Full Transcript for S1E8: Dr. John Hunter: The Neuroscience of LGAT Experiences

mania. And then mania would sit above that. it's not exactly the opposite of depression, but it kind of is. So with depression, you feel a very low sense of self-worth, very low energy, a lot of pessimism, a lot of kind of sense of guilt and shame and fear and inadequacy and that kind of thing. Whereas when you are hyper manic or manic, Often you feel the opposite of that. feel incredibly euphoric and confident and optimistic and full of energy and full of the sort of sense that you can achieve anything in life. so, yeah, so basically I was diagnosed in 2003 after a sort three month manic episode, which is quite a very long time to spend in this elevated state. And then I sunk into a very severe depression and I was diagnosed. And then from 2003 to 2010, um, I spent quite a lot of time just learning about the disorder, trying to understand the triggers. So what would lead to further episodes because it can be quite debilitating, particularly if you don't manage it well. Um, and I learned that. Over that period, learned that three of the major triggers were psychological stress. So being put through situations where you just feel a huge amount of pressure, you know, and that stress can come in a number of different forms. So feelings of guilt and shame, inadequacy, fear, basically negative feelings can be ⁓ a trigger for these elevated states. Then the second trigger I learned about was goal attainment. So ⁓ basically reaching a goal. So when you've been striving for something and you suddenly achieve it, that can be something that can trigger these elevated states. And the third one was sleep disruption or sleep deprivation. So being deprived of sleep. So this again is relevant because in 2010, I started working at a company and as part of their induction, they asked that everyone take part in these two personal development centers. And this was my introduction to LGATs or large group awareness trainings. And they didn't really tell us much about what to expect, but very basically the first seminar that I took part in ran from Thursday until Sunday. It started at six o'clock on a Thursday evening after a full day at work. It ran until about two in the morning. And then they gave us homework to do on top of that. Then we went to work on Friday, started the seminar again at six o'clock on Friday evening, ran until about two in the morning, gave us homework on top of that. Started at nine o'clock on Saturday, ran until midnight, homework again. And then Sunday, I think it started at maybe nine or 10 and finished at six. So Sunday was quite different. But to summarize those four days, it was the most stressful. experience that I think I've been through. So a group of us, I think there were about 24 of us, and then there was a trainer, a lot of exercises, a lot of interactions that seem to be designed to generate a lot of stress and shame and guilt and humiliation and that sort of thing. Obviously very long hours, very long sessions, you couldn't really use the bathroom, shouting at a lot, lot of swearing, visualizations about painful childhood experiences, that kind of thing. And so I was there sitting and I was thinking, well, this is incredibly stressful. This is something that I generally try to avoid as a trigger. Then there was the sleep disruption and I was like, well, this is also something that I tried to avoid. And then on the Sunday, the atmosphere switched from being, you know, very, what I would call abusive, but at least oppressive to being very uplifting. a lot of love shown from the trainer, a lot of hugging between participants. You've graduated, you're wonderful, you're one of us, those kinds of things. And that to me seemed like a very clear indication of goal attainment. as somebody had been really trying to manage these conditions in my life, I thought, well, the seminar seems to almost be designed, if I had to design an environment to generate a harmonic episode, This is what it would look like. So that was the first part. And then the second part, which was quite striking was that they had promised us an experience after participating. they said, you're going to experience a called a transformation or a breakthrough. And they described what it would be like to some degree. They said, you're going to feel incredible. You're going to feel the best you've ever felt in your life. Anything's going to feel like it's possible. The entire way that you view the world is going to change. And I just thought, well, that sounds. you know, identical to hypermania and mania. Yeah. And so after completing the seminar, I started looking into it in a bit more depth. And I found out that there were these seminars that were basically using exactly the same processes that I had used all around the world and strangely exactly the same process that the podcast, I mean, the YouTuber from Taiwan ended up speaking about last year. And all these people spoke about the same conditions. So massive psychological stress, sleep disruption, goal attainment, same structure, generally over three, four, sometimes five days. And they all spoke about the same effects of participation. And when I looked at the effects in a lot more depth, I I read hundreds and hundreds of documents that people had written about their experiences. You would see euphoria. You would hear about excessive confidence. So people suddenly becoming more confident, becoming very energetic, often needing less sleep for at least a couple of days, becoming quite decisive. with heart mania, you hear about impulsivity. So people making very big decisions, maybe being a little bit more risky in terms of spending money, maybe in terms of ⁓ sexually taking more risks than they would otherwise take, but making big decisions. And what you would see in these old gats is that people were spending huge amounts of money. They were often changing jobs or quitting jobs, people getting divorced very abruptly. And this was coming up at a very

unusual rate. So those were some of the things that I noticed. So I ended up going back to university in 2013. And I started studying psychology and I ended up doing a PhD on these seminars and effectively just drawing a very clear picture by bringing a lot of evidence together that they all involve this pattern in terms of the stress, sleep disruption, the goal attainment and the effects of participation look very similar, if not identical to hypermania and mania. Occasionally you would actually see people at the very extreme of mania experiencing psychosis, which again is something that's linked to it's about early disorder. And then you also have a percentage of people that would be elevated, but they would come down and they wouldn't come down to normal. They would end up falling below the normal range of mutin. They'd feel quite depressed afterwards and quite concerned about themselves and lack motivation a lot. you know, over the last 50 years that these things have been around, there've been a lot of claims of suicide and that kind of thing as well. So that all seemed very interesting to me. So I tried to do some research on it to draw a bit of attention to it. But as you probably are aware, it's not always easy to do that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's been so normalized, especially I'm from San Francisco, California, the home of many occult and a you so yeah, if you You mentioned that that's been going on for like 50 years and in the case you were looking at yeah What's the history as far as where you jumped in? Yeah, I mean so It's very difficult to say this is where they started because that almost gives too much credit to the people that came about in the early 1970s. it would seem that almost every person that starts one of these type of organizations likes to claim that they basically started it from zero, that they had no influence at all. But as soon as you start speaking to people, you realize that they're all influenced by something. You know, in the 1950s and the 1960s, ⁓ there were things called sensitivity groups and T groups and encounter groups. those sort of involved a lot of confrontation in relatively small groups. ⁓ In the 1970s, well, let's go back a little bit. in the late 1960s, an organization called Mind Dynamics, ⁓ came about, I think in 1967, it was run by somebody named Alexander Everett. And they were effectively selling these courses to help people to achieve a certain mental state. And they may be called an alpha state of awareness. the writing on mind dynamics, it didn't seem like, at least initially, that it was particularly confrontational. There were long lectures, were various exercise and visualizations that you would see in in OLGATS later on, but it didn't really have too much of