Was I In A Cult? - Doomsday New-Age Religious Cult: "My parents started a cult"

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

He didn’t just join a cult. He was born a "prince" in one.In this two-part mind-bender, we welcome Sean Prophet, son of Mark Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet—founders of the Church Universal and Triumphant (aka CUT). At its height, this doomsday spiritual empire commanded tens of millions in real estate, a global following, and enough freeze-dried food and ammo to survive a nuclear winter.In Part 1, Sean takes us from his early days living in a 17,000-square-foot mansion filled with unpaid devotees, to being groomed as the next “Messenger” of God……until a $1.5 million lawsuit shifted everything.Follow Us for More Culty Content:Instagram & TikTok: @wasiinacultSean’s new memoir, My Cult, Your Cult, is out now. Order here.Support the Show:If Was I In A Cult? has impacted you, moved you, or made you laugh-uncomfortably-in-public, please rate & review—it helps new listeners find us.Want ad-free episodes + bonus content? Join our Patreon!Share Your Story:Have a cultic experience you want to share on the show? Email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you're looking to streamline your audio advertising buys and maximize your revenue, look no further than Triton Digital's Programmatic Audio Advertising Exchange, A2X. The private exchange consists of only licensed broadcasters and top-tier internet radio publishers, assuring the quality inventory and brand safety you can trust. Visit www.tritondigital.com to learn more. The views, information, or opinions expressed by the guest appearing in this episode solely belong to the guest and do not represent or reflect the views or positions of the hosts, the show, Podcast One, this network, or any of their respective affiliates. For the last year and then some, I've been writing a book about my cult. It's called My Cult, Your Cult. And what the book really delves into, aside from my own story and my own experience, is how cult-like thinking impacts society. And it wasn't immediately

obvious to me that I was in a cult. Everybody called us that and we insisted that we were just normal Americans, patriotic, you know, that we were trying to find answers to life's questions, spiritual salvation, et cetera. So the idea of a cult, we treated that like a slur and an insult. And so, you know, it took me a little while to realize, hey, I was absolutely in a cult and not a small one. Welcome to our little show. Was I in a cult? Why is that funny? It's like you're opening the door.

Welcome to our party. Hi, put your coat over here. You want to come in. That's a very welcoming welcome. It is a very welcoming welcome. I'm Liz Ayacuzzi. It's about time you're here for the party. You've been late.

Help yourself. There's some chips. There's some wine. There's some via hemp there's some wine. There's some via hemp. I'm Tyler Meesom. I'm Liz Ayacuzzi. And I know we say this every week on this show,

but man, guys, do we have a story or what for you today? What's it giving, Tyler? It's giving spiritual dynasty. It's giving apocalyptic wealth. It's giving mole people. It's I don't want to say it's giving anymore. Can I not say that? You're now giving Boomer energy, Tyler.

And you're giving me a headache. Who came up with it's giving anyway? Who came up with that? Coincidentally, I happen to have those facts. Actually, it started in the black and Latinx queer ballroom scene of the 80s. Liz, phrases like it's giving face. Giving face. It's giving body. It's giving body. Meant that you were channeling a vibe. And then Gen Z got ahold of it, put it on TikTok, and now suddenly everything was giving something. So it started as queer ballroom brilliance,

and now it's giving white girls at Air 1. Pretty much. I mean, that same culture is where a lot of Gen Z got their lingo, right? Shade, work, sleigh, serve, RuPaul made it global, and now it's in your aunt's Instagram feed. Tyler, do you know any of those words that you just said? I do not, Liz, I do not. serve RuPaul made it global and now it's in your aunt's Instagram feed. Tyler, do you know any of those words that you just said? I do not, Liz. I do not.

I mean, I probably know them in the term that I would use them, i.e. I have a pale complexion, therefore I should stay in the shade before I go to work. But you don't work at work. You work at work. I do not. No, I do not. Well, Tyler, you just served us all, so we're going to keep you around.

I appreciate that. I'm already here and sitting down. So today's guest isn't just someone who joined cults. He was born into one. He slayed in this cult, guys. I sure it perhaps. And why? Well, that's because his parents, well, they were the leaders and he was groomed from birth for spiritual greatness.

It's giving million dollar nuclear bunkers. It's giving illegal guns. It's giving unpaid followers who believe his parents literally spoke for God. You did it. You like it. You're in it now. When you first put the shoes on, they don't feel very good. And then once they get broken in, it feels good.

I'm going to keep giving it. Let's give it to Shawn then. Let's give it over. Okay. And are we rolling? We are rolling. Welcome to the show, Sean. Thank you so much. Really glad to be here. You know, we've never had cult royalty on our show. Oh, is that what I am, cult royalty? Well, you were a prince, right? Yes, I was. So I feel honored. So first, I guess, just why don't you introduce yourself?

My name is Sean Proffitt. I am the son of Mark Proffitt and Elizabeth Clare Proffitt. So my earliest memories are in Colorado Springs in this huge brick mansion, 17,000 square feet. And that was our headquarters. My family really occupied the main quarters, but there was also anywhere from 30 to 60 cult staff there. And they lived in the attics, the basement, wherever they could find a place to crash, you know.

Now, when Sean says cult staff, what he actually means is 30 to 60 adult followers who gave up their homes and their jobs and sometimes even their families to live in that mansion, believing that they were part of a divine mission. They spent their days cooking, cleaning, running errands, caring for the kids and basically keeping the entire spiritual empire afloat. Essentially indentured servants. They weren't getting paid, but they believed that by serving the prophet family, they were serving God. And not serving in the Gen Z term. I loved my mom a lot, just like anyone does, and very tender memories of that time. You know, I think I remember riding with my mom and dad in the car, and I remember the decrees and things like that. But it didn't dawn on me immediately that I was anything other than just a normal kid.

