Y2K Cult Goo! Doomsday Prophets, UFOs & Internet Vampires

[00:00:00] The following podcast contains adult themes, gritty details from true crimes, and naughty language. Listener discretion is advised.

[00:00:35] Welcome back to Human Fuckery, the only podcast to wrap dark history around a freshly harvested batch of human psychology, smother both in melted true crime, then serve the steaming outcome on artisan-made small plates for your overstimulated ear holes.

[00:00:56] This is Edward, your terminally sweaty doctor of clinical psychology, broadcasting to you from what today feels like, I swear to God, the very taint folds of Satan's human gooch. New Orleans, Louisiana. Joining me today as always is the perpetually dewy Kimberly, everyone's favorite underpaid recovering journalist,

[00:01:25] and perimenopausal menace. Say hello, Kimberly. It's so fucking hot. It is so fucking hot. For folks listening from a more rational location on planet Earth, note, our local heat index has been 115 for the last three days, and the dew point is at 77 degrees, so we're being basted alive as we record this episode for all of y'all.

[00:01:53] It's the kind of heat that, like, gradually boils your brain and lowers your IQ until you're just communicating via grunts and gestures, which, you know, maybe not ideal communication style for the podcasting medium. Mm. Mm. All of this is just to emphasize that when we reference Satan's gooch at the top of every episode, it is not merely quirky scene setting. We're fighting for our fucking lives to share these stories with everyone.

[00:02:22] Our special guest judge is also a full-time resident of Hell, so we've got zero well-hydrated adults on the show who can make good and rational life choices. But since this episode features tales of groups of people practicing baffling decisions together, it's very on theme. It's a decent segue. Thank you. Do you want to do the obligatory explanation of how the show works? I'm so happy to.

[00:02:48] Thank you. Thank you. Regular listeners can fast forward, but for the newcomers, this show is a competition.

[00:03:17] Mm. To, so much grunting, to present our stories to a reluctant judge who'll declare one of us the winner. In the process, we endeavor to learn something alongside you, the listeners, about what makes people tick and why humans do some of the profoundly confusing things humans so often do.

[00:03:36] A reminder that our intern slash fact checker slash chief financial officer, Gary the Ghoul, kidnaps the show's judges in the dead of night and forces them under threat of creative or supernatural death to participate in any of this. So the judge's rulings are always coerced, suspect at best, and terminally unreliable. Kimberly, how is Gary the Ghoul torturing our judge this week?

[00:04:04] Well, as shared in our last episode, this season, we've reduced the previously standard number of judges from two to one in an effort to reduce deadlocked outcomes and to just, you know, make the episodes a bit shorter since everyone has ADHD and to our podcast don't fit well in that landscape. Anyway, we were going to do a whole crawfish boil thing for the torture, but since living here is pretty much that, Gary the Ghoul has made a supercut of the now infamous 2002 film Queen of the Damned.

[00:04:32] The entire edit is now just Stuart Townsend's line deliveries, just him, not Akasha, no Aaliyah, no singing, just Stewie only on relentless loop while the judge is placed in an un-air-conditioned room with direct sunlight pouring through a window onto her. Good evening. Sorry, I'm late. Just trying to catch my breakfast. Okay, well, for the record, who won the last episode? You did.

[00:05:02] I did. Your tale of the Nordic King Frederick, who literally gorged himself to death on Scandinavian cream puffs. Worth it. One in our battle of stories about famous dinnertime fuckery. It was a strategic error on my part. I should have known that our guest judge, my own father, Chef David Kaye, would not enjoy any story about kids being murdered, even at the infamous black dinner in medieval Scotland. He's just got too soft a heart for kids and people in general.

[00:05:30] But you get the bragging rights of not only beating me, but getting my dad to vote for you. It's the psychology degree. It comes in handy. Yeah. But your mother, she did write in to say she voted for your story. Women supporting women. Love to see it. I think people overall will have a harder time picking a winner this month. I did reduce the number of dead children in my submission by 100%, so one would hope. Want to do the thing?

[00:05:58] The subject of today's podcast is Doomsday Cults. This one was your addition to the mercury tainted top hat. So do you want to like quickly summarize very briefly how this kind of cult is different from, say, like the many other cults we have already covered on this show? The motivation, the hinge point is entirely different. They're very fatalistic. Everything is about impending catastrophe.

[00:06:26] And you can use that as leverage in a completely different way than, say, for example, Enlightenment, right? Like some of these like guru type cults frame all of their work. Sure. Like NXIVM and Keith Ranieri was sort of like, I'm going to make you a better person in this lifetime. And I'm going to like it wasn't like I'm saving your soul. It was like I'm going to make you the most, you know. People are motivated in different ways. Keith Ranieri wanted your money just like anyone in a Doomsday Cult would.

[00:06:55] But the way he approached it was differently. Give us all your money. Like it's not going to be worth anything anyway because the end of the world's coming in. Right. Say, for example, like two years from now. Right. And so people make much more rash, irrational choices in light of the impending apocalypse. It turns the heat up in terms of like urgency, for example. It gets you to do things and compromise in ways you wouldn't ordinarily would because you have a compressed timeline. OK.

[00:07:26] Returning to us as a guest judge this time around is someone deeply familiar with cults and the perils of groupthink. Writer and full time professional witch Celeste Mott, who some of you may recognize from her viral posts across TikTok and social media, as well as her previous appearance on this show's season two premiere about cursed locations. Celeste is very publicly a survivor of a Y2K era online vampire cult, which is still, fun fact, actively harassing her today.

[00:07:57] Can't wait to learn more about this. We're going to let her explain what an online vampire cult even means because best to hear from that from a primary source. But suffice to say that she has some very valuable personal insight on how even the most rational people can be drawn into situations like the ones we are sharing in our stories. Yeah, I'm honestly more excited to talk to her about the cult than I am to whoop your ass for a second time in a row. Considering how I wiped the floor with you last season, I'm sure that's true.

[00:08:26] Hmm. Shots fired. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just play your story already. It's hot. It is 1987 and you are sitting in a hotel conference room in Montreal. It's not a bad hotel. It's actually got a rather snazzy setup. The chairs are plush. The lighting has been considered.

[00:08:53] And around you, the room is filled with the kind of people who read books they don't have to read. Architects, physicians, academics, a retired judge. Someone near the back works in finance. Someone near the front brought their spouse. There's wine on a side table and it is not cheap wine. And the fact that you noticed this, well, that says something about you we'll come back to later.

[00:09:24] You're in this room because someone you trust and respect handed you a flyer and said simply, You should hear this man. And then, Luc Jure walks in. Belgian born 39 years old.

[00:09:40] A homeopath who lectures on alternative medicine and spirituality with the easy authority of someone who decided long ago that the most interesting thing in any room is you. He's got riz, as the kids would say. He takes to the microphone and opens with a question. Do you feel, he asks, that you were born in the wrong century?

[00:10:08] The room gets very quiet. Because the answer for most of the people in those padded chairs is yes. Not as a complaint. As a private, almost embarrassing recognition. The persistent sense that the world they actually live in is somehow smaller than the one they were built for.

[00:10:30] That there is a register of meaning they can almost hear just beneath the frequency of ordinary life, but can never quite tune to. Luc Jure has spent years learning exactly how that feels. You sit up straight and listen more closely. He speaks with competence for two hours on a range of subjects. The planet is dying.

[00:10:58] The Knights Templar were suppressed by a paranoid Pope in 1312, and their wisdom was preserved in secret through seven centuries of initiated lineages. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky and the soul of Isis, is waiting for us. Your head spins a bit.

[00:11:23] But by the time he's done, the architecture of his rant somehow feels coherent. Like truth you already half knew, finally spoken aloud in a way that makes sense. As he wraps up, he does not ask you for money. No, not tonight. He asks only if you'd like to continue the conversation. Most people in that room say yes.

[00:11:53] Now, out of all the things Luc Jure tells you that night, here's what he doesn't. He does not tell you about the man behind the curtain. Joseph DiMombro. DiMombro is in his 60s French and has been running spiritual movements since the 1950s. He's not a mystic. He's a jeweler and a fraud.

[00:12:16] A man who impersonated a psychiatrist, wrote bad checks, scammed a business partner, and served six months in prison before discovering that esoteric belief was a significantly more lucrative racket than any of the above. Now, he had a head full of ideas, but what he lacked was someone who could sell them.

[00:12:40] And in 1981, he found Jure, watched him work a room and made a decision. Jure had the presence he was looking for. He would be the face of everything that was to come. That arrangement never changed. The organization the pair co-founded in 1984 called itself the Order of the Solar Temple.

[00:13:07] Now, as a new member, you entered at the outer level and were given fellowship, community, shared meals, and the intoxicating pleasure of being around people who were also searching. Now, as you eventually proved your commitment financially, temporally, emotionally, you were admitted deeper. Each level offered something genuine enough to keep you moving forward.

[00:13:37] Enough to make the next step feel like your own idea. This was not an accident of design. This was the design. After all, you weren't joining a cult. You were joining a lecture series, then a dinner group, then an initiatory circle. And then, somehow, you're wearing fucking robes in a candlelit room in Geneva.

[00:14:03] And the journey from that hotel room in Montreal felt at every point like your own free choice. Because it was. And when we consider cults, the question for so many on the outside looking in is often, how could someone fall for this?

[00:14:22] But the more illuminated question is rather, what would you have needed to be going through to find yourself sitting in that hotel conference room chair? A divorce? A diagnosis? A promotion that felt hollow the week after you got it?

[00:14:42] The specific loneliness of being smart enough to see through most of what the world is selling, but not so enlightened that you no longer need to belong somewhere. And my friends, that's the whole market. That, if we are being honest, is almost everyone. So here's the bill of goods. The order taught that the physical world was in terminal decline. It's not really a hard sell, honestly.

[00:15:12] But they didn't mean it as a metaphor. The collapse was real, measurable, and coming. And the humans awake enough to perceive it were awake for a reason. They were the solar race. Reincarnated Templars sent back for a final mission before the end. Their job was not to stop it. Their job was to be ready for the transit.

[00:15:42] Now, transit was the word the order used for death because death for them was not termination. It was relocation. The soul would be directed along routes the initiated masters had mapped to the star Sirius. The blue star. Home. Home in a sense that the word home had never quite managed to mean before. Now, long ago, Ernest Becker, the father of terror management theory,

[00:16:12] he was a cultural anthropologist who spent his career arguing that virtually all of human culture, whether it be art, religion, ambition, is just an elaborate system for managing the unbearable awareness that we are going to die. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it posthumously, which feels appropriate. The order of the solar temple was such a system,

[00:16:41] precision engineered for people who had outgrown ordinary religion, but not the fear beneath it. And it offered, most insidiously, status. You see, you were not merely saved. You were among the few who could perceive the truth. Like Neo in the Matrix, you were one of the awakened. And the people around you,

[00:17:07] the ones who went to their jobs and didn't lie awake at three in the morning, grappling with the undercurrent that something is not quite right in the world, well, they were just simply not ready. The order called them, quote, mankind of the earth. As weird as that is, I mean, they didn't mean it as a slur. It was just a formal category. And you see, this is how intelligent people end up inside something like this.

[00:17:35] Not through stupidity or ignorance or what have you, through the satisfaction of finally having a framework that accounts for everything, including their own sense of being different. Now let's put you, dear listener, back in the first person point of view. You've come a long way since the wine and cheese night at the airport Sheridan. You now find yourself years later in a ritual chamber,

[00:18:03] sitting amongst your fellow believers, watching dazzling apparitions of light move across a wall. You can hardly believe the miracle you're witnessing. The figures you see are luminous, hovering, ascended masters speaking from beyond the physical plane. They're delivering instruction, confirming the mission, telling the people in that room that they were exactly who they believed themselves to be.

[00:18:33] People wept in this room. People gave up their savings. People called their families and said they'd finally found what they were looking for because they had seen, with their own eyes, proof that the transit was real. Now in time, however, you would come to discover that this miracle was the result of bootleg Disney Imagineering. The figures you witnessed were projected by equipment

[00:19:02] DiMombro had concealed in the walls. The master's voices, they're all pre-recorded. And the man who operated the projector was an order member named Antonio Dutrois, a Swiss handyman DiMombro had trusted like a son. Dutrois kept the gods appearing on schedule for years, raising his family inside the order's orbit. But then, in 1990,

[00:19:30] DiMombro's own son, Eli, he looked behind the curtain and found the great and powerful Oz. He found the equipment. He went to Dutrois, who confirmed the hoax. And then Eli went full-masked magician and told the other members exactly what his father had built. Now this is a big problem, obviously, but believe it or not, some explained it away. Many others, well, they did leave, to their credit,

[00:20:00] taking their money with them. Either way, the whole thing couldn't be ignored. It strained the gears of the organization to a seeming breaking point. It was a rolling stone. And by 1993, everything was closing in now. As former members spoke out, a police investigation was now underway. Financial fuckery was exposed. And as a cherry, DiMombro was now dying of kidney disease.

[00:20:29] The shit hadn't just hit the fan, it was spraying back now on everyone. And what you would expect is collapse, right? Like that's the normal logical thing that we would all anticipate when fuckery is exposed. But that is not what happened. You see, the people who had given the most, they could not afford, psychologically, to be wrong. When a belief that has cost you everything meets evidence that it isn't real, you see, your mind,

[00:20:59] our minds, the human mind, doesn't surrender the belief. It absorbs it, reframes it. Dismantling the identity you've spent years constructing is actually more painful than simply believing harder, even if that belief is bullshit. And DiMombro gave them a framework to support that bullshit. You see, the projector hoax was intentional. It was put in place to test members' resolve

[00:21:29] and weed out the weak ones. DiMombro, well, he wasn't dying. No, he was preparing. You see, because the transit was no longer something that would happen after the collapse. The transit was the mission. Arriving ahead of schedule to remain on Earth, that was not survival. It was delay. So really think about it. Think about, at this juncture, what you would have had to give up

[00:21:58] in order to head for the off-ramp at that point, right? This point in time when everyone would say to themselves out loud, listening to this story, oh, this is when I would have checked out, right? No. You would have had to admit that the better part of a decade, your money, your relationships, your sense of self was built on something that wasn't real. But here's what really hurts. We can deal with the sunk cost to an extent,

[00:22:27] but what's even harder to deal with is that you would have had to walk back out into the ordinary world, the world you had spent years learning to see as thin as the province of the unawakened, and somehow find a way to live there again. For some people, in some rooms, a holographic projector is easier to look at than that. It is the night of October 2nd, 1994.