that harsh element and it didn't really have that ⁓ that MLM elements where you see in OLGATS where you have almost ⁓ a heavy emphasis on recruiting by graduates. ⁓ So. There were a number of people involved with mind dynamics and of the early LGATs, almost all of them were trainers. What I would call the early LGATs, all of them pretty much were trainers at mind dynamics. So you had Werner Ehrhardt who ended up forming Ehrhardt Seminars Training or EST in 1971, which later became Werner Ehrhardt and Associates. And then it became Landmark Education. And then it became landmark worldwide, is still around now. And I mean, the lineage is very kind of clear. But then you also had, for example, John Hanley, was a ⁓ trainer at Mind Dynamics. And along with ⁓ several other people who were also trainers at Mind Dynamics, he formed LifeSpring, which I think came about 1974. ⁓ so it was Robert White and Randy Revel and Charlene Afrimaux and John Hanley formed LifeSpring. And just to give you a sense of how these organizations are interrelated. So, ⁓ Charlene Afrimaux was a founder of, trained Earhart when he started at Mind Dynamics. So she was a trainer at Mind Dynamics. Then she was one of the founders of LifeSpring. Then I think she moved back to Est for a while. And then she ended up back at Life spring for a little while and then she ended up at Landmark until the end of her career, know, so there was a lot of interaction between them. ⁓ There was another organization called SiaSendRs, which is still around, or SiaWorld, ⁓ which was founded by Thomas Wilhite and Jane Wilhite. And Thomas Wilhite, who's passed away now, he was also a trainer at Mind Dynamics. it really was a... Quite an incestuous group. was also Stuart Emery. So he formed an organization called Actualizations. But before he did that, he was the first CEO of Est with Werner Ayer. Then he broke away and formed Actualizations. a lot of these, the organizations that exist today can be traced back to mind dynamics. Okay. So, I mean, that would be the one part of the story. I think a very important part to mention, and this is covered by Stephen Pressman and his book on Werner Erhardt, but it's also covered ⁓ by a number of other people in the sort 80s and 90s. There was another organization closely linked to mind dynamics called Leadership Dynamics Institutions. And they offered a seminar which was far more harsh. than the seminars that had been offered by Mind Dynamics. And if you read the descriptions of what went on at Leadership Dynamics, ⁓ I mean, there was an article written by Mark Fisher in 1987 in the Washington Post called, I cried enough to fill a glass. And he talks about John Hanley's participation in Leadership Dynamics. Steven Pressman talks about Earhart's participation in and leadership dynamics and they talk about things like people being tied to crosses and locked in coffins and screamed at and shouted at and I mean literally things like being forced to eat garbage and feces and the men in the training would be asked to fillet a fake penis while women doing the female version of the training would be asked to come in and watch to generate humiliation. So it was almost the most brutal and

unfiltered version of an L-Gap. But what they noticed is that at the end of these marathon sessions of extreme pressure and stress, people would be in these very elevated states afterwards. So, know, Hanley, when he writes his book, he said, you know, that was one of the most powerful things that he he'd seen and you could certainly see how these trainers that took something from mind dynamics, but then also realized that there's something going on over here that seems to be leading to a powerful experience in people. if there's some way for us to package it and sell it, then we can possibly make quite a lot of money. And if you look into the history of Earhart, if you look into the history of Handley, these are salesmen. didn't have backgrounds in psychology or psychiatry or... neuroscience or anything like that. They tend to dress themselves up, you know, after the fact, you know, once they've generated their product, then they start developing a ⁓ law around themselves. But at the time, you could say very clearly that their backgrounds were sales. I mean, certainly in the case of Hanley, who was a convicted felon, and certainly in the case of Earhart, it would be some who would say that ⁓ some of these sales ventures beforehand, ⁓ involve quite a lot of hard pressure type, type. So the hard sell, humiliating, guilting, shaming, all the tactics that, ⁓ people make excuses for. Yeah. And maybe sort of your one more thing before, before, ⁓ thing that's very relevant is that holiday magic was basically an organization that was tied to. leadership dynamics and tied to mind dynamics. And Holiday Magic was, from what I remember, I might be getting it a little bit wrong, I believe they were shut down for being a multi-level marketing or pyramid type of organization in early 1970s. So there was this element of sales, there was this element of highly abusive trainings coming from the leadership dynamics, and there was this element of kind of visualizations and almost hypnotic type of processes that were coming from mind dynamics. And you can kind of see how those things came together. There's also a fair amount of good evidence that Erhard, for example, had participated in Scientology prior to forming EST. So the organizations differ To some degree, each founder has got kind of their own background and their own flavor that they add to it. Some more than others. But scarily enough, mean, the seminar that I took in 2010 was pretty much identical exercises to what I've read about taking place in the early 1970s in Est and life. I mean, literally the songs that we sang had the same words. The music that was played was identical. some of the games that we played were literally identical. And the organization that I took part through didn't claim to have any linkage to either of those ⁓ big organizations. So a lot of copying and pasting by the ⁓ people running these things. Okay, that was a lot. yeah. Yeah. No, it's fantastic. I just think it's really helpful. You know, as we as individuals come out of whichever organization or couple of organizations we got sucked into, to be able to step back and understand in a larger context, they're not special. They didn't invent it. It's intended, it's known to have these effects. usually wants you to sign up again or come back or recruit people. ultimately, is not, it's sold to be in your best interest and that these people are trustworthy to help you grow, transform, whatever flavor of that. But ultimately, what we see is it is not in most and many people's best interest. It is deceitful what they're selling. Uh, yeah, I mean, I would say that that's certainly the case. And I'm, definitely a lot more familiar with certain organizations than with others. So, I mean, I've had some exposure to, to ISTA and I've kind of had a quick look at, you know, what, sort of goes on there. But my focus was on EST, LifeSpring, Landmark, and those organizations are, the, the history of them is quite easy to, to pin down and. and work out. ⁓ And I can certainly comment on what I think about their marketing, about the information that they provide to people beforehand. And I think that there are a lot of problems with what they're communicating to people in terms of what the evidence shows compared to what they are saying. Yeah. So when you did this deep research, you did all of this background context, what is an L-GAP, you also did a whole other line of inquiry, which was actually looking into what's happening, a theory of the dopaminergic defense mechanism. Yeah, I mean, I, and I always have to be very cautious with this, because I think it's, the explanation is, is very intuitively. appealing because it kind of makes sense when you hear it, but it's a theory, it's a hypothesis. And I want to be very clear about that and I can explain what that was. But basically my PhD consisted of, I would say, three major parts. The first part was describing what goes on in the seminars by bringing a whole bunch of evidence together and kind of showing this is exactly what takes place in these things. I mean, they say... They say it's going to be a vigorous inquiry, but then you hear about people being shamed for being raped and for being beaten and quite consistently. I say nice. It's good to bring together so many different accounts from so many different ⁓ seminars in different parts of the world that makes it very difficult for somebody to say, ⁓ that was just a rogue trainer or that was a... You can see that this is part of the process. The way of speaking to people, the way of engaging is very much part of what they call their technology. So first part involved describing what goes on and describing how people respond to it. And basically mapping that against the triggers of bipolar disorder and the symptoms of bipolar disorder. The second part was to try to come up with, to theorize an explanation for for what was going on because people have been noticing these things for

