Your Undivided Attention - How To Free Our Minds — with Cult Deprogramming Expert Dr. Steven Hassan

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

How would you know if you were in a cult? If not a cult, then at least under undue influence?The truth is: we're all under some form of undue influence. The question is: to what degree and to what extent we’re aware of this influence — which is exacerbated by social media. In an era of likes, followers, and echo chambers, how can we become aware of undue influence and gain sovereignty over our minds?Our guest this week is Dr. Steven Hassan, an expert on undue influence, brainwashing, and unethical hypnosis. He’s the founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center — a coaching, consulting, and training organization dedicated to helping people freely consider how they want to live their lives. Dr. Hassan was himself a member of a cult: the Unification Church (also known as the Moonies), which was developed in Korea in the 1950's. Since leaving the Moonies, Dr. Hassan has helped thousands of individuals and families recover from undue influence.RECOMMENDED MEDIA Freedom of Mind website: The website for Dr. Hassan’s Freedom of Mind Resource Center, which includes resources such as his Influence Continuum, BITE model of authoritarian control, and Strategic Interactive Approach for alleviating people of undue influenceThe Influence Continuum with Dr. Steven Hassan: Dr. Hassan’s podcast exploring how mind-control works, and how to protect yourself from its grips Reckonings: A podcast that told the stories of people who’ve transcended extremism, expanded their worldviews, and made other kinds of transformative change. Start with episode 17 featuring a former paid climate skeptic, or episode 18 featuring the former protégé of Fox News chairman Roger AilesRECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES Can Your Reality Turn on a Word? Guest: Anthony Jacquin: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/34-can-your-reality-turn-on-a-wordThe World According to Q. Guest: Travis View: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/21-the-world-according-to-qThe Cure for Hate. Guest: Tony McAleer: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/11-the-cure-for-hateYour Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_

How would you know if you were in a cult? Okay, well, if not in a cult, at least under some form of undue influence. I mean, there you are, and you know that you're right, you believe you're thinking freely. Your social network shows everyone's agreeing with you. So again, how would you know if you were under undue influence? And how could we regain sovereignty over our minds? I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Azaraskin.

And this is your undivided attention, the podcast from the Center for Humane Technology. Our guest today is Dr. Stephen Hassan, an expert in undue influence, brainwashing, and unethical hypnosis. Dr. Hassan is the founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a coaching, consulting, and training organization dedicated to helping people think clearly and freely consider how they want to live their lives. Dr. Hassan himself was a member of a cult. For over two years, he was part of the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies, which was developed in the 1950s in Korea by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who considered himself the Second Coming of Christ.

Since leaving the Moonies, Dr. Hassan has helped thousands of individuals and families recover from undue influence. Dr. Stephen Hassan, welcome to your undivided attention. Thank you, Tristan. And Azza, it's a real honor to be with you today. Well, you know, it's a real honor for us, too, because back when we launched this podcast, Your Undivided Attention in June 2019, we actually promised our listeners that we would be talking to cult deprogramming experts, and we failed to deliver on that promise until today, two and a half years approximately later. And, you know, the reason actually that this was always in our agenda to talk about cult deep programming is that there's so many dynamics of the way that social media works that mirror some of the, you know, social manipulative processes that occur in cults and many listeners actually may not know this

and Steve I don't know if you knew this but I actually spent about three years kind of touring different cults from the outside going to large group awareness trainings going into different groups I had many friends in the pay area who were part of and participating in various new age cults as I would hear of my stories when I would talk about these various groups I would join and I think see the thing I'm so excited to get into with you is that people really underestimate the degree to which psychological influence can work in an invisible way, regardless of intelligence, regardless of Ph.D. level.

In fact, there's many of the ways that social media kind of acts like a cult factory. It identifies these buckets of human behavior that are similar. You know, the people who are clicking on flat earth videos or the people who are clicking on various political tribe videos and then pulling you deeper and deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. And so what we're really excited to just speak with you about today is the dynamics of how cults work,

and then we'll get hopefully all the way into a conversation about the techniques of cult deprogramming, because I think if there's any discipline that is most needed right now to reverse our way out of the mind warp of the last 10 years of psychological derangement, it's the discipline of cult deprogramming.

