space. and he's following an influencer in the business. I mean, it's just, it's sort of this weird matroshka, the Russian dolls. You open up one and you find the person that they're following, and then that person looks really successful, and then there's another person that they're following. And it's like all roads lead back to some of these kind of OG guys who and some are dead now.

And then the one after that just picks up the mantle and keeps going. Yeah. And so again, I come back to the idea of the dual identity, and people are either really being authentically them. versus being a clone of somebody else. And the danger with modeling other people and thinking that you need to be, think like them and feel like them and walk like them and talk like them is that it's, that's not who you are. That's who they are. Or at least that's a persona that they're projecting as well.

You hinted at this before. Are cults more popular now or is it just that we're more aware of them because of the internet and the fact that they can target us literally? on Facebook and Instagram. I would say that destructive cults are everywhere and they're more of them because of all the breakdown of society's institutions of faith that leaders know what they're doing and are leading the world in a right direction. Anyone who is anti-science and anti-climate change science is going to kill the rest of us if we allow them to dictate policy.

It's to the point of absurdity that we're allowing lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry to control the rest of what's happening on the planet. And I'm very happy that younger people are getting activists about this and understanding. Science isn't perfect. You know, the beauty about the scientific method is you have a hypothesis that needs to be tested and is thrown aside when there's a better hypothesis. It's a search for truth, and it's a community-based search for truth, because people are trying to replicate your studies, et cetera.

And one of the things that I've researched in the last year, as I've been preparing a new book, is something very important that you will probably want to know more about and maybe do a podcast on. It's called Fourth Generation Warfare. Okay. Ever hear of it? No.

It's a Psiops theory developed in the 80s by William Lynde and other military strategists. But unlike trying to convince the other side that your side is the right one or their side is the wrong one, it's an assault on truth itself. It's a delegitimization of any leader or any institution. It's a deliberate disinformation campaign. Overload campaign to make people numb, to make people powerless, to make people want to give up so that an authoritarian leader with a very confident voice, trust me, I've got this. I can tell you what needs to happen that people will, because they're back in their childhood

brain and their amygdala being stimulated by phobias, will follow a dictator and vote. vote for dictatorships. It's interesting. I've got a friend who will simultaneously argue that there's a, for example, a certain leader is really, really got some good answers. He's cutting through all the BS. You know, I'm going to vote for him. He's going to win the election.

And then we'll also say, and he's a genius manipulator. And he's manipulating all these people. And I'm going, you are saying all of the things that he wants you to believe. and you're saying he's a genius manipulator, but you're saying that you like him for different reasons. That is a little suspicious to me when someone says, if I were to say, you know, this person, this is an abusive person, they are a master manipulator,

and then someone goes, what do you do tonight? And I go, oh, I'm hanging out with so-and-so, the same person. Well, wait a minute. Serial abuser of women. Right. What do you mean you're hanging out? Why would you do that? Oh, well, I, since I see them for what they are,

he's not it, she's not a danger to me, he's not a danger to me. That is the height of self-delusion. It is. And to quote another academic concept, cognitive dissonance theory, Leon Fessinger came up with this, studying a UFO cult that was prophesying a spaceship coming to a particular mountain on a particular night. And he and his students were predicting that when the spaceship didn't come, people would get disillusioned and leave.

only they believed more when the spaceship didn't come. And he was like trying to figure this out. And what he came up with is we have thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but humans want to be congruent. If we do an extreme behavior, our thoughts and our feelings are going to shift to justify the behavior. Right. So when the leader said, because of your faith, the world was saved. They didn't need to evacuate us.

Right. You're going to go, yeah, I sold my house, I quit my job, but I saved the planet. Right. It was all worth it. The narrative, right? But I want to just quote James Comey, if I may. You may. It was a beautiful description of cognitive dissonance in action.

He said, when you're sitting at a room and the guy at the head of the table is saying lie after lie after lie. And you're sitting there going, that's a lie, that's a lie, that's a lie. But you don't call him out on it and you don't get up and walk out, but you continue to sit there. He said it bends your soul. Oh, that's interesting. Because you're, because of cognitive dissonance, since I'm still sitting here, even though I know that he's lying, I'm sitting here because I must believe or like something else or find him credible in some other way. Because here I am. Why else would I sit here and listen to this BS?

