Armchair Anonymous: Cults II

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Mon Padman. Hi.

You're trying it out. It doesn't sound right on you. Not when you do first and last name. Mon Padman.

That sounds like Mon Seward Padman, which is pretty cool. Yeah, that is cool. Maybe it is good. Monty Padman.

That sounds crazy, too. These nicknames, when they're in conjunction with your full name, maybe don't work. Okay, that's fine. Yeah.

Like D.D. Shepard. Ooh, D.D. Shepard.

That sounds fun. Today is part two of one of our favorite prompts ever. Escaping a cult. This is tough.

It's tough out there. It is. We learned a lot. There's some real through lines.

Oh, yeah. There's consistencies. There's a lot more than I'm aware of. I just stupidly assume I'll see a doc about them if they're real.

It makes me think you're bumping into people all the time that probably were raised in some of these cringy religious traditions. Oh, I'm a pussyfooter. Yeah. Please enjoy cults part two.

Hard times, come and go. Good times, take them slow. My life, I had to go. But one thing, you gotta know, I'm gonna keep them shining.

Hi, is this Taj? Yes, it's good to meet you guys. Oh, wonderful to meet you. You're my first Taj.

Is this a family name? My real name is Amy. Oh, okay. And I have a very common last name.

And about 10 years ago, I decided to know there's too many in the world. So I'm just gonna pick a different name. Oh, I love this. You rebranded it.

My brother and I both have done this. And did the people around you immediately accept it? Or did you have people that were still calling you Cassius Clay? Well, I live in Portland, Oregon, where everybody changes their name.

Oh, that's a great place to change your name. But my mom, who at the time was still living in New Jersey, she's passing son, she freaked out because she was a therapist. And the only person that she knew who had changed their name was a schizophrenic patient. Oh, okay.

She thought that was a battle then. She thought that her kids were going to do over here. You know, the topic I would love to briefly touch on with you, Tax, is improv. Oh, yes, please.

Oh, I used to be painfully shy. That comes out in the story because it happened just after college. And improv has really changed my life. And it's not that I was ever interested in being in front of the camera, but it's a mindfulness practice.

And also for helping you be a better human. So I just wondered if you'd ever come across that approach to improv. I want to hear about yours. So someone taught you and it was taught with the intention of the life practice more than a pursuit.

I actually came across that myself. When I was living in Flagstaff, my next door neighbor was a meditation teacher. I was a lapsed meditator. And you know that old Reese's commercial where two people bump into each other.

One has peanut butter and one has chocolate. Yes. So it was like, you got meditation in my improv. No, you got improv in my meditation.

So during the pandemic, we started teaching mindful improv and meditation using improv games. Okay. Now tell me why you think that's a good overlap. Right out of the gates, I would go like presence is required.

Listening. Yeah. And you have to let go of your idea because let's say you start a scene with somebody and you think you're in a barn and they say, entertain me the scalpel or something like that. And you have to just let go right away or else it's going to be like tug of war.

And just be present with what is and let go of ego. And the less you try to be funny, I know you guys know. If you're trying to put in the crazy things, it doesn't work. Yeah.

There's a spirit of harmony and collaboration. It doesn't work. Someone's team rolling. Okay.

I like that. All right. Alas, this episode though is about cults. I hope it's not an improv cult.

Well, but as we've already acknowledged, they are cults. They can be culty. I wouldn't call them cults. My experience was not with an improv cult.

So this takes place in 94 when I was in my mid twenties. I was vulnerable to this because I had just gotten out of college a couple of years before. I was just lost. I had been really successful in the structure of college.

I was so shy. I just had no idea how the world worked. So I was looking for something to latch onto. So one day I saw a sign at a bookstore saying they were having a meditation class and I went and it was in this little room above the bookstore and it turned out I was the only student.

It was me and this teacher. We did the meditation for a bit and then he turned into my therapist for that day. And that was very attractive. Someone would listen to me and he told me about his teacher who was going to be giving this free vegetarian dinner at a fancy restaurant in downtown Boston.

They always get you with a vegetarian dinner. We have somebody else on talking about this. If someone offers you a vegetarian dinner, just run. Let me not run.

Let me run. He said his teacher was named Rama to describe Rama a little bit. He's this tall guy with a jufro, as we say in my background, blondish hair, very kind of awkward, but also very, very confident. That pulls people in.

But not Indian because you said his name was. Well, his chosen name was Rama. And I think I can share the real name because it's all over the internet. The story has come out about him.

He's going by this other name. He's not Indian. I thought Indian. I heard the name and I thought meditation, but no.

He believed he was the reincarnation of St. Thomas More and Indian teachers and all kinds of people. It's never like I'm the reincarnation of a field worker. Right.

I went and he gave a little talk. He was very into Carlos Castaneda and he wanted us to read those books. How many folks were at this initial free vegetarian dinner? I'd say a hundred.

Oh, okay. There's some critical mass. If you show up somewhere to see a spiritual guide and there's three people, you're like, well, this guy's bunk. A hundred.

You're like, okay. He can't be that crazy of all these people. That's right. If you are starting a call, stock it with some extras, even if you don't have that many followers, maybe get some hourly folks to build out the audience.

The thing that grabbed me was we meditated with him and he was sitting on a little stage in front of everyone and he asked us to keep our eyes open and look at him while we were meditating. When we started meditating with him, I started almost immediately seeing light coming out of him and his face started morphing into an old man and then a child and then a woman and I would close my eyes and try and clear my vision and it just kept happening and I thought, wow, there's something going on. That's quite a thing to observe. Are you not terrified?

