What Now? with Trevor Noah - Dr. Steven Hassan: Are You In a Cult?

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

In a conversation that’s equal parts psychological thriller and masterclass in influence, Trevor and Eugene sit down with world-renowned cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan. Recruited into the Unification Church (aka the Moonies) as a college student, Hassan rose through its ranks before ultimately breaking free — an experience that reshaped his life’s work and inspired his bestselling book The Cult of Trump. From fringe groups to social media echo chambers, the trio unpack how and why ordinary people get swept into systems of extreme belief, the ways loyalty is engineered, and what separates healthy persuasion from manipulation. They also explore why the line between conviction and control is thinner and closer to home than we think. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is something that I'm picking up on already is many of the things that a cult might say to you are actually true. Do you get what I'm saying? I do think mankind is asleep in that way. And we see it in what we eat, how we live, how we work, how we consume. There is a level of like a sleep. Sleepwalking. Yeah, but I go like, yeah, no, this is true. We're not in touch with our bodies anymore.

We're not in tune with our minds. We act mindlessly. If someone said that to me. walking down the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know how many times I see people walk into the street on their phone and then a car has to swivel? I'm like, yeah, we are.

So they would have me on that line. If they said mankind is asleep, I'd be like, carry on. But you're getting on another universal point that's really demanding, underlining and with a red pencil that the ideologies have truthful, important things in it. And they quote, famous people. who say really important things. So it's not just all BS, and that's also as a therapist, that's what I try to do in helping my clients deconstruct.

How did they get hooked? What were the pieces that hook them? And the technique, I'm jumping ahead, and I'll circle back to your earlier question, but the technique that's most effective is I empower my clients to understand Chinese communist brainwashing, model, et cetera, and the technique is this simple. I ask people to go back to that critical earlier moment when they were getting recruited

or they were falling in love with someone who was a malignant narcissist that was going to ruin their lives. If you knew then what you know now, what would you say and do differently? This is What Now with Trevor Noah. How do you pronounce your last name? Hassan. Hasen. Like Maggie Hasson.

Because everyone has a different pronunciation of H-A-S-S-A-N. Some say what? There's Hassan. Hassan. Hassan. Like they all... Hassan. Now you're just adding words.

So Hassan was the cousin of Muhammad in the Muslim religion. Yeah. But the derivation of mine is Ellis Island. Oh, okay, okay. And my grandfather was a cousin, a Jewish. A chazen. I was almost there with chasen. Yeah, you were actually.

But mine sounded more Schwarzenegger than. Yeah, Gazzen. Gazen. That's hasn't Khazen over there, I met Arnold when I first got out of the Moonies, when I went public and he was promoting pumping iron. He was the guests before me. And he heard I had gotten out of the Moonies.

And he said, can I join? Join the Moonies? No, he joined my segment. Oh. I was like, wait. I was like, wait, wait. I thought that you left a cult. I left the cult.

And you told people about leaving the cult. And then Arnold Schwarzenegger heard about this. He's like, can I want to join the cult? I want to make a cult. I just heard you're talking about. I want to, can I join? No, but he stayed and he made some very, wait. This is 19, 1970.

Yeah. I was on the Barry Farber show in Manhattan. I had never met a bodybuilder. He was there with a gorgeous blonde. And what is the documentary, right? Yeah, his thing about becoming his bodybuilder. Yeah. Is that the thing that blew up?

That's what inspired everyone to start pumping iron. That's what blew him up. Venice Beach famous. Way before he became government. His documentary is great. I don't know if you've watched it. Which one? The Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary.

And it's self-reflection as well. He's in it. Yeah. Talks about his life. How old is it? Maybe it's like a few years old now. Oh, I haven't seen if there's a new one. Well, he talks about his illegitimate son and his relationship.

Talks about everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It talks about everything. But I watch it again. I think I watched it too quickly. It's really, really great. So this was, wait, 1970. So wait, how long were you in a cult for? I was recruited at Queens College. The same month, Patty Hurst was abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Women flirted with me. My girlfriend had dumped me. And a few weeks later, I'm a right-wing fascist cult, but I didn't know what it was at all for months. I feel like that puts somebody in the perfect position. You know, I had a conversation with a monk about who can be a monk and how to become a monk and what, you know, a monk life is. And it was interesting. So we're in Bhutan and they took us to, it is, is it a monastery?

Yeah, it is a monastery. Okay, just making sure. So we go to the monastery and there's all the monks there and everything. And there's all these young boys who've come. from different childhoods. Some have almost been on a path of monkhood their whole lives. Others have come in because they're living troubled lives. Yes.

And so somebody said in the group were in, they were like, oh, but like, isn't that, you know, this kid's been through like this 20 year old or 19 year old. He's been through, he's done all these things. And can he be a monk? And the monk said something really amazing. He said, oh, he's the best person to be a monk. Because if you've been perfect your whole life and you're a monk, that's fine.

It's normal. But if you haven't been perfect your whole life, you've lived the furthest life from perfect, and then you become a monk. He's like, I feel like you're the best disciple slash teacher because you've actually experienced the things that you're talking about. And I feel like that's you.

Well, that's a piece of it, but I'd also say you have to have an ego before you can surrender your ego if you're on a spiritual path. And a lot of people haven't figured out who they are and to recruit them into, something that's totalistic is not informed consent from my mental health professional point of

view. No, but this is what I mean is like you are you are now an expert in the world of cults. You're an author who's written about cults. You teach people and you help them understand what a cult is, whether the inner cult, the difference between cults, etc. But your origin story, I find particularly fascinating because it gives you a unique insight. You're not just coming at this from academia. Like you just told us. You were in a, so I didn't know much about this before I, like, read your story, but tell us about, like, the Moonies. Tell us about the story. How does this journey begin for you? So I was not a joiner. I was raised in a conservative Jewish family and Flushing Queens with two older sisters, and my mom's side was Orthodox. And my mom was an eighth-grade art teacher in Brooklyn, and my dad took over his father's heart.

hardware store in Ozone Park, Queens. And I played basketball and was writing poetry at Queens College. A well-rounded genit. I was reading philosophy. I was 19, had a ponytail. I'd skipped eighth grade, extra honors student. So I was in the last draft lottery of the Vietnam War, which I was opposed, but I got a good number, fortunately.

I hated Nixon. What do you mean? Sorry, what does that mean? I got a good number. What is that? I was in the last draft lottery, meaning they were picking numbers of your birthday to decide who was going to fight in Vietnam. Damn, I didn't know. I was like that.

I'm aging myself, yes. Oh, wow. So if you got 60 or less, you were going to Vietnam, I got like 300 out of, you know, 365. And that was basically the reason you didn't go. Yeah. Wow. But I hated Nixon. And then they get in the Moonies a few months later.

I'm fasting for Nixon to be president despite Watergate, and I think my dad's going to appreciate me. And I'm like, Dad, God wants Nixon to be president. I'm fasting for him. He goes, Steve, you are right. He's a crook. I'm like, Dad, you don't understand. God wants him to be president.

But how did you, you understand what you just skipped for me? You just told me about art, basketball, philosophy, and then you go to the gym. And then all of a sudden, you just jumped into moonies. No, I need to understand. I understand. And I'll elaborate on why later. Okay.

I need you to take us through the steps because I like what you said. I'm not a joiner. It sounds like you were a smart kid. It came from a good family. You had your own point of view. And then what happens? When does the Mooneys? So the Mooneys is educated about the Holocaust.

Yeah. Bicycle crossed the U.S. when I was 16. Wait, for why? Because I was like wanting to see the United States. And I was. And you hadn't heard of buses? What bicyclists? I was 16.

I didn't have, no, I, this was a, this was an outing to have experiences. How did you get back before dark? What were you, what were you? No, we would camp out or stay at hostels. I went with American youth hospitals. What bicycle? Was it a schwin? It actually was a schwin.

How did you guess? Eugene knows. In any case, whenever you try to ride across the country, there's only one bike for you. Shwin. Schwinn. Shwin. Bye, ma, ma, ma, ma. Anyway.

No, my story is my girlfriend dumped me abruptly over Christmas, and I'm sitting at Queens College cafeteria ready to start the next semester, and three women came over and started love bombing me, which is a term for cult recruitment. Okay. Oh, Trevor, you're so special. Tell us about you, Trevor. And they were like with Steve, and I'm like, there are three of them.

I'm going to get lucky with one of them. I can't if I if my math was very good even from I said I said are you students here yeah my you'd have a bright future with online gambling yeah if you're the time machine spread my odds here but they didn't say is we don't believe in sex wait so how so they come no they were just using sexual seduction as a recruiting tool okay and I they lied they said they were students they weren't I said are you part of some religious group no not at all So you asked? I asked.

I literally asked, but they lied. But that's also part of people need to understand destructive cults deceive. But wait, what made you ask that question? Because I don't know. Intuition. I've asked myself that question over and over again. The only major cult story was the Manson's back in 74 that I can think of. Because that's a weird question to ask.

It is. A group of women who've just approached you and said. said, wow, you look nice. And you're like, are you guys part of a religious group? No, I did ask that. It's a perfect question to ask. I can also tell you, because I've helped people for 49 years, and I asked them questions about what were their first contacts, what was the attraction, what was going on for them in their life.