the last 50 years, but they weren't able to explain why it was happening. there've been dozens and dozens of lawsuits against these organizations for psychological harm, for psychosis, for suicide attempts, for suicide, those sorts of things. But you know, in 1987, there was an article written by a researcher from University of California, can't remember which one, ⁓ Morton Lieberman. And he said, he said, there's no reason for us to assume based on what we know about these seminars, that they couldn't cause psychiatric harm. So there's no reason for us to think that they couldn't cause harm. But at the moment, there's no theory to explain a relationship. between what happens in the seminars and these things that we've been seeing and things that they've been saying with like manic type behavior, the psychosis, the depression, suicidal type of stuff. So there was no theory to explain it. So what I wanted to do was offer an explanation for it. So. There were two things that are, there were two existing theories on bipolar disorder that I thought, okay, these seem to maybe explain what's going on. So the first theory that I looked at was an old theory linked to Freud. It was one of Freud's students. It was from 1911. So old theory, but basically the idea of defense mechanisms. So if you know anything about Freud, you know the idea of repression and regression or whatever. These are ways that we protect ourselves. from things that feel uncomfortable. So one of his students, Carl Abram, had a theory called the manic defense hypothesis. And the idea there was that mania, so this elevated state, was like an exaggerated defense against feelings of guilt and shame and inadequacy and fear. And basically, when things are making you feel very low, then there's this unconscious force, which is how he described it, because they didn't really have the neuroscience. time, this unconscious force that fights against these negative feelings. So get these things making you feel negative. And then this unconscious force fights against those to kind of keep you in balance. So to keep you in equilibrium or homeostasis. And in the case of people with bipolar disorder, this defensive force becomes too powerful. And instead of just keeping you in balance, pushes you up and elevates you above the normal range of mood. I mean, people can scoff at Freud, but homeostasis is something that we understand really well. When it's hot, our body wants to cool us down. When our sugar levels are low, it tells us to go and eat something. our bodies and brains are constantly trying to keep us in balance. So I thought, well, that makes sense. And in terms of the LGAD environment, you've got this very extreme environment creating this. downforce, which may create a very extreme up force to kind of make you feel like you can cope with it. And then you've got this goal attainment at the end. So the stress is removed. so maybe that's what's leading. mean, literally this is how simple the idea was in my brain. So I okay, well, that's kind of interesting, but psychodynamic and Freudian type of theories are very difficult to test. And that's all very interesting. Are there any other sort of more recent? ideas about bipolar disorder. And there were a couple of papers published, you know, after the turn of the century, up until about 2017. ⁓ And I was, my PhD was only finished in 2017, that spoke about something called the dopamine hypothesis of bipolar disorder. And the very simplified idea here, and I always have to throw in caveats because if they're neuroscientists listening, they'll take me apart. because the brain's obviously incredibly complicated and there's lots going on. And if you say, it's just dopamine, you know, it's rarely, there's so much else going on. But the idea was that dopamine, which is a chemical in your brain, plays a big role in the elevated side of bipolar disorder and mania and depression. So an elevation of dopamine can lead to manic or hyper manic symptoms and a depletion of dopamine can lead to... depressive symptoms. And there were a lot of good reasons for thinking that. there's certain drugs that they give to people with Parkinson's disease. And often when they give these people levodopa or L-dopa, which elevates dopamine, they start showing these manic-like ⁓ symptoms. were other, you know, if you look at the effects of dopaminergic drugs like cocaine or amphetamine, They look very similar to hypermania, this high level of energy and optimism and seeing the world in a positive light and lack of need for sleep. so there were those sorts of things. I mean, there were even some really interesting things which are ⁓ less universal, but they noticed that there were some people that had bipolar disorder and Parkinson's disease. And Parkinson's is because of a breakdown of dopamine-producing neurons. Sometimes when these people had a manic episode, their movement would improve. And they knew that the problems with the movement were because of a lack of dopamine. So when they were manic and suddenly their movement improved, it suggested that dopamine might be involved. But very, very simply, there was this idea that an elevation in dopamine could lead to at least symptoms that look like hypermania and mania, whether or not that causes bipolar disorder or not is still up for ⁓ debate. It's a lot more complicated than that. So thought, okay, great. So we got this dopamine hypothesis. Is there any relationship between ⁓ what goes on in L-GATS and dopamine? So is there any relationship between stress and dopamine, between sleep disruption and dopamine, between goal attainment and dope men. And initially when I started speaking to people, because when I came up with this, I hadn't studied psychology before. I had seen what was going on. was trying to figure it out based on my own learning about bipolar disorder, having lived with the illness. And I spoke to a couple of psychiatrists and professors and they said,

actually stress leads to depletion of dope. And so I thought, ⁓ okay, well, that's... Totally the opposite of what I thought. So anyway, there goes my idea. But the more that I looked into it, I started seeing that there was a subtlety to that relationship. And the way I often explain it is it's a little bit like the relationship between exercise and perspiration or exercise and sweat. So initially when you start exercising, your body wants to cool you down. it produces perspiration in order to to cool you down and that has a homeostatic effect. So that allows you to kind of stay in balance in terms of body temperature. But if you keep running or if you keep exercising indefinitely without, you know, rehydrating, it's going to lead to a depletion of moisture in your body. And so a lot of the research on stress and dopamine was speaking about it in terms of chronic stress, like this long-term stress that would lead to this depletion of dopamine and the symptoms associated with that. like... lack of motivation, anhedonia, like all of those kinds of things. But there was quite a lot of good research and I mean, a lot of good research showing that acute stress, so shorter term stress that people or animals, ⁓ thought that they could escape from. So escapable stress, dopamine would elevate. And so long-term stress, dopamine depletion. short-term escapable stress, seems like dopamine would elevate. And that also kind of makes sense if you think about it, because in the same way that perspiration cools you down, what does dopamine do when you're feeling like you can't deal with something, when you feel unsure of yourself, you feel guilt or shame or inadequacy or something like that? What is a useful thing to throw into the mix from a homeostatic perspective? Well, think about cocaine. mean, I'm not advocating cocaine, but if you take a drug like that, you feel a sense of confidence. You feel a sense of, can deal with anything. can, you know, I can get through this situation. So there was a good theoretical reason to think that dopamine would be useful in that situation. And there was empirical research showing that under certain circumstances, dopamine does get released when there's stress. I was like, okay, well that's straight. Maybe these old gats have evolved to basically hit the sweet spot in terms of how much stress there can be, you know, and it's definitely a stateable stress because you know that the seminar is stressful, it's difficult, but you're going to get through it in a