Within Reason - #112 Rick Alan Ross - Do Cult Leaders Believe Their Own Lies?

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Rick Alan Ross is an American deprogrammer, cult specialist, and founder and executive director of the non-profit Cult Education Institute. Frequently appearing in the news and other media, discussing groups some consider cults. Ross has intervened in more than 500 deprogramming cases in various countries. (Wikipedia) Get Rick's book, "Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out" here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there any such thing as a cult that isn't bad? Oh, yeah, sure. There can be a group that has a charismatic leader who has great power and authority, but is relatively benign. And there have been a number of groups like that. The one that I would use as an example would be Arcosante, the organization that followed and controlled, continues to follow the teachings of the architect Paul Solari. His philosophy was called

archaeology. They had an intentional community north of Phoenix in the desert where they were building Arcosante, this experimental city. But Salary was a relatively benign leader. There were later allegations regarding sexual abuse of his daughter, but that was within the family. As far as getting complaints about members leaving the group, feeling they couldn't leave the group, that they were being coerced to stay, that never appeared in my work. So I think he was a fairly benign leader, and it was a benign organization. he's now dead and the foundation continues. Yeah, I think people might be surprised to hear you say something like that because

when it comes to philosophy, theology, sociology, terms are very difficult to define, right? Religion, cult. Words like these are impossible to define precisely. But I think people would generally think that a cult involves things like resistance to anybody trying to leave. You've got your sort of charismatic leader, but they're also seems to be this insular and isolated nature to that community. And I know that a lot of people in the anti-cult movement make a distinction between so-called benign cults, ones that aren't so-bid, and so-called destructive cults, which are the bad ones. And if it is that the kind of the typically bad stuff, not allowing people to leave and stuff like that, isn't intrinsic

to being a cult, I think people might be a little confused about what a cult could be then. Well, so there are three core characteristics that form what I would call the nucleus for the definition of a destructive cult. And every definition I've ever read or heard intersected on these three core characteristics, which are, number one, a charismatic leader who becomes an object of worship and is the defining element and driving force of the group, typically totality. And second, that that leader uses identifiable thought reform techniques to gain undue influence over his or her followers. And then third, if it is a destructive cult, it does harm. And that varies by degree from group to groups. Some groups are much worse than others.

So you take those three core elements together, the all-powerful charismatic leader who is worshipped by the followers in the group and the use of thought reform, or what has been called coercive persuasion or brainwashing in popular culture. And then finally, that this undue influence that the leader has is used to exploit his or her followers, and you have the crucial elements of a destructive cult. In that case, if that's how we would define a destructive cult. Are those first two points, just the definition you would give for a cult, as opposed to a destructive cult? If there are non-destructive cult, what makes something just a cult? Well, I would say that you have this all-powerful leader, who is the defining element and

driving force of the group. So it could be someone like Steve Jobs. It could be Elvis and his fans. It could be the group, the Grateful Dead, who had followers that were called the deadheads. And they would go from venue to venue following this rock group across the United States as a tour. So you have this, you know, leader or a very small, let's say, triumvirate of leaders that form the basis of the charismatic leadership that defines the group. and then the group has a kind of mindset that is set in place by the leadership that defines the movement and gives the leader great influence and power. Now, if the leader is relatively benign, certainly Elvis wasn't known for creating a compound, exploiting members in any particular way, his fans. So that would be a benign group. And there have been, you know, quite a few benign groups

historically in the United States and around the world. And simply because the leader is an object of worship is the defining element of the group doesn't necessarily mean that the group is destructive. But in my experience, when you have an authoritarian leader who has no checks and balances and has totalitarian power, frequently it slides into abuse. Yes, cult, I believe, comes from the Latin cultus, meaning worship. So certainly the worship of some kind of entity is going to be important here. But I think the thing that's going to jump out to my listeners here, I mostly speak about religion and philosophy, and there's a bit of a meme almost that goes around that people say that, well, religion is basically just a big cult, and cults are basically just small religions. I can't quite put my finger on why, but for me it is incredibly unhelpful to describe, you know, Christianity as a cult, unless you're using like it in a very particular scholarly sense, like the cult of John the Baptist or something. And yet, when you describe a cult being defined as a group of people,

people sort of organizing around a charismatic leader who has some kind of unquestionable authoritative status, things like this, some resistance to leaving, but only in the more destructive cases, sometimes benign. I think at least of like early religious movements, like the original followers of Jesus. And then Christians, Muslims today, who have figures like Jesus and Muhammad, who, despite being dead, are considered, well, alive by Christians and still an object of, not reverence, but maybe the kind of thing you're talking about by Muslims, but certainly God himself, in both of those cases, would be this kind of authoritative leader, sometimes caricatured as something like a tyrant sitting in heaven in a celestial North Korea.

So what do you make of all of that, and people saying that a religion like Christianity or Islam is just a big cult? Well, I think that we need to make distinctions and we need to look at it historically in context. And I'll be honest with you, I'm kind of tired of people saying that all religions are a cult and not making those distinctions because I think it just kind of is not helpful.

So is it possible for a cult to evolve into a religion? Certainly. I mean, let's look at Mormonism. Originally, it was all about Joseph Smith. He was the defining element and driving force of the religion. He was the one who supposedly found these golden tablets and created the book of Mormon and the writings on which the religion stands. Subsequent to his death, Brigham Young took over,

and I think arguably it continued to be a personality, But after Brigham Young, power began to devolve from the top down. And so now you have church government. You have the first council of the presidency of the Mormon church, and then you have the first quorum of the 70, second quorum of the 70. The same thing happened with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. They were originally known as the Millerites. They followed a man by the name of Miller.

And then after his failed prophecy of the end of the world in the 1800s, they coalesced around a woman, Ellen White, who was responsible for much of their writings. But after White died, the Seventh-day Adventist Church likewise evolved and changed. And I think today, it's a benign religion that's pretty much mainstream. They still celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday as opposed to Sunday as most Christians, but they have basically moved into the mainstream. They have democratic governance and checks and balances regarding authority and power. And Jehovah's Witnesses would yet be another example. They started as the followers of Charles Russell.

And then they followed a man by the name of Rutherford who succeeded Russell. But then power devolved, and today the witnesses, though much more authoritarian than the Mormons, in my opinion, are governed by a group literally called the governing body, which is composed of about nine men who run Jehovah's Witnesses. Now, they still, in my opinion, are a destructive authoritarian religious organization because of things like their denial of blood transferect. And many witnesses die every year, children die because they're not permitted to get a blood transfusion because of the group's beliefs. Also, the witnesses can be very harsh when it comes to excommunicating someone or shunning them, what they call disfellowshiping, and they can cut people off from families and so forth. And then we can look at mainstream religion, and we can look at Jesus, Moses,

Buddha, Muhammad. Muhammad is historically well documented. Jesus and Moses and Buddha, not so much, but based on the history that we have available, we could argue that maybe when Moses was alive or Abraham, it was a personality-driven cult. But subsequently, again, it evolved and the religion became more about the law of Moses and the beliefs than it was about any particular personality. Jesus is an interesting story because assuming that the New Testament is historical, Jesus had nothing, wanted nothing. and was really the antithesis of a typical cult leader, in my opinion, because he wasn't looking for power on this earth.

And it's hard to say, you know, whether Christianity is the religion of Jesus or about Jesus, because there's so little objective history outside of the New Testament to confirm, you know, what he taught and his philosophy. But it seems like he was the suffering servant of God, and in that sense, he was willing to suffer for his followers, rather than his followers suffering for him. And when we look at things like the sermon on the Mount, it seems like he was a relatively benign, peaceful kind of leader. The same could be said of Buddha. So I think that a religion can start with the charismatic leader, and it can be defined by that leader. But after the leader dies, how does the religion evolve?

Some cults, personality cults, will just simply disintegrate after the leader dies. Others may continue. For example, Scientology has been called a cult. Elron Hubbard died. And interestingly, a secretary of his in his 20s, David Muskevich, who was essentially the gatekeeper for Hubbard in his declining years, became the successor to Elron Hubbard. And I would argue that he's probably more harsh, many people think, than Hubbard was. And so rather than Scientology evolving in the direction of becoming more benign, many people would say it's gotten worse.