So we're just incredibly excited to talk to you today about everything you've got to offer. Thank you. And ultimately, I believe if you're an adult, you should be in control of your own mind and not turning over your power, getting rid of your conscience, your critical thinking, and having blind faith,

and having certainty that your doctrine is the truth with a capital T, no matter what it is. Yeah, and maybe just to mark for listeners that I think that there are cults on all sides of the different political aisles, obviously to different degrees, and people are going to argue about that. But I want to mark that explicitly

because I think one of the actual challenges of cult deep programming is the belief that those who are being accused of being in a cult get very defensive, right? And just to name that no matter which group you might be a part of or which set of beliefs we might touch upon, try to come to this conversation, if you're a listener, with an open mind, really just studying what are the processes that have us go more and more extreme into a set of self-reinforcing beliefs and groups,

and what would it take to kind of liberate us? So maybe just to warm our listeners up for a bit to understand your personal story and how you got recruited into the Mooneys? Who were you back then? And what were the steps along the way that got you recruited? I know this is sort of setting the table for listeners. My story is not that unusual, actually. I was victimized by a honey trap. So I grew up in a very middle, middle class Jewish household and flushing queens.

I was not a joiner. I was introverted. I wrote poetry in short stories. That was my major in college. I worked as a banquet waiter at a holiday inn in Hempstead while I was going to college to make my money. And I was in the last draft lottery, go to the Vietnam War. So I was very disillusioned with what I had been taught growing up about fighting communists. And when I realized this was an unjust war and that the government has been lying to us, I was like, I'm just not interested in wanting to make the world a better place. My girlfriend had dumped me abruptly over the Christmas break at college. I was an upper junior.

I was blue starting the new semester. I was sitting in the cafeteria of Queens College. And three very attractive women asked if they could share my table with me and were flirting with me. And I was like, wow, sure, here, sit on down. and I had a whole pile of college textbooks that I had purchased for the next semester. I think I had high diggers being in time and a book on the Upanishads and a whole bunch of other philosophy course that I was taking. And they just asked me a billion questions, and I was so happy to tell them all about me.

And I'd want to mark this part of my story, if I may, for your listeners, because back in the 70s, and I want to add, this was February of 1974, the whole idea of cults was not mainstream at all. But back then, you needed to elicit information about people directly from them. So tell me about your family. What does your father do? Oh, he has a hardware store that you took over from his father. What does your mother do? Oh, she teaches art for eighth grade. Do you have siblings? Yes, I have two older sisters. So, Well, they elicited everything about who I was and what was important to me. These days, all of this data is now being collected online and is being used by agents,

you know, bad agents, good agents, whatever, to sell us products or to recruit us into cults. And if I may take one more minute, when I was a Mooney recruiter, and that's part of the story, as they recruited me into a front group through deception. But when I was a Mooney recruiter, I was told to sort people into thinkers, feelers, doers, or believers. And the idea was, like, what's their lead thing? Like, if someone says, you know, I'm a strong Christian, I pray every day,

there was going to be a different recruitment scenario developed for that person versus someone who's like, I'm an atheist, but I want to fix the world and help starving children. different angle but back to my cult story if I may so they asked me all this information then they were like we would love to get to know you better you're so special and you're so wonderful what's known as love bombing which online is called swarming I believe they were just love bombing me up and I was lapping it up because wow attention from three attractive women and I do remember asking them, are you students? Yes. Are you part of a religious group? No. Right? And they looked me straight in

the eye. And that's another thing I want to share with your listeners. My dad, who is a hardware store owner in Ozone Park, was like, Steve, you can always tell. If someone's shady, they won't look you straight in the eyes. Like, that was how I was inoculated by my dad. Right. People in cults are actually very good at actually looking you directly in the eye persuasively. And they were very sincere, and I learned. And later, as I was helping people get out of Scientology, I learned they were actually drilling people to stare people in the eyes and not blank, et cetera. Well, actually, just to mark a few things, because I think it's nice to interactively kind

of go back and forth and name some of the features of what pulled you in. Because the first thing I heard you say is that the Vietnam War is happening. And there's a disenchantment with government is part of that which proceeded going into something. Because I think there's some similar processes now, right? There's mass disenchantment with, you know, a lot of the systems that have run our society. That's one thing I heard you say. Another thing I heard you say is the affirmation and love bombing from, and lots of attention from attractive women. And, you know, just to make this concrete for listeners with social media, you know, if I'm designing a social media product, the first thing I want to do when you enter is say, boom, you're so special.

interests are really special to us. We're going to give you all of these things. In fact, we're going to show you the most attractive people on here when you first opened that TikTok app. We're going to show you the most attractive, either men or women, just to sort of make some parallels for listeners. Then I'd love for you to keep going. Yeah, attractiveness is important, but identification is even more important that you're meeting people who are like you or people that you can really relate with. And so as a recruiter, if we knew someone was like, like a disaffected Catholic from the Bronx, and we had a disaffected Catholic from the Bronx,

we would make sure to introduce them to each other. We know just from the Wall Street Journal did a great video about the TikTok algorithm that just, you know, when you swipe a couple things, and it actually tests like, hey, do, is it the religious videos that work with you? Is it the dancer videos? Is it the soft porn videos for the, you know?

