BONUS 4: How to Fire Your Boss

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so it's been a while since the first season of the dream aired And in the intervening time, we've received a ton of email, text, and DMs from people in MLMs asking for help.

They're mostly really sad stories of people feeling stuck in the cycle of throwing good money after bad and wondering how to get out.

That's why we're doing this episode and why it's so important.

Hopefully, it's actually helpful.

In our last episode, we started to explore just how similar MLMs are to cults.

A dear friend of the podcast and an attorney who's worked on a number of MLM cases, Doug Brooks, talked to me about his legal run-ins with a man named Keith Ranieri, the founder of the MLM/slash human trafficking cult called Nexium.

And towards the end of our conversation, he said something that caught my attention.

He told me that to try and fight organizations like Nexium in court, we needed the help of someone named Steve.

I'm thinking that really we need people like Steve to explain to us how it could be that someone just sort of suspends their critical thinking and despite all the information that they have in front of them about their own experience and about the experience of other people, why would they continue to stay in it?

I wanted to know who this Steve guy was and why we needed his help.

So I asked Doug if he thought we could get the two of them in a studio together.

And being the gentleman that he is, Doug made it happen.

The conversation started out hot.

It doesn't surprise me that Keith Ranieri did not invent any of this stuff.

He's plagiarized from Scientology and Amway and probably a dozen other things, but he's not this brilliant original thinker that he portrays himself to be.

Right.

A liar.

Another pathological liar.

Keith Ranieri was known to tell his followers he was one of the smartest people in the world, claiming he had an IQ of 240.

So to give some context, a score of 145 to 159 is considered genius level and is only achieved by about 1% of test takers.

I could listen to these guys talk shit about Rani forever, but we need to back up here and find out a little bit more about Steve.

My name is Stephen Hassen.

I'm a licensed mental health counselor.

I operate out of Boston, Massachusetts.

I've been helping people get out of destructive cults and controlling relationships for over 43 years since my own deprogramming out of the Moon cult.

The heyday of the Moonies is over, so I'm going to catch everyone up a bit.

It's actually called the Unification Movement.

People call it the Moonies because it was founded in South Korea in 1954 by a man named Sun Myung Moon.

Moon's followers believe that on Easter Day in 1936, Jesus appeared before Moon and asked him to continue the work he had started so very long ago, I suppose.

The Moonies were known for being very secretive with their church doctrines, and also for holding gigantic wedding ceremonies which would absolve participants of past sins, including one at Seoul's Olympic Stadium for 30,000 couples.

Since Moon's death in 2010, the group split into several factions, although Moon's widow is considered by many to be the current Messiah and the, quote, mother of all humankind.

Sounds very Game of Thrones.

I am involved with a forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School, pursuing a doctorate.

And I want to train young clinicians, and I want to create a standard in the legal system for undue influence and to develop a forensic evaluation that meets the standards

so that any judge or jury could look at something like annexium when Keith Ranieri's on trial currently can listen to the testimony of everyone and understand

how intelligent educated people can fall under someone else's control.

I asked Steve what he meant by undue influence.

So for example, ethical influence, you have informed consent,

you have respect, you're not being manipulated, your conscience is being honored, you have free will to read whatever you want to read and talk to whoever you want to talk to, and you have the freedom to exit at any time without any great fear or any type of punishment that happens.

Whereas in undue influence situations, there's fraud, there's coercion, there's control, there's manipulation, there's often use of altered states of consciousness exercises, but it's bypassing people's critical rational thoughts and capturing capturing their imagination.

I had my own journey into the world of mind control that lasted two and a half years.

And I wound up dropping out of college, quitting my job, donating my bank account.

turning my back on my religion, which is Judaism, turning my back on my family and friends, my creative writing aspirations, and becoming a right-wing fascist who thought that Moon was the Messiah and that we needed to establish a theocracy to rule the world.

When I was 19 in an upper junior of Queen's College, my girlfriend had dumped me.

I was sitting in the cafeteria waiting for my next class.

and three women approached me, flirting with me, pretending to be students, who were basically recruiters for the Mooney cult, which I had never heard of before.

And like destructive cults, operate through deceptive recruitment and manipulation.

I was involved for two and a half years and how I exited was due to

act of love from my family.

They hired a team of deprogrammers and my sister lured me to come visit to see my nephew who had been born and they did an intervention with me that lasted five days that I agreed to do because I was so sure I wasn't brainwashed and I wasn't in a cult.

I was just following God.

But in that five days, I'd had a chance to reflect on who I was before I met the group and what actually was happening.

When you're in a mind control group, you're kept so busy and so sleep deprived that you don't have time to reflect and they alienate you from family, friends, from other sources of information.

And I describe it as a dissociative disorder where I was given a new Mooney identity and told to die to my old self.

And Moon and his wife were my true parents.