And I would also point out that when cults accumulate great wealth and cash flow, as many have in modern history, there's a desire, a will to keep the thing going, even if it is a scheme or a scam, in order to just take over the assets and the cash flow. It's complicated, of course, by the fact that, you know, we've been talking about, say, Christianity, but a lot of cults exist sort of as a subsidiary of Christianity, like how the Jehovah's Witnesses started out. I think they used to be called Russellites, right, after Charles Tays Russell, the founder. And yet that would still sort of a form of Christianity, although like restorationists, they thought you need to reinterpret everything. They don't believe in the

Trinity, all of this kind of stuff. But today, like, I know some ex-Jhovah's witnesses, and I know people whose family won't speak to them, who knew that if they were to ever leave, they would be, their family would be instructed not to talk to them. In fact, I knew one chap who was living in the same sort of house on a different floor to some of his family members, because there was this rule that if you live under the same roof, it's impractical to fully excommunicate, so you're still allowed to communicate with them. And this guy wanted to move out. out, you know, he was married, you know, he had kids, he wanted to, he wanted to leave, but he knew that the moment he left that particular building and went and lived somewhere else,

his family would never speak to him again. And so people like that will say to me like, yeah, it's a cult. I mean, it's definitely a cult. I suppose it seems like what you're saying is that because it lacks specifically the charismatic leader now, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but would you say therefore something like the Jehovah's Witnesses probably best isn't characterized as a cult for that reason? We might call a group a destructive, authoritarian organization or religious organizations. Keep in mind that many cults have nothing to do with religion. Keep Renary, who led Nexium, which was supposedly a self-improvement seminar selling company, that wasn't a religion. It was incorporated as a business. And Renary

was, and I testified at his criminal trial before he was in prison, in my opinion, one of the destructive cult leaders in recent times. Another example would be Synanon, the drug rehabilitation community in California that was started by Charles Diedrich. Diedrich didn't create a religion. It was a rehabilitation community that some people would argue initially was beneficial, but went off the rails. So there are groups that have no religious basis whatsoever. The single most salient feature of a destructive cult is the all-powerful leader. And this is a leader who is determining, depending on the group, virtually everything and anything regarding the members in the group. So whatever the leader says is right is right. Whatever the leader says is wrong is

wrong. And the leader engenders dependency upon him to make value judgments for you. And in my experience, the leader typically believes, because the leaders I've encountered are deeply narcissistic, that everyone should think like them, be like them, and that they are, in fact, the prototype for perfection of human existence. And so what you have in many of these groups is the leader instituting a system to clone himself. And when you consider, that many of the cult leaders that we can talk about, like Keith Ranieri, David Koresh, Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, have been called psychopaths. You see that what they're doing is cloning people to be crazy like them. And that's what frequently happens, is that people begin to lose their

sense of self, their ability to function autonomously and independently and think critically, and that the leader essentially thinks for them. So that is what goes on in cults. And all of the major religious organizations, be it Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam have groups that I call splinter groups that have broken away from them and typically at the behest of a leader who doesn't want to follow the guidance of the larger religion, but create his own subset or sect that he alone controls and is king over. And all of the major religions have these splinter groups, whether it's the Hari Krishna's with Hinduism, Shoko Asahara and Amshin Riccio with Buddhism,

Lev Tihore, which is a breakaway group from Judaism, or groups like the People's Temple led by Jim Jones, who was an ordained Protestant minister. And we could go on and on and on. And I think it's important to point out that by taking on the facade of whether it be Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, it gives the leader a sense of authority and more credibility. So if I want to target Christians in the United States to join my particular group,

I am going to come to them seemingly espousing Christianity, but not really. And I think the real issue and the difference between religion as we know it in the United States or in the U.K. or in Europe or most of the world, is that by and large, religion has checks and balances to power. They have democratic governance or they have some kind of accountability for their leader. Pope Leo was just elected Pope, and he went through a process to get to that place where he could even be considered. and there were checks and balances along the way. Now, no doubt we can find fault with the system. But in a destructive cult, there's nothing there.

There's just simply the leader, an absolute dictator, with no checks and balances whatsoever. And so I think when we say that all religion is a cult, we're really denigrating the clear and historical, definition of what a cult is, and we're also, in a sense, dismissing the difference between a destructive cult and mainstream religion. And there are distinct differences. To what extent do you think these charismatic leaders who engage in manipulative tactics and essentially brainwashing, ultimate authority, of course this will vary from person to person, but do you think

more of this, psychologically speaking, is people just trying to exert power, trying to have influence, trying to get sex, trying to get money, and knowing that it's all nonsense and just like making something up for the sake of control, versus how much you think it is people genuinely deluded into thinking that they actually are, you know, the Messiah, the unalterable authority. I'm thinking of, for example, Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, or the Moonies, as they are. sometimes known, who I think from reading your book, if I remember rightly, claimed to have like met in the spiritual world with like Karl Marx and Jesus and like Lenin or a bunch of other people like in the spirit world and they all just, oh and God of course, and they all decide to sort of give him the spiritual authority and he takes out like 30 advertisements and newspapers across America to let people know that this meeting took place. I'm looking at someone like thinking, does he really believe that he is the Messiah? Or is he just trying to string people along for a scam? What do you think is going on? I think that he's dead now. He lived into his 90s,

and his family now is reportedly worth over a billion dollars. And at one point, they controlled one third of the American fishing fleet. And about 50% of the wholesale sushi business in major metropolitan areas in the U.S. And he built all these businesses on the basis of cheap, low-cost labor frequently provided by his followers, who he did not really compensate very well. I've talked to many of them. There's a book written in the Shadow of the Moons by Nansukhom. She was Moon's daughter-in-law, married to one of his sons.

Moon wasn't a very good father. One son was a drug addict, another died in a one car collision, perhaps due to being intoxicated. Yet another son jumped from a high-rise hotel and killed himself. So the Unification Church is predicated on the idea that Moon is the perfect parent, the perfect father. Hardly that. And I don't think he really believed in it. that he was. I think he was a very arrogant, egotistical man, very deeply narcissistic, as most cult leaders are. But I think that there's pretty much a knowingness concerning the con game that cult leaders play. And I think Moon probably understood that. Did he get full of himself? Did he feel that he could get away with anything? Maybe. El Ron Hubbard. Did he really believe the Xenu story about spaceships from outer space being directly linked to the human condition through a kind of residue of ghosts of aliens that are clinging to our bodies called body Thaetons. I find it hard to believe that Hubbard really believed that. I think that

he created that myth. He was a sci-fi writer before he was a so-called cult leader. And I think that many of these leaders, and I've met them face to face, Keith Renary, I would sit with him and deal with him through court-ordered mediation. He sued me for 14 years in a lawsuit that went on and on and on and was finally dismissed not long before he was arrested and ultimately convicted of multiple crimes. He's now serving over a hundred-year sentence. But I didn't think that Keith Renary really believed his own hype based on the way that he interacted with me. And I think many cult leaders are little more than con men. And the

difference between a con man and a cult leader is that a con man typically runs their scam, takes the money, and they run. They skip town. A cult leader will run the same scheme on the same people indefinitely. And yes, they do it for power, for money, for sexual favors. And many of them have almost a symbiotic relationship, it seems to me, with their followers feeding their ego and that they need that adulation, they need that sense of power and control to just basically keep going. It's what pumps through their bloodstream. It's what they need. So you came face to face with Keith Renere, is his name? Yes.

What kind of cult did he run? You said that you came face to face with him because he was suing you, presumably, because of some critical activity you were engaged with. But what I'm really interested in after explaining that is what it was like to come face-to-face with one of these charismatic leaders and whether you could see just why his cult was successful. Well, you know, Keith Ranieri was underwhelming, to say the least. I mean, he looks kind of like one of those garden gnomes

that you might see in someone's backyard. Not a very impressive figure. Poorly put, he didn't dress very well. He didn't present very well. And I would call him a covert narcissist. And someone who is introverted, deeply narcissistic, and so they seem subdued, they seem more quiet, less of a braggard, a person that's really allowed and boisterous, or what we would call an overt narcissist.