[00:22:57] You're now seven years removed from that hotel. You're all in, baby. And you are somehow in a farmhouse in cheery Switzerland. Now the basement has been converted into something between a chapel and a theater, circular, red draped. A solar disk dominates one wall. The lighting is low. The air smells of incense and something underneath it that you choose in this moment not to identify.

[00:23:27] Twenty-three people, all together, ritual cloaks. Some have been there for hours. Some arrived tonight, told only that a ceremony was being held. Others, however, well, they understood that the transit was now imminent. But what most of them do not know is that the transit had already begun. Two days earlier, 3,600 miles away, in a ski chalet in Morin Heights, Quebec,

[00:23:57] De Mombro's preparations were initiated. Antonio Dutrois and his wife, Nikki, well, by this point, they had left the order. Antonio had operated the projection equipment, right? He was the man who kept the ascended masters appearing on cue. Now, when De Mombro's son exposed the illusion, it was Dutrois who confirmed it. Members left because of him. And then Nikki Dutrois, his wife, defied an inexplicable

[00:24:27] direct order. De Mombro had forbidden her from having children. So she left the group. She had a son, anyway, and she named him Christopher Emmanuel. Now, here's where it gets even more dumb. Emmanuel, the name De Mombro had given a variation of to his own daughter, a child who he proclaimed as Cosmic Christ, conceived by the power of his mind alone. Now, as far as

[00:24:56] De Mombro was concerned, the Dutrois had not just betrayed him, but they had also taken the Messiah's name and put it on a handyman's baby. In De Mombro's theology, already metastasizing with paranoia, Dutrois' baby was the Antichrist, the man who had exposed the illusion and the woman who had defied his authority had produced a child whose name was an act of war.

[00:25:25] De Mombro's partner, Dominique Bellaton, well, she lured the family to the chalet on September 30th, where two members of the order, Joel Egger and Jerry Junard, were waiting. The Dutrois were stabbed repeatedly, all three of them. Bellaton and Egger, they left for Switzerland immediately. Junard and his family, well, they stayed back for four days to clean up the scene,

[00:25:54] then set incendiary timers that would burn the chalet down with themselves inside of it. The Dutrois bodies were found in the cellar the following day. Back in Sherry, the ceremony was underway, but what followed was not in any meaningful sense a ceremony. 21 of the 23 people in that basement that night were shot after being drugged with sleeping pills.

[00:26:23] Two were suffocated in plastic bags. A Swiss magistrate later concluded that of all the dead, only 15 could be confirmed as suicides. Within hours of this, 25 more bodies were found at a nearby site where the dead had been injected with poison. Luc Jure and Joseph de Mambro were among them. 53 people, two countries,

[00:26:54] five days. Now, according to one surviving member's testimony, de Mambro and Jure had planned for exactly 54 dead, one for each of the 54 Templars burned at the stake in the 14th century, a number they believed would create direct magical contact with those departed souls. A member named Thierry Huguenen sensed danger and escaped at the last minute. The count fell one short.

[00:27:24] Fuck them. Now, the testament letters that were mailed the morning of October 5th, well, they were sent to media outlets, police, government offices, not tucked into their pockets, filed, distributed the order's final case to mankind of the earth. They described a mission completed, souls who had outgrown their terrestrial containers. There was very little fear in the language. There was,

[00:27:53] in some of them, something that read disturbingly like joy. And the joy can be harder to accept than the violence. You see, violence, it's got a shape the mind can hold with shit like this, right? But what's more difficult to wrap our hands around is the certainty, the absolute, unironic certainty that they were going somewhere, that the map was real, that Jure had told them the truth. He had stood

[00:28:23] in a hotel conference room in Montreal seven years earlier and asked whether they felt they were born into the wrong century. They believed, right up until the moments the lights went out, that he had shown them the way home. Now, the order of the solar temple is usually filed under cautionary tale. Accurate, but insufficient. The cautionary version is this. Charismatic leaders exploit vulnerable people.

[00:28:53] Tragedy results, keep your critical thinking intact, don't join anything that asks you for your money. It's not wrong, but it's comfortable and neat in a way that the actual story refuses to be. Those people were not more vulnerable than you or I. Hell, the mayor of a Quebec town died in those fires. The worldwide sales director of Piaget Watches, a journalist, the son and wife

[00:29:22] of an Olympic gold medalist. They all had critical thinking. They had the instincts. And Luc Jure walked in and asked one question and something in them answered before their instincts had time to weigh in. Go back to that room. Go back to where this started. The plush chairs, the good wine, the kind of people who noticed it was good wine. They weren't there because they were lost. They were there because they believed that if the truth existed,

[00:29:52] they would be among the first to recognize it. Jure understood that. He didn't offer salvation. He offered the best available version of it. A spirituality with provenance, with history, with a star you could find in the night sky. The fear underneath all of it. The one that every culture in human history has built elaborate architecture to contain. That

[00:30:21] is the most real thing there is. Jure and Damambro didn't manufacture it. They just learned to recognize it walking through the door. The order killed 74 people, 53 in those first five days, 14 more in a forest clearing in France in December of 1995, shot in the head, burned, three of them children, orchestrated by a woman who claimed she could commune with the dead leaders from beyond.

[00:30:51] Then five more in Quebec in March 1997. It seems the map had outlived the cartographers. Regardless of whether any of their souls landed on Sirius or were sent scattering to the far reaches of the cosmos, for each of them, it began every single time in a room full of people who felt like the world had been built for someone else and a man who knew exactly what to do with that feeling.

[00:31:20] Jure and Damambro are gone. The order is gone. But the hunger for meaning still pangs in the gut of the human collective. And somewhere, right now, in some version of that hotel conference room, a different voice is offering to feed that hunger. A different name, a different framework, a different star to aim for. And someone in the audience

[00:31:48] is leaning forward. And we're back. And we're back. What'd you think? First thoughts? First impressions? Fuck these guys, I think was definitely my first. Yeah, I mean, they went with it. We have previously

[00:32:17] discussed on this show the sort of like spiritualism and the seances and some of the ways that folks in the 18th century were, you know, using parlor tricks essentially to, and so it felt wild to be like, oh, it's now the 20th century and we're still doing the same thing. We're still getting people into the room and faking, you know, rituals and contact with higher beings and just like... The project, I mean, that's pretty special. Like, my God. That's special. Yeah. Really. Yeah, I said to you it reminded me

[00:32:47] of the first season of Loki, like where you get to the end and it's just a bunch of fucking robotic fake gods who are in charge of everything. But, you know, look, how many people are fooled on a day-to-day basis with the AI slop that's all over the internet and they're just like, wow, look at this, sharing it and things like that. Yeah. I get it. It's the X-Files thing of like, I want to believe but like, fuck these guys. Definitely. I did want to, at the top of the episode, kind of just like review for folks at home. Okay.

[00:33:16] What are the hallmarks of cults so that we can see why we selected these stories? Is now a good time to do that? Yeah, sure. So, these are not all of the hallmarks of cults but they are the generally recognized like, in the top 10 on these items. So, you got a singular or a hierarchy with a leader at the top, typically charismatic, not always, but there are some people who really make me question the definition of charisma. For some people, I'm like, that's your charismatic leader? That's... Riz is just, you know, very relative. Riz is subjective.

[00:33:46] Riz is truly subjective. So, how do you feel your cult leader does on the Riz scale? Well, I mean, by description, Luc Jarre was a very charismatic individual who could hold an audience of very intelligent people rapped for hours on end talking about the fucking Knights Templar and how we're all going to travel to the Star Series. Like, you've got to be able to work a room. Yeah. You know, you could sell smoothies through Beachbody. Like, like you,

[00:34:15] what was Shakeology? Yeah. Like, you could definitely rule a multi-level marketing program with that kind of Riz. So, number two is behavior regulation of the members, usually controlling their clothes, their finances, food relationships. Did Luke check those boxes? It seemed like less so. Like, your guys didn't have like a uniform necessarily. They didn't have like, you can eat this, you can't eat this. No, they did have ceremonial robes and things like that. Okay. you know, for some of their rituals. They, kind of like we talked about in the story, like they,

[00:34:45] they didn't have to emphasize certain levels of restriction the same way because the cult kind of founded itself on exclusivity. Like, everyone had an embedded status by being a part of it, you know? And so, they didn't have to strip you down as much as they glorified what you already were. And that created isolation. Okay. Oh, good. We'll get to that. Um, and us versus them mentality and sure seems like there was that, like there was a hierarchy within your hierarchy.

[00:35:14] It seemed like they were pretty forgiving of mankind of the earth as just the, the inherent Neanderthals of the world. Like, oh, those poor, helpless, harmless creatures that is the regular human race. Rubes. But we are the awakened ones. We are the solar children. We are the enlightened ones. Okay. Um, fear as a control tool, which I mean, yeah, into the world, right. The whole, the whole idea is, your everlasting soul. My question to you is what I didn't totally

[00:35:42] understand from your cult is whether they believed that life as we understand it in our vessels here talking today continues after you go to Sirius or if like, it's a soul ascension thing. Um, it's a soul ascension in the sense that you survive consciousness that, that you will persist. Like you, will you have memories of your previous life and all of the people in the cults that you love? Yes. Okay. The transit initially was about the world's going to end

[00:36:12] and we need to essentially be prepared for that and for the endeavor of living on past that point and the inevitable transit from the now desolate world to once we discovered Joseph DiMombro is dying, that the transit is now something that needs to precede doomsday. Okay. That they had to bring about the transit before the world ended. I mean, she changed the goalposts based on her failing kidneys, you know? Sort of renally influenced doomsday.

[00:36:42] Okay. I mean, she was hitting the fan for them. Another hallmark is conspiracies about the wider or the more general world. Mm-hmm. Um, so did they have conspiracies about like the rubes or do you, would you say that like everybody else is just kind of a salt of the earth rube and we're the only brilliant ones? Is that the conspiracy? Uh, I wouldn't say that that was necessarily the conspiracy. I think the information that they were supposedly privy to the suppression of spiritual information via the Knights Templar when they were all killed and the spirits of those Templars more or less

[00:37:12] were returning in some form or another and this information was being conveyed through these awakened individuals to just be the fucking best. Like it's, it's, you know, I hate being reductive, but it is just like we know things nobody else does. Right. So we have, we have a different responsibility than everyone else does. Right. We're the keepers of secret and important knowledge and as always the church is the enemy. Yes. Okay, got it. Forced isolation, which, you know, it doesn't sound like your folks were kept prisoner,

[00:37:41] but by making them different from everybody else on earth by saying you're in a different in-group, there's isolation that comes with that. And like I said, towards the end of the story, one of the hardest thing for these people to accept was not that they had been lied to. It was that I now have to go back out into the world that I saw myself separated from. Yes. I finally felt like I was living in an adjacent existence that was built for me. Well, I have to radically accept that

[00:38:09] I am just a rube. Right. And now I'm going back into the world that I have always felt was never built for me. Right. And so that discomfort, you know, that by itself was a propulsion to keep these people isolated and continuing to give their money away. These are not the only hallmarks of cults, but one of the more important ones is no leadership accountability. So you're not allowed to challenge Luke. You're not allowed to challenge the leader. If you say, hey, I think this sounds nuts. You're shunned. There's a punishment. Sometimes,

[00:38:39] you know, there's like a cleansing or you're just kicked out. You know, surprisingly, obviously he let some of these people go when they decided to leave the organization and take their money with them once the whole projector thing was found out. But he made no apologies and eventually reframe the whole thing as we were just testing you. Cool. You know, the fact that you, you bought this and you left shows that you weren't strong enough. You're not one of the awakened. You're not one of the solar children. But you're asleep. Everyone else, you passed the test.

[00:39:09] Interesting. So now you have even more status. Okay. So what made you pick this story? I thought it was absolutely fascinating, obviously. Why though? Look at Tom Cruise and maybe today he's not talked about it a lot, but go back and watch those big Scientology organizational events where they're all in black ties and they're at the Staples Center and Tom Cruise goes up there and he talks about the mission and he's got his medals on and he's saluting my God, the medals. LRH's portrait on the wall.

[00:39:38] It's the certainty that these intelligent people have. It's the most certain they'll ever feel in their whole lives. is intelligent? I do. I really do. Yeah. You just think he's lost? Lost in the sauce? I mean, this is a person who has like no contact with his kid and his daughter is like dropping his last name. For sure. Sure. Like, you gotta be pretty lost in the sauce to be like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm just, I'm just gonna, my child's a fucking suppressive alien entity. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I believe, truly. Like, you gotta be lost in that sauce.

[00:40:08] Yeah, he's lost. So a little bit of what you're saying is that this is a cult that you could see yourself perhaps going and sitting on the roadside and joining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you're saying. Yes. Like, you, I don't know, at least halfway through the process, it was probably really enjoyable. Oh, yeah. the dinners, the lecture series, the community, all these brilliant people surrounding you, all working towards

[00:40:38] personal growth and redefining their life. Yeah, and you're growing in a direction to gather with people that, I mean, that's why people join churches, it's why people join development groups, it's why people join all sorts of groups. Yes, because just like I said in the story, I'm smart enough to see through most of the bullshit that is everyday life, the human experience, not speaking with hubris, right, but just smart enough, but I'm not so enlightened that I don't get lonely. I'm not so enlightened

[00:41:08] that I'm never afraid. I'm not so enlightened that I don't want to have a sense of belonging. Sure. And that's what this was. So at what point do you think The projectors. The projectors did it for you. There's no way. But how would you have known? His kid. But did everybody find out about that? Everybody found out, yes. Oh, I didn't get that from the story. His kid told everybody. Oh, okay. Okay. DeMombro's kid, like I said, he went full mass magician. He was just like, hey, y'all, here's how. I didn't know if that reached every member though or if like he just told

[00:41:38] like a subset of people. Everyone had the choice at that point to stay or go. Okay. All right. Got it. So the projectors is where you draw the line. Yeah. I'd have been out. I think that's good. That means a lot. It's nice to know that, you know, your loneliness can't make you go, I'm okay with, I'm okay with this. Yeah. Okay. Any last questions before we move on to your story? Do we know what happened to any of his members after the disbanding? Like, was there a period of like profound grief for people? Did anybody write about their experiences?