And it figures out which of these things work. And so just that matching Steve that you're talking about, of making sure that we have people who look like me because the creature brain inside of us, I'm taking my neuro-linguistic programming knowledge out here, the creature brain is saying, am I with like kind? Am I with people who look like me?

And that's what creates that trust. What exactly is a cult? How do you define like undue influence? What differentiates like brainwashing versus persuasion versus mind control versus influence? Because I could imagine a question arising in our listener's mind, which is, okay, how is this not all relative? How is it not that there's a cult of the mainstream

and then each one of these cult is like a different kind of right belief in their own right? How do you even know what a cult is? And I think if we can go right to the heart of that question that'll help the rest of this conversation land much more strongly. Yeah, so

I would like to start I have what's called an influence continuum graphic, which is on my freedom of mind.com site. And it basically talks about ethical influence on one end of the continuum, the unethical influence. And so for me, there are cults that are on the ethical end and authoritarian cults that are on the unethical end. So when people say,

ethical cults, what are you talking about? So for me, there are some behavioral criteria that helps flesh that out and people can self-assess. And I refer to the four overlapping components as control of behavior, control of information, control of thoughts, and control of emotions. I refer to as the bite model of authoritarian control. And the more a group or person controls your behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions to make you over in their image or to have a pseudo-identity that's obedient and dependent, that's my definition of an authoritarian cult versus an ethical cult where you know what you're getting involved with. You have informed consent. You're encouraged to read whatever you want to

read, talk to critics, talk to former members, challenge authority. And you're free to leave without phobias that have been put in your mind that you're going to get hit by a car or get cancer or be possessed by demons or go to hell or whatever and so by having a frame based on human rights based on you know i'm an adult these women who said they weren't part of a religious cult but they were going back to the center bowing to an altar with moon and his wife's picture on it reciting a pledge to die for the moonies cult that was a lie these are the warning flags because if something's legit, it will stand up to scrutiny. I say it over and over.

The burden is on them to prove that they have this great thing, not on us to disprove it. I actually would like to double-click on each of those because, okay, we're starting to define cults as the ability to influence behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. And if you're saying, Steve, that those are the critical ingredients, could you give some specific examples? and if you could maybe to do it through stories

that actually happened in the Mooneys as you were getting recruited because I think that would help ground people in what it means to be tapping into those things. Just to say one last thing, I think that if we can make a match to how social media is enabling the exact same manipulation on those four different axes

that you're talking about, to even a more precise degree than you experienced or anyone experiences in a cult, I think we're starting to make the case that there is a mirroring and a matching and an even extension of, a supercharging of, those capacities. Supercharging is absolutely the right word. And as your work has so ably demonstrated,

we're needing to use ethics and wisdom to try to get a handle on this technology because bad actors can use it for nefarious purposes and exploit people. So let's go back to the Mooney. So these women were flirting. They invited me over to meet their friends. I had a free dinner and I was like okay this is interesting there are people from all over the world that were sitting on the floor having you know eating without paper plates and uh okay nothing here for me thanks have a nice time and I get my shoes on I go out it was snowing to my car and I don't know a dozen people follow me out without jackets or shoes and surround my car and I'm like in a confused state which is a technique of mind control right if

you want to mind control someone confuse them and how do you confuse people you do incongruent behaviors that are not normal scripts for how humans interact with each other so it makes the normal person curious like what is going on I was surrounded and people were like we like you so much You have to promise to come back tomorrow. We want to get to know you better. And I'm like, it's cold. Go inside. Like, leave me alone.

And they're like, no, we're not going to leave until you promise to come back. I'm serious. They actually did this. They actually made you promise to come back. And I, you know, I looked back with 2020 hindsight. But they were so sincere and they were so nice. And there was someone from Harvard. There was someone from Princeton.