Because I was born into it, I don't know what it's like to join a cult. I have no idea. My dad's name is Mark Prophet, and he was born in Wisconsin. His father died when he was nine, so... AMT – You lost your dad at nine. AC – I did, yeah. So we both, yeah. AMT – That's kind of eerie. Okay, continue. AC – And so it was just him and his mother. Yeah, he grew up poor. He went into the army

right around World War II. He was in communications. I've seen photos of him teaching other soldiers, Morse code. My dad didn't fight overseas, but he was stationed at Wendover, Utah. Wendover, Utah. Yes, I've been there many times. It's a dusty outpost on the edge of nowhere. Now it's mostly known for slot machines, cheap buffets and questionable decisions. And it's just a few hours drive from Salt Lake where I used to live and it's where the Mormons travel so they can sin. Far from the peering eyes of brother and sister Jensen.

But back in the 1940s. They do make a great casserole, don't they? It's a really good casserole. But back in the 1940s, Wendover was one of the most important and secretive places on the planet. When is this gonna be over? Are you continuing? Wendover, okay, fine. was one of the most important and secretive places on the planet. When is this going to be over? Are you continuing?

Wendover. Okay, fine. No, I am continuing. Wendover Army Airfield is where the US Army trained bomber crews during World War II, but most famously it was home to the 509th Composite Group and that's the unit that carried out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wendover was also where they trained from the entire mission and that's where the Enola Gay took off. The B-29 Superfortress dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The Enola Gay was flown by Colonel Paul Tibbett, who, side note, actually named the plane after his mom. I actually read a great book entitled My Father's Son. It's by Paul Tibbitt's son, and it's a wild look at what it was like growing up in the shadow of a guy who literally dropped the first atomic bomb.

What was take your kid to work day like for that guy? So when Sean says my dad served at Wendover during World War II, that's not just military service, that's brushing shoulders with a secret chapter of world history. So after that, he had various jobs. He was an electrician, he was a salesman. From the time he was very young, he had set up an altar in his attic. He used to go up and pray, and he was constantly seeking something. He was studying the Bible and he was studying other literature, but he was more into esoteric stuff. And apparently the story goes that he had been dumped by a few different women because of his beliefs. And so the woman that he married, he didn't tell her about his unorthodox

beliefs until after they were married. They stayed together. They had five children. I guess he would have called himself a mystic, somebody who was into esoteric stuff, Rosicrucianism, Levatsky, Ascended Masters, El Morya, Cthumi. And then he was a part of another organization called the Bridge to Freedom, and he also belonged to the Mighty I Am cult. Adam Chapnick The Mighty I Am movement was a full-blown American cult founded in the 1930s by a guy named Guy Ballard. He claimed he met an ascended master named Saint Germain while hiking Mount Shasta. Now, with his wife Edna, Guy started channeling divine messages, writing books and

convincing thousands of followers that they too could achieve immortality if they followed the teachings. What do you mean, too? Aren't they all dead? Well, yes, Guy died at the age of 58 in 1939 of the hardening of the arteries. At its peak around 1938, the movement had over 1 million devotees, massive rallies at places like the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and followers who had chanted decrees for hours on end, all in the hopes of cleansing their karma and becoming ascended themselves. It was nationalistic and obsessed with purity, both spiritual and disturbingly racial, and it laid the exact blueprint for what Sean's parents would go on to build.

The Bridge to Freedom was a 1950s offshoot of this IM cult, basically a spiritual rebrand, same core beliefs, different messengers. So Sean's father? He's observing these other cult leaders doing what they do, and he decided he was going to become a messenger. This is like in the late 50s. but what he did is he began to write these, what he called, ashram notes. And these were mimeographed notes that he was passing out to people and these little informal study groups that he was running.

He always had money problems. And he was moving around. At various times, he changed his name because he had bad credit. And eventually he kind of settled on a formula where he started taking in borders into his house and getting their social security checks. You can live here and be a part of this organization, turn over your check and I'll take care of you kind of thing. And so that became like his first steady income as a cult leader. And this is the same house, by the way, where he set up a chapel and was holding weekly services. You know, now he's getting money in the collection plate and that's how the

whole thing started. He didn't finish high school. And so his smarts was, you know, he was a people person and my dad definitely had charisma. And you have to have a messianic ego to get up and speak for God. You're claiming to be a messenger for God, right? That's pretty intense. He was constantly traveling and he would speak to local groups and, you know, he'd rent a room and just see who would show up. Will you tonight then understand with me that when you enter into that heart of light, when you commune with that eternal presence that is actually pulsing moment by moment the flames of universal reality into the very cosmic force field of real identity, you can find at last that you are not a physical body at all, but a real person, a soul identifying both now and always with God.

And one of those times was in Boston, and my mom, you know, she attends this meeting because her mother had one of the IM books on the shelf, and my mother became familiar with it or saw it at around the age of 17 or 18. LESLIE KENDRICK-KLEIN Self-help books, the original gateway drug to cults. BRIAN KARDELL My mother was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Her father was German and he had been a U-boat captain, but they had enough money to immigrate to the U.S.

One of the things that happened that had a big influence on my mother's life was that her mother tried to abort her using quinine sulfate, which is what they used back in the 30s. And there's a good chance that contributed to my mother's lifelong struggle with epilepsy. Qinine sulfate was an anti-malarial drug, but in the early 1900s, when abortions were illegal, thousands of women used it to try and end pregnancies because it was known to cause uterine contractions, and women thought it might help, quote, bring on their period. But it was dangerous, mostly unreliable, and for many, unfortunately, the only option they

had. Yeah, quinine sulfates making a comeback, guys. My mother started to experience, you know, as a child, these Petit Mal seizures. And there's a connection there between these intense spiritual experiences and epilepsy. This is a kind of a well-known thing that people have visions and see light and all sorts of things due to epilepsy. So her parents were basically non-religious. And so she decided as a very young girl

to go find a church to be a part of. Then she worked for the Christian Science Monitor and was very involved. And unlike his father, Sean's mother was educated. She went to Antioch College, which is notoriously liberal progressive school. Go Yellow Jackets. And then she went to Boston University after that.