[00:42:07] Are there any like follow-up documentaries about the people who survived and how they put their lives back together? There have been documentaries about it, of course, and I'm sure other podcasts have covered it in the years since, but there were people who wrote about it, members who off themselves, they all had letters that were delivered to media. Mm-hmm. Talking about their experience, their joy, their sense of responsibility, how they felt as though that they had fulfilled their mission. A lot of them seemed to be relatively content with their decision,

[00:42:37] which even that, that level of certainty, it's just, wow, okay. But as I mentioned, only 53 people were initially killed in those first couple of waves. Later on, another round of people were all killed by a woman who claimed to be in spiritual communication with Jure and Damambro from beyond the fucking grave, which is, like, she was still all in. And how, how much did the media cover all of this? Like, Heaven's Gate was, like, everywhere all of the time.

[00:43:07] This happened in my lifetime and I don't remember this happening, so. It almost, outside of Canada, it all happened in Europe. Right. So we, personally, over here in the States, were not exposed to it. Okay. Yeah. I never heard of this. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think you're gonna find that there's some parallels between your story and my story. So, why don't we do my story and then we can get more into, like, the nuances of the stories when we're talking with our guest. God was coming

[00:43:36] to Texas to a beige, split-level suburban home specifically. It was March 1998 and the church had been methodically preparing for months. 30 houses within a 2.5-mile radius had been bought and paid for in cold, hard cash. A hundred parishioners dressed all in white had already flown into their western promised land, moving into the church-owned properties to live communally. A shrine had been built in the backyard,

[00:44:06] then donned with fruit, soda, and crackers as offerings. There was a group baptism in a local stream and a few dozen men had even shaved their heads, parting with their hair as a symbol that they were ready to leave earthly attachments behind. None of this was a secret. Teacher Chen, head of the church, had issued a press release explaining the situation titled God's, comma, The Heavenly Father, comma, Declaration, The Salvation of Billions of People

[00:44:35] from Abroad. There was also his newly self-published book, A Wellspring of Information which went on for hundreds of pages and included one of the most specific predictions for the return of God ever published. At 10 a.m. on March 31st, 1998, God shall make his appearance in the Holy Land of the Kingdom of God. 3513 Ridgedale Drive,

[00:45:04] Garland, Texas, 75041 USA. I guarantee this on my life. God's first ever scheduled television appearance was, according to the same book, just hours away. Dozens of parishioners were already seated in their living rooms in anticipation, waiting for the clocks to strike 12, trying not to notice or acknowledge the pods of police cars and news vans waiting anxiously

[00:45:33] just outside their windows. Homing Chen entered our humble terrestrial plane in April 1955 in Chiai, Taiwan, probably mangled that. His parents were not particularly religious, practicing a blend of Buddhism and traditional ancestor rituals. His mother died tragically while her son was fairly young. A few years later, Chen's father, a farmer, also died, leaving him orphaned, but still well cared for and loved by extended family.

[00:46:03] Chen grew up, went to school for political science and became an associate professor at a state university. He spoke openly about being an atheist, took no wife, had no children. He occasionally, according to treatises he'd later publish, saw inexplicable balls of golden light, but didn't make a big deal out of it. For roughly 40 years straight, basically nothing remarkable happened to Hon Ming Chen until 1992. After a lifetime of academia

[00:46:32] and atheism, one of two pivotal things happened. Either Chen received what he described as a direct transmission from God himself, commanding Chen to lead a devoted religious life from that point forward, or he had a full-on midlife crisis complete with religious hallucinations. Chen began voraciously consuming the Bible, Tao Te Ching, Buddhist sutras, alt theories on energy and alternate dimensions, which the burgeoning internet of the early 90s made easier to find.

[00:47:02] All of this ultimately brought him to his first cult. The association for research on soul light was definitely more cult than association, one of many fixated on extraterrestrials and the end of the world. Doomsday cults, especially those which blend technology and interstellar themes, tend to crop up around the turn of centuries in general, and the turn of the millennium acted like fertilizer on an international array of similar groups.

[00:47:32] The USA had Heaven's Gate, Taiwan had the ARSL. The sect's goal was cleansing their, quote, spiritual light energy using a slurry of ancient techniques and new technology, aka random-ass devices, plus Qigong meditation and paying the leader a shit ton of money. Big Scientology energy with some Eastern seasoning for flavor. It was weirdly popular with academics, white-collar workers, and students at the time,

[00:48:01] and Chen initially found great comfort in belonging to a group of like-minded people after so many years doing life solo. Like many smart people, it eventually dawned on Chen that a religion requiring its members give all their money to one guy might not have pure energetic intentions. Like fewer smart people, Chen handled this by splitting off from the group and forming his own upgraded sect called the Soul Light Resurgence Association or SLRA.

[00:48:30] Well-spoken and agreeable, his commentary on the poor ethics of high fees for a soul cleansing swayed other members of the original group away as well. Chen's new assembly had several hundred believers practicing at four different sites within the first year of its founding. The Soul Light Resurgence Association combined Chen's understanding of Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, then stirred in hefty portions of numerology, fortune-telling, and ufology. These, he felt strongly, helped explain

[00:49:00] the golden balls of light he'd seen intermittently in the past. An energetic force was trying to get his attention and finally had. For the sake of time, we're going to condense a lot of information into the audio equivalent of an infographic, but here's the gist of what Hon Ming Chen taught. God is a literal cosmic being and the universe populated with other sentient, compassionate beings. Extraterrestrials have changed the course of history through direct contact

[00:49:29] with civilization many times. The Bible is a document of alien interventions and their impact on people alive at that time. Aliens communicate with all of us routinely through weather, clouds, and contrails, the latter of which are not actually from jets, but UFOs. Humans have three souls and can get all three to ascend out of the suffering of reincarnation by working toward enlightenment. Humans thus have a responsibility to take compassionate care

[00:49:58] of all living things and should not eat meat or kill anything, even bugs, if they want to achieve the energetic purity to get free. While God's salvation can be earned through discipline and reflection, people can also be pulled deeper into earthly suffering by corrupted souls and false prophets of all religions. True believers who trust in God and follow an energetically pure path will eventually be rescued from Earth via spaceship, a.k.a. God planes.

[00:50:28] Basically, be good, stay woke, don't get trapped in earthly temptations, and you won't have to do any of this pain and suffering again. Pretty boilerplate religion, minus the interstellar aircraft bits. But then came Chen's, let's call them, fringier beliefs, which included, a diamond ring Chen wore on his hand was a transmitter broadcasting God's messages directly to him. Chen actually fathered Jesus. Non-vegetarians cannot enter the home

[00:50:57] of vegetarians without corrupting the souls of the vegetarians. Nuclear apocalypse was gonna butt-fuck the world at some point in 1999. God would personally collect believers and spiritually evolved souls from Texas as well as the shores of Lake Michigan prior to the Great Tribulation of 1999, saving all who boarded his spaceship from the nightmare of reincarnating on Earth. God would herald his own coming on Channel 18 at 12.01 a.m.

[00:51:26] on March 25th, 1998, bumping the home shopping network to make his big debut. Much of this was laid out in Chen's 1996 opus, The Practical Evidence and Study of the World of God and Buddha. For a variety of arguable reasons, Chen preached the United States as the, quote, pure land of God, literally, God's chosen landmass. He also roasted Asia for being full of, quote, devils and devil religions

[00:51:54] and told his devotees, again, largely middle-class, well-educated professionals, they needed to sell everything, pool their assets, and get to the United States before the end of the world. Many of Chen's followers drew the line here, and fair enough. But a few hundred true believers were like, bed, fam. This is how the first few dozen settlers of Chen's posse end up in San Dimas, California, registering legally under the name God's Salvation Church, a.k.a. Chen Tao. Sidebar,

[00:52:24] Chen Tao, translates to True Way. It's also when Chen's text messages from God and overall project management style got more erratic and unintentionally hilarious. Eventually attracting media scrutiny. Take, for example, the Abraham Lincoln incident. A vision told our nutty professor that the soul of Jesus had split in two upon its most recent reincarnation, with one half uploading in Taiwan and the other in Canada. Chen tasked his peeps with finding Canadian Christ, explaining he'd be

[00:52:53] 28 years old, over six feet tall, slim, bearded, just like Abraham Lincoln. Except foreign visa issues meant a wild road trip from Cali to Canada to find, quote, the Jesus of the West, end quote, was out. So devotees did what the rest of us had to do in the mid-1990s, place a bunch of Canadian newspaper ads. These said plainly that Jesus 2.0 was in Vancouver, looked like young Honest Abe, and to please call the church with any info on his whereabouts. No calls came in.

[00:53:23] Once in California, Chen immediately shifted his sight elsewhere. The American South, he said, was densely packed with secret energy grids UFOs used to travel. The highways around Dallas matched, viewed from above, sacred Chinese numerology. Garland, Texas, in particular, sounded like, quote, God's land to Chen, and the whole region was apparently supercharged with cosmic energy. Chen asserted this place would be ground zero for God's return

[00:53:53] via spaceship during the Great Tribulation. All of this information was delivered to him via direct contact from alien God, which we know because he wrote it into the 178-page tome God's Descending on Clouds, parentheses, flying saucers, to save people. Into a caravan of white bands, God's Salvation Church went, and eastward they headed. A few emissaries went back to Taiwan to beg remaining members for the sake of their souls to lay down

[00:54:22] their earthly fixations and join them for redemption in Texas. The people of Garland, Texas had mixed feelings about all of this. For the most part, Chen Tao were pretty solid neighbors. They told me that Garland is God's land and I thought, well, okay, to each his own. Bonnie Nichols, who lived three doors down from Teacher Chen, told the New York Times in 1998. Her husband, Carl, added, They all seem nice enough. They're quiet. They keep their yards up and everything.

[00:54:51] Chen even directed the group to add white cowboy hats to their uniform of white running shoes, white pants, and white shirts so the locals could see they were no threat. Packs of placid, polite Taiwanese men, women, and children started to be seen around Garland on foot or group bike rides, their white hats glowing in the bright Texas sun. But not everyone was convinced. Garland code enforcement was called on the group several times, first for overcrowding in one of the communal homes, then for pouring concrete

[00:55:20] to build that shrine. With the Heaven's Gate mass suicide event still fresh in the American psyche, a big poisoned applesauce debacle went down in March 1997, police began receiving calls predicting Chen Tao would collectively kill themselves to meet a spaceship. Taiwanese and American press alike began running fear-mongery allegations of brainwashing and kidnapping within a nefarious doomsday cult. Eventually, in early March 1998, Teacher Chen was forced to hold a press conference

[00:55:49] explaining that yes, the end of the world was coming next year. And yeah, his believers believed they would be saved by God's spaceship March 31st, but LOL, no, they weren't going to kill themselves. They didn't even kill bugs, after all. He reiterated that God would make a TV appearance at midnight one week before his landing, giving folks plenty of opportunity to see for themselves. Now, given it's 2026 and you're all pretty smart, we know you know how all of this ends. The time of God's schedule

[00:56:18] U.S. television debut came and went. Police outside were about to bust in the door and make sure the cult didn't do a suicide when Chen came out and told onlookers the press tour was a bust. God, a no-show for Taiwanese sect in Texas, declared one especially cunty headline from the San Francisco Chronicle. But, Chen assured all parties, the salvation spaceship Boogaloo was still set for next week. God would appear, he said, introduce himself to every person,

[00:56:47] demonstrate his superpowers, and then take his followers to space nirvana or wherever. But at 10 a.m., March 31st, 1998, neither Chen Tao nor the gathered police nor the mixed audience of neighbors and reporters once again waiting on Ridgedale Drive got the big finale they'd waited for. There was a public display of cringe so incredible it could have been a righteous gemstones bit, which I'm condensing here for time.

[00:57:16] Short version is, Chen came outside, greeted the crowd, and told everyone to shake their own hand, which to their credit the onlookers did. He gave a short speech saying they were all God and God is all of us, and by everyone shaking their own hand, they had been introduced to God. Then he went silent, looked up, and gazed directly into the blazing morning sun. The silence was reportedly excruciating. Just dozens of cops and media pros and random Texans

[00:57:46] watching this guy blinking into oblivion for several agonizing minutes. Finally, he looked back at the crowd, waved, and explained this had been a demonstration of God's superpowers for no mere mortal could do such a thing without going blind. No one was convinced. Now, here's where this story differs from nearly every other cult story you'll ever hear podcasted. When God didn't show up in Texas that spring day, there was no blaming anyone else. No mass poisoning? Nada. After his display of cringe, Chen was basically

[00:58:16] just like, my bad, this is embarrassing. It's okay if you want to literally crucify me. An utterly refreshing bit of accountability from not just cult leaders but religious daddies at large. He said his own predictions were nonsense and publicly encouraged disillusioned followers to leave. Which two-thirds of the group did in the following weeks without incident. Hon Ming Chen may have been the best cult leader ever in that he balanced his bombastic claims with a notable lack

[00:58:46] of felony offenses or sexual trauma. To the best of our knowledge, he sexually assaulted no one of any age, married zero children, leveraged no child labor, and never declared God wanted him and only him to be polygamous. Which is like, seriously, if you're into cults, you know how rare this is. Sure. There was real economic harm done to people who sold everything they owned and left their families behind because they believed his stories. There's the emotional toll of truly believing with your whole heart you're about to be rescued

[00:59:16] from the dumpster fire of life on Earth, only to discover, sorry babe, you're stuck here. But in the decades following Chen Tao's unraveling, no evidence was ever found that its members were brainwashed or coerced, at least not any more so than any other religious person. Every religion requires an upfront investment of personal time, blind faith, and then some bonus items ranging from community service to specialty diet to weekly blood ritual to vows of chastity. And as the stock market

[00:59:46] teaches us, not every investment pays off. In Chen Tao's case, it seems like the worst that happened was an orphan, fixated on the horrors of our world and trying to transcend them, built himself a family with shared values, and then dragged that family around for a year or so before finally saying, sorry, I got this pretty wrong, something many of us will never hear from our own families, religious or otherwise. It's still not a happy ending, but when it comes

[01:00:15] to doomsday cults, it is very much as good as it gets. Okay. Teacher Chen. We're back. Yeah. Teacher Chen. What a name. Not Guru Chen, not Lord Chen. He was just a teacher. He had a certain level of humility. Yeah. His little straw hat that he wore. Yeah. Fascinating guy. Yeah, he's just average, you know,