I'll be fired, is the obvious answer. was, but it's a very important window into why you want your friends not to hang out with the perpetrating person, because by your behavior of hanging out, you have to adjust and rationalize and justify why it's okay to do that. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Steve Hassan. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air.

To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Steve Hassan. Going back to the type of person that gets recruited into a cult, I found that, of course, look, somebody who's feeling wounded, they just got down, they divorced, broken up with financial setbacks, not doing well at school or work, maybe some bad physical

health. That's also, you know, that seems obvious. However, there's also doctors and lawyer. I mean, the thing I was in, it wasn't just a bunch of dumbasses that upgraded to the advanced course. There were people there where I said, you have a $10 million of your business. The hell are you doing here? How do you not see that this is manipulation? One thing I've learned and really has been highlighted in the past like three years or so is that critical thinking skills and self-awareness, cognitive bias, knowledge of cognitive distance, that seems to be, it's like cancer. It affects everybody on every stratum of social and economic scale. It does not seem to matter if someone is an attorney or a doctor or they work at

Chipotle and they're 16 years old. They seem equally or at least universally susceptible to this. And me walking out of that BS leadership course, the person next to me was, I think she was a, she was from El Salvador. And I want to say she was like a daycare person. She and I were like, I mean, her English was shaky. And she was going, I don't like this. And I was thinking, me neither. And we left a room full of surgeons and doctors and other people that should have, in my opinion at that time, freaking known better. Right.

And didn't. Right. But the social proof aspect of very accomplished, wealthy, you know, highly educated people, that was one of the lures of my first workshop in the Mooney's. Oh, he's from Yale. He's from Princeton. You know, he's a doctor. There must be something here because I wasn't seeing it for the first day and a half of the Mooney workshop. Like, this seems childish to me.

It was what I was thinking. How did you get recruited? Let's talk about the Moon Cult that you were in. The reason you're an expert in this is because you've seen it firsthand. I'd love to hear a little bit about how they indoctrinated you in the beginning because I want people to listen and go, wait a minute, this is happening to me right now, or this is what my brother is telling me is he's doing at college, or this is that weird thing my friend was into that didn't seem right to me.

Yeah. So, I mean, the truth is the 70s, it was a different reality than exists today because there was no information about the Mooneys. You couldn't Google it. There wasn't information about cults per se or how they work. However, the same kinds of principles that the Chinese communist use in the 50s, and they're using today and over a million citizens of China, particularly Muslims, Christians, and others, is social psychology.

And understanding that people, people are meaning-making organisms. For me, I was so lied to about what the workshop was as we were driving into the gates of the multi-million dollar estate in Tarrytown. And I was told, oh, this weekend, we're going to have a joint workshop with the Unification Church. I said, what are you talking about? I'm Jewish.

What church? What workshop? You didn't tell me anything about a work. What did they tell you it was? these women who were invited you. We're all going to go away and have a good time this weekend. So you're thinking, we're hanging out. I'm going to hang out with these cute.

I thought I was going to get lucky. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that was what I thought. I would do. I would have jumped in the house. And I said, what are you talking about, a workshop and church? I'm Jewish. And they're like, Steve, and this is a classic mind controller thing, is they take the objection

and they turn it around on you. What's the matter, Steve? Are you close-minded? Do you have like a problem with being with Christians? Oh, right. So like, yeah, I'm not racist. Yeah. But the frame of you lied to me.

Like anyone who's lying to me that wants to be my friend, I don't want to be their friend. They're not trustworthy. Like I want to hang out with people that I can count on. And so the lie got turned around emotionally. And I didn't have a cell phone way too early for cell phones. It was snowing. outside. I'm like, I want to go back now, like, drive, turn the van around and drive me home. That was another mistake. I should have taken my own car. Oh, yeah. You were at the mercy.

The logistics, yeah. Oh, it's not going back. It'll go in the morning. Just, you know, chill out. We'll go in. We'll have a fireplace. We're going to, you know, get to know each other. And you will, you can leave in the morning. And I bought into that instead of just walking out onto the street in the snow. Nicole, waiting to hitchhike. Please get me out. But I didn't understand the danger I was in again. And then in the morning came. I hadn't slept all night because the noise is in the room.

