This week, Dr. Yuval Laor is back, this time to discuss the nature of fervor, the evolution of which happened to be the subject of his doctoral thesis. We go into some amazing and fascinating details about this and how it ties in with love, awe, infatuation and all of us. Enjoy!
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #191: Why Do People Go Nuts Over Belief? ft. Dr. Yuval Laor appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week I am tackling the difficult subject of coercive control and persuasion and how these relate to what goes on in destructive cults like Scientology. I have some ideas of my own about this which I want to share and I look forward to your feedback. Enjoy!
Coercive Persuasion and Attitude Change by Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D.
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #190: Coercive Control in Destructive Cults appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

The following are the show notes, quotes and sources I used in this week’s podcast. This whole thing really should be called The Confederacy of Dunces. I polled my viewers about doing this podcast before researching and recording it, and 80% of you said to do this podcast, so this one is all your guys’ fault!
Redactions
From NPR article:
“Grand jury materials“— Under federal rules, materials from grand jury proceedings are secret, although there are a few narrow exceptions that allow limited disclosure.“Intelligence materials“— The report contains information that comes from U.S. intelligence agencies. Officials are concerned that the public release of some of that information could reveal how the U.S. got it — compromising sources and methods that America’s spies want to protect.“Information related to ongoing investigations“— A number of high-profile investigations have been spun out of Mueller’s Russia probe. The most notable one, perhaps, was the case in New York City brought against President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.“Details in the Mueller report that could reveal information about other ongoing investigations are scrubbed out of the redacted version.“Derogatory information about ‘peripheral’ individuals“— Barr told Congress he wants to honor the Justice Department’s practice of not revealing information it has uncovered about people who were part of an investigation but whom it is not accusing of a crime. Trump won’t be covered by such redactions, he said, but the Justice Department is excising detail from the report about people who aren’t public officeholders.”
Without knowing the details, it’s impossible to know if all the redactions littered throughout the report are legitimate or are covering up the names or activities of current bad guys. Given that Mueller’s office was involved in the redaction process and it was not just William Barr siting there with a black felt marker, I am willing to trust that the redactions are consistent with the Special Council’s intentions and that nothing really pertinent or crucial for our eyes was crossed out.
Election Interference
Okay, so first let’s put to rest any nonsense floating around out there that the Russians did not interfere substantially in our election process. They did. There is no question they did. And the extent to which it was done is frankly, pretty shocking. Anyone who thinks Russia is not a hostile foreign adversary of ours is deeply mistaken. Friends don’t do to each other what Russia did to us during the 2016 election.
And let’s be clear about something else too. If you have the idea that “well we interfere in elections too, so what’s the big deal?” then you really are a dope. If it’s true that our country’s intelligence services have interefered in the free and open elections of other countries, that was and is totally wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right. We shouldn’t be doing it and I would never, under any circumstances in any country anywhere, be okay with us screwing around with their elections. That should be sacrasanct and any efforts on our government’s part to do that was legally as well as morally wrong and utterly corrupt. This is a moral position I am pretty decided upon. So don’t throw moral relativism around as though it’s no big deal for Russia to mess with us because we mess with them, blah blah blah. Just no.
So how bad was it? What did the Russians actually do? Let’s take a look at what Mueller found:
“By the end of the 2016 U.S. election, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) had the ability to reach millions of U.S. persons through their social media accounts. Multiple IRA-controlled Facebook groups and Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of U.S. participants. IRA-controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers, including multiple U.S. political figures who retweeted IRA-created content. In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified 470 IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts.6 In January 2018, Twitter announced that it had identified 3,814 IRA-controlled Twitter accounts and notified approximately 1.4 million people Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA-controlled account.” (Part 1, page 15)“Dozens of IRA employees were responsible for operating accounts and personas on different U.S. social media platforms. The IRA referred to employees assigned to operate the social media accounts as “specialists.” Starting as early as 2014, the IRA’s U.S. operations included social media specialists focusing on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The IRA later added specialists who operated on Tumblr and Instagram accounts.“Initially, the IRA created social media accounts that pretended to be the personal accounts of U.S. persons. By early 2015, the IRA began to create larger social media groups or public social media pages that claimed (falsely) to be affiliated with U.S. political and grassroots organizations. In certain cases, the IRA created accounts that mimicked real U.S. organizations. For example, one IRA-controlled Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, purported to be connected to the Tennessee Republican Party.46 More commonly, the IRA created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots groups and used these accounts to pose as antiimmigration groups, Tea Party activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political activists.” (Part 1, page 22)“By February 2016, internal IRA documents referred to support for the Trump Campaign and opposition to candidate Clinton. For example, (redacted) directions to IRA operators (redacted) “Main idea: Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump – we support them).” (Part 1, page 23)“IRA Facebook groups active during the 2016 campaign covered a range of political issues and included purported conservative groups (with names such as “Being Patriotic,” “Stop All Immigrants,” “Secured Borders,” and “Tea Party News”), purported Black social justice groups (“Black Matters,” “Blacktivist,” and “Don’t Shoot Us”), LGBTQ groups (“LGBT United”), and religious groups (“United Muslims of America”).“Throughout 2016, IRA accounts published an increasing number of materials supporting the Trump Campaign and opposing the Clinton Campaign. For example, on May 31, 2016, the operational account “Matt Skiber” began to privately message dozens of pro-Trump Facebook groups asking them to help plan a “pro-Trump rally near Trump Tower.”“IRA-purchased advertisements referencing candidate Trump largely supported his campaign. The first known IRA advertisement explicitly endorsing the Trump Campaign was purchased on April 19, 2016. The IRA bought an advertisement for its Instagram account “Tea Party News” asking U.S. persons to help them “make a patriotic team of young Trump supporters” by uploading photos with the hashtag “#I“Collectively, the IRA’s social media accounts reached tens of millions of U.S. persons. Individual IRA social media accounts attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. For example, at the time they were deactivated by Facebook in mid-2017, the IRA’s “United Muslims of America” Facebook group had over 300,000 followers, the “Don’t Shoot Us” Facebook group had over 250,000 followers, the “Being Patriotic” Facebook group had over 200,000 followers, and the “Secured Borders” Facebook group had over 130,000 followers.61 According to Facebook, in total the IRA-controlled accounts made over 80,000 posts before their deactivation in August 2017, and these posts reached at least 29 million U.S persons and “may have reached an estimated 126 million people.”