And almost all of them have signals like that of, I thought it was crazier, I thought it was odd, or I had a bad vibe. Intuition. But they don't listen. Yeah. They don't listen. they get overwhelmed by the external influences. And it's a step-by-step thing where they don't say,

hi, we have a cult, come and join us. They say, do you care about the world, Eugene? Yeah. Do you care about starving children? Of course. Because there are children starving. And they need you. And this kind of emotional stuff.

And you're a teenager. And they bring you to an introductory lecture and a free dinner, etc. The weirdest part of my story is I was working as a banquet waiter at the Holiday Inn on Hempstead, Long Island, every weekend because I was going to college and I wanted gas money and date money and whatever. So they met me, they invited me over for dinner, and they said, we're going away for the weekend. It's going to be so great. And we want you. Please come. And I'm like, I work every weekend.

I'm sorry. I can't go. Period. But they kept asking over and over and over and over. And finally, I don't know why I said it, but I said, if I don't have to work some weekend, then I'll go. And two days later, I called my boss up, as I always did, because it was a parmitsvah, a wedding, a this or a that. He said, you won't believe it, Steve, but the wedding was called off, so take the weekend off. Wait, did they have something to do with that?

I don't think so. I think it was just bad luck or synchrony. But I was like, hmm, I'm wondering if I meant to go with these folks, these fun people. So you call them up, they pull up in their station wagon? No, I went to their house. And I made a miss, this was way before cell phone. So I made the mistake to not bring my car. So I'd have wheels if I didn't like it.

That was big mistake. And I didn't have a phone number to tell my family or anybody where I was. was, so nobody knew where I was. And we're driving up to Tarrytown to this multimillion dollar estate. And as we're passing, it's dark at night, it was snowy. They're in your car. I'm in their van. Oh, you're in their van. I'm in their van. And one of the people at the front says, this weekend, we're going to have a joint workshop with the Unification Church. And I went, what? What? I'm Jewish. I'm not. into church.

Nobody said anything about a workshop. I'm out of here. Drive me back to Queens. And I swear to God, that's exactly what happened. You know, can I tell you what? You remind me of how Eugene reacts sometimes when he'll be in my car. And I'll just be like, we're just going to hang out.

And then at the last second, I'll be like, so we're going to be moving furniture around in my house? And then Eugene is in the car like, ah! Let me out! Let me out of here. Let me out of here. He's like, who's moving furniture?

It happens all the time. Bate and switch and all of that. And then I was like, it's snowing outside. It's completely dark. I don't have any means I could get on the road and hitchhike and ask somebody to take me to the police station. But there I said, bring me back. Well, going in the morning. So just, you know, come in and you'll leave in the morning.

But they had no intention of bringing me back in the morning. Because the van left. And the phone wasn't working. The pay phone. It was all later as I was a leader, I understood. This was all heavenly deception. Yes, my man, Eugene. Before you become a leader, the van pulls up, right?

Then what happens? The van pulls into this estate, formerly owned by the Seagram's family. And I hear this rap about workshop and the Unification Church. I have my thing. And they did a very typical mind control technique. They turned it around on me. Can you explain more? Yeah.

So I said, what do you mean, church? I'm Jewish. And what do I mean workshop? I thought we were just going to have fun. And they're like, are you close-minded about Christianity, Steve? So they, whatever objection you have, they make it your fault versus those motherfuckers, it's okay to curse. Oh, yeah, I mean, those motherfuckers said if they weren't religious, it wasn't a group.

I was lied to, I won out of here. But anyway, it was not, I just, nobody explained to me how cults operate. and I was one of, as most people today, walking around going, I'm too smart to ever fall for a cult. So let's break this. I'm educated. I come from a good family. Yeah, but let's break this part down now.

Please. So now knowing the things that you know, let's go through these two major steps to help somebody else understand like what is actually happening. So let's go back to the university campus. Help me understand what that initial, do you have a name for that? Is there a term for what happened there? What is significant about the way that they approached you and brought you in? So the Mooney's call it witnessing, but that's a term Christians often use for proselytizing.

Okay. So, but the key thing is ethical religious groups tell people up front who they are, what they believe, and what they want from them. Okay, that's ethical. Before they pressure you or guilt-trip you or indoctrinate you into things. So they identify themselves and say. what the agenda is. Exactly. So I have an influence continuum.

It's on my website, Freedom of Mind.com. You can download it for free. Ethical influence looks like this, respects your conscience, free will, creativity, love-based,

ethical leadership, checks and balances, and destructive authoritarian cults. And my definition is really critical of authoritarian cults. Okay. And that can be,

be a one-on-one authoritarian relationship. It can be a commercial cult. It can be a political cult. It can be a therapy cult or a religious cult, whatever. But I have four overlapping criteria, and that's what I did my doctoral dissertation on. Behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. Okay. B-I-T-E. B-I-T-E. B-I-T-E. B-I-T-E. I call it the B-E-E-M-T-Model. You can download it the whole list. And so if they control your sleep, if they control your clothing, what you eat, you can start ticking off how authoritarian it is. But critically, did you have informed consent going in? And how free are you to question it or leave if you're not happy or if you find something better? So that's second part then. So when they're saying to you, are you not open? What is that,

what is that technique? Like, why is that so bad? And I'm literally just trying to understand this and play devil's advocate at the same time. Someone goes like, oh, are you close-minded, Steve? Right. What are they actually doing there to you? So things have become far more sophisticated than we were in the 70s, in the Mooney's, and much is going on online.

So what I'd like to try to do in this conversation is explain what I now understand what's happening today in a way that's going to help the, the widest audience. So what I want to say is that our attention is very narrow. We can't focus, I think the number is between five and nine bits of information any second, but we're taking in tens of thousands of bits of information just visually a second. So we have a conscious mind, kind of like a tuner on a radio, as AM and FM, but it's just listening to this one band, but all the rest is happening. At the same time.

So understand that a lot of what happens today is misdirection, reversal, to distract people from what to really pay attention to. So, you know, I'm asking this question, and now they're flipping it, they're doing a reversal or people are doing a projection onto somebody else. And you forget, I just asked about this, but now you're talking about that. You said, hey, guys, you said, why is they a workshop? And I'm Jewish. They lie to me. And they flip it. They lie to me.

They didn't say, yep, we did or we had to. We just said, do you have an issue, obviously? You have an issue, Eugene, with trust, apparently. That you're even asking this. Does that go back? Yeah, is that, yeah. But the technique of mind controllers, the more data. they can gather on a person ahead of time, usually by asking the recruiter who's already, and

back then you couldn't buy somebody's profile. Today you can. So it's way more problematic now because if you're a person of influence, if you have money, for example, you can be targeted and have no idea you're being targeted online with AI. And that's why it's so important. My solution to what's happening in the world right now is psychoeducation about how the mind works, how social psychology works, how neuroscience works, and how are we going to be ethical so we have planetary survival. Because most people are good. Most people know this climate warming due to fossil fuels and don't want to buy into the constant brainwashing.

and propaganda saying there's no scientific proof. It's like the big tobacco. There's no proof it's cancer causing. They knew it was cancer causing. And the big cults have hired sociologists of religion to say there's no such proof of brainwashing at all. So they use many of the same techniques to turn the lens to shift your view. But it's formulaic.

Once you know the formula, you can see it. You can I name it. I think it's also easier when you. you when you hear it in the story because now now I'm with you when we go step by step. So you're you've just come into this compound in Terrytown, right? And now they've said to you, oh wow, Steve, you're clearly the asshole because you have a problem with Christianity. So now you go, no, I don't.

I want to go home, take me home. And they're sorry, we're not going. So like, let's just go in and we'll sit by the fireside and have roast marshmallows and sing some songs. And we'll take you back in the morning. But at what point does your brain stop going? I want to go home. When you're having marshmallows by the fast side with hot chicks.

At the point that I didn't opt for, this is dangerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a mind control cult. Get me the hell out of here. I was like, I'll wait till the morning and they'll take me back. So this is a stall maneuver. This is another important feature. A mind controller wants to get you over there at the corner of the room.

They don't say walk to that corner of the room. the room. They say, would you mind picking up that pencil that's over there? Oh, and do you see that interesting picture on the wall over there? Trevor, go over and, you know, see the detail on that picture. So they come up with ways to misdirect your attention till you're behaving the way they want you to behave. And in the end, they want to program a new identity. And it's a dissociative disorder. So I was the real Stephen and they wanted me to believe that Sun Myung Moon was 10 times greater than Jesus Christ or any religious figure in history that he was sinless and he was going to save the world. He was going to bring peace. He was going to feed all the starving children in the

world and I needed to be like him. So they built a moon identity that took over my identity and this identity said he's satanic. Don't listen to him. He wants the right poetry and have sex with girls and play basketball. Sex is a big no-no, except for the leaders. The leaders apparently got to have a lot of sex. They can always have sex. Oh, they're a lot, you know.

Are we leaders? Power money and sex. Power money and sex is the universal for bad groups. So you're in this place and you're having these conversations. He's having marshmallows. You having marshmallows. By the fireplace. Nothing says non-threatening like marshmallows.

And three hot chicks? So that's another point. You're in. So one of the techniques that cults like to do is in hypnosis. It's called age regression. They want you to become like a child. They bring you back to your childhood. So they bring you back to camp where you're playing guitar around the fireplace.

And it's bringing up good feelings. Yeah. Oh, remember how it was? Yeah. Yeah. Because it's easier to direct children than an adult. Huh. Yeah.