It was subtle. Almost like you're having a dream. Or if you're on dreams or something. Well, exactly.

That's what I was about to say. Oh, no. Oh, no. But, you know, I could clear it.

If I blinked my eyes, he was normal again. So I thought, you know, this is part of channeling other entities. It's not like he's actually changing to someone else. So it wasn't terrifying.

It was more intriguing to me. The senior student of his that had invited me to that dinner said that there was going to be this 10 day meditation retreat coming up and it sort of felt like it was an audition to be part of the cult in a way. They wanted people to have headshots and full body, especially women, to have pictures to submit as part of the application, which you have to wonder what those are for. Sure.

But I decided to go against better judgment and we went to the summer camp that they had rented for the 10 days. A lot of the time he wasn't there. If anyone criticized him, if he had any enemies, he could cause them to get cancer or be in a major car accident. Oh, because we have a dark side.

Yes, very much. He also claimed to control the weather and pass through alternate dimensions and create and destroy universes. And I was just starting to get very skeptical at this point. We're on day three, four.

And I'm like, I think I need to get out of here. Yeah, yeah. And it did not feel like a place where you could just say, OK, bye. I'm not into this.

They were kind of you are staying for the 10 days you committed to this no matter what. So he had shown up for one evening that he's talking about Kundalini. The image is the snake that's curled up at the base of each person's spine. And when you raise the Kundalini energy, that snake is supposed to come up.

So that night I had a dream that the Kundalini snake was not inside me, but was wrapping around me and trying to just kill me. And I woke up with terrible cramps. And I decided to kind of embellish the cramps into, I think, that my appendix. I have to get to a hospital.

So I finally got them to call an ambulance to get me out of there, from which I called my family and just went away from this whole thing. But I forgot to mention, he always would talk about his dog, Bayou. And apparently he believed that he was one of 12 enlightened beings on the planet. And Bayou was another one of the 12.

OK, so two of the 12 were accounted for between he and Bayou. Yeah. And he believed that Bayou was the reincarnation of his spiritual teacher. He had all these mansions and lots of cars.

He had a whole collection of Porsches and Mercedes and Range Rovers. And his senior students got together for his birthday and bought him a Porsche. They claimed to have memory of technology from Atlantis. Oh, OK.

And Zen Master Rama said his form of Buddhism was what he called materialistic Buddhism. That's the kind we need to practice. Where it's OK to make a pile of money, because that is a reflection of your spiritual progress. Once you left, did you keep following this person and what was happening?

A number of years later, I read an article about how he died. But I did want to mention one thing I did see personally, which was that evening that he showed up, somebody had asked him if he would be able to drink a whole bottle of hot sauce without any physical manifestation. You know how you would turn red and you would be in pain. So he did that.

No big deal. So the guy had something, but I wouldn't say it was for the good of all. Yeah. But his death really nailed that this was not a sane person because his dog had passed away.

And apparently Zen Master Rama could not handle being in the world without this dog. His master. So he committed suicide, wearing a Versace suit and the dog's collar and tags. He was found in the water by one of his mansions.

And he had over 150 value in his system. And he made a suicide pact with one of his followers who happened to be a former model. He had sort of a harem going. Yes.

Yeah. They're going to have a harem. They're going to have some nice cars. Oh, it's so classic.

So do we think he did drug you guys? I think it's hypnosis. Because you hadn't eaten the vegetarian meal prior to seeing all that or had you? We had actually.

So there's always that possibility. But there were other times where I hadn't eaten something and was sitting in some of the students' presents and felt some interesting stuff. Wow. Wow.

Did you know anyone that stuck with that? No. I just got out of it and stayed away. There's a quote from a documentary I saw about people who win the Powerball that I think really fits with this kind of person.

In the quote, it's about winning the lottery. But I think it's if you attain a lot of money and a lot of power, it's like pouring Miracle Grow on your character flaws. Ooh. Yeah.

Yeah. That's good. That's really good. Those lottery documentaries fascinate the hell out of me.

I've seen a couple. Talk about, be careful what you wish for. There's almost no good stories in those. And the one that I saw years ago was called Lucky.

There are some good stories and some negatives. Yeah, it can't all be bad. No, I shouldn't say that. There's just an incredibly high rate of people filing for bankruptcy.

There's a lot of stress with their family. Yeah, a lot of suicide. It upticks a lot of things. I also have a joke for you guys if you want a really bad taste joke about cults.

Oh, yeah, yeah. We love bad taste jokes. Why aren't there very many popular jokes about Jonestown? I think it must have to do with Kulme, but I don't know.

What is it? The punchlines are too long. I don't get it. Standing in line for the punch.

Oh, oh. Very literal. Terrible. It's a pun.

Well, Tasha, this has been a delight meeting you and hearing your story. I love you guys. Thank you. Thank you.

Bye. All right, take care. As someone who saw, ran lady hands, ran my hands, that's what she saw. Yeah, on shrimps and you stare at any given thing long enough, you'll just see them.

Yeah, things morph. Yeah, I think they definitely chalk that vegetarian meal. And to their credit, mushrooms are vegetarian. Maybe that's why, because they can technically get away with it.

It's technically legal. Mushroom medley. Hi, how are you? Good, how are you?

Good. Is this a beautiful photo of you and your lover engaged in play on the beach? Engagement photos. Oh, that's cute.

It looks like you're either doing hacky sack or you could be doing the kid in play dance. I think I was kicking water at him. Okay, because you're playful and you taunted him. 17 years ago.

You don't look nearly old enough to be engaged 17 years ago. I'm 38 now. I was 20. Were you high school sweethearts?

