Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

MeidasTouch Network
MeidasTouch Network
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Steven Hassan, PhD, is one of the leading experts on cults and undue influence in the world. A former member of the right-wing Moonie cult, Hassan was deprogrammed 45 years ago and has dedicated his life to helping people out of cults and destructive situations. Dr. Hassan is a licensed mental health professional and has written four books, including The Cult of Trump and the seminal book Combating Cult Mind Control. On this podcast, Steve will explain HOW mind-control works, and how to protect yourself from its grips. He will also address ethical influence as the podcast will address the entire Influence Continuum. He’ll interview the biggest names in this field.

  1. 1d ago

    Is It Dementia, Alzheimer’s or Medication Side Effects? With Germaine Odenheimer MD — A geriatric neurologist opines on public misinformation

    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.

  2. Sep 28

    How to Build a Truth Engine: Friedrich Moser on Disinformation and the Mind - What we now know about psychological warfare conspiracy theories and finding reliable information

    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.

  3. Sep 21

    Selling Financial Freedom: William Keep on MLMs, Crypto, and the Politics of Deception – How promises of a better life become tools of undue influence—and why consumer protection matters

    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.

  4. Sep 14

    Who Gains From The “Inevitability” of AI? Oxford ethicist Carissa Véliz on how AI prediction became a tool of influence and power

    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.

  5. Sep 7

    The Power of Us: Dr. Jay Van Bavel on Social Identity and The Power of Dissent

    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.

  6. Aug 31

    Carlos Castaneda's Cult of Witches with Ru Marshall: Fooling Millions and UC Press still sells his books as anthropology

    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.

  7. Aug 24

    The Problems with America's Family Courts with Karen Winner: A journalist turned lawyer on custody, cronyism, and courts without oversight

    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.

  8. Aug 17

    Escaping the Moonies, and Rebuilding his Life: Ingo Michehl gave the cult his flute, his country, and six years of his life

    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.

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Steven Hassan, PhD, is one of the leading experts on cults and undue influence in the world. A former member of the right-wing Moonie cult, Hassan was deprogrammed 45 years ago and has dedicated his life to helping people out of cults and destructive situations. Dr. Hassan is a licensed mental health professional and has written four books, including The Cult of Trump and the seminal book Combating Cult Mind Control. On this podcast, Steve will explain HOW mind-control works, and how to protect yourself from its grips. He will also address ethical influence as the podcast will address the entire Influence Continuum. He’ll interview the biggest names in this field.

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