And then where's the van? I'm ready to leave. Oh, it left already. Sorry. So it's really a lot of manipulation and handling and me not being assertive to demand I'm exiting. Sure. Wow. And different people coming over to talk with me, well, let's go have breakfast.

We're going to go outside and have some sports for a few minutes. So, and me not wanting to be a pain in the ass. Again, I was curious why everybody was so happy and so into this and so excited. And the pitch also was that this was a student movement that was going to make a difference. and make the world a better place. Right. And culturally, I was raised as a Jew in a concept called Tikunalam, that you want to repair the world. You want to contribute and make the world a little bit better than the world that you came into.

So that was a vulnerability of mine as well. The deprogramming that you do when you help other people get out of cults, is this something that you went through yourself at some point? So deprogramming, the term was coined by Ted Patrick. In the early 70s, it was involving almost by force holding someone against their will and kind of a very confrontative. Like, Jordan, wake up, you know, Moon is not the Messiah, dude. Like, let me tell you why. He's not the Messiah. It was like a hardcore intervention.

It was very, very hardcore. That's how it started with me. That was not going to work. my father cried at one point saying, you know, Steve, you dropped out of school, you quit your job, you donated your bank account, you got involved with a controversial group, your mom and I are worried about you. Oh, don't worry about it. I'm not brainwashed.

I'm never been happier. He's like, just prove it. Just like sit and talk with these people and listen and question. And if you want to go back, I'll drive you. you there, but at least we'll be able to sleep at night knowing we did the responsible thing. And my father was not a crier, and tears were coming down, and he touched the real me. I can tell that he was really upset for me, even though I was good.

I knew that I was good. I was following God's will. So it became voluntary. And the people who were involved with my deprogramming, the woman I had recruited into the moonies and had gotten out. So I had a personal emotional connection with her where I trusted her and liked her. But to get to your question, deprogramming has evolved over the decades tremendously. It first of all, when I got out and did deprogramming, judges were granting ex parte conservatorships to families for a week.

What does that mean? It means parents would go before a judge and say, Your Honor, my, my, my, my family. My 19-year-old son is a victim of artful and designing people. He's in a cult, and we believe he doesn't understand the nature of the group or the psychological forces on him. We would like permission to have custody for one week to expose him to information about brainwashing and mind control, about theology and former members. And the judge would say, bring him back in a week.

But he would grant a piece of paper that would empower the parents to hide. some sheriffs, go to the cult center and escort them to the deprogramming. Holy cow. So I did cases like that, and they worked. Wow. But at the point that it was illegal, I said, I'm not doing this anymore. Right. But I still cared, and I wanted to help people get out.

And as I was learning NLP and learning how to model cult mind control and what worked in my deprogramming, what were the thought processes and emotional experiences that I had to go through to wake up. I developed a voluntary intervention model that I called exit counseling. And then when the Internet happened, that and my book came out combating cult mind control in 1988. A lot of the cult leaders read my book. Sure. And so they weren't allowing people to go home by themselves. and there was a much higher level of monitoring.

So what I've evolved it to is something called the strategic interactive approach, which, to summarize, it's an ethical counter-influence campaign. But instead of trying to indoctrinate someone to be dependent and obedient, it's geared towards empowering them to think for themselves and feel for themselves and make their own independent evaluation. Because you're thinking the authentic self that's still there underneath the cult self does want to get out. They can still make decisions. They've been programmed to shut that down. Yeah. And being in a mind control cult is horrible on a very fundamental human way where you can't say, you know what, I'm tired. I need to sleep a few extra hours.

Or, you know what, I want a day off. Like I didn't have a day off. What was your wake-up call? You had a pretty severe... I slept three to four hours a night. I worked 18 to 21 hours a day, seven days a week. I was a labor trafficking victim, basically, because the definition of trafficking is fraud, force, or coercion. So that can involve labor or sex fraud force and coercion.