No, we met, well, this kind of comes into play. I grew up in a cult. Oh, so I did not know him in high school. Okay.

Kristen, where are you from? I'm from Northern California. You know, Humboldt County. I think you talked about it, actually.

Golden Triangle or Green Triangle. Up where all the good weed and meth are. Yes. I was almost born into it.

My mom got married and I was in the religion from the time I was really tiny. So it wasn't something where I joined. It was something where I was there as a child. And are you allowed to say the name of what the religion was?

It was called Gospel Outreach. It's still around today. It's one you wouldn't have heard of. It's a lot smaller.

And they're pretty good at keeping themselves on the down low and not being too obvious about what's going on there. Their religious beliefs would be evangelical Lutheran type of thing. They believe that you are born full of sin. And every day your old man, as I call it, needs to be killed so that your new man can come forth in Christ.

So the way they do this is they try to break you by just beating down on you. You have meetings. As children, we would have circle meetings where you pick a person and you just verbally attack them until they finally get to their breaking point. And they would do weird things like make us wear signs about our shortcomings and wear those around school.

Oh my God. Okay, really quick. So this is huge overlap with this doc I saw about Synanom, which was this offshoot of sobriety a guy invented in Venice. And he had this thing called The Game.

And it's how the group therapy worked. And you attacked each other. And then all these people wanted to be a part of that organization that weren't drug addicts. And then all these civilians joined up in the Bay Area.

I just wonder if there's any bleed out of this. Do you know the history of this religion? But then that church got associated with a church up in Olympia, Washington. And that's what I call the mother church, where a lot of the very culty things came from in the way we lived life.

So I think it's more from up there is where it all started. It's pretty small. It's not very connected with other things. There's a few churches in Oregon, Washington, and then the one in Northern California.

So there's really not many. There's maybe five total. They're really involved. And then the church has its own school where we're all educated.

Whoops. We were taught by parents originally. None of them really had degrees or educations. They weren't teachers.

Some of the classes we were self-taught. I didn't really learn science or anything like that. It was pretty basic. How many parishioners were at the church?

And then how many kids were you in school with? It's grown. So they always say that their church growth plan is be fruitful and multiply. They almost never let people come in from the outside, but they just have lots of kids.

And then they kind of intermarry. And eventually that's going to get interesting. They send women to the other churches so that they kind of have more of a pool to choose from. I was a student teacher a very young time there in school.

And then when I was 15, they said, okay, come to be done. Go take your California high school Christians examination. So I went and took it and I failed. And then I took it a while later.

Once they offered again, after some studying, I passed. I was 16 then. And then at that point, I just taught full time in the school. I was never paid.

It was all free. I didn't have any really education to speak of, but I was one of the teachers, which is somewhat of an esteemed position. You wanted to be a teacher. As a woman in that environment, your job is to be a wife and a mother.

There's nothing else for you. You shouldn't pursue a career. No one should go to college. College is considered to almost be evil.

Getting married is a really huge thing. You have to be recommended for marriage. You have to attain a certain level of status. And the last thing you would want is to be all alone.

The marriages were somewhat arranged. You could express interest in a person as a man if you wanted to. The men who leave the church might say no. They might say yes.

They might say look at someone else. You also might just go to the men and say, who should I marry? And they would tell you who you should marry. As a woman, you do have the right to say no to a marriage offer, but it will probably be your last offer.

Oh my God. This is wild. And is there any visible impropriety? There's no multiple marriages happening.

No full marriage. It's all one-on-one and it's all of age. So they're winning there. Yes, yes.

They're keeping it legal. They look really good from the outside and they do well at that. People are always very impressed. How do I get a part of this?

This is so amazing. You guys are doing such good things. Your kids are so well-behaved. How many boys your age were in your school?

So my school, the Y and Eureka, California, was very small. So at the time I was there, it was only maybe 40 kids in the school. So in my age group, I had five boys. Very few options.

Unless I was to be sent to another church. And did you get a crush on any of them? It's a really, really simple thing to admit that you would have a crush on somebody. So you really have to kind of suppress that part of yourself.

Be very careful not to be seen interacting too heavily with boys. You don't want to touch in any kind of a way or get too close. If they think you might like somebody, it's not going to work out well for you. Generally, you need to leave that to the church.