There were similar numbers in the breakdown on the IRA activities on Twitter.
“Multiple IRA-posted tweets gained popularity.70 U.S. media outlets also quoted tweets from IRA-controlled accounts and attributed them to the reactions of real U.S. persons. Similarly, numerous high-profile U.S. persons, including former Ambassador Michael McFaul, Roger Stone, Sean Hannity, and Michael Flynn Jr. retweeted or responded to tweets posted to these IRA controlled accounts. Multiple individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign also promoted IRA tweets.”
And then there were the rallies. Yes, from Russia, foreign agents organized, recruited personnel for and oversaw political rallies right here in the US. From flash mobs in front of Trump Tower to hiring a self-defense instructor in New York to offer classes to African-Americans under the banner of “Black Fist”) to hiring someone to walk around New York dressed as Santa Claus but with a Donald Trump mask on.
“In sum, the investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the “active measures” social media campaign carried out by the IRA, an organization funded by Prigozhin and companies that he controlled. As explained further in Volume I, Section V.A, infra, the Office concluded (and a grand jury has alleged) that Prigozhin, his companies, and IRA employees violated U.S. law through these operations, principally by undermining through deceptive acts the work of federal agencies charged with regulating foreign influence in U.S. elections.”
Now the second thing that conservatives are screaming is that it doesn’t matter. “No one interferred in my opinions!” they say. “I didn’t look at any of that Russian stuff. I would have known better. It didn’t affect me.”
Oh yeah?
One of the ugly truths that this investigation exposed was just how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to gathering information about you and what you do and don’t like, what you will and won’t accept and basically, how you think. Download your social media profile from Facebook sometime if you are wondering what I’m talking about. Look at the raw data they have collected on you based on your social media usage, the pictures you upload, the posts you like, and on and on.
Now I want you to realize that all of that information is for sale and has been for years. Pretty much everything you say and do online is stored in some marketing database that advertisers pay very good money for. And the social media component is just one aspect of what is known as market research, all of which is just as applicable to politics as it is to selling you soap.
Why do you think marketing research firms spend billions of dollars every year to figure out what you are thinking and how to sell you things? Because market research works. Advertisements may look stupid to some of us, but not to all of us. We buy the things that are advertised to us for a legion of reasons, most of them having to do with that whole podcast I did on free will. If you think the conscious, rational part of your mind is the one making decisions, I’m sorry but that just isn’t true. We know from science that isn’t true. It’s not an opinion. It’s not just some fanciful idea I have.
Human beings are push button in so many of their responses. Why do you think we have developed the concept of triggers? I don’t mean trigger warnings, which are controversial and could even rebound destructively because they could cause a person to not deal with or confront their fears or anxieties. But the point is that we all have triggers and they aren’t all bad. Seeing a cute little puppy in the window at the pet store triggers a desire to protect and care for it in a lot of people and so they go buy it, even when they weren’t even thinking about getting a pet.
The thing that is so difficult for people to get their wits around with this is that they are not consciously aware of most of what is going on in their own heads. Our emotions come from some place we don’t understand so we just feel how we feel from one minute to the next and maybe we know why and maybe we don’t. Our impulses are not under our control, otherwise they wouldn’t be called impulses. And our decisions are mandated by the choices available to us in our heads at the moment of the decision and by our emotional investment in those choices. It’s easy to be objective when you aren’t emotionally involved, but just try to be objective when it’s your husband or wife or kids who are involved. There’s no way.
So that’s the advertising end of it. But let’s go a little deeper. You aren’t aware of it, because your brain filters out so much for you, but it’s receiving inputs from the environment 24 hours a day, even when you are sleeping. Again, I’m going to stress that this is below your level of awareness. But when someone says your name from across the room, or when you’re asleep, how do you think you hear it so clearly and respond so quickly? Because your brain is suddenly alerting you that someone said your name. Out of the thousands and thousands of words, pictures and sounds that cross your eyes and ears every single day, your brain is deciding all on its own what is important to alert you to and what isn’t so that your conscious processing can safely ignore almost all of it. But the point is that it’s still going in to your brain and those images and ideas are still having an effect on your thinking processes. Most people think about this when they hear about subliminal advertising but otherwise they conveniently forget that this is going on 24/7 in their heads and they pretend that the only thinking they are doing is what they are aware of.
So what I’m saying is, even if you think those Facebook or Twitter ads just fly by your vision and you don’t see it and it doesn’t affect you, I’m here to tell you that Madison Avenue, all the social media companies and all the intelligence agencies in the world know differently.
And there is one final note on this I should mention. We tend to trust certain sources and we tend to distrust others. Some of us just outright refuse to believe or even read or listen to some networks or news media, for example, and we have our various good and bad reasons for doing so. But if someone presents information to you and they claim they are from a source you trust or from a partisan side you are already on, then statistically speaking you are going to accept that information far more easily and believe it more readily and even defend it more passionately just because of where it came from.
In fact, it’s even worse than you think. Studies are finding that our brains actually equate facts and opinions if the opinions come from a source we trust or find credible. This is literally the opposite of critical thinking and we are naturally tuned to do it, so it takes real mental work to sort out the true from the untrue, the facts from the opinions.
For example, if you are a conservative and you see an article published by Fox News, odds are your threshhold for evidence is going to be lower for the claims made in that article and you will approach it with an “I can believe this” attitude instead of a “Do I have to believe this?” attitude. When you feel forced to accept something as true, it’s a lot easier to find reasons not to believe it, but when someone you trust tells you then it’s really easy to believe it. Again, the Russian intelligence agencies who were placing political ads and articles and comments all over Facebook and Twitter know that. They know what words to use to indicate in-group alliances. Anything that was anti-Hillary, for example, had to be true as far as the conservatives were concerned. And every single bad report about Trump was received with equal gullibility by the Left. I sure fell for some whoppers during the campaign. So no one is immune from any of this. It’s got nothing to do with the conservative or liberal mindset. It’s just that being human makes us very easy and vulnerable targets for manipulation. When the right words and colors and sounds are used, we can be made to believe anything.
So to say with any degree of certainty that all that Russian inteference in our election process had no effect is pretty ridiculous to my ears.
Collusion or Not?