couple of days. So I thought, okay, well, you know, that kind of makes sense. Then there's other research that shows that stress or homeostatic imbalance also makes the dopamine system more sensitive to rewards. if you experience a reward, it elevates dopamine. That's kind of the first thing that we knew about dopamine. used to be called the reward pathway or the pleasure pathway. So when something rewarding happens, dopamine kind of codes it. It kind of goes, remember that. That's important for survival. And it kind of spikes to let you know this is something that's that's useful. But if you're in a difficult situation, so say you're in a stressed situation, that spark will be even higher because now you're in a very difficult, it's almost like you're very, very aware and you're really looking to see if there's something that can be useful for survival. So when that reward comes, it really elevates in a special way. So what have you got in AlGAT? You've got this period of two, three, whatever days. of lot of psychological stress, you know, these relaxation exercises kind of thrown in there to kind of keep you feeling like, okay, this is manageable or whatever, you're going to get through it in a couple of days, a lot of stress, but you're in the state of homeostatic imbalance. So your body's producing theoretically dopamine to help you cope with the situation. And then you have this massive social reward at the end. You've graduated, you're wonderful, you're amazing. Those things all ended. And so At least theoretically, this could be a great way to elevate ⁓ dopamine, I mean, amongst other things. And then if you look at the symptoms of elevated dopamine, you see everything that you see at the end of these seminars. You see euphoria, see elevated confidence, energy, impulsivity, an enhanced sense of creativity. People become more sociable. They want to interact with people more. Like there's this big sense of bonding. Um, which, know, maybe more oxytocin related or, but there's a lot of things that kind of really look like what you would expect if there was a huge sort of, um, Elevated dopamine signaling. And then at the extreme of it, you start seeing psychosis. Um, and there've been claims of psychosis for, as I say, for 50 years. And they would always just say like, well, you know, this could happen anywhere. It could happen in the supermarket. It could happen, but it was happening at a rate. that was higher than what you would expect. And I mean, there've been more than 7,000 journal articles written about the relationship between dopamine and psychosis. Almost all of the antipsychotic medications are dopamine blockers in one way or another. So they would juice dopamine segments. So somebody that's experiencing psychosis, they give them a drug that juices dopamine and that tends to kind of bring them back down to normal. at least from a theoretical point of view, there were a lot of things that were like, okay, well that falls in line, that falls in line. And so far there hasn't been anything that somebody's said to me or shown me that's kind of said, well, this is why your explanation can't make sense. So far it seems to at least at least makes sense. It hasn't been tested yet. Wow. And that research now has been out how many years since you published? Well, mean, the PhD was 2017, I kind of, it sort of sat on a shelf for quite a while. And then I don't know who ended up getting hold of it. A lot of

people in the States, actually, people just started contacting me. I didn't really have an email address and I presented at a conference in maybe 2020. two at the International Cultic Studies Association Conference. And then from there, Steve Hasson wants me on his podcast and he said, should probably get a website. I said, ⁓ okay. And then after that, then I just started getting, you know, calls and emails from people all over the world. And it's been really fascinating. I mean, I've got a book in front of me at the moment and every page is just some person that I've either done a podcast with or sat down and had a conversation with about their experience with either personally in an old gap like group, or often it's like a family member or partner or a spouse or a child. And they kind of don't really know what to do about it. And it doesn't seem like anyone else has been doing research on these things. was the one lunatic who threw my academic career under this area of church that nobody wants to publish. So. It hasn't been very good from an academic perspective, but it has been very rewarding because it has reached a lot of people. I think it's made a lot of sense to a lot of people. And ⁓ yeah, that's been very gratifying. Yes, I think it was. ⁓ Gosh, I'm trying to remember where I pulled the thread that I found you, but I did find the IXA. videos and then I found your the PhD it was before you published manufacturing mania and Then the other rabbit hole let me see Before we go there the other rabbit hole that I went down was you mentioned fight club and your wonderful story about pattern recognition or seeing things and then doubting it and then really, yeah, so that was the other piece where I was like, oh, this is so fascinating into how it shows up culturally and yeah, I'm still trying to pay more attention to that. Every time I meet somebody, I mean, I think it's unbelievably fascinating, but I think it's so difficult to explain without the detail. that if you kind of try to just do session, people will just kind of look at you like, okay, yeah, all right, I mean, they wander off and think that you. Yeah. I rewatched the film after that because of I guess there's a written piece I'll link to it. Was it that you that wrote it or somebody wrote it? No, no, no, I wrote that. So let's say you can find it on Yeah. So there are links to. all of those things. I've actually made a nice presentation that I prefer, but it's probably a little bit, I name people and organizations a little bit too closely to be floating around. So the one that's online is the one that everyone else can go to. It's remarkable. mean, so essentially the guy that wrote Fight Club had taken part in ⁓ an Algate called The Forum in 1989. And if you know anything about the history of the organizations and the people and the way that the seminars work, Fight Club is really just a satire of the industry. mean, there's a little bit of stuff on consumerism and masculinity and whatever, but the primary focus is really in just almost every scene is a nod to some place or some person or something from that industry. So it's quite weird that it's long without being looked at more carefully. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see as people hear this possibly and we keep talking about it because it is such an iconic film in the culture. ⁓ I love clue hunts and you break down like there's little clues and little signs that the director, the writer put in there. that made it another layer of depth that was really fascinating. I mean, it's very meta because he hints that he's inserting things by flashing Tyler every now and again or flashing something every now and again. But really, there's other things that are being flashed throughout that you aren't aware of unless you know what's of the course. yeah, very fascinating. But for somebody with bipolar disorder, I mean, I picked it up in 2012 and I've got a history of delusion and seeing things that aren't real and thinking things that aren't true. So as soon as I saw this, was just going, you know, this definitely seems like it's linked, but also I'm kind of crazy. So I sat with it for a long time before I had the courage to sort of write it down and publish anything like that. And then, you know, the people that have read it seem to be like, okay, yeah. that does make sense. It's nice to realize that at least on occasion I'm not a complete in its care. Some pattern recognition and insight really is insight. It's all not. ⁓ Yeah. from an ISTA perspective, just looking at those criteria, ISTA is usually seven or eight days long. I does promise transformation says it's all about love and empowerment. ⁓ They the because you're away at a retreat center, you know, many people experience sleep disruptions because they're in bunk rooms or they're camping or very few people often have like a private space to return to. And then many of the events go late into the night, which again, there's they have a kind of a container of well, it's all if you want to or not. So I don't think, you know, I think as as these groups have evolved, at least in this space, they're less overt with a lot of that abuse that was more normalized, ⁓ but it's covert still. And so it's not gone. I think it comes on more subtly and there's more kind of a manufacturing of consent. that then also creates that extra stress. And I think it's helpful, like from my experience, like when we talk about that stress, it looks like ⁓ I wanna fully participate. It's on me to make the most of this experience. I'm gonna take these opportunities to look inward and find what needs to be fixed or reveal. what hurts and it's in my power and it's my responsibility to do that in order to get the most out of that experience. And if I'm not, it's my fault because I'm not trying hard enough. So there's this like proving, efforting and so much of it is turned on oneself. Right? So it's like the beautiful things we do in like a good therapeutic