Go you Boston Terriers. And that's how she was in Boston to meet my dad. And when, you know, she attends this meeting because she was trying to find the masters that she had read about in the IM books. And all of a sudden, here's this live messenger who is purporting to speak for the ascended masters. And she was just like, here's this teacher, I gotta go follow him.

Well, of course, my dad's married, he's 45, he's got five kids, right? And he sees my mom and she's this ingenue, 20 years younger. She was a seeker and she was smart and beautiful. She worked with him for a while and I think he kept trying to get something going romantically. And finally, he did write a letter saying El Morya wants us to be together. And so, you know, it was all couched in terms of messenger training, you know, I'm going to train you to be a messenger.

You know, call leaders have got to stop using God and angels and saints and masters to justify their predatory, borderline pedophiliac behavior. Listen up, God didn't tell you to go screw a 20 year old, OK? You're addicted. Nevertheless, it was love, supposedly, and they got married in 63 and I was born almost like right away, you know. They had their own house and they probably had maybe five or six followers in the inner circle and they had more people who were coming in. You've got the IM students, you know, and there's this live messenger

who's claiming to talk to the same masters that the IM people are, you know. All right. So what is the recipe to make one of these ascended masters? Ascended masters are supposedly people who have evolved and balanced most of their karma. The idea is, you know, you reincarnate for multiple lifetimes, you keep coming back until you get it right, and once you get it right, you've balanced your karma, you've fulfilled your dharma, your mission, right, and then you can reunite with God and you become an ascended master. And so the idea in our cult was that anybody can do this. They were dreamed up in the late 1800s by occult writers like Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to be in telepathic contact with invisible spiritual guides.

That idea was later expanded by Guy Ananda Ballard into a full-blown hierarchy of quote masters, including Jesus, Buddha, Saint Germain, and other spiritual VIPs who supposedly transcended karma and now guide humanity from beyond, like a cosmic board of directors. If you consider that Jesus is also an ascended master, right? Christians worship only Jesus, but we worship Jesus. Saint Germain, El Morya, Maha Chahan, Dual Kool, Archangel Michael, Archangel Gabriel, you know, there's nobody really in charge of this dogma. It's just whatever anybody says it is.

Where did those names come from and why did it change? Well, my dad came up with the Summit Lighthouse. When it was the Summit Lighthouse, I guess it was a study group. Definitely New Age, mystical, esoteric, all of those terms apply. And his idea was everyone needs a beacon to draw them home to God. Before the whole apocalypse and predictions of nuclear war and all that, you know, my parents really were trying to create positive change in the world. That's how they started, was trying to bring people together, do these decrees, and kind of try to create some positive movement. And they were idealists in a way. LESLIE KENDRICK All right, ladies, and honestly, anyone with a butt. You know that drawer full of

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They move with you, not against you. And they have the cutest prints and colors. I'm currently loving this teal set myself. They also come in sizes extra small to 4XL. And they're made from sustainably sourced materials. Oh, and if you don't love your first pair, it's on them. So spring into comfort with MeUndies. Support the show by going to MeUndies.com slash Colt and using our code Colt to get

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I wonder youth mental health is in crisis. And look, we get it. Tech isn't evil, but not all tech is made for kids. That's why I really like what Gab is doing. Right. Gab's approach is called a tech in steps It basically means giving kids the right kind of tech for their age Not just tossing them an adult smartphone and hoping for the best it starts with a super simple smartwatch for little kids It's got GPS safe zones. No internet. No social media Then there's a starter phone for tweens with things like monitored messaging and video calls Yeah, look, I would never give my six-year-old a phone, but I would give him a Gab watch. I mean, he thinks it's the coolest thing ever

because he could send voice messages, and I think it's the coolest thing ever because it doesn't come with TikTok, a browser, or a portal to Doom. And for teens, they have a more advanced phone with features like a camera that still lets you, the parent, manage which apps they're using. Bottom line, you don't need to get your kid a phone that was made for an adult.

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So Mark Prophet, and yes, that is his original surname Prophet, which is derived from the Middle English and Old French word prophète, meaning someone who speaks for a deity. Which is weirdly fitting because he would eventually actually become a self-proclaimed

prophet. Yeah. It's actually called an aptronym. These are names that ironically or unironically fit the person's profession a little. I'm learning so much. So like Usain Bolt, the sprinter. Right. Or the poet William Wordsworth.

Right. Those people that I put in front of you to read. I said it so well though. My favorite is Thomas Crapper, right? A lot of people think that he invented the toilet. He didn't, but he did make major improvements on the toilet and had a thriving plumbing business in Victoria, England.

The more you know. Okay, continue on. You know, my dad, he would dictate these, what were called pearls of wisdom. And it was a weekly newsletter that he sent out. When that flame of freedom breathes and lives within your soul, the paltry treasures of mortal self become as nothing. And man sees that he has been as a serf groveling in the sands and dusts of the earth without ever understanding the meaning of his immortal destiny. You could just be a subscriber to the Pearls, but if you wanted to actually join was called the Keepers of the Flame Fraternity. And then you get these lessons, which he wrote,

and they're full of conspiracy theories. Oh, it's always fallen ones, you know, attacking the earth, lessons about mole people, lizard people, you know, a lot of the stuff that you hear recycled now into QAnon. My dad was very paranoid. He was really super anti-communist, very conservative. You know, if you look at these early lessons, his lack of education is very evident. My mom was a good writer and she had editorial skills and she was also educated enough not to be talking about mole people, you know. But, you know, she herself came up with other equally wacky conspiracies later. The main one that people always talk about is the