When you read over the findings of the report, it’s clear that when it comes to the issue of collusion (or cooperation) we now can say the following with certainty:
(a) there were multiple lines of communication and attempted assistance to the Trump Campaign during the election;
(b) that the Trump team staff were so incompetent that they sometimes were receptive and other times were skittish;
(c) at no time did any Trump Campaign staff member involved in any of these multiple lines contact the FBI or other authorities to alert them that Russian agents and governemnt officials were reaching out to them and making offers of information and assistance;
(d) As David Graham from the Atlantic wrote: “If there was no collusion, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
And on this point, let’s talk a few details from the report.
The June 9th meeting at Trump Tower was one of my biggest issues and in the end, while it was slimy and suspicious as hell, it doesn’t appear from all the data Mueller gathered that an actual crime was committed there. Mueller wrote:
“On the facts here, the government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful. The investigation has not developed evidence that the participants in the meeting were familiar with the foreign-contribution ban or the application of federal law to the relevant factual context … While the government has evidence of later efforts to prevent disclosure of the nature of the June 9 meeting that could circumstantially provide support for a showing of scienter … that concealment occurred more than a year later, involved individuals who did not attend the June 9 meeting, and may reflect an intention to avoid political consequences rather than any prior knowledge of illegality.”
The actions of George Papadopoulos are also something I talked about extensively in my earlier podcast and I stand by everything I said there. Mueller’s report vindicates everything I said here:
“On April 27, 2016 … Papadopoulos wrote a second message to Miller stating that ‘some interesting messages [were] coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.’ The same day, Papadopoulos sent a similar email to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, telling Lewandowski that Papadopoulos had ‘been receiving a lot of calls over the last month about Putin wanting to host [Trump] and the team when the time is right’… On May 4, 2016, he forwarded to Lewandowski an email from [Russian national Ivan] Timofeev raising the possibility of a meeting in Moscow, asking Lewandowski whether that was ‘something we want to move forward with.’ The next day, Papadopoulos forwarded the same Timofeev email to Sam Clovis, adding to the top of the email ‘Russia update.’ He included the same email in a May 21, 2016 message to senior Campaign official Paul Manafort, under the subject line ‘Request from Russia to meet Mr. Trump.'”
The spin on this one by conservative news outlets has been relenetless. If you are only getting your news from conservative outlets, I want to point out to you that they are spinning, which is not the same as outright lying. They are making generalizations, citing opinion as fact and using language tricks to make it sound like Papadopolous didn’t do anything wrong or didn’t try to do anything wrong. That’s not what Mueller found. The only thing that saved Papadopolous was that no one who he was desperately emailing to set up meetings with Russian officials cared enough to respond to him. In fact, as I laid out in my earlier podcast, the only one who seemed to take him seriously was the Australian diplomat, who incredibly was the one who alerted the FBI to what Papadopolous was claiming. So again, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
The Actions of an Innocent Man?
There are two points I want to make regarding Donald Trump himself and his actions over the course of this investigation. All of them point to a man who, even if he’s not guilty of coordinating his campaign actions with the Russian interests who wanted to see him in office, is definitely guilty of something.
The first thing he’s absolutely guilty of is obstruction of justice. This point is made throughout the report. I couldn’t help but wonder that while Mueller chose not to go for an indictment, I’m wondering if that was because he felt it was Congress’ job to carry out an impeachment based on the data he provided. I’m thinking that he didn’t want to get the DOJ involved in what could be a Constitutional crisis of sorts. Can you indict a sitting President is a question that is definitely beyond my pay grade and I suspect Mueller felt it was beyond his too in his role as Special Counsel.
I was happy to find that I was joined in that opinion by Yoni Applebaum of The Atlantic, who wrote that “the Special Counsel has concluded he can neither charge nor clear the President, only Congress can now resolve the allegations against him.”
He further wrote:
“A basic principle lies at the heart of the American criminal-justice system: The accused is entitled to a fair defense and a chance to clear his name. Every American is entitled to this protection, from the humblest citizen all the way up to the chief executive. And that, Mueller explained in his report, is why criminal allegations against a sitting president should be considered by Congress and not the Justice Department. The Mueller report, in short, is an impeachment referral.”
But did Trump obstruct justice? Of course he did, right in front of the entire world and on numerous occasions.
There was his attempt to get then FBI Director Comey to “let Flynn go” in a clear-cut effort to influence the FBI to stop an active investigation into potential criminal activity on the part of Trump’s newly appointed National Security Advisor.
There was the firing of James Comey. Trumnp claimed he did this becasue of how Comey handled the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The only problem is that this ad hoc justification was pure nonsense. Mueller specifically calls out Trump on this, saying that this reasoning is not supported by the evidence. In fact, some of the evidence “indicates that the President wanted to protect himself from an investigation into his campaign,” Mueller wrote.
Then there was Trump directing White House Counsel Don McGhan to fire Mueller, but McGhan refused.
The report cites this specific quote as told by McGhan to the Special Counsel from a May 2017 phone call he had with Trump: “You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod,” Trump told him, and Trump discussed “knocking out Mueller.” Finally, on Trump’s intent, there was “substantial evidence” Mueller said he found about how the President wanted to fire Mueller because he was being investigated for obstruction.
Then there was witness tampering as obstruction. Trump put pressure on Flynn, Manafort, Cohen and another unnamed person from giving information against him.
“Evidence concerning the President’s conduct towards Manafort indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government,” Mueller wrote. “Some evidence supports a conclusion that the President intended, at least in part, to influence the jury.”
Most of this was actually done right in public too, via Twitter and Trump’s statements to the media. Everyone knew what he was doing when he was doing it. Subtlely is not only unheard of in the Trump White House, I don’t think he even understands what the word means.
CNN analyst Ellie Honig discussed the opinions and problems that were brought up by Mueller in his report and also by Barr and Rosenstein in their press conference this week. “It’s a strong obstruction case.” But are Barr and Rosenstein going to bring that case against Trump. Of course they aren’t. And if you’re wondering why, there is only one reason: they are corrupt.
Mueller was crystal clear about this in the report and ANYONE saying that this report exonerates Donald Trump and his campaign of criminal activity is either delusional or lying. There are no other conclusions that can be made when Robert Mueller writes:
“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.”
That is not a statement that exonerates anyone.
The second point I want to make is the culture of dishonesty and outright corruption Trump brought to the White House.