It's very formulaic now. It's very, and that's why I've written books about it, and why I'm teaching clinicians. There's no graduate program in the United States or the world that I'm aware of that teaches mental health professional how to do therapy with former cultmen. members.

So I did that. I'm already learning so much. Now I know next time to give Eugene marshmallows in the car, before we go move the couches, just to like, soothe his spirit. Because I just throw couches.

I'm like, Couches. And Eugene's like, yeah. My back hurts. I should just be like, Eugene, would you like some marshmallows?

The wheels on the bus go round and round. And bring in a banjo. You know, the more you talk, the more I realize that this is more pervasive than we think it is. It's a global epidemic. It's an epidemic. It's an epidemic. Yeah. And I tried to explain to politicians that we should be declaring a public health emergency. We should treat this like a virus, a real virus, but a mind control virus. We should be doing

inoculation programs to educate people, what the techniques are, how to tell, how to reality test. We should be training clinicians, educators, politicians, media people. Yeah. And we should be making it safe for people to exit authoritarian cults and not stigmatizing them by saying you're a moron. Once you're in you in forever. We told you it was a cult, Steve. How come you didn't listen? People would say that to me when I got out and made me feel worse.

It didn't help me recover once I got out and realized it was a mind control cult. How did you get to leader, though? I mean, you go from not wanting to come along to slowly being soothed into this world. And then how many days are you there? How long is this process? How do you go from skeptic to leader of the organization? Good question. So there's another weirdo event, because I told you a weirdo event with my boss at the Holiday Inn.

So at the, I thought it was a weekend come Sunday night. No, it's a three-day workshop. You have to stay for the most important day. I'm like, I'm a student. I have classes. Take me back now. And they worked on me, worked on me, worked on me, worked on me. So they got me to stay for the third day.

And I felt like my brain had been in a washing machine. I remember that. But I knew I needed to get the hell out of there. and I just got angry and kept saying, I want to go home, I want to go home. They started pressuring me to stay for a seven-day workshop after the three-day workshop. And nothing worked until I threatened violence

that I don't want to be here. So they did let me go home. And my mother and my father were like, where were you? We were worried. Your eyes are all glassy. Were you drugged? And I said, I don't think they drugged me.

I haven't slept. much, and that's a major technique of mind control. My mother said, let's go talk to the rabbi. That was her go-to. And I went, sure, I'll talk to the rabbi. And he was completely clueless of what to say or even what to ask. And he thought I wanted to convert to Christianity, which is the furthest thing on my mind. Furthest thing from his mind, too. But they had put in three days, they had put the idea in my head that we were living at a moment in history where the world was going to be transformed

to be this Garden of Eden Paradise because the Messiah was coming. They didn't say Moon was the Messiah yet, just that we're in this moment. And so I asked the rabbi that what he should have said is Steve, I've never heard of this group, but let me tell you, if a group is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny.

Promise me you won't be in touch with them for the next few weeks and we'll research it together. That's what he should have said to me. But he didn't know to say that. He didn't know to say that. So I'm back at home, three days of hypnotic programming in my head, and I'm going, these people think the Messiah is coming. I want to write poetry.

You're back in your normal life, yeah. I want, save the world, write poetry. Save the world, do God's will or write poetry. and I had this moment where I just was in my room. I had books all over the floor. I was reading two to three books a week because I'm a reader like you. Not two to three books a week reading. Back then I was reading two to three books a week.

I'm still reading a lot. In any case, I pick up a book about another cult leader named Gerjif. Okay. You ever heard of Gerjee? No, never heard of good. Turned out my next door neighbor's father was into Gerjeef, so he had introduced me to this. So I was already primed a bit into mankind is asleep,

and we have to wake up, and there are these esoteric forces. Which, by the way, can I just interject here and say, which I often find a lot of these things are true, though. So this is something that I'm picking up on already is many of the things that a cult might say to you are actually true. Do you get what I'm saying? I do think mankind is asleep in that way.

we see it in what we eat, how we live, how we work, how we consume. There is a level of like a sleep. Sleepwalking. Yeah, but I go like, yeah, no, this is true. We're not in touch with our bodies anymore. We're not in tune with our minds. We, you know, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, if someone said that to me, walking down the street.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know how many times I see people walk into the street on their phone and then a car has to swivel. I'm like, yeah, we are. So they would have me on that line. If they said, mankind's asleep, I'd be like, carry on. But you're getting on another universe. point that's really demanding, underlining, and with a red pencil, that the ideologies have

truthful, important things in it. And they quote famous people who say really important things. So it's not just all BS. And that's also as a therapist. That's what I try to do in helping my clients deconstruct, how did they get hooked, what were the pieces that hook them? And the technique, I'm jumping ahead, and I'll circle back to your earlier question, but the technique that's most effective is I empower my clients to understand Chinese communist brainwashing, my model, etc. And the technique is this simple. I ask people to go back to that critical earlier moment when they were getting recruited

or they were falling in love with someone who was a malignant narcissist that was going to ruin their lives. If you knew then what you know now, what would you say and do differently? And I have them reprocess because they didn't know what they didn't know. But if I knew it was the Moonies that this fat Korean billionaire was a pervert and involved with the Korean CIA and the Washington Times, etc., I would have. has said, you're not students, get the hell out of here. I'm calling security. But the point is it's a dissociative disorder. I was using my hands before. So the key is once you're out, is deconstructing the programmed identity by going back to critical moments and rewiring using

neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, saying, if I knew then, what I know now, here's how I would have handled it or could have handled it or should have handled it. Because then it empowers you going forward into the future to not get taken again with those techniques. Letting your brain train your body on how to react next time instead of freezing. And the key is the locus of control has to be in you, not looking outside to some authority figure or ideology to tell you what reality is or what the beliefs are. We'll be right back after this. You know, the story of recruitment sounds so familiar to me.

When I was 14, we moved from the township to town. So we lived in this block of flats. My mom, my two other siblings. So we used to play soccer downstairs. So these friends of mine that I just made in the apartment block did not show up for soccer that day. Then there were two teenagers, like maybe in university age, who were outside our gate in the apartment because we played in the parking lot. And then kicked the ball, ball came over to them. they were on the other side of it

and they just said, hey, how are you doing? And I said, I'm fine. They said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm playing soccer, but my friends are not here. They were like, if the gate would open, we'd play with you. And I was like, yeah, the gate won't open. It's fine. We can just talk from here.

They kept showing up until they were familiar to me. A week later, they said, they spotted me coming back from school because I used to take the train. Yeah, they were targeting you. They said, you look like you've come from far because I was like, I was still going to a township school, living in town. So I took the train. So they said, you know what we could do. We're in university now.

we could help you with homework if you want. Then I said, yeah, I'm fine with homework. They were like, trust me. We're good at math. And I hated math. We do all sorts of things. But if you want, we could help you. But now we're outside the gate just before I entered the apartment block.

And I said, no, thank you. Two weeks went by. I saw them again. But now with my friends. So now this is important to mention. These were white kids. I'm black. Our apartment building was predominantly white.

The two friends of mine, Fani and Gerald. Now, I'm seeing them interacting with them thinking it's all normal. But the target here was me. So ultimately they said to me, we know what you should do. We could meet at the mall. The mall was not two blocks away from my house. He had restaurants. They said, we can meet at the mall, all of us.

Fania and Heral did not go. I ended up going. We got to a restaurant. There were two other people. Three to one ratio. Yes, there were two other people. Yes, you're not wrong. There were two other people.

And there was a girl in there. So it felt safer. Started talking. They said, you could have anything you want in the restaurant, anything you want. I didn't know what I wanted. Then they ordered this drink. I'll never forget. It's ingrained in my mind.

I've never had it ever since. It's called Horlicks. So it's almost like... It's almost like... But I think it's a Dutch drink. It's like hot chocolatey slash warm milky thing. They had that came in a tall glassy mug with a long teaspoon. And I was staring at this thing for long.

Because I didn't know what was going on here. And they were talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. That weekend, I ended up in a bus without telling my mom. to a stadium and it was a church event. Yeah, they were trying to recruit you. I was there. I had red t-shirts. The church was called Hope.

It was like a red t-shirt with white writing on it on the chest. It was packed. I was in a stadium. Got back home that night. My mom was worried sick. I had to explain to her what really happened. She said, you're never seeing these people again. This will never happen again.

And they kept on coming and I never went out the gate again. So you listen to your mom? Yes, I was 15. Okay. You were a minor. So obviously, it's seen a lot of these kind of things at the hospital at the ER, people who attempted suicide and all of that jazz. But it was a church cult. Yeah, exactly.

And cults will tell young people, don't tell your parents. I was in the car with these people. I didn't know who they were. I get it. It happened to me. I went to a stadium. No, it happens a lot. And I was listening to you read your book about your childhood.

Yeah. And it sounded like one of those churches. that you went to. Like you said, there's different ones. Because remember, we use the word church for everything. Right. But it's like anyone can say church. Do you get them saying?

It's like the church of. Anything can say church. And then everyone has a specific idea. What sticks out to me in this story is I go, you were playing soccer. Yes. Wow, my friend. I was quite good at soccer.

Good for him. Wow. Good for him. Even now he hates it. Is this why, Eugene? Have we found the source of why you hate football? so much. I was like, is this, have we gotten to the root of the trauma?