So he really kind of tried to project the image of this kind of absent-minded professor, philosopher, king, kind of quiet, but he also might be called a dark empath, which means that though as a narcissist and many people would call him a psychopath, he lacked the ability to have genuine empathy or even sympathy. He had the ability, and this is where he was a savant, to identify the vulnerabilities of people and then drill into those cracks and leverage them for control. So he could figure out, and he devised a system through nexium, in which he would question people constantly through coaches that he had assembled, and that he would find out what

is your pain, what is your vulnerability, what is it that. you feel you need more than anything else. And with that information, he was able to manipulate people. And what Nexium supposedly was about, which was the group that he created, which when I first came across it, it was called executive success programs or ESP. And the people that were part of it were called espians. And Ranieri was given the title of Vanguard to denote that he was like on the cutting edge of what the world needed, the technology, he would say, the philosophy, which he called rational inquiry, that he marketed and sold through seminars that cost a great deal of money. And then you had people moving to Albany, New York, to be near.

him because Raineri lived there. So there were hundreds of people involved in various activities in the group. They would eventually put seminars, put thousands of people through seminar training, including two children of past presidents of Mexico and two heiresses to the Seagram's liquor fortune, Claire Bronfman and her sister Sarah Bromfman. Each, of them worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And Keith Renary would eventually get reportedly over a hundred million from those two Bronfman sisters and millions more from other wealthy, successful people, celebrities, some of them, that became part of nexium. But as Ranieri became more and more powerful and he had more and more control, he became

really depraved. He created a kind of cult within his cult that was called Dost. And these were women that were his sexual slaves. And he would eventually have them branded, having a doctor using a cauterizing iron to engrave a brand on their pelvis to denote their involvement with this group, DOS. And it turned out to be not very well disguised initials of Keith Ranieri. And so he was convicted for sex trafficking and financial fraud and numerous things, racketeering. And he's now serving over a hundred year sentence. But it escalated over a period of time. The more power that he garnered, the more he wanted. And for him, the sex wasn't really so much. I think about the, his sexual needs. It was about power and control and dominating the women

that he tortured and abused. Thinking about those victims of cults and thinking about victims of cults more generally, a question that comes to mind for me is that I think a lot of people are suspicious of their own ability to be susceptible to cults. And I think, one important bit of advocacy that anti-cult activists will do is to remind people that, you know, everybody is susceptible to this kind of stuff in the right conditions. But having said that, are there like predictive factors as to the kinds of people or the kinds of communities or kinds of upbringings and stuff like this that are predictive factors of higher likelihood to be susceptible to joining a cult? Or is it basically random and contingent on chance?

Well, I think there's one narrative that I think pulls through many of the people that I've worked with and talked to that have been victimized by destructive cults, and that is that perhaps they were at a difficult time in their life. And they were, they were being bothered by something. Their job, family issues, divorce. Maybe they had a relationship. It fell apart. They were in school and they were struggling. They had financial difficulties. Whatever that would be, along come someone, typically someone you know, who's an old friend, a coworker, maybe a relative or a romantic interest.

And they tell you, gee, I know you're hurting. And I know of an organization that has something to offer that can help you. And that's how many people initially become involved. And in the process of recruitment, there's so much deception. I would call it like a bait and switch con. You have no clue what you're really getting involved in. And they deliberately don't tell you. And that's the difference between thought reform and religious indoctrination.

You know, I'm Jewish. And I grew up being indoctrinated into the religious, of Judaism. And when I went to Hebrew school or I went for my training for what we call a bar mitzvah, which is what happens when you're 13 and you go up in front of the congregation and read from what we call the Torah or the 10 books of Moses, I always knew what I was involved with. My parents knew what they were involved with. We were in a very liberal denomination of Judaism called the Union for Reform Judaism. And so there was no deception involved, and we understood what we were getting involved in.

The same thing with a Jesuit or a woman who would want to become a sister of charity, Mother Teresa's sect within Catholicism. So you know what you're getting involved with. They tell you up front. You know what the demands are going to be. be, they tell you up front, and you submit yourself to it willingly because that's what you want. That is so different from a destructive cult using thought reform. They do not tell you what their expectations ultimately are, what their demands are going to be, and you really do

not make a choice based on informed consent for what you're getting pulled into. And the person you trust, who probably is a true believer who brought you in thinking that it was the best thing for you, they're also not going to be completely transparent about everything in the group. So you are brought in, and then it's a kind of spoon-feeding process of increments as you submerge deeper and deeper into the group. And then clicks in the social isolation that most often happens to various degrees, depending on how extreme the group is. But you essentially become enveloped in a kind of echo chamber or bubble in which you are not getting accurate feedback.

And instead, other members of the group are constantly reinforcing the group's beliefs and demands. And so you are essentially information is being controlled. and feedback is being filtered, and you are not getting the true picture. And that's by design. That's deliberate. And so it's very different from religious indoctrination where everything is laid on the table. Do you want to be a Catholic?

Go to the catechisms. Do you want to be a Jew? Go to Hebrew school and be confirmed. Everything is up front, as opposed to being withheld and being micromanaging. in the way it is within destructive cults. What jumps out at me from that then is the idea that people are essentially fooled into joining these cults. No one intentionally joins a cult, right?

But the extent to which these cults then pray on the cult members and completely eliminate their communication with the outside world, completely reshape the way that they're thinking, something that struck me from your book was talking about the Charles Manson murders and how some of the followers of Charles Manson commits some of these gruesome murders and are still in prison for it today. And there was one woman in particular, I can't remember her name, but who's still in prison as far as I know and she's been there for however many decades it's been and is repeatedly denied parole because she's committed this gruesome murder, but now she sort of looks back and says, you know, and you write about this, about her sort of saying,

like, I was completely stripped of my humanity. I would have done anything. I sort of totally lost sight of myself, and now has kind of been brought around to seeing that she was in a cult, but she's still responsible for these crimes. So she's applying for parole and getting denied, and on the one hand, I'm thinking she's a victim of essentially brainwashing. It's not her fault. She should get to go free. But on the other hand, people are going to think, but she did commit these murders. And at some degree, you could say that about anybody who's a murderer. Maybe it's their upbringing or socioeconomic factors that led to it.

And so, I don't know, like, in a case like that, where it's a bit more of a gray area, do you still consider these people to be victims? And do you think that that should meaningfully impact the way we view their guilt for crimes like these? Well, look, I think you're talking about Leslie Van Houghton. She was a cheerleader, I think. She was a from a middle class family in Los Angeles. There was nothing in her history that would be a ready. flag saying this is going to become, this person is going to become a cult member and a murderer.

But that's what happened. Leslie Van Houghton was a teenager when she entered into the Manson family, as it was called, headed by Charlie Manson, which was a very small group. And Manson, by all accounts, a psychopath, someone who basically grew up in juvenile facilities, the prison system, came out of prison and started to manipulate people and dominate people. He was in his 30s. And he collected these very impressionable young people around him, including Leslie Van Houghton. And she would eventually kill in the Tate LaBianca murders. She stabbed Mrs. LaBianca, I think, 26 times.