There are numerous instances cited in the report of Trump literally ordering his aides and staffers to lie to cover up for his actions, such as when he asked for Sessions to submit a letter of resignation, then held on to it as potential leverage over Sessions and told Don McGahn and also then-WH Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to cover for him. This is just one of MANY such instances and it was kind of fascinating to see how Trump’s more experienced and savvy aides just ignore these kinds of orders. It’s to their credit actually, because if these people had done all the things Trump ordered them to do, there would be a lot more people in jail right now. Think about that.
Then there is this tasty bit which the cable news jumped on almost immediately. Here’s the quote from the report:
“The President learned of the Special Counsel’s appointment from Sessions, who was with the President, Hunt, and McGahn conducting interviews for a new FBI Director. Sessions stepped out of the Oval Office to take a call from Rosenstein, who told him about the Special Counsel appointment, and Sessions then returned to inform the President of the news. According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.” The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, “How could you let this happen, Jeff?” The President said the position of Attorney General was his most important appointment and that Sessions had “let [him] down,” contrasting him to Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. Sessions recalled that the President said to him, ‘you were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect. The President returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, ‘Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.'”
Does any of that sound like an honest, innocent man who is just making personal sacrifices so he can serve the public good as President? Not to me it doesn’t.
Vindicated? Hardly!
So does this report vindicate Trump? No! Not at all.
All the spin and bullshit you are hearing flying around on conservative airways and media are a bunch of people caught up in their cognitive dissonance, or people who are trying to confuse you with spin so you don’t know the actual story.
It’s not that Trump is vindicated, it’s that he’s the President so he can’t be treated like any other common criminal. Here is what Mueller said on this:
“…we recognized that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct … The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
It can’t be any clearer than that. It’s crystal clear, at least to me, that Mueller laid all the groundwork here for Congress to enact impeachment hearings. Criminal indictment can also occur after the President leaves office. Mueller disagreed with the argument from Trump’s lawyers that a President could not be guilty of obstruction of justice:
“The protection of the criminal justice system from corrupt acts by any person — including the President — accords with the fundamental principle of our government that ‘[n]o [person] in this country is so high that he is above the law.'”
There’s also the fact that you don’t indict a President, you impeach him. The Mueller report contains 10 credible allegations of Donald Trump as an individual engaging in obstructive behavior. Regardless of what any of his enablers or conservative spin masters have to say, that information is now in the public record and it will never go away.
Yet here is the spin from Attorney General Barr. I want you to keep in mind that AG Barr is in the Department of Justice and while he serves at the pleasure of the President, he is not supposed to be his lackey:
“In assessing the President’s actions discussed in the report, it is important to bear in mind the context. President Trump faced an unprecedented situation. As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as President, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates. At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the President’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.”
So because the President was frustrated, he committed obstruction of justice numerous times?
Here’s an idea: why not just tell the truth?
Because he can’t.
Our President appears to me to be a pathological liar. He has raised a family of them. Maybe that’s genetic and maybe it’s just how they were raised. I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow up in the Trump household but I can’t imagine I would describe it as “fun.”
Trump lies as easily as he breathes and almost as often. I don’t think there is any other politician in all of recorded history, not just Presidents, who has told as many documented and blatant falsehoods as Donald Trump. Yet his supporters don’t care. And that should tell you everything you need to know about their ability to engage in critical thinking.
Just like I said many times during the campaign, Donald Trump cannot be trusted. He’s a malignant narcissist who only thinks of himself first and perhaps his family second and beyond that, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about you or me or any of us. His behavior on the campaign trail was that of an uncivilized lout. His behavior since taking office – as an individual now, I’m not talking about his policies – are line-for-line the same as a Mafia don or cult leader. His approval ratings even reflect this cult status, stuck at around 40% for the past two years.
No matter what he says or does, his base will never break from him. And that, my friends, is a cult.
But Trump cannot do this alone. He has to have enablers and Attorney General Barr has proven himself to be just such an enabler. I’ll quote from a Forbes article that mirrors my thoughts on this exactly:
“First, it’s important to know that there are three things necessary to make a case for obstruction of justice: an intent to obstruct, knowledge that this obstruction is related to an actual investigation and “corrupt intent.” Direct excerpts from Mueller’s report clearly show corrupt intent, stating, for example, that various actions Trump took were to “protect himself from an investigation” or to “prevent further investigative scrutiny of the president’s and his campaign’s conduct” or to “deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President’s conduct towards the investigation.”“Barr, however, blithely and globally ascribes “non-corrupt motives” to the president. From his press conference today: “Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. And at the same time, the President took no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation. Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.”“Barr’s pseudo-logic goes like this: if the President did one thing properly and without corrupt motives (release documents, give witnesses “permission” to talk), then he has non-corrupt motives, so the instances of corrupt motives related to specific instances are ….by definition also non-corrupt? Irrelevant? Not real? It may be the attack on our perceptions and sense of reality that’s the most damaging to the national psyche.”…“Is this the same thing that Trump does, when he blatantly denies something we know he said or did? The most recent example occurred on the day Julian Assange was arrested. Trump was asked if he still “loves” WikiLeaks and he said, “WikiLeaks? I don’t know anything about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.” Minutes later, video clips of him saying how much he loved WikiLeaks and praising WikiLeaks at numerous rallies were on the air. With Trump, his denying what we know we see and hear is so common and silly that it doesn’t affect our sense of reality. It doesn’t matter if he says he never heard of WikiLeaks. We have faith in our memories and the evidence in front of our eyes that he is lying. So the reaction is a laugh or a snort of disgust, but not a tremor in our sense of sanity. But it’s different with Barr, who still has a veneer of truth-telling.”
So long as Trump has enablers like Barr as his Attorney General and Mitch McConnell as the Senate Majority Leader in Congress, he will be protected from prosecution, impeachment or any other problematic situations that could remove him from the office he is clearly and hopelessly unqualified to hold.
Trump is just a man, but he holds the office of the President of the United States, arguably the single most powerful position on this planet. I have talked in earlier podcasts about the fact that cult leaders can only get away with what they do because their followers enable them. That is 100% the case right now here in America and the enablers are in the most senior positions of our government.
This Presidency has been such an eye-opener for so many of us at just how bad things really are in Washington and how deadlocked we as a country are in terms of what to do about it.
