The Jordan Harbinger Show - 238: Steven Hassan | Combating Cult Mind Control Part Two

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Steven Hassan (@CultExpert) is 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 two of a two-part episode. Check out part one here! What We Discuss with Steven Hassan:  What to do if you suspect you've been targeted for recruitment by a cult.  How to tell if your friends and family are being affected by a cult.  What you should and shouldn't say to someone you're trying to rescue from a cult.  How phobia indoctrination keeps a cult's potential defectors tethered to its undue influence by fear (and how Steven helps people break this indoctrination).  Why Steven is optimistic that we've reached a turning point at which the bulk of humanity is waking up to understanding the psychology of undue influence.  And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/238 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 do. 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 we turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life

and those around you. And today is part two of our cult special with Stephen Hassan. If you haven't heard part one, you're going to want to go back to the last episode and check out part one from Stephen Hassan. This is a continuation of that episode. more cult stuff going on lately. Documentaries on Netflix, exposives to Scientology, there's Woo Wooo Yoga,

there's self-help seminars and business cults, MLM stuff. CrossFit. CrossFit. Maybe not quite, right? Well, he was interviewed for a CrossFit documentary, so maybe. That's pretty funny. You never know. I don't know. We'll define cults, of course, and we have former cult member and current cult

expert Stephen Hassan in part two. His book, Cult Mind Control, so interesting. It's all about the manipulative practices cults use advanced hypnosis all the way down to blackmail. This stuff is crazy. The fact that it comes from intelligence agencies and things like that. Today we're going to get into what happens if you or someone you love is being recruited by a cult, what to do, how to get people out, how his cult rescues work is so much here that

we had to do two parts. I hope you enjoy this. And by the way, if you want to know how I managed to make connections like this, it's all about systems and tiny habits. So check out our six-minute networking course, which is free. that's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests here on the show

subscribe to the course, they read the newsletter. So come join us. You're going to be in some great company. All right, here's part two of cults with Stephen Hassan. Okay, so we just left off saying cult mind control might have been created

by the Korean CIA, which even coming out of my mouth sounds like I've just watched too much, you know, info wars, conspiracy theory stuff, but that it was created as a counterpoint to the North Korean regime, which having been there makes sense to me, which that's the best mind control I've ever seen. And the Korean CIA was, of course, trained and founded by, in part, by the American CIA.

So in this weird roundabout way, the American CIA was instrumental in creating, I can't believe I'm saying this, cult mind control techniques. Well, specifically the Mooney mind control techniques, but of course mind control techniques were developed many years earlier. They were used by Hitler in World War II. They were developed for World War I. It's been an evolution. But in terms of my direct entry into this was as an experiment or some type of creature of this joint program

between the CIA and the Korean CIA using the Moonies to influence people to be, very right wing. I think it's even scarier that the moon cult, the cult you were in, the Moonies, they own newspapers and gun manufacturers. That is a very scary combination. Yeah. They, they, they own the patent for the Thompson submachine gun, assault rifles. It's, it is. It's very scary. And I was thinking this morning just about how many people are being indoctrinated online to believe there's going to be a civil war. And so they should stockpile assault, you know, rifles with automatic capabilities for the war that's about to come. And that's really frightening. Well, yeah. I mean, that's some Koresh compound type stuff right there.

You remember that. If I remember that, you certainly remember that. That was like your contact. I was contacting my congressman and a Attorney General Reno saying, I'd like to offer my expertise because you don't know what you're doing and you're going to cause a lot of violence. And they said, we've got this, no problem. Sure. Yeah. And I happened to meet the former lead negotiator for the FBI doing a taping of a documentary. And he read my books and we sat down together and he said, I wish I had known you back then. He feels very badly. I'm sure.

I mean, I can imagine you reaching out saying, hey, I'd like to offer my assistance, you're going to end up with violence and then saying, we got this and then cut immediately to giant compound on fire, FBI SWAT tank rolling into a garage and a bunch of people burning alive in a building that totally didn't need to happen. Exactly. And I had access to family members who wanted to speak to the loved ones inside the compound. The FBI, you know, didn't allow them to do that, which would have been one of my many strategies that and having a really sexy voiced female negotiator with David Koresh. That would have been smart as well. I had a whole bunch of suggestions, which I later did a talk at Harvard about all the things the FBI, and the ATF did wrong and what they should have done instead, which is online on my site. I will definitely link to that in the show notes. I'm curious, though, the sexy voice negotiator, is that because we're playing to Koresh's ego and that's what we know works with him? Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, well, part of his thing was that he said only he could have sex with all the women. Even the married women couldn't have sex with their husbands. And he even had sex with a 10-year-old. That was part of the abuse there. But he felt like he was Jesus. So, and the FBI looked at him and said, this is a con artist. So they thought that when the gas was shot in, that he would, you know, come out and save himself. He didn't understand that he wanted to be martyred.