international capitalist communist conspiracy, right? And this is the idea that the Soviets in the US were really on the same side and it was all being run by bankers and that they were arming both sides. But then it got woven into this idea of the biblical Nephilim and aliens interbreeding with humans and that whole thing. Yeah, that whole thing. And then when I was about two years old, somehow he got some donors to spring for this mansion. It was the Broadmoor neighborhood of Colorado Springs, which is a very snooty, all-white, upper- class neighborhood. These retirees are giving not only necessarily their checks, but also savings to come up

with this money for this house. Again, it was this whole thing, give us money and we'll take care of you. When I was born, there was maybe five or six main people in the group. By the time we're in Colorado Springs and I'm four or five years old, there's 60 people maybe. You know, a lot of it in the beginning was word-of-mouth. Former members of the IM or other masters organizations that wanted to see what was going on with us. We would hold these conferences four times a year, and so hundreds of people would crowd into this mansion for these conferences and things like that. You have these multiple tiers. You have somebody who may have just

come to a lecture and then that's it. Or then you have people who would be subscribers. Then you have keepers of the flame. Then you have various levels of staff, right? You come on staff, you give everything. You disclose all of your assets, you turn them over. Any pensions or trusts or anything you have, it gets signed over. And you're basically there for life. OK, we've obviously heard a lot of cult stories over the years, but I'm still sometimes floored by how easily people can be convinced to give up everything. Money, time, energy, all in the pursuit of something bigger. You know, and they may as well have just handed over their cash because the cult, well, they

basically took away anything good that you could buy with it anyway. This is almost like a monastery environment. There's dietary rules and restrictions, no popular music, no R-rated movies, no popular fiction novels, certainly no sex between unmarried people. You're either married or celibate, and if you want to get married, you had to go through this process of asking permission, and then if you did get permission to date, you couldn't basically touch each other at all until you were married. All the taboos about sex is just completely about control.

The I Am movement was extremely anti-sex. You're going to waste all your light, it's going to about control. The I Am movement was extremely anti-sex. You're going to waste all your light. It's going to be spilled on the ground or wasted. And, you know, you won't have enough to make your ascension. And this is a huge fear factor for anybody who is in my cult. And yes, that phrase, quote, spilled on the ground wasn't just metaphorical. It's straight out of the Bible.

Genesis 38, to be exact. See, a guy named Onan tries to dodge his duty to give his dead brother's wife a child, don't ask. So he, I mean, he reroutes his seed delivery. How's that? It spills on the ground. And God smites it. For bad aim. And God smites him. For bad aim. And so yeah, centuries later cult leaders are still using that one verse to terrify people into celibacy. The ascension to become an ascended master. All the masters who are associated with Earth were people who had lived many lifetimes, fulfilled their divine mission, balanced 51% or more of their karma and reunited with God. So the pitch for our cult was that anyone can do this.

Anyone can make their ascension and become one with God. If you live according to the rules and the doctrines and balance your karma, then yes, you can become an ascended master. And did anybody become an Ascended Master? My dad. It's funny, I mean, there were a couple of announcements that various members had ascended, right? And sometimes they even gave dictations. Like my mom would take a dictation

from someone who had ascended, right? And this gets into the whole past lives thing, which I haven't talked about yet. Of course, in our family, we were all supposedly famous people in our past lives. Who were you? Well, one of my supposed embodiments was this Austro-Hungarian composer named Franz Lehar. My mother printed this from the time I was a child. She bought me his music. She bought me the books about him and this was you essentially.

Franz LaHarr, how about playing a little Franz LaHarr, Rob? This particular piece is entitled The Merry Widow, which became a global phenomenon after it premiered in Vienna in 1905. I almost named my child Franz Lehar. No, you didn't. But I didn't. But I didn't. And talking about some of her other embodiments, I mean, she was Guinevere. I mean, and the thing that was crazy about it is that the Camelot story is fiction.

These are Celtic legends, right? And yet she made that very real, even to the point where she claimed to have been that in a past life It's not even a real person Guinevere is the legendary queen of King Arthur Yes, that's King Arthur round table excalibur swords quests and all that She's most famously known for being Arthur's wife and also for her not so secret-secret affair with his top knight, Sir Lancelot, which she says he does a lot more than Lance. A lot.

Scare them. I would say that generally my relationship with my parents was good. My dad was a very strict disciplinarian, so we did get spanked. My mom did use the hairbrush on me a few times, but they thought they were doing the right thing, you know. The main thing that I remember about my parents is that they were always gone. They were always busy.

I was mainly taken care of by staff members. As a kid, I didn't really participate in the services. I mean, I was always just playing. I went to public school starting in kindergarten. I was completely weird compared to everybody else. They dressed differently. You know, I had never heard their music. I didn't know about sports. I was ignorant of American culture. They thought I was strange because I came from this cult house, which everybody knew was not just

a regular house. By the time I was in fourth grade, my dad started to clash with the principal and he just pulled me out in the middle of fourth grade. And then they had actually started a school and it was run in the big house. We had 20, 30 kids, mostly kids of members. So it was a Saturday. Neither of my parents were around. And I said, where's my mom and dad?

Oh, your mom went to the hospital. Your dad, he's ill. And I'm going like, oh, I figured he'd be back at some point, but he didn't. And what had happened is that he had a massive stroke in the morning and they took him in and put him on breathing machines, but he had no brain activity. Two days later, my mom unplugged him. So it was very sudden. Yeah, I was 53. You know, my mom, she sat us all down on our sandbox. She grabs this leaf in her hand and she says, you know, your daddy's body is just like this leaf.