Our efforts on the Left to educate, inform or fight back are met with direct insults more often than not by people who lack the intellectual rigor to understand what they are doing and who they are supporting. For those who simply hate the Left and everything it stands for, they’d vote for their dog before they would have voted for Hillary Clinton. Literally, that is what one Trump supporter told me after the election. And to be fair, I’ve heard similar sentiments from the Left about Trump, so there is a lot of passion on both sides. But we’re talking about a malignant narcissist here. This is a dangerous person to give the nuclear codes to. The fact that Trump has that kind of power has kept me awake some nights. This is not a man who should be trusted with such power.
Yet Trump’s supporters were happy to open the door to allow him to walk in and take over, bringing his family along for the ride as though the Presidential term was the same thing as a summer trip to the Hamptons. Nepotism, corruption, obstruction of justice – these are only the tip of the iceberg with these people.
We were hoping for more from this investigation. Frankly, I’m pretty disappointed. I understand what happened and I understand why it happened, but that doesn’t make it all any more palatable.
I wish I had better news, but it seems to me that we have a rocky and long road ahead of us. We have got to get Trump and his enablers out of office and we have so much work to do to restore not just our faith in the office of President, but in our federal leadership as a whole.
A lot of very well-intentioned and honest people work in Washington. They work hard to keep us safe, to keep the lights on and to keep our country going. None of what I’ve talked about in this podcast was meant as a hit on them. The US government is huge and while we like to think there’s a Wizard of Oz kind of figure in charge of everything, that isn’t the case at all. Not every bad thing that’s come out of Washington in the past two years has been because of Donald Trump. His administration has managed to do a few good things but it’s a lot like Scientology as far as I’m concerned. Sure, there’s some good stuff there but look at all the crap you have to sift through to get to it! Is this what we voted for? Is this what we want leading our nation and deciding our policies?
Personally, I think we need to clean house not just in the White House but in Congress. Badly. I mean, take a look at the place. It’s not a dynamic, working group of people representing the wide and diverse interests of our country. It looks more like the Capitol Hill Geriatric Club who work only for the monied elite and entrenched special interest groups who pay them good money for their Congressional votes. That isn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind and they wrote specifically against all of that. They never envisoned career politicians who would get fat and rich from campaign donationes and the public largesse. Every other week we hear about some corrupt politician getting busted having sex with minors, ripping us off to fund their extravagant lifestyles or just plain ignoring their constituents because Big Pharma or Big Oil or Big Money has them by the pocketbook. It’s disgusting how far we have fallen in the morality of public service. We have got to turn this around or the plain truth is that the Great Experiment of American Democracy is going to end up a catastrophic and historical failure.
That is what this Presidency has shown me and that’s why I speak out about these things the way I do. As Americans, we have a lot of work to do if we are going to turn this whole scene around. I’m trying my best to do my part through education and information. I hope you’ll step up and do yours too.
Thanks for watching and please always remember, it’s chaos – be kind.
Sources
Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election
Our Brains Rapidly and Automatically Process Opinions We Agree with as if They are Facts
Mueller had everything he needed to charge Trump with obstruction, but didn’t
The Mueller Report Is an Impeachment Referral
Did We Just Get Gaslighted by the Attorney General?
How Much of the Mueller Report is Redacted
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #189: Some Real Talk about the Mueller Report appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week, I am tackling the difficult subject of suicide and its prevention. If you’re wondering how I ended up talking on this topic, I explain that in detail too. I truly hope this can help everyone who watches. Enjoy!
Sources:
Save.org
ASIST information
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #188: Negotiation and Suicide Prevention appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week I am tackling Theranos and the story of Elizabeth Holmes, a “self-made billionaire” who took Silicon Valley by storm but whose fall from supposed grace was even more spectacular. In this podcast, I take apart what happened and how and then how this is just one of many such stories we see all the time. There are reasons for that and they aren’t all comfortable to know. Enjoy!
The Story of Theranos
Theranos is a combination of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.” The basic concept of the company, founded by Elizabeth Holmes after she dropped out of Stanford in her sophomore year, is that drawing a tiny amount of blood at a time from each patient’s finger and avoiding the large syringes used by traditional labs will make patients less reluctant to get blood tests. The idea was that consumers would be less afraid, it would cost less and the number of tests that could be done on that drop or small vial of blood would offer the general public a lot more transparency and access to their medical reports and conditions.
She got the idea to do blood testing on a single drop of blood while she was attending Stanford’s School of Engineering in 2004. With the initial help of Channing Robertson, Stanford School of Engineering’s dean and her school adviser, she started Theranos in April 2004. Despite being told by actual engineers and medical professionals that her idea was impossible and simply could not be done, she pushed forward on her idea to create a small, simple looking machine no bigger than a printer that would run hundreds of tests on a single drop of a person’s blood. By December she had raised $6 million.
She had a very persuasive personality and was a natural salesperson, getting support from major financial and political players such as former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger as well as former secretary of defense William Perry, former head of the CDC William Foege and former Senate Republican majority leader Bill Frist, some of whom didn’t just financially back the venture but became board members. They were all sold on the promise of the technology but didn’t appear to be aware of the house of cards that tech was built on.
Until 2013, all of this was being done out of the public eye when Holmes leaped into the spotlight through major press exposure in Fortune magazine, Forbes, The New York Times and Inc. And not just public publicity, but inking multi-million dollar agreements with Walgreens, Cleveland Clinic, Carlos Slim Foundation, Capital BlueCross and AmeriHealth Caritas to use Theranos’ devices.
She modeled herself after Steve Jobs, not just in style but in appearance, wearing his signature black turtleneck sweater and even speaking in a deeper voice in public. And the similarities were not lost on the reporters who covered her story. They were more than happy to go along with her branding and dubbed her the “female Steve Jobs.”
Here’s how an October 2015 Inc Magazine article begins:
“You’d have to look really hard not to see Steve Jobs in Elizabeth Holmes. Both Holmes and Jobs were loners as kids. As a teenager, Jobs discovered Plato; Holmes favored Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Both dropped out of college, in part, because they didn’t see the virtue in an education they believed wouldn’t make a difference in their futures. Like the Apple creator, Holmes has kept her company, Theranos — which seeks to radically disrupt the lab test industry — shrouded in secrecy. Jobs became a billionaire by the time he was 40. For Holmes, that moment came sooner, when Theranos was valued at $9 billion. She was not yet 31.”
Like Jobs, Holmes is also a vegan and a workaholic.