It was a horrific, brutal murder. And it shocked Los Angeles in the late 60s. And so that became, you know, she was originally sentenced to death. And then ultimately, she did get parole not too long ago, but she spent, what, like a half a century, locked up in prison. and I remember when I received a call from the extended, a member of the La Bianca family called me up. And I had written and spoken about Leslie Van Houghton and pointed out that before she met Charlie Manson,

she was not a criminal. She was not in trouble. There was nothing there to indicate that this would be her ultimate lot in life. And then during the time in prison, when Charlie Manson was no longer able to influence her, she went on, she became a college graduate, she counseled other women prisoners, she was not a violent prisoner. She was not, she was seen as essentially a model prisoner. So the Manson cult was an anomaly in her life. It represented this one space of time where she was. was completely different than she was before or after. And I would attribute that to the influence of Charlie Manson. But when one of the La Bianca family called me up, what they said to me is they said,

you know, Leslie Manhattan was originally sentenced to death. And then when California at one point abolished the death penalty, that sentence was commuted and she was a sentence to life in prison. I don't think this member of the La Bianca family said to me that she should ever get out because my family has suffered so horribly that there's no way that we can ever be made whole. There's no way that these family members can ever be returned to us and they're dead. They will never have another chance. And so she was vehemently opposed, the woman who spoke to me,

to Leslie Van Houten's parole. And I think there is a line where cult members cross into criminal activity where they are punished. And in some situations where it involves horrible crimes like murder or horrible sexual abuse of children or adults, it's reasonable to think that they should be punished. but I recognize that they have diminished capacity. That is, that they were under undue influence

and that they would not have committed the crime if they were not under that type of control. It's a really unique kind of case because I'm sure the law is filled with examples of people being literally coerced into committing crimes or people who plead insanity, but it's a sort of midway case here with, cults, and I'm not sure how long it has been that people have really been aware of cult as

like a phenomenon to be taken seriously in this regard. And so I suppose people are still kind of working it out, but I think it raises a big sort of moral question mark. I mean, I'm tempted to say, like, of course, you should be in prison, but maybe it should be like a factor in the sentencing, you know, some kind of inhibiting factor. But I can totally imagine why a victim of the family, a family member of the victim wouldn't, wouldn't see it that way. It does make me wonder then as well, since you mentioned that Charles Manson's cult was incredibly small, and we've talked about a group like the Mooneys who were absolutely massive, I don't know exactly how big they were, but a huge organisation. Of the two, the sort of

really small, tight-knit cults who I suppose could be like more isolated, but there are less members to keep up the status quo versus these huge organisations which cannot keep. track of and micromanage every single member, but there are just so many people and so many communities to sort of keep you in the fold. Of those two, which do you think is a more dangerous kind of cult, the big ones or the little ones? Well, you know, it really depends on the leader. The leader is the defining element and driving force of the group. So as the leader goes, so goes the group. And even though a group could be quite large, the way in which the pyramid scheme of authority is built, there are all these levels of authority that are ultimately being

dictated to by the leader at the top, and there are mandated ways of dealing with others in the group that the leader determines and that are implemented systematically. So you have groups like the Children of God, which was led by a man by the name of Moses David Berg, who was a pedophile, a predator who raped his own daughter, his own daughter, his own granddaughter and mandated that members in the group have sex with children. And so in the group, there were children that were being raped at the age of four. And these children, needless to say, grew up in a very tortured, very difficult existence. And Berg was really kind of a shadowy figure that was not ever present, but that the edicts that he had,

through his Mo letters and his authority, were mandated through the systematic implementation in the group. And so all of these children suffered. And I've talked to many of them as they left a group. They were adults. The actor River Phoenix and his brother Joaquin Phoenix, their family was in the children of God. And many of the children that come out of the group come out with very conflicted feelings about what happened to them.

You know, they love their parents, and yet their parents were part of their pain because their parents either allowed a sexual abuse to occur or were part of it, and the children were hurt. So they have this love, hate kind of relationship frequently with their parents. Another example, though, to point out is Jim Jones. Jim Jones at one time headed a very large church in California called the People's Temple. And they had thousands of people going to church services. And they were considered by many to be a very dynamic, a very positive church because they had programs to help the elderly, to rehabilitate drug addicts and so on. And so they were seen as a social action kind of church. And Jim Jones was seen

as a mover and shaker in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was at one time very friendly with the governor of California, the head of the state assembly. He was kind of a local selection. But as his power grew and it was unchecked, and that was the problem, was they did not have a system of democratic governance to check and balance Jim Jones. And he was a deeply disturbed personality. Many would say a psychopath. He also had substance abuse problems. So as he deteriorated and became worse and worse, so did the organization that he headed. And this is the dilemma or a formula for disaster in cult groups, which is they are so firmly attached to the leader that as the leader loses his ability to make rational judgments and becomes more and more crazy, if you will,

the group becomes crazy. So what happened with Jim Jones was he got worse and worse until eventually the media exposed him, and he left California with more than a thousand of his most loyal followers. And they went to English-speaking Guyana, where they created a cult compound in the middle of the jungle, which became known as Jonestown. And it was there in 1978, under government scrutiny, that Jim Jones decided to pull the plug. And he wanted to die, and he took all of his followers with him. They were either murdered or coerced to commit suicide, and 900 people died, about 300 children. So this is the formula for disaster. You have an entire organization that is wholly dependent on the sanity of its leader. And when that leader is a

psychopath, a malignant narcissist, the possibilities are that even if that leader isn't really bad comparatively at one point, without any checks or balances to his power, he might run off the rails. And that's what we see over and over again and in cult tragedies. If I'm not mistaken, an investigation into Jonestown was commissioned by, like, the U.S. government, so they sent a congressman to Jonestown to check it out. And while he was there, some of the members were like handing him notes saying, like, I want to get out of here. And I don't know the exact details of what happened next, but it wasn't pretty. Yeah. Well, that was Leo J. Ryan. He was the congressman from that district that included. the People's Temple and many of his constituents were coming to him and saying, you know,

my family member is in Guyana and I can't get them on the phone. There were no phones. There was no communication. There was no newspaper, no radios. Jim Jones controlled all information and communication, which is a scenario you see that plays out in many cult groups. the more extreme the group, the more extreme the control to enforce what the leader wants. And so the people that lived in Jonestown were unable to communicate with their families in California. So Leo J. Ryan went with the agreement of Jim Jones on a fact-finding trip to see what was happening with these people who overwhelmingly were from his district or from California. and when he went there, of course, there were people passing notes, take me with you, help me, save me.

And when Ryan left, he left with some of the people from Jonestown. And so Jim Jones knew that when they left, they would tell what was really going on inside Jonestown, which was that Jim Jones had his own prison, he had his own police force, and he was ruthlessly totalitarian and controlling of all the people in there. And he was sexually exploiting some. So that, he didn't want that truth to be known.

And so he decided to kill Leo J. Ryan and the people that were trying to leave. And Ryan was assassinated. He was murdered. And I think after that, even though Jones was in a very, you know, strange, kind of bizarre fantasy conspiracy driven state of mind he had the presence

of mind to know it was over and that the authorities would eventually come to arrest him as they were from Georgetown in Guyana and so he infamously mixed what they called the Kool-Aid

which was a flavorade punch with cyanide and barbiturates. And that was given to hundreds of people. The children had no choice. They were given poison by either their parents or by adults. And they were murdered. And then there were people that tried to escape. They were forced to take the poison. There were people that were shot. So it wasn't simply a mass suicide. It was by and large murder. And Jones had determined, that I'm going to die and therefore you could see it as almost like this incredible act of narcissism without me you are nothing and therefore you must all die with me because what will

you be without me and so they all died and 918 people do we know what he actually said to because presumably he didn't say to his followers like the games up the police are coming for us it's time to get out of here. He must have said something a little more dramatic, a bit more narrative. Do we know what the actual message was before they all died? Yes, he told them that this was an act of revolutionary suicide in response to a cruel world that didn't understand their truth, that resisted their sense of social justice, that they were making a statement that the world would note that the world was so unjust, and as many cult leaders have said, whenever there are situations where they're being held accountable for their behavior,

this is persecution. We are being persecuted. Not I am being held accountable for my behavior, but we are being persecuted, and therefore we will commit revolutionary suicide, in order to make a statement. And that's what they believed. The followers of Marshall Applewhite, a very small group called Heaven's Gate, that they all died, 39 of them, in California in the 90s.

They were told by their leader, who had been in and out of mental institutions and also considered a psychopath, that they were going to ascend to a level above human by shedding their earthly containers, meaning their bodies. So the leader, Marshall Applewhite, a deeply troubled individual who controlled everything in this small group, convinced them that the way for them to evolve as human beings was to shed their bodily containers.