there. These were not dummies. These are interesting people, but I was an introvert. I was not into groups of any kind. But anyway, I promised to come back. And I'm a man on my word. And that came back to haunt me again, because after the second night, they started with, we're going away this weekend. We're going to have a great time. We need you to come. And I'm like, I'm a banquet waiter. I work on the weekends. I've never had a weekend off. for two years, please stop asking me to come. I work. And they kept bugging me. And I said, okay, if I don't have to work some weekend, I'll go. And wouldn't you know, two days later, I call up my boss, okay, when do you need me? He said, you won't believe it, but the wedding

was called off. Take the weekend off. So this is a very important point I want to share with your listeners because it turns out a lot of people get recruited into authoritarian cults because of some type of coincidence that just happens to mesh with what's happening in your life. And it's an misattribution of causality. And it was like, in my back of my head, this was weird. I promised to go. I didn't want to go. My boss gave me. me the weekend off but I gave my word I gave my word so I'm going to go so there's a commitment device there's almost a superstitious like whoa there's a coincidence here something's matching something else there's a perfect timing what they call chiros yes of you know the exact match of when something

comes at the time that you might yes and I I hear this all the time with people that I've helped where they were like I was praying that morning for God to show me what I should do with my life and knock, knock, the Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, knocked on my door. So, of course, I let them in. And social media can play on that as well to talk about just to make a mirror for our listeners in terms of the re-engagement paradigm. There you are. You're leaving your first night of dinner and you're like, okay, I'm done with this.

But then they actually, like, love bomb you and kind of swarm you right as you're leaving. So now notice that let's say you're on Facebook or Twitter and you started your account and you only engaged a few times with a couple tweets and then you stop using it. Well, what do they do? do they just sit there and say, well, it was kind of nice to have Steve as a Twitter user for a day. We're just going to let him go. No, they get really aggressive. They start actually pounding you with, here's all this content you're going to miss.

Here are these people that look like you. Oh, don't go. They'll literally use language with exclamation points saying, we're really sorry to miss you. We want you to come back. They use that kind of language. And it's not Facebook saying that they put that in the coming from your friends. They'll show you faces of your friends that say these people miss you, come back. Yeah, so this is you're talking specifically about if I go into Facebook and say I want to delete my account, as you go through that flow and it says, are you sure you want to delete your account? It'll put up the photos of five of the people you've clicked on the most. It calculates which faces of which friends can I put on this screen that are most likely to dissuade you from deleting your Facebook account. And they can calculate exactly which people. It would be like when Steve is walking out to his car, which of these five people should we send to surround him? Should we send the Harvard people? Did you respond to them? Did you respond to appeals to authority?

and that credibility of the Harvard people. Did he respond to those attractive girls? And so you can play with it, right? But now social media is doing that to a level of precision and degree that is totally different. To answer your question about B-I-T-E, behavior, information, thought, and emotional control, I want to first just say I got this idea from Leon Festinger,

who is a psychologist who wrote a book, Prophecy Fail in the 50s, and he talked about thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and how humans want congruity or consistency amongst these three elements of our lives. We don't like dissonance, so we will start reformulating things. So if we are asked to do an extreme behavior, we'll rationalize it in order to feel good about it.

So for me, the misattribution effect, and maybe I'm meant to go for this weekend, And now I'm, I drive over to the Mooney House. They want me to go in their van. Big mistake should have had my own car. But way before cell phones were invented, right? Now I'm going to a place. I have no idea what the destination is.

I haven't told my family or anyone, you know, where I am, other than I'm going off with some friends. Being driven into a multi-million dollar estate in Tarrytown, and the guy at the front of the van says, oh, this weekend we're having a joint workshop with the Unification Church, to which I said, wait a minute, no one told me about a workshop,

and what's this thing about a church? I'm Jewish. And then they did the classic cult, mind control technique of turning it around on the person that it's their fault. What's the matter, Steve? Are you close-minded? Do you have an issue with Christians?

all of a sudden now Steve's defensive and I'm confused because I thought I was going to have fun and meet friends and have a great time for the weekend and now all of a sudden it's a religious workshop and they told me it wasn't religious. I said I want to leave. Drive me back.

So actually I think this is important to double-click on as well which is how our hesitations actually get weaponized as examples of our lack of belief of the very thing that the colt wants you to do. You know, an example is in a Tony Robbins workshop. One of the experiences is you walk over these burning hot coals. And that's meant to show yourself that you are capable of something impossible. You know, there you are.

You're afraid of doing something as dangerous as that. And there you see these huge flames. I mean, I actually did do it. And I think it was in Chicago. I did a workshop with Tony Robbins. And I was actually really afraid of doing it, right? I mean, people, there are stories that people who have burned their their feet walking on these burning hot coals.

