Welcome to Go ask Alli, a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. Rolling on the full. Loafing is a thing I can. I've seen We've all seen people do it. I've done it. I've kiddies for me. Now the work is to warrant what I have, even kind of shinny stuff. You know, that's my work. It's imperfect. So let me ask you a question about actors because you are Yeah, me too. We are old, funny duddies. We go to sleep at ten, we wake up at six, we go to bed at eight, So there are more funny duddies than you. You are the funny duddiest. Yes, welcome to go ask Alli. I'm Alle Wentworth. I've always been fascinated by cult. I think when I was in college in Upstate, New York, the whole Moon cult was living all around us, and I didn't understand what it was and I was afraid I was going to be kidnapped by them and had so many questions. And ever since then, whenever I see a cult documentary or some kind of a streamer about cults, I'm always tuning in. So what is it about cults that were so fascinated by Are we afraid of becoming engulfed in one, getting lost in one, being brainwashed by one? There's no better person to talk to about cults, about brainwashing, mind control, all of it than doctor Stephen Hassen. He's a PhD. He's a mental health professional and expert in an educator in cult and undue influenced tactics. A former member of the Moon Cult himself, doctor Hassen was d programmed when he was twenty two. Doctor Hassen has been working in the field of cults now for over forty years and has developed models to identify control tactics. He's a founding director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, and he's the author of four books on cult and mind control, and also hosts his own podcast, The Influence Continuum. Hello, doctor Hassen. I there's a wealth of information in your podcasts, in your ted talk, so I'm going to try to hit your greatest hits. Thank you. So, doctor Hassen, it is not every day that somebody wants to study brainwashing, my manipulation cults. And there's a reason that you sort of started delving into this world. So you have to tell that story because you've walked a few miles in the shoes of the cult, so tell my listeners about that. Sure, So go back to February of nineteen seventy four. I was nineteen. I was an upper junior at Queen's College, studying creative writing poetry in particular, and my girlfriend dumped me abruptly, and I was kind of blue, and the new semester was starting, and three women came up to me while I was sitting in the cafeteria and flirted with me and asked if they could join me at my table. And I was a nineteen year old, healthy male who thought he got lucky that day. And they said they were students. They said they weren't part of a religious group, but it turned out they were recruiters for the Moon Organization, Korean messiah who wants to take over the world and thinks that democracy is satanic. But I didn't know any of this. And I grew up in a middle class Jewish family. My dad had a hardware store, my mom was an art teacher. In eighth grade, two older sisters extra honor student, and I was not a joiner, but I was bright, and I want to improve myself and didn't want to be closed minded, and so they were flirting. They said, we lived together with people from all over the world. You have to come and meet our friends. And two and a half years later I was waking up on the Baltimore Beltway driving into the back of a tractor trailer truck at eighty miles an hour due to sleep deprivation. And in between that, I was made a leader in the Moon cult and was recruiting and doing crazy things like fasting for Richard Nixon during Watergate because God said he should be president. And I had hated Nixon before I've met the cult and been indoctrinated in mind control. Anyway, what happened in nineteen seventy six was this near fatal van crash in the hospital away from the group, sleeping a lot, and I called my sister, who I was always very close with, and she persuaded me to visit her and my nephew and she said on him to know his uncle Stevie come home. So I said, if you don't tell the parents, and you don't tell Steph, my oldest sister, who had all said I was in a cult and I was brainwashed, and I knew that was evil and satanic. I did go, and she did tell, and they had hired some ex moonies, one of whom was a woman I had recruited myself into the cult and I was very fond of and I was program to kill rather than betray the Messiah. And I actually almost snapped my father's neck while he was driving in the Long Island Expressway, but I didn't kill him, thank goodness. We get to the point of the dprogramming place and a big burly guy is going to come and help me go in there with my big long cast and I basically said to my father, who knew I was very very strong. I'm six feet tall. I said, if you try to make me go in there, I will be very violent and I will kill everybody or they will kill me, and my blood will be on your conscience forever. And my father cried and say, what would you do if it was your son, your only son? How would you feel? And it was the tears that got to the real me, and I switched into what I imagined was his perspective, thinking how crazy it must have looked to him that I had dropped out of college, quit my job, donated my bank account, and was fasting for Nixon. So anyway, I said, what do you want me to do? He said, just listen with an open mind. If you want to go back, at least your mother and I will be able to sleep at night knowing we did the responsible thing. So I wanted to prove I wasn't brainwashed or mind control, and I wanted to show that I had free will by the end, because they were showing me things like Chinese communist brainwashing studies of Robert Lifton, and basically my mind opened where I realized Moon was a liar. I had heard him personally tell us to lie so many times, and how could he be a man of God if he's a liar if we're teaching that God is a god of truth. So the wheels, the creaky wheels, started going, and then it just felt like a house of cards was going plap, plap pop, and I and I went. I just cried for three hours, like what was I been doing for two and a half years? And at that point I just needed to understand what happened to me. I bet because I'm you know, just a few minutes that I'm looking at you and talking to you, You're incredibly smart man, and I can't imagine you were any less smart when you were a eighteen nineteen year old man. No, I was reading postgraduate level when I was eight years old. Right, You're not an idiot as a teenager. As my point, you seem to have a caring, loving family. So definitely, what is it that these women, Okay, aside from hormones, how how did they infiltrate you in this way? How could they manipulate your mind? I mean to me, it reminds me of you know, I have friends whose children were addicts, and they literally had to have somebody come in at three in the morning and take them away and kind of break them all down and rebuild them again. And it sounds like you kind of have to do that when somebody has been seeked in a cult. I'm not a fan of the three AM boot camp interventions. I'm sure some have saved people's lives, but also a lot of them are run by people who are not mental health professionals. Well, yes, I agree with you. The bottom line is that I that people are situationally vulnerable. Breakup of a relationship, death of a loved one, illness movie. So your breakup is your vulnerability. The girlfriend that broke up with it was the biggest vulnerability, if I can be honest, allay was that I thought I was too smart and only dumb people get into cults. I thought I was too smart. I had bicycle cross country when I was sixteen. My father taught me in the hardware store. When he brought me in to train me, he said, you can tell if someone's lying by their eyes. Steve and I looked at their eyes and they were completely convincing that they were sincere. They were students, they weren't part of a religious group. And I later became a top recruiter doing the same techniques to get people in believing that the world was satanic and I needed to save their souls and all their ancestors. Let me ask you this very quickly. Sure, so let's define cult. Okay, So what I'm my work is around authoritarian cults and a way of thinking about it as a pyramid structured organization with someone or some group or some ideology that's controlling and the deceptive recruitment and the behavior, information, thought, and emotional control to make a new identity where their dependent and obedient on the