But I was kept busy all the time. And part of my manipulation was, Steve, you're a leader. like God wants you to run a country one day. How flattering. And they even said you should think what country you would like to run to me when I was 21 years old. Which fantasize about what you're going to do later when all of those horrible crap stops and you're in charge of Germany. But I thought Australia would be a good country to run because I'd have my own continent. I honestly had that thought.

I'm embarrassed to say. Australia is good. I would, I had no ambitions to be a politician or to have power. I was writing poetry. I want to be English professor. Right. Before that. But the strategic interactive approach says essentially that asking good questions in a respectful, thoughtful, caring way.

Like Jordan, I really like you. I really want to understand how you were before and how you are now. It seems different. Like, tell me about your evolution. Tell me what it was that they were teaching you that seemed to make a difference. But it makes you go inside and remember. Like, if someone has not been thinking about the lie. Like, when you first met the women at the cafeteria of Queens College, what did they say?

Did they say we are members of the Unification Church and we believe Samyo Moon is the Messiah? I would have said, no. In fact, I asked them if they were part of religion. group and they looked me straight in the eye and said no right so you start going back in time in your head and going oh i was lied to here here here here here here and now i'm doing this and now i'm lying to people to get people in right and i believe in god and i teach because they have a book called the divine principle we teach that god is a god of truth so i'm teaching that god is a god of truth we're agents of god but we're lying because everyone's in satan's world

That's the rap. That's the rhetoric, yeah. But it does not compute. Like, how are we going to build a perfect world based on lies and mind control? Like, even if we took over the world, how would that work? And it wasn't until I was out of the cult for four years, where, for example, I remembered an experience with Moon directly where he said, you know, when we take power in America, we'll amend the Constitution and make it a capital offense for people to have sex outside.

of the Unification Church marriages. Wow. And I went, yes, father. And I was educated about the Holocaust. Right. I was educated. I read books like Animal Farm in 1984 before I was in the cult. But you suppress all of these things that do not compute to the narrative of what the

ideal you want to believe the group is doing. So my whole approach is not. based on force, coercion. It's on love, questioning, curiosity, and that people should make their own decisions. If you are happy and want to stay in the group and recruit and work for nothing, that's your choice. But do it with your eyes open,

understanding what coercion is, understanding what mind control is, et cetera. And it works because people don't want to be slaves. That is so interesting. There's different elements of mind control. I want to, before we get into those, though, you list multi-level marketing as a commercial cult. And I'm wondering, does that water down the definition at all? Because these are so, they're so popular now.

And I say all the time, don't sign up for this is MLM. That's an MLM. And people who, first of all, a lot of people don't even seem to know what that is. They don't seem to understand it. Other people go, well, this is different. And these are the same people that have been ripped off by three other. stupid as product things in the past. Right. And Betsy DeVos made her money, family money in Amway. Right. And she's in charge of education and wants to dismantle education in the United States and put in

religious education instead. So I want to recommend Robert Fitzpatrick cites pyramid scheme alert.org. Robert was on my show. Oh, you did. Eight years ago. Okay. No, it was so long ago. Time to have them on again because they are trying to pass a law making pyramid scheme. seems legal in the United States under the current administration. So the bottom line is it's the same bite model stuff, the deceptive recruitment, you know, and believe 100% and listen to the tapes, go to the meetings, don't say anything negative. You can only say something negative to your upline, which is totally information control. And getting people to do incremental commitments, buying people.

products and such. And again, cognitive dissonance theory kicks in. Sure. The Lewin model, the unfreezing, changing, refreezing. And people are made to feel like there's something wrong with them, that they're not making all the money. Because, say, they have the models. They have the yachts and the Rolex watches, and you're losing money. So you need to go inside and figure out why you're not, what's sabotaging you inside of your mind.

you know, or or in the religious multi-level marketing groups, because Utah is the biggest state in the United States from multi-level marketing. You have to pray more. You have to confess more. I met a Mormon guy the other day from Utah, and I was asked, I asked him about this. I said, you know, what's up with MLMs and Mormons, no offense? And he goes, no, none taken. These are a plague. Those of us that get it, we can't even talk our friends out of it because it's, and he's, he told me, this is kind of controversial. but what he said is, I think our, he's Mormon and he's conservative, so take it in the contact. He said, I think our women are bored and they need something to do.