[01:00:43] middle-aged college professor. I mean, clearly. College professor. Why did I say that? Like, college professor. College of murder. Clearly this is human fuckery, but like, you seem to have a little bit of sympathy or at the very least empathy for this guy written towards the end of the story. Like, did a part of you feel forgiving of this man? I think because in the previous stories we've done about cults, like, these leaders have been such fucking monsters, like, people who... So basically because he didn't have sex with any of the women, you were like,

[01:01:13] he's alright. It wasn't just that. Like, I mean, for sure, I mean, I hate, the bar is in hell. The bar is truly in hell, but like, the fact that he cleared that bar, we do have to reward him some points. Okay. But, like, he really, he didn't seem to have some of the malice that other cult leaders have had. Mm-hmm. And when we're talking about what makes a cult leader a cult leader, Yeah. There, you know, there's that, like, point on the list about, like, there's no leadership accountability. Yeah. And when it was time to be accountable,

[01:01:43] this guy was like, I, you should never listen to a thing I say again. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Sure. Like, he made no excuses. He didn't blame anybody else. He didn't mass murder anybody. He wasn't touching kids. So, like, I tried to think about, like, why would a person who is in touch with reality enough to be able to be like, well, I just, I clearly got this all wrong. This is embarrassing. Why would somebody do this? Sure. And the only thing that I could come to was he had to have been lonely. Yeah, we talked about. this orphan was lonely. And you talked about it earlier

[01:02:13] in this discussion about how, like, cult members joining for a sense of belonging. But then in this situation, your story, we have a man who creates a cult for a sense of belonging. Yes. I mean, he joined a cult first. Sure he did, yeah. And then he created his own cult. Because, like, prices were too high because the prices were too high. Yeah. So the economics of the other cults didn't work. So, like, look, did people suffer as a result of his choices? Yes. But it really did seem like his members were free to leave and that there was

[01:02:43] less coercion. And so, I wouldn't necessarily say I feel like sympathy for him. But I really admired the fact that Chen did all this, was so publicly, embarrassingly, humiliatingly broadcast onto TVs, you know, snarky little headlines and was just like, I was wrong. Like, I was like, points for this. Like, we don't see this much on this show. Okay, if you were present for when he came out and stared into the sun for like 30 minutes,

[01:03:13] would you have shook your own hand? As a cult member or as a neighborhood dweller? It's just like a looky-loo. Somebody out in the neighborhood who was just like, well, let's just see if God shows up. Sure, why not? Yeah, you probably would have felt so bad for him. You would just say, I gotta shake my leg. the cringe in me, the recognizes the cringe in you and would be like anything to make this less bad for all of us. Wow. Rarely do you hear about cults forming where neighbors are like, yeah, they were pretty good. Like,

[01:03:43] we didn't really have a lot of problems with them. They cut their grass and, you know, they kept to themselves and they wore their cowboy hats. Now, there were people who like, you know, had issues with them like we said in the story and kind of like, concerns and like, we're afraid that they're going to off each other and like code violations. But like, I was like, did you report them for code violations as they were building a gazebo because you were concerned about the wellness of the members or just because you're a fucking Karen and you like, didn't like that somebody like had a pickup truck near your property. You know what I mean? Like,

[01:04:12] I couldn't tell whether this was like a neighbor reporting because they're just being that kind of person or whether they actually had authentic concern for the members of the cult. Now, we talked about why I chose the story I chose. Why do you think you chose this one? I chose this one because we've done so many stories about such heinous cults and I was just so entertained and fascinated by this very different type of cult leader. The reason certainly was also

[01:04:41] the hilarity of, hey, it's going to be on the Home Shopping Network at this time and this date God's going to appear. Like, it's such an audacious claim and yes, there's like, there are so many other cults and religious sects that like, maybe don't fit the definition of cult exactly but like, sure, doomsday religions that have been like, the end of the world's here, the end of the world's here, the end of the world's here but none of them were like, and God's going to be on TV at this time and you can see him and like, it was just,

[01:05:11] it was such a public. He wasn't exactly like promoting rapture either. It was just God's return. Yeah, well, it was, it was rapture. It's God is coming on the TV to tell you about the coming rapture. Okay. I mean, like, you know, when we talk about revelation and things like that, Christians always get on the pulpit and they talk about the fire, the brimstone, the beast, 666, and God coming down with a flaming sword and all this other stuff. This was God showing up as a guy

[01:05:41] on QVC trying to sell you steak knives. It wasn't quite that. It wasn't quite that. No, but there was brimstone. There was a nuclear apocalypse. He was saying that there was a nuclear apocalypse was going to come and the only way that people were going to survive the nuclear apocalypse was to get on board with Chen Tao's teaching and to get on the spaceship. I wonder what a God plane looked like, at least in his mind. It's a good question. I don't know that there were diagrams. I wasn't able to get, I did look for like a copy of James Way. The 90s are tough.

[01:06:11] The 90s are tough. It's like a dead space. It is. We didn't have the digital archiving happening yet. There was a lot of paper things that like didn't make it. Weirdly, sometimes it's easier to find things from the 80s or the 60s or something than it is to find things in the 90s. Yes. We should be clear that there is fire and brimstone because nuclear apocalypse is that. It is fire and brimstone and death and destruction and no one survives. But there's less fire and brimstone. He is a less evangelical

[01:06:40] kind of leader as far as like you have to listen to me and we will die and be the, but also like even though we're awarding points to Chen for being less of a shit bag than, you know, other. Big points for being a vegetarian. Right? Like he is, you know, lower on the scale of shit bags and other shit bags we have talked about in the past. However, he's still fucking nuts. Like he believes that his diamond ring is transmitting information to him. Isn't it? He believes that the layout

[01:07:09] of the highways are, you know, matching sacred numerology. Right. He believes the chemtrails of it all. Like there, there is some silliness and there is a lack of discretion in what's an idea that just popped into my head and what's an indoor thought and what's an outdoor thought? Like, no, all of his indoor thoughts became outdoor thoughts. Yeah. And that's a good point because we, we get into so much online discourse these days for valid reasons about what is a cult

[01:07:39] and what's not a cult. There you see some distinctions, really. Yes. There are things that are cult adjacent. Chantau does check the boxes. Absolutely. Most of the boxes. And again, in order for the cult to get there, people had to give their fucking money. Like they had to buy these houses. They had to buy all of these plane tickets. They had to buy visas. They had to like, yeah. So like people did lose money in this. But as far as like, you need to give us fucking everything. And if not, like you're going

[01:08:09] to burn in hell. Like there was, there was just a bit less of that. You haven't asked anything about the Abraham Lincoln thing, which I'm so confused that you haven't asked me about that yet. These have all been valid questions. What was it about Lincoln? No idea. That just building on like. Was he just like the alpha male archetype for Chantau? Chantau just had indoor thoughts. He had a thing for hats. No, he, he, he described what they said the Canadian Christ looked like. And he's,

[01:08:38] he said he looks like, this is a picture of Abe Lincoln. This is what he looks like. Like it wasn't about him being an alpha male or anything. It was just, that is what he, he thought the, the, the Christ looked like. And so since they couldn't go to Canada, there were like, have you seen me posters like all over? They put them in the newspapers. Oh, okay. Gotcha. They weren't like on telephone poles. Like, have you seen Christ? Remember in the story, in the story, I say, because they couldn't go there because of visa issues, they had to call newspapers and place ads in newspapers.

[01:09:08] Right. Not one person ever called them and reported saying. You would have thought at least one or two people. There's gotta be one person in Canada right now who looks like Abe Lincoln, but. Or who would just call for a laugh. Yeah. Nobody, nobody did. Maybe they didn't pick the right newspapers, but. That's fascinating. Do you want to go through the list? Okay. Now, going back to the hallmarks of cults, Chen Tao, in his own way, does seem, or Teacher Chen, excuse me, seemed like he had some riz. I guess he did. Like,

[01:09:38] I honestly don't know. I've seen no videos. I've seen, I've heard no audio. I haven't been able to read his books. He, me. He was a professor. Looking at his photos, I'm like, how did you pull this out? Like, I'm not getting the riz, but like, I don't think I'm the target audience for that, you know, spaceship nuclear apocalypse. Like, maybe it's not, maybe you have to be like, he was an experienced professor, so he had public speaking skills. He was a sociology professor, so he understood people and how groups of people organized themselves. Right. He probably had some basic

[01:10:07] understanding of like human psychology, at least to the degree that we were talking about that then. The point is that he, whatever he was doing, he was good enough that when he left the other cult, other people followed him. Right. Okay. So how would you feel, what were the greatest examples of how he regulated behavior? They were told what they could wear. They all had to wear all white. They had to wear the white hats and the white shoes once they moved to Texas. Did they have to? Were there, were there any discussions ever of consequences? I don't know. I genuinely.

[01:10:36] Probably just exile or something. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't get the sense that like. Some cults are more perilous. Like they isolate you inside of isolation. Yeah. You know what I mean? There's, there, I don't. David Miscarriage's wife. Miscavige. Miscavige. Miscarriage. I think I got it right the first time. I genuinely don't know how they enforced it, but everybody had to be vegetarian. And then after a certain point,

[01:11:06] you couldn't even go in the home of a non-vegetarian because it would damage your soul. Right. And saying, hey, you can't do this because it's going to damage your soul. Like there were spiritual consequences. I don't know if he was like taking people out back and beating them with a hose if they didn't do what he said, but. So as far as us versus them, did they have like a living op where, where there are a certain group of people? Was it meat eaters or was it kind of like solar temple? Like they were just kind of guarding sacred knowledge. Yes. We're guiding sacred knowledge and like we're trying

[01:11:35] to share the knowledge so that you will be able to ascend. But anybody who doesn't live this way, and doesn't ascribe to living this way, will get left here in nuclear apocalypse while the rest of us go get to live a second life in outer space. As far as conspiratorial knowledge, did they think the world out there was actively trying to suppress people, hold them back? I don't think that that was part of it. I think it was more that this is knowledge that is hiding

[01:12:05] in plain sight. if you are smart enough, if you're meditating enough, if you're living in alignment with God enough. So there wasn't some big, the Pope was not suppressing the information that Gentau had. It was just, these are, you know, much like your cult, the us versus them is we are becoming spiritually pure and we are mindfully, the reason they wore all white was because it's a spiritually pure cleansing color. You'll see lots of sex wear white because it's supposed

[01:12:33] to symbolize purity, you know, even if you're not at purity, like you're aspiring to it and so you're dressing pure and you're eating pure which is the vegetarianism, you're meditating, you're leaving offerings, you're praying before the spaceship, you know, in quotes, was going to land like some of them ritually shaved their head because that's purifying and it's signifying like letting go. You know what I mean? Like the us versus them was we are spiritually pure and everybody else is again, salt of the earth cult. Well, we know that he took accountability eventually,

[01:13:04] but all of this begs the question. There seemed to be a great emphasis on integrity, purity, making sure you don't harm others. When it's all said and done, do you think even for a time that Teacher Chen really believed this? Yes. Yeah. Yes. He wasn't playing a long game necessarily. Like he really No. He bought in. To the degree that even after this perilous public humiliation and the shame

[01:13:33] ritual of staring into the sun like a maniac, they moved to upstate New York and he continued to keep doing this and then he predicted a second coming of the spaceship and then it didn't come again. And this was after he said, don't listen to me. Yes. And so he just Yes. He just kept going. And was just like, yeah, maybe you should listen to me. He didn't have a wife. He didn't have kids of his own. All he had was the family of this and whether the actual end point for Chen was the spaceship coming or not, I don't know.

[01:14:03] I don't know whether he kept going just because he was like, I have nothing else. I don't live in Taiwan anymore. Like I don't, like I can't go back there. I'm going to have to face all the families, all of his people. Like I don't know what his motivation was because documentation about the group just kind of falls off after this big newspaper stopped writing about it. They weren't writing in English. A lot of them had to go back to Taiwan. Yes. Their visas expired and they had to go back. Like, and also like their families were like, are you, do you get it now? Are you done?

[01:14:32] You can come home, but like, are you good? Got this out of your system. Yeah. So like there was only like 12 people or something like that with him by the time he was in New York. Garland and God's land. What a reach. So I, I still don't know how much he believed by the end, but he was a true believer. He was a true believer in the mid nineties for sure. Okay. Okay. Well, last question, you know, you're a lucky Lou, you're out there, you're waiting for God

[01:15:02] to come speak to the people. And on the day of God's appearance, big, white, shiny plane lands right in the middle of downtown Garland, Texas. Right. And this is told to you to be a God plane. You're not in the cult, but they offer you a ride. Do you get on that plane and see where it goes? No, no, no. I'm not leaving you and all of the people I love and my family and my dog behind in nuclear apocalypse. I guess my big worry would be like,

[01:15:32] are we going to end up in Siberia or something like that? Or are you going to crash just in the side of a mountain? But I would be really curious. It's not going to look like a plane, though. It's going to be a spaceship. Well, okay, fine. I mean, you called them God planes, though, is what I'm saying. Sure. That's what it translates to in English. Great. But like... All right, say a big spaceship. Yeah. Then maybe if it looked like a UFO or something? Even if it looked like a UFO, I'm not getting on it. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Let me just ride out the nuclear holocaust together. Yeah. I respect that. Yeah.

[01:16:02] I think it's time that we bring our judge into the mix. I agree. Gary, turn off that fucking tape. Can't take it. Can't just even for another minute listen to Stuart Townsend. All righty. We are back. Gary the Ghoul has released our guest judge, Celeste. Celeste, how have you enjoyed the last 24 hours of watching the super cut of Queen of the Damned? It was a horrifying experience. It was bad when I was 17

[01:16:31] and it was bad again now. Somehow worse. So it hasn't aged well. It hasn't aged like a vampire at all. Well, I mean, Stuart Townsend looks much the same in the super cut as he did when I was 17 and I did have that man's face on a t-shirt. So there's that. Good for you. Good for you. He's a good looking man. He is a good looking man. He's spiritual now. Did you know this? How spiritual? Very apparently. I found out. Like live prayer on Instagram spiritual? Believes in witchcraft.

[01:17:00] Oh, that kind of spiritual. And collects crystals and probably like suns his butthole. I can't confirm or deny that. Good for him. Yeah. He's one of them. All right. He's all over the Instagram talking about it. It was a surprise to me. It's actually not surprising at all. I buy 100% of that. Good for him. Good for him. We need more spiritual. Actually, we don't need more spiritual. We sure don't. Actually. I just saw like a Rolodex of like the worst sexual offenders from the spiritual Instagram world and was like, oh no, we need less. We need less.