relationship or in some deep friendships that have time and space that we would look into dark corners or blind spots or but it's like compressed into this rather, you know, dramatic. ⁓ That was something I hear a lot with L-GRAPS or other cults is like actually experiencing like musical harm like the manipulation by the music and then being like ⁓ like for me i've like there's so much music i don't listen to anymore because it was like used against me and part of that like uplifting or the you know drama and so that stress doesn't have to be someone yelling at you or directly shaming you yeah i mean i think that A lot of the stuff that you've said, and again, I can't really comment so much on your experience, but what I can say is that the idea of personal responsibility and accountability is almost the central idea in Elgat. So the idea of you're responsible and also the idea of participating fully. Like, are you holding anything back? And so it does place you in a position of kind of, if I don't get everything out of this, it's because I wasn't doing it. the right ways. There's a catch to it. So either you kind of protect yourself and then if something goes wrong, then it's your fault because you weren't doing it the way that they told you to do it, or you don't protect yourself, in which case something might, if something feels uncomfortable and you go along with it, then yeah, it's quite a difficult situation. But what I would also say is, mean, since the... Since the days of mind dynamics and particularly leadership dynamics, there's no way that they could carry on doing the leadership dynamics type of exercises other than on a very small scale in a certain part of the United States at a very particular time in the world. They were eventually sued to the point that they had to shut down. So I would think that the people that started up the Elgats in early 1970s would have said, okay, we can't quite do that. I mean, but maybe we can generate some of the same responses without, you know, forcing people to eat garbage or hanging people on crosses. You know, so what else can we do? Okay, maybe we can strip scream at people. so in the 1970s, there was a lot of that kind of verbal like shouting and screaming, which used to have lessened over the over time. But what you still see now, and I'm not saying that the screaming has completely stopped, certainly in some of the small al-ghats, they're quite happy to do it because they don't have the publicity. Or also in ours where the deeper you get in, so on the outside, they're not going to do that kind of harm or abuse, but as you go through the layers, that increases the dark love, tough love, humiliating you for your own best interest. Well, mean, exactly that. Even just the language that's used, and Lifton referred to it as loading the language, just saying that it's tough love. know, so there was a YouTube video with Dr. James Doherty from Stanford University and Werner Ehrhardt, and it was labeled conversations on compassion. sorry, I might have just thrown it up in my mouth a little bit. But they speak about ruthless compassion, which again is just such a manipulation of language to say, okay, so you're going to treat somebody in a way that to any rational objective observer would seem to be incredibly harsh if not abusive, but you're going to label it compassion. So I'm actually like, I'm doing this for your good type of idea, which is just a way of distorting things. But what I was saying is that you don't have to scream at people. If you see the way that some of these skilled trainers interact with people, it's often more about kind of getting people to feel like they are responsible for something that happened or that, you know, and by responsible, I mean, like in brackets, very loudly and bold to blame for something. So that can do far more damage to somebody than just screaming in their face. If you can really. assert a position of authority over somebody. Like, know how things work. I've got all this insights. I'm revered as a trainer or as a leader or whatever. And I've got this knowledge and I'm telling you about something and I'm getting you to think about yourself in a way that can be very hurtful. There doesn't have to be screaming. There doesn't have to be anything that might be called overtly abusive, but you do see some of these conversations and these interactions and you think, that would be helpful to to us and even though nobody's voice was raised. Yeah. Right. Right. So yeah, I think that's a shift we see. and you know, you're speaking to like Mindspring and kind of the lineages. What we know with ISTA is that the founder definitely attended Landmark. and or other adjacent. So did one of the main women who's on the council and she's actually in the Osho lineage and the Raj, you know, Bhagwan Rajneesh ⁓ and big on responsibility, right? Big on you create your reality, you attract whatever happens if you get assaulted, it's because you called it in. ⁓ And what's really interesting to me and you might have an insight on this from your studies is that there is a psychological relief or a thing that happens that I've experienced other people talk about when you go, ⁓ yeah, I am responsible and I feel relief for taking responsibility because Now I feel like I am safe, I can avoid it. It wasn't random. wasn't all these things that are quite scary psychologically to the helplessness of not being in control. Then saying, oh no, yeah, it was totally my fault. For me, was, you know, that I was raped when I was 15. And when I was like, oh no, that's not, that was me. I made this mistake. I did this. It was definitely my fault. I take responsibility, which is ludicrous, but it created, I don't know, a defense mechanism, a coping mechanism. Yeah. I mean, I think that the problem is that there's a lack of subtlety in the way that these ideas are being applied because they're being applied by non-professionals, a one size fits

all, or as you said earlier, in a very rushed way. without really developing a trust relationship. if you were, you know, a registered psychologist in South Africa, I'm sure it's pretty much the same in the US. You know, so much of the training goes towards avoiding harm. And the problem with that, and I think this is why lot of these organizations exist, is that sometimes therapists can become just yes men who just tell you how amazing you are. may as well speak to chat GPT and it tell you what a legend you are. And that's not going to be useful. So you want somebody that challenges you, that kind of pushes you, that says actually, no, that's not great. How can we maybe change this, et cetera. So saying that people should take responsibility, that's true. Of course, you should be taking responsibility for certain things. But it's when you kind of just brush over the nuance of it and you're saying to somebody that was sexually assaulted, you you're responsible for this and you're doing it in, I don't know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever it is that you've got the trainer interacting. They haven't met you before. There's no ability to contain that conversation and it's being done in front of a group of people. There's also a performative element. So because the trainer or leader doesn't want to come across as maybe showing any doubts. there's never any opportunity for the leaders to go, actually hold on a second. You know, maybe I need to take a step back because that undermines their ability for the next person where they're going to be pushing them to accept responsibility for something else. So it's not so much that the ideas are problematic. It's that the application isn't being done. responsibly. And that's why it may work for a fair number of people. But if you've got the mindset of, if you want to make an omelet, you've got to break a couple of eggs and the eggs are people, then that's a problem. You can't just discard the people that are harmed as if they're nothing and just only count the wins and be like, look at all these testimonies that we've got on our website saying what an amazing time. We had, but what about the group of people that was really negatively affected by