That was part of the plan. Right. So looking at cult leaders as con men isn't quite the right angle, right? We're not looking at somebody. It's completely the wrong thing. And this is, why is this? Because to me it looks like a con man is somebody who knows deep down who kind of, they turn off their microphone and they go, or their video camera, and they go, oh, all right, let's go to McDonald's and sick of this vegan, hippie, self-help, BS, give me my private jet and I want to go to this strip club. And not that these cult leaders aren't doing that same thing, but they also at some point are more of a belief, there's not like this other identity in there that says, okay, this is just how I make money, right?

Right. So, I mean, a con artist wants to size up the mark, figure out the angle, get in, make the money, or make the conquest, and move on. Cult leaders are a different creature altogether, and most cult leaders were in a cult themselves or in a cult-like family system where they internalized. a very unhealthy sense of self, very narcissistic, often psychopathological. And they make the mistake, but they have to because their life is oriented to surrounding themselves with people to give them narcissistic supply. Of surrounding themselves with yes people who don't say you're wrong or you lied. By the way, you prophesied something completely different. people are not going to, you know, like this new prophecy. They just eject everybody.

They just fire them. Yeah. So they have no reality testing mechanism within their sphere of reality. And so it gets more and more bent over time. Let's talk about these four components of mind control. You've got some pretty interesting. There's actually a lot of components to this, but there's four sort of basic overarching, right?

So cognitive dissonance theory is the first one that I wrote down here. Can we go through this? Because this I find is like the meat and potatoes of how your brain essentially, how your personality gets taken over by this person or this cult. Well, let me explain it this way, Jordan. I've come up with something I call the bite model of mind control. B stands for behavior control, I stands for information control, then there's thought control and emotional control.

And I have sub-variables under each one of these. But I came to this model from Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Model, which he wrote about in the 50s when studying a UFO cult. And what he posited is that people have thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and they seek to make choices and do things to reduce dissonance, dissonance between the three of them. So, for example, if you do something behaviorally extreme is a strong movement to rationalize and justify why it was a good thing to do and to feel okay about it. So when I was studying all the models of brainwashing and mind control, the Lifton model, the Singer

model, the Lewin model, it just didn't make easy sense. But when I thought about adding information controlled to Festinger's cognitive dissonance model and came up with the bite model, it all fell into place where people could really understand quickly and easily whether any relationship or group is a destructive mind control one. So cognitive dissonance, just in this case, to your point, the extreme behavior requires extreme rationalization. So if I've given up my life savings to some Korean guy who says that he's the Messiah, I don't go, man, I've made a huge mistake. I gave my life savings to this Korean guy who says he's the Messiah, and now that's not really checking out. What I do is go, okay, I'm having a moment of panic here. What I need to

do is figure out all the reasons why I believe this Korean guy is the Messiah, because otherwise that means I just gave away my life savings to a cult leader, and I don't really want to believe that, because that's going to make me highly uncomfortable. So let me jump through some hoops. it's not quite that rational, at least in the mind of Amuni. What they are trained to think about is if you have a doubt or a question about Moon, the doctrine, which is called the divine principle, or the organizational policy, this is evil spirits trying to invade your mind or Satan is trying to test you. So you're alienated from doing any time. of thought process that begins to analyze anything. You are trained to do thought stopping,

which is one of the techniques under the T of the Bight model. You're trained to shut down any critical thinking and reinforce your cult identity. So in the case of my father, who read in the Washington Post one day that Moon had an M-16 gun factory in South Korea and thought, aha, now I have the proof to get my son out and wake him up that this he's not the messiah the moon isn't the messiah and he just said steve how come how could a messiah have an m16 gun factory we're from queens new york i should have and i started immediately saying in my mind crush satan crush satan glory to heaven peace on earth glory to have him peace on earth true parents true parents true parents because that's what i was trained to do so this is the thought stopping this is yeah i was being

I was under persecution from Satan. Right. This is the adult equivalent of like putting your fingers in your ears and going, la, la, la, la, I can't hear you. Right. It's just that type of situation. I never thought of that one, but I'm going to use that one, Jordan. That's good. Go ahead.

But seriously, my father's intention was to wake me up and to get me to critically think. But the way he delivered the message, it forced me to do this mind control technique. on myself that propelled me deeper into the involvement and made me more alienated against him and distrustful of him. Other elements of thought control, I see this in a lot of these self-help cults. Those are the ones I'm most familiar with just because there's so many people trying to get me to do these things. And sometimes I go to a quote unquote leadership class like I mentioned before.

And it turns out to be some BS like this in the past years. And they love making up their own words for things. they love using specific jargon. So you'll say something like, well, I don't know about this. And they'll go, well, that's your racket. That's your, that's your racket that you do when you, and it's like you're trying to make yourself, you're trying to make me wrong. And like all this weird sort of twisted language and you've got to have a friggin dictionary

together to talk with it, these people half the time. Right. So Robert Lifton, when he was doing his research on Chinese communist brainwashing in the 50s and wrote his seminal book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. In his famous chapter 22, he outlined eight criteria of brainwashing, and one was loaded language. And it's thought-terminating cliches is how he wrote about it, that it's something that's known only inside the group. It has no meaning to anyone outside of the group where people think it's childish or stupid. but it shuts down any type of understanding of reality.