But of course, people do it thousands and thousands of times over, and there is a way in which it works, and it feels impossible. But if you're, if you hesitate, it's used as kind of a, well, isn't this how you're hesitating and not showing up bravely for your life? What I hope we're going to be doing for listeners is showing how, whether we're talking about Tony Robbins or Landmark or Est or the Mooney's or whatever, I mean, they exist in very different parts of the continuum or coaching or actual religions or political tribes. There's actually, there's these features of your hesitation as examples of something that you

need to fix about yourself. The power of certainty, you know, most people, until they've met a cult recruiter, have never experienced someone so confident and so certain that they know what reality is and what's going on and what's best for you. And the average person has, uncertainty and so for me whenever someone comes into my life who's super certain i have warning warning going off in my head because i want people who aren't that certain and are willing to change their mind and detach their ego from their beliefs because i'm willing to change my beliefs if there's evidence that's convincing so when we criticize or name any groups here right there's going to be people who are going to be offended, you know, say people who are, or believe

there are various religions, or you say Magistan or Wokistan. Everyone believes that they have the way, the one truth. And everyone believes that the other side, that we're awake, but it's the rest of the world that's not awake. You know, I saw that at the conservative political action conference, CPAC, Ted Cruz was speaking, and behind him was a big poster that said, awake, not woke. So they're saying that we're the awake ones, because woke is the bad thing. But then the woke people on the left believe that they're the ones who are actually. actually awake to the actual history and the roots of oppression that we need to actually correct and fix. And then even the matrix is used on both sides, right? And the right has kind

of currently co-opted the phrase red-pilling in the film, The Social Dilemma. I said, how do you wake up from the matrix when you don't know you're in the matrix? Everyone believes that the other side is in the matrix. If you're a pro-vaccine, you're in a cult of not questioning whether the vaccine is actually safe. But if you're anti-vaccine, the people who are pro-vaccines say you're in a cult of questioning the validity of something that's saving lives. So everyone is very certain. And that's just a ground for listeners, the stakes of this conversation is why it's so important. If we don't have ways of waking up from the certainty, one of the basic tools that you need of just recognizing, how would I know if I was wrong? If I can't even

send my mind there, that's probably proof that I'm captured by something. Yeah, no, you're bringing up a really and critically important point because ultimately, the cure to blind faith is perspective. And developmentally, if you can't go a level up and look at both sides and the evidence for both sides and apply, how did I arrive at this information, you're going to be very vulnerable to being sucked into one side or the other and come back to what are my values, what are my beliefs, and how do I want to live my life? Can I look in the mirror at night feel good about myself? So in my case, you know, I wanted to leave right away. They said we're not

going back till the morning, just stay the night, and I wanted to leave. But what I should have done is walk out to the street and try to hitchhike in the dark and in the snow. But I didn't feel like it was a threatening, dangerous environment. I just didn't want to be there because they weren't honest with me, et cetera. And I didn't sleep. And you were asking me about behavior control things. One of the universals is sleep deprivation. Yeah, say more about that. Why is sleep deprivation so powerful and a part of so many cults? So sleep is one of those things that's been so researched by the military, by NASA. It's so central. And I'll say, Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep is a really great book, important book.

We need seven to nine hours of sleep, the average person. And if you're sleeping like I was in the Mooney's three to four hours a night, seven days a week for two and a half years. And that was suggested by them. They want you to sleep only three to four hours a night, right? Yeah, they literally said you should be like father, meaning Sun Myung Moon, who's now deceased, his wife, is Haq Jahan is running the cult. Anyway, they were like, Father only sleeps three to four hours a night

because the world needs saving. You know, the end times are here. And I was being told, like, you know, God has summoned me to save the planet. We're going to save the world. There will be peace on earth. No conflicts, no wars, no poverty. Everyone would be brothers and sisters.

That was the fantasy that Moonies are given. of why they're working so hard, and it's replicated a billion times by a billion other cults. But to answer your question, what happens when you're not sleeping properly is your frontal cortex doesn't function properly. And a lot of your limbic system, your emotional amygdala, etc., is running the show instead of you being able to think clearly. And if I may jump ahead of my story for one second on the theme of sleep deprivation. Two and a half years into the group, I was elevated given high position. I was fasting for Nixon on the Capitol stairs because Moon said God wanted him to be president despite Watergate. Like I did these right-wing fascist stuff that was so opposite who I really was.

But how I wound up getting to the point where I could get out of the cult was my leader had told me I was running a fundraising team in Baltimore, Maryland. He wanted everyone on my team to make a minimum of $100 a night, otherwise they couldn't sleep. And I was trained as a good leader. If your members don't sleep, you shouldn't sleep. And so I was up for three days when I'm driving and fall asleep at the wheel of a van on the Baltimore Beltway

and drove into the back of a tractor trailer truck at 80 miles an hour. And it took the emergency technology, and fire department and police, like a half an hour to rescue me out of the wreckage because they thought it might blow up. So, I mean, I almost died, and, like, I was trapped in this van. They thought it was going to blow up. I was in more pain than I had ever felt in my life. But the important thing that I want to say is that I survived,

and I was in a hospital away from the cult for two weeks. I slept. I slept, and they did give me some cassette tapes of some speeches of Moon, but after listening to each one a couple of times, I had no influences from cult members. So it was in that context that I called my sister, who I was always very close with, my sister, Thea, who had never said I was in a cult or I was brainwashed.