I was like, this is why my friend never wants to talk about soccer. He's laughing very loud. It's interesting. I'm a mental health profession. I want to say something really important to today. So there are a lot of people who claim to be doing Christianity and evangelical Christianity. I really want to be clear. The people who talk about following Jesus, love, my kingdom is not of this world,

no one will know the time, you know, render unto Caesar, what's Caesar. That's not what's happening to tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions around the world. What's happening is a form of authoritarian cultism called New Apostolic Reformation is the title. Okay. And what's different is these people who run these. groups and megachurches they say I'm an apostle or I'm a prophet and I speak to God. Okay. And God told me so and so won the 2020 election and don't listen to Satan because if you're

feeling or believing that, it's because Satan is in you, but I can help cast out the demons. Yeah, leave it up to me. So look at the bite model. So they basically become the intermediary between you and God. They go, you don't speak to God. I'll do it to God. Yes. And they have you cut off from family and friends who are being like,

go to this church. They actually follow the Bible instead of following a person who's doing these mind control techniques on them. So that's how they also don't stand up to scrutiny is they remove you from your environment so that you have fewer people or fewer places that can make you doubt them. Absolutely. So another critical point I want to cover that I think you'll really find important is the notion of phobia indoctrination.

Phobia indoctrination. So let's take an elevator phobia. Someone is afraid to get in an elevator because they think they'll plummet to their death or they'll be trapped for eternity. Very reasonable phobia, I must say. So they create, for anyone who has that. They create movies in their mind where this is not safe, it's dangerous. But the thing is.

is we have fear to keep us safe from real danger. Yes. So if there's emergency breaks, so it can't fall to your death, if there's a phone, the worst that happens is you pee on yourself, but you'll get out and everything will be fine. But if you have this phobia of being in an elevator,

you'll walk 40 flights of stairs, even though you're schitzing like crazy, because you're that afraid of it. Understand, People in mind control cults are like that. They can't imagine leaving the group and being happy and fulfilled or with God. And here's another part of my story, since you were interested in how this happened to Steve. I was taken with a hundred other Moonies to see The Exorcist movie.

In Greenwich Village, they rented a whole theater. We went up to hear Moon speak, and Moon said, God made the exorcist. This movie is a prophecy of what will happen if you leave the Unification Church. Damn. And from that moment, I thought any doubt was a demon trying to possess my mind. So I was taught thought stopping. I was chanting in order to keep the, and I didn't believe in demons. I was Jewish.

I didn't believe in Satan either. Does it make it harder for you to trust your own doubts and instincts when you're surrounded by many seemingly reasonable people who agree with what you're being taught. That's another very important point we teach in social psychology is that we're social beings. And part of our brain calibrates off of who we identify with. Yeah, we want to belong. And our brains even entrain. There's a neuropsychological phenomenon that they're tracking now where you're playing music,

you're singing together, your brains start to sink. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a known phenomenon. You have a whole bunch of people singing in church or whatever. It feels great. That was when people say, what was the best part of the moon is? I said, I love singing in a group. Oh, yeah.

It's the reason armies can march further together than they can. Remember when the first large militaries, like the way we think of militaries, started marching in unison on a beat. Yeah, Roman military. Yeah, marching together on a beat with a drum and with like a vibe. Totally. They went further and they got less tired. Yeah, because that thing, it does something to us that we don't fully understand as humans.

So one of the social psychology experiments I teach my clients and the public, there are three. Yeah. Ash conformity study, Milgram obedience study and Zimbardo Prison Study. Okay. Any of those sound familiar? No, no. Ash was a social psychologist in the 50s, very briefly. He did an experiment.

He called it a social perception experiment. He had the person at the front of the room, people in a ring, they'd show a sample-sized line, let's say three-inch line. They have three sample lines, three, four, and five inches. They had everybody in the room. say which of the three was the same size as the sample line. Okay. Okay. They did it correctly twice.

And then all of the people who were in on the experiment started confidently giving the wrong answer. But the person in seat six was then like a two inch line is equal to a three inch line? No, no, no. And they disagreed. But two-thirds start giving the wrong answer. just to fit in to the social conformity. And no one gets up to measure.

That's what I teach. It's like if you really want to know, look for an objective way to measure what's going on. But you see now that for me taps into one of the greatest conundrums in society. And that is for most of society to function, we have to agree on things that aren't real or rather realities that are imagined so that we can function together, right?

We have to trust. Like a traffic light is a society agreeing on something that is not real. We go, the red light stops us. It doesn't stop us, but we all agree that we will stop. It's the rule that we've agreed to. Yeah, but we all have to sort of imagine that the thing has happened or hasn't happened

or, you know, the way people go quiet in certain spaces. We all agree to be quiet in the space so we all. So it's like it's a weird thing because it feels like we need to be able to do this as humans so that we can form societies. But now you're saying we also have to be careful of when we do it because then the society we perform as a cult. So I believe cults exist from the ethical to the unethical.

So I make a distinction because there are cult classic. I joke I'm in the TEDx cult because I've done four TEDx talks. And I love to watch them. I love to learn. I love to have a fascinating input in my brain or scuba diving. I'm passionate about scuba diving. And it's great. It's expensive.

I have to buy equipment, et cetera, et cetera. But it's my choice. And nobody's forcing me or guilt-ripping me that I'm a bad person. But how do you know that nobody's forcing you or guilt-tripping you? Because I have my experience. And that's where it comes down to trusting your ability. I genuinely don't mean this facetiously. I mean like many people who are in cults go,

no, I'm not forced to be there. Their families will say. I didn't think I was forced in the moonies. So that's what I'm saying is like now it becomes this weird world where you're saying I love scuba diving. Now, I don't think scuba diving is a cult. But I'm saying we don't think we're in a cult when we're in a cult and we're in a cult and we don't think we're not in a cult and we're not in a cult.

So then when are we in a cult and when are we not in a cult? So now you're tapping into another variant. important point. I knew you were going to ask some good questions. So how did Steve get out of being a fanatical? No, first I want to know how Steve became leader. I'm not forgetting that. I need to know how I go from, I don't want to be here to welcome to my haram. I'm still stuck at wanting to meet the real lead, the first leader. Yeah. So there's so many stories. How much time do we have? Oh, we've got time for this. We got time. Okay. So this, we're watching the exorcist. That was the first movie with subliminal images, by the way.

Right. Like a flash, just like a flashes of the devil were put in by the filmmaker. Yeah, just like a, yeah. Because it actually can bypass our consciousness and we can be affected emotionally. When did they introduce that law? And I don't know if this is a myth. Nobody's enforced the law. Okay, because I remember reading once.

And again, I should go and double check it now, now that we have better search tools, that they changed the rules about like ads specifically where an ad has to be longer than a certain period of time on screen. Otherwise, people don't know that they've seen the ad. Like you could just flash something and then people are like, hmm, I'm craving something now. We can talk for a week about what's happening online

with techniques that are being used by state actors to hypnotically program the craziest of belief. But back to my story. So what happened in my case, interestingly, I think I got to the point in the story where my mom had asked me to talk to the rabbi. I'm sitting in my room with books and I pick up a book. It was a book about Gerjeef. And I just, my eyes go on one sentence. And my brain interpreted that sentence as a message that I needed to go to the group. Because Gerjeefe was dead. and following a living spiritual master was the way to go. And so I still, in my mind, I wasn't joining for my life, but I had this quandary. Is the Messiah maybe coming or isn't it? So I wanted to know more.

And that's part of the appeal at the beginning, is to recommit your life, but it's to learn more. Open your mind. Don't be closed-minded. Consider that there's a bigger path for you. And where I got hooked was I was selected by a top Japanese leader that Moon had brought over to the United States. Moon was very unhappy with the American movement because they weren't militant enough. So he brought this top Japanese guy over and the Japanese guy checked me out and he made me one of his disciples.

So through this guy, I got to be in the room with Moon as we had discussions about infiltrating the U.S. government and how God wants a theocracy and thinks democracy is satanic. I got to hear all of these things in 1974, but I was a true believer because I learned to shut down any doubts, and I believed that if I just followed what Moon was saying because he was plugged into God, then the world would be saved. Ten generations of my ancestors on my mothers and father's side would get out of a terrible situation in the spirit world, which I didn't believe in before. But this is something that's always confused me. Like you're talking about the leaders are now in a room.

I've always wondered, do cult leaders themselves believe in the cults? Yeah, it's a great question. But do they, though? It's a great question. But do they, though? It's a great question. I can't say definitively, I'm a forensic expert, but I can't. tell you that when you're surrounded only by yes people, you tend to believe what you want to

believe. That becomes your cult. So it becomes your reality. But it doesn't mean you don't have doubts. Okay, but now this introduces now. I'll say one more thing that's important. So a lot of people think cult leaders are just con artists and criminals. Yes, that's why I'm asking the question.

Did I, I'm sorry. No, no, no. interrupted your question. You didn't at all. You answered it. No, most cult leaders were in a cult themselves before. That's where they were trained. That's where they learned a lot of these techniques.

So it's not, I'm a criminal, because most con artists and criminals, they want to get in, make the money, and get out. They don't want to create something for 20 years. Followers. And, yeah, it's a lot of responsibility. Uniform, doctrine. It turns out what I learned, because I was a whistleblower for a congressional subcommittee investigation in 1907, when I got it in 76. They were looking into Korean CIA activities in the United States, and the Moonies were a major part of the Korean CIA.