So in the Moonies, for example, if you had any type of relationship problem, it could be reduced to either a Chapter 2 problem or a Kane-Abel problem. Okay. What's a Chapter 2 problem? Well, in the Moon cult, Moon says that Satan seduced Eve sexually. and impregnated her and got her to seduce Adam. And that's how all of humankind fell away from God and the Garden of Eden. And so any feelings of impulses of sexuality is a Chapter 2 problem, basically.

And I was 19 years old when I was. Yeah, the whole book is Chapter 2 at that point, right? My whole life was, you know, chapter two, but you had to train yourself to do thought stopping. No masturbation, no dating, nothing. You could never be alone with a woman. You couldn't hug a woman or kiss a woman at all because, you know, they could, you know, Satan could use her to seduce you. And it was just a, you should be so lucky. Yeah.

A radical mind control technique. The Kane-Abel problem, the biblical story, is that Kane basically killed his brother Abel. And Moon says that basically you need to surrender to your central figure, your Abel figure, no matter what they tell you to do, even if it goes against your conscience, it's God's will, and that somehow the restoration will take place. So they were training blind submission to your superior by using that loaded term. But the point is, words should help us understand reality better. It should widen our view and widen our ability to connect the dots with what is.

But in mind control cults, it's all about constriction and making things tighter where you're in this idealized. technologically totalist web of control. Yeah. And we see this with even modern day sort of ISIS, al-Qaeda, infidels, apostates, anyone who doesn't agree with you, infidel, anyone who is not your specific branch of Islam, right? Like, those might have wider meaning when they were originally in the Quran, but really now they're just kind of designed to be, if you're not sitting in this room listening to Bacher al-Baghdadi or whatever from ISIS, then you're one of these things.

those people just broadly are worthy of death because Muhammad, whatever, because Islam, right? Because of our radical branch of Islam. So you see things like that happening, but it can be really subtle in a lot of, for example, in North Korea and in any sort of country where they have a really high level of control, they have special words for outsider, not just foreigner. That's a common word. They have words that are like pejorative and they embrace basically everything that has to do with anything that's not, let's say, North Korea friendly is just this giant pejorative word that has to do

with America. Yeah, so it's the map of a mind control cult is black and white, all or nothing, good versus evil. It's very simplistic. And the map is reality as opposed to it's a, it's a description of reality, but it's not a perfect one. When you're in a mind control cult, you're told the dogma is perfect. It's scientific. Right. But if you question it, there's something inherently wrong with you that you can't see the truth with a capital T.

Right. And this is one reason why this cult doctrine is vague, right? It's not supposed to be understood or studied rigorously. It's supposed to help you disregard your non-cult identity, limit critical thinking, focus on believing more strongly, versus fitting the doctrine into your life as it already is. It's supposed to get rid of all the stuff that's sort of non-cult. And you talked about this before. Exactly.

So the point is not to understand an ideology of a cult, but to believe it completely. And furthermore, I think it was Eric Hoffer, who said the vividness and tangibility of a mass movement can be measured by its devil. the more real you can make the enemy, the more you can mobilize people to sacrifice themselves and follow you. 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 Hosson. 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.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 Hosson. Other elements that I think people are familiar with, things like information control, people knowing very little, even about their own cult, not allowed to get outside information, can't even be critical with one another. You see it with North Korea, of course, that can't even get radio or TV from other places, no internet. You mentioned emotional control and these emotional overwhelm. The double binds that lock us into the cult, can you give an example of a double bind? Because these are so common.

When you talked about those in the book, I went, oh, yeah, I've heard these a million times. Yeah, I'll do that in one second. If I may, Jordan, and just say that the number one thing about information control from my experience is, deceptive recruitment or lack of informed consent. Right. People don't know what they're getting into. Right. We touched us.

Women were flirting with me. Right. I didn't understand what was happening. Right. Let's go away for the weekend. Suddenly turns into we're at a church gathering for the whole weekend and you can't go home and we're not just hanging out. Right.

So if anyone's listening to this and they have gotten involved with a group of any type or relationship and you think back to the first few experiences and you can actually say, they lied to me, that should cause you to step back and, you know, reevaluate what everything else that followed after it. Because a legitimate group or a legitimate person will always tell you up front who they are, what they believe, and what they want. Like, what's going to happen if you go into this relationship or you enter this group or you go to this workshop. And of course, Jordan, you know that a lot of these experiential workshops, the last thing they're going to tell you is what you're going to experience because they don't want to spoil it for you.

You need to have your own experience. But no, you want my money, you want my time, you want my body. Tell me what you believe. And I can decide if I want to subject myself to this environment or not. And this has to do. And they never will. They can't because it has to do with the emotional overwhelm that you mentioned before. If I've, if somebody hadn't said we're going to a leadership class, if somebody said,

hey, we're going to go do eye staring exercises where you're supposed to get the other person to cry after generating dopamine and oxytocin because you're staring in their eyes for a half hour, 45 minutes at a time. And, you know, when you cry, you get to crawl in the other person's lap and then then you're good and you do it right. So, of course, you get bored and you get ridiculously entranced with staring at someone in the eye. And then finally, when you get tired, someone just goes, okay, screw it. I'm going to cry because I'm sick of staring and sitting here. And other people are so firmly entrenched that they're actually doing this.