Jonestown was the big event where I realized and I saw the bodies of 300 children who had been poisoned by their parents.

at the hands of Jim Jones.

I realized this is much bigger than just the Moon cult.

And

so I've really developed an expertise at helping people to exit and to recover.

Okay, so what do you actually call what you do?

Because I feel like deprogramming is kind of outdated.

I was struggling for a term and I still don't have a snappy one-word term, but I describe what I do as strategic interactive approach because it's a process-oriented team-ethical counter-influence campaign that's all aimed at empowering the person to think for themselves and make their own decisions.

Contrary to what cults do, which is a systematic social influence process to get people to be dependent and obedient on them and do what they want you to do.

This is really aimed at getting people in touch with themselves and giving them tools.

Okay, let's talk about cults

and what they are and your work getting people out of them.

There are religious cults, there are political cults, there are therapy cults, there are commercial cults, including human traffickers, as well as MLMs, as well as cults of personality, where someone is completely under someone else's control.

And thinking is black and white, all or nothing, good versus evil.

We are the chosen.

We have the special knowledge and the special formula for success.

The universal mind control technique is phobia indoctrination, where people have irrational fears that terrible things will happen to them if they exit.

The amount of attention that people give to you, praise, surrounding you, looking for commonalities, oh yeah, I grew up there, or oh, that's your favorite music, mine too, even if it wasn't, to create a sense of bonding.

And then the behavior modification, withdrawal of reinforcement, and outright punishment if you're doing things that violate rules or doing things that you're told it's not appropriate to bring that particular question up.

We live in an era of such incredible knowledge of the human mind and human interaction that is being used against people's best interests and is not being channeled only to bettering people and helping people who've had tragic lives get functional and better because there's no money in it.

Unfortunately, family and friends who watch somebody they know change and get radicalized into

this cultic-like group try to wake them up up and yell at them and rationally argue with them and tell them that they're brainwashed.

And that has the exact opposite effect of

the person feeling more defensive of the group, doing more thought-stopping,

getting polarized, feeling persecuted.

People need to process so many disillusioning thoughts and experiences, so many things that had happened during those five years, let's let's say, that they can unpack it and then they can process it.

And it's an unfolding where people become empowered to take their life back again.

How do you talk rationally to someone who's in love with somebody and tell them they're a cheater?

I saw them with another guy an hour ago.

If you're in love, you don't want to believe that because of emotion.

It's not because of intellect.

It's because of emotional need and desire.

So what I do with my families who are worried about a loved one is I teach them how to understand the mindset of somebody who's been indoctrinated.

I bring along former members of MLMs, for example, and I show them videos of other cults.

And I really then teach them how to have

respectful conversations where you're asking questions that are very strategic and they're designed to empower the person to feel good about themselves, to reconnect with who they were before they were in the group, to even imagine a future outside of the group, in order to take a time out and research the whole issue of social influence, undue influence, cults.

And with love, with respect, with timing, it's a very successful, strategic, interactive approach.

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When families care that much to bring me in to do something like this, it really creates a platform because they're educated.

The family and friends understand mind control.

They don't say the hurtful things that almost every normal family would say to someone who's coming out of a mind control experience.

Like, how could you be so stupid?

I told you it was a cult five years ago.

Why didn't you listen?

You would have saved so much money and so much headaches.

And they don't do that because they understand what the person was subjected to and they're compassionate.

And that creates the foundation for a healing and an exit that's really

important for somebody to move on with their life.

One of the things I wanted to talk to Stephen about was something I found while reading an interview he did a few years back.

In it, the interviewer focuses on something Stephen developed called the BITE model, which describes the specific methods cults use to recruit and maintain control over people.

BITE stands for Behavioral Informational Thought and Emotional Control, B-I-T-E.

Behavioral control includes things like regulating how much a person eats or what they wear or who they can talk to, and creating a system of rewards and punishments to help with behavior modification.

Informational control is a way of regulating a person's connection with the outside world by monitoring or distorting the information they're allowed to see.

Thought control is instilling people with that black and white good versus evil way of thinking that Stephen was talking about earlier, like changing people's names and asking them to dissociate from friends and family.

And finally, emotional control is basically nagging and guilting the shit out of people.

Enormous number of people from different cults as well as multi-level marketing groups have looked at the influence continuum and the BITE model and reflected over what their experience was and went, holy mackerel, this is a destructive end of the continuum and the bite model, we're doing most of these things.

And it gives them a wake-up moment to say, you know what?

You can be free.

You don't need to do this anymore.

Do you feel that most or all MLMs are cults?

Well, MLMs, by definition, are using deception.

In my understanding of MLMs, they're all using deception, fraud, and bite model techniques.

Destructive groups will either omit critical data, distort information, or outright lie.

And MLMs do all three.

There's usually that one-on-one relationship where the person tells you stories of how great their life is and how wealthy they are, and they're typically lying as they were lied to by the person who recruited them.