group and some people say you need a living guru or leader to have a cult, and that's not my knowledge or research, because you can have ideological cults right right. So, for example, the right wing sovereign citizens, the racist, the neo Nazis, they were doing leaderless resistance was the term. In other words, they put an isis was doing this. Um. They put out the ideology, they they they they give videos and for people to indoctrinate, but they leave it up to people to decide how they're going to act out right. Um. And I went on to develop my own model based on an influence continuum from ethical to unethical and what I call the BITE model of authoritaring control. Yeah, behavior, behavior control, information controls, and emotions emotional. Yeah. So if you can control those four variables including where the persons sleeping and eating, and their clothing and their language, and give them rigid rules and regulations and put them through a process where they're confused, disoriented, and hypnosis is a major factor, but not the the watch kind of hypnosis. It's a much more DVOS this kind of process level of hypnosis. It's something that I've spent a lot of times learning about because it helps me and my work to coach families how to help love ones and to help people recover from these types of cases. And it's been a journey. I was persuaded to get my doctorate a few years ago because I got involved with a forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School, because I realized the law is about a hundred years out of date with understanding neuroscience and social psychology. And if you're young, you can be unduly influenced automatically by your age. If you're older and have dementia, that but the middle ground is called a slippery slope, and for me, it's not a slippery slope if you have these four components in the context of a lack of informed consent and installing phobias, for example, to make people rationally afraid to question the leader or the group, or irrationally afraid to exit the group because terrible things will happen to you. I was literally taken to the Exorcist movie alley in nineteen seventy four and Moon said, personally, God made the Exorcist movie, this is what will happen if anyone leaves the Unification Church. And at that point I had no critical thing you'll start throwing up and spinning around. Wow, it was scary, yes, of course, And so obviously I think about Patty Hurst. She was made into Tania and she robbed banks and yeah, and a lot of people didn't believe she was brainwashed. They thought she was a wealthy little kid acting out. And in my opinion, she was absolutely a victim of brainwashing. She was put in a closet, she was sexually abused. So for me, it was just bad legal defense and lack of the public's awareness and understanding that it doesn't just happen to stupid people, weak people, people from bad families, etc. Right, the right conditions, almost everybody can be hurt this way, and so and can you create those conditions, Meaning with Patty Hurst, they locked her in a closet, they sexually abused her. I'm sure they starved her. I mean, so you can also as a cult leader, you can create all those conditions with which to get people embedded in your sort of philosophies and your agenda. Basically, Yeah, so traffickers and pimps do this, And trafficking is illegal in the US and most civilized countries of the world. It's defined as fraud, force, or coercion, and most every mind control cult has the fraud, the lack of informed consent, and the coercion, which is granularly explained by the control of behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. And in fact, labor trafficking experts are using my model, and sex trafficking experts who are helping people get out of that type of mind control are using it because it makes sense. So with the sex trafficking and labor trafficking, it's very fear based, right, It's much more about if you try to leave, you will be killed or will kill your family or right, yes, so that's where the force comes in. If somebody holds a knife up, like Larry Ray of the Sarah Lawrence cult, he was just convicted of trafficking, if he holds a big knife up and starts to coerce you to make a false confession, you repeated enough times, you start believing it, because that's the way the mind works and memory works, is you can reprogram people's memories and people can have false memories of experiences that never happened. And so Charles Manson was kind of the genius of this too. Correct. Well, we don't want to give him that much credit. I don't think genius is a right word. I don't think it was a genius, but he was. He was definitely involved with scientology and he also used psychedelics. So psychedelics is another method that can be used to subvert people's critical thinking and reality testing. If you're tripping on acid and somebody is telling you we were married in the past life, don't you remember, you know, we were walking down the river of the Nile and we were fishing. Don't you remember, and you're tripping, you know, it's going to go in your head somewhere. Yeah, there's a lot more to come after the short break and we're back. It's interesting you think you equate sex trafficking with a cult, because most people think sex trafficking is they go after vulnerable children or women, They kidnap them, and then they use threats and fear to keep them there, same with pimps. But you're saying that it's it's more than that, No, it's it really is a systematic social influence process where people's behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions are manipulated to create a new identity that's the pendant and obedient on the pimp or the trafficker. So they frequently will change the name, change the clothing, change the language system, and people have an alternate life and belief about themselves. And so I do want to clarify something. So I have something called the influence continuum ethical to unethical, and this is all on my Freedom of mind dot com website under learn about undue influence. So I say there are cults along the entire continuum, but the difference between healthy cults as you choose. You can think you have your own critical faculties. You can leave without threats or fear or harassment. You can be fanatically into something, but it's your own choice versus having a new identity. I mean, one could say that there are abusive and horrific relationships that are that model this cult thing. I mean, I have some friends whose son has gotten involved with a woman and he doesn't speak to his parents and he's moved far away, and I keep saying to them, God, it's like he's in a cult, But no one looks at it that way because it's a relationship one cult to one. No, you're right, yeah, you're one hundred percent correct. And men controlling women and in fact, in the UK they have a new law called course of control where a man is controlling a woman and isolating her from her family and controlling her finances. It's not yet recognizing women controlling men. But in the United States I do a lot of cases one on one controlling and they're typically malignant narcissists, by the way, so it's another way of saying it is a narcissist who's a psychopath who are isolating a person and taking their money and wanting to exert power over them and sex. So we can talk about political cults, therapy cults, multi level marketing cults, psychotherapeutic cults, boot camp cults, which you mentioned something about friends who brought their kids who are addicts to a closed environment to break them down and create a new identity presumably, but a lot of those groups make the person dependent on the cult well, especially because they get kickbacks, and that whole system in Utah so corrupt, but yes, exactly, Utah is one of the worst states for these systems, and Paris Hilton is probably the most famous person who survived that. And so when you talk about like communist China, brainwashing and some of these techniques whether they're used on an educated adult. When it comes to let's say, sex trafficking, isn't it all fear based? Well, people don't understand. Most young people, mostly women or girls rather or boys, are recruited around twelve to fourteen years of age, and so it starts with what's called grooming, and the right wing is now using that term and flipping it on its head. But the real grooming of perverts and pedophiles and traffickers is giving food, buying a gift, walking with them, paying attention to them, maybe playing video games with