And she crumples it up and she says, it just returns to the earth. But his spirit is with us. She stood up and said his ascended master name was Lanello. And this gets into the whole past lives thing. He was supposed to have been the poet Longfellow and the Camelot character Lancelot. And so Lanello was his spiritual name. And she gets up and says, I am Lanello and I am speaking to you. And she immediately started taking dictations from him. So like he's gone, but he's still talking through her, right?

So that was very, very weird for me to have my dad die, but he's still talking and I'm only nine years old and I'm listening to this and I'm confused. To me, it didn't sound like him, but I wanted to believe that it was him. I wanted to believe, you know, from the, all the way up until I was a teenager, I would get personal messages from him to me, but he's dead. The minute that she gives a dictation from my dead father, that cements her as the leader, right? There were other people who were in the organization at that time who maybe were trying to take control or whatever, but, you know, she had the spiritual

mantle and everybody believes her. So now Elizabeth Clare Proffitt takes over the helm of the church. Who's the Merry Widow now? Play it Rob. Also, we're not even going to mention the affair she had while her husband was dying. Mmm, Guinevere indeed. So many cult parallels, so little podcast time. Regardless, Elizabeth takes the reins of the cult and makes a few changes. There was a certain point when my mother decided that children should go to the Sunday services and listen to the lectures.

And it would be, you know, maybe an hour or two of the decrees and then another hour of lecture and then another like hour dictation. It's interesting because there's all of this sort of pressure to get really really into these intense decrees. And it shall come to pass and it shall be and if the white fire core representatives of Aliphy and Omega if the components of the capstone of the crown of the very third eye now be activated as those special disciples of light invoking the judgment. That is the ritual, is to get to that point where you're doing these decrees really fast.

And when it's being said fast, you can't tell what it is. And they're very fast, and they sound kind of like an auctioneer, and you can't really tell what anyone's saying. So it would be like, I am a being, a violet fire, I am the purity God desires. And that would be said many times. So, it would be like, I am the purity God desires, I am the purity God desires, like hundreds of times. I'm going to make an opening invocation, and then we're going to begin this. You are going to roll this tape. Please close your eyes at this time. I don't, I really don't like doing it. The thing is, is that I will find, you know, I'm 30 years out of this thing and I will find these decrees going through my head.

Together. Okay, so we talk a lot about people losing control in cults, but let's be honest, sometimes we lose control of our own finances without even realizing it. Yeah, you know, I thought I had a pretty good handle on my spending until Rocket Money showed me I'd been paying for things I don't even remember signing up for. It was humbling. Same, it was like opening a drawer and finding a bunch of financial clutter I didn't even know was there. Subscriptions, random charges, Rocket Money made it all visible all in one place.

Rocket Money? It's this brilliant personal finance app that helps you track spending, manage subscriptions, and even negotiate bills on your behalf, which I truly appreciate it because I hate calling customer service. And their budgeting tool is actually usable. Like, I could see where my money was going and finally start setting aside money for things that matter. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Download the Rocket Money app and enter our show's name, Was I in a Cult, in the survey so they know that we sent you. Don't wait.

Download the Rocket Money app today and tell them you heard about them from our show. Seriously, do it today because financial freedom, that's the kind of autonomy that we can get behind. Have you noticed silence doesn't really exist anymore? Like we've all forgotten how to just be without scrolling, swiping, spiraling. Right, and truthfully, historically, I'm not a meditation guy. I've tried, I feel like I'm doing it wrong, or I start thinking about snacks, but Headspace, well, that surprised me.

Ah, he's been converted, people. Yeah, I have. You see, Headspace is the first time meditation felt actually approachable. I started using it when I couldn't sleep and now it's part of my daily routine. Just five or ten minutes and my brain feels a little quieter. It's not perfect, but just a little less chaotic. And I'm a big meditation person and I personally love Headspace. It has guided meditations, breathing exercises, stuff to help with stress, anger, insomnia,

basically the human condition. Yeah, look, if you're like me and you don't want to sit cross-legged on a mountaintop, they've got short on-the-go practices you can do even while pacing your kitchen. And it's all backed by science and taught by real meditation teachers, guys, not cult leaders. Feel good and mean it when you say it. For a limited time, get Headspace free for 60 days. Go to headspace.com slash cult pod.

That's H-E-A-D-S-P-A-C-E dot com slash cult pod to unlock all of Headspace free for 60 whole days, guys. Headspace.com slash cult pod. So this is after the initial survival period when my dad died. My mom did this whole worldwide expansion. It became very sophisticated marketing. Yeah, she has a degree in political science. What she did with our cult in terms of building a worldwide organization was brilliant. My dad never could have achieved that.

And within a few years after that, we had centers in almost every major US city. Usually, members would raise the funds and they got these centers started and they would hold services there and they were used for recruiting. There would be a local person in charge or minister. And at that point, they had already started a formal training program called Summit University. People would go through first, second, third level Summit University, and then they could be ordained a minister and start a local chapter. Go Ascenders! Go Ascenders!

Really? No. No, Summit University does not have a football team, but they still operate in Gardner, Montana, where you can take classes such as the Aquarian Age Minister or Spiritual Healing through the Emerald Matrix. Danielle Pletka You really can't make this shit up, can you? Nat Malkus No. And on their website, it has a picture of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, our founder.

Nat Malkus Most churches have tithes where they expect their members to give 10%. We were no exception to that. Then there's the weekly collection plate. Then there's books, tapes, seminars, conferences, summit university tuition, things like that. Then we would have special fundraising campaigns. We had a publishing plant. We had a farm and ranch operation. We had auto maintenance shop. We made most of our money in real estate. Effectively, from our earliest, humblest beginnings, we leveraged real estate always to grow. And we got our members to donate funds to buy various properties. Because at some point in the late 80s, we were probably worth about $50 million. Not too shabby for a dude who started out with mimeographed newsletters, charisma and

an expert knowledge of cult tactics. Mm hmm. 50 million. I mean, maybe they should have changed their name to profit. Huh? It's profit. P-R-O-F-I-T. It looked better on the page. It is better on the page. Yeah, right. So with all these millions, naturally they were passing that money on to their employees. Right. Yeah. The trickle down effect in action.

