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What happens when billionaires decide that democracy is an obstacle to the future they want to build? Journalist Gil Duran argues that this question helps explain the alliance between powerful Silicon Valley figures and Donald Trump—and the ideas connecting Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and JD Vance. In our conversation on Cults, Culture, & Coercion, we discussed his book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. His central warning is that some influential tech leaders want to replace democratic accountability with forms of corporate power. Their ambitions reach beyond lower taxes and fewer regulations to the question of who should govern. Three themes run through the interview: proposals for societies governed by founders and corporations; the money and relationships carrying these ideas into politics; and beliefs that cast a small group of tech visionaries as the people destined to determine humanity’s future. Gil argues that understanding the cultic dimensions of these beliefs is essential to understanding their appeal and their danger. Peter Thiel’s own words make the stakes clear. In his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian, he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He explored technological routes beyond conventional politics, including cyberspace, outer space, and settlements at sea. Democracy gives the public a say in decisions that affect everyone. It allows citizens to impose limits on powerful people and institutions. Thiel’s statement raises a basic question: whose freedom is protected when democratic participation becomes the obstacle? Gil traces an important intellectual influence to The Sovereign Individual, the 1997 book by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. It envisioned an information economy in which wealthy, mobile individuals could escape many constraints imposed by territorial governments. The publisher’s description and excerpt describe governments losing economic control and facing pressure to operate on market terms.

Mara teaches at Queens College, the very place where I was recruited into the Moonies cult in 1974. She came to the study of influence through advertising and media. I came to it through my experience in a destructive cult and my work helping others understand and recover from authoritarian control. We had a great deal to talk about. On Cults, Culture, and Coercion, we discussed her book, Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. It examines how commercial interests draw on our desire for belonging, our insecurities, and our trust in other people to shape what we buy and believe. Mara spent a decade working in advertising and television before questioning what she was helping accomplish. As she told me, getting people to watch more television could not be all she was supposed to do with her life. She returned to school, studied with Neil Postman, and earned a doctorate in media ecology, which examines how communication technologies change society. She has written numerous books and teaches at my alma mater. Her background helps her explain what many of us encounter every day without fully understanding: the planning behind the pitch. A social media post may look spontaneous. A recommendation may feel like advice from a friend. A community may appear to have formed entirely around shared interests. Mara asks us to look more closely at the commercial arrangements and incentives behind those experiences. One of her most useful ideas is the “anxiety economy.” We often hear that platforms compete for our attention. Mara argues that this description leaves out a crucial part of the business model. Anxiety can keep us engaged. We scroll because we are worried, encounter more upsetting material, and keep scrolling in search of relief. Along the way, advertisers have more opportunities to reach us. The proposed relief may be another video, a purchase, a course, or a membership. The underlying message is familiar: something is wrong with your life, and someone has what you need to fix it. This is an enlightening discussion.

What happens when you tell people what you actually believe? Kate Cohen discovered that the answer can be much less frightening, and much more interesting, than you expect. For years, she participated in religious life without believing in God. Then she became a mother. Faced with children who trusted her to explain the world, she found she could no longer present something as true when she did not believe it herself. “I could not tell them something I didn’t believe was true,” she told me. “I just couldn’t do it.” That commitment to honesty runs through our conversation on Cults, Culture, and Coercion. Kate is a former Washington Post contributing columnist and the author of We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too). She now writes Scratch on Substack. We talked about raising children, questioning religious authority, defending democracy, and the ordinary acts of creativity that help us remain active participants in our own lives. We did not agree about every label or every approach to religion. That made the conversation interesting and valuable. Freedom of mind includes the ability to explore different points of view while holding the other person with respect. Too many people today think is simplistic binaries and so if another thinks differently, they might get labeled as “less than” and in the worst case, an enemy.

When someone promises you financial freedom, it is worth asking how much freedom you have to question what they are selling. Can you challenge their claims? Can you consult independent experts? Can you change your mind without being mocked, shamed, or told you are missing the opportunity of a lifetime? When celebrities like Tom Brady and Taylor Swift promote crypto- do people understand they are not experts on business and economics? Many people know Ben McKensie from The O.C., Southland, and Gotham. I wanted to speak with him about his investigation into cryptocurrency—and the patterns of influence that make its promises so compelling. Ben wrote Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with journalist Jacob Silverman. His new, independent documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, brings that investigation to the screen. I watched the film and loved it. It is funny, disturbing, and accessible, even if you have never understood what cryptocurrency actually does. Our conversation explored how financial promises can become bound up with identity—and how difficult it becomes to reconsider a belief when your money, community, and self-esteem are invested in it. Crypto is part of the Tech bros plan to usurp democracy by promoting dark money that corrupt elections! Ben testified before Congress. Fortunately, the “Clarity Act” crypto bill was not passed in the Senate due to not including ethics requirements. This was a big blow to the crypto lobby which spent more than Big Oil in the 2024 election.