So they took a concoction of phenol barbitol, they went to sleep, Most of them were suffocated with plastic bags over their heads. One, I think the final person that was left, inflicted a gunshot wound and died. And so that was the way that Heaven's Gate ended. But I don't think any of them at the time were thinking, I'm killing myself. They were thinking something idealistic,

something that was consistent with the group's philosophy, and that was the way in which Applewhite controlled them to death. And this is what's so sad about so many of these groups is that the members believe that they're doing something idealistic, they're doing something positive when in fact they aren't. Given how depressing this reality is, that sounds quite dramatic, but as we said earlier, it's surprising how susceptible people are to getting to that point. And if you think that you're not the kind of person that could fool for a cult, that probably means you're all the more likely to fall for a cult because you're less likely to see it coming. I suppose what I want to ask you is a question I'm sure you get asked

quite a lot, which is like, if you're worried about like a friend who's hanging out with a new group of people and you're not really sure what's going on there, what are some of the red flags you should look out for, not necessarily for, like, a cult for you yourself, but like behaviors of someone you know that might indicate that they're getting into something a little bit dodgy? They're becoming isolated, social isolation, that increasingly you're not hearing from them, they're not communicating, they seem to be submerged in this new group they're involved in to the exclusion of family and old friends, that when you ask them about the

group. They go on and on about the leader. And it seems like the leader is perfect, that the leader can do no wrong. And when you ask them about, you know, anything that might imply there might be a problem with the group or a question about something that they're doing, that the response is uniformly that the group can do no wrong, that the leader is always right. and that there's this total intolerance for any type of critique, and that those who criticize the group are always wrong or even evil, and that there's no legitimate reason to leave, that when you ask about people, are there people that have left your group?

Are there people that have moved on to a different church or organization? They're stigmatized. They're vilified. And the narrative is there really is no legitimate reason to leave. And many of these groups have troubled histories. So you can use AI or you can use Google and search down their historical information. And you can find it online. And you can see that there's a pattern of grievances about the group that are consistent,

that are, that the same kind of problems happen over and over again, which means that this group has a troubled history and that there are people that have been hurt. We've spoken about like historical cults, speaking a lot in the past tense, or we talk in the present tense about sort of borderline cases like strange religious groups, but are there still today any like well-known cults that like you can point to as, as, immediate red flags, if you hear a particular organization or whatnot. I think if people were asked to name a cult today, they might struggle outside of saying things like Scientology. Well, in my opinion, Falun Gong, which is the group behind the Shen Yun, a dance company, is a deeply troubled

organization that has been called a cult many times. Its leader is a guy that is called Master Lee. And they believe that he has supernatural powers, that he can become invisible, and that the truth of the universe is channeled through him. And so Falun Gong is not simply some type of traditional Chinese organization, nor is the Shen Yun dance company or the Epok Times or Epic Times newspaper that is also controlled by Falun Gong, just any newspaper. So that would be one example. Another example would be, of course, Scientology, which is still very much present in the world. And then there are groups like the Unification Church that have not ceased to be that are still very much in recruiting and active today.

And what I would say is that the way that groups recruit has changed. So what has happened is they are now online. So virtually anyone with a smartphone can be targeted by a group, that they are streaming, their indoctrination, that they have videos on platforms like YouTube, that they are on TikTok, X, Twitter, Facebook. They have groups on Facebook that meet online, and that the way in which they fundraise,

they receive money through PayPal, through VEMO. So the way in which a cult is created, the way in which it recruits, the way in which it extracts money from people, has changed. The internet has changed all of that. So that minor children, and this is coming out more and more, there was a series called Adolescence that I'm sure that you're aware of, that brought out the fact that teenagers, kids, minor children can be influenced by online influencers, in-cell, intentional celibate movement, or some other misogynistic type of organization that will

encourage, you know, this kind of hyper-masculinity that culminates in, you know, altercations and at times violence. And likewise, radicalized groups will recruit online. You know, for example, Hamas has recruited online and other terrorist organizations. So cults increasingly are starting online and proliferating online. And in that sense, there are so many groups, it's impossible to keep up with them. One group recently was exposed called Twin Flames, that there was a documentary done. And this was a group that has been called a cult. by two people, they recruit online, they interact online, then they have their offline group

meetings, seminars, etc. But the premise of the group was that they will find your true spiritual partner for you. They will find the person that you are meant to be with. And this became very manipulative, very destructive. When women were told that they needed to become a man in order to find their perfect partner, which would be another woman in the group. And this really became very destructive because women who otherwise would never have considered this were being coerced by the leaders of the group, according to former members that have left, to change their sexual identity. So again and again, what we see are these groups are pernicious and that they expand in whatever medium they can. And given the internet today and social media platforms, it's much easier for them to find people and recruit them than ever before. It also makes it sort of vaguer to me.

I mean, thinking about adolescents, for example, I think they name Andrew. Tate, maybe his brother, Tristan Tate. These are the sort of the big names of the kind of movement that we're talking about, this whole manosphere type thing. And a lot of people look at guys like that and see them as essentially a kind of cult leader. And there is a sense in which everything you're saying makes sense. It's almost as if they can do no wrong. They can say essentially anything and they'll have people lapping it up. But it doesn't have the organization. It doesn't have, I mean, I think they have like online courses and stuff and God knows what actually goes on behind that paywall or whatever. There is this idea, this element of, you know, exploiting people

for financial gain, selling products, that kind of stuff. But at the same time, it sort of doesn't feel like there's a proactive encouraging of like shunning and disfellowshiping, the kind of thing that you see in more organized cult. So when somebody describes something like the movement you've just been talking about, this sort of online nebulous, manosphere, masculinity type stuff as cult-like, do you think that's appropriate? Do you think this stuff is more in line with what we were talking about earlier as cults or more like the sort of more nebulous religion or that kind of thing? Like, where do you think that kind of thing fits into this definitional paradigm?

Well, I think Andrew Tate is right there on the line. I mean, he is currently facing criminal. charges. And there are allegations that offline he was presiding over a cult-like group of people that lived together and that he was exploiting women and so on. And that he is this kind of driving force, defining element of his following, and that they worship him in the sense that they see him as iconic, they see him as the prototype of what they wish to become. And so he is being criticized as being a cult-like leader or a cult leader. And these are the allegations that surround him. And I think it's really important for us to recognize that cults are,

you know, they're not all the same. So if we say the word cult, or we say destructive cult, that doesn't mean that they are all equally destructive. So there are many cult leaders that are simply happy to make a lot of money and have low-cost labor of their followers and become very rich, as many of them do. And they don't sexually abuse their followers. They don't physically abuse people. They operate on a continuum at a less destructive level. Now, having said that, there are cult leaders

that start out at that level and then become worse over a period of time. That was Keith Renary's story. But there are many, many cult leaders who are simply happy to be very rich, live luxuriously, have people wait on them hand and foot,

and are not planning a doomsday mass suicide or any kind of physical violence or criminal activity. And it isn't until the group crosses into criminal activity that the authorities become involved on the basis of those criminal acts. So I think it's important for us to recognize that the groups that end in murder and suicide are the very small minority of destructive cults, that the majority of them are destructive in the sense that they exploit people financially,

that they inflict intentional, emotional distress on people, that they cause psychological and emotional damage, that they traumatize people, and that that trauma follows that individual could be for years many people will leave a destructive cult without ever really unpacking what happened to them. And so they will live out the rest of their life blaming themselves, saying it was my fault, or if the group is religious, religiously based saying, well, I betrayed God by leaving the group. I'm a terrible person.

And they've never really unpacked what happened to them. I see this over and over and over again, people self-blaming, carrying this incredible feeling of guilt and shame that they have over being involved in a cult without understanding what was done to them. I would say that people typically are tricked and then trapped in these groups and that it is not their fault that they have been prayed upon and taken advantage of. And if they did have weaknesses and vulnerabilities that were the leverage that the leader used or the group used to manipulate them, again, it's not their fault. They're merely human to have their frailties and their weaknesses, as we all do. And that these groups are relentlessly predatory and they take advantage of our weaknesses. and it is not the victim's fault any more than it's the fault of someone who's been raped. You hear people say, well, you know, she was asking for it.