My older sister, Steph, did to my parents. were satanic and I was under orders not never to tell them where I was or to talk to them. You were told they were satanic by the moonies, right? They convinced you that your own family was Satanic. By the moonies. Exactly. They need to isolate you from the people who have the power to influence you back to reality is what it was. And anyway, I called my sister and she said, oh, you have a nephew, you haven't met yet. I want him to know his uncle Stevie. Come home and visit. I'm like, I have this cast on my leg from my toes to my groin. She's like, I'll take care of you.

And I said, don't tell the parents, and I can arrange it because I'm a leader. And thank God, she told my parents, and they had lined up some ex-moonies. And I got to my sister's house, and what do you know? That crutches got taken away. And all these ex-moonies started coming into my sister's living room. And I was like, Satan. Get away, Satan. You know, and I was prepared to die or kill on command as I had been trained.

And I almost snapped my father's neck on the Long Island Expressway when they needed to move me from my sister's house. I snapped into my programming, which was kill your father because it's better to die than lose your connection to father and God and salvation. fortunately I didn't do it because I was so sure I was the ideal member I was a fanatic and I didn't think they could break me we also I think in your book you mentioned because previously you were talking about

the way out of blind faith is multiple perspectives that there's something your father said right then that sort of helped you for the first time you said in months start to see through his eyes So I'm curious you take there before we get into the full story of what are the elements of stepping away from undue influence. Sure.

I was sitting on the back seat of the car. My father was turned around from the driver's seat. And he looked me in the eye and he started to cry. And I saw my father cry once before when my grandmother died. And he said, how would you feel if it was your son? your only son, who met a group of people, got into a controversial group, dropped out of college, quit his job, and disappeared. How would you feel, Steve? And the force of his tears made me step out of my Mooney identity into the old Steve, who was like, my dad really loves me. He's really suffering.

I know I have the truth, I know I'm following God, but he's really worried about me. So I said to him, I'd probably be doing what you're doing now, even though I was convinced he was brainwashed by the communist media against the group. And I said, I'd probably be doing what you're doing now. What do you want from me? He said, we just want you to listen for the next few days. And if you want to go back, I'll drive you there myself. But at least your mother and I will be able to sleep at night.

we did the responsible thing. So what happened was then, it was a challenge, a test, and I wanted to prove that I wasn't brainwashed and I wasn't an occult. So I thought, I'm useless to the group anyway because of my physical condition. I'll agree. And I agreed. And that was critical to the success of the intervention because I wasn't just reacting against anymore. And the former members, one of whom I had recruited into the cult and was my

spiritual daughter, air quotes, over time as they were educating me about what is brainwashing, what is mind control, telling me stories of their own experiences. And I was doing thought stopping, which is a thought control technique. I was trained to chant or pray or sing if a doubt came into my head to center myself. So while they're trying to deprogram you or, you know, challenge your views, the cult actually creates an immune system in your mind to be able to resist anything that's like a kind of counterattack. Yeah.

You're just jamming your mind with other thoughts you can't think. Yes, but I want to add a very important variable that we haven't talked about yet, which is the dual identity or the dissociative model that I'm operating from because there was the old Steve Hassan who wrote poetry and liked women, and then there was the right-wing fascist Steve who thought women were objects and needed to take over the world. And it was the real me that wanted out, but was trapped by the cult program techniques. Colt's program phobias in people's minds so that the irrational fear hijacks your ability to reality. test. I was afraid of my own mind. I was afraid every doubt was some invisible evil spirit trying

to invade me. Right. And so you've got phobias that are consciously used to make deprogramming from the cult harder. You've got reinforced relationships and being embedded constantly in this environment that makes it harder to leave. So if we just reground the stakes, you know, why are we having this conversation for just reground listeners? We're in a really tense moment. It feels like the U.S. could domestically be heading towards escalating conflict. Some might say closer and closer to civil war, not in the ways that I think the 1800s would recognize. But given those stakes and that part of the thing that would drive us towards that kind of domestic conflict, right, is the certainty with which each different cult coming out