It's just so nice when they do that. Effectively, our method of operation was get people to work for free or very little. It was very, very low-paid labor. There was no health care. There was no overtime. There was no nothing. 12 hours a day, six days a week. The staff housing was always atrocious.

Some people slept in their offices or slept on the floor or in a classroom or with a foam pad somewhere. Some people were sleeping outside. One guy I went to high school with was sleeping in a pump room along with our math teacher. The setup was clear. Long hours, little or no pay and brutal living conditions. Devotion was expected, comfort optional. And just when things couldn't seem more unsustainable came a new directive, not from leadership meetings or logistic plans, but of course, from prophecy.

See, my dad had, in the months before his death, he started to predict war and earth changes. So he told us, find some land away from the city, put all your assets into gold, and buy survival supplies and food and clothing and weapons. You know, he told us all that literally within days before he died. And then when he actually died, this became like a command from God, right? The last words of the prophet, right? So we started making plans to relocate. We bought some property in rural Colorado. We also had property up in Idaho and Montana and we started this company that was selling survival food and gold and silver. This particular endeavor led the church to nearly losing its tax exemption status due

to some silver futures investing shenanigans. So as a preventative measure, the group had to change their name, of course. We changed to Church Universal and Triumphant. Which was often shortened to the acronym CUT. It's one small letter away from a very befitting word for both the prophetess and the group. Of course, I'm referring to cute. No, you're not. We were involved in this heavy survivalist thinking for a couple of years. We held a big conference there. And

the idea is that's where we're going to go to survive the apocalypse, right? And it ended up really not amounting to anything. We didn't have a date then. It was just a general period of concern. And then my mom decided, that's not happening. Let's move to Los Angeles. So we ended up eventually in Los Angeles on this property called the King Gillette Ranch, which we called Camelot. That's 240 acres in the Malibu Hills. That property in 1978 was $5 million. That was kind of a real hub of our activity for a good 10 years. Our school was at the Camelot property. So yeah, I mean, it was a very strict conservative high school. The high school kids were expected to follow the

adult code of conduct, which meant no flirting, no dating, no physical contact between members of the opposite sex, no rock music, no alcohol, no drugs, no nothing. I mean, I know you started to have doubt here, actually. Well, I had all kinds of doubts. I really didn't like a lot of the strict rules. All of those things are things that I didn't agree with. Even though I believed in my mother's authenticity, I was also a rebellious kid. She loved me and I loved her a lot when I was a small child.

But as I started to come to my own and think for myself and I'm 13, 14 years old, she's angry that I'm becoming an individual. And there were a few incidents when I was a teenager. And, you know, I could think a normal parent would kind of go like, yeah, I kind of did that when I was a kid and maybe that's not a good idea, you know, but this was like, you make me sick, you're horrible, you know, like just making me feel like I was worthless. I think the worst thing is that she allowed herself to treat people as if they were subhuman. And she believed that her status as a spiritual

leader and as having this divine mission justified cruelty, just utter cruelty to people who were giving their lives. It was just intensive, verbal, psychological abuse. And that's, I think, the worst part of it is that she was somehow doing them a favor by treating them this way. I think cults are like algorithms. They act on the leader as well as on the followers. My mom didn't start out like this. But having people kowtow to her and cater to her every whim creates this situation where if she's not getting exactly what she wants

at a moment, you know, suddenly this person is a tool of the sinister force. What a C-U-T. She's serving C-U-T. Ugh, she is serving C-U-T right there. Mm-hmm. Again, my mother's doing this big expansion and we've got centers all over the world and we had a bunch of other properties in the San Fernando Valley.

And then once she started becoming more apocalyptic, she decided she wanted to buy a much larger piece of property in Montana. And so we bought the Forbes Ranch in the Paradise Valley, 12,000 acres. And we bought that in 1981. LESLIE KENDRICK Paradise Valley, Montana, a breathtaking expanse just north of Yellowstone National Park. JOHNNY STAPLETON You know, just because I haven't said anything about music in this episode, I will say that John Mayer named his 2013 album Paradise Valley

after the location where he owns a home. Well on his way to cult leader status. Right. Ooz's charisma, he's deeply mysterious, and he escaped to Montana, to a compound where he contemplates ego transcendence and spiritual enlightenment, while recording soft rock in a barn. Guess he wasn't kidding when he said... No, I'm not the man I used to be lately.

And the idea with the Ranch in Montana initially was just, you know, we want a self-sufficient community. We want to do farming and ranching. I want to have animals, and people could go up there and live and work and be in this community setting, right? But it didn't take long before she started to treat it as a much more serious effort. Like we had to all go up there

and there was gonna be cataclysm, earth changes, and war, and we would need this property in order to survive. Was I in a Cult is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. So you chose to hit play on this podcast today, which was, I got to give it to you guys, smart choice. Mm-hmm. And Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called AutoQuote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive

car insurance quote with rates from other companies. So you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Look, give it a try after this episode at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates not available in all states or situations prices vary based on how you buy. This episode is sponsored by Greenlight. So the other week,

my six year old gathered up every last crumpled birthday bill and roped Penny from his piggy bank. We're talking full treasure hunt energy. We marched to the bank. He cashed it in and loaded the total onto his green light card and he knows exactly how much money he has. He's saving towards goals. We've officially retired the bedroom coin jar that sounded like a slot machine every

time he rolled over in bed. That's progress. See when I was a kid, financial advice basically stopped at, money doesn't grow on trees. Thanks, Dad. Informative and vaguely botanical. But Greenlight actually teaches kids the stuff we didn't learn, how to spend wisely, how to save for real things, how to invest.