These days there are too many people on social media proclaiming Trump has dementia when she says that all the facts are not available. Dr. Odenheimer is a geriatric neurologist and professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. She retired from academic medicine in 2017, keeps her medical license, and advocates for people with dementia and their caregivers. Dr. Odenheimer and I are colleagues in the Program in Psychiatry and the Law, a forensic think associated with Harvard Medical School. Like myself, she values truth telling and integrity. This commitment can get us both in conflict with others in our respective fields.She also cared for her own mother, who had dementia. We first spoke in 2022 about her fight against a false Alzheimer’s cure, in our earlier conversation⁵. This time we talked about the dementia misdiagnosis problems she has seen across her career. In this interview, we didn’t focus on Donald Trump. However, I thought it important to ask a forensic expert on dementia to come on my podcast again. This topic demands an expert knowing all the facts and doing her due diligence before tracking down a correct diagnosis. There are huge numbers of aging people who are being misdiagnosed and supplements and quack claims of treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia abound. Dementia misdiagnosis changes what happens to a person next: the medications they take, the independence they keep, and the care their family chooses.

Austrian filmmaker Friedrich “Fritz” Moser discusses his documentary, How to Build a Truth Engine. The film brings together investigative journalism, computer science, and neuroscience to examine our susceptibility to disinformation and what might help us resist it. The film was executive produced by George Clooney. Fritz initially set out to make a film about automating fact-checking. Could technology help investigators keep pace with the material circulating online? His work eventually brought him to Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury of UCLA and Prof. Tim Tangherlini of UC Berkeley and their research group developing StoryMiner, a system for analyzing narratives and the relationships within them. In the film, visualizations help make complicated connections among claims, people, and events easier to examine. The researchers also encouraged him to speak with neuroscientists. Finding errors in a story and understanding a person’s attachment to that story are different tasks. That distinction matters in my work. Someone may have built friendships, a sense of purpose, and part of their identity around a belief system. Presenting contradictory evidence can be important, but we also need to understand what reconsidering would mean for that person.Fritz’s original technology question grew into a much broader inquiry: Why are we susceptible to disinformation, and how can we become better equipped to evaluate it? This interview covers crucial insights and technologies what can help us navigate the psychological warfare that is being used on peoples around the world. A fascinating interview.

You want to help your family. Someone you trust offers an opportunity to earn extra income, work from home, and become financially independent. They introduce you to enthusiastic people who seem to share your values. Perhaps they attend your house of worship. Then you discover that making money requires recruiting other people. When the income fails to materialize, you are encouraged to buy more training, pay for coaching, and work on your lack of belief that you can become a millionaire by working part-time. By this point, questioning the opportunity may feel like questioning your friends, your faith, or your own ability to succeed. I have encountered these patterns for decades in my work with people harmed by commercial cults that do multi-level marketing (MLMs). Other varieties of commercial cults include trafficking and crypto. My guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Dr. William Keep, has spent decades examining the business practices behind them. I have known Bill for many years through our shared concern about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. A former business school dean at the College of New Jersey, he has helped attorneys and government investigators evaluate these operations. Our conversation explored how financial deception works, why it can be so difficult to recognize from inside, and what happens when businesses gain influence over the institutions meant to protect us.

Human beings want to make sense of chaos. We want explanations, patterns, and some sense that we know what is coming next. However, wanting an explanation does not necessarily mean wanting what is true and factual. That was one of the ideas that stood out to me during my conversation with Oxford professor Carissa Véliz. Her latest book Prophecy, Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future: From Ancient Oracles to AI covers the ethics of AI, privacy, and the ways power and influence shape technology and vice versa. Her work takes a much longer view of prediction by tracing the human desire to know the future from ancient oracles to algorithms. Véliz states that as human beings, we do not necessarily prefer what is true but rather what is familiar. So, when it comes to outsourcing more of our thinking to Large Language Models (LLMs) and possibly future artificial general intelligence (AGI) – defined as a hypothetical computer system that matches or exceeds human cognitive abilities across any domain – this is an important consideration. Prediction itself is not inherently bad; it's a core part of the scientific process. A hypothesis is a type of prediction itself. Within this process, we expect to observe something, but are open to it being challenged. This kind of prediction is something we carefully test, taking care that outside factors do not confuse the results and understand that it may not prove to be accurate or true. Yet, when it comes to predicting human behaviors and social dynamics, problems emerge. People are, inherently, impacted by predictions themselves, which can have an effect on future behavior, whereas something like a molecule or even the weather would not respond the same way.