of the cult factory of the last 10 years of social media driving us down these more extreme rabbit holes on every side with every niche belief, you know, micro-targeted to us. And I think people, listeners of this podcast probably have family members who they can think about, who, you know, they've kind of lost because they've gone down some rabbit hole. They find it very hard to talk to them. The real sort of trillion-dollar question, because it's essential for being able to back away from the prospect of a domestic conflict, civil war type scenario, is how do we get out of this? And you have something called the strategic interactive approach. I'd love for you to talk about your intuition right now

in this moment, feeling into those stakes. What do you think is needed to step away from that and to have each of us kind of deprogram ourselves and each other? Yeah, so how would anyone know or how would I know if I was brainwashed or mind controlled or subjected to undue influence? I found that there is a process of reality testing that actually works for people. And the first step is really just detaching from the constant reinforcing influences. And these days, it's like smartphones and notifications and screens. Like, just take a time out, take a week off and do the kinds of things you used to love to do that really reflect the real you, whether it's playing with your dog or being in nature or listening to music or dancing or whatever.

So just kind of like reconnect with yourself and detach from the constant bombardment of information that's coming at you. Secondly, learn about the bite model of authoritarian control, which is my model of looking at control of behavior. information, thoughts, and emotions in the context of my influence continuum from ethical to unethical, the more of these that you can tick off, the more authoritarian your situation is. The next step is deliberately seek out critics and former members and hear why they left or why they're critical of the group and look at their facts and take the position that if what you're in is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny, then the next step is go back in your mind before you got recruited. What did you think you were getting into? And think about the

model of mind control. Think about the information you heard. And if you were lied to, if you have lack of informed consent, this is a huge red flag. But go through your experiences. Reflect honestly and then answer the question, if I knew then what I know now, would I have ever gotten involved? And if the answer is no, time to leave. And I think another very important point that we haven't mentioned yet is that it's easier to see it in another group than the one you're in. But it was ultimately the next day, the last day, when they handed me one of Moon's speeches to congressmen and senators and said, what do you think of this? And I was reading it, and in the context of the whole experience,

Moon was lying to the congressman and senators how much he loves America and respects Americans. When I heard him personally say how pathetic Americans were a hundred or more times, and I had the first conscious doubt where I said, he's a liar. And then I started thinking, wait a minute, this whole thing is built on the the idea he's the Messiah, the greatest man in human history who's going to save the planet, if he's a liar and he's not, the whole thing falls apart. And then I cried for three hours. So we're going to take a quick interlude here.

Tristan and I are going to talk about something I think is pretty extraordinary. And that is, there are already in law definitions of what undue influence is. So let me lay out the Brandel Heisler-Stegler model of undue influence, which is based on domestic violence relationships, stalking, and sexual assault. One, the victim is kept unaware. Two, the victim is isolated from others and information. Three, the influencer tries to create fear. The influencer preys on vulnerabilities.

The influencer creates dependencies. The influencer makes the victim lose faith in their own beliefs. The influencer induces shame and secrecy. And finally, the influencer performs intermittent acts of kindness. I just want you to stop and think about how this applies in the world of social media. The user was kept unaware, and the user is isolated from others and given silent information. Are platforms creating the incentives for fear, for preying on human vulnerabilities, for creating dependencies? And finally, do we all get dosed in likes and followers as kinds of intermittent acts of kindness?

Well, it's interesting to read that this is a model that's currently taught by the National College of district attorneys and the National District Attorney's Association for use in criminal prosecutions. And I think the thing, Aza, that you were pointing out to me in this model is that it's really helpful when we already have an existing legal framework for something that

we want to say, you know, we have to draw a line in the sand. And one of the challenges of the whole field of persuasive technology, manipulation, the last 10 years, I mean, I can't tell you how many conversations people always say, well, what's the line between persuasion, manipulation, coercion? And so what's so helpful about this model is we can say, okay, maybe we actually have legal precedent for the fact that this is an undue influence environment.

We can apply this undue influence model for what's wrong with today's technology. So over 45 years, what I've evolved too, and especially because the Internet changed the whole ballgame, right? What I've come up with is that the people who have the most influence are the family members and friends of the person. And in the case of what's happening in this country, so many people have blocked or muted or cut off contact with their loved ones who are involved with a authoritarian cultish belief system because they try to talk them out of it rationally. They try to persuade them and it dug deeper in, which is what happens. So my whole coaching is how to help people understand effective ways to interact with their loved one. And the single most powerful, important technique is asking a good question respectfully and waiting for an answer and following up. What's an example of that?