them online where the person thinks they're their own age. And by the way, neuroscience has now told us that when someone is playing a video game online, the brain starts acting like it's a friend, even though you have no idea who's on the other side, and it could be a Chinese agent or a Russian agent, or the porn industry. It's exactly. It's typically a love thing where the young people think that that's a boyfriend, and they step by step get them involved with sex and do a favor for me. My best friend is coming over. He's really lonely, he needs attention. Give him a back rub, you know now pull down his shirt and rub his back that way. And it's just step by step. And and it's unfortunate that everybody who walks around thinking it's only someone else's kid, it's only weak people or stupid people. They're the most vulnerable. Really, it's way better to be humble and go. It could happen to me. And that's why you always want to stay in touch with your intuition, your gut, and you want to always have a red flag go off in your mind. If someone is saying don't tell your parents or don't don't share this with your husband or your wife. That should be like an immediate information control, right, danger, danger, you know what I've The bottom line is there's some people who are exceptionally vulnerable. And it turns out that people on the spectrum, very smart, high functioning folks on the spectrum, are exceptionally vulnerable to recruitment by mind control cults. Why because they're love bombed. They have an instant community where they have meaning and everyone's saying, oh, oh, Allie, you're so special, you're so smart, we're so glad to have you. So I did a chapter for an Oxford University Press textbook on loan actor terrorism, and mine was the only chapter on online indoctrination. And I used the case example of someone on the spectrum who was moved to violence because they were manipulated to feel like they have to act out either against women because women are evil, because they could never get a girlfriend, or they want to tear down America because America is evil, so they want to create anarchy. So the thing that I want so desperately, and why I'm so grateful that you asked me to be on your show, is I want people to step back and understand we're living in the age of influence, and in particular digital influence. Yes, yes, I want to talk to you about all of that because it's very scary and COVID has sped everything up and people are believing stupid, crazy conspiracy theories because they've been programmed. Let's just throw qan on out there, let's take them. That is, to me an authoritarian cult in itself exactly. I did a bite model analysis actually of QAnon on my website. I was invited by Dave Troy, who does ted X mid Atlantic, to do a program called Dismantling QAnon, and it was there that I learned for the first time that QAnon was based on alternate reality gaming technology, and I was I'm old, right, So I did pack Man oh too? Yeah, yeah, I never did. I never did, you know, video games like so many people do. But this is based on the idea that you can go on treasure hunts and figure things out and clues with these bread drops and this and that, and it engages people. And the other side of this that I want to state for your listeners is this is a PSI up. This is a psychological warfare operation. And we know for a fact Michael Flynn, General Flynn did this for our country against people in other countries for a long time. And he's already proclaimed the digital Soldier oath and he's definitely not a person who loves the rule of law. Okay, And now I have to throw Trump out too, because he's clearly was given a few handbooks and models for this. So I wrote the book called The Cult of Trump Simon and Schuster, and my thesis essentially is that they're authoritarian cults whose leaders were directing people to believe in Trump. And so chapter seven is all about the puppeteers as I research them, including Putin. I put him first in the list. The Family, which is a cult that used to do the National Prayer breakfasts and everything, and Michael Pence is in that group. So that's another cult. Jeffrey Charlotte has written two good books and there's a Netflix series about the Family, and that cult recruits Democrats and Republicans. By the way. Then we have Opus Day, which is a right wing cult in my professional opinion of the Catholic Church that thinks the Pope is Satanic and they want to break down the separation of church and state. The biggest threat, and the media has missed this in my opinion, is what's called new Apostolic Reformation churches and what these are. The media said, these are white Christian evangelicals. Well, I know white Christian evangelicals, and they're like, this is not Jesus's teachings, this is not biblical. The leaders of these groups, they say, I'm an apostle or I'm a prophet of God. I talk directly to God and get direct revelations, and I speak in tongues and cast out demons like the Exorcists, and I can do faith feelings. And their followers are called spiritual warriors because they're gonna get rid of all the satanic libtards me and people in the Cult of Sorrows presumably me, right, But there's forty million in the United States in this body of different cults, and an estimated six hundred and fifty million worldwide, and people are reporting, oh their popularist movements around the world. These are psyops by authoritarian governments or people who are promoting fossil fuels to divert people from global climate crisis legislation and action, and to keep the prices of oil high. So we're in we're in a World War three type information warfare. Of course, there's kinetic warfare in Ukraine right now, as everybody knows so well. But we have to wake up and realize if we love our country, if we want rule of law, if we want human rights, women's rights, gay rights, indigenous rights, we have to take action and not just be reactive, but we have to proactively think about how to reclaim and how to reinstitute laws that have been systematically broken down over the last forty years. Do you connect any dots with school shootings and cults? Absolutely so. There's something called social learning theory and people who study terrorism, it's a version of contagion effect or copycat things, and they would literally, I believe bad actors recruiting young vulnerable men to think that they will be immortal if they go into a mosque and kill a lot of people in live stream it or any number of variables of that. And I actually put the NR in the Cult of Trump because when I was researching it, there were five million people. And this is a group that is by the way, you remember, is it Marina Boutina? Remember the Russian agent who's now in the parliament in Russia. She infiltrated the NRA. She was at the national prayer breakfast of a family cult. Putin doesn't allow citizens to have assault rifles in Russia, but he wants us to have twenty million AR fifteens. Why he wants us to kill each other. And my former cult has a gun factory making AR fifteens. The Moonees and another son of Sun Young Moon has a crown of golden bullets, calls himself the king and his cult is called the Rod of Iron Ministry, saying that the revelations in the Bible, it says that we should have ar fifteen. So he has two compounds, one in Texas and one in Tennessee, hiring vets to train people how to use these weapons. And this is happening right now in our country. And I have to believe that law enforcement, now that Biden has come in, is trying to clean up the mess. Yeah, that's been made in the Cult of Trump era. Well, and there's also sort of small things we can do. Certainly the media cannot, and they've started to stop showing faces of shooters and not giving out their name and not using any platforms so that they do feel immortalized or sainted and focus on the victims, and focus on the victims exactly. Yeah, and it's time for a short break. Welcome back to go ask Galley. Technology. I mean that is sort of the greatest enemy to trying to stop all this because you know, I always say on my podcast, it's it's just the wild West. I mean, you can recruit extremists, you can create cults online without leaving your living room now exactly. And to me, I mean that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to fight to battle, you know, because the laws for you know, all these techno highways have not even been implemented. So how can somebody like me take action? What should we do? The problem was the the infiltration through the Federalist