And how much natural question... did you have i was pretty violent this is my life this is everything i know i've got to do the right thing leaving the church is the ultimate worst thing you could do and so it was really scary i was kind of doing what they wanted me to do the other thing that's interesting about the school day is we did school as a math language till noon and then from noon on we did only music we recorded pretty cds i think wabi-wabi has some pictures oh wow i was 17 in the picture of me and that boy for the listener you're on stage it's a good-sized stage we've got a lot of huge pictures of biblical paintings behind you being put on a projector now that i see the stage i'm assuming the music portion is like the attractive part of the religion like if you were to observe this you'd be oh yeah they're having so much fun they're not trying to recruit which i find interesting well recruiting can get dicey because people aren't usually willing to give everything if they didn't grow up in that environment there's going to be some inherent skepticism it'd be tough when people question things were you guys inviting non-church members to witness the music we would go perform in front of large audiences we would do like christmas performances the cd that i sent the song and the pictures we did box with cantata we did very like intricate difficult music and got pretty good because it's literally everything we do it's pretty insane and comical to listen to because it's like a whole different person so how i left i wasn't the highest i just realized i was doing all right but i was very bought in and then one day my dad sat my whole family down in the living room there's seven of us kids and i'm the oldest and i was 19 at the time and he said we're leaving the church total shock to us we all just started sobbing we were devastated it's our whole life we don't even know people outside the church so it's like the worst thing that could happen to us and i remember he said we could stay for like another month until some performance happened with music so we had to go back to school and my friends were crying in the grocery store crying till they'd throw up like it's the worst thing that could happen we went through the last little bit and we left but the day that he told me we were leaving i called someone who was like a mentor a woman who was higher up as far as women can be and she said to me how much do you love the church do you love the church enough to leave your family and i remember that i thought yes and i said maybe i don't know the next day she took back her offer and said i talked to my husband and he said i need to stay out of it because she had mentioned maybe me coming and living with them and she was like never mind you stay with your family and i was devastated by that and i found out later that my dad had gone and threatened the men of the church and said don't fuck with my family okay i'll try to come after my kids when your dad told you you were all leaving did he give an explanation as to why i don't remember a lot of that day but i know that he had gone to the men of the church and said i don't believe that we're doing things biblically here i think there's some real issues and we should make some changes and they said we don't care you need to either do what we're doing or get out and then when we left the church to me it felt a lot like if you've moved to a different country that was english speaking like now we speak the same language but i don't really get your humor your culture i don't really understand what you're saying i was really shocked by boys just being even mildly you were clutching your pearls a lot it was really scary and lonely it was so hard but i met friends and gradually have become the person i am now it was a very long evolution because there's a lot of boundaries in your head that you might not even realize you have like the pursuing a career i really didn't feel like i could pursue a career and i remember one day early in my husband and i's marriage i said something about one day it'd be cool to go to nursing school and he said you should do it and i was like so shocked by his response because i was like wait i could do it it just didn't seem possible to me i did eventually go to college i was 30 when i took my first ever college class i had nervous shits in between every class it was so scary but i have a bachelor's degree and i'm an er nurse it's so cool to look back and it's a big part because i had people in my life who just supported me and wanted me to be a full person and my husband was a huge part of that any foreign objects what's the term rectal rectal foreign objects there's a cucumber beer bottle oh my god a kid with a lichmec oh no did you watch the pit yes i watched the pit hands down the most accurate medical show i've ever seen there we go the one thing they never get right is nurses are so underrepresented we're doing everything the docs within orders we do it wow really quick did dad find his way to another fringy religion he is a pastor and he has a small church and what about your siblings do they transition well into the worldly world we've all kind of had a hard time in different ways they're all doing good but it's been a struggle mentally it's a lot to get through luckily some of them were a lot younger i was the oldest so some of them had much shorter periods of time that they lived in the religion and they were mostly outside so that helps does it diminish your confidence in your ability to evaluate reality to some degree there's things i have expectations of people how they're gonna treat me and i think that's the most point in my marriage where he'll say something pretty benign and i'm like why are you trying to attack me why are you coming after me i just expect that so we've had to definitely work through some things to me there is nothing more impressive than shedding an old life and starting fresh thank you do you like megan phelps roper have you heard her talk at all i don't think so she was in westboro baptist that wild baptist church that holds the terrible signs up at funerals yes you had a book i'm just in awe of people who can do that me too it's very hard well can my husband come say hi of course hi handsome husband oh there's a cat in the mix my daughter talked me into one and then now we have four oh kind of got duped on that deal yeah i think that's what happens with one cat they're like mogwai all of a sudden you have five it's like they got wet yeah they work their way in there i'm glad you guys got to meet my wife she's a huge fan she's definitely a full package so they're working save a couple lives come home paint the house and send the kids to bed yeah it's good to get someone that really was like brainwashed and had to do a lot of stuff because then just doing normal stuff feels like nothing that's like a hack i had a pretty good inside track on it because i worked with a lot of people she went to church with for about 11 years so i was probably as close as you can get to the inside circle without being on the inside you were well versed that's helpful well so nice meeting both of you guys thanks for sharing all right take care hello is this anna it is hi anna nice to meet you i love your floral wallpaper thank you i'm in a bnb and what state are you visiting i am in toulouse france i live in portland oregon but i'm visiting my friend who is getting married she is the one who recommended this prompt to me we're really cool together oh together that's how you met well we were children but it feels very full circle to me i just arrived today to see her oh how lovely this may or may not shock you but of the three people we've spoken with two are from portland oh interesting yeah i feel like colds are kind of a west coast deal i do too yeah northern cal we had and then that's who wasn't the rajneesh that was oregon too that was eastern oregon yeah the og okay og the