Social identity, or how the portion of our identity we derive from participating in our social groups can expand our mind or limit our ability to embrace complexity and nuance. Why should this matter to someone who has never joined a cult? Because every one of us moves through families, workplaces, political communities, faiths, fandoms, and online networks. We are constantly being influenced, day in and day out, by every single person we meet. Social identity belongs at the center of a conversation about freedom of mind, connecting the intimate pressure to fit in with the public systems that reward some voices while punishing others. That tension guided my conversation with Jay Van Bavel, author of The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation and Promote Social Harmony. He is a professor of social psychology and director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at New York University. The Power of Us explores how we experience the world and what shapes our perception day to day. It asks why disagreeing with others has become so difficult, and what has driven such a rise in hostility. But understanding is a key to navigating the polarization America and other countries are experiencing.

Carlos Castaneda sold more than 10 million books to readers who thought they were buying anthropology. Real fieldwork. A real Yaqui shaman named Don Juan, teaching a real Westerner how to see. None of it happened. Castaneda made it up, and for years almost nobody in the press called him on it. I read all of those books as a teenager. Grew up on them, the way a lot of people my age did, right alongside Kung Fu reruns and books about Gurdjieff my neighbor suggested I read. So, when I heard that Ru Marshall, a nonbinary writer and artist I met years ago at a cult conference, had just published a full biography of the man, I wanted them on the podcast immediately. The book is called American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, and it took Marshall almost twenty years to write it. Here's the part most casual fans never learn. While Castaneda was cranking out sequels, he was also running an actual cult, a small group of women out of a house in Westwood that he called his witches. That story ends with human remains found in Death Valley. This is a fascinating discussion and will be thought provoking for sure.

A family court judge can reach into your family, single you out by name, and rearrange your life by dinnertime: where your child sleeps tonight, whether you're allowed to see them, whether you're even permitted to raise a concern about your spouse. Karen Winner told me that in the opening minutes of our conversation, and it's the line I keep coming back to. Winner is a journalist turned attorney and the author of Divorced from Justice: The Abuse of Women and Children by Divorce Lawyers and Judges, a book that started as a government investigation and became one of the few serious accountings of how family court actually operates in this country. Winner's path into this work began at the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, where she investigated financial abuse of women by their own divorce attorneys under commissioner Mark Green. Three women brought her their stories, including Monica Getz, the ex-wife of saxophonist Stan Getz, and Peggy Hammond, ex-wife of blues musician John Hammond Jr. Winner went on to interview roughly a hundred people inside the system, insiders included. One judge pulled her aside in an empty courtroom to whisper how the wealthy get exploited by their own lawyers. The resulting report led to New York's Statement of Client's Rights, one of the first consumer protections written specifically for divorce clients, and still law today. What struck me most was Winner's explanation of judicial discretion. Family court judges, she said, "operate without any checks and balances." They decide behind closed doors, rarely have to explain their reasoning, and face almost no outside scrutiny because the whole apparatus runs at the state level. Custody evaluations compound the problem. Courts routinely appoint psychologists to assess parents, but "there's nobody reviewing the reviewers." Their reports are often sealed from the public and, astonishingly, from the parents whose children's futures depend on them. "It's not fair," Winner said. "It's not democratic. It's Kafka." A small, favored pool of evaluators gets reused case after case, regardless of credentials, because judges default to whoever they already know. That is the same undue influence dynamic I study in destructive cults: a closed information environment where the people affected by a decision have no way to question the process that produced it. When Bandy Lee joined me on this podcast, she described family courts as functioning like "a mini cult," advancing a false narrative that protects the wrong parent while the public stays in the dark.

Ingo Michehl spent six and a half years as one of the Moonies' most productive fundraisers, selling laser-etched foil pictures out of a Ford Transit van at a twenty-fold markup, sleeping five hours a night, and believing every dollar liberated God's suffering heart. Recruited off a San Francisco street corner at nineteen while visiting America from Germany, he came out the other side with a master's in counseling psychology and a career helping people leave high-control groups, playing music, traveling and working on his dream to make a film that is educational about cult mind control and liberation. LIke Ingo, I too was deceptively recruited by this Korean cult that still has great wealth and influence, including in world politics. He exited when a Chistian shared information with him that contradicted his beliefs in the Moonie ideology of the “Divine Principle.” Ingo was liberated from a mind control cult by a stranger who cared and warmly interacted with him and encouraged him to think for himself. This episode is valuable as so many people are beginning to wake up from their own information silos.