Society of our Supreme Court and courts around the land. But we need digital protection legislation because there's five estimated five thousand data points on every voting American that's been collected, every website you've gone to, everylike, every dislike what food you like to eat. There are AI algorithms to understand which buttons to push for which people in order to manipulate them. And then the other part of it. I've been interviewed by Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, the person who is very involved with the Social Dilemma documentary, which is a must see in my opinion for everyone. So we need to understand that billionaires who have platforms and their goal is money and selling ad by capturing people's attention. The rule of thumb is if it's free, then you're the product, right right, So you have to understand that there are great benefits from virtual technology. You can surgeons can do surgery remotely who are highly skilled and save somebody's life. However, bad actors who want to subvert America's power and prestige and subvert democracy. Are for example, the second biggest owner of Twitter of the Saudis or at least the Middle Eastern oil barrens if Elon musk Is so into electric cars, an electric solar Why would oil barons want to be on this platform. By the way, QAnon's back, Neo Nazis are back on Twitter. It's really terrible. Yeah, but there is hope. But we need to pass legislation. And I've been saying we should have open hearings on QAnon sy ops, information warfare, propaganda, brainwashing by top experts, educate American citizens and the world for what we know is being done right now. But there are all these politicians who've been given donations and have other kinds of corruption, maybe from Russia infiltration, and they're gonna undermine that effort. So right now, it just feels like citizens like you, Ali and me and others who genuinely care, we need to think outside the box for how how to get this done. So, doctor Hasson, does it really all come down to money? Is it just greed? So in my work when people ask me what's in it for cult leaders or what's it all about. It seems to me power is number one. Money is number two, which gives you more power, and sex is number three, which can also be used. Because you yes, because you hear about authoritarian cults. You hear, I mean these are the ones that are sort of on Hulu and Netflix, the political halts, and then cults that are sort of built from the base up by people that that it's just greed, they just want money. Um, you know, I would say that there are cults of people who you know, rip off grandmothers because they have dementias. Right, So there's a difference between con artists and cult leaders. The con artists just want the quick in and out, get the money and move on to the next victim. It's the people who want to literally create slaves, right, people who want the long controlled expansion of power. But I put them in with the sex cults, the slave cults, so I put I put them in the same category. And that's all power. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, the sex to me is power. I find those to be the same. Not love. No, it's not love. And I'm a love guy, I say too. And I've been saying this for years. If you have a friend or a family member who's gone down the Magar road, you know, the qan On road. The worst thing to do is cuttle off from them, or call them names or say their brainwash, just like my family did to me in seventy four. It just makes the person dig in more and feel persecuted. The best technique is a warm technique, inviting people to remember that you were brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles or best friends, and saying, listen, you're intelligent, I respect you. You seem very fervent. I want to understand how you've come to believe this. Please, let's spend the time. Go back in time and tell me your first memory of QAnon, for example, and what did you think? And they almost always ali say I thought it was crazy or I thought it was stupid, and then they say, oh, that's very interesting. So tell me what was it if you can think back, what was it that made you start taking it seriously and made as one of these propaganda documentaries, or maybe one of the girlfriend that they're with, the boyfriend that they're with who they fall in love with, is into it. But the point is is educating them, not saying you're an occult, but educating them about other groups that use mind control, Chinese communist brainwashing techniques, which is what was helpful to me to get out of the Moone fascist cult or traffickers, sex traffickers in particular of children. They're very interested to learn about that. Yeah, So here's my big question to you. How do you sleep at night? Truly? Like how do you digest all the stuff all day long? And how do you sleep? And do you take anything to make yourself go to sleep? Because I would be so anxious and so scared all the time. It's really a burden. My wife of twenty almost twenty five years has really been incredible support and she helped me in researching and writing of the Cult of Trump. She's a professional writer. But the truth is I often don't sleep at night, and I don't like sleeping pills. My go to self hypnosis and I've been to clinical interesting mental health professionals trained and hypnosis and it helps me get my agitation my cortsol levels down. And by the way, I did have cancer, and my heart goes out to Jamie Raskin. I had them FOMA two because I was working too hard and traveling and not sleeping enough. My heart goes out to Jamie. I hope he has a fast recovery. But the bottom line is I really am trying to train more people to understand how to help these victims. That's why I created an online course plug Plug No good for mental health professionals, but for anyone who wants a deeper dive to understand how do you help people heal from their identity being given an associative disorder? Are you worried about the future. I mean for somebody that is so immersed in this, but I mean really worried. I was worried about the mid terms, whether I would have to move to another country, honestly, but I was so relieved when we saved the Senate that the bottom line is I'm an optimist because there's no option but to believe, have hope, inspire other people, and to educate people how to protect their own minds, their friends and families minds, but also to stand up against these authoritarians and say no, we want human rights, we want rule of law. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for doing this podcast. I said, there's so much, and we have in our show notes all your books, and your podcast. So I do direct all my listeners to everything because it's so important and it's so informative, and at a certain point we a lot of us have to do some of the work that you're doing now as well, because there are people in our friend world and our family that need this. So thank you, thank you, thank you. So can I ask you a question? Yes, I was just going to get to that. What's your favorite cupcake? Oh? What is my favorite cupcake? It's chocolate with vanilla frosting. I'm a traditionalist. I can do that or I can do vanilla with chocolate frosting. But it has to be one or the other. I'm not a red velvet fan. Huh. Okay, And you like milk with it or of course milk, yes, and milk with my cookies, and yes, I'm all about dairy. You dunk your cookies and do not do that. I do it more of the way people who drink do a shot and then they have a chaser. It's more like that. I don't like to mix. So okay, okay, there you go. That's great. Thank you your pleasure, Thank you for listening to go Ask Alli if you'd like to learn more about cults and undo influence. Check out our show notes and visit Freedom of Mind dot com to access tons of resources, services, and doctor Hasson's podcast, The Influence Continuum. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review Go Ask Alli and follow me on social media on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth Now. If you'd like to ask me a question or suggest a guest or a topic to dig into, I would love to hear from you, and there's a bunch of ways you can do it. You can call or text me at three two three three six four six three five six, or you can email a voice memo right from your phone to Go Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. And if you leave a question, you just might hear it on goo ascut. Go Ask Galley is a production of Shondaland Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Go ask Alli, a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. Rolling on the full. Loafing is a thing I can. I've seen We've all seen people do it. I've done it. I've kiddies for me. Now the work is to warrant what I have, even kind of shinny stuff. You know, that's my work. It's imperfect. So let me ask you a question about actors because you are Yeah, me too. We are old, funny duddies. We go to sleep at ten, we wake up at six, we go to bed at eight, So there are more funny duddies than you. You are the funny duddiest. Yes, welcome to go ask Alli. I'm Alle Wentworth. I've always been fascinated by cult. I think when I was in college in Upstate, New York, the whole Moon cult was living all around us, and I didn't understand what it was and I was afraid I was going to be kidnapped by them and had so many questions. And ever since then, whenever I see a cult documentary or some kind of a streamer about cults, I'm always tuning in. So what is it about cults that were so fascinated by Are we afraid of becoming engulfed in one, getting lost in one, being brainwashed by one? There's no better person to talk to about cults, about brainwashing, mind control, all of it than doctor Stephen Hassen. He's a PhD. He's a mental health professional and expert in an educator in cult and undue influenced tactics. A former member of the Moon Cult himself, doctor Hassen was d programmed when he was twenty two. Doctor Hassen has been working in the field of cults now for over forty years and has developed models to identify control tactics. He's a founding director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, and he's the author of four books on cult and mind control, and also hosts his own podcast, The Influence Continuum. Hello, doctor Hassen. I there's a wealth of information in your podcasts, in your ted talk, so I'm going to try to hit your greatest hits. Thank you. So, doctor Hassen, it is not every day that somebody wants to study brainwashing, my manipulation cults. And there's a reason that you sort of started delving into this world. So you have to tell that story because you've walked a few miles in the shoes of the cult, so tell my listeners about that. Sure, So go back to February of nineteen seventy four. I was nineteen. I was an upper junior at Queen's College, studying creative writing poetry in particular, and my girlfriend dumped me abruptly, and I was kind of blue, and the new semester was starting, and three women came up to me while I was sitting in the cafeteria and flirted with me and asked if they could join me at my table. And I was a nineteen year old, healthy male who thought he got lucky that day. And they said they were students. They said they weren't part of a religious group, but it turned out they were recruiters for the Moon Organization, Korean messiah who wants to take over the world and thinks that democracy is satanic. But I didn't know any of this. And I grew up in a middle class Jewish family. My dad had a hardware store, my mom was an art teacher. In eighth grade, two older sisters extra honor student, and I was not a joiner, but I was bright, and I want to improve myself and didn't want to be closed minded, and so they were flirting. They said, we lived together with people from all over the world. You have to come and meet our friends. And two and a half years later I was waking up on the Baltimore Beltway driving into the back of a tractor trailer truck at eighty miles an hour due to sleep deprivation. And in between that, I was made a leader in the Moon cult and was recruiting and doing crazy things like fasting for Richard Nixon during Watergate because God said he should be president. And I had hated Nixon before I've met the cult and been indoctrinated in mind control. Anyway, what happened in nineteen seventy six was this near fatal van crash in the hospital away from the group, sleeping a lot, and I called my sister, who I was always very close with, and she persuaded me to visit her and my nephew and she said on him to know his uncle Stevie come home. So I said, if you don't tell the parents, and you don't tell Steph, my oldest sister, who had all said I was in a cult and I was brainwashed, and I knew that was evil and satanic. I did go, and she did tell, and they had hired some ex moonies, one of whom was a woman I had recruited myself into the cult and I was very fond of and I was program to kill rather than betray the Messiah. And I actually almost snapped my father's neck while he was driving in the Long Island Expressway, but I didn't kill him, thank goodness. We get to the point of the dprogramming place and a big burly guy is going to come and help me go in there with my big long cast and I basically said to my father, who knew I was very very strong. I'm six feet tall. I said, if you try to make me go in there, I will be very violent and I will kill everybody or they will kill me, and my blood will be on your conscience forever. And my father cried and say, what would you do if it was your son, your only son? How would you feel? And it was the tears that got to the real me, and I switched into what I imagined was his perspective, thinking how crazy it must have looked to him that I had dropped out of college, quit my job, donated my bank account, and was fasting for Nixon. So anyway, I said, what do you want me to do? He said, just listen with an open mind. If you want to go back, at least your mother and I will be able to sleep at night knowing we did the responsible thing. So I wanted to prove I wasn't brainwashed or mind control, and I wanted to show that I had free will by the end, because they were showing me things like Chinese communist brainwashing studies of Robert Lifton, and basically my mind opened where I realized Moon was a liar. I had heard him personally tell us to lie so many times, and how could he be a man of God if he's a liar if we're teaching that God is a god of truth. So the wheels, the creaky wheels, started going, and then it just felt like a house of cards was going plap, plap pop, and I and I went. I just cried for three hours, like what was I been doing for two and a half years? And at that point I just needed to understand what happened to me. I bet because I'm you know, just a few minutes that I'm looking at you and talking to you, You're incredibly smart man, and I can't imagine you were any less smart when you were a eighteen nineteen year old man. No, I was reading postgraduate level when I was eight years old. Right, You're not an idiot as a teenager. As my point, you seem to have a caring, loving family. So definitely, what is it that these women, Okay, aside from hormones, how how did they infiltrate you in this way? How could they manipulate your mind? I mean to me, it reminds me of you know, I have friends whose children were addicts, and they literally had to have somebody come in at three in the morning and take them away and kind of break them all down and rebuild them again. And it sounds like you kind of have to do that when somebody has been seeked in a cult. I'm not a fan of the three AM boot camp interventions. I'm sure some have saved people's lives, but also a lot of them are run by people who are not mental health professionals. Well, yes, I agree with you. The bottom line is that I that people are situationally vulnerable. Breakup of a relationship, death of a loved one, illness movie. So your breakup is your vulnerability. The girlfriend that broke up with it was the biggest vulnerability, if I can be honest, allay was that I thought I was too smart and only dumb people get into cults. I thought I was too smart. I had bicycle cross country when I was sixteen. My father taught me in the hardware store. When he brought me in to train me, he said, you can tell if someone's lying by their eyes. Steve and I looked at their eyes and they were completely convincing that they were sincere. They were students, they weren't part of a religious group. And I later became a top recruiter doing the same techniques to get people in believing that the world was satanic and I needed to save their souls and all their ancestors. Let me ask you this very quickly. Sure, so let's define cult. Okay, So what I'm my work is around authoritarian cults and a way of thinking about it as a pyramid structured organization with someone or some group or some ideology that's controlling and the deceptive recruitment and the behavior, information, thought, and emotional control to make a new identity where their dependent and obedient on the group