original guru no oregon oh yeah that's it okay anna please tell us your experience to be fair to portland oregon i'm in california we're all up and down the coast my group and i grew up in i don't know if you've ever heard of a group called the assembly also called the gift tax assembly no no i've never heard this but i like the name oregon is ominous yeah so the assembly doesn't exist anymore but it was a christian cult basically a protestant church that started in the 70s where we just wanted to go back to basically really minimal people didn't wear makeup they didn't dress up too much people kind of lived communally i think it was kind of nice in the beginning everyone sort of participated you know sang on papella and it was just like forget all that worldly stuff it had a heyday in the 70s it started in california but it was all over there are branches in canada mexico england the other places in south america and did it have a founding charismatic leader george and eddie gattakis are guiding lights they were divinely inspired as far as we were concerned we talked about cold at first i think it's gonna be like fun and sensationalist and wild it's actually just had you know those stories are really grim and a lot more about abuse but i wanted something that had a little more sparkle to it okay okay so my story is about a pseudoscientific medical device that my family used that kind of caught on in our very insular group it's called the zapper and the zapper was supposed to heal you by giving you a very light sustained electric shock okay and i want to be clear this was a preach from the pulpit like the zapper will heal you but it was a kind of environment where we didn't have any other friends and just weird fads would take place and if someone of influence brought in a certain fad one time it was a planner or like a franklin planner it's almost like an mlm that's funny because we actually did a lot of mls together and just sort of marketed to each other basically so to set the scene because i sometimes went on a dark rabbit hole trying to explain the assembly i made a kind of list of our fears and loves which i'll share with you yeah the assembly of the person the assembly loves abstinence all day all night meetings chores which are also called stewardships communal living door-to-door witnessing fellowships which are like really lame parties or the george attack is homeschooling the left behind franchise modesty multi-level marketing street preaching spankings tithing and of course it's after z you have a z and you have an alphabetical list you gotta put it in there so these are fears abortion bikinis evolution government homosexuality when you go to church or you see the service how tied to christianity was it was the bible still being primarily used or had he deviated so much that a lot of what you were learning had nothing to do with the bible in a way we were trying to be so strict unlike you so closely to scripture we thought all the other churches were kind of too diluted but you know the verse about straining a gnat and swallowing a camel no there's a verse that's about foolish people who would strain a gnat and swallow a camel maybe focusing on the real details and swallowing something enormous without even considering it maybe that reference is not the right audience no it makes sense it got so granular that the bigger picture was crazy yeah the thing that made it a high control group was that we believe that our leader and people closely associated with him were receiving divine inspiration if someone suggested something to you like you just sort of did it it wasn't a suggestion it was this is my way of being closer to god yeah so what was novel about the mormons is that the parishioners could receive revelation that was the appealing part as i understand it but in this sect they could at least receive revelations yes my family left when i was probably like 13 i had like the adults or i but i remember the most like us being incredibly bored when i look back and it feels a lot of the revelations are kind of ad hoc and they're kind of convenient well it's like joseph smith's revelations that a man should have multiple wives once he was busted having sex with a young woman that lived next door that's interesting timing of that revelation yeah i don't know how it's called a revelation but by the time i was conscious of participating one of our big things was we didn't do mainstream music we didn't watch film television we didn't even sing in harmony what they were worried there's a lot of pop christian music at the time and people get caught up in the music and the emotion and sort of lose the message so that way we're focused on the message but yeah let's see our fear is government homosexuality eastern mysticism we're like no can do feminism no public schools and their agendas mainstream music makeup we're so scared of satan worshipers we never met any we were talking about them all the time secular holidays we didn't participate in right and really quickly on the zapper i'm guessing it was a pre-existing product that this was an off-label use for or did someone invent this thing within the church the person who seemed to have invented it was like a quack doctor who wasn't part of our church her name was holta clark she's also the author of a quack book called the cure for all diseases she was investigated for medical malpractice i later learned to move to mexico because they're gonna close down her wellness center in california her whole thing was well all diseases including cancer and aids are caused by a parasite in the body so you just need to electrocute the parasite and then you'll be all better so simple crazy how these doctors thought of this oh sure if you commit to like life in the assembly you're asked to push away your friends you're going to meetings every day this group of people done in fuller 10 they're just always sick and doctors could tell them what's wrong with them they were a tease it was headaches sometimes it's stomachache they wouldn't have any energy like they just weren't well george and meddy would give them like a special diet they would follow and that wouldn't work we started to call it fullerton disease when i do this as an adult i think fullerton disease is probably depression when you're a kid in the assembly pit sucked right because you're in meetings all day like you're getting like spankings all the time so many rules you don't celebrate Christmas you're just like this sucks but the best thing in the world is to be sick or someone in your family is sick everyone's looking after you you don't have to participate oh god this is like producing munchausen yeah yeah yeah yeah it's late 90s the apocalypse is kind of around the corner we're big in the white dk we need like our best soldiers on the ground but people coming down with fullerton disease so enter this amazing device that's gonna solve what doctors and diet i can't suddenly we're all zapping around the late 90s imagine a black plastic box maybe around the size of your face or smaller with a little light on the top inside it's got batteries and wires and stuff and it's got an on-off switch wires are coming out of it the wires kind of leave these two copper handles and you're meant to hold onto the handles and just turn on the thing and get an electric shock but work up to 20 minutes if it wasn't working you could get a paper towel wet and put that over and get like a little more shock oh jesus okay juice it up a little bit exactly i'm thinking of basically the lie detector device that's been rebranded within Scientology where you hold the handles and you get an e-meter you did it yeah i did it at the celebrity center you went to the celebrity center you don't know this story no i don't know this story either what how come we've done all this Scientology wait you should be a caller i wasn't joining we had an improv show at ucb yeah cross the sorry i'll commandeer