Also from that same article:
“Holmes is a vegan because avoiding animal products allows her to function on less sleep. She says she ‘doesn’t really hang out with anyone anymore,’ aside from her younger brother, who joined Theranos as a product manager four years ago. She didn’t take a vacation during the entire decade of her 20s and doesn’t date. ‘I literally designed my whole life for this,’ says Holmes in a strikingly baritone voice, her shoulders curled inward and hands clasped, the body language of someone who is fiercely protective and on guard. Talking to Holmes is a bit like talking to a politician — she’s politely impenetrable, unspooling a stream of words without actually revealing very much.”
In hindsight, it’s interesting reading the articles written about Holmes a few years ago and how they were all slanted to position her in a very positive, entrepreneurial light. She was going to be the Next Big Thing. The possibilites were endless!
Behind the scenes, things were not quite as positive.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal got a tip that something was very wrong with the blood testing device Theranos was working on, called the Edison after inventor Thomas Edison, and he began an investigation that resulted in a whole book called Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
And this is where things become super creepy and for those of you who have followed my work on Scientology and other destructive cults, some of this is going to sound eerily familiar.
Before Carreyrou had even finished his first article for The Journal, much less his book, Holmes turned to high-profile attorney David Boies, a man with an extremely controversial legal history who not only was Theranos’ lawyer but was also a board member. This is a man who doesn’t let moral quibbles get in the way of a good defense. For example, in November 2017 the HuffPost reported that Boies was fired by the New York Times after it was discovered that his law firm was hiring private investigators who were tasked with spying on and intimidating NY Times reporters who were working on the Harvey Weinstein story as well as intimidating Weinstein’s actual victims. From that story:
“The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow reported Monday that lawyer David Boies, working on behalf of Weinstein, contracted with a team of private investigators, including former Mossad agents, to try to kill a negative New York Times story about Weinstein. Boies firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, has represented the newspaper three times in the last 10 years. The firm was reportedly defending the Times in a libel suit at the same time it was hiring private investigators to target its journalists.“We never contemplated that the law firm would contract with an intelligence firm to conduct a secret spying operation aimed at our reporting and our reporters,” the Times said in a statement obtained by Politico’s Michael Calderone.
Boies claimed he knew nothing about these private investigators and what they were working on. Yet those claims fall a little flat when we also look at what happened with Theranos.
According to Carreyrou, Boies law firm directed PIs to surveil witnesses and journalists, weaponized non-discolosure agreements to enforce silence about company abuses of its employees and used other heavy-handed intimidation tactics. The fact that Boies himself was on the board of directors of Theranos and was using his law offices in New York to host promotional meetings for Theranos was a clear conflict of interest.
Carreyrou published the first article critical of Theranos and what was going on behind the scenes there in October 2015 including the shocking discovery that Theranos was using third-party machinery and not their own in-house devices to do the blood testing that made up most of Theranos’ income stream. They were making claims on their website that said one thing while doing something very different. And worse, the tech they were supposedly developing was not just a bit behind but had never actually gotten out of the starting gate.
According to an October 2016 article in Vanity Fair, Holmes called a staff meeing right after the Wall Street Journal article came out, a staff meeting that ended with all of the Theranos staff chanting in unison “Fuck you, Carreyrou!”
Just imagine that. An article critical of whatever company you work at is printed in the Wall Street Journal. Your CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, and her boyfriend who is also the company President, Ramesh Sunny Bulwani, come out and rile you up about how your company is changing the world and how the media are attacking you and getting it so wrong because that’s what the media does. They tell you that you are on the side of everything that is just and good and true. Of course this is exactly what you want to hear. You don’t want to lose your job. You don’t want to work for crooks. So you totally believe everything they tell you. And you see everyone else is nodding too. By the end of it, it’s more like a religious revival and than a staff meeting. Everyone is so worked up that they are chanting obscenities as a group towards the person blowing the whistle on their shenanigans. And you find yourself chanting right along with them. Does this sound at all familiar to any of you?
There is a culture in Silicon Valley which contributes to this kind of nonsense. In fact, I dare say it’s not a culture. It’s a cult. Here’s how Nick Boltin describes it in that Vanity Fair article:
“In Silicon Valley, every company has an origin story — a fable, often slightly embellished, that humanizes its mission for the purpose of winning over investors, the press, and, if it ever gets to that point, customers, too. These origin stories can provide a unique, and uniquely powerful, lubricant in the Valley. After all, while Silicon Valley is responsible for some truly astounding companies, its business dealings can also replicate one big confidence game in which entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the tech media pretend to vet one another while, in reality, functioning as cogs in a machine that is designed to not question anything — and buoy one another all along the way.“It generally works like this: the venture capitalists (who are mostly white men) don’t really know what they’re doing with any certainty — it’s impossible, after all, to truly predict the next big thing — so they bet a little bit on every company that they can with the hope that one of them hits it big. The entrepreneurs (also mostly white men) often work on a lot of meaningless stuff, like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say “Yo!” (and only “Yo!”) to your friends. The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world, which tends to appease the venture capitalists, because they can also pretend they’re not there only to make money. And this also helps seduce the tech press (also largely comprised of white men), which is often ready to play a game of access in exchange for a few more page views of their story about the company that is trying to change the world by getting frozen yogurt to customers more expeditiously. The financial rewards speak for themselves. Silicon Valley, which is 50 square miles, has created more wealth than any place in human history. In the end, it isn’t in anyone’s interest to call bullshit.”“When Elizabeth Holmes emerged on the tech scene, around 2003, she had a preternaturally good story. She was a woman. She was building a company that really aimed to change the world. And, as a then dark-haired 19-year-old first-year at Stanford University’s School of Chemical Engineering, she already comported herself in a distinctly Jobsian fashion. She adopted black turtlenecks, would boast of never taking a vacation, and would come to practice veganism. She quoted Jane Austen by heart and referred to a letter that she had written to her father when she was nine years old insisting, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” And it was this instinct, she said, coupled with a childhood fear of needles, that led her to come up with her revolutionary company.”
I have spoken at length on my channel about the hagiography of L. Ron Hubbard. That is a technical term for the life story of a religious figure. Is what I just read there from Vanity Fair any different from what L. Ron Hubbard said about his own life and how he came to his calling as a humanitarian, philosopher and educator? It’s the same con job we all respond to only in Silicon Valley it’s all about tech instead of spirituality. At least it is for now.