and some people say you need a living guru or leader to have a cult, and that's not my knowledge or research, because you can have ideological cults right right. So, for example, the right wing sovereign citizens, the racist, the neo Nazis, they were doing leaderless resistance was the term. In other words, they put an isis was doing this. Um. They put out the ideology, they they they they give videos and for people to indoctrinate, but they leave it up to people to decide how they're going to act out right. Um. And I went on to develop my own model based on an influence continuum from ethical to unethical and what I call the BITE model of authoritaring control. Yeah, behavior, behavior control, information controls, and emotions emotional. Yeah. So if you can control those four variables including where the persons sleeping and eating, and their clothing and their language, and give them rigid rules and regulations and put them through a process where they're confused, disoriented, and hypnosis is a major factor, but not the the watch kind of hypnosis. It's a much more DVOS this kind of process level of hypnosis. It's something that I've spent a lot of times learning about because it helps me and my work to coach families how to help love ones and to help people recover from these types of cases. And it's been a journey. I was persuaded to get my doctorate a few years ago because I got involved with a forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School, because I realized the law is about a hundred years out of date with understanding neuroscience and social psychology. And if you're young, you can be unduly influenced automatically by your age. If you're older and have dementia, that but the middle ground is called a slippery slope, and for me, it's not a slippery slope if you have these four components in the context of a lack of informed consent and installing phobias, for example, to make people rationally afraid to question the leader or the group, or irrationally afraid to exit the group because terrible things will happen to you. I was literally taken to the Exorcist movie alley in nineteen seventy four and Moon said, personally, God made the Exorcist movie, this is what will happen if anyone leaves the Unification Church. And at that point I had no critical thing you'll start throwing up and spinning around. Wow, it was scary, yes, of course, And so obviously I think about Patty Hurst. She was made into Tania and she robbed banks and yeah, and a lot of people didn't believe she was brainwashed. They thought she was a wealthy little kid acting out. And in my opinion, she was absolutely a victim of brainwashing. She was put in a closet, she was sexually abused. So for me, it was just bad legal defense and lack of the public's awareness and understanding that it doesn't just happen to stupid people, weak people, people from bad families, etc. Right, the right conditions, almost everybody can be hurt this way, and so and can you create those conditions, Meaning with Patty Hurst, they locked her in a closet, they sexually abused her. I'm sure they starved her. I mean, so you can also as a cult leader, you can create all those conditions with which to get people embedded in your sort of philosophies and your agenda. Basically, Yeah, so traffickers and pimps do this, And trafficking is illegal in the US and most civilized countries of the world. It's defined as fraud, force, or coercion, and most every mind control cult has the fraud, the lack of informed consent, and the coercion, which is granularly explained by the control of behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. And in fact, labor trafficking experts are using my model, and sex trafficking experts who are helping people get out of that type of mind control are using it because it makes sense. So with the sex trafficking and labor trafficking, it's very fear based, right, It's much more about if you try to leave, you will be killed or will kill your family or right, yes, so that's where the force comes in. If somebody holds a knife up, like Larry Ray of the Sarah Lawrence cult, he was just convicted of trafficking, if he holds a big knife up and starts to coerce you to make a false confession, you repeated enough times, you start believing it, because that's the way the mind works and memory works, is you can reprogram people's memories and people can have false memories of experiences that never happened. And so Charles Manson was kind of the genius of this too. Correct. Well, we don't want to give him that much credit. I don't think genius is a right word. I don't think it was a genius, but he was. He was definitely involved with scientology and he also used psychedelics. So psychedelics is another method that can be used to subvert people's critical thinking and reality testing. If you're tripping on acid and somebody is telling you we were married in the past life, don't you remember, you know, we were walking down the river of the Nile and we were fishing. Don't you remember, and you're tripping, you know, it's going to go in your head somewhere. Yeah, there's a lot more to come after the short break and we're back. It's interesting you think you equate sex trafficking with a cult, because most people think sex trafficking is they go after vulnerable children or women, They kidnap them, and then they use threats and fear to keep them there, same with pimps. But you're saying that it's it's more than that, No, it's it really is a systematic social influence process where people's behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions are manipulated to create a new identity that's the pendant and obedient on the pimp or the trafficker. So they frequently will change the name, change the clothing, change the language system, and people have an alternate life and belief about themselves. And so I do want to clarify something. So I have something called the influence continuum ethical to unethical, and this is all on my Freedom of mind dot com website under learn about undue influence. So I say there are cults along the entire continuum, but the difference between healthy cults as you choose. You can think you have your own critical faculties. You can leave without threats or fear or harassment. You can be fanatically into something, but it's your own choice versus having a new identity. I mean, one could say that there are abusive and horrific relationships that are that model this cult thing. I mean, I have some friends whose son has gotten involved with a woman and he doesn't speak to his parents and he's moved far away, and I keep saying to them, God, it's like he's in a cult, But no one looks at it that way because it's a relationship one cult to one. No, you're right, yeah, you're one hundred percent correct. And men controlling women and in fact, in the UK they have a new law called course of control where a man is controlling a woman and isolating her from her family and controlling her finances. It's not yet recognizing women controlling men. But in the United States I do a lot of cases one on one controlling and they're typically malignant narcissists, by the way, so it's another way of saying it is a narcissist who's a psychopath who are isolating a person and taking their money and wanting to exert power over them and sex. So we can talk about political cults, therapy cults, multi level marketing cults, psychotherapeutic cults, boot camp cults, which you mentioned something about friends who brought their kids who are addicts to a closed environment to break them down and create a new identity presumably, but a lot of those groups make the person dependent on the cult well, especially because they get kickbacks, and that whole system in Utah so corrupt, but yes, exactly, Utah is one of the worst states for these systems, and Paris Hilton is probably the most famous person who survived that. And so when you talk about like communist China, brainwashing and some of these techniques whether they're used on an educated adult. When it comes to let's say, sex trafficking, isn't it all fear based? Well, people don't understand. Most young people, mostly women or girls rather or boys, are recruited around twelve to fourteen years of age, and so it starts with what's called grooming, and the right wing is now using that term and flipping it on its head. But the real grooming of perverts and pedophiles and traffickers is giving food, buying a gift, walking with them, paying attention to them, maybe playing video games with them