And so then suddenly you've got this, you know, 50-year-old judge in your lap crying. And I'm just thinking to myself, what am I doing right now? But I'm looking around and I'm not seeing other people looking around going, what are we doing? And the lights are low, so you can't, you know, it's just. unbelievable. So of course they can't tell you you're going to go do that. You would never go. You'd go, this is ridiculous. No, thank you. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, you're a very sophisticated, educated person about social influence. So you were going into those scenarios with a library of resources to analyze what the techniques and strategies are. Most people don't have that knowledge.

and most people do have those critical thoughts in the beginning, but they learn to suppress it. And that's another thing that I want to tell your listeners. Like, you should never suppress your inner thoughts. You know, it's like if you're having a thought that something's BS, maybe it is. Like, check it out, you know. And if people are making you feel badly and threatening to shun you,

if you ask those questions, are they really a friend? Is this a real relationship? Or is this just a cult person acting out their indoctrination? We see hypnosis, and this is sort of a different show here, but we see hypnosis working in the brain by shutting down, in part, shutting down rational faculties. And that's what a lot of these exercises seek to do. And of course, last time we talked, we mentioned that the people who are highly critical, you know, the doctors and lawyers in the room that stood up and went, you know, this is, I can't do this. I got to be on call or, hey, I googled this yesterday and there was some criticism online. What do you have to say about that?

Those people were removed immediately because they can't even let that seed germinate in the room. Exactly. Exactly. In the Moonies and many other cults, they would categorize people as sheep or goats. And the goats were the ones that were going to ask the questions that were going to be difficult. and they needed to be, you know, isolated or ejected so they wouldn't affect everybody else that was going to go along with it. What do we do if we're being recruited or we think we're being recruited by a cult?

You know, explain what this looks like. You kind of mentioned before if something sounds really good and you think, then it turns out to be a lie, you should put a pin in that and remember that. But what are we, what should we do in the moment? So a lot of people are recruited by family or friends. people, or coworkers, people they like and know. And so I say, do you're investigating up front, ask questions, do independent research before you ever go and agree to do anything that involves your time and energy or money?

And I'm for being a good consumer. So you say, tell me more. You know, who founded it? What's its origins? What happens if people join? What happens if people want to leave? Have you ever talked to anyone who's ever left? And what you can't count on is a face that is looking like it's lying.

Right. Because that was the error in my father's teaching to me about you can know if people are trying to lie to you, but they won't look you in the eye or they'll look. you know, Shifty or whatever. And it's like, no, the Mooney's were smiling and looking me straight in the eyes and lying there, lying their faces off essentially. So what do you do if you think that you're being recruited into a cult? Yeah, there's got to be sort of direct questions. And I would love to add these to the worksheet for the episode.

You know, hey, if this is happening, ask them these five things or these three things. I think the critical question is who founded the group? what are their credentials and their background? Do they have any criminal history? Have you ever checked out whether these credentials are real or not? For example, Keith Rennary said that he had the highest IQ in the world. Right. He's the founder of Nexium, who I think is in jail now, right? Yeah, he's still in jail. He's been convicted seven counts of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and racketeering. But he conned so many people. into accepting his version of his history, that he was speaking when he was really young and

that he was a martial artist. Like, no one ever checked. Yeah. And said, you know, you're not the smartest person. Yeah. Surprise. This is a bunch of BS. Right.

But, I mean, the people who check never get involved. But the people who, again, it's understanding that recruiters are really good at recruiting. They're really good at. that developing rapport and trust, many of them like in Nexium, learned NLP techniques, neurolinguistic programming techniques that involve mirroring and pacing and leading and breathing, et cetera, where people feel like, oh, my God, these people are, I feel like I've known them my whole lives and I've just met them 24 hours ago. Well, if you feel that way in 24 hours, it's really important to remind yourself,

It's only been 24 hours. And while this is a cool feeling, and maybe they're really good people, maybe there's something else going on here that I need to be alert to. Right. I remember people saying this leadership class, you know, I met people that I'm going to be friends with for my whole life. And I was like, it's day one, dude. What are you talking about?

Day two or whatever of a weekend. Exactly. And I'm sure that some people made friends there, but I did an interesting experiment. I put it, I got contact info for everybody that I was in their little subgroup, right? Because they put you in these little teams or whatever to sort of team up. I made a six month or eight month, can't remember now, a reminder, my calendar to contact all these people via email. Not a single one was still in. The vast majority had taken the advance from the beginning class.

Some people went on to their fake, they call it a PhD program, which is funny because it's not a school. It's just a bunch of bullshit where you work for free for them selling other people. people on the intro and advanced courses. Right. But everybody who had gone through the PhD program except for one person had said, I'm actually really angry with them. I feel like I was mistreated. They all kind of woke up after a while.