And what I later came to understand, getting into politics, is this okay? Yeah, definitely. What I understood was that because North Korea brainwashes, this is the height of the Cold War, North Korea and South Korea are separated. There were two unsuccessful coups in South Korea. The CIA thought we have to stabilize the regime. So we're going to help them set up a Korean CIA, and we're going to pick a proxy group to brainwash political dissonance. And they selected the Moonies.

So the Moonies were used as a tool to brainwash South Koreans. And they used the Moonies to make arms to give to dictatorships around the world by passing congressional approval. I'm not making this up. I've written books on this. No, no, what I'm saying about insane is like I go, it's just crazy. Like the CIA, that's what my brain was thinking was just like, wait, what? Wait, what's happening here?

Well, but remember MK Ultra? Yeah. Okay, so the CIA was experimenting with LSD hypnosis, hypnosis, mind control. And after Jonestown, there was a special, I think ABC did a special, and the former head psychologist of the CIA said, yeah, we researched brainwashing, but we didn't find anything that worked,

and we burned our records. Lies. Total lies. And to this day, no government has been honest with the citizens of, we know how to hack people's brains. We know how to recruit and indoctrinate people. But that's where we're at now is we have to educate everybody because America is being hacked. We're in a coup. It's really horrendous what's happening. And people need to understand. This is a Cold War. extension. We thought the Soviet Union collapsed, we won, and Putin and the other oligarchs who were KGB are like, we're taking down the U.S. You see, but this is what I mean about where we draw the distinctions. Because in my head, I'm going, I hear when there are specific cults. And then I understand what you're saying about the B-I-T-E, right? But then I go. it feels like, and maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like to me, there are some overlaps between things

that are cult-ish, but not necessarily a cult. And then there are things that are definitely cult, but don't seem like a cult. And so it leaves us in the space where you go, is this a tool that cults use, or is this a tool of cults that non-cults use? Oh, it goes both ways. Absolutely. So you're not necessarily saying that everyone is in a cult, or are you saying, at the inner color. I can't figure it out. Well, we have culture. I mean, I grew up in the fear of the nuclear Holocaust and, you know, fearing Russia and getting under my wooden desk at PS-173 in Queens because Russia may nuke us. And then I had my disillusionment with America and Vietnam. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was a just war and I realized that they were lying from the

whole time and they were just killing innocent people who wanted their country, et cetera. but it was to fight communism. In any case, what I want to say is that we are either going to continue to evolve as a species with the goal of planetary survival, which means cooperation with other countries, or it's the authoritarian versus the rest of us, you know, who want rule of law and human rights and gay rights and, women's rights, indigenous rights, and minority religious rights. So I think that there's more of us than them, and we just need to understand correctly to diagnose the situation and approach it.

Now, actually, to that question, though, this is something I've always struggled and grappled with, but I've gone, should we try to immunize everybody from cult or cultish ideas? And is that realistic? Or should we focus more on the environmental circumstances that make it easier for somebody to be in that situation? So going back to what you were saying, you know, you playing football, you know, in your little, one of the things that stuck out to me was your friends weren't there that day. Do you get what I'm saying? So that becomes the first, I think you're less likely to go talk to these people and to be taken away if your friends were there. So I just identify one point by myself as Trevor, I go like, oh, okay, so if you have a robust community, maybe it's

less likely. Absolutely. And then I think of like economic situations or circumstance. So if you're in an environment where, you know, you're not hungry and you're not desperate and you're not heartbroken, you're not lonely, you're not broken. You're alone in the cafeteria. You were alone in the cafeteria. I'm just picking up some of these traits. Horny as well. We can't skip that one. We can't skip horny. We can't skip horny.

Not still, but. We can't skip horny. So you go. No, but people have needs. Yes, but this is my point. And but destructive groups are trying to say that's an evil impulse and you should suppress it. Right. And it's, you know, and that's what we get into an overlap with groups that are giving informed

consent. And groups that aren't. aren't. Yeah. And so, you know, the ones that say it's, it's unnatural to have sexual thoughts. It's like you don't understand human psychology. But now, but this is what I'm, so this is what I come back to. Like, let's say when we talk about it now, if we, if we shift the lens into politics, you know, and people go, oh, what politics is doing, what authoritarian regimes are doing, et cetera, I've found very few instances. I'm not a historian, but when I read or when I watch a documentary or I found very few instances of authoritarian regimes that were able to start in good

times. Do you get on saying? Absolutely. So that's another really important point that you're making. And when I did my doctoral dissertation, I included a law professor's model called the social influence model. Okay. Which he created for expert witnesses to explain to judges and juries how to evaluate social influence. And he said, you have to look at the influencee and their vulnerabilities, whether they were, you know, young, they were a minor, 15 years old, or they had been assaulted as a child or whatever. The influencer or the predator or the predatory organization, was it a priest or was it a teacher, or was it someone twice their age, et cetera? And this whole set of criteria around malignant narcissism, pimps and traffickers are. are also, and how they groom and recruit and indoctrinate people. And what are the consequences?

So it's a formula. When there's economic uncertainty, political turmoil, people are more confused than ever, and they want hope. And desperate. And so, trust me, I know more than the generals. I know more than the economists. You do a better Trump than me. Anyway.

Don't get him started. I know more than any. Trust me, but the thing is falling apart now, the illusion over the Epstein files. Yeah, no, that's created a whole, yes. But QAnon was a sci-op. It was using alternate game technology to recruit people into believing that there was this conspiracy of traffickers. But wait, was it, though, because I, it's interesting. I don't know what the origins or not of Q&N are.

Like, you know definitively? Because I remember seeing that some people said that QAnon was this like deep conspiracy or organization that was trying to control. And then another group said, QAnon was literally started by like trolls from 4chan on those pages. Well, it was started on 4chan. Okay, yeah, but I thought it was started as like a joke. They were like, I'm going to go out into the real world. It was a joke initially. Okay, okay.

On the Trumpers. There were three people. I found this out from a source, who knows, because he was there. And he said, then they realized they could make money selling merch. And then the Russians got involved. And we know Michael Flynn got involved. And we know this because a PhD who has a company that's able to analyze Twitter, we can track back to the first mentions of Q&N and where we go on, we go all the

hashtags and you can literally find who are the trolls, who's recruiting who, et cetera. So we have forensic evidence. And I actually did a bite model analysis of Q&N. So how do people get indoctrinated into a cult that they're not physically a part of? Because that would defy what people believe a cult is then. Someone goes, I'm not an occult. I'm at home. Minding my own business. I don't wear a uniform. This is how. Yeah, but I can I can turn it off. Unlike you who stuck in Terrytown for the weekend. Turned itself on. By itself. I did turn it off. Unlike Terrytown where you're like trapped, you can't go home.

I can't be in a culture on my phone. I can just turn the thing off. Well, so ask people to turn off their phone for 24 hours. Are you crazy? You want me to miss out of my life? Sorry, guys. Sorry, sorry. So here's where reality testing is so important. important, and you've hit on a lot of key points, and I want to emphasize, I believe you should have a trust pod. You were talking about, Eugene should, if he had friends, that they would have protected them. Yeah, if they would hear that thing. You have a trust pod where you watch each other's back and even take roles, who's going to be the contrarian. You know, if Trevor says, I want to go to

this workshop in Maui with, you know, this or that. And Eugene goes, hey, dude, I check this out. and this guy is a leech or he's a troll. Maui. Maui, I'll go. But in any case, reality testing. So coming back to my story, what helped Stephen get out of this cult? He was willing to die on command, kill on command. What happened?

Steve fell asleep at the wheel of a van, drove into the back of a tractor trailer truck on the Baltimore Beltway at 80 miles an hour, was trapped for a half an hour before I was rescued, needed surgery, but I was away from the cult. Oh, an extenuating circumstances, separated you from them. Eating. Well, my brain...

Oh, you can call it divine intervention. My brain came back online because it wasn't constant. I was sleeping three to four hours a night in the cold. You had switched off your phone for two weeks. I had no phone. This was 76. The proverbial phone.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. No, I literally, so that opened the door to me calling my sister, who is the only one in my family that didn't say I was brainwashed and a cult. She convinced me to visit and meet my nephew who had been born. I made her promise not to tell my parents because I was afraid of being deprogrammed. And she told my parents, and they took my crutches away. And I had a situation where I was going to be deprogrammed, and I was going to snap my father's neck. while he was driving a car on the Long Island Expressway.

And I thought, but I know God and I know Father, and they can't get me out of doing God's will. So why don't I prove to them I'm not in a cult and I'm not brainwashed? So that's what my thought process was. And what helped me get out was learning what Chinese communist brainwashing methods were. What were they? So they used a book that was published in 1961. The little red book?

No. Oh, another one. There was some red on the front cover, believe it or not. It's called Thought Reform, the Psychology of Totalism, a study of brainwashing in China by psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, former Air Force psychiatrist. And he outlined eight criteria in Chapter 22, how to evaluate whether an environment does brainwashing.