online where the person thinks they're their own age. And by the way, neuroscience has now told us that when someone is playing a video game online, the brain starts acting like it's a friend, even though you have no idea who's on the other side, and it could be a Chinese agent or a Russian agent, or the porn industry. It's exactly. It's typically a love thing where the young people think that that's a boyfriend, and they step by step get them involved with sex and do a favor for me. My best friend is coming over. He's really lonely, he needs attention. Give him a back rub, you know now pull down his shirt and rub his back that way. And it's just step by step. And and it's unfortunate that everybody who walks around thinking it's only someone else's kid, it's only weak people or stupid people. They're the most vulnerable. Really, it's way better to be humble and go. It could happen to me. And that's why you always want to stay in touch with your intuition, your gut, and you want to always have a red flag go off in your mind. If someone is saying don't tell your parents or don't don't share this with your husband or your wife. That should be like an immediate information control, right, danger, danger, you know what I've The bottom line is there's some people who are exceptionally vulnerable. And it turns out that people on the spectrum, very smart, high functioning folks on the spectrum, are exceptionally vulnerable to recruitment by mind control cults. Why because they're love bombed. They have an instant community where they have meaning and everyone's saying, oh, oh, Allie, you're so special, you're so smart, we're so glad to have you. So I did a chapter for an Oxford University Press textbook on loan actor terrorism, and mine was the only chapter on online indoctrination. And I used the case example of someone on the spectrum who was moved to violence because they were manipulated to feel like they have to act out either against women because women are evil, because they could never get a girlfriend, or they want to tear down America because America is evil, so they want to create anarchy. So the thing that I want so desperately, and why I'm so grateful that you asked me to be on your show, is I want people to step back and understand we're living in the age of influence, and in particular digital influence. Yes, yes, I want to talk to you about all of that because it's very scary and COVID has sped everything up and people are believing stupid, crazy conspiracy theories because they've been programmed. Let's just throw qan on out there, let's take them. That is, to me an authoritarian cult in itself exactly. I did a bite model analysis actually of QAnon on my website. I was invited by Dave Troy, who does ted X mid Atlantic, to do a program called Dismantling QAnon, and it was there that I learned for the first time that QAnon was based on alternate reality gaming technology, and I was I'm old, right, So I did pack Man oh too? Yeah, yeah, I never did. I never did, you know, video games like so many people do. But this is based on the idea that you can go on treasure hunts and figure things out and clues with these bread drops and this and that, and it engages people. And the other side of this that I want to state for your listeners is this is a PSI up. This is a psychological warfare operation. And we know for a fact Michael Flynn, General Flynn did this for our country against people in other countries for a long time. And he's already proclaimed the digital Soldier oath and he's definitely not a person who loves the rule of law. Okay, And now I have to throw Trump out too, because he's clearly was given a few handbooks and models for this. So I wrote the book called The Cult of Trump Simon and Schuster, and my thesis essentially is that they're authoritarian cults whose leaders were directing people to believe in Trump. And so chapter seven is all about the puppeteers as I research them, including Putin. I put him first in the list. The Family, which is a cult that used to do the National Prayer breakfasts and everything, and Michael Pence is in that group. So that's another cult. Jeffrey Charlotte has written two good books and there's a Netflix series about the Family, and that cult recruits Democrats and Republicans. By the way. Then we have Opus Day, which is a right wing cult in my professional opinion of the Catholic Church that thinks the Pope is Satanic and they want to break down the separation of church and state. The biggest threat, and the media has missed this in my opinion, is what's called new Apostolic Reformation churches and what these are. The media said, these are white Christian evangelicals. Well, I know white Christian evangelicals, and they're like, this is not Jesus's teachings, this is not biblical. The leaders of these groups, they say, I'm an apostle or I'm a prophet of God. I talk directly to God and get direct revelations, and I speak in tongues and cast out demons like the Exorcists, and I can do faith feelings. And their followers are called spiritual warriors because they're gonna get rid of all the satanic libtards me and people in the Cult of Sorrows presumably me, right, But there's forty million in the United States in this body of different cults, and an estimated six hundred and fifty million worldwide, and people are reporting, oh their popularist movements around the world. These are psyops by authoritarian governments or people who are promoting fossil fuels to divert people from global climate crisis legislation and action, and to keep the prices of oil high. So we're in we're in a World War three type information warfare. Of course, there's kinetic warfare in Ukraine right now, as everybody knows so well. But we have to wake up and realize if we love our country, if we want rule of law, if we want human rights, women's rights, gay rights, indigenous rights, we have to take action and not just be reactive, but we have to proactively think about how to reclaim and how to reinstitute laws that have been systematically broken down over the last forty years. Do you connect any dots with school shootings and cults? Absolutely so. There's something called social learning theory and people who study terrorism, it's a version of contagion effect or copycat things, and they would literally, I believe bad actors recruiting young vulnerable men to think that they will be immortal if they go into a mosque and kill a lot of people in live stream it or any number of variables of that. And I actually put the NR in the Cult of Trump because when I was researching it, there were five million people. And this is a group that is by the way, you remember, is it Marina Boutina? Remember the Russian agent who's now in the parliament in Russia. She infiltrated the NRA. She was at the national prayer breakfast of a family cult. Putin doesn't allow citizens to have assault rifles in Russia, but he wants us to have twenty million AR fifteens. Why he wants us to kill each other. And my former cult has a gun factory making AR fifteens. The Moonees and another son of Sun Young Moon has a crown of golden bullets, calls himself the king and his cult is called the Rod of Iron Ministry, saying that the revelations in the Bible, it says that we should have ar fifteen. So he has two compounds, one in Texas and one in Tennessee, hiring vets to train people how to use these weapons. And this is happening right now in our country. And I have to believe that law enforcement, now that Biden has come in, is trying to clean up the mess. Yeah, that's been made in the Cult of Trump era. Well, and there's also sort of small things we can do. Certainly the media cannot, and they've started to stop showing faces of shooters and not giving out their name and not using any platforms so that they do feel immortalized or sainted and focus on the victims, and focus on the victims exactly. Yeah, and it's time for a short break. Welcome back to go ask Galley. Technology. I mean that is sort of the greatest enemy to trying to stop all this because you know, I always say on my podcast, it's it's just the wild West. I mean, you can recruit extremists, you can create cults online without leaving your living room now exactly. And to me, I mean that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to fight to battle, you know, because the laws for you know, all these techno highways have not even been implemented. So how can somebody like me take action? What should we do? The problem was the the infiltration through the Federalist