She was dressed provocatively. She was looking too sexual. And so not surprisingly, she was raped. I have heard people talk that way. and that that has happened historically as if people are blaming the victim. And I think that we should never blame the victim of a destructive cult and that we should recognize who is to blame. And it's the predatory nature of the cult that is the problem, not the person that has been

preyed upon. That's when again I'm thinking of like the Charles Manson murderers and why that poses such an ethically difficult case. because I think what you say is quite compelling, and people will intuitively listen and go, yeah, we shouldn't blame the victims, but when you face with a case like that, it's very difficult for people to just say, oh, you know, whatever, that sort of wasn't her fault. It's complicated, to say the least. But I think quite insightful here, as you said, that people who've left cults have sort of interesting psychological insights to give about how they still associate with the cults and maybe still feel like religiously. guilt despite having left. Maybe they sort of haven't abandoned all of the beliefs or something. But what it makes me think is how do people generally escape these cults and where do attempts to get people out of cults go wrong? Because I imagine a lot of people try it with family members and friends that they're worried about and completely and utterly fail.

Where do they go wrong and where do they go right? Well, first of all, most people will leave cults on their own. Not through an intervention. And typically it will be something shocked them. They saw something happen in the group that caused them to be shocked, to feel, I can't handle this. This is too terrible. I need to leave.

Or they're exhausted. They're simply exhausted. They've been working too hard. They've been, they've been, they've been, they've been, exhausted by the group and the demands of the group and they feel like I just can't go on. It's too difficult. It's too painful. And I'm going to leave.

But then because of their indoctrination in the group, they may feel that this is something that is something that they should be ashamed of that I should have been stronger. I should have been able to work 60 hours a week. Why couldn't I just keep doing that? I should have been able to not be in touch with my family. Why did I feel so homesick? It was a weakness that I loved my family. I should have put God first, meaning the group,

because in the mind of the individual, a higher power or a higher purpose is fused with the group to the, in the sense that you feel that you're not deferring to the leader, you're deferring to God, you're deferring to a higher order, a higher principle. And so you feel that when you walk away, you have betrayed that. And so that's kind of the baggage that people may leave with. But typically they leave because it was too hard, it was too difficult. The group was too punitive. they saw people suffering. They saw things that happened that shocked them and they left. Now, what will help them after they've left is to do quite a bit of study and reading and research

about what is a cult, how does thought reform or coercive persuasion work, what are the mechanisms that are used to manipulate people in totalistic groups. And if they can do that, they can unwind the group programming and understand what happened to them. And in that way, essentially free themselves from the guilt and the shame and get on with their life. And there are a number of books that people can read. Of course, I'm going to plug mine, cults inside out, because the book not only has a history of modern cults, but it has a narrative. of former cult members talking about what happened to them. And what the reader will see is even though the groups have completely different beliefs,

that the same things are happening in the same way to people in various groups, despite their differences in supposed beliefs, doctrines, etc. And then also there is a chapter examining what we call cult brainwashing, which is really a synthesis of coercive persuasion, thought reform, and influence techniques with the research notes so people can drill down and find more information. And then I describe what I do in interventions. I've done over 500 interventions across the U.S. and internationally. I've worked in the U.K., I've worked in Ireland, and I've worked across Europe.

So what happens in an intervention is basically education and sharing information. And that boils down to four basic blocks of discussion. Number one, defining what is a destructive cult and asking the question, does that fit the profile of the group that you are currently involved in? Number two, what is coercive persuasion? What is thought reform? And are there parallels between the criteria that would distinguish a thought reform program and what your group is doing to you now? And then number three, what history of the group do you not know that you should know to make a more informed decision about continuing with this group? withholding information from you? Do they have secrets that they don't want you to know? Why aren't they telling you their history? Why aren't they sharing these things with you? And then finally,

the fourth block, why did your family decide to do an intervention? What was it about your behavior, your choices, or your actions in recent history that caused your family so much concern, that they decided to bring me in and stage this intervention. And so you go through that. It could take three or four days of discussion. And during that time, you're asking the person to not communicate with the group or people associated with the group and to take a temporary time out to discuss what the family is concerned about and the various things that I've outlined. And then at the end, they will decide to do what they want.

Some decide to return to the group. I would say about 30% of the people that I work with at the end will say, I want to go back to the group. I'm happy there. That's what I want to do. And the family will accept that. All they want is the time allotted to discuss their concerns. And then many of the people I work with will say, I'm leaving in the first day. I'm not even going to stay here for a day.

So out of the 30% that I'm not effective with, many of them leave in the first day, many of them leave early on, some at the end. But mostly in the beginning, they just decide, I don't want to continue or they're in touch with someone in the group. and they tell them, hey, get out of there. We don't want you to talk about these things with anyone. Come back to us, ignore your family, ignore their concerns. So that's how people get out through intervention, but the overwhelming majority of former cult members, they simply walked away.

It must be quite difficult to convince people to sit down for an intervention in the first place. especially the type that's likely to sort of walk away. I mean, do you sort of, I'm imagining somebody who's sort of in a cult and it's kind of hard to get a hold of them. It's all, they're already kind of distant, you know, you're just sending a text message saying, hey, would you mind popping over so we can do a five-day intervention where you take a break from you? Like, how do you get people into that situation? Well, sadly, many of the families that contact me, I'm going to tell them there's nothing I can do for you.

because it does require meaningful communication, meaningful access, that things are not so far gone, either through the cult's efforts, or because the family has had so many heated arguments about their family members' involvement, that there's no more communication. Or if they live in a compound And there are a minority of cult members, but there are a substantial amount.

They live in an intentional community or a compound with other cult members, and the family absolutely has no access. And in situations like that, I will tell the family initially, look, there's just nothing I can do. I have a chapter in my book called coping strategies to coach families on how to improve communication, hopefully leading to a better place where they might be able to stage an intervention. But in most cases, there is enough communication and there is enough access that a family could stage an intervention. And so what they do is they have a designated time when I'm going to come

And when the family member is there, it could be a son, a daughter. It could be a parent with adult children initiating the intervention. It could be a spouse. So I come in as a total surprise and we sit down and the family will introduce me. And the family will say, look, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. And what we want from you is just time. Would you be willing to give us the next two or three or four days

not grueling where we talk for a while we break? Maybe we spend seven or eight hours a day in discussion. And then would you be willing to do that? Because we love you. We're your family. And we really feel this is important to us. And what we would like you to agree to is to just give us the time. And then you will do whatever it is that you want to do. And we will respect that. But we would like the time

to talk with you about why we're worried, why we're concerned. And usually most of the people will say, okay, fine. You know, I don't think it's necessary. I think this group I'm in is great. everything is wonderful. Some of the people will say, hey, this is maybe an opportunity for me to explain to you why you should get involved in this group and how it could help you. And the family will typically respond by saying, great, then we can have an exchange of ideas and discussion. And we brought Rick in me because I'm an expert. I testify as a court expert in court proceedings. across the United States and internationally.

And so I am here on the basis of my expertise to share what I know and your family is here as eyewitnesses to what has happened. And we just want to talk things through. So in that sense, it's kind of like a drug or alcohol intervention, which typically begins as a surprise. and the family pleads with the individual to hang in there and talk things out with them. And that's eventually the format or the general structure.

But what is discussed is very different. And the crucial difference with a drug or alcohol intervention is that in those interventions, the liquor store owner or the drug dealer are not trying to sabotage the intervention. Yeah. But the cult, given any opportunity, will try to sabotage the intervention. And that's why you want the person to agree not to be in touch with them during the days that you're having this discussion, this dialogue. You mentioned the fact that a lot of interventions for alcoholics, for example, are surprises. You don't text them and say, hey, you just sort of, the image is walking home and all your family are sat there.

