Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

What happens when you tell people what you actually believe? Kate Cohen discovered that the answer can be much less frightening, and much more interesting, than you expect. For years, she participated in religious life without believing in God. Then she became a mother. Faced with children who trusted her to explain the world, she found she could no longer present something as true when she did not believe it herself.“I could not tell them something I didn’t believe was true,” she told me. “I just couldn’t do it.”That commitment to honesty runs through our conversation on Cults, Culture, and Coercion. Kate is a former Washington Post contributing columnist and the author of We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too). She now writes Scratch on Substack. We talked about raising children, questioning religious authority, defending democracy, and the ordinary acts of creativity that help us remain active participants in our own lives.We did not agree about every label or every approach to religion. That made the conversation interesting and valuable. Freedom of mind includes the ability to explore different points of view while holding the other person with respect. Too many people today think is simplistic binaries and so if another thinks differently, they might get labeled as “less than” and in the worst case, an enemy.

When someone promises you financial freedom, it is worth asking how much freedom you have to question what they are selling. Can you challenge their claims? Can you consult independent experts? Can you change your mind without being mocked, shamed, or told you are missing the opportunity of a lifetime? When celebrities like Tom Brady and Taylor Swift promote crypto- do people understand they are not experts on business and economics? Many people know Ben McKensie from The O.C., Southland, and Gotham. I wanted to speak with him about his investigation into cryptocurrency—and the patterns of influence that make its promises so compelling. Ben wrote Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with journalist Jacob Silverman. His new, independent documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, brings that investigation to the screen. I watched the film and loved it. It is funny, disturbing, and accessible, even if you have never understood what cryptocurrency actually does. Our conversation explored how financial promises can become bound up with identity—and how difficult it becomes to reconsider a belief when your money, community, and self-esteem are invested in it. Crypto is part of the Tech bros plan to usurp democracy by promoting dark money that corrupt elections! Ben testified before Congress. Fortunately, the “Clarity Act” crypto bill was not passed in the Senate due to not including ethics requirements. This was a big blow to the crypto lobby which spent more than Big Oil in the 2024 election.

These days there are too many people on social media proclaiming Trump has dementia when she says that all the facts are not available. Dr. Odenheimer is a geriatric neurologist and professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. She retired from academic medicine in 2017, keeps her medical license, and advocates for people with dementia and their caregivers. Dr. Odenheimer and I are colleagues in the Program in Psychiatry and the Law, a forensic think associated with Harvard Medical School. Like myself, she values truth telling and integrity. This commitment can get us both in conflict with others in our respective fields.She also cared for her own mother, who had dementia. We first spoke in 2022 about her fight against a false Alzheimer’s cure, in our earlier conversation⁵. This time we talked about the dementia misdiagnosis problems she has seen across her career.In this interview, we didn’t focus on Donald Trump. However, I thought it important to ask a forensic expert on dementia to come on my podcast again. This topic demands an expert knowing all the facts and doing her due diligence before tracking down a correct diagnosis.There are huge numbers of aging people who are being misdiagnosed and supplements and quack claims of treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia abound. Dementia misdiagnosis changes what happens to a person next: the medications they take, the independence they keep, and the care their family chooses.

Austrian filmmaker Friedrich “Fritz” Moser discusses his documentary, How to Build a Truth Engine. The film brings together investigative journalism, computer science, and neuroscience to examine our susceptibility to disinformation and what might help us resist it. The film was executive produced by George Clooney. Fritz initially set out to make a film about automating fact-checking. Could technology help investigators keep pace with the material circulating online? His work eventually brought him to Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury of UCLA and Prof. Tim Tangherlini of UC Berkeley and their research group developing StoryMiner, a system for analyzing narratives and the relationships within them. In the film, visualizations help make complicated connections among claims, people, and events easier to examine.The researchers also encouraged him to speak with neuroscientists. Finding errors in a story and understanding a person’s attachment to that story are different tasks. That distinction matters in my work. Someone may have built friendships, a sense of purpose, and part of their identity around a belief system. Presenting contradictory evidence can be important, but we also need to understand what reconsidering would mean for that person.Fritz’s original technology question grew into a much broader inquiry: Why are we susceptible to disinformation, and how can we become better equipped to evaluate it? This interview covers crucial insights and technologies what can help us navigate the psychological warfare that is being used on peoples around the world. A fascinating interview.

You want to help your family. Someone you trust offers an opportunity to earn extra income, work from home, and become financially independent. They introduce you to enthusiastic people who seem to share your values. Perhaps they attend your house of worship. Then you discover that making money requires recruiting other people. When the income fails to materialize, you are encouraged to buy more training, pay for coaching, and work on your lack of belief that you can become a millionaire by working part-time. By this point, questioning the opportunity may feel like questioning your friends, your faith, or your own ability to succeed.I have encountered these patterns for decades in my work with people harmed by commercial cults that do multi-level marketing (MLMs). Other varieties of commercial cults include trafficking and crypto. My guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Dr. William Keep, has spent decades examining the business practices behind them. I have known Bill for many years through our shared concern about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. A former business school dean at the College of New Jersey, he has helped attorneys and government investigators evaluate these operations. Our conversation explored how financial deception works, why it can be so difficult to recognize from inside, and what happens when businesses gain influence over the institutions meant to protect us.