Society of our Supreme Court and courts around the land. But we need digital protection legislation because there's five estimated five thousand data points on every voting American that's been collected, every website you've gone to, everylike, every dislike what food you like to eat. There are AI algorithms to understand which buttons to push for which people in order to manipulate them. And then the other part of it. I've been interviewed by Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, the person who is very involved with the Social Dilemma documentary, which is a must see in my opinion for everyone. So we need to understand that billionaires who have platforms and their goal is money and selling ad by capturing people's attention. The rule of thumb is if it's free, then you're the product, right right, So you have to understand that there are great benefits from virtual technology. You can surgeons can do surgery remotely who are highly skilled and save somebody's life. However, bad actors who want to subvert America's power and prestige and subvert democracy. Are for example, the second biggest owner of Twitter of the Saudis or at least the Middle Eastern oil barrens if Elon musk Is so into electric cars, an electric solar Why would oil barons want to be on this platform. By the way, QAnon's back, Neo Nazis are back on Twitter. It's really terrible. Yeah, but there is hope. But we need to pass legislation. And I've been saying we should have open hearings on QAnon sy ops, information warfare, propaganda, brainwashing by top experts, educate American citizens and the world for what we know is being done right now. But there are all these politicians who've been given donations and have other kinds of corruption, maybe from Russia infiltration, and they're gonna undermine that effort. So right now, it just feels like citizens like you, Ali and me and others who genuinely care, we need to think outside the box for how how to get this done. So, doctor Hasson, does it really all come down to money? Is it just greed? So in my work when people ask me what's in it for cult leaders or what's it all about. It seems to me power is number one. Money is number two, which gives you more power, and sex is number three, which can also be used. Because you yes, because you hear about authoritarian cults. You hear, I mean these are the ones that are sort of on Hulu and Netflix, the political halts, and then cults that are sort of built from the base up by people that that it's just greed, they just want money. Um, you know, I would say that there are cults of people who you know, rip off grandmothers because they have dementias. Right, So there's a difference between con artists and cult leaders. The con artists just want the quick in and out, get the money and move on to the next victim. It's the people who want to literally create slaves, right, people who want the long controlled expansion of power. But I put them in with the sex cults, the slave cults, so I put I put them in the same category. And that's all power. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, the sex to me is power. I find those to be the same. Not love. No, it's not love. And I'm a love guy, I say too. And I've been saying this for years. If you have a friend or a family member who's gone down the Magar road, you know, the qan On road. The worst thing to do is cuttle off from them, or call them names or say their brainwash, just like my family did to me in seventy four. It just makes the person dig in more and feel persecuted. The best technique is a warm technique, inviting people to remember that you were brothers and sisters or aunts and uncles or best friends, and saying, listen, you're intelligent, I respect you. You seem very fervent. I want to understand how you've come to believe this. Please, let's spend the time. Go back in time and tell me your first memory of QAnon, for example, and what did you think? And they almost always ali say I thought it was crazy or I thought it was stupid, and then they say, oh, that's very interesting. So tell me what was it if you can think back, what was it that made you start taking it seriously and made as one of these propaganda documentaries, or maybe one of the girlfriend that they're with, the boyfriend that they're with who they fall in love with, is into it. But the point is is educating them, not saying you're an occult, but educating them about other groups that use mind control, Chinese communist brainwashing techniques, which is what was helpful to me to get out of the Moone fascist cult or traffickers, sex traffickers in particular of children. They're very interested to learn about that. Yeah, So here's my big question to you. How do you sleep at night? Truly? Like how do you digest all the stuff all day long? And how do you sleep? And do you take anything to make yourself go to sleep? Because I would be so anxious and so scared all the time. It's really a burden. My wife of twenty almost twenty five years has really been incredible support and she helped me in researching and writing of the Cult of Trump. She's a professional writer. But the truth is I often don't sleep at night, and I don't like sleeping pills. My go to self hypnosis and I've been to clinical interesting mental health professionals trained and hypnosis and it helps me get my agitation my cortsol levels down. And by the way, I did have cancer, and my heart goes out to Jamie Raskin. I had them FOMA two because I was working too hard and traveling and not sleeping enough. My heart goes out to Jamie. I hope he has a fast recovery. But the bottom line is I really am trying to train more people to understand how to help these victims. That's why I created an online course plug Plug No good for mental health professionals, but for anyone who wants a deeper dive to understand how do you help people heal from their identity being given an associative disorder? Are you worried about the future. I mean for somebody that is so immersed in this, but I mean really worried. I was worried about the mid terms, whether I would have to move to another country, honestly, but I was so relieved when we saved the Senate that the bottom line is I'm an optimist because there's no option but to believe, have hope, inspire other people, and to educate people how to protect their own minds, their friends and families minds, but also to stand up against these authoritarians and say no, we want human rights, we want rule of law. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for doing this podcast. I said, there's so much, and we have in our show notes all your books, and your podcast. So I do direct all my listeners to everything because it's so important and it's so informative, and at a certain point we a lot of us have to do some of the work that you're doing now as well, because there are people in our friend world and our family that need this. So thank you, thank you, thank you. So can I ask you a question? Yes, I was just going to get to that. What's your favorite cupcake? Oh? What is my favorite cupcake? It's chocolate with vanilla frosting. I'm a traditionalist. I can do that or I can do vanilla with chocolate frosting. But it has to be one or the other. I'm not a red velvet fan. Huh. Okay, And you like milk with it or of course milk, yes, and milk with my cookies, and yes, I'm all about dairy. You dunk your cookies and do not do that. I do it more of the way people who drink do a shot and then they have a chaser. It's more like that. I don't like to mix. So okay, okay, there you go. That's great. Thank you your pleasure, Thank you for listening to go Ask Alli if you'd like to learn more about cults and undo influence. Check out our show notes and visit Freedom of Mind dot com to access tons of resources, services, and doctor Hasson's podcast, The Influence Continuum. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review Go Ask Alli and follow me on social media on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth Now. If you'd like to ask me a question or suggest a guest or a topic to dig into, I would love to hear from you, and there's a bunch of ways you can do it. You can call or text me at three two three three six four six three five six, or you can email a voice memo right from your phone to Go Ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. And if you leave a question, you just might hear it on goo ascut. Go Ask Galley is a production of Shondaland Audio and partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.