But, you know, it took six, eight months. I think a couple of people took like a year or more. And I think they invested upwards of 30 grand for the fake PhD thing, which again was you cold calling people to sell them. Yeah. So the thing about large group awareness training type. groups and multi-level marketing groups, and my experience is this huge turnover within a year. Like most people leave after a year, very few people stay in it for multiple years.

But with mind control cults of the religious bent or the political bent that do more extreme kinds of indoctrination, people can be in for 20 years. Yeah, that's terrifying. And what are some mistakes that people make when trying to get people out of cults? I know direct confrontation was one of the big ones. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of stereotypical, but the average person will say, this sounds like a cult. Are you an occult?

Like the person's going to answer, yes, even if they knew that, you know, understood what was going on with them. or dude, I looked your group up online. It's a freaking cult, you know, what's wrong with you? Are you stupid or something? You're acting like a brainwashed zombie. Like those types of confrontational, you know, put-downish alienating things are the worst thing you can do.

And what I recommend is to ask questions from a curious position. Like, wow, you seem really into this. Tell me more. Tell me when you first met this group. Tell me what you liked about it. What didn't you like about it? Oh, there's nothing you didn't like about it? That's odd because there's always something in life that you don't like about something.

And that's like a little clue. But I think the, so the worst thing you can do is attack the person or put them down or label them. The best thing you can do is be curious. and ask them to tell you their story, and ask them how much, how much have they actually researched independently, which means not relying on the organization for answers, their group.

And have they ever sought out former members and actually asked to hear their story or read their book or listen to their podcast or whatever? Because when you're in a mind control cult, you are not allowed to talk to or, listen to anything that is negative against the leader of the doctrine or the group. So in Scientology, people are told they have to disconnect from an ex-member, or they're told that the information is n-theta, that it's negative for their spirit to be exposed to this.

And I say, you know, if something's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. And if it's not legitimate, why would you want to spend your time and energy and money in it? And what you don't want to also do, Bernardin, is overestimate your capacity to infiltrate a cult group. Because a lot of people go in trying to help a friend or a relative. They go to the meetings and they get co-opted by the indoctrination. And they forget that they didn't do their homework up front. and they had, it got to them essentially. So don't have some humility.

Don't think you're invulnerable. Get coaching. Talk to former members, especially former leaders. But I say it again. If something's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. And if somebody's involved with a group for 10 years recruiting you, you can say, hey, in 10 years, have you ever had a friend who decided to leave? you know, and then long silence.

Right. And then they may say no, but they usually will say yes. Oh, when they decided to leave, did you sit down and talk with them and find out why they were leaving? And the answer, of course, is we're not allowed to do that. Well, they basically what you get is silence. They don't even want to answer that. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think they won't answer that.

I think a lot of parents or close friends, they think this is temporary, this is, a phase or they're like my kids too smart for that but i'll tell you i went to this quote unquote leadership course realized it was a call probably the couple days before because i was doing googling and said screw it i'm going to go because it'll be interesting uh and a bunch of my friends are going and i'm too smart for this and i said and jen said you have to call me this is when we were just dating my wife and i have to call me every day afterwards and i don't care if it's four o'clock in the morning and i want to talk about everything and so i would talk about things and she'd go, oh, you're pretty excited about this, huh? Because there were some things where I was

like, this is a good point, but the rest of this is a bunch of BS. And then she would go, okay, well, you know, you promised you would not sign up for the advanced thing. And I'm like, I'm not going to do that. But on day three, I was like, I'm on the fence. And she's like, nope, you promise. I was like, oh, that's true. But it's funny because going in, knowing that it's a bunch of BS, knowing that it's a self-help call, not liking most of the stuff that you're hearing, not being able to do, and all this stuff, being fully cognizant of it. I still was like, maybe I'll go to the thing next week just to see a little bit more. I mean, they are that good at it. You can go in with the roadmap. I think, I thank you for your honesty and I thank your wife. She's a keeper.

Yeah. The whole idea of if you're going to infiltrate to have somebody who's your ground base to reality test, to debrief, where you even have a code word for like sending the police and get me out of here. People will often sign a notarized document ahead of time. I'm going into this meeting because I have a loved one in it, and I know that there's a possibility I might get brainwashed, and if at any point I am happy and I want to stay, please bring out this document and remind me that I've promised my loved ones,

and I'm going to take three weeks and talk to cult experts afterward. Wow. to really not underestimate the power of hypnosis and mind control. Yeah, I mean, I went in there knowing almost exactly what was going on the entire time and having read, this is a cult, danger, all these things on the website. And I was very much sort of a dissenter in the room. And then it just slowly, if you stay, I mean, look, how much can you do when you're sleep deprived and you've undergone 36 hours of bullshit?

Like, there's only so much that you can do. And unfortunately, a lot of people leaving cults, I've heard this, Dr. Drew and I were talking about this, mental health care folks, this is just kind of out of their wheelhouse. They don't really know what's going on. And if you try to find a cult counselor, cults are onto this. And now they've got, like, fake cult counselors and cult tri. It's just crazy to me. Yes, there are a lot of phony people, people who are not former cult members, who are not mental health

professionals who don't have the credentials who are out there hanging a shingle. And I've talked with numerous former cult members who actually set up phony websites saying that they were ex-members to try to trap people, to see whether or not anyone was having doubts or to find out if anyone is trying to rescue someone out of the cult. So you have to be really careful if you have a loved one in a group to understand they're very high-tech, a lot of these groups. You don't want to use your real identity. It's better to have someone else that isn't associated with you, et cetera. There's a lot of safety things that have to have to go into place.