But there's something to that. If you're bored in your home and you feel purposeless, your kids are a little older and they're not calling free every five minutes, sure, you want to start contributing to the family and to the house. So, yeah, you start selling something that looks as an obvious. Women empowerment model. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that, of course, but they start selling shakes and they're

recruiting their social circle and Mormons are really, generally, really lovely people that have really wide social circles that are really tight. So it's a really easy way for them to go to their church and recruit a bunch of other people that are going to trust and like them because they grew up together or whatever. And it becomes more dangerous because you see people starting to pollute their own church, their own family groups with this in irreparable ways. And I was watching a documentary on MLM and I think it was on, I think it was called betting on zero. And you see this. I wrote a blog about it. I almost, I'm just sort of, I'm just sort of, I'm just sort of, I'm choken up at this point because this Hispanic woman said this she was supposed to be my friend right

this woman was ruining her relationships with friends to make i don't know 13 000 bucks i mean it's just not worth the money right and she didn't get to keep that 13 000 and went straight to her upline i didn't know you couldn't say negative things to the people you recruit you're only allowed to tell the people that have recruited you yeah only yes because and and every mind control cult does not want you seeing anything negative against the leader the doctrine or the policy So that's part of the information control, right? Yeah. Healthy organizations, you want to hear criticisms.

You want to hear feedback of if the leader, you know, said something wrong, bad decision or something. You want to call the leader out and say, hey, we trusted you. You did this wrong. Right. You want a leader. It goes, you're right. I screwed up. We can do better.

I apologize. And you want that kind of responsive dynamic organization. I did want to mention Warren Jeffs, who in jail for the fundamentalist Latter-day Saints, he had 74 wives, and God knows how many children. He was marrying a 10-year-old girls. Oh, so. And this was a, this is, they felt the mainline Mormon church was taken over by Satan because they were abandoning polygamy. Right. Right.

Right. Because they wanted statehood. So he's just a pedophile, yeah. Right. But then when I started counseling people out of that group, I started hearing from former Mormons. And I was actually invited to a convention of ex-mainstream Mormons who wanted to educate me about their church. And I proceeded to teach about the bite model. It's actually on their website on YouTube, I should say, my talk.

And 250x Mormons were agreeing with the Mormons. And then there was a fellow who spoke right after me, who had. been a professor at one of their institutes, their training institutes at BYU and other places. And the title of his talk was lying for the Lord, deception as a management tool of the LDS Church. And he proceeded to talk about the lies of Joseph Smith all the way to a secret recording he made with his boss, where he's saying to his boss, so you're telling me I have to lie to my students in order to keep my job. and the boss said, yes, that's correct. If you teach them the history of the Mormon church, the accurate history, then you're fired.

And he said, I quit. Wow. And when I heard that, I was like, that really resonates with the Moonies and Hubbard and a lot of other cults. Wow. How do cult leaders even come up with all this mind control stuff, right? Because look, when somebody says, this old Korean guy is not the Messiah, and if somebody says that to you, you're supposed to sing holy songs and la la your way through the negative talk i mean how that seems pretty basic but some of this is really advanced manipulation over time one thing that i went through with that

stupid self-help seminar that i went to is there was a guy who was being he was probably a new yorker or something he was very vocal and very critical and then they they they he was just on the borderline of getting kind of kicked out but i think they wanted to rope him in because he had some people that kind of agreed with them here and there it's like day two and so they said, oh, well, you know what, let's do something different. I was going to do this, this drill, but now I want to do another drill. And it was like, everyone stand on the side and pick one person that you think is unattractive and negative. And everyone just walked over to this guy and he's got everyone staring at him. That we're supposed to stare at that person. So we're staring at that person. And this guy's like, well, what did I do? And then he's like, see, this is how you're perceived by others. That guy didn't say much for the rest of the weekend. Yeah, I bet. It was very, and it was obvious that that drill wasn't just the next thing we were going to do. It was a drill that he kept the leader kept in his back pocket to go, when somebody's acting up and kicking them out would make me look bad because they've gotten a few people to nod at an agreement.