[01:17:30] Stu, if you're listening, I hope. Don't go that way. Yeah, man. Keep it ethical. Go into the light. But you had a t-shirt with his face on it. So my guess is that you've been a fan of vampires, if not Stuart Townsend, for a long time. Yeah. That kind of brings us into why you're here. Why you're our expert. Yeah. Guess judge this month. You know a thing or two about vampires. Living vampires, that is. Our episode is about cults. So why don't we. Hey.

[01:18:00] Okay. Let's just make sure we blend all of the sections together seamlessly in the way we used to be able to do without having to work so hard at it. Podcast police. Kimberly Kay, everyone. I am a director. It's different. You. Me. As I were getting to were a member of a vampire cult. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately. Or fortunately, depending on who you ask. Yeah. I suppose. Yeah. There's some desperate

[01:18:30] housewife somewhere right now listening going, I want to be in a vampire cult. That sounds lit. More than you would think. Definitely. There's a renewed search right now happening. For sure. There is Googling right now. You're going to inspire someone today. For sure. Based on my DMs over the past two years, yes. I have at least 10 in my DMs right now. People being like, how do I join the vampire cult? Can you make me into one of them? How do I do that? Ma'am? Ma'am? Are you? Why won't you respond to me? Ma'am? Incredible. Okay.

[01:18:58] So for the folks playing at home, what is a Y2K online vampire cult? Well, the internet of 2001, 2002 was, of course, not the internet of today. It was a special place. It really was. What an incredible time to be alive. We've lost a beautiful thing. We have. But also a terrifying thing. So it might somewhat be. I feel like we still have the terrifying thing. Like we kept the terrifying parts and we got rid of the best parts.

[01:19:28] You are right. You know, where are the blinkies? Where are the animated GIFs? Let us cost our minds back to live journal and message boards. That was an intense domain. It was. It was. It's still there and now it's owned by the Russians. So it's an intense domain in a whole different manner now. Fascinating. But that's neither here nor there. So the Y2K online Anne Rice vampire cult existed on a internet message board with about 400 active members,

[01:19:58] I would say. So like more than you would think. Yeah. You know. Okay. And there was a chat room component, of course, because what are you going to do in the middle of the night when you can't sleep? You're, if you're me, you're going to log onto the internet and talk to some fucking Anne Rice vampires. Right. And I found it through a series of other weird vampire websites. I was, you know, a weird little kid and I didn't have friends and I was a morbid weirdo. So I was on the internet typing vampires real Anne Rice vampires real.

[01:20:27] What does it mean if I have anemia suddenly? What's happening to me? And I found through a convoluted web of link trees and other things, you know, little like web rings. Remember web rings? I remember. I found this website that claimed to be run by the Anne Rice vampires. Okay. I'm sure people do know if they are listening, your listenership is probably fellow weirdos who like weird stuff,

[01:20:57] but Anne Rice, extremely famous, gothic and vampire novelist renowned for her Vampire Chronicles series. And the forum, the website, was claiming to be run by the characters and the fictional characters. Lestat, Louis, and Armand? In the real world. In the real world. They were live online hot vampires in your area. Wow. Yeah. And was it all three of them?

[01:21:27] Oh yeah. Well, so it was largely Lestat, Armand, Louis. Marius was there a little bit. All right. Kind of. Santiago? Yeah, a little. Okay, you got the mix. I love that. Big Santiago fans here. And then, you know, other characters would dip in and out. Daniel Malloy was on there, but of course he was the book Daniel, not the old man Anthony Bourd Daniel from the TV show. Right, right. Eric Boghossian.

[01:21:56] Eric Boghossian was not on the vampire form. What a bummer. What a bummer. What a bummer. Well, maybe he was. Maybe he was. So I joined because I was, you know, deeply invested. I was looking for vampires to be real and I was a creepy kid. I'm a, as you said, you know, full-time professional witch. Now I'm an occultist. I believe in spirits. I've had a lot of weird experiences and I was having a lot of weird experiences as a teenager too. I was having weird dreams. I was having, you know, sudden mystery anemia.

[01:22:26] In retrospect, I think there were some medical reasons for that. Endometriosis. Yeah. Was it vampires? But in 2001, it was actually easier for a woman to be diagnosed a vampire than it was for her to get an endometriosis diagnosis. It's probably still easier to this day. It's absolutely still easier. Oh yeah, yeah. We live in hell. So wait, really quick, just to orient us. How old were you when this was happening? Yeah, so I came to this internet forum

[01:22:53] I think probably at about 15 or 16 I would have been. So prime brain jello. Totally. Yeah, like the jello's just been poured into the mold. Yeah, you're cooking still at that point. And you know, hormones are hormoning and in my case, I had lost my dad a couple of years prior so I was also like in the midst of intense grief and like all of this other stuff and I was, you know, a lonely weird kid. So join this forum. I am at this point also chronically online

[01:23:23] and I was familiar with the idea of role play forums where people would pretend, you know, write little stories and fan fiction and pretend to be things that they weren't. Sure. I had participated in such things myself. I loved to be a Hogwarts student on the internet when I was 14 years old. Who didn't? Who didn't? Before we realized what a horrifying garbage human J.K. Rowling was. It was, yeah. You always have to say that now, unfortunately. Yes, no, it is. It's an important, it's an important aside. Yeah, so I was familiar with role play but this forum was going to really extreme lengths

[01:23:52] to convince people that they were really the vampires. There were sort of disclaimers all over the forum saying this is not role play. We're not pretending, you guys, for realsies. And there were members from all sorts of different walks of life. It wasn't just like weird little teenage kids like me. It was professionals. There was a woman there who was in her 60s and had grandkids. There were people who were nurses. There were people who were doctors. There were people with like real lives and real jobs.

[01:24:22] And I think when you have enough of a group of people who are sharing about their lives, you know, they're telling you this is my day-to-day job. This is what I'm doing. Not the vampires. You know, these were just regular human being members. But they're saying, no, I've seen stuff. Like I've seen evidence that this is real. And, you know, a couple of them were bringing back reports and saying, no, Lestat showed up in my house. Like, I know this is real because I've literally met the moderator Lestat, you know, and he did some paranormal thing and that's how I know, right?

[01:24:52] Right. And so, but even then, I was very skeptical when I first joined. And, you know, I wanted it to be real for sure, which is always a kicker if you, and, you know. I want to believe. I want to believe. It was a very Fox Mulder moment. Yes. I was like, life is so much cooler. We had t-shirts at this time that people wore in public that said, I want to believe. I had a Stuart Townsend on my t-shirt. Some of us had the I want to believe t-shirt. You know, it was a strange time, but I really wanted it

[01:25:22] to be real because my real life sucked ass to be perfectly frank. Like, I was not having a good time of it. I was like, I wish Lestat would come through my bedroom window and take me away to some, like, New Orleans mansion. That sounds fucking sick, bro. I don't even care if I have to die. That's fine. So, I was kind of primed already, but I was skeptical. And then over years and years, because I was part of this group for almost a decade, I got close to the vampire moderators. We developed

[01:25:51] what I believed to be a legitimate friendship, like, through the internet, but I was like, okay, well, these people care about me. We talk almost every day. I'm spending hours of my life, like, daily investing in this space and creating as well, like, co-creating, sharing art, sharing videos, sharing music, having paranormal experiences also. And over time, the guilt started trickling in because the moderators would say things like, well, after everything you've seen, like,

[01:26:21] how can you not believe that we are what we say we are. And they were, it turns out, later we found out, bugging our computers with spyware so that they could, so they could read our minds by figuring out what we were saying in AOL instant messenger windows to each other and things like that. Crazy, crazy shit. Key loggers on the computers. And then the narrative became that Armand was sneaking

[01:26:51] into my bedroom at night and, like, drinking my blood and part of the reason that I was having all these physical chronic illness symptoms which were starting to kick up because I was, at this point, in my late teens and early 20s. Right. The reason for that was that I had Anne Rice vampire blood and I was, like, not fully a human and I was part vampire. And this revelation came, like, the sort of proper conversation I had with the moderators, with the vampires

[01:27:20] about this came when I was in the midst of what I later found out was a mononucleosis. Right. I had mono and I was very sick and if anyone out there has had mono, it will totally... We both have. It levels you, right? It really, really... There's nothing like it. Yeah. It's a milestone in people's lives for a reason. in a boy's life. Yeah. It's... Train wreck. Yeah. Yeah, you just... You can't... Your brain doesn't function properly. You're completely depleted and exhausted. You can't eat. You can't sleep. You have a fever.

[01:27:50] Like, it's horrible and it goes on and on and on and on and oftentimes they can't early detect it on tests. So I had had... I was really sick. I had had testing done. My doctor was like, I don't know. Something's wrong with you. We don't know what it is. And the vampires were like, it's vampire blood. And all I was doing was, like, lying awake in bed sweating profusely, feeling like ass. And I was like, well, shit, maybe that's it. I'd been, you know, six years deep in this group at this point. Sure.

[01:28:20] Um, and yeah, they kind of got me at that point. I was sort of super on the hook and then I was in the group for a couple of years after that and eventually I just couldn't hold the, the duality of life in my head, I guess, because I had sort of consumed that narrative and absorbed it into my being. I was like, well, fuck. All right. I guess I'm half vampire. What the hell does that mean? And they were busy telling me, well, you're never going to connect

[01:28:49] with human beings and you're probably going to be miserable forever, but you will be psychic as balls. And I was like, cool. Um, the funny part about that is that that has kind of been how my life has played out. So I do sometimes go,, sure. All right. Um, but broke a clock still right twice a day. Exactly right. So it was a weird time because all of that was happening. But meanwhile, I was still having to work a job, right? Having to finish college, trying to have relationships with people, trying to sort of keep grounded and the stress of balancing

[01:29:19] those two things was becoming very, very, very difficult. Um, and so it kind of drove me into like an extreme mental breakdown and I tried to take my own life. It was real bad. And eventually I confronted these people with some evidence that I had gathered myself and also been given by third parties. And I was like, look, I don't think, well, I said, I don't know what's going on, but your IP address, Armand, is exactly the same as the IP address of this woman named Julie

[01:29:49] who lives in Canada in like a double wide trailer or whatever it was, you know? So either you're living in Julie's basement or in her, like water closet. Double wides don't have basements. It's true. Well, I made up the double wide part if anyone's listening to this, they will come for me about this, but like you've been inconsistent in your story because you said they don't understand humor. So to be clear, it was not a double wide trailer, but, um, I sort of confronted Julie essentially and I said, look,

[01:30:18] either you are Armand or he is living in your basement. Um, but something's happening here because you got the same IP address and this woman who it turned out later was, she was in her 50s when I was in my early 20s. She's now, you know, pushing into her 70s and all she said to me was, I have nothing to explain to you. If you're going to be like this, you're never going to get your answers, like that kind of thing. And then she, she blocked me. I got booted from the forum

[01:30:49] and this is a very compressed history. There's so much more. Yes. Um, yes. I mean, God, it was bad guys. There were other members like me who were told that they couldn't donate blood or like couldn't give plasma because they had vampire blood and if they gave like blood or plasma to dying family members that the family member would also get vampire sickness. It was control, control, control, control, feed the narrative. at all costs. So, safe to say that this was sort of like

[01:31:19] a shared world building experience and group project that gave people an alternate reality but also gave them a sense of us versus them in the style of like, so like we, earlier in this episode we talked about some of the hallmarks of cults and the us versus them. So, it sounds like it really ticks that box as far as like there is us, the vampires or the halflings or the whatever and then there's, you know,

[01:31:49] civilians. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Very us versus them and I mean within the world, right, of the form of what I call a cult. They would argue that they're not a cult but of course they would. There's also layers, right? Because you have the regular members who are just logging on and they're having conversations, they're trying to get the vampires' attention and they're not getting anywhere and then you have the inner circle which was, you know, where I wound up of the people who were like, but we've given you the vampire blood and now you're the special one. Right.

[01:32:18] So yeah, very much. Like Scientology, you had to level up. Yeah, you gotta level up. You got your thetans raised. Yeah, I did. Did the inner circle have a special name? No. Oh, that's a missed opportunity. Yeah, come on, there's a lot to draw from in the book so you could have, all right, it's fine, it's fine. We could have drawn some Vampire the Mosquerade lore there. Like it was rich, it was rich for the pickings. We did get little custom titles under our avatars on the forum. So there's that. Special little badge. all right. I like that. Mine was Sailing to Byzantium

[01:32:48] from the WB8's poem. That's fantastic. That's pretty fucking cool. Fucking nerds. So they assigned you some status, right? We talked about that with my story. Yep. Elevating members, giving them a sense of I'm better than the rest, right? To get them more deeply invested. It seems like they worked really hard over a long period of time to exercise a certain level of control. Did they ever try to wield that control? Did they ever try to activate you in the real world? Make you do something. To do something.

[01:33:18] Oh, yeah. Yeah, 100%. Or other members too. Yeah, yeah, they did. And I think this is something that people have struggled with a little bit with my story. Like, people either immediately connect to it and they go, oh, that's totally cult-like behavior. But some people will say, well, it's just all on the internet. Like, you know. Sure. Turn your computer off, bitch, which is like what every therapist that I told about this would say in the early 2000s. And I was like, I feel like I'd be different now, to be honest. Yeah, we have much more tech literate therapy providers these days.

[01:33:48] I mean, to see how easy it is. I don't know if anybody has watched that documentary on Netflix about the guy who made calls to fast food restaurants all throughout the United States and convinced the manager to bring in employees and strip search them right there while they were on the phone under the accusation that they had stole something from customers. This went on for over a decade. We're talking like dozens and dozens of cases of human beings on a telephone willfully

[01:34:17] breaking the law like whether through ignorance or fear or whatever the case may be bringing their employees into their managerial office having them completely stripped down spread their butt cheeks the whole nine yards. I need to go watch this clearly. This couldn't happen to me, right? Like maybe maybe you would be exempt from the whole thing, right? Maybe you could just turn your computer off or hang up the phone. There are a lot of people in this world who clearly they don't have

[01:34:46] that capacity and I don't mean that as an intelligence thing. No. Like we talked about earlier in the story, it's always about where you are in your life at the time. You know? Yes. Where you are in your life and also culturally and again this is not like a universal truth of humans but culturally a lot of cultures have like compliance, people pleasing, politeness, not making other people uncomfortable as kind of like a baseline shared social agreement. And fear. Just fear as a baseline as well, you know?