And you mentioned Dr. Drew. I actually did an interview with him a long time ago. Yeah, that's why this came up. I said, I'm doing a cold interview. And he goes, oh, is it Stephen Hassan? And I said, yeah. Good memory. Okay. It's a good memory.

Yeah. So the thing is, I'm thrilled to do this with you because it's epidemic. And the knowledge of how to manipulate people for the good or for the bad has never been greater. And, of course, as a mental health professional, I want more people to do it for the good to help people change their lives in good ways that are ethical. to help people have integrity. Yeah. There's an example.

Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, if you think about the whole prison system in the United States, it's not oriented to helping people change their identity for the better. No. It's meant to reinforce and label them and keep them, you know, stuck. And it's a shame because we have the knowledge of how to help people, heal from traumatic childhood, wounds, and all kinds of dysfunctional relationships and to become functional members of the world. 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.

In cult mind control, you have some great examples of persuasion and using cults as examples of mind control and letting people draw their own parallels. And I thought this was fascinating. So if somebody's in, let's say, some kind of other religious cult, and instead of saying, like, I can't believe you believe this, you could, you can, the example you gave and correct me if I'm wrong, you can sort of tell an analogous story like, can you believe there's a group in Montana where they think that some Korean guy is the Messiah? And this person who believes that some, I don't know, Taiwanese guys,

the Messiah will be like, that's unbelievable. These people are ridiculous. And their subconscious brain, I'm thinking it's got to be that will then start to draw some parallels. Of course, the cognitive dissonance will eventually take over and smash that. But it plants these little bits of seeds. And your idea here, your point here was you don't convince people people to leave, you just make an opportunity for their authentic self as opposed to their cult identity to come out and start questioning, which requires rapport building. And a lot of, I'm picturing, is this one of those times where you're showing them photos of their childhood during like their family intervention and they're starting to get more emotional and the cracks

begin to show? Or am I, have I just watched too much TV? No, no, no. That's definitely a major piece, but I'm usually recommending that the family show that stuff to the person before the intervention itself to soften them up, to get them more empowered to accept a voluntary intervention. Because remember, I don't kidnap people or hold them against their will. They have to agree. Right. So yes.

Have you watched Captain Marvel? Not yet. The movie? So it's a story about cult mind control on the character. That's why I don't want to be a spoiler. Oh, wow. But it's about, you know, her waking up to her true self and her friends are showing her pictures and reminding her of experiences and saying, we know you.

Yeah. You're a good person, you know? It's scary to me, though, that you even mention this. It's a cults will leave baggage in people. even after they leave. So people will leave and they'll think, oh, my kids are going to die of something. And you were shown, I think, was it,

the Moon cult showed you like the Exorcist. And this is going to happen to you. And it sounds so dumb if you're not in the cult. But if you're in it in the moment, what do they tell you? Like, this devil made this movie and is going to. Moon himself said that God made the exorcist movie. And this movie is a prophecy of what would happen to you if you leave the Unification Church.

Of course, he wasn't laughing. when he said it. I'm laughing because how ridiculous it is. But I had been so indoctrinated to believe he was the greatest man in human history and was capable of reading minds and knowing the future

and et cetera, et cetera, that when he said it, it was like, okay, but it scared the hell out of me, pun intended. And I didn't understand that this is what's known as phobia indoctrination. It's one of the main pieces of the E of the bite model, that people are made to have these irrational fears that

if they ever question the leader or leave the group, terrible things are going to happen to them. And in my book, Freedom of Mind, I have four pages, single space of the most common phobias that I've encountered in my career. You'll be hit by a car, you'll get cancer, you'll die of a drug overdose, you'll be possessed by demons, you'll be reincarnated 10,000 times. But the idea, Jordan, is that when you're under mind control, cult mind control, you can't imagine being free and happy and fulfilled spiritually. You can only generate negative models in your brain. and at the point that a person meets a former member who's happy and functional and doing great things, it starts to open that door of, huh, how come he's not possessed?

How come he's not, you know, spinning out green vomit and levitating and spinning around this head? It sounds a lot like they're trying to sort of imprint PTSD, and you see the same thing from North Korea. they'll say, oh, this defector, all these defectors that go to South Korea, they just beg to come back or, oh, they die because it's so poured out. I mean, there's all this fear. And of course, they're telling people that, I mean, I've seen movies in North Korea where they're like, people in America have to drink melted snow because there's no water and there's no food. They get one cup of snow per day. It's like, how much snow do you think we have? We can fill up on snow if we need to.