We have to absolutely cut him off at the knees, and this is a drill that will do that. And you see self-help people using these bullying drills where, you know, and I'm going to throw Tony Robbins under the bus on this one. There was a time where he said some, a woman stood up and said something about the, the women's movement, the Me Too movement. And he said, oh, this is a victimhood thing. And he took a lot of shit for that, okay. But what he did in the moment, as he should. But what he did in the moment was he said, put your hand out against mine.

And then he started pushing her forward. And he's like six foot seven and she's like five foot five. And then he said, why are you pushing against me? See, you're wired to resist. And it's like, you could have illustrated that point right up. next to her you could have just said so what you wanted to do was show 11,000 people and make her know that 11,000 people or 8,000 people were watching her get pushed by you physically and make her wrong in a very dramatic way this is a drill that I've seen him do before with

other people when they resist him and I've seen other people do the exact same thing in these self-help groups these are drills that are not there to help everyone learn something they are drills that are designed to manipulate somebody no I couldn't agree more. I'm not a fan of Tony Robbins. We could talk for weeks, I have a feeling, but there's two comments I want to, different directions. I'll do them quickly. You asked me, how do people learn about this stuff? Yeah, how do the cult leaders even come up with it? Because there's no manual for this besides maybe a book. So, yeah, unfortunately, that was a negative side effect of my book coming out is that it was teaching people how cults operate and

could be used for nefarious purposes. But what I want to say first is that what I learned when I got out of the group and really dove deep into the whole world of mind control, I mentioned M.K. Ultra. Post-World War II, Korean War, Chinese Communist Brainwashed, brainwashing. South Korea was very unstable. North Korea is a version of what it is today, a totalitarian dictatorship, total mind control. And some people in military intelligence in the United States decided,

well, the North Koreans are brainwashing. We need to help create a program in South Korea to stabilize the regime. They taught the South Korean. president, you need to set up a Korean CIA, we'll help you, and we'll teach you. And they set up a reeducation program for dissidents in South Korea. And they decided to use a front person. So it was not looking like a government operation. And it was the Mooneys that was chosen to do that.

Wow. So this started as a counterbalance to Kim Il-Sung-Sung-Nor-Exactly. And the Moonies had, nobody knows why. Why or how the patents for manufacturing M16 rifles and other American military hardware, why? Because America was leaving Vietnam. It was still the height of the Cold War. We have to stop the commies. And then somebody said, let's bring the Moonies to the United States and set up counter communist programs on college campuses.

And that's where I got recruited. So this started off as a Cold War thing. just kind of went. Correct. And then I was sent with Moonies to fast for Nixon during Watergate because God loves Nixon and God wants Nixon. But the U.S. government has never acknowledged the existence of these things. They don't want to talk about it even during Jonestown where Congressman Ryan was assassinated. There was an entire Korea Gate investigation. George Sr. Bush was the head of the CIA during the operations that I was just describing. So I found this all out after I got out of the group, right?

Yeah. But in the meantime, groups are being set up to do political purposes. Not only by the U.S., Russia, China, setting up front groups, because then they can gather intel, they can recruit and indoctrinate people. So there's a whole political side to this. But then the other answer is that people who are in, In a mind control, let's say someone's raised in a destructive family system. Father's authoritarian, beats the crap out of the kids, wants obedience.

They're learning mind control techniques in that context experientially, right? Yeah. Or take someone who's in Osho, in Rajneesh, or someone who's in Scientology and leaves and goes, you know, I can take these techniques and use them. Jack Rosenberg, who sets up Est and landmark forum. What I took was an offshoot of that. Which morphs into many splinter groups because people were trained in the forum and then they go, well, why don't I do my own version of this?

I'd like to make the money instead. So there's this victim victimizer effect where there's more and more of these smaller groups. The other comment I wanted to say about staring is, So in Scientology, do you know about the TRs? The training routines? No. Very briefly, they are a set of graduated exercises. They tell someone, we're going to teach you how to communicate, Jordan.