[01:35:17] And for a young person who wants to believe in the supernatural, who's going through a very difficult and trying times in their life, it makes sense why these older figures would be able to plant these seeds of fear and doubt in your mind that would make it quite difficult to turn the power button off on the computer. 100%. Sure. And I think that's it like to your point of did they try and kind of get us to do anything in the real world or like what was I guess almost like what was the payoff. That story of the guy calling all the fast food restaurants,

[01:35:46] I've seen that documentary and I've heard some podcasts about it. It's horrifying. But you kind of have to ask, you know, what was that guy's endgame, right? What was the point? And I think a lot of people don't understand about cults. It's not always money and it's not always like power in a kind of very obvious flashy sense. We know a lot of those big stories, you know, Jonestown, stuff like that. But sometimes it's just the shared delusion. Sometimes it's just the control of saying like, I want to be in charge of the story and I want all these other people

[01:36:16] to feed into the story with me. And so the thing that we were kind of, those of us in the inner circle were, I guess if you like controlled or encouraged, manipulated to do was to find ways to perpetuate the story. We were fed, you know, this information, like in my case, you have vampire blood, blah, blah, blah. We would do meetups, not of course with the moderators, right? Never, huh? Of course not. They were always, oh, my webcam doesn't work or, you know, The sun's out. Fascinating. Whoops, I slept through it.

[01:36:46] I don't have a soul. The camera can't see me. Right, right. But we would do meetups in New Orleans, usually roughly once a year and members would come from all over the place. I was still living in Australia at the time, so I would fly out from Australia to meet up with all my little weird cult friends. Is this cult at all how you ended up here? Maybe a little. She goes to sip out of her glittery Stanley. I love it. I love it. Okay. No, I fucking love that.

[01:37:16] No, yeah. I mean, weirdly though, the year that I moved here, I moved here in 2012, so I've been here for almost 15 years, was the year after I got kicked out of the cult. But, so it was very like bittersweet. I was like, oh, I'm living my dream. Like, I'm here in vampire town and like, also I've been exiled from my family. Wow. Yeah, I was real heavy. How brave of you. I know, I was so scared, but also I was coming out for a poetry degree too, so I had like an inbuilt poetry family. That's a different

[01:37:46] kind of vampire. We don't have time there. A whole different type of cult. Yeah, a whole different type of cult. Yeah, really interesting hierarchy we could spend hours on. But yeah, so the things that they were trying to make me do though, when we would have these meetups in New Orleans, there would always of course be this sort of crackle of possibility and potential, this sort of magical friscian in the air, you know, which was, are the vampires here? Like, are they watching us? And of course, they would still be on the forum and in the chat room sort of making weird little comments,

[01:38:15] which did lead us to believe that maybe sometimes they were actually in the city, whoever was really, you know, behind the mosque watching and kind of reporting back. But there was one time where Armand and his, this is, so listen, this is cringe. We talk about a lot of cringe stuff that we personally have done on this podcast. So you are in a safe space. Oh boy. You're okay. So okay, like we got to cast our minds back to the LiveJournal times, okay? It was a different time.

[01:38:45] So Armand on the forum had a little vampire lover named Maxwell little emo kid vampire boy who had been a regular member but then was vampirized by Armand, which of course got all of us thinking, oh, if it happened to him, it would happen to me. I could be vampirized. That could be me next. I'm a halfling now but I could go the whole way. Right. I just got to suck that vampire dick. I got to get there. Yes, yes. Can we say that on the internet? We can. We can. We said it now.

[01:39:14] So yeah, it turned out that Maxwell was actually this woman named Liza who was an older woman from New York. She ran a witch shop actually. And so whatever. But Maxwell and Armand were supposedly in New Orleans on one of these trips that we were all out here for. And they were, you know, watching me specifically because we had a weird little vampire love triangle. I don't even want to get into it. There was a lot of role play happening in the chat room and we don't even need to talk about that.

[01:39:44] Oh, I feel like we do but keep going. When I realized they were middle-aged women, I was sad about that. Listen, okay? They were both middle-aged women. Yeah, both of them. Fantastic. Yeah, it's wonderful. I love to know that I had cyber sex with a woman my mother's age. Wow. What a time to be alive. You guys are getting the unfiltered version of this story. A lot of this is not come out on the internet. But anyway, so they were supposedly there watching me, blah, blah, blah.

[01:40:14] And they, of course, wanted me, they wanted me to be proof. You know, I get to be the beacon of the story that convinces all these other people that it's real. So, one day after the trip happened, we're in the chat room and they're telling me, like, yeah, you saw us in New Orleans. Do you not remember? Like, you don't remember that car pulling up and Maxwell getting out? You don't remember seeing? And it was Halloween in New Orleans. Was there a fucking emo kid with eyeliner on? Of course there was. Fuck yes, that word might have

[01:40:43] been one of them. It was you. It was you all along. So, of course, you know, everyone's been drinking. Like, I'm like, I guess, maybe. Like, I don't know. And I was a little bit cheesed off with them this particular day. So I was like, yeah, man, I don't know, maybe. Like, fuck, I was just not feeling it, Mr. Krabs. But they were really on me about it. Like, they kind of wouldn't let it go. It got kind of like a little verbally abusive. And they were like, well, we saw your mom in the restaurant. Like, you know,

[01:41:13] you remember when you went off with all your cult friends and, you know, you were here in town with your mom and she was in a restaurant. She was really drunk and she forgot her bag and, like, Maxwell picked the bag up for her. And, you know, are you going to deny that that happened? And I was like, man, I don't fucking know. Like, this is a crazy story that you're telling me. And they were like, pick up the phone right now and call her. Call your mom while you're in the chat room on video chat. Call her and ask her if she remembers this happening. And I remember I had just sort of like hit my limit for the day and I was like, fucking fine.

[01:41:43] All right, I'll do it. Call my mother up. My poor mom who, like, God love her. She will never listen to this probably, but she is an alcoholic. And so I call her. I'm like, hey, mom, remember when we were in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago? Do you remember, like, a guy with a sideswept fringe looked a little bit like a member of My Chemical Romance? Do you remember him picking your bag up in this restaurant because you forgot it? And she's real quiet on the phone and then she's just like, yeah, yeah, I think that did happen.

[01:42:12] Of course, right? And she's like, why are you asking? She's starting to get a little suspicious and I'm like, no reason, bye. You know, I hang up the phone and the vampire moderators, Armand and Maxwell, like, oh, are you going to deny your own mother now? Are you just going to, are you just going to say that didn't happen? Yeah. Like, it's never going to be enough for you, bitch. It's never going to be enough. You're always going to have questions. Like, why are you like this? And then there was a later day, you know, Maxwell and I would talk on AIM. He was like, just tell everybody that you met me in New York. Just tell everybody that when you were in New York class

[01:42:42] that we met up. And, you know, if you do that, then I'll give you like my real phone number. And if you do that, then we can really have a conversation on the phone. And maybe next time you're in New York, we will hang out. But you got to tell everybody that I'm real. Right. And so there was a lot of that going on with manipulating people to create the shared delusions structure and keep it safe. A hundred percent. Got it. Just to kind of draw it, you know, to feed, to draw more, et cetera. Wow. Yeah.

[01:43:11] It's a little crazy. It's fantastic. And they're still doing it is the crazy part. Wait, they're still going. It's still going on? Oh, yeah. I mean, not to me. Thank God. Yes. I feel like we'd be having a very different interview if you were like still actively in there. No, not to, you know, be too forward or be inappropriate. Or be as inappropriate as you like. Careful. You know, I have a different ethical responsibility. How much did this experience long term

[01:43:41] influence the suicidal ideation? Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, I would say that, you know, I am wilted rose emoji perpetual sad girl and that's probably just like in the brain chemistry from childhood, you know. So, it was there prior to me becoming a part of this group. As I said, I had lost my dad. That definitely like spiraled me. I had some childhood trauma. But I think that being in a group that was,

[01:44:11] they weren't exactly like life denying as a group. In some ways, it was kind of weird because it was very much, it was very Anne Rice-y. It was like, oh, the world is this beautiful, like lush, delicious, decadent place and we should sink our teeth into the experiences. You know, it was kind of some Lord Byron. By sitting in our houses online. Be on the internet more. You know you want to. But yeah, so it wasn't like, they weren't pushing people, I would say,

[01:44:40] into a suicidal space. That would be disingenuous of me to say. But there was a sort of level of emotional manipulation and abuse and especially in this place of like, the love and the connection and the sort of world that they were creating of like, you are totally alone and no one will ever understand you or love you like we understand you and love you. And I am the, you know, I, Armand,

[01:45:09] am the only person that's ever going to get to you like that. And if you try and connect to anybody else, it's not going to work. But at the same time, doing this kind of like cat and mouse push-pull game where he would be, he, Julie, fuck you, Julie, if you're listening. She probably is because they can't stay with you. She earned that. She did. She earned that. I hope she does. I appreciate the listeners. She might email you. She's been doing that. She's been like, take your episodes down. Girl, you don't even know.

[01:45:40] All right. Should have made some different decisions back in 2001. But yeah, she, you know, this idea of I am all you have, but I'm also going to keep pushing you away. And I don't know if the push away was just also part of the manipulation. I'm sure partially it was. But I think it was also maybe a little bit of guilt seeping in occasionally. A level of awareness of like, oh, I'm manipulating children because a lot of us were really young. I mean,

[01:46:10] we were dead ass like 14, 15 when we joined this website. She was an adult. bananas behavior. If it was a man, like this is the other thing. If that had been a dude on the other end of the screen. There would already be a Netflix series about this cult. Absolutely. And people would be calling for them to be prosecuted. you're like a little old lady. Well, that's probably fine. It's like, no, it's not. Yeah, no, we were still manipulating kids. that's still like child predation actually. Absolutely. Yes. Especially because, you know, there was sort of sexual talk that got dragged into it and stuff like that. So yeah, it informed

[01:46:39] the suicidal ideation for me. I would not say it caused it, but it definitely amplified my desire to sort of not be here because I didn't know what kind of life I was going to have if I didn't have this. Yeah, right. And the shattering of that belief or the worry that it was going to shatter was extremely stressful because there was a part of me the whole time that was like, none of this is real. Right. And I think, you know, you talk about this in your story particularly that's fear of losing something that you've poured

[01:47:09] all your time and your effort and your emotional energy into for so long. And you're limited social energy energy as well because not all of us are wired to connect easily and it's a real effort to have to do it and being members of communities are like muscles we have to flex and they atrophy easily and so like the idea that you would work that muscle that hard only to lose your connection to the like devastating, validly devastating. Let's quantify it here. Like you had the seeds of doubt,

[01:47:39] sure, but it inspired you to the extent that you would travel halfway across the world to socialize with these folks on a percentage scale if you can, how much of this became your identity at its strongest? A hundred percent. Really? Wow. Easy. Because I didn't have a whole lot going on outside of it and even when I did start to sort of claw some of my life back I mean I remember very distinctly because I was in my sort of early to mid-twenties

[01:48:08] it had just gotten a little bit too psycho on the forum and so I was starting to go out again I had wonderful friends in the goth community and I was going to goth night a lot and I entered my party girl phase I was a DJ. Yes. Good for you. It was not I was not a good don't good for me I was a very bad DJ I played a lot of share it was not a good time. It's all right. Sounds enjoyable. But they hated that they hated that I was out there of course you know and I was not crazy either I mean I did later

[01:48:38] become an alcoholic but at this point I was not an alcoholic and I was just you know doing normal early 20s stuff having a couple of drinks with friends sometimes going all bender dancing being a little bit crazy having young person experiences and they hated it and they would they would shame me they'd be like oh you're just like sledding around now and you're like I'm like sledding around I like kissed a boy one time how dare you excuse me sir pot please meat kettle what the hell

[01:49:07] and so yeah they didn't want me to have another type of life you know sure but even when I was having those experiences like out in the world with my friends having a wonderful time I mean you know in retrospect crazy times but some of the best times of my life you know rose colored glasses that world that I supposedly belonged to this identity of being like hot vampire and that's why you're chronically ill like that informed everything everything that I did how long did it take you to realize

[01:49:36] that you had been over this long period of time traumatized by the experience a long time I mean I think so I moved to New Orleans in 2012 and I had some friends actually from the cult who also were living here at that time who were also no longer part of the cult so we and we had obviously as you can imagine some pretty intense like bonding sure I know trauma bond is not technically the right term psychologically and that but you know shared experience

[01:50:06] for sure a shared trauma certainly yeah sure and so there was some unpacking over the first five years that I was here with those people but I think it truly didn't hit me the layers to this trauma until I started trying to write my memoir last year and I was like up in the middle of the night going back over live journal entries and back over chat logs and reading all this shit that I hadn't read in years and literally losing my mind in my house and pacing the garden

[01:50:35] at four in the morning being like oh no the child predation part I hadn't unpacked whatsoever yeah like it had just not hit me that that was a piece of the puzzle you kind of have to become an adult to really see when you were being preyed on as a child sure and then reframe it as like this wasn't exciting or this wasn't interesting or this wasn't just a thing that happened like these were fucking grown ass people with gelled brains 100% doing things with young people

[01:51:04] that are wholly inappropriate it took me realizing so I started to share the story on the internet in like April of 2025 and it went viral very quickly very quickly oh my god and then I kind of went on this weirdly year long odyssey where a bunch of weird shit happened and I met some wonderful people lots of people kind of who had had similar experiences some people who had been in the cult who I hadn't talked to in years like lots of people just lots of conversations learning new aspects and facets of the story as an adult but I remember

[01:51:33] people were asking me at the time like well do you feel like you were preyed on like as a child you know now that these women were like your mom's age like do you feel like there was some sort of weird child predator stuff going on and I remember saying no like you know I knew what I was doing like I signed up for this and I you know I participated in my own like victimization so that's on me and people were saying to me like yes and dead ass I think only maybe only maybe

[01:52:03] five or six months ago did the penny drop and I was like oh wait hang on and then like then the anger was there a little bit because even you know I've got videos up on the internet where I'm talking about it and I'm saying well you know I did keep going I did keep logging onto the website I didn't turn my computer off so that's on me I guess you know a lot of self-blame so at what point in this odyssey did you start being recontacted by yeah