It's a debit card and money app made just for families, and it's designed to help kids build smart habits while parents still get to keep an eye on things. You can send them money, assign chores, track what they're spending. It's all in there. It's weirdly satisfying watching your kids kind of get it, actually. And me? I wish I had green light growing up. If I'm going to be honest, I wish I'd have started using it sooner with my child. But hey, no time like now. He's into it, I'm into it. And the piggy bank, well, it's in early retirement.

Start your risk-free Greenlight trial today at greenlight.com slash cult. That's greenlight.com slash cult. To get started, greenlight.com slash cult. By the way, as Sean mentioned earlier, he has just completed a book about growing up the son of two cult leaders. It's called My Cult, Your Cult, and it literally comes out two days after this podcast. Yeah, but you can order it now if you want. You can speed read.

You can finish the story before next week's second half. And we'll have a link to it in the show notes where you can buy the book. Yeah, support him. Support Sean. He's been working on this book for years. This is 80, 81. When I went to college, I went to Northwestern University. Go Wildcats! And I can actually say that and mean it because I grew up in Evanston where Northwestern is. The first year was very hard because I was living in the cult teaching center there on

the north side of Chicago. And so I'm just around all these adults. I just couldn't handle it. I was too young. I was 16. So I was way too young to be in college and I was struggling academically and I was struggling emotionally and socially because I didn't have any social life. I would go to school, go to my classes and come back to the teaching center. I dropped out of Northwestern after a year. I'd come back from Northwestern. We had another center downtown LA. And so I was living there and I was working at the Kultz Video Production Company. The company was called Excalibur Video Systems, and it was downtown on Wilshire Boulevard. It was really interesting the way we did it. We couldn't afford, obviously,

to buy airtime like most preachers do. But what we did is we made these shows, we would ship hundreds of tapes out to different cities, and we had our members put them on public access and get them played for free. So my mom was able to reach millions of people for free. The business model didn't work. After a few years, that company closed and I went back to the Camelot property and worked there. But even as Sean poured himself into the work, those quiet, uncomfortable questions, the ones he'd been pushing down for years, started getting louder. I mean, I think I was expected to follow in the footsteps of my parents as the next messenger, but I started to get very dismissive. This isn't right. I know this isn't right, but then I'm trying to reconcile this is supposed to be God talking, right?

This is God talking, not just my mother. And so even though I know it's wrong, I'm having to try to sort out how could she be wrong and then still be right about all these other things. So it created this real wedge of cognitive dissonance as I was growing up. I had a two-year period where I left the group entirely and came back. It was at the end of 84 and I met a woman in the cult who I fell in love with. Her name was Kathleen. And we kind of were getting together on the down-low and soon we were having sex, which is against all the rules and my mom found out about it and basically said, you're breaking the code of conduct.

I'm going to have to kick Kathleen out because I can't have this double standard happening here. So I was like, well, you kick her out, you're going to kick me out too because I'm with her. And so that's what happened. I left with Kathleen. You know, we got our stuff together and we had an apartment in Encino. So we were just cut off in every possible way. Like everybody

in the cult turned on us. And my mom, she basically announced to everybody when we left that Kathleen was a cat woman and that she had green glowing eyes and black fur. And she was trying to derail me from my spiritual path. The C-A-T escapes from the C-U-T. You sound like the mother of a three year old, Liz. That's because I am the mother of a three year old. So meanwhile, back on the C-U-T, compound. Spell it, Spell it, Tyler. Compound.

That's not spelling. The C-U-T. Spell it out, right? C-O-M-P-O-N-C-U-T compound. Good boy. Great job. Wait, we're not supposed to say great job. I like when you use your brain, Tyler. There was a plan at that point to build a huge auditorium and a bunch of dormitories and really expand on the Malibu campus. Gregory Mull was an architect from San Francisco. He joined our group in 1975, and he's like, I want to be the architect of this. And so the compromise that they worked out was they were paying him, but they were calling it loans and he's getting three or $4,000 a month in expenses. And all of a sudden they're like, we need you to sign promissory notes. He finally signs a promissory note for $37,000. Just promising to pay all

the money back that we'd paid him. And we never built the project. In fact, he never worked on any designs for the project. So anyway, my mother's pretty upset with him. Says, you've betrayed me. Your soul is at risk here. You need to pay this money. And he gives my mother his last $5,000. He was forced to dumpster dive to eat him, him and his daughter. They're in a rough spot and he starts reevaluating his whole life and existence and what he was

doing in this cult and he eventually decides, they fucked me over. So my mom decides to sue him for the $37,000. He countersued for $253 million. And so, you know, the thing went to trial and we lost. What year did you go to trial? 1986. And how much did you lose? One point five, six million.

She fundraised from her members to pay the judgment. But for her, I think once the United States of America, Los Angeles Superior Court rebuked her spiritual authority, that was it. Los Angeles Superior Court rebuked her spiritual authority. That was it. Now it's become personal. The United States is not only engaged in decadence and sin, it also rejected the messenger of God. So that's like triple reason to have the judgment happen now.

She starts to get all apocalyptic. Her messages are getting worse and worse. Leave the coasts. Los Angeles is not a safe place to be. There's going to be earthquakes and judgments and tsunamis and who knows what else. At the same time, I'm doing really well in my career. I started out as an assistant editor and then I moved into doing film transfer work. And my son is born in May of 86. And so I'm happy. Now, while Sean was technically out of the group, he still caught wind of the prophecies

coming from his mother. But I was too scared of all of the prophecies about Los Angeles. And, you know, my mother came out with this book called Saint Germain on Prophecy in 1986. She's quoting Nostradamus and she's saying it's going to be a modern ride of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She's already announced that Camelot is being sold and that the whole organization is withdrawing. We're at the LA airport Hilton and Towers, she's holding a conference there, and Saint Germain gives this big dictation, basically saying, leave the coasts of the United States, don't be anywhere near the coast." And then at that point, the prophecies were intensifying,

and there should be a confrontation and a reckoning if something is not done. I remember that quote perfectly because effectively she's saying there's gonna be a nuclear war. She was really trying to get the United States to put up a kind of iron dome strategic missile shield so that we could shoot down incoming missiles. Now, for all you children of the Cold War like myself, this was a weird time the late 80s. The Berlin Wall was still up. Reagan was president. And the idea of a Soviet missile raining down on your suburb was not sci-fi.