participation? You can't just forget about them. And that's what a, you know, at least a psychologist, psychiatrist shouldn't get away with doing. There should be more regulation. There should be more oversight. And I'm not saying the problems don't exist in that space as well. There can be corruption. can be bad actors. There can be whatever, but there's just no regulation. when it comes to these spaces. And in order to generate what they're selling, which is this powerful experience, it's like the movie, The Big Short. There's an incentive to take risks if somebody's going to bail you out. Why not gamble more heavily if the upside is infinite and the downside is a limited downside? And I think a lot of people running these organizations you know, whether intentionally or not might see it that way, is that the upside is I want to get as many people having these powerful experiences as possible and bonding and telling people and, you know, going out and telling everyone that this is the greatest thing ever. And if there are a couple of people that get hurt, I mean, you know how difficult it is to, number one, afford to sue an organization, number two, convince, ⁓ you know, anyone in the legal system that psychological harm was definitely caused by, by this particular activity, it's a very difficult thing to do. So you have to have the mental fortitude, the financial resources, somehow enough evidence to convince people that a weekend or week long retreat caused you very serious psychological harm. It's a difficult thing to do. And we have someone that, at least one who went straight into a psychiatric ward. from the training and many stories of facilitators who have left who have said, yeah, I saw people in psychotic breaks and clearly not okay. And it's not only that people end up that place, it's how are you treated in that moment even. And this one gal was like, it was torture. Like I was, it was horrible. horrible how they treated me when I was completely out of my mind. And so you're like, well, if care isn't part of it, if this isn't designed with participants best interest at heart, if underneath all of this, it is basically the business in the capital model of extract. and carry on. And so there's a lot of people that fall out the sides and then there's people that get ⁓ into the workings and then they carry on. Yeah, I think there's clearly a financial incentive, but I mean, I also think that there's a big guard complex element to it as well. think that the people that are senior, you know from participating the way that you looked at the people that were leading and then when you hear about the main lady or man or whoever then that person is just there has to be something incredibly intoxicating about that for people that have got that level of power and that level of you know almost worship coming from people. So I think that there's a financial incentive but there's that other side that's It's driving people. Right. I mean, there's the research also into the brain that as we gain power, we lose ⁓ attunement, we lose mirror neurons as we get more. And so we misinterpret people in our favor. And then people withhold information because we have power. And so the hierarchical ⁓ adaptations are fascinating and it's like, okay, can we actually kind of keep each other on the peer level and share power and not be so conditioned to this, the great man, the accumulation of power. It's funny. When I've spoken to some people about the disorder, sometimes people say, like Kanye. And I think, well, that's not a great example, but it speaks to what you're talking about is the idea that this person has got just yes men following him around the whole time. He had a guide complex, I think, before there

was any mental health stuff going on. And he's obviously quite an eccentric person to start off with. So that's not a great example of bipolar disorder. But I do think that's... Absolutely. When you've got any person that's walking around and people are not keeping them in check, you're going to get the worst version of that person. yeah, I mean, a lot of these organizations, there'll be one or maybe two people that are kind of right at the top. yeah, they... Right. There's nobody really checking on them. Right, the charismatic leader, the one that's channeling the entities or has the secret, you know, messages, solved the mysteries. ⁓ One of the things that I don't think we've talked about, and I'd be curious about your perspective is, especially in when I went into the miracle of love, which was a one week long personal development. sold as the Roto-Rooter of the Soul. Like, why would I go that? Anyway, I was like, yay, Roto-Rooter of my soul. And they claimed that they had no dogma, no worldviews. It was just an experience, open for everybody. And yet, after we did, you know, these emotional release cry, very emotional, like... looking at your childhood trauma and singing and dancing and crying and emoting and then falling into this kind of like spent hypnotic, right, state, they started playing tapes of the woman they said wasn't the leader of her talking and talking. And it was, course you want to escape. Of course you don't want to be reincarnated. if you set your eye on the prize, this is the lifetime in which you can achieve escape. Nothing should stand in your way. so, you know, I found these things in my head after I left that I was like, I don't believe in things, but all of a sudden I have these ideas and they were like implanted in that state of Vulnerability, impressionability. Yeah. I mean, I I think that that general pattern is, so I I said that there were three things that I looked at in my PSG. The first was the description of the conditions and the results. The second was the theory about what was going on. And the third thing was the social influence side. So that's how they basically influence you or persuade you to believe something. And old gats tend to do the same thing. They say that we don't have any beliefs. But then if you ask anyone that's spent a lot of time and then you says any, any such thing as a victim, no. There isn't. Well, that seems to be a belief, right? And it's not the one that you had before, But the general pattern from an influence perspective is they make it very difficult for your critical thinking to operate. And again, I'm talking about the ones that I know about. overload you with esoteric information and often contradictory information and big words and lot of jargon. So it's actually very difficult for you to process everything. At the Algaads that I've looked at, don't even let you take notes. So you're sitting there for, you know, eight hours, 12 hours, however long, you can't write anything down. it's just this huge volume of information being given to you by the person running it. So you get cognitively tired, you get emotionally exhausted because you are thinking about your childhood and your parents and these things that you've done. You're sharing ⁓ information about yourself in front of a group and you've been made to take responsibility for it, which is very difficult, but you're physically tired as well. You're sitting on chairs for up to three, four hours at a time. You can't really use the bathroom. You've got homework late at night, but you're getting cognitively, physically, emotionally exhausted. When your brain is tired like that, it's going to default from thinking critically, basically your prefrontal cortex, your ability to kind of stop and think about things, and it's going to default to the automatic process. So Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, spoke about system one thinking, which is fast, automatic, easy, doesn't use any cognitive resources. And then system two or slow thinking, you've got to focus on things. You're less likely to get things wrong, but it takes a lot of resources. If you're exhausted for three or four days, you're to just default to system one, fast thinking. So you're going to rely on intuition. You're going to rely on cognitive shortcuts, heuristics. So things like, do I feel good about this thing that I'm being told? that's going to be all the evidence that you're going to use. You're not going to weigh up all the strengths and weaknesses and whatever. You've been given this information for so much, you can't even go through it. So you just think, okay, well, how do I feel about this? So by the end of an LGAD, they trigger this really powerful, positive feeling, this euphoria, this transformation, and you feel better than you've ever felt in your life. And so you've got these ideas floating around. And so rather than thinking about all of the the information that led to those ideas, you've just got a positive feeling and the ideas and that becomes associated with ⁓ itself. So that's something called the affectoristic. And I think that it plays quite a big role in the influence side of things. As you say, when you're very tired, you've got all these things first, know, and you don't have the ability to kind of like stop and think and whatever. I mean, the The example I'd give to my students is I'll say, if you're trying to eat well and you're well rested and you go to the fridge and you're alert and your brain is working well and you open the fridge and there's a piece of cheesecake or chocolate cake or something there, you'll probably be able to go, okay, hold on a second. I feel like it, but I'm not going to do it. But if you're exhausted and you're not expecting it and you just come home and you open up and it's just there. The next thing you know, it's the cheesecakes and you've, know, mainland, the Kit Kats and then Snickers and whatever. And before you know it, you