If you have invested heavily into something, you emotionally and intellectually align to justify that.

And unless one steps back and looks at the big picture and realizes, you know what, if I stay in this another year, another year, another year, I'm still not going to make the fortune.

I'm just going to get deeper in.

There's a tremendous amount of investment of time and energy, often listening to lots of tapes, reading books, going to meetings, in order to inculcate this proper 100% commitment of thought that's very much in most mind control cults.

There's manipulation of sleep often because you're pushing yourself so hard.

There's often a manipulation of diet, especially if you're in an MLM that's selling products, you're using a lot of those particular products.

So it's capturing people's hopes and dreams and short-circuiting their critical thinking by telling them that it only works if you believe 100%.

It installs phobias in people's minds, irrational fears, that if they share their doubts, if they even think the doubts, terrible things are going to happen to them.

They'll be an utter failure.

So in my worldview, there are ethical, constructive cults, and there are destructive cults.

And I say any group that's using deception and manipulation to make people dependent and obedient, that's exploiting them socially, financially, emotionally, psychologically, is a destructive cult.

So it turns out, Stephen's been working on getting people out of MLMs for years, years, in much the same way he's helped people get out of cults.

He told me there was probably too many people to count at this point, but he did give me the names of a few MLMs he helped people get out of.

Some of them sounded pretty familiar, like Amway and Herbalife.

So is the process similar when you're trying to get someone out of an MLM as opposed to a cult?

Or like,

how does that work?

With people in MLM, when I'm meeting the person, they've already agreed to meet with me.

They think that their parents are crazy.

It's typically their parents.

Sometimes it's a husband, sometimes it's a wife.

And I just say, listen, I'm here because they love you and they're worried about you.

Let me tell you about myself.

And then I start talking about the Moonies.

And they're almost always fascinated.

Like, how could you believe in the Moon?

You bowed to the floor with your Korean billionaire who made automatic rifles.

And I'd show them a BBC documentary about the Moonies.

And they're like, holy crap, how did you,

what is this about?

And then I started explaining about social psychology.

I'd explain about how the mind works.

And so people are fascinated to learn this stuff.

I'm not attacking the MLM.

I'm just creating a frame where people are learning valuable things about the way the mind works.

And then I ask them to tell me their story.

Who were they before they met the group?

And I really want to hear from them.

What was it that caught their attention?

What made them think this was a good thing?

What Steve is asking here feels very familiar.

We have the same questions throughout this series when listening to people involved in MLMs.

If all the statistics point to a 99% failure rate for new distributors, why join?

And why stay?

Often I'll say, you know, I'm meeting you now.

It's five years later.

You know, your wife's left you your $30,000 in debt.

If you knew then what you know now, if you could go back in time to that moment where the recruiter was inviting you to hear this wonderful opportunity, what do you think you would do?

And their face, they go,

and there's a long silence and they often say, I don't think I would go.

And then I say, you know, when I was in the cafeteria at Queen's College and those women were flirting with me, if I could go back in time, knowing about cults and knowing about the Moonies, I would have told them to get lost.

In fact, I would have called security to have them thrown off the campus.

And so we make, we join in that moment of, you know, what life happens, and you just got to move on.

You just gotta move on.

As Steve knows more than just about anybody, that's easier said than done.

But Steven is going to continue the lonely work of trying to get people out from under undue influence, one person at a time.

Recently, several people from the FTC reached out to Jane to tell her they were listening to and enjoying Season 1 of The Dream over at the actual offices of the actual FTC.

Apparently, they're ready to reassess the way they've been handling MLMs, and the FTC employees who reached out told us that they had even asked the chair of the FTC to listen.

Apparently, the chair's first response was, What's a podcast?

But there is some hope that they will listen and maybe even take some action on behalf of the 18.2 million distributors who we know 99% of will lose money this year.

In the meantime, Steve is staying positive, so I will too.

Yes, you may have to be

embarrassed to say to your folks, I should have listened to you, or your friends who said, Hey, that's a scam, or that's a cult.

So, there's a certain amount of face-saving that we always want to do, but it's

you know, we're human and we didn't know what we didn't know.

And that's part of what I'm trying to do with my life work is role model and say, Hey, I got sucked into a cult, but life doesn't end

when you're in a cult or you get out of a cult.

You use it to enrich your appreciation of being free.

You use it to

improve yourself and your ability to learn how to trust

yourself and others based on critical evaluation of data and behavior and not just trusting wishful thinking.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me, Jane Marie, and Dan Gallucci, with help from Lyra Smith.

We're edited by Peter Clowney.

Our executive producers are Chris Bannon, Dan Gallucci, and me.

We have a brand new season coming out in a few months, so don't forget to subscribe, and we also appreciate you rating and reviewing the podcast anywhere you listen.

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