Not long after this public exposure began and that “Fuck You Carreyrou!” staff meeting, Sunny Bulwani was later found to be ordering company technicians to not use Edison machines at all when doing proficiency testing, which is required by FDA regulations to show that diagnostic machinery like the Edison are producing accurate results. After this was reported anonymously by a Theranos employee to New York’s public health lab and the New York State Department of Health in April 2014, Theranos then confirmed that the Edison was producing different results from the industry standard machines. Their lawyers then spun this to mean that the Edison was in a category all on its own and couldn’t be compared to traditional proficiency-testing methods.
There were also technical issues with being able to do such a wide array of tests on such a small sample of blood. If you’ve ever wondered why you have to give over a few vials of the stuff when you go get tested, it’s because that’s how much it takes to do all those tests. You can’t just dilute that blood and then factor in that you diluted it and get the same test results. By diluting blood, you literally change its chemical properties and this will definitely affect test results.
“Anytime you dilute a sample, you’re adulterating the sample and changing it in some fashion, and that introduces more potential for error,” says Timothy R. Hamill, vice chairman of the University of California, San Francisco’s department of laboratory medicine. Using dilution frequently is “poor laboratory practice.”
Also, getting blood from a pin prick, which is what the Theranos machinery is all about, can all by itself give you a bad time.
“Former employees say diluting blood drawn from fingers contributed to accuracy problems early last year with a test to measure potassium. Lab experts say finger-pricked blood samples can be less pure than those drawn from a vein because finger-pricked blood often mixes with fluids from tissue and cells that can interfere with tests.”
Holmes went on Mad Money the same day this article was published and wouldn’t give a straight answer to the simple questions she was asked. Instead, as part of her long diatribe she paraphrased Gandhi: “This is what happens when you work to change things, first they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.”
Within a few months, real trouble started brewing. The New York Times reported in April 2016:
“Federal regulators have threatened a series of stiff sanctions against Theranos, the embattled blood-testing company, including closing down its flagship laboratory and potentially barring its chief executive from owning or operating its labs for two years.“The sanctions, which have not been made final, were included in a strongly worded letter from officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It is the latest blow to the credibility of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, its chief executive, who seemingly became a self-made billionaire by promising to upend the clinical testing industry.“The government officials proposed a series of sanctions against the company, including the revocation of the company’s certification for its California laboratory, its primary operation, and suspension of its eligibility to receive payments under the Medicare insurance program.”
By July they followed through and banned Holmes from “owning, operating, or directing a blood-testing service for a period of two years.” Walgreens then ended its relationship and closed its blood collection centers. They were also ordered to cease use of one of their core devices, the Capillary Tube Nanotainer. Then the lawsuits began.
A Business Insider report from April 2017 stated:
“Anyone who paid to take one of Theranos’s blood tests in Arizona will be receiving a refund from the company… In total, Theranos will pay the state $4.65 million to refund the tests, and will also pay $225,000 to cover civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.“Between 2013 and 2016, Theranos sold approximately 1.5 million blood tests to more than 175,000 Arizonans,” the attorney general said in a news release. “Each customer will now be reimbursed the full amount the customer paid for testing regardless of whether the results were voided or corrected.”
Other reported ongoing actions include civil and criminal investigations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, an unspecified FBI investigation, and two class action fraud lawsuits. Holmes denied any wrongdoing.
But on March 14, 2018, Holmes settled an SEC lawsuit. The charges of fraud included the company’s false claim that its technology was being used by the U.S. Department of Defense in combat situations and they also lied about a $100 million income in 2014 when in fact they only made $100,000. Holmes was also personally fined half a million dollars.
By September 2018, the company folded but not before Holems and Balwani were charged on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
But what is she doing right now? She’s broke it off with Balwani in 2016 after firing him from the company but she wasn’t a free agent for long. She is now reportedly fiancé to hotel heir Billy Evans and hangs out in San Francisco as though she doesn’t have a care in the world. Just days before Theranos was dissolved, Daily Mail reported that Holmes was hanging out at Burning Man with Evans and his MIT signet rink around her neck. In other words, she is living the consequence-free life of the rich and famous.
She got away with everything and let’s be really clear: she is very likely never going to see a day in jail. She will buy her way out of that and perhaps end up with some hefty fines or the equivalent of rich people’s community service. Elizabeth Holmes lives in the rarefied air of the rich and famous and while I don’t make a practice of predicting stuff, I will say that in this case I’d be shocked if she gets more than slap on the wrist.
Now there’s all kinds of things that could be said, but I’m sure most of you won’t be surprised to hear what I found most fascinating about all of this. It’s the fact that Elizabeth Holmes acted a whole lot like a destructive cult leader throughout most of this, yet no one could really say with a straight face that Theranos was a destructive cult. Or could they?
Holmes and Steve Jobs
From that 2016 Vanity Fair article:
“Holmes had learned a lot from Jobs. Like Apple, Theranos was secretive, even internally. Just as Jobs had famously insisted at 1 Infinite Loop, 10 minutes away, that departments were generally siloed, Holmes largely forbade her employees from communicating with one another about what they were working on—a culture that resulted in a rare form of executive omniscience. At Theranos, Holmes was founder, C.E.O., and chairwoman. There wasn’t a decision—from the number of American flags framed in the company’s hallway (they are ubiquitous) to the compensation of each new hire—that didn’t cross her desk.“And like Jobs, crucially, Holmes also paid indefatigable attention to her company’s story, its “narrative.” Theranos was not simply endeavoring to make a product that sold off the shelves and lined investors’ pockets; rather, it was attempting something far more poignant. In interviews, Holmes reiterated that Theranos’s proprietary technology could take a pinprick’s worth of blood, extracted from the tip of a finger, instead of intravenously, and test for hundreds of diseases—a remarkable innovation that was going to save millions of lives and, in a phrase she often repeated, ‘change the world.'”…“In hundreds of interviews with the media and on panels, Holmes honed her story to near perfection. She talked about how she didn’t play with Barbies as a child, and how her father, Christian Holmes IV, who worked in environmental technology for Enron before going on to work in a number of senior government jobs in Washington, was one of her idols. But her reverence for Steve Jobs was perhaps most glaring. Besides the turtlenecks, Holmes’s proprietary blood-analysis device, which she named “Edison” after Thomas Edison, resembled Jobs’s NeXT computer. She designed her Theranos office with Le Corbusier black leather chairs, a Jobs favorite. She also adhered to a strange diet of only green juices (cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery), to be drunk only at specific times of the day. Like Jobs, too, her company was her life. She rarely ever left the office, only going home to sleep. To celebrate her birthday, Holmes held a party at Theranos headquarters with her employees. (Her brother, Christian, also works at Theranos.)”