yeah but this needs immediate attention the Scientology Center had the recruitment day and it was exciting and fair and we were like we're gonna go as a bit as a bit but also what are they gonna say yeah yeah yeah reconnaissance yeah we all went to this movie theater and there was a woman there who was in charge of us she was very odd i would say and we watched this crazy movie about Scientology it's not produced considering the people who are involved in Scientology they have a TV station too it's not good they have Tom act in the movie at the very least famous writers have been involved exactly then they separated us all and we had to do the thing with the hands and then they told us they asked questions how much you're holding how much you're not it's very primitive psychology for like a lie detector test yeah it's a polygraph yeah but even way more basic than that anyway okay so it sounds like a similar setup you're acting even less than what you're describing even like reducing any kind of results or anything well this isn't it either they tell you a result so you were doing the zapper 20 minutes a day yeah we were zapping a lot you know you felt like you're coming down with something you might zap or just kind of proactively you can zap in my head I associated with like a punishment I remember my parents being like go zap your parasite was acting up yeah I think it was like a parasite you're out of control my mom she likes to be active she can't just sit and hold something for 20 minutes that's torture to her she was the same stress she wanted to be like working at her sewing table I remember this one used to take the copper rods and just like put them down the back of her pants oh they need to make skin contact but it didn't matter what kind of skin yeah my dad notices this he's an engineer he's got his own shop where he works with some industrial tools so he goes away and like makes his own modification where instead of the two round handles which fans he makes it to her butt cheek shaped sort of thing like big spoons yeah exactly then you can just put them down this is madness this is how he's spending his time someone knocks on the door and walks into this scene oh yeah this is an original manufacturing this is a hybrid to do what to kill the parasite obviously the weirdest bit is now if someone else in the family is using it you know it's like been down the month I'm sure you got on your cheeks or something I forgot about that they've been on mom's bottom cheeks at 13 how do we get out of this my mom decided she was going to leave she's not like going to leave she's not like going to leave she's not going to leave she's not going to leave she's not going to leave she's not going to leave she got out of the apartment she bought a car and disappeared away to this other like just to get out when you live in this kind of environment you don't know who you are or what your favorite color is you can't have a conversation you just crack did she stay in the same town as you so we lived in San Luis Obispo and she went to Atascadero I know Atascadero very well is it close it's the same county so she didn't go very well oh my gosh there's also probably a perimetopause and her hormones oh you think this is on all fours kind of it's a little bit all fours book and then after about a year my dad decided to remove the family from the group because he was just kind of seeing them for who they really were yeah it ruined his family how is the celibate command working out is there celibacy within the marriage oh not within the marriage sex is only okay in this really specific context but there's this idea of no sex outside of marriage you weren't supposed to have crushes you didn't really date you weren't really supposed to like have desire you were just obeying god's command oh this is wild there's a lot of these there are there's so many like you're not thinking when you're driving through San Luis Obispo that's the home of Cal Poly and that these engineers are involved I know that's a stereotype but I guess I imagine how could an engineer get trapped into this it's the spinning and that's all in a camel thing you guys have to focus on engineering this effort that you're not thinking about why are we trying to do it yeah we really think George and Fullerton has all the answers and he ever got busted having multiple lovers founders he definitely did have multiple liaisons a lot of allegations against him to be honest why else deal with all the obligations of having cult followers you're not having sex with like what is the reward power what's the point of power if not sex with hot people for you for men i mean that's what power is about really it wasn't totally monetarily driven but the tithing you give a percentage of 10 percent of your earnings to the church that's ongoing to george finnerton quickly to tie this bow on it your friend's wedding so she was a member of the church and she presumably left as well yeah her family left a little bit earlier under the guise of oh we have to move away so the task at arrow tomorrow i'm gonna see her get married on saturday i'm gonna see a lot of old family friends from the assembly days wow oh that'll be such an interesting reunion yeah what a group to get together with well and a nice meeting you thanks for telling us that thank you so much all right trip bye hi is this francesca this is me i'm so nervous oh don't be nervous you have a very cute sweater on and do you go buy something shorter than francesca because i can go all the way with francesca but do you have like a nickname people call me fran or my dad calls me frankie oh i love that that's so cute i used to hate it but i like it now yeah what age do you think you get to when you finally start liking all this cute stuff your parents when you feel like they might die oh once they die yeah once or they're getting close then you love it yeah yeah yeah oh did you make a fort for us i did and i've really found my center in here because i was really nervous and it feels good just to sit here in the slight dark cozy do you do any breathing exercises or anything i try but they're not working okay where are you are you in portland oregon no i'm in big sky montana oh okay so you've got a cult story francesca fran frankie i sure do what if i said frankie and she just started bawling yeah it's too dangerous but i want you to be okay you just need to ask and then i'll officially say yes everyone's dad no you want to see my dad that's my dad oh that's a sweet picture so if you're wondering who joined the cult it was these people they're so cute they look like they're on either a seals and croft or a art garfunkel and paul simon album i feel like they're in italy oh are they in italy in that photo i don't think so i'm guessing they're in kepsis okay okay so those gorgeous young people they found their way into something what was it they met these two people their names were trina and stephen they met them at a rebirthing seminar i don't know if you guys have ever heard of that i don't really know what it is either it's just where you practice redoing your birth it was the early 80s wait you're reenacting your own birth so that if you had any trauma coming in you can get rid of it they joined trina and stephen because trina believed she could transfer a spirit through her body a dead trans medium is what she was called so she would leave her body and then the spirit would take over and that's what i did on sundays pretty much from when i was born until i was 18 oh my god you go see trina channel spirits so they collected a bunch of people it was called the collective was an actual collective so they all shared money and everything but by the time i was born it was not so much a collective everyone had their own money this was in texas it was in arizona we went to trance every sunday it was like a dimly lit room everyone entered and we would sing which was my favorite part because the