haven't been able to stop yourself because you're just in such an automatic way of operating. And I think that there's quite a deliberate process of getting you into that state. And what all gets to is what is they also devalue critical thinking. So they often say to you things like, it's about the experience. You know, understanding is the booby prize. Come from your heart, don't come from your head. So not only are they like forcing you to, to, to not be able to think critically, they are convincing you that critical thinking is actually a barrier to getting the big prize that they are holding out in front of you. So there's a lot of things kind of going on at the same time. And most people are unaware that there's all of these things happening that are. Effectively, don't want to say design, but have evolved to make it more likely that they're going to sign up for the next thing, more likely that they're going to recruit family and friends, ⁓ et cetera. Yeah, there's, you know, having walked in blind and maybe hoping for connection and community and belonging, all the idealism that maybe brings us more into the culty version with the Elgat, maybe more than the just self development that they're all kind of mashed together. ⁓ I wonder about, you know, we talk about this, I think it was like the modern era, but what also about like religious rituals and processes. And one of the things I think is like, like so many things like ISTA uses many tools as weapons or they misuse them. So they weaponize things like responsibility. Now they're weaponizing consent. It's ugly. ⁓ If there wasn't a profit motive, if there wasn't, ⁓ you know, could it be used for good? If you really have someone's well, true well intention for their growth process or for right, the bonding, you know, can it be used for that? Yeah, I mean, I think the question is so valid. Are these things by their nature harmful? Or are they harmful because somebody's distorted something that was actually quite pure initially? And I think you use the religious example and you certainly see that with churches. So I'm not somebody that goes to church. You can certainly see a spectrum of ⁓ different places that people can go to worship. And often the less successful ones, financially, are the ones that aren't manipulating the people that are going as much. And the ones that are doing incredibly well, if you look at them, you think, wow, there's quite a bit of manipulation going on there. But there's also probably a much bigger sense of like, power and joy and euphoria coming as a result of attending some of these things. my book focuses on how a very similar process occurs in Christianity in terms of generating religious experiences. And I've spoken to the people at SeekSafely and I've spoken to a number of people about this, people that came out of Landmark and they asked the question, you know, what do you place this with? Because people do want connection. People do want a sense of meaning.

People do want something that's outside of their everyday. You know, being entirely rational all the time is not a great thing either. can be exhausting, it can be quite harmful. You almost want to have a little bit of naive belief in something and to give your life meaning. quite an envy of some people that have got beliefs that I just can't subscribe to because it does seem to bring them a lot of joy and it doesn't seem to have too much of a dark side ⁓ to it. you know, almost the... I started at an Anglican church, that's what I grew up in. it's almost like maybe that's where I should go back to, just this very simple, you know, there's no heavy pressure. There's no, you know, you sing a hymn, you've got people that you interact with, that you meet once a week. There's a sense of community, there's a sense of shared belief and whatever. Unfortunately, I just don't believe in God. It makes it quite tricky. I'd feel like a bit of a phony, I do, I certainly do empathize with the idea that's like not having anything is also a tricky place to be in. And it really does feel good to believe so strongly it's something to feel connected with people. That's all I've got this very strong belief, but that's also why, you know, that person that you mentioned that that had a ⁓ mental breakdown, why they didn't kind of look at it seriously because it threatened that amazing feeling. It threatened what they had. And so it's easier to kind of just say, well, this is something wrong with this person. There's nothing wrong with what we believe in. ⁓ And so you discard the person ironically, ⁓ you know, betraying all of the characteristics that you think you hold as a member of that community. So all of the things that you kind of think about yourself and say, we are all about love and about support and about whatever. And as soon as somebody threatens that with, know, really going through something difficult, you say, you know, it's a whole with them. I want to keep feeling like I've got these things rather than actually demonstrating that I have these. these characteristics, which can be very difficult. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think about it here where I live in Northern California, we have the Yurok and the Wi'at tribes and the Yurok in particular, you know, they do flower dances and grass dances and they have, you know, sometimes they are multiple day. rituals and it's in the context though of the place like the land, their home, their community. It's built around different ages and stages. ⁓ And so I feel like, you know, we have the inclination of the desire, but so many of us have been severed from that. Kind of family and and they've had to reassemble it too because they also have been Severed for 500 years from being able to do their dances, you know in many places and to have the rituals But it makes me think like it really is in whose hands are we doing it in what context? and and so this idea that you helicopter To a foreign country and do this with a bunch of people from all over the world and open up and all these things, and then you just drop back into your default normal life. ⁓ It's like, as I've come out of it and learned these things, it's like, ⁓ my God, you guys, it's a recipe for disaster on so many levels. You know? mean, it's also the kind of cultural appropriation idea as well. So a couple of people that have got hold of me have spoken about rituals that have been brought from all different parts of the world, but they've been kind of westernized. And it just seems as soon as somebody gets hold of it with a capitalist view of like, let's turn this into something that makes money, it seems to go awry quite quickly. I mean, something that I noticed that I really found fascinating, because I mean, I've been chatting to people now for the last three or four years, but mainly people from the US and the UK and Australia. And that's just the occasional person from Eastern Europe, maybe. when this YouTuber got hold of me, and I mean, on my website, and my website's johnhansophd.com, so people must go and have a look. There's links to a bunch of videos, but I would strongly recommend that if you want to hear about the... the history of these things and how they work and everything about them. The Chinese video that was done by this YouTube that's been viewed 6.8 million times. I mean, it's won awards in Taiwan. I mean, it's really done so well. So I mean, it's got English subtitles, but what you see in the comments underneath is so different from people in Taiwan compared to what you see elsewhere. So often when you see videos on these seminars, You know, there's a bit of back and forth going on, but almost universally in Taiwan with the culture seems to be a lot more collectivist. And so it's all very much like, thank you for doing this for Taiwan. Thank you for doing this so we can warn other people about this. It's very protective and it's very, you know... It's not like, you decided to do this, you're responsible for it, which is very much a Western idea of individuality and you're responsible for everything. the idea is the response to it is just very, very different in terms of the comment section underneath the video. And I think it's made a huge, huge difference. I mean, Taiwan's got a population, I think, I don't know, 25 million maybe, and it's been viewed nearly 7 million. time. So it's a huge number of people have seen it and are now aware of these things going on. And there is a spread of them in China and Hong Kong and around those areas. But the way that the public responds to it is also different. And that's something that I think that we can hopefully shift as well, is that people become aware, they share it, and they see it as this is something that we're all kind of accountable for. Yeah, get the conversation moving in that direction. Right, right. Yeah, kind of back to the broken eggs, you know, well, it's only five or 10 % of people that have a bad experience. Like,

