Nobody's Perfect

Never meet your heroes… or take them too seriously when they're speaking outside of their wheelhouse.

I was listening to Steve Hassan speaking on a podcast recently, A Little Bit Culty - hosted by ex NXIVM cult members Sarah Edmondson and her husband Anthony Ames. Steve is well known by now for his BITE model of control in cults, and I've written about this model and its usefulness before.

However in the course of less than an hour, Steve managed to talk about hypnosis as an efficacious treatment for cult addiction, Trump using Neuro Linguistic Programming to control people, and Jeffrey Epstein working with Putin to record compromising material about world leaders and use it to blackmail them.

In the next episode, Janja Lalich, another cult expert, managed to drop rebirthing, hypnotism and more NLP into the conversation. It seems that surviving a cult does not immunise someone against all forms of pseudoscience.

On top of this, the advertisements in the podcast include spots for Ka'Chava (an “all-in-one plant-based superfood meal to fuel your mind and body”) and the NextEvo CBD (cannabis) extract that's meant to help you sleep better. Looking at the podcast website, there's more for me to look forward to in later episodes, with new sponsors including biOptimizers (magnesium that appears to be a panacea) and organifi (part of the juice craze - how is this still a thing?). Of course none of these adverts come with any robust peer-reviewed evidence to support the claims that are being made - and yet the podcast hosts appear happy to read their lines for the adverts, and take the money in return.

So how do I react to all of this nonsense I'm hearing? Should I switch to listening to a different podcast, like Let's Talk About Sects? How should this change how I view the hosts or the guests of this podcast?

My first thought is that I'm aware enough of this nonsense when I hear it that I can still listen without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I feel it's like that idea of the enemy of my enemy being my friend.

Sometimes as skeptics we'll find ourselves fighting alongside people who aren't very skeptical, but are still doing good work. One example of this would be the Gloriavale Leavers' Support Trust - a charity that is doing some really good work with both exposing the abuse happening at Gloriavale, and helping those who are leaving. The Trust is run by people who are mostly Christian, and I'm sure skeptics would disagree with these people on many of the religious beliefs they hold - but it's hard to deny that they're doing some amazing work, and making the world a better place for people who really need it.

So I guess in answer to the first question, at least for now I'm going to keep listening to the podcast, as I'm learning a lot of fascinating stuff about cults and how they operate, but I'll just be a little bit more wary of what I hear from now on. My ears will be pricked up, and I'll probably look something up if it's new to me, just to be sure it's legit.

As for the second question, I'm not going to dismiss Steven or Janja outright, because I know we all make mistakes. We all have bad beliefs, no matter how hard we try to be skeptical - and people like Steven and Janja aren't even trying to be skeptics, just experts in their field. However, I'm also not going to just gloss over these issues or forget about them. One or two mistakes can be attributed to carelessness, but, over time, if these issues start to build up, they might cumulatively paint a picture of someone who's not thinking very critically. And if someone's not able to think critically, it might bring into question all of their academic work, and at that point I don't want to be using them as a source of truth.

When it comes to the hosts and their adverts, things get muddier. And this is where I get to finish off with one of my “rare but fun rants” (to quote Tim Minchin).

I've never been a fan of advertising in podcasts where the hosts read the adverts. This is especially true when it comes to podcasts on skeptical themes, such as cults and scams. If I'm expected to trust podcast hosts to tell me the truth, the last thing I want to hear is them trading on this trust to tell me a half-truth about how they use the product they're advertising “every day”, or it's the “best on the market”. When podcasters do this, they're abusing the trust I've invested in them in order to try to make money from me - and that's just not okay.

It's one thing for a podcast to run an advert spoken by a random voice artist telling me that QuickBooks is the best way to do my accounts, or that Hulu has the widest range of streaming videos, but it's another when the hosts themselves tell me this. I know they're lying, and they know they're lying - often I swear I can hear it in their voices. And so it always disappoints me when I hear someone I've chosen to trust lying to me about a product they're being paid to convince me to buy.

Years ago I stopped listening to what is probably the most popular skeptical podcast in the world because the hosts kept trying to hawk stuff to me where they were making claims that were obviously not true. In fact, I had the chance to talk to one of the hosts soon after I stopped listening to the podcast, and they told me that they didn't like recording the ads, and that most of what they said in them was made up. There are skeptic-adjacent podcasts where the adverts voiced by the host irk me, and I'm able to fast forward past them (like Swindled, for example), but I just could not bear to listen to a skeptical podcast where the hosts are willing to lie to me. Grrrrrrrr.

So, in conclusion, for now I will continue to listen to A Little Bit Culty - but there may come a point when they push me past my breaking point, and when that happens I'm probably going to have to start listening to Conspirituality instead.

Just in case you're the one skeptic in the world who's never listened to Storm by Tim Minchin and didn't get my reference to the song.