only part that made sense to me so we would sing a song and then she would meditate and then the spirit would come through dr duran who was a 14th century doctor and basically he would say a sermon and then he would open up for questions so people basically sought advice from him how many folks were in attendance normally 100 at its peak when i was growing up it was probably more like 50 and was it held in a church or what kind of space we had this trance room that was locked out no windows or anything because she needed darkness but it wasn't so dark that you and it's so hard because this was real for all of us but it wasn't obviously but i grew up in it so it was all i knew yeah i just remember being a kid sitting in church and going like i don't know were you having any battle later on when i got older but no they created chaos so that you just wanted to be a part of this family so she doesn't even have kids and grandkids and there was a hierarchy they were treated better than my family it was all based on money and i realize that now they targeted people who had rich families and my mom had wealthy parents my dad didn't but my parents weren't giving any money because my grandparents wouldn't provide so they were basically just treated like the lowest on the totem pole my mom and dad never had a chance i'm surprised they weren't like we gotta get out of here no one's even being nice to us if you can't climb the ladder yeah what's the incentive we were told that we are the closest to god because we're with the spirit in this lifetime so it did have some like buddhist principles we believed in reincarnation and we believe that this life was our last because we were with the spirit so we were special i see was it christianity linked or no not really we would make fun of it a little bit so trance you never knew what you were going to get sometimes it was him like oh my god you guys need to lighten up and have a party literally the spirit talking through who was telling us this or he would rip people to shreds and then after trance sometimes there were like processes where the adults would all get together and they'd all drink alcohol and just like rip each other a new one wow i wasn't there i was too young but i was usually babysitting the kids by the time they got home you could tell they'd been crying and just unregulated oh my god okay this again is like the game this kind of group participation therapy where you call out each other's character defects people would make stuff up just to like get the attention off of them yeah that was what's happening in the games like you want to sit down with a gun loaded to direct at someone else to get the heat off yourself so you're like incentivized yeah it was pretty bad there were good parts like growing up in tono village i had a bunch of friends and it was dirt roads and it was a good place to grow up but it was pretty toxic we had our own school you weren't encouraged to go out and get a degree or anything you were encouraged to just stay small service was a big thing people who weren't even qualified would be teaching at the school with no pay free bad teaching this is what we offer we think teachers who do get paid don't get paid enough i was so afraid of everybody it was so scary but also i wanted their approval so bad but my dad was always kind of like half in half out he didn't actually want to go he did it for my mom and so when i was seven they divorced and he kind of left the community but even before that he was just painted as a terrible person because he didn't want to be there and that showed i knew my dad was a good guy i loved him but people would talk crap about him in front of me oh that's the cruelest thing you can do to a kid yeah that was part of the problem with trance was you were like asking a question and then you're airing all of your shit in front of everybody and in front of the kids do you know what it was that your mom was getting out of it at first you wanted a community and then they ended up creating chaos to where it's like if you leave the community you're leaving all of your friends your family you'll lose everything and that's what they do they make it so that you can't leave there were people who left but it sounds easy to just pick up and leave but it's not you don't have anything yeah starting from scratch how far did your dad move he just moved down to phoenix area so i would still see him but not very often so later on when i was 11 years old my mom decided to get a boyfriend who did not want to be in the community it was just kind of looked down upon to have a boyfriend at all and he was a vietnam vet he's sort of abusive so i had to live with him for a little bit basically my mom was shunned because she wanted to be with this man who didn't want to be in the community so there was a point around that time where i was also shunned the whole community was having thanksgiving at you and i wasn't allowed to go i like met with my sister and she's like saying you're not allowed my oldest sister i'm the youngest of five but she was my person when my mom wasn't around why was she allowed to go because she had her own life she actually got pregnant at 16 that was part of it too you get married and you have babies assigned marriages she had a baby at 16 because they told her don't wear a condom it hurts how old was the dude he was only a couple years older than her but they ended up getting married and then torn apart because one of the leader's daughters wanted to marry the guy she was with oh yeah my sister's the real mvp she's the first born child of the cult and i say it shows so she told me i can't go they're mad at my mom and i was like heartbroken about that so later on i'm going to feed my horses and i'm walking past you and steven's houses which is where everyone was gathered and my friend scout came outside she's like what are you doing innocently she's like come on we're all having a party and i was like okay so i go up the stairs and i get abused by steven camp who is the leader he just screamed at me in front of everyone told me that i can't be there i need to go home and i'm 11 years old oh my god what a fucking coward oh he was a scary scary guy i don't even remember to be honest what i did after that it was pretty traumatizing so i had moved out of the house because of the guy she was with so i moved in with my sister for a little while and then i was gonna move back i was told this later but paul her boyfriend didn't want me to move back in and so he asked her for a divorce and then after that my mom took her own life oh my goodness what a horrific you've really been through the ringer after my mom died it was kind of like my family was finally in it we were finally treated better which is just absolutely crazy oh they decided to extend some compassion or they feel guilty i think they felt guilty basically she just lost her whole support system because the women in the family all stopped talking to her and then the guy that she was doing it for wanted to leave her and he was just a terrible person what age were you when that happened i was 11 oh jesus it was rough i don't blame them for it but i do think my mom dying did shatter the glass a little had people questioning what the fuck are we doing here and then i didn't actually leave myself because i was young but i ended up living with multiple different families plus my sister and it just got worse once i was living with the cult leader's daughter and they're really sweet like everyone's a victim to this i think including their children i had a boyfriend at 15 i went to trance one time and i got called a whore in trance my spirit called me a whore was that boyfriend part of this no he wasn't when you were around other people were you like embarrassed to talk about it no it was kind of a joke like oh you guys live in common village you guys are part of that cult and we're like yeah you guys think it's a cult it's not