[01:52:33] that was going to be my next question and you know for the listeners here Celeste this book is being shopped to various publishers potentially for a release sometime relatively soon so if you want to hear the whole story like this will be in book form sooner rather than later so please go to Celeste's website we're going to have that in the show notes subscribe to her feeds the whole nine yards I don't want you to tell the whole story

[01:53:03] because I don't want to ruin it for people right when they do get to experience this however we're kind of in real time right now with this part of the story since you opened yourself back up to discussing this has anything scary happened? oh god yeah man like where to even start hopefully the book will happen because there's just it's just so much and I have more nuanced

[01:53:32] feelings about it now too because I think there's so much this idea of how your reality can distort like yes it's a cult thing but it's also so germane with the rise of AI right now oh my god it's like distorting everyone's perception of what reality actually is but also like the widespread availability of parasocial relationships 100% because 20 years ago like it was not at all impossible like people have been forming parasocial obsessions and bonds since the since the analog days

[01:54:02] but it's easier now than ever before for sure to feel like you know somebody that you've never met because of the degree of which we are sharing ourselves and how easy it is to access that information and I think people get it now on a level that they just did not really get it even five years ago if you like tried to talk to people about parasocial relations they're like that's just weirdos and you're like no it's not it's literally everyone yeah like you're a normal person and you're a little weird about this singer who you've never met or spoken to you know like yeah

[01:54:32] so yeah so I made the videos they went a little viral we're talking millions of views yeah not a little viral millions of views now when I go to my vet I take my cat to the vet and they're like hey didn't I see you on a podcast talking about some weird like real vampire shit and they're like oh can you just fix my cat's bladder that'd be great can we not can we not get into this please just make my cat's vulva stop bleeding that's why I'm here oh god but yeah so various people

[01:55:00] popped out of the woodwork right and one of the people who popped out of nowhere after the videos went viral was this person with a completely blank TikTok account like they were following no one pretty much except me totally new no videos heavy side and and and they you know they came into my DMs and they were like oh hey it's it's James from the forum and I remembered James James was a another member

[01:55:30] who was kind of inner circle a little bit but the funny thing is that so many of these these moderators of the forum had sock puppet characters so they would play the vampires but they would also have like a ton of other sock puppets that were you know propping the narrative up right and James was always suspected to be one of those sock puppets because he never came to any meetups no one ever met him in real life he was like a very like classically attractive like British gay man in ways that you know

[01:55:59] like classically attractive British gay men exist obviously absolutely but you know on an internet forum that was predominantly like awkward teenage girls and older women it was a little bit of an anomaly sure so some eyebrows were raised even Ben Daniels just like being in the mix with all of that you're like you're better than us Ben you're better why are you here so already back in the day people were like is he like a real person I don't know but anyway suddenly he was in my DMs and he was like oh hi and I was like oh hello

[01:56:29] person I haven't literally spoken to whatsoever in 15 years what's up and he started to ask me you know we had some really good conversations it was actually a little bit heartbreaking but I remember we started to have these conversations on TikTok you know reminiscing about the old days a little bit and his speech patterns and the way that he was talking and just the vibe of the back and forth I was like this is Armand this is what this is this is Julie come on Julie

[01:56:59] what an Armand move though yeah like couldn't come to me as Armand couldn't like fulfill my past fantasy you gotta come to me as James the gay man what am I gonna do with that fuck so I have this like long back and forth with James and it's we have this sort of friendly almost sibling like barbed back and forth but it's given me vibes and he's saying weird stuff like he keeps saying I'm really glad you're telling your story you know it's good it's good that this is coming out now like we were all

[01:57:28] so young like you know it's a trap yeah right and I was like I guess we were all so young yeah yeah and you know you weren't Julie the rest of us were minors but um at the time like I wasn't 100% sure I was like well maybe James is just just like a guy roughly my age he's in England he had some similarly weird experiences but he told me at one point he was like well I really hope you get your answers eventually because I got mine

[01:57:58] and I was like what does that mean James giant rabbit ears in the air scare quotes and he said well you know you know I had that relationship with Daniel Molloy you know me and Daniel were like I was getting the vampire blood from Daniel and this was a big like scandalous plot point on the forum because somebody tried to overdose on fentanyl or something about it it was a whole it was very it was very Y2K internet okay yeah got it and I

[01:58:28] was really in a relationship with Daniel and I got my answers about the whole thing and I said to him well do you mean that you met Daniel like is that what you're saying that you like met the person behind the mosque and he said I can't answer that and I said why that's a pretty yeah that's a what do you mean I

[01:59:24] well all of the moderators were actually men like you know they weren't vampires but they were all men I'm like well I know that's a fucking lie I

[01:59:56] yeah that was a crazy time telling he told me that there was a rumor going around that I had molested someone and like did I have anything to got

[02:00:26] got there a little more and my friend Askia who hosts that podcast was getting emails from cult members being like take your episode down like you don't even know Celeste she's a horrible person like she's done horrible terrible things and you should talk to us so we can share our side of

[02:00:55] down they might have realized like take it down or what like will bite you will like what is the consequence someone at some point got an email from Julie and I've not heard from Julie directly I mean I'm pretty sure James was Julie so I've had that interaction but I

[02:01:25] no judge will ever let that happen there is a lawyer in the building right now who would be cackling if she heard us talking about this and also you I will say you have for someone who was

[02:01:55] identities have been protected in a way that perhaps they haven't earned no doxing no sharing of images none of that you're just sharing your piece of what you lived totally and I mean unfortunately and I do understand why they're upset I mean it turns out that the person who was playing Maxwell the emo boy vampire her kids I guess had seen my videos and they like they must have known that their mom was role playing on the internet but I probably didn't

[02:02:25] know to what degree but evidently that's how she found out and you know she was pretty upset about that and she's older and she's got some health problems and she's probably not necessarily playing with a full deck as a lot of these people maybe aren't well she did give your mom her purse though yeah so it was that yeah that was kind she was a gentleman yeah she was a gentleman fascinating so you know I get why they're upset it's not ever fun to

[02:03:17] into this as heavily as I did and let it run my life and I mean it's not my fault that that happened I can say this now but you know I'm still very cognizant of the fact that it takes a group of people participating in different ways to foster a dynamic absolutely so I have tried to be really careful about that in my content but yeah they are they are very angry at me I have never received any kind of legal anything from these people and I doubt that I will Julie is in Canada also so good

[02:03:47] luck suing me from Canada for anything to be honest I guess you could try but yeah they and they're scared I think they're scared it would be written in crayon anyway don't talk bad about Armand K-Fix emoji so looping this winding story which again people I'm sure that listeners have questions that they're like why aren't you asking about this and the reason is I want you to go

[02:04:16] and watch Celeste's content and read her story because the primary source is the person you should be getting this from and this is a podcast episode about cults not about Celeste's deep and involved of time with the vampire cult so there's more information that you can get in drips and drabs in many other ways but let's going back to the sort of like rough guideline we were using at the beginning of the podcast sort of like measure cults let's see how many boxes

[02:04:46] you checked so like lightning round okay singular or hierarchical leader ish I would say so I mean yeah because at the end of the day it boiled down to Lestat and Latter-Leon Mond they were the kind of where the buck stopped so I would say yes poor Louis Louis was checked out Louis was too busy very New Orleans I'm not like a part of this okay behavioral regulation for members via clothes finances foods relationships

[02:05:16] things that you have to talk about stories that you have to confirm sounds like it checks those boxes there yeah I would say so there was also a lot like for those of us who were in the inner circle there was a lot of like break up with your partner don't be with your husband etc etc don't be a DJ don't go to goth night don't drink free wines at goth night don't do it madness okay us versus them mentality for sure yeah we are vampires they're not yeah okay got it fear as a control tool

[02:05:46] yeah I would say so it's interesting though I would say almost it was like love as a control tool more so than fear well how about fear of having the love the fear of loss yes the fear of loss the fear of being exiled was definitely very present fear of being banned yeah that's fear all right conspiracies about the wider or general world hmm that one maybe not actually all right I think I think maybe not that one okay yeah enforced isolation by nature of the internet

[02:06:17] even if you said no I would say wrong yeah yeah no leadership accountability 100% yeah so based on you know the things that we measured the other cults by you were in a cult however they feel about and again and Edward talked about this a little bit earlier there are things that are not a pure definition of the word cult that are still cult adjacent culty and that's so many different you know the survivors of the NXIVM podcast have

[02:06:47] that like a little bit culty their show that's about that like there there are some of us are in groups that are edging with being a cult and they're really enjoying that experience I love to be edged by a cult so Edward you know you've talked before about living LA have you ever joined or been part of a group that you would call culty or a cult no but I was tempted yeah you know you get bored sometimes when you're out in LA

[02:07:16] you move out there not knowing anyone right and I went to Central Casting when I first got out there because I needed a job and for anyone who's not familiar with what Central Casting is they wrangle all the extras for all the movies and TV shows that you watch all the extras they're run by Central Casting and you go you sign up and you know there's a weird hotline you call every day and they tell you if you got work the next day right Scientology camps out

[02:07:45] in front of Central Casting brilliant because they understand that you are young and you are impressionable and you are lonely most likely just got to Los Angeles and they offer free acting classes oh my god and so I took the flyer and I wrote my phone number down and lo and behold the next day I get a phone call from Scientology and they asked me if I want to come to this class and I was just like I'm aware enough and I was like God as tempting as this is

[02:08:15] I don't have any money to give these people so I don't know how far I could go I can't afford this cult is an amazing reason to not join the cult I don't know how many steps down the bridge to total freedom I would actually get but I was just like no thank you I think I think that I'm going to have to pass and they were like well if you don't want to be a serious fucking actor like you know don't come to this like you're never going to be an actor if you don't come to this and I was just like wow I was like

[02:08:45] this is how it's done and I just hung up the phone I was like I no wonder people get beaten into this kind of thing you know they have no fear no filter and they will do what it takes to get control of your mind like it is wild it was fascinating but I hung up the phone and I just stared at it for like five minutes I was like what just happened by Scientology no less you know that's wild

[02:09:14] it was fun that's diabolical though setting up outside of Central Casting and offering acting classes to like desperate beautiful people and their dreams hate that I hate that my goodness okay yeah what about you you ever get engaged in anything a little bit culty yeah yeah I did tell the listeners when I first met you you were very passionate about a sport known as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu so incredibly passionate you were

[02:09:44] maybe one of the only women that watched every UFC fight and not because their partner made them every single one you would post about it I remember not really knowing you too well and you were posting about the Anderson Silva fight and all this other stuff I was like this broad's wild we gotta hang out this is neat you were in you got your purple belt right like that is beyond the entry point you know like you get your blue belt when you're in there for about a year or two

[02:10:13] yeah year and a half purple belt you gotta get you know you gotta be doing it for you gotta get three fourths up the way of the stick like it's not just the tip you know what I mean like you you've got no I was the dick was in the chef was glazed I was not yeah what happens what do you come to realize or did something change yes something changed but I want to be really explicit that like Brazilian jujitsu itself is not a cult but

[02:10:43] because the way gyms are set up and because the way the sport itself is set up it definitely does that edging thing and so there are certain gyms that are absolutely I don't care I have already received death threats from some of them so we're fine they are cults but that doesn't necessarily mean that jujitsu or martial arts is but sure you're talking about singular hierarchical leaders so either the owner

[02:11:12] of the gym or the black belt who is the winningest person at the gym they will typically be the hierarchy there's some gyms have picture of Helio Gracie on the wall dead Gracie and you gotta go bow at him the Gracie family itself has a long story there's some great podcasts if you listen to BJJ mental models they'll talk about this as well but like the Gracie family itself certainly edges up against a cult if it's not actually a cult at this point so that aspect's already built into the framework of it

[02:11:43] behavior regulation of members how you dress like you have to wear this uniform and some of this is practical right like you can't learn how to throw someone in a gi if you're not wearing a gi I wouldn't call the military necessarily a cult per se right but there are culty branches and culty little in groups within that subsections and that's facilitated by this behavioral regulation so like within jiu jitsu it's like you gotta dress this way and people are ranked so that's that leaves you a little

[02:12:12] malleable a little porous for like some people are worth more than other people and their opinions are worth more than other people's there is the us versus them mentality in a very big way of sort of like this is the best martial art this is the martial art that everyone should learn you are being taught to evangelize about why it is the one that everyone should learn and women should learn it and children need to learn it and it's about the little person being able to be the big person which like some of that is objectively true and not

[02:12:42] every gym is like go out and evangelize about this but you know as you get further down the list conspiracies about the wider in general world like that starts to unlock as a level that's kind of built into the culture of certainly American and Brazilian jiu jitsu is you know the government jiu jitsu four or five years ago certainly during the pandemic was this always something that was there

[02:13:12] or did you feel like over time BJJ started to broadly shift towards certain political stances I think it's a little bit of both I think that so you know in the history of the sport when it sort of came up from South America and started being taught it really I think at that point was a lot more pure and a lot just more about like this is the gentle art and you know the American way of approaching things and just sort of like beating things in face or brandishing your bicep at them uselessly or using you know

[02:13:41] your firearm to we were so hungry for this I mean it is a beautiful art form it is an incredible system it gets you in your body it is if you are in a safe gym led by a fucking ethical and competent adult practitioner it is an incredible place for trauma trauma patients to go and get back in their bodies learn how to work through difficult moments learn to stop dissociating and learn to feel empowered in their body again versus disempowered like there's all of these things that evolved

[02:14:11] along with the worst things about jiu jitsu and so when it first got here I think it was a slow burn and it was a lot more pure and there was a little bit of like the gracies the gracies helio gracie the carlo gracie like the health gracie you know like the gracies and you know here's this video I mean you remember like the you can still find you know here's here's a gracie literally doing pranic breathing in a waterfall and then talking about how he's only lived off of fruit and rice because it's like

[02:14:41] the preferred diet of the evolved being and it's the way to hit your peak athletic and spiritual form you're like oh it's a little culty but like then there was a thing that sort of happened as the pandemic started when I first started in jujitsu it was like 2013 2014 somewhere in there and a lot of this wasn't happening yet but there was always