we're really gonna, you know, overbalance and so many more people had a good experience. And that's just such a Western and transactional, you know. attitude it seems because there are others that come in and are like, yeah, we need to consider how do we not do harm? We need to consider as the creators, as the people being paid, as the experts, that is our responsibility. again, my view isn't that things should be censored and ⁓ People shouldn't be able to participate if they want to, but there needs to be informed concerns about it. So if you're playing Russian roulette, you can't give the person a revolver and say, there's a 0 % chance that something bad is going to happen if there's one bullet out of the six chambers or whatever it is. Like you have to say to people, that is the risk that you are taking. Are you comfortable with that? Okay, if you are, then let's go ahead. But when I've seen the communications, It's either just made up statistics. So it'll be like one in every, you know, a hundred thousand people has a, and I'm, and I just think, well, where did you get that? That number from you're not monitoring it. You, you deliberately trying to keep people quiet that say that they've had bad experiences. So at least be open about it. People can take part in whatever they want to, but they need to have, ⁓ fair information and the correct information to. to make the decision. that's my kind of take on it. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess from a seek safely perspective, if there were warning, more accurate consent informed consent warnings to say, you're going into this, at least that would be more choiceful. think it would be more choiceful. I don't know that you can. I don't know that there's anybody I trust anymore that would run a seminar like that at this point. I'm pretty like, you know, scared off. Yeah. So, wow. I guess one of, as we wrap up, it's, are you continuing this line of work? Like, where's that? Yeah, I mean, I am to a degree. I became involved with some work regarding the troubled teen industry in the US. ⁓ yeah. So I don't know if you have any idea of that, but LifeSpring seminars seem to basically be, or at least for a long time, were being used on these vulnerable teenagers, adolescents, in a lot of ⁓ these programs that were supposed to be helping people out. I've... I've been trying to get an article published on that at the moment. I don't know how easy that will be. I'm trying to write a book on that. yeah, just to shed a bit of light on it. as I kind of said earlier from like a publishing perspective, which is something that I've got to do, these topics are quite difficult to publish on. So the journals often look at You know, some of the things that the participants are revealing are so horrific that a journal will look at it and say, well, there's a legal responsibility here, which creates, and then you don't want to water it down. So it's a, it's a very tough area to publish. And so it's kind of an area that I'm, I'm doing as an add on and I'm trying to do it sort of, ⁓ separately. You it's not going to get me any academic points or any promotions or anything like that. But I do find it's quite an interesting area and a fulfilling area. Yeah. And I've said this on previous podcasts. I constantly try to pull myself away from these things because it's quite a dark world. so it is. It is quite emotionally draining to focus on it. there's also been so many instances of ⁓ a documentary that's going to get made, that's going to reveal this. And then I sign on for that and I do whatever and then it doesn't get picked up. there's been a lot of disappointments and things. it's something that I'll do, then I'll take a break from it, and somebody will get hold of me and... you know, ask me a question and then I find myself kind of coming back into it. yeah, there's a huge amount of information. So if anyone wants to find out about these seminars, if they go to my website, there's tons of podcasts, there's a lot of overlap. So if you've watched one or two, you've probably watched all of them. But I'd say that the documentary that's in Chinese is a fantastic Fantastic thing to watch just in terms of the whole history, the process. He's done great interviews. He's really done an amazing job of putting that together. So yeah, I would say there's a lot of resources for people now. I think the one thing that's useful is the idea that the term LGAT is now getting known a bit more because everyone used to be like, ⁓ Isda or... ⁓ they're martini institutes or landmark or life spring or whatever. And nobody would know that these things were, know, at least there was some overlaps between. So when you can understand the general process and understand that there are a lot of similarities, it makes it a lot easier. So somebody's looking, somebody's been through something you can say, you know, maybe go and listen to this podcast or read this, this document. If you start recognizing things, it's easier to. find your way to answers than I think it was 10 years ago. Right. Right. I know in my journey of pulling through it, was, you know, it's been really useful, kind of like when I first learned about Darvo as language for what I had experienced over and over, ⁓ which is the defend, attack, reverse, victim, and offender, those that don't know. And that created again a context to get out of my own spin and shame and everything. so same with understanding, ⁓ I'm in this context, this experience that I was moved through and moved through, right? And so it reduces my shame. It helped me work through the harm faster. Yeah. And I mean, I think as well, when you look at the demographics of people that have bought into Elgats, often very educated, very smart, if you know what I mean. So you can look objectively and realize that this isn't something that shows any weakness on anyone's part to get involved in. I think the other thing is that they weaponize people's good nature. A lot of it has to do with wanting to do something good, wanting to be a part of something positive, wanting to connect with people. So it's really a good part of people that these things work on. I've said before, if you threw a complete sociopath into one of these seminars, it wouldn't affect them at all because they wouldn't worry about somebody sharing about a traumatic thing that they went through. Like none of this would impact them. It's because we care. It's because we have empathy that's... these processes work on us. And that's why it works in America and in Bulgaria and in South Africa and Australia and in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, because people are people and we all have these common characteristics. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to humanity. Yeah. We are people. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. am so excited to get this out to people and continue the conversation and help more people understand both what happened to them, what elegance are, how to avoid them, what, you know, to share with their friends. So maybe we can reduce some of that suffering and loss. We can go do actual pro-social community building things that are gonna, you know, be more foundational and sustainable than jumping into these containers that really, you know, end up being quite extractive on a lot of levels. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of opportunity to do good stuff in the world at the moment. there's no shorts to have at the moment. So, Yeah. Thank you so much. And that's the end of our episode. Thanks for listening. Our theme music is Midnight Rendezvous by Sasha Nde. If this helped you sort glitter from gold, I hope you'll come back. And I'd love to hear from you ⁓ at Fool's Gold Podcast at proton.me.