i listened to a recent recording of a trance which is the only one i had i don't know where they all are because they recorded them all in the recording he says yeah because everyone out there thinks we're a cult we're not they were always trying to stress that we're not a cult in school they showed us jim jones and david koresh they showed us those and they're like see that's a cult if no one gets murdered it's yeah how'd you exit eventually my sister moved down to the valley down to phoenix she tried to stay in it but basically if you're away they're not really letting you do it everybody tithes money everyone was paying for trina and stephen's life for her weekly show exactly my sister went up there to tithe and i guess she was trying to quit smoking one of the cult leader's daughters said oh dosh is trying to quit smoking and trina went smoking doesn't cause cancer and dosh was like okay that's it like that was your last straw well 14th century doctors don't really know yet about small cell carcinoma the irony too of the spirit being invoked somehow would have some elevated something because they were a 14th century doctor like nobody on earth right now would be as bad of a doctor as a 14th century doctor right and he would give medical advice oh god what blood pressure medication are you i don't like it oh my god even though he only dealt in blood bleeding and probably leeches yeah like my friend's mom died of a stroke if we were getting actual medical care we would have known that she had high blood pressure but instead we were listening to the spirit so that kind of stuff makes me really angry did you end up having a relationship with your dad turns out he had manic bipolar which he also would have known if therapy was a thing or if medical psychology was a thing so i ended up having a relationship with him and then it kind of fell out because i didn't go live with him i lived with my sister and then he had a huge episode kept having episodes he would get off his meds on his meds and then he started doing drugs and so now his brain is pretty frapped yeah oh man we still have a relationship with him we love him he comes over for dinner and everything but he's just not the same guy francesca you have been dealt quite a fucking hand my lord the fact that you're in that cute sweater and put together i made this sweater oh my gosh so cute one of the guys from the cult is a chess master because there's like this whole thing steven was obsessed with chess he was a co-founder of chess.com which is where you play online chess and he just wrote a book and it's coming out in september and it's going to be about the cult a little bit and also his chess journey did he ultimately leave the cult will it be a critical look at the cult yes everyone has left the cult there's still people that still have it in their brain they're so brainwashed that it's still real for him including my dad he'll go in and out because he was so abused by them but yeah the cult is dismantled i want to see trina's show i wish she would just do it at a black box theater so i could see it as like a one woman show she used to do public trances she passed actually she died three years ago it was like an alcohol induced dementia which makes sense i still don't know if she was in on it right it's hard to know that or was it steven like saw this craziness about her and decided to capitalize on it i wish i could be a fly on the wall to hear a conversation that went on if we're to like just look at the pattern of history and acknowledge it as real i mean hunches steven was somehow pulling the strings of this whole definitely but i think probably at some point whether she started off believing it i'm sure at some point she did believe she was channeling this person yeah i don't think you can keep that up for that long if it's a full ruse this is a terrible false equivalency but we've talked about it on here with other improv people a lot of comedians have certain characters i have a couple of them that when i start talking like them they have a whole language that i don't necessarily have robot it's true the second i'm talking as frito all of these thoughts are just very quickly there they're not my normal thoughts i've not even tried to embrace that in a way that would be my identity but i understand the notion of feeling like you're creating things that aren't really yours does that make sense yeah for her to buy into it i don't think it'd be that hard to buy into it yeah i mean not to get so buddhist but we are all sort of buying into our identities all the time it's not that much of a stretch to believe something about yourself and then just be it yeah i think your brain does crazy stuff especially if you have some dementia going on later on yeah i'm impressed you've made it out and i'm doing okay me and all my siblings are doing pretty well good happy to hear that my sister i just want to shout her out her name is tosh she raised me pretty much oh good on you tosh shout out well francesca thank you for sharing all that with us that's heavy and i'm sorry for all that i'm sure we'll help a lot of people you never know who's listening who might be like in a bad situation and needs to be heard and seen yeah just know that they're creating chaos to keep you there yeah yeah well thank you so much for chatting with us yeah it was so nice to meet you guys i can't believe this this is crazy really nice to meet you all right take care bye what you would hope people would hear is there's such a pattern to all this exactly they all do almost the same thing the arranged marriage piece is interesting that that's come up multiple times the beating you down the group criticism yeah if any of these things are happening in your book club you know maybe the book club isn't maybe take a second my teeth look really white yeah you have exceptionally white and nice teeth if you want to have white teeth just join join now for 1999 and i'll also throw in a free sermon i want to see you channel and talk in tongues i want you to lose your marbles a little bit for an hour every sunday i would go to your show then you'd be laughing at me and then i'd cry no you wouldn't you'd be a warlock from the 14th century i understand how it happens you're there and it's what you know but it's so amazing what the brain does it can't just pull out for a minute but they do the job of saying it's not a cult i was exposed to some weird stuff i went to church on sundays two different religions whatever that's standard but my father was also quite woo right like through aa he found ac away adult children about politics and in the course of miracles and then oh it's fine but i was in a basement with him where a guy's like making someone hold something then pushing on your liver and then pushing the arm down a lot of the people that are in a are there and they're kind of intrigued by it there's crystals i don't want to sound like a pat on the back to myself or casting any shame on anybody but i'm just not very susceptible I was like, what the fuck? Okay, but the reason you weren't is because you had an environment that also lives opposite that. Yes, in fact, applauded critical skepticism.

Yeah, so if everyone you know is doing one thing, there's no way. I'm not suggesting that I too couldn't be this way. I just am remembering that I was in lots of different situations where I was like, this is horseshit. And this is why they don't want to let other people in.

They shouldn't invite me in because I'll probably be like, hold on, how do you know about that? That was invented in the 16th century. I'd like bust the 14th century doctor. Then everyone would stand up and go, oh my God, the spell's been broken.

Thank you, Dax Shepard. You are our new leader. A new song for this new show. So here I go, go, go.

We're going to ask some random questions and with the help of all sharing some suggestions I'm the Flyer Rindish. I'm the Flyer Rindish. Enjoy.