And every single one, the Moonies did. Do you remember any of them offhand? Of course. This is my work. Yes. But I was like, we're God, they're Satan. Communism is Satan. But we're doing the same brainwashing. This is where the dissonance when my brain started kicking into gear. So milieu control is control of the environment and communication. Sacred science, where you claim to have the ultimate science and moral vision for the thing. loaded language, which are basically thought-terminating cliches, because words are the tools we use to think. Okay. So if you can have buzzwords, fake news, you know,

don't think about what the content was. Just label it fake news. What else? Demand for purity, which is a perfectionism, where they always keep raising the bar, so you always are feeling shameful or insufficient. So you always are trying harder and harder. The cult of confession,

and that talks about information control, finding everything about your background, and if you were feeling guilty over something you did, they use it against you, they have people turning in each other, if they break the rules. This is all outlined in my bite model, because I take in his model,

and made it more codified. One of the most important ones is called dispensing of existence, and that says if you're in the cult, you have a right to exist, and if you leave, then you're nothing. You're a non-person. You can be killed, you can be lied to, or whatever. And it's Lifton's description of cancel culture. Wow.

Cancel people, the right does it, the left, does it, but you, I say, you know, people should have the right to leave an environment. If they're not happy or they find something better. Wow. If it's healthy, you let people go. Nope, you left us and you're the enemy now. Yeah, and so you're no longer human. You're no longer, you disagree on this.

Yes, you're a trader. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So, but, you know. But no, you see now, okay, now my brain then goes, everything is then a cult. That's what my brain says. Because I, okay, so let me tell you why. So I'm saying as you're explaining it.

Cult comes from culture. So we have culture. We need culture. No, no, I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm saying both on my behalf and someone who's listening to this. Yep. All right.

I start with like, let's say a family. A family can say, we are the Johnsons. You are a Johnson. I am a Johnson. And in the Johnson family, we always have dinner at 7 p.m. And at the Johnson household, we go for war. on Saturdays and you know what I mean and if you don't like it you can leave but if you leave this house totally we will cut you off from the Johnson's and you're no longer Johnson and you will

never walk into this house never a healthy family okay but that's so if you have the influence continuum chart folks please go download it so you have it in front of you and you can understand this healthy parenting recognizes that each child is a unique being and healthy parenting is to help that unique being grow up to adulthood to become their best self. It's developmentally appropriate. It's not too micromanaging. It's not being too permissive. It's giving challenges.

It's not constant praise. It's rewarding effort. And also not setting them up for failure. To prove yourself right. Correct. That's an addiction of some parents. So we know models of excellence for healthy attention. You need to keep babies off of screens for the first three years.

This is well-established neuroscientifically, not even TV screens, no iPads, no phones, because the baby's brain is malleable. Yes, and it's pruning neurons, and it needs to smell mommy and daddy and needs to feel our heartbeat, hear our voice reading books to the child, etc. This helps the child to feel loved and to feel safe and secure. Healthy attachment is the key to avoiding all personality disorders. Unhealthy families are authoritarian. They want the kids to be obedient.

They often do corporal punishment, which is illegal in most civilized countries, except here. But beating children is, to the brain. It does not encourage children to think differently and act differently, et cetera. And often kids who are gay, if they're in a homophobic church or something, are kicked out, and then they're picked up by pimps or traffickers or somebody else on the street. And more trauma happens. So when you say, Steve, some families are authoritarian cults, I'm like, yes. Yeah, no, but that's what I mean by everything is a... Do you get what I'm saying?

So I'm saying... I wasn't beaten as a child. I was... Honestly, I had a very unusual... That's why you went off on a weekend doing nonsense things, Steve. You see, where not Steve? If you were in my house, you would have... Hey, one now, Steve.

Where are you going? Yeah, Outsi, Schwinn. Outsie. We can... Hey, Steve! Yeah, cult. You'll see your cult. But when you grow up with an authoritarian,

you're going to be attracted to. to an authoritarian call. Because it's familiar. That's the thing. The familiarity of control. As you speak, I'm thinking about how a lot of commercials, how a lot of TV shows, there's a TV show where people who are frustrated with their own lives, enter into a house, meet up with strangers.

A reality TV. They're trapped into this house with cameras everywhere. There's a confessional booth where they go in and say their desires to a faceless person. that speaks to only them at that time and can find a way to manipulate so that they can get what they want. And the ultimate objective is to co-op everyone outside the house, which is the viewer, to vote for them.

But there's temptation in the middle of it because you can't have sex inside the house. But if you do, make sure that you're not seen, but the camera can see you because it's got night vision camera. So that causes disorder inside the house. But ultimately, the most deceitful, the one who plays the game the best, will ultimately become the leader of the house once a week

and will ultimately win the show. The show is called Big Brother. Yeah. Wait, you, you, I mean, it's crazy that they're like just taking... They should have to pay royalties to the cults. Well, so what we need is to celebrate people who have virtue

and who are good people and not... Those go first in the house. And not malignant narcissists. We should shame malignant narcissists who have hundreds of billions of dollars and they could be feeding the poor and they're pushing for legislation so people don't have health care and they can't feed children. Shame on them. And seriously, we need to start getting out of the,

you know, the Hollywood and all of the social influence that this is okay to harm people and trick people and abuse people for entertainment. I was talking with one of your production people, Trevor, before, and I was just saying that there's so many cult documentaries, and they're not educational. Yeah. Why do you say that? Because they're not explaining what are the techniques that are being used in a way that the listener can understand. And avoid. Yeah, and protect themselves and see how it could have happened to them.

It's like trauma porn. Oh, look how it's screwed up. They allowed it to be branded with their crotch with no anesthesia. that's not the message. I want people to understand because I'm a survivor of a cult. I mean, that's why I've devoted my life to this. It's because it's like I've entered into a world where people need to know this on a global scale, but we're going to lose our world.

Like it's getting really crazier and crazier, and it's not healthy. Don't press anything. We've got more. What now after this? It's interesting when you say, when you talk about how people speak about themselves post a cult, a lot of it sounds similar to how people speak about themselves post an authoritarian regime.

Yeah, because they are. When they interviewed people, when they interviewed people post Hitler and the Nazis, they asked many Germans and they're like, I didn't, you know, I just found myself being part of this. and I didn't know and I really just found myself. And when they would talk to people in America who were part of, you know, whether it was the Ku Klux Klan

or whether they go like, I just felt myself being swept up in a wave and looking back, I can't believe that that's me. That's what a lot of people say. I can't believe South Africans who, you know what I mean, an apartheid, why South Africans who are like, I can't believe I ever thought that I just can't, it's this interesting world where they do not see themselves now.

You separate themselves from the person. and it feels like the same thing. It's like in the moment, someone can do anything, and then in hindsight go, I can't believe that that would have been me. I can't believe that. Right. But instead of walking away,

I realized because I have such a unique perspective, having been in the room where they talked about taking over the United States and destroying the rule of law and separation of church and state and everything, I feel an obligation to say, hello, here's how they're doing it. These are the techniques.

We have to teach everyone how to protect themselves how to talk to family and friends who've been radicalized. A lot of people have blocked their family and friends because they can't talk about... What's a mistake that families make when doing that? You know, because you said something interesting. You said, I spoke to my sister

because she was the only one who didn't say to me that I was crazy and I was in a cult. Correct. But I didn't speak to the rest of the rest of the person. of my family. So what can someone do right to have a conversation with someone in their family who they feel is an occult? Perfect question. So I explain the real Steve and the Mooney Steve. The Mooney Steve was trained that if any attack happens against Moon or the doctor or the policy, defend, label it as evil, chant, pray or whatever. So what do we learn from this? We say,

never attack with logic and facts, the leader, the doctrine, or the policy of the group that the person is in because it will make them deeper. It will paint you as the enemy. Okay. That's rule number one. What works is finding out from the person another group that they think is a cult or is brainwashed. That is hilarious. And with MAGA, it's Chinese communist brainwashing or pimps and traffickers. That is hilarious. And explaining the bite model and how people get taken in and how they are programmed and these behaviors.

And the critical technique that works is being warm, being respectful, being an active listener, and asking good questions, just like you do. You ask good questions that make people think. That's the goal, not to persuade them to leave. to reality test for themselves. But if you understand the techniques that were used on them, like I was saying before,

I ask people, go back, what was your first feeling and thought when that person invited you to the thing? I remember. I remember it was odd. Or I had a feeling in my pit of my stomach. There was something wrong.

And now that you know more, how would you have liked to respond? I would have liked to have questioned it or I would have liked to say no way, Jose or whatever. But the point is people want to be free. People don't like to be abused and lie to. But they need a face-saving way to exit. So if they understand how pimps recruit women to be sex slaves

or labor trafficking victims, if they understand the methods and you ask them, so what's your understanding of how intelligent people can be controlled that way and give them the tools and ask them to go back and reflect because a lot of people hated Trump and then they got converted.

Who converted them? They watched the movie. They went to a rally. They had a friend at work. Like get them to remember what they thought they were hearing and learning. Those I think, you know, I've seen a lot of people,

I mean, I've obviously read about your book and you know what people have said. And you were welcomed into many spaces when you were writing just about cults, right? Then you wrote... Every TV show in America. 16 minutes, nightline, dayline, everything. Yeah, you were everywhere, basically.

And then you wrote a book entitled The Cult of Trump. For Simon and Schuster. Yeah, and then all of a sudden you were sort of... Crickets. Yeah. Now, We all know. Doesn't matter who you are.