GQ Magazine wrote a review of Bad Blood in May 2018 and also found parallels with my thinking on this:
“[Holmes] was a classic narcissist — an intelligent and ambitious entrepreneur who surrounded herself with mediocre yes men. She pitted engineering teams against each other, assuming competition would foster better productivity over collaboration. She was also paranoid and secretive. Holmes’s assistants would Facebook-friend employees just to report on what they were posting. Her entire M.O. could be summed up by a motivational saying inscribed on a paperweight she kept on her desk: ‘What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?'”“Bad Blood argues that Holmes was less an impressive con artist, and something more akin to a cult leader. People — employees and investors alike — were taken by Holmes’s ‘aura.’ It’s no surprise that she deeply, deeply admired Steve Jobs. She dressed like him. Her Audi didn’t have a license plate, a nod to Jobs. After the Apple founder’s death, co-workers at Theranos noticed that Holmes was lifting management tactics from Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. (‘They were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating.’) If she wasn’t being investigated for ‘massive fraud,’ you’d imagine Holmes’s second startup would invent technology to let her wear Jobs’s skin.”
What if she had succeeded? Everything we just covered would still be just as true, yet would anyone care?
Steve Jobs was an authoritarian and is worshiped because people think he invented the Mac and the iPod. He didn’t. He just marketed them. But Elizabeth Holmes ran her company in lock step with what Jobs did at Apple. Do you think she’s the only one doing that?
Jeff Bezos is an authoritarian yet is worshipped because of his financial status.
Tom Cruise is adored and worshiped by millions yet he’s a monster.
Our obsession or at least complicitness with success drives an end-justifies-the-means mentality. It is us who enables these people. We are the followers and they are the leaders. We empower them. Without us, they are nothing.
There is a personality type there. A type that lies as easily as it breathes. That uses people like puppets so long as they willingly dance to their tune, but is just as happy to watch them burn on a bonfire once they won’t. That promises the sun, the moon and the stars to anyone who will support them, but will visit the wrath of hell on anyone who oppposes them. It’s not just about being vindictive or abusive. It’s a much more complete package.
It’s developing a persona of trust, of affability even. Just don’t try to get too close or those friendly eyes might just turn dark and stormy and you may find yourself suddenly at the receiving end of an unexpectedly brutal personal remark. Of course, if they need you for something, the smiles will come back and the apologies will sound so sincere and you’d swear you were just imagining the severity of what just happened. There’s no way this kind soul ever meant to say those things. It was just stress.
It’s carrying oneself with authority and passion and a sense of purpose that is striking in its simplicity and its directness. Here is someone who knows what they want. Who has a clear idea of how to get it and isn’t afraid to push people around in service to a greater cause.
It’s knowing that everything they do is not just for the greater good, but is for your good. You, personally. They want YOU to succeed. They want YOU to live longer or be better or worry less. Whatever it is that you want, they seem to want that same thing too. And once you accept that, you’ll not just be okay with them pushing you around but you’ll want them to. You know that’s the kind of thing you need to be the better person you want to be but somehow can’t make yourself accomplish.
It’s the kind of person you start thinking you should be. The kind of person who is better than you in some crucial way but who doesn’t lord it over you because they seem to say, at least at the beginning, that you can be just like them too.
That is the personality type of the cult leader. It’s got nothing to do with religion or wealth-making or company building or entertaining. To this type of person, that’s just window dressing. It doesn’t much matter what they are doing so long as they are dominating other people and doing it in such a way that those people never suspect they are being dominated. That is what a cult leader is.
That is Jeff Bezos. That is Tom Cruise. That was Steve Jobs and that was Elizabeth Holmes. So long as they aren’t abusing us, we are happy to have them around because they provide us with trinkets and little conveniences or distractions which make our lives a little less stressful or a little less worrying or a little funnier. I think there are probably a bunch of lessons to be learned here but I don’t think I need to spell them out. I hope you’ll give what I said here today some thought and maybe the next time the Next Big Thing comes around, maybe we can be a little more critical about what that thing is and who it is that is offering it to us. They might just not be what you think they are.
Thank you for watching. I want to end with this little reminder: It’s chaos. Be kind.
Sources:
Wall Street Journal – Theranos has Struggled with Blood Tests
How Playing the Long Game Made Elizabeth Holmes a Billionaire
Department of Health and Human Services FDA inspection report of 9/16/2015
Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down
Bad Blood Review: The Biggest Scam in Silicon Valley
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #187: Theranos and the Authoritarian Personality appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week, I am sharing some advice I have learned over the years, and specifically what I think would be the single most helpful thing people can do to stay out of or prevent the kind of trouble that derailed my life as a teenager getting involved in Scientology. It might sound simple, but aren’t all great truths supposed to be that way? Enjoy!
References for this podcast:
Grin and bear it: the influence of manipulated facial expression on the stress response
Laughter Prescription
Use of humor to reduce stress and pain and enhance healing in the dental setting
How to Train Your Brain to Be More Optimistic
Behavior: Finding Happiness, Caojle Your Brain to the Left
Happy Brain, Happy Life
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #186: My Best Advice About Cults and Otherwise appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This week I examine the concept of free will and whether or not we have it. This interest has sprung as a direct result of my recent studies and connecting dots between neuroscience, psychology and cult studies. This is not meant to be the definitive end statement. I want to start the conversation, not end it. Enjoy!
References for this podcast:
Incognito by David Eagleman Free Will by Sam HarrisThe Righteous Mind by Jonathan HaidtThe Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan HaidtThe Secret Life of the Brain by Mariano SigmanConsciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #185: You Have No Free Will – Watch This Podcast! appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

You may or may not have seen the videos or heard anything about Sovereign Citizens, but they are a thing and they are growing. In this podcast, we take it all apart starting with who this group is, what they basically believe and the kinds of trouble they have caused because of their delusory thinking including real violence. John P. Capitalist is a big contributor this week and I think you’ll find his wealth of knowledge on this topic to be very enlightening.
The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #184: The Cult of Sovereign Citizens ft. John P. Capitalist appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.