Yeah, no, it's, it's the cure to brainwashing and mind. control is perspective and we need to have critical analytic thinking that goes along with our emotional brain and our unconscious mind. So in the case of fear, we need to have fear when there's a legitimate concern or danger, but we need to reality test if something is an absurdity, like somebody drawing a chalk line on a carpet telling you that it's got 100,000 volts of electricity, and if you step on it, you're going to die. It's just, yeah, madness. You need to know that electricity isn't conducted by carpeting and chalk of any kind.

Right. Period. And even though the person is very convincing and authoritative and uses the hypnotic voice, it's bull it's not real this concept you say this is called floating so even after leaving cult literature certain trigger words they can actually re-trigger your cult programming even years later and so there's there are people that you mentioned in the book and that i've seen online they need to change associations with like music sounds places habits food they can't they can't use jargon they have to make all these new associations, it's so bizarre. It's like this stuff is really in there and it kind of never

goes away. Well, it can go away and that's what I teach to my clients is like it's your mind. You should control it. And if you like a certain kind of music, you should be able to listen to it and not think of the cult, even though the cult used it in its indoctrination. And it's about you having an internal locus of control for your experience. And I, I, I, I, you. I, you know, avoiding stimuli or triggers is not a good long-term solution for someone being healed from a destructive cult mind control group. So the fastest way, by the way, Jordan, to get over a trigger like that is direct experience again. So if you're afraid of a dog and you deliberately look at a picture of a dog or, go and pet a puppy, that's going to be the fastest way to get over it. You could visualize it.

You could go to a therapist. You could do systematic desensitization if it's too scary for you to look at a picture of a dog or to pet a puppy. But if there's anyone listening and they have all kinds of phobias left over from their cult experience, like a phobia of the Bible, for example, Like there's so many people who are traumatized by Christian Bible cults that they're afraid to look at a Bible. It's crazy. It just brings back the cult programming. The best way to get over it is to go take a college course or take a course online to study the Bible. Right.

Make it academic instead of. Yeah, with a credentialed person who actually knows the Bible. That's the best way to challenge. the indoctrination, and to reframe it and to neutralize it. I was just going to say in my case, when I first got out of the moonies, when somebody said, hey, did you see the moon last night? It would trigger me back to kneeling on a concrete floor in front of this fat Korean billionaire, who I thought was the Messiah. And I had to ask myself, before I met the group, when I heard the word moon, what did they think of? And I thought of the satellite that went around the earth.

Yeah. And then I just said, moon, and I thought of the satellite. Moon, thought of the satellite, moon. And when people said moon, I thought of the satellite. What groups are you most worried about right now? I know that we talked about business cults, which is actually something most people don't think about, you know, MLM, having cult mind control concepts being used routinely. also. I was going to say Enron, a friend of mine who wrote a book about political cults did a wonderful critique of Enron as a corporate cult. He's working on another paper on Theranos, the blood corporation that was very popular. What do I worry about? I worry about governments. I worry about China. I worry about anyone who aspires to be a dictator who wants to abolish a free press, who wants to enslave any critics or former members of

their administration or regime. And I think we're at a tipping point now where either the bulk of humanity wakes up to understand the psychology of influence or they succumb to it. So I'm optimistic, and that's why I love your show, and I'm happy. to do this podcast with you. I think there's a lot of people who realize there's something very drastically wrong with the whole influence mechanisms around the world. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that because I look at ISIS, I see this. I look at al-Qaeda, I see this.

But I also look at white Christian identity. And I don't mean people who are white that go to a Christian church. I mean hate groups that are white nationalists. I look at ISIS in North Korea and I see so many parallels. but I also see the same thing happening in street gangs. And so you see these mind control regimes. I'm wondering, do you think, and can you extrapolate this sort of recent trend of, let's say, mindfulness, which leads to these woo-woo influencers online?

Do you think that contributes to this? Because I see people online and I go, this person is dangerous and people don't really know it yet. Like, they're working on. I think it's very interesting. You bring up mindfulness. Yes. So any technique can be used in an ethical way or an unethical way, and any technique, mind technique, can be good for some people but not for everybody.

And the whole mindfulness field is now taking off in a very concerning way where there are authority figures who are being treated like gurus. and the techniques are not necessarily healthy ones for being in your body and having having peace and having integrity. I was actually just at a conference, a cult conference in England, and I met a professor of neuroscience at Brown University who is researching the negative effects of mindfulness, and there are a lot of them. So it's not the universal panacea, nor is Transcendental Meditation, which was another program that I saw at this conference, ex-members, talking about what it was really like in the upper levels of the TM movement.

But I like meditation, but the key is you need to be in control of the technique, and it has to be a technique that is resonant with who you are as a person. I've been getting emails recently. Another popular personal growth podcast that I really like had this guy on recently, and his video got over a million views, I think, and his name is like Sad Guru or something, right? And somebody reached out to me and goes, hey, don't have this guy on. And I was like, I wouldn't, but just out of curiosity, why? And he told me the story of how his wife went to these Sad Guru meditation sessions, ended up going to India, leaving her whole family, disconnecting from everybody, getting divorced,

then about a year, year and a half later, coming back out and going, hey, you wouldn't believe it, that's a cult. And everyone goes, yeah, we knew. Where were you for the last year and a half, two years? And she's like, yeah, I just got, I went to, I went to do this TM retreats and then dot, dot, dot, I'm living in India, working for free at some vegan restaurant or whatever, helping other people in here. And she goes, surprise, it's a cult.