You don't even, this is not like a political thing. You just know many news organizations, many TV station, they've just been very afraid to be on the wrong side of Trump. Companies as well, this is not like a, forget the politics side. They've even said, look, we're not trying to, we're not trying to get on the wrong side of Trump. But I want to know what the pushback was that you got on Trump. And I also want to know why you, why you so confidently could say that it is the cult of Trump

when someone who supports Trump would go like, no, hey, I'm voting for. you know, my country, I'm voting for the border. This is politics. Yeah, but also this is politics. Why are you making this about a cult? This is nothing to do with a cult. So I invite you to read the cult of Trump because it still is valid. Everything's been validated.

When I was asked by my book agent and Simon & Chuskid... When did you write it, by the way? This was 20... It came out in 2019. I wrote it in 2019. The Mueller investigation was going on. I started because I grew up in New York knowing that Donald Trump was a malignant narcissist because I knew Eric Fromm's work about Hitler.

I knew about cults. So I knew he had a cult of personality for sure. And the people who worked for him were in that cult. But what I understood when I started researching was there were actual authoritarian cults that comprise the cult of Trump that bring millions of people. that bring millions of their followers to follow Trump. So it's like sub-organizations, essentially. For example, I mentioned New Apostolic Reformation churches and megachurches,

and there is 30 to 40 million Americans in those that are saying that Trump won the 2020 election. And Trump is the vessel of God. I've seen some of them saying. Yeah, he's a King Cyrus figure, et cetera. So I made a distinction between people, who just always voted Republican, just voting Republican the first time. But the second time, things have gotten connected with the billionaire techies. Yeah. Hacking Facebook and algorithms

and state level manipulation of people's perceptions and minds. It's not just this information. So I talk about a cult called The Family that recruited Democrats and Republicans into it. They were doing the National Prayer Breakfast. Jeffrey Charlotte wrote two New York Times bestselling books and did a Netflix series on this political cult. I wrote about Opus Day, which was a Catholic cult that was saying the Pope was Satanic. They're the ones who put in the Federalist Society. Supreme Court justices. They're the ones behind the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 Opus Day, and I've helped many people get out of that group. So I talk about different cults.

Falun Gong does the Epic Times, Scientology, the Mormons. Nobody wants to talk about the Mormons as an authoritarian group, but talk to former leaders of the Mormons, and they'll tell you what it's like. pyramid structure, B-I-T-E. And you can go on my substack and go through. Some of the criteria fits, some of them don't, depending on where you are in the pyramid or if you're a fringe member. But so the point is also that I named Russia as one of the puppet masters because I came to understand that when Trump was first in Moscow in 1980,

and came back. He took out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying NATO should be disbanded. He did back then? 87. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and he had no political thing before that, and who paid for that. And I interviewed Craig Unger, who has written numerous books. He's a very respected author.

I interviewed him and a former KGB official. for his book, American Compromot. And the former KGB official, no kidding, I had a two-part podcast. He said, I was much higher up in the KGB than Vladimir was. It was standard operating procedure to take Westman businessmen and co-op them for our purposes. And then he named the place in New York City. And the Russians have been,

getting revenge on on the united states ever since and that's what people has russia hoax russia hoax it's like read the mullah report there were russians named yeah but you see this is this is where i now my bring on let's go buddy no but it's no no no no my thing is like i spent seven years like just in a world inundated by this stuff and the thing i started realizing was the fingers that could be pointed in terms of how people saw the world in like the Trump world. Man, I also saw people who were anti-Trump. There's like an anti-Trump cult as well then, if that's the case.

There is. Where some people go every anti-trump. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, I go, but okay, this has nothing. No, no, no. You see, he did this and this is, I'm like, okay, but what are you basing this on? Genuinely, what are you basing this on? You're basing this on one person who showed you one video who made you think. And I know you hate him, but you should always.

also not now just become a default, correct, anti-anything. Correct. Because you might now be indoctrinated. You see what you just said? No, you're absolutely right. And that's what I say when I talk to any person in any group is like, change my mind. I'm really, I'll listen to whatever proof you have.

Right. I'll show you my proof. You show me your proof. And let's, if it's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. Someone might ask this question. They might ask, and I'd love to hear your response. And someone might say, okay but if if Trump is a cult then how come his people are angry with him about the

Epstein files and Marjorie Taylor Green is turned against him and why is that happening then what would your response be I'll tell you in one minute but I first want to just say two points yeah forgive me no you're the so if you're Russia and you want to do psychological warfare on the United States you want polarization and you want division so you're not just influencing the right. You're influencing the left. Oh, completely, yes. So authoritarian manipulation is happening on both extremes to create confusion.

So that's one point. Let me interrupt you on that point to add to it, by the way. Same team here. We care about humanity. Yeah, but in and around, not just the start of the war in Ukraine, etc. Microsoft did this whole thing where they analyzed a lot of where they was coming from from, like the farms and everything. And that is something that I wish more people understood to your point.

Fight if you want to fight. Disagree if you want to disagree. But also know what is prompting your disagreement. And they did find genuinely that a lot of the posts that were coming out online, both pro-Trump, pro-democrat, anti-democrat. No, we're coming from the same Russian farms. Yeah, yeah, full on troll farms. Yeah, full-on troll farms.

And then, I mean, I'll always say with a little asterisk, I go, I always find it funny, though, that like America says, well, the Russians, then I'm like, but also you guys, I mean, you're the professionals of the, it's just a funny, you know, a world of every country doing everything. The CIA developed all these tools that are being used on us. Yeah. No big. And this is where we have to understand complex systems. Yes, yes. We invented roadside bombs for the Afghans to use on the Russians. and then we went into Afghanistan

that were used on Americans. Like we were developing all of these technologies, et cetera, and it's being used on us. But it's a complex system. Genuinely is. Yeah, yeah. So the other point I want to make is something called fourth and fifth generation psychological warfare.

I wrote about this in the cult of Trump. Fourth generation warfare was first written down as a thing in the 80s by a guy, a military strategist, American military strategist named William Lynde. And it's about attacking experts, science, and democratic institutions to demoralize a society so you can influence and put in a dictatorship or whatever. Yeah.

Replace one authority figure with another. Right. But so because human beings, we can't know everything. We depend on experts who spent their lives studying. Most importantly. And we want to trust the experts, but that's, we've seen a systematic assault on experts and on science. There's good science and there's bullshit science. Good science doesn't say we have the truth.

It says we have an hypothesis and we test. And we have a community of people who test the test to make sure that it really is what it says. And if we have a better hypothesis, we get rid of the old one and we go with the new one. That's progress. That's what we should be having. So fourth generation cycle, William Lynn met with Trump in the White House, connected with Michael Flynn, who would do it on the enemies of the United States before he got turned. And he's gotten involved with the Christian right that thinks that we should have a white Christian country and that everyone else is inferior, et cetera.

Like that's a real thing. The guy who did the apprentice, Mark Burnett, is head of Seven Mountain Dominionism, the media part, who made Trump's image as a successful businessman on that show. Yeah, when he was completely failing. But he was a Christian, he's a Christian dominionist. So we need to understand there are specific actors and positions of influence. And this has been going on for decades. kids. This is not something that happened overnight. But all of this wouldn't have been easy to achieve if the status quo had done a better job of making sure that Americans weren't in a place

where their rents and mortgages were out of control, where food became unaffordable, where schooling and healthcare was. Do you get what I'm saying? So I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm just saying we also we I think we should be careful to just like sort of blame cults but in this system not understand that people are a lot less amenable to these ideas if the people in power actually address their needs and concerns do you know what I mean yeah we want to be angry with people for becoming a certain way but we don't want to be angry with why the situation existed for them to be even open to be becoming that way yeah desperation and isolation right Absolutely. We want to be solution focused.

You know, we can analyze what went wrong and how they did it. Otherwise, otherwise we go Trump bad or we go that thing bad or yeah, but then you don't, you don't like go, no, no, no, no, no, no. What's bad is people feeling like they just have to vote to break a system because the system is not caring for them. When we had, you know, mayor of New York now, Zoran Mamdani, we had him on the show. I saw. Yeah, where he goes, the people don't, they don't, even even, even. him is a response in that way to that. People are going, look, we don't care about all these old school Democrat.

There's no one else in this race. We're going to vote for this guy. And then people are like, he's going to break New York. And they're like, it's better he breaks it because the fixed New York was not working for most people in New York. Do you get what I'm saying? So it's this world where you're trying to find a balance between, as you're saying, analyzing the thing that's doing something wrong.

Right. It's interesting, seeing, by the way, Marjorie Taylor Green, I find, I find that particularly interesting. Because of what you're saying, some of it speaks to exactly what you're talking about. Marjorie Taylor Green has fully been with Trump from the beginning. Fully, fully, fully. Then she basically said, hey, man, this guy's deviating off the path. We said America first. We said, no Epstein.

We said, what is happening here? And then now she's been cast as the traitor, the traitor. and we will never talk to her and she's out on her own. It's interesting how that ties into what you're saying. Yeah, well, that's part of what you realize when you're in an authoritarian group that you think the other members are your friends, but you see what happens if somebody questions it or doesn't go along and how badly they're treated.