It was baked into school drills, movie plots and our collective anxiety. was baked into school drills, movie plots and our collective anxiety. So what we came down to is that our last defense was bomb shelters. So that was in October of 87. By the summer of 88, we were already in, you know, in Montana. They were in full swing planning for the bomb shelters. The engineers had already started doing design work and drawings for these shelters. And I just decided, look, you know, if we're going to have to survive a nuclear war, I want to have something to do with the planning and the building.

So he signs back up. Back to the group where he was raised in hopes of surviving the forthcoming nuclear apocalypse. And lend his support to the building of the bomb shelters. clear apocalypse. And lend his support to the building of the bomb shelters. Now the bomb shelters were a gigantic project that took about two and a half years to design and build. It was a major operation, probably cost about 25 million in 1990 dollars.

We had space for 756 people. They had everything. Diesel generators, you know, there were dormitories for men, women and couples, the medical facility in each one, commercial kitchen in each one. We had stored food where we could occupy the shelters for seven months and then we had seven years of stored food for after we came out of the shelters. And you had also ammunition. Oh, yeah.

You forgot about? Forgot about the guns. The FBI raid. Yeah. Oh yeah. You forgot about the guns. The FBI raid. Excuse me. Okay, grab some water. I gotta take two minutes. I know that we're almost out of time. No, no, it's fine. Take your time. Well, let's give him that break, but it might be slightly longer than two minutes, more like a week. Because we have much, much more to this amazing story. Yeah, we're talking about given the full scale building of a bomb shelter, gun turrets,

we're given those, we're given grain silos and given some dictations from dead masters. That's working. We are giving all of that, guys. I did it right, right? from Dead Masters. That's working. We are giving all of that, guys. I did it right, right? No. And the cut, the CUT is given and gets some press. The organization itself sometimes seems less a church than a cult, but it has several thousand members, and as Nightline correspondent Farah Sawyer reports,

they, their convictions and their activities are a little difficult to ignore. I feel like when Ted Koppel calls you a cult, you might want to take heed. So join us next week, guys. It gets crazy. It does get crazy. It really does. So thank you, Sean Proffitt, for telling us the first half of your story. And thank you, George Elder, for introducing us to Sean.

George is a fellow Evanstonian and happens to be friends with my parents. Yeah, he's one of the good ones, George is. Don't forget to order Sean's book, guys. My cult, your cult. The link is in the show notes. And that's it. Please consider being Patreon supporters to help our cause. Right. All we ask is for you to disclose all your assets, turn over any pensions and trusts, and anything you have. And you too can serve as staff for free and live on Tyler's couch.

And get a Was I Anacult mug. With Tyler's mug on it! Wasana Cult is written, produced, edited, and hosted by that guy Tyler, the Ascended Master Mee-Sum. And her, Liz C-U-T Ayacuzzi. You're missing the N, brother. Sound editing and design by Rob Moll-Peeple-Pera. I do need to go to the dermatologist. Rob did not listen to any of this episode.

No, I'm here. You would have known that mole people has nothing to do with moles on your skin. Right. I know, but it's a joke because I actually need to go to the dermatologist. Maybe listen to the episode before you edit it. It's actually a to-do list, Rob.

I got this one right here and it's sticking out. Please don't show me your lower extremities. Assistant Editor Greta Guinevere Stromquist. This episode brought to you by MeUndies, which he just showed. Which he actually needs. Who are we on? Studio engineer Stacy Lizard People Para. And our video engineer is Gabby. Happy honeymooning, rap. So with that guys,

wrap it up. Bitches. Take out your knife. Purify me. Don't spill my life. One small letter away from a befitting word for both the prophetess and the group. Cunt. Sorry. I knew it. I knew group. Cunt. I knew it. I was like, she's gonna say it.

She's just gonna say it. Also, but the letter L. L, I thought you were going for Cole. Yeah, I knew where you'd go. I was going for both. I still won't go to the C word. It's so good, though. You want to take... Let's take it again. It's giving good though. You want to take, let's take it again. It's giving second take.

It's giving second take. A true crime podcast. It got me upset because this is someone's kid and someone knows she's gone. That takes a different approach. It was shocking for something like this to happen in our little town. Focusing on the communities affected by life-shattering crimes. It made news throughout the entire region that these two people had been shot while they slept in such a safe community. To give a new perspective on the devastation crimes can cause.

It was shocking for something like this to happen in our little town. Featuring cases from quiet towns to bustling cities and interviewing the people closest to the case. My first thought was that it's an unusual location for us to have a homicide. Listen to the True Crime podcast, City Confidential, and step beyond the yellow tape to learn just how far a crime can reach. There are certain cases in the history of Boston that I think sort of define the city. I think this is one of them. New episodes of the City Confidential Podcast are available every Thursday. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Are you looking for your next case? Pluto TV has all your favorite crime dramas streaming for free. You're gonna need some backup. Which means suspense is free. Very cool. Watch CSI New York, Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, Tracker, FBI and Swap all for free. You can't outrun this. Someone's gonna pay for all this crime.

But it's not gonna be you. Take care of business, fellas. Watch all the cases all for free from all your favorite devices. We got you. Feel the free. PlutoTV. Stream now. Pay never.