Like, what's going on here? What do you think about the ethics and the efficacy of involuntary interventions for cults? Well, you know, as any of your viewers can find out, I myself was involved in involuntary deprogramming or involuntary cult interventions back in the 90s. And actually, 9091 would have been the last involuntary intervention I did. And quite frankly, I went through legal hassles over it. The families involved went through illegal hassles. And basically, it was abandoned. But in fairness, I want to say this, that the families that retain me in maybe two dozen

adult interventions that I did on an involuntary basis where the family hired security and they would not let the person go, were in extreme situations that involve frequently cult compounds, inability to access the person, and very extreme groups. I think it's fair to say that it could be a life or death situation. I've been involved in interventions where the group said, don't take your insulin. Don't take this medication that you take to avoid convulsions. And the person could die as a result of the cult's influence. Or there were situations where children were being horribly abused. And the adult needed to leave the group in order to take their children with them

because another aspect that we haven't discussed is that people are born into and grow up in groups called cults where what we consider crazy and abnormal to them is everyday life and that abuse is the norm and harsh corporal punishment, sexual exploitation,

labor violations, working kids. I mean, these are the kind of things that go on, and children suffer, and some die in destructive cults. There was a group in Australia that denied a little girl 10 years old insulin, Elizabeth Strauss, and she died. And now the parents and other members of the group will be going to prison for their complicity in her death, that they wantonly denied her insulin, and she died. a very painful death as a result of the teachings of the group and the leader of the group. So back in the in the 70s, the 80s, when involuntary deprogramings were taking place, not all of them were life or death, but many of them, and in fact a majority of them,

were with groups or organizations that there was no way to access that individual, that there was no way to do a voluntary intervention or with very limited possibility of success. So that's why parents did that. But because of the legal complications, that is lawsuits, criminal prosecution, that form of intervention has been abandoned. And I don't know of anyone that does it currently. and I think it pretty much ended around 9192. It sounds really dramatic. I mean, the idea of, it's one thing to say it's a surprise versus an invitation,

but for there to be security, to physically not let someone leave. I mean, firstly, I'm trying to imagine, like, how the person or people that you were involved with in these cases reacted. And secondly, like, does it work? Or are they so sort of trapped and imprisoned that they're just consistently saying, let me the hell out of here like I'm not going to listen to you well I'll I'll I'll tell you a case history in exactly that which was a young woman she was a college graduate she had a postgraduate degree she became involved in a very extreme group uh and this group believe that the members of the group should be sterilized. And so men got vasectomies.

Women got tubuligations and cauterizations so that they could not have children. The woman that I eventually would work with was 26 years old. Her family wanted her to be able to have children. They wanted her to have all the opportunities in life. They chose to do an involuntary intervention. This was in the late 80s. And I was the deprogrammer or intervention specialist that worked with the family and with this young woman. And she became very, almost really violent, screaming, chanting, did not want to listen to anything. But at the end of a period of days, there were about five days, she gradually changed and she listened and she took in the information and eventually decided to leave the group. And years later, she sent me a card with a

picture of her daughter, a baby that she had had. And I think what she was telling me was thank you. And I'm thankful for my family because I can have a child. And there were so many people from this particular group in California that they could never have children. Even after they left the group, there were women that I appeared with on a news program to expose the group. And they said, you know, I finally realized that I left the group for good reasons, and it was good that I left. You know, at the time I left, it was very painful. I felt I was turning my back on God, but eventually I realized it was a cult, and that the leader was not God, and that he was demanding and unreasonable, and I left because it was the right

thing to do for me and for my family, meaning parents, extended family. But that same person said, but I can never have children. I know that the group is a cult and I won't go back, but I will never be able to have children because I have been sterilized. So those are the stakes in some of these interventions. Another woman that I worked with had a particular disease that caused extreme convulsions. And she was on a medication

to obviate that, to take care of that, deal with that. And the group was telling her not to take it. The parents' fear was first that their daughter would die. And so they did an involuntary intervention. and she came out of it. She left the group.

She was in touch with me. I haven't heard from her in a while, but she used to call me every now and then, and we had an ongoing joke, which was when I was working with her, at times she would drift into a kind of trance, and I wouldn't think that she was hearing me. And I would say to her,

hello, hello, you know, and I would like, knock on something and say, is anybody home? And she would look at me and she'd get angry and say, I'm here, I'm here. And that was my way of engaging her. And she would call me on the phone over the years. And she would, when I picked up the photo, I'd say, hello. And she'd say, hello, hello, you're there.

And I would always know it was her. And incidentally, I worked with Harvey Kytel. on the Jane Campion film Holy Terror, direct, you know, which included Kate Winslet. And Harvey, I was his technical advisor. And there was a scene in Holy Smoke where he behaved in the same way. Hello, hello, are you there to Kate Winslet, who was the cult member? And that was from Harvey and I talking about cases that I had done.

Wow. That's pretty cool. That's a pretty cool stamp that you've made on popular culture there. Okay, those sound actually quite successful, and it's a shame that there are so many legal complications, even in these extreme cases. But most people listening to this, anybody who's thinking, gosh, you know,

I think I know somebody who's susceptible or something's going on, maybe they don't really want to save a whole intervention. Maybe they're just looking to sort of talk to their friend. Where do people go wrong? Like on that level, when they try to sort of say somebody, hey, let's have a chat about this. They sit down for an hour over coffee and they say, listen, I think you're in a cult

and you need to get out. Where do they go wrong? They're too harsh. They're too judgey. They haven't figured out the best approach, which is to be calm, to be conciliatory, to say, you know,

well, what's going on with this group? Talk to me about it or whatever. Do not be threatening or confrontational or critical. or negative and to just be open and to be a good listener and to listen to them. Because quite frankly, about half the calls that I get or emails are from people where they think it's a cult and they're wrong. So the first thing that you should think is, well, maybe I'm wrong that I think the group

is a cult because maybe they're a little weird and they believe things that are somewhat it's strange. But as I often say, it's not about beliefs. It's about behavior. How does the group behave? How is the group structured? Can it objectively be defined as a destructive cult by virtue of the structure of its authority and the group dynamics and its behavior? Not subjectively because, you know, I don't like what you believe. I don't like your doctrine. Because in my opinion, and the way I see it, if a group has weird beliefs, so what? It's none of my business. It's only when the group is doing something that is destructive and that is hurting people,

that people like me become involved or for that matter law enforcement. So keep in mind, if somebody you know, you think they're in a cult, you may be wrong. And you may just be over, overreacting. And you might need to just chill out a little bit, do some reading, do some research. I mean, come on, we've got open AI. We've got chat GPT, which is not always right. You know, a lot of times I'll ask AI something and I'll see mistakes and whatever. But we have the tools to explore the back.

of a particular group and find out more information about them and it behooves you if you care about somebody to do the research first, not later, and find out more about what they're involved in because you may be wrong. You may just be overreacting. What kinds of groups just briefly? Do people call you up and say, I'm worried about my friend who's in a cult, but they're not actually a cult? What kind of groups give people that impression? Oh, well, Freemasonry, Wicca, nativistic kind of voodoo, you know, Santa Ria or whatever, that may be relatively benign. They don't have a dictatorial leader. They're not hurting people, but their beliefs are strange. You know, I think that the Satanists, though their beliefs may be repugnant to people, are not causing direct harm in the way that other groups are that have been called destructive cults. So there are exceptions.

You know, there recently was an online supposedly Satanist group that was targeting kids. But that's the exception, not the rule. And for the most part, I find Satanists, Wiccans, witches, Santoria, and so forth. to be relatively benign, and though the beliefs are strange to the mainstream, that doesn't make them a destructive cult. Likewise, there could be a kind of philosophical group or a political group that we don't agree with, that we should not label a cult simply because we don't agree with them. For example, I would not call the so-called woke movement a cult any more than I would call Donald Trump a cult leader.