Shincheonji recruits through what looks like an ordinary Bible study, and most people who walk through the door have no idea that it is a destructive cult. Chris Vishoot found out only after three and a half years as a devoted member. In 2018, a woman he met on a dating app invited him to what she called an innocent class on scripture. Within a year he was driving an hour each way to an unmarked building in Seattle, sleeping three to four hours a night, and reporting on Bible study students he had once sat beside as a recruit himself. Chris grew up in a Christian household that expected the world to end at any moment. He graduated from the University of Washington with two engineering degrees, and by his mid-twenties he found himself asking a familiar question: is this all there is to life? Two friends had died young, and Chris, an agnostic at the time, was searching for something bigger. That search is exactly what recruiters for the group are trained to find and use. Chris is now one of the more credible Christian ex-Shincheonji voices in the country. He runs Bible Vaccine Center, helps moderate the r/shincheonji subreddit for former members, and works with pastors whose congregations have been infiltrated by recruiters posing as ordinary Christians. In this internationally criticized group, we talked about how he got in, how he got out, and why he now helps other people leave the same group.

Anthony Forte spent more than ten years inside the World Mission Society Church of God, rising from a new recruit stopped on a Queens, NY, sidewalk to a leader who trained others to recruit the way he had been recruited. He joined at 25, during a stretch of his life when he felt behind everyone around him. He stayed through an arranged marriage. He left only after the research he did during the pandemic exposed cracks in a doctrine he had built a decade of his life on. The World Mission Society Church of God, known to researchers in this field as WMSCOG, teaches that Ahn Sahng-hong, a Korean man who died in 1985, was the second coming of Christ, and Zahng Gil-jah is “God the Mother,” a living deity based in South Korea. Members are told they must accept both figures, keep the Sabbath and Passover, tithe, and recruit new members to earn a place in heaven. Anthony rose through recruiting and teaching, eventually overseeing a team of members, before he found his way out. A year into membership, leaders promoted Anthony to team leader and turned the conversation toward marriage. His pastor pushed him toward a Korean member who would need a visa sponsor, framing marriage as a path to greater blessings. The wedding took place in October 2012; the same year the group had told members would mark the end of the world. “I only have two more months on Earth anyway,” Anthony remembered thinking. “Might as well do this big action and please God, so I have a better chance to get into heaven.” He and his wife communicated mostly by text for quite some time, since she spoke little English. “It was very difficult,” he told me, “to marry a stranger.” This is a very insightful interview and of great interest to folks who themselves with involved with a Bible group that claimed to have the “Truth.”

A person on the autism spectrum leaves a file-sharing program running overnight because they want cartoons or anime. By morning, thousands of images have downloaded onto their hard drive, some of them child sexual abuse material they never chose and, in some cases, never even opened. Months later, the FBI is at the door. A judge stares at the download count and asks how anyone could not understand what they were doing. My guest Dr. Mary Riggs Cohen, spends her working life answering that question in courtrooms across the country. She is a clinical psychologist with thirty years specializing in autism spectrum disorders and has conducted forensic evaluations of autistic defendants since 2009. Her new book, co-written with defense attorney Elizabeth Kelley and digital forensics expert Michele Bush, is Cybercrime and the Autism Spectrum: How the Online World Creates Victims and Offenders. I met Dr. Cohen at the International Academy of Law and Mental Health Congress in Montreal, and I asked her on the show the moment her presentation ended, because so much of what she described maps directly onto the recruitment tactics I have studied for five decades. Dr. Cohen's first point cuts against the instinct to sort people into predators and prey. “Most people on the spectrum are both victimized and offenders at some point,” she told me. Cyberbullying, financial scams, and sexual exploitation run in one direction. Chat rooms that ask for “a picture of a child in your family” run in the other, quietly moving an autistic person into possession of CSAM they may never have sought out. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create distribute or possess. CSAM includes both real and synthetic content such as images created with artificial intelligence tools. Because many autistic individuals catalog and organize obsessively, agents who search a seized computer often find the material sorted into folders, which reads to an outsider as intent rather than what it frequently is: a hyperfocus trait turned against the person who has it. This is a justice issue and more people need to learn, please.