Step one is putting your hands flat on your knees, closing your eyes and breathing and just being there. And the Scientologist will tell you when you've reached. that state of being there, which when I demonstrate it to my colleagues at the International Society of Hypnosis, they go, oh, that's hypnosis. And I'm like, yeah, that's right. That's step one. When you pass that, then you sit knee to knee to a Scientologist and you stare in their eyes and you don't move.

To what end? Hypnosis. For minutes, minutes, many minutes, sometimes hours. You can't not go into a trans state if you freeze. The eyes are meant to scan. If you focus on a flame, if you focus on a mantra, you're directing your mind. You're not thinking analytically. You go into a zone where you're more suggestible to indoctrination.

Step three, and then I'll stop in Scientologies, TR's is you stare and the science. Scientologist tries to get you to respond. Tells you a bad joke. See, flunk. You just moved your head. Why? Flunk. Because they're training obedience.

Oh, God, I would be honest. And people spend days until they can pass. Why? Because in our culture, we're trained. We want to be the best. We want to succeed. We want to graduate the course. We don't want to be a failure.

Yeah. But people are groomed and indoctrinated into hypnotic states where they're then indoctrinated with Hubbard's weird crap. Yeah. There's so many interesting elements of this where you even mentioned that the real self when you're in a cult, your authentic self that's buried underneath this cult identity will start having medical issues, nightmares to get kind of your emotional brain is kicking the rest of you and saying, wake up, man, I'm in here.

Why are you ignoring me? You've suppressed all your natural resources and instincts here. It's like your emotional brain is desperately trying to communicate. with the outside world. And in part two, what I want to get into is what to do if you're being recruited by a cult, how to see if your friends and family are being affected by this. I've got another cult story that I didn't even know was a cult story until I read your book from a kid in college who ended up getting kidnapped by his own parents to leave this cult.

It was weird. He ended up working at like a store. It's a whole, it just, that's why it didn't seem like a cult until I read the book. So stay tuned for part two. In the meantime, Stephen Hassan. And thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks for flying to Boston. Nice to meet you.

You got it. So, Jason, this is just part one. And we're just getting warmed up. Part two is crazy as well. What did you think of this episode? Oh, my God. I was listening to this going, this is some of the most insane s that I've ever heard in my life.

And I didn't even know he was a Mooney until I listened to this. And just how he got recruited, I can see how easy it would be to be pulled into a cult. You know, they're offering you women and salvation. And, you know, if you're lost in your early 20s or your teens, how easy it can be to be sucked into this. And the defense mechanisms that he has given us, like, you know, throughout the episode would be golden to just teach these to your kids. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because I think like, oh, you know, I'm not going to get sucked into this. But when I was like 25, I would so have gotten sucked into this.

Are you kidding? Yeah, me too. I would have been there with a tambourine in hand wearing the robes, doing whatever you asked me to. Because free women, sure, I'm in. You're not thinking. You're thinking with your other parts, not your brain at that point. Plus, also, you're just thinking like, okay, so what if this old Korean guy is not the Messiah? I'm getting laid like crazy.

Of course I'm going to stay here. I'm just going to play along. And then 10 years later, it's like, what happened to you, right? Yeah, it's like, what am I going to do? Go get a job at Kinko's or am I going to sit around here, get free food, get. get free ladies and just have to go out and do culty stuff. I'm going to take the culty stuff. Yeah, and that's for guys.

Yeah, you rationalize it. And for a lot of the women that join, I'm sure there's an element of like, oh, this is my, these people are protecting me. I mean, it's so manipulative and crazy. Everybody here is just getting victimized and abused. It's just absolutely crazy. Yeah. This book is called Cult Mind Control.

Part 2 is going to be out in a couple days here. So you should go and check that out because we get into some deep, stuff as well, as well as some cult self-defense, and a lot of the practicals are in that episode. We're teaching you how to connect with great people in a legit way, a non-manipulative way, and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits that don't involve mind control over at six-minute networking. That's a free course over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and do it now. You know, you've got to dig the well before you get thirsty. Once you need relationships, you're too late. If you want relationships to pull you out of your cult, you know, you've got to build

before you join. These drills are designed to take just a few minutes a day. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. This is crucial. It's all free. I'm teaching you that for free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And most of the guests on the show,

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