I think that there are groups that we disagree with, that we look at them and say, well, I don't like what your political platform is. I don't like your agenda. And therefore, I want to denigrate you. And I'm going to use the word cult because that makes me feel like I've, you know, you're brainwashed if you don't think how I think. That is not really helpful. And that is not what a destructive cult is. It's not about whether they agree with. your beliefs. It's about how do they behave and what are the group dynamics and how is authority exercised in the group. Even in the case of a Trump-like figure who many criticize particularly because of insistence on loyalty, surrounding himself with yes men, firing people who exhibit contradictory attitudes, and then a movement which crops up around him, which, you know, when when somebody gets up and says that they're a socialist, they say, oh, you've been brainwashed by the woke media and you're not thinking straight. And again, it's kind of hard to judge

because it's on such a sort of broad scale. But in the way that you just said, you know, I wouldn't say that anymore than I would say Donald Trump is a cult leader. But some people kind of do say that about a man like him, you know? Famously, he said he could shoot someone in New York and his followers wouldn't do anything, right? It's like, it's sort of a lot of resonance with the kind of stuff you're talking about? Well, Trump comes across as very narcissistic and self-indulgent and, you know, and so on, which makes him disagreeable to some people. And, but it doesn't make him a cult leader. I mean, there are many movie stars, actors, celebrities who are very narcissistic who have a kind of posse or entourage that,

follows them that agrees with whatever they say that are sycophants. But that doesn't make it a cult. And what I think Donald Trump is is more of a vessel than he is a cult leader. That is that the sentiments and the grievances, the feelings of the Republican Party, the base of the Republican Party, that he identified all of the most important issues for most of the Republican party. And he gives voice to their grievances, their sentiments, their fears in a way that has engendered their support. And if you look at Donald Trump's history, I see him more as a salesman than a

leader, someone who understands his target market, and in this sense it would be the Republican base, and he understands what they want to hear, and he speaks to their deepest held feelings. And I don't think that the people that support him suddenly change their feelings or their political attitudes or their grievances, but rather it just flowed through him. And in that sense, he is more beholding to them than they are to him. I think if, for example, Donald Trump said, well, I think that we should have immigration reform and we should have work visas for people that are harvesting crops and restaurants and hotels and in construction because we need those people and they should be given some leeway a pathway to citizenship. I think immediately

Donald Trump would no longer be followed by the Republican base, that they would, as they say, throw them under the bus. And in fact, he did a rally in Alabama at one point. And he spoke in favor of vaccinations because one of the vaccinations was produced through something called Operation Warp Speed. And that vaccination was quite effective in the COVID pandemic. And Trump said, you know, what about that vaccination? Wasn't that great? I hope all of you are vaccinated.

And he started getting booed. And in my experience, cult leaders are not booed. Cult followers are not allowed that privilege to boo or show discontent in that way. And instead of Trump denouncing them and saying, take all of these negative people out of here, he changed and walked back what he was saying and morphed it into an issue of, well, you know, If you don't want to take the vaccine, you shouldn't have to be forced to take the vaccine. The vaccine should not be mandated. And then the audience started to clap and then cheer. And if you watch Trump in many of these interactions at his rallies, he's playing to the crowd.

He's playing to the audience. It isn't like the audience is simply obedient and subservient to him. Yeah, that makes a lot of tense, actually. And I think, again, it's probably helpful in the way that when people say, like, you know, religions are just cults. It's like, I know what you mean, but it's probably quite unhelpful to annex that kind of terminology where it doesn't properly belong. Because of the kind of work that you're doing, it will blur some of the lines and confuse the sort of information that people need to know. One other, before we wrap up here, like there is one other specific thing I wanted to ask you about just because in terms of the popular understanding. understanding of cults. This random thing just sort of burst onto the internet recently. It went super

viral. It was this viral video of a group of people sat singing quite a strange sounding but very beautiful song in a language that most people listening didn't understand. And it looked very sort of community oriented. They were all sort of sat in a room together and it looked really nice. It almost looked like a, you know, a family get together around the campfire or something. And upon looking into who these people were, they were part of the John from Cargo Colt. What is the John from Cargo Cult? Well, you know, that is a group that is based on, I think it's the, isn't it the Sullivan Islands or somewhere islands in the Pacific? in the Pacific.

Yeah, the Solomon Islands, I believe. So it's a very isolated group that had interaction with Western countries and they began to kind of worship this man that had landed on their island and shared these great things

from the West with them. And they began to idolize this individual who came to the islands and they began to worship the things that he brought, you know, and they were called a cargo cult. But this is not a group that has an authoritarian leader today that is making demands on the people. It's more like, really kind of like the deadheads and the grateful dead. the idolization of someone and, you know, being a fan of that person and what they represent. So I think you can have what we call, you know, a cult following, which means fans, a fan base. And that's different from the type of cult that would be called a destructive cult. Yeah. So, I mean, my favorite example of a cargo cult is the so-called Prince Philip movement, as it's described on Wikipedia. But I think, sort of relatively well known that I think it must have been that Prince Philip, who was the husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II, they visited these islands. And the islanders see the reverence with which these royals are being treated and conclude that the man, the husband, the husband,

must be the sort of divine type figure. And so there's this community of people in, again, like an isolated island somewhere in the South Pacific who like worship Prince Philip. They've got like pictures of him. And Prince Philip was told about this cult and he sent them a picture of himself and they sent back this like a pig killing baton thing. It's like a traditional thing from their cult. and at their request, Prince Philip, like, poses for a photo with it and sends it back.

And it's just bizarre. And I think it's got something to do again with this sort of visitation. And some of these cargo cults, they'll, like, build sort of, I guess, ceremonial air strips. Because, of course, when they were visited in the past, an airplane came down and dropped off, you know, all these goods. And so they build these airports out of, like, you know, out of wood, essentially. because in some of these cargo cults, I think they might believe that this is somehow going to attract back this mythical figure like the drawn from who's going to come and drop off the cargo cult, drop off the cargo. But yeah, fascinating to think that there is a community of people, even today, after his death, who idolize and worship Prince Philip as a divine figure because of this kind of visitation that they interpreted in this way. And I think if there's any evidence of the proneness of people to, under the right circumstances, be able to adopt what from the outside might seem like some of the most insane and inexplicable beliefs you could conjure up, I think this provides a good example and a reminder that, you know, a lot of us are susceptible to a lot sort of wackier and more esoteric beliefs than our current circumstances might have us believe.

I think the important thing to the takeaway is, does the group hurt people? So the cargo cult doesn't have a history of hurting people. And they're simply fascinated with this colonial figure who made them aware of the Western world and things that they thought were magical that represented a higher form of, you know, evolved technology and so on. But there are leaders of nations, political leaders, not Prince Philip, but let's say Adolf Hitler, or Benito Mussolini, or for that matter, Joseph Stalin,

or Lennon, who can be seen as cult leaders in the sense that they were the defining element and the driving force of, of what was happening in their country. For example, people didn't say Heil Germany. They said Heil Hitler. And they saw Hitler as a messianic figure. In the same way, we now have North Korea,

which has had three successive generations of leaders from the same family who are worshipped as semi-divine, as virtually supernatural, and they can be seen likewise as cult leaders. So it is possible, and we've seen it historically, where people become a cult leader and they have a movement behind them, and that movement is political, and it takes over an entire country, and the leader is worshipped. I mean, if you go to Russia today, you can visit you. at Lenin's tomb, and his body has been, you know, embalmed and preserved.

And so this is evidence of the fact that he was an object of worship, and there have been political leaders in that type of position. Yeah, you talked about Trump earlier getting booed and sort of changing his message. What came to mind then was the video I'm sure you'll have seen. You can watch it on YouTube of Joseph Stalin in front of a room of his party and he starts listing off names and the people who he names, a soldier goes over, picks them up and takes them outside. And these names start getting listed off. And people are nervously sat there. And as the names keep going, some of them start standing up and hailing Stalin

and shouting their praise at the top of their lungs because they're just terrified of what's going to happen if their name gets read out. I think it's a list of alleged traitors or people engaging in conspiracy and those people get taken outside and everyone's terrified because they know what's going to happen to them. Slavot-Jizek said to me that there was an old joke about like a person who criticizes Stalin and another person who says, hey, you can't criticize Stalin and it's the second person who gets sent to the gulag first because the most important thing is that sort of at least pretense of ideological certainty. And of course those people were killed.

And it does pose a stark contrast to the Donald Trump saying, I hope you're all vaccinated and getting booed by the Alabama. So I understand, you know, that's not downplay people's political fears or anything. But when we're talking about cult leadership, the kind that you're describing, it is a different level of worship and personality and authority and certainty, I think. And I think that is an important note to say, and perhaps a good one to end on too. So, Rick Allen Ross, the book is, as you mentioned earlier, cults inside out. It will be linked in the description, of course.

Some of the stuff we've been talking about, you go into more detail, more examples. Fascinating. Like, really, really strange and wacky stuff going on in the history of cults, beyond the already wacky and strange stuff that people are famously familiar with. So I would really recommend anybody who's interested to go and check it out. But thanks to taking the time. It's been an interesting one. A bit sort of different to the stuff I usually talk about,

and I hope people have found it interesting. I certainly have. All right. Well, let me know when it's up, and I'll link to it. Cool.