People get that message. And they're like, they'll only be my friend if I obey and if I conform and do exactly what I'm told. Look, I don't trust Marjorie Taylor Green until she says, because she's saying I'm not in a cult, I'm not in a cult. I'm a cult expert. QAnon was a cult. I wrote a whole bite model analysis. I called it a sci-op. I analyzed why it's an online cult, but it was a mind control cult. Until she gets what I'm talking about, until she says, says Trump did win, excuse me, Biden did win the 2020 election, and anyone who says that Trump won it is in the cult. Until she says that, I don't trust anything she says. You think that

she's just sort of making a splinter cult? Yeah. Is that common in cults, by the way? Yes. Oh, yeah. Because she doesn't understand brainwashing and mind control. And there are those colleagues of mind who thinks that she's co-opted by Russia. Damn. The Russians. I would like to go get co-opted by Russia. It sounds like a fun vibe. Criminal,

criminal, you know, oligarchs, man. You guys are haters, man. You're too nice. You guys are just haters out in these streets. He chews ice cream. So I have another quick story. Do we have time for another story? Yeah, go up.

Okay, go for. We got time for one more story. Let's go. So, 1993. I'm invited to Moscow. Oh. Soviet Union fell. And they said every cult from the United States is coming into Mother Russia.

And we want to, psychiatrists and psychologists, we want to understand what are cults. And what is this all about? Like they were experiencing cults coming in. Yeah. Okay. So the Soviet Union collapsed. Yes. And the mental health people are like, what's going on here with all of these Western groups that are showing up?

So they brought me over. They didn't pay me. I paid my way and went to Moscow and I taught my work. So I'm teaching about Chinese communist brainwashing and my model. And they're like, Dr. Hassan, don't you understand, you're describing the whole system of pedagogy of the Soviet Union? And I said, uh-huh. And they said, don't you understand?

We would put dissidents into psychiatric facilities because they were critical. criticizing the regime. And I'm like, uh-huh. And they're like, oh, so you are counseling us. That is so insane. And I said if the shoe fits. And then beyond those psychiatrists. Wait, but how did they respond to that? Were they, were, were they like. No, they were, they were understanding the model because the model is, it doesn't have any fluff. Oh, interesting. So the model is agnostic. Yeah. The model, you can, you're basically saying to everyone, hey, I'm not saying anything about your world. Here's a model. I'm just going to put it in front of you and then you just find yourself there. And here's the influence continuum. Here's healthy and here's unhealthy. You

decide for yourself. That's my approach. Is you determine. You do reality. Just don't use it. Just now you're not helping with couches anymore. I know how this goes. I have a disciple here in my midst. You know, all of this is interesting to me, especially when you think of where our country comes from. and how you find that people who grew up in a generation during apartheid sometimes long for those days. When things don't work out the way they showed according to them, they'll always say things were better during that time. And I'm not talking about the oppressed, I'm talking about the oppressed.

No, and slavery in the United States. Yes. That was psychological brainwashing done to not only the slaves, but everyone else. Yeah, it's wild. Apply the bite model, and it's like, duh, of course. And you think of how many people still long for those? days when I talk about efficiency of anything, public transport, the roads, housing, education. And this is my biggest pet peeve. And I've spoken to you about it with many of our other guests.

And I've said, I hate how arts and culture have been slowly been eroded out of the schooling system. When you grew up, you had a mother that was doing this and you were so important for brain and you were reading three books. You were writing a bicycle. All of that is being eradicated. And I see these young adults that have tried so hard to get energy. an education and a job. Before, you'd know this, it would have to be an interrogation or a communist country

or an authoritarian country that has video footage of people saying how they feel, good or bad. Right now, it's volunteered to everyone with these people, with people on social media. So now they're cooperating themselves, they're recruiting themselves for their next employer

and showing their desperation and the dead end that some systems that they've taken have taken them. And they're going to AI to do it. Do creativity instead of themselves going inside. So it's like we're living in this weird dystopia. I think if someone was in a cryogenic coffin and wakes up now 40 years later, they'd be shocked to see what's happening now. People are literally doing their own depositions in the comfort of their own homes

with their own devices and sending them out for the world to see. And the brain adapts to whatever environment's happening. and if you spend 10 to 12 hours on digital devices, it's going to rewire your brain. Attention spans are shrinking, creativity is shrinking. It is exactly the same debate that when I was growing up,

our parents would say, we're spending too much time watching television. This time, this generation is spending too much time making television. Damn. No, you're right. And I'm guilty. I watch TV, but I also read a lot of books. Yeah, I was the same.

I was a bit of a mix of both, you know? No, technology is both a positive. That's fantastic. and can be used negatively. And we have to be wise. We have to be wise. We have to really realize how precious it is to have freedom.

For ex-members, we know what it's like to live in authoritarian state, even though I didn't grow up in China or Russia. But China wants to make us like them, all this surveillance crap with Palantier and cameras everywhere. Yeah, but ironically now,

you can't really separate a lot of how China works with how the U.S. is trying to work. That's what I'm saying. This is not, it's, we, we need to keep the vision of what humanity and what, you know, human life's about. When people are on their deathbed, they're not going, damn, I wish I had another million dollars. They're like, I should have spent more time with my kids.

Or I always wanted to go kayaking. Or I always wanted to learn scuba diving or whatever. And it's like we need to come back to. This is a very unique precious opportunity to be alive. And we have an amazing, I'm so grateful to meet you because I've been listening to you for years. And I'm like, damn, Trevor wants me to be on. I'm coming.

Oh, you're very kind. Thank you. No, I mean it because this has been a really interesting conversation because you're getting a key things. Yeah. And we'll do a part two at some point because there's so much more that we can say. See, this is my kind of guy. You know, we speak about this all the time.

We need more people who agree to a part. I love it. I love it. Coming back for a part two. Part two is the way to go. No, there's a lot to share. You know what? This is amazing.

Actually, what's interesting, what you've just mentioned, and you've made me realize it. I'm very, people who know me, they know that I'm very much against technology. I think there's a word that you used to describe. Ladite. Ladite. I know the term. I try not to know as much about technology because I still like. like the human experience.

I'd like, I'd like us to throw information to each other, not Google if it's true or not. And we can discuss. I'd like some other things to be done physically. I try to spend as much time as I can in the outdoors and go on site quests and find new adventures and things to learn. And that's what I wish for many people is to just try things out, try as much as you can to create your own memories instead of viewing other people's memories. Hey, bra.

You know? And build social relationships, you know? No, that's a big one. Create your own memories and not explore everyone else's. And just appreciate the human experience. Every time we meet someone new, it's like opening another book and going, wow, tell me your story. You know, like tell me your journey. That's what you started with me.

But it's fascinating. I'm a therapist. So I get to hear incredible stories and help people in their way. But I'm helping them to help themselves. So I'm not making myself, you follow me. I'll tell you how to get fixed. I'm teaching them the techniques and strategies that worked for me and that has worked with other clients.

And there's reason to be hopeful and grateful, but we need to have strategy. We need to correctly diagnose the problem and we need to understand who's the bad actors and we need to have a plan where we can bring out the best in each other to sustain this earth. We're on one planet.

You know, I'll tell you now, Dr. Hassan, I, like, didn't know you before I met you. Now I've met you. You've pulled me in, man. I'm in your cult. I'm in. Sign me up. So, let's go to Terry Town for the weekend. Call me Steve.

And let's roll. And so I say freedom of mind is what I decided to name my company, not Stephen Hassan Foundation. Freedom of mind. I say it's your mind and only you should. control it. It's like own it. You can make mistakes, but learn. Don't make the same mistake twice. But don't be paralyzed and not try new things. Be open to other perspective. That's another key. Blind faith, the cure is perspective. Yeah. To look at it from other points of view. That's why looking at Chinese communist brainwashing or pimps and traffickers is a new lens.

Right. It gives you an opportunity to take a step back and say, oh, maybe I'm looking at this in like a limited way. And if I just move myself around it, maybe I'll see a different side. That's what Rodan always wanted, the sculptor. The sculptor. The French sculptor. What made him so special, they said,

was when you would look at his art, his sculptures, depending on where you looked at it from, you had a very different feeling of what was happening. So the same sculpture could look like a pained person, a strong person, a pensive person. And he did that on purpose because he wanted you to feel, he always said, from every angle, I've made a different sculpture. And so, thinking of it, yeah, thinking of it through that lens.

That's all you have to ask yourself in your world, basically, is the system you're in, does it allow you to look at the sculpture from a different angle? If it doesn't, should probably go and look at this website, download bite, and then see what happens. And the influence continuum. One last thing, I know we're going. over but no no no beware certainty

a beware anyone who says 100% it's this because if you have a lens thinking your beliefs are certain the world is flat whatever information you're only doing

confirmation bias to confirm your worldview if you start with it's like you're wearing eschimo glasses I have beliefs but they could be wrong and there may be better perspectives, then the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And it makes you more curious. It makes you more engaged to learn and get other people's perspectives. So you want to be

this. You don't want to be this. So less Eskimo classes, more Applevision pros. Not Applevision pros. Dude, you're the Luddite. You just flipped it. You clearly have never used an Applevision pro. I was like, Eugene, do you know what an Apple Vision pro is like, hey man, I think it's the one that lists you see out. No, virtual reality. Really, really appreciate you. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you for joining us.

You have Hutzpah for having me on. Oh, no, what do you mean? You have chutzpah for joining us. Thank you so much. We had a great time with you. It's really great. Take care. This is fun.

Thank you. You're amazing. Thank you, my man. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaziamen, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is a very. our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Hardoof. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode

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