Here's a hypothetical I've used in actual cases. So I'm talking to a member of a cult and I give them a what-eat. What if? What if your leader is on stage, you're sitting there, and your leader says, hey, listen, everybody, I need to apologize. I've been seeing a therapist. I'm on medication, and I realize I'm not the Messiah, and you need to go back and resume your life. Would you believe them? A person says, no, he would never do that, or she would never say that. And then I said, What would you do if they did? And then you just wait. Because sometimes you even see illusory smoke coming out of their ears.

Because now the thing about someone in a mind-control state, they can't imagine leaving and being happy and fulfilled. That's the cure to the phobia. Phobia indoctrination makes you generate only negative fearful scenarios in your mind but thinking about possibilities and a future and that's why former members are also so powerful i'm happy i'm out of the moonies i've traveled the world i've been married had a kid go scuba diving yay that's a contradiction in the indoctrination because i'm supposed to be a drug

addict who you know goes to prostitutes and you know is selfish so i suppose this is actually another technique which is causing somebody to, like, imagine to make real in their mind something which they couldn't before. 100%. So the imagination is what helps us be creative and evolve, but it can be used against us in a weaponized way by basically bad actors who are authoritarians who deliberately want to stir conflict. Now, what needs to happen on a meta scale, and we need high-tech wisdom and technology to figure out how to do this, and I'll add that there are millions of former cult members like me that are walking around but are stigmatized not to share their stories. We need to have a high-tech platform that can help people to reality test in a non-threatening way where they're empowered. But we also need to destigmatize the whole issue of a mind control cult.

You mentioned many, many things to dig into here. But one of them is the power of former members, the stories of formers. In fact, Stephanie Lepar, executive producer of this podcast, had a podcast called Reckonings. That was all about people having a reckoning with their former worldview and how powerful it is to hear and spread those stories. Now, if we actually apply this in a solutions mindset to the way technology designed, Let's imagine that Facebook could take all the people that it knew were formers of every group.

So wouldn't it be interesting if you're inside of Magistan to see, well, who are all the people who left that world? If you were inside of the Moonies to see all the people who left the Mooneyland, if you were someone who was really extreme far-left Antifa and who left Antifa or something like that. And then you could actually imagine news feeds that are designed to rank those voices higher. That would be almost a different kind of pro-liberation version of social media because you're trying to live. liberate people from whatever it was was the previous developmental stage that they were at, the things that had captured them, and making it easier to find that information, which now it's the opposite. Right now, the current incentive is to show you more of the extreme stuff

within the echo chambers and extreme groups that you're already a part of. And the good news with social media is there are lots of former members to network with. I'm involved with a group of former members. We're doing a project called I Got Out, hashtag I Got Out. to try to destigmatize the fact that, hey, good people, intelligent people, can be lied to, their minds can get hacked, and they can get sucked into an authoritarian situation, and there's life after cult. I wonder what is the one action our listeners can take?

Well, I would ask everybody to consider, do they believe that their mind is unmalleable? to really think that you've never believed a lie or were tricked to buy something that you didn't need or want or fall in love with someone who is a pathological liar or narcissist? I mean, reflect honestly over your life. I would ask people to consider

are they afraid of making a change in their life? And if so, what's the worst fear that people will say, I told you so, Steve, I told you it was a cult, and that's what I got when I left, and I'm like, I wish I had listened to you, I'm so sorry, right? But the thing is, is, so watch, you know, everybody's human, no one's perfect, so get over your fear, ask yourself, is this a rational fear? Will there actually be danger, or will it be, is this just an irrational fear that will hurt my ego or that, you know, somebody might try to shame me.

But if you understand mind control and how ubiquitous it is and how millions and millions of people have been co-opted, you know, join the human race. Educate yourself. Stephen, I feel like we have barely even begun to scout the territory of where these conversations can go. It's incredibly important work, increasingly important. And I just really thank you for coming on to your undivided attention.

It's been an honor, and I look forward to being together again. Dr. Stephen Hassan is an author, educator, and mental health counselor specializing in destructive cults. He holds two master's degrees and a PhD with a dissertation that did the first quantitative study on a tool to evaluate undue influence in the law. His models have been used in the fields of labor and sex trafficking, as well as counter-extremism. Dr. Hassan's organization, the Freedom of Mind Resource Center,

provides resources and training to help individuals think freely and recover from undue influence. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization working to catalyze a humane future. Our executive producer is Stephanie Lep. Our senior producer is Julia Scott, mixing on this episode by Jeff Sudakin. Original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday, and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology.

technology team for making this podcast possible. You can find show notes, transcripts, and much more at humanetech.com. A very special thanks to our generous lead supporters, including the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Evolve Foundation, among many others. And if you've made it all the way here, let me give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.