And it's just so easy to find something that seems really innocuous. Look, we just want to keep you chill. Life's stressful. Do some TM. And then like Scientology, you get to the higher level and they go, by the way, this guy is, he's a profit. And we don't want to do that because it freaks people out. But here you go. And then you believe it because you're already in.

You have two feet in. Right. But I guess I want to use this story you just shared as an opportunity to say, hey, if you care about a family member or a friend, that you see is getting involved with a destructive group. But they're saying, oh, but I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. Leave me alone. I'm an adult. Don't listen to them.

Just know that they don't understand what's being done to them, and they'll thank you for an intervention. If my family, when I first came back from the Mooney, said, Steve, if this group is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. do us a favor, promise us you won't go back for the next two weeks, and let's research it together. I would have done that. That was a reasonable request. And the thing is right now with the Internet is that a lot of the destructive cults are burying the best critical information that's out there.

So you can't just be satisfied with the first 10 hits on Google anymore when you're doing the name. of the group plus cult plus ex-member plus brainwashing you have to go much deeper into the web and in some cases go on the web archive itself the wayback machine archive.org to find the really juicy articles and the important information yeah I think you'd mentioned in the book that there are cults that buy things they purchase or bully nonprofits like cult awareness network used to be the cult awareness network. Now it's a front group, which is really scary. They're on to it. Scientology bankrupted it, Jordan, and they got all the files, too, in the bankruptcy court,

which is crazy and unethical completely. And a lot of people are intimidated by wealthy, you know, cult groups threatening to sue. So even the media will do a show with me, and then they won't air it because they're afraid of being sued. That's crazy, because they're afraid of being sued. That's crazy because you mentioned specific names. Yeah, because I mentioned particular groups. Jeez. Should I be worried about this? That naturally is a, that's a natural question.

Yes, you should be, you know, you should be a lawyer. So you want to talk legally about in a way that is responsible. That this is, and yes, you should be concerned in the sense that groups do not. like negative information told about them so crazy unbelievable it's and you have me on your shows right a lot of groups don't like me at all they say all kinds of mean things and nasty things that they make up about me yeah it's just absolutely mind-blowing it's scary it makes me think maybe i should bleep out do i do i need to bleep out scientology people will know what we're talking about anyway i think i don't think so because they've kind of um

exhausted themselves in the legal system harassing people. Like there's so much information. Leah Remini has a award-winning show. Fascinating show. And you've mentioned TM, but TM doesn't want publicity. And if they threaten to sue you, you just say, yeah, let's do it. Let's have some fun. They won't pursue it.

And that's always been a useful strategy with Colts. is they want you to back down. And if you say, nope, not backing down, let's dance. Then they go away because they realize it will create more negative publicity for them if they pursue it. Yeah, it would be interesting. I mean, I would love it if somebody said, you lied about us. And I'll be like, well, let's examine everything that was said in a public forum because I can, I don't let people say. Invite them on and have a critic and ex-member.

Exactly. Let them go at it with each other. Yeah, that's the plan. That makes perfect sense to me. I would love to do that. And then we'll see who looks better in the end. That's for sure. And the truth will stand up to scrutiny.

Stephen, thank you so much for this. This has been so interesting. And the control techniques, what to look for, all of this, is just absolutely been fascinating and hopefully very useful to everyone that's listened. So, very, thank you. And combating cult mind control is 30 years old. It tells my story about the Moonies in depth. and gives a good overview.

And the Freedom of Mind Book is, you know, kind of the advanced stuff on how to help somebody wake up from a mind control call. We'll link to that in the show notes. The book was excellent, and we'll link to your website as well. Thank you very much for your time. I know we did a big old interview here, but it was worth it. Well, I really appreciate it, and thanks for your good work.

Jason, the conclusion here, absolutely insane. We didn't even get to a lot of the business and MLM stuff and a lot of the other types of cults, we didn't even really get to touch on some of this stuff. The book had a ton more, and he's updating it, and it's just there's, it seems, it's a little depressing. There's so much on cults we literally ran out of time,

even with two episodes. The well is so deep on cults that, you know, we could be talking for, we could actually have an entire show every week about cults. It goes so deep. And I just love having Stephen Hassan on the show because he's been there. It's not like some academic,

that is giving us advice, you know, based on stuff that he's read or interviews that he's done. He was a Mooney. So he has been in the belly of the beast, which is fantastic. So this was a, I mean, this was a great set of episodes. So thank you so much to Stephen for coming on the show. This was, this was so enlightening. And I can use this every time I get a new friend that wants to sign up for Herbalife. Yep, exactly.

Exactly. Great big thank you to him. The book is called Cult Mind Control. new book coming out. We're going to have them back on the show for that. We're teaching you how to connect with great people like Stephen and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I know you're going to do it later. The problem with kicking the can down the road is you cannot make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one

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