[02:15:11] when I started at that time it was a lot of outcasts a lot of you know people who had been bullied a lot of people who didn't feel like they fit in anywhere else so they weren't going to go to like a CrossFit gym where the chads were they were going to go to the weirdo pothead we're going to roll around on the floor and hug people gym and so that was the vibe at least in my bubble of it in New York City at that time but then as UFC and jujitsu started to merge more

[02:15:41] and the bully the bully archetype the dickhead alpha male posturing gorilla nonsense of the American male ego these sort of like the bad guys from WWE like we all of these American Cobra Kai yes like all of these sort of like uniquely not uniquely American but like maybe dominantly American at least in the media and the

[02:16:11] ethos in some ways they started to creep into what had been like this kind of dorky niche sport that only a couple thousand people were doing and then it got even more popular and it started live streaming and then you know like more and more of the UFC and WWE started to make its way in including a lot of right wing guys who around 2020 felt especially empowered because of a political movement being in charge and them being in

[02:16:41] charge and them getting to make the rules but the pandemic sort of took this gas leak and it was like a fire just spread through the whole sport now in terms of us versus them I remember a time where you used to wear apparel that said BJJ versus everybody right I had a trucker hat a flat brim trucker hat that I wore that said jujitsu versus everyone and you know just like

[02:17:10] Celeste eventually you were encouraged to become an evangelist you became a writer for one of the more popular jujitsu websites jujitsu websites BJJ times and so you spoke about the sport and your love for the sport but as things started to change that platform became an opportunity for you to start speaking out about some of the darker sides of BJJ and that's when things really started to get weird for you yeah

[02:17:40] talk about that a little bit I was an associate editor at jujitsu times and really like it was a very pure writing gig like the other writers that I was writing with like we were all no one was being paid particularly well like you got like grocery money at the end of the month for it and we weren't writing like here's why this is the best board was like here's what this person did at this competition here's this sick move here's how this particular leg entanglement used to be like a niche thing that one weirdo did

[02:18:18] lead editors were the only women on staff and we're also like in every I was lucky enough to train with a group of women within my gym but we were still the smallest population at the gym by dozens of bodies and so I started to write about things from a woman's perspective and my stories got approved because I had a female editor who was like yes we do need to talk about this and that did not go over well with the readers

[02:18:47] and I encountered some really heinous comments feedback death threats eventually just reporting on documented sexual assault or predation not like hey we're accusing this guy of this this man was arrested and prosecuted by a jury of his peers based on overwhelming evidence that he is a fucking sexual predator and he is incarcerated and it's like you're bad for the sport

[02:19:16] and one bad apple doesn't ruin the whole and we were like hey what we need you guys to hear is that this is not one bad apple because of this hierarchical structure because of this extremely tactile close body nature of this because when we're doing nogi we are basically in our bathing suits rubbing up against each other like there is a power dynamic and an eroticism to this that shouldn't necessarily be there but do be there because y'all frankly have a

[02:19:46] self-control issue like and it it went extremely badly and a couple of like highly visible figures in that community you became their number one op for a while yes yeah Gordon Ryan sent the King Ryan army as he called them his tens of the idea look I know Gordon Ryan could beat me up but that's funny

[02:20:16] Gordon Ryan also all you gotta do is like give him a piece of cheese or gluten right now and he'll shit his pants like he's he's got a really nice Achilles heel that you can work with but Gordon Ryan sent the King Ryan army after me and was like so proud of it like go get her she looks like a man and she's this and she and like was in it was just all we were trying to do at that moment in time was sort of say hey guys the bullies have found the nerd group and are starting to

[02:20:45] infiltrate the nerd group and it would be great if we could try and keep some of this sort of like weird alpha male nonsense out of this and that was met with like you are being difficult and women ruin the sport and this is why we don't and you know around this same year Claudia Delval who was like one of the greatest female jiu-jitsu athletes at the time very publicly came out and said my coach De La Riva who has like a move named after him

[02:21:15] was grooming me and being a sexual predator towards me and I'm leaving his gym and when she did that he responded by being like well women can't train at my gym anymore because this is what they do and so we were sort of like hey guys are you not seeing that there's like a there's like a pattern of again not every gym not every guy not every practitioner but much in the same way we've seen in every sport that has men and women in it whether it's gymnastics or soccer or it doesn't matter sure we started to say hey these sort

[02:21:44] of habitual problems are so guys listening no matter how many women come out and speak about trans athletes if you listen to the majority of female athletes trans athletes is not their number one concern in terms of protecting them have genuine issues that really need to be paid really need to be paid attention to in the less than 1% of all competitors across

[02:22:14] amateur and professional sports that are trans people are not the priority have you just considered that as a woman you should just not be so pressed about abuse and being preyed upon I have considered it but five years from now we will discover Gordon Ryan was always a middle aged woman in a trailer park he was Stuart Townsend oh my god so yeah so I

[02:22:43] for me in my personal journey I would say I got very deep into the cultier part of jujitsu and I was evangelizing I was telling everybody this is the thing to do you should do it it helps with PTSD it's helped me so much it can help you too you know this is a better way there was a time you want to let's go let's meet Celeste's cringe she got very vulnerable I was so deep into the jujitsu you know evangelism part that I

[02:23:13] contacted a black activist here in New Orleans okay that we both know and said hey why don't we do free jujitsu seminars for black inner city youth so they're less likely to use guns because if you show them that there's another way like that's how deep I had heard this from my coach sure and heard that like you know I had heard this really changed the gun violence

[02:23:43] in the barrio in you know Brazil was like once everybody learned jujitsu you know we no longer need and like complete fucking nonsense like you know what the best way to die in a gunfight is lay down on the ground and bull guard that's like embarrassing level of what was the response you were met with silence which I thought was incredibly generous really really generous this

[02:24:14] dumb white bitch like would have been a completely fair response but like that was the sermon that we were being given multiple times a week every week and that was the sermon that we were all all of that the spell was broken and I still love jiu-jitsu and I still have deep

[02:24:44] respect and love for so many people that I met within it and the sport itself and as a self-defense system it is incredible but like yeah that shit is culty and it's a shame when people use platforms and systems like that to further an agenda and make people who are desperate for belonging desperate to feel safe desperate to be part of something that makes the world feel ordered and

[02:25:13] less terrifying to navigate when people hijack that to try and control the way you live if you don't like it yep yeah that's the sad part about the Anne Rice stuff too I mean I still love the work of Anne Rice she her books are beautiful they're still really important to me the Anne Rice fandom most of the people some of the people in there are a little kooky self included but

[02:25:50] yes and no I would say I was so embedded at that point but I've also always kind of been on the periphery like there's a lot of vampire groups in New Orleans you know I know a lot of those people I have known many of them for like upward of 20

[02:26:20] ever drink blood oh you gotta it's fair it's a fair question listen to be honest I already popped the cap off this

[02:26:50] it will give you mono yeah it will give you monocleosis I already had it we good EBV and I go way back yeah no I mean yeah the human blood consumption so that's a big part

[02:27:20] no she says but yeah it's you know you probably shouldn't though here's my PSA like if you're listening and you're like that sounds fun I mean you probably shouldn't you

[02:27:50] it was too good to not so these stories yeah why don't we start with Edward's story thoughts questions feedback things that you felt as you listened yeah what's really weird when I was listening to Edward's story is I kept forgetting that this was the 90s like it felt to me like do you know what I mean this is a Victorian drawing room same yeah and I kept having to be like oh

[02:28:20] it's it's curious there was this beautiful line when you're telling your story where you go into the collapse of of the reality but also like the kind of the built in testing of belief that resonated very much for me this idea of like we're gonna pull back the curtain a little bit and we're gonna see how much people are all in even when the curtain has been pulled away and that resonated for me it escalated very quickly

[02:28:50] was my other thought I was like okay well I get so many words you know we gotta bang these stories it did escalate quickly in life it seems like it did seem to once once the hologram reveal took place and then Damambro discovers he's dying it was just like yeah doomsday's coming let's get this thing going you know we fucked around long enough yeah it's interesting too so I was re-listening this morning as I was preparing to finish being tortured

[02:29:20] by Gary the ghoul you know I was staring at the deep V on Stuart you Gary and Stu yeah but I was thinking to myself you know can I put myself in the mindset of someone who perhaps would have gone through like the solar temple and if I divorce my common sense from this philosophical idea of okay so these people are gonna there's gonna be a ritual suicide or mass

[02:29:50] murder and then the souls of these templars are gonna somehow by some weird spiritual osmosis is gonna you know take you to serious yeah yeah I was like well I get it which is a weird thing to say for the cult survivor I

[02:30:28] you're about to be aligned with a dead knights templar and go serious this is the thing about cults right is that the window the opening is not always sure it's just an acting class it's just it's just a message board it's just a way to exercise the thing about it that I struggle with with the ending was that you you don't know for certain for how many people was it just a way for them to

[02:30:57] manage their life they're suffering their loneliness because we get that statistic that only a fraction of them could we actually prove killed themselves right how when they get up to that threshold of like oh now we're going we're transiting now like how many people were like I never really fucking believe in all of this I just hang I didn't think we were actually going to get here I just like the party planning I don't actually like the party the wine was good at the hotel I

[02:31:47] out and even once the cracks begin to show and you have some reasons to believe that perhaps things here are not what they say you're sort of like well I'm invested and I don't want to lose my community and so you sort of plow forward anyway like I could hear some parallels. Yeah. And, you know, with the solar temple, I can say, at least from my own perspective, the worst thing that took place is that at least a couple of people were convinced enough, all in enough or just deluded enough to stab a baby through the heart.

[02:32:17] Oh, yeah. Did you ever feel like your community, that it was ever going to crescendo into something dangerous? Oh, yeah. Well, I'm happy to tell you that no one was ever told to stab a baby through a heart. That's great. I'm really happy for you. And I will say, I don't know that in my group, it was ever going to go to like a place like that. But what's interesting is that around that same time, like late 90s, early 2000s, as you guys may even have talked about on the podcast,

[02:32:47] there were other fictional vampire related cults that did go to that place. There's a super famous Florida case based around Vampire the Masquerade where like they- I don't know this. Oh my God, it's so crazy. The dude, Rod Farrell, like killed his girlfriend's mom and dad, and then they got in a car, all of them. And this was like 1993, I want to say. Got in a car, drove to New Orleans from Florida. Yeah. It's always New Orleans. Yeah. But it was all Vampire the Masquerade based. Right.

[02:33:14] They had been playing, heavily, heavily playing Vampire the Masquerade. The dude in question was like, yeah, I am my character, Visago the Vampire from Vampire the Masquerade. I think they ended up at the Crystal on Decatur Street. I used to play there. It's always Lower Decatur, man. I'm telling you. It's a nexus of evil. Yeah. The portal to hell is right underneath Decatur Street. It's just been one goth bar after another. Yeah, for sure. That's what was the Dervish too, right? The Crystal? Yeah. It was the Dervish. It was Ruby Fruit Drunkle. What was it? The Old Crow at one point or something like that. Now it's Santos.

[02:33:45] The Vampire Bar. Yeah. Yeah. See, it all comes back. It all comes back. Full circle. See, Kim, this is a podcast about vampires. You were wrong. I was wrong. I'm glad to say that I don't think we were ever even really encouraged to... There was, you know, dark stuff was mentioned and things were wound into the narrative that were shitty and dark. I mean, there was a lot of sort of incorporating New Orleans stuff into what was happening because Lestat was supposed to be here in the city.

[02:34:15] So, like, after Katrina happened, for example, there was, like, some fictionalization of Katrina through the lens of Lestat, which is in very poor taste and shitty. Yeah. Murders that were happening. Like, a friend of mine was living in the city at the time and they were like, oh, you know, the vampires were like, look at this bloodstain on, like, Esplanade Avenue. That was me. You couldn't find the body in the trash can. Oh, my God. You know, my friend Jamie was like, I live down the street from that. Fuck off. Yeah. Yeah. Just stop.

[02:34:40] It's interesting that cults seem to, when they get to that level of harnessed power, either end up going towards sex or violence, which is what makes Kim's story so fascinating because neither thing happened. I'm really, you know, there's criticisms to be made, but I am proud of the folks of Chantau for, at least to our knowledge, really staying away from all of that. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:35:09] What did you think of Teacher Chin? Oh, I, you know, I just don't want to, I don't know how we get there. Like, how, and I think that was a question that I had about the story a little is like, what's the deal? How does someone become that? Sure. I guess. Where does that come from in childhood? Where does this come from as we grow? Do you have thoughts on that? Having, you know. How do you become a cult leader? Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess there's many ways you become a cult leader. Yeah, for sure.

[02:35:38] There's no wrong or right way. Buy my PDF e-book on how to become a cult leader. I think being a cult leader and being a cult member are two sides of the same coin. You know, it's, it's one person is wanting to live inside of a controlled frame and one person is wanting to architect a control frame. One wants to give up their power. One wants to have it all for various reasons, you know. Well, so from a psychology standpoint, how much do you think, um, teacher Chen became

[02:36:08] who he is as a result of his being orphaned so young? Yeah. Cause that my, what I was, you know, my assumption is I was writing my version of the story was, was sort of, I, I think this man was trying to create a family for himself. Sure. That's kind of how it sounded. Yeah. And I guess that's, that's my question, you know, you, cause they're kind of a benign cult leader in a sense. Yeah. Yeah. Which kind of makes him a little atypical. He did drag all these people all around the fucking world.

[02:36:37] Turns out he was just banging everybody, guys, girls, whatever. Look, I looked, I looked and I looked and I looked because I was like, is there something here? But like by all accounts. His God ring was a cock ring. Like it was, you know, just by all accounts, it, it, it seems like teacher Chen was kind of like asexual. Like he was never documented as being involved with anyone of any gender.

[02:37:03] And then, you know, at one point he was calling those two kids, like, you know, his kids, but his kids only because he was the presumed reincarnation and they were also reincarnated souls. And so like I, you know, I'm Joseph and you're the Christ child and you're the reincarnation of the Buddha. It felt like a very fundamental loneliness. And I wondered also, you know, listening to your episode, obviously no one here can

[02:37:32] speculate on the mental health of anyone. I mean, Edward is the most qualified and he's not going to because he is qualified. We shouldn't. And you don't do that when you're qualified. We don't diagnose anybody on the podcast. But I wonder, you know, like what's going on mental health wise also. Is some of this like, because he really did, based on the way you were telling it anyway, he seemed like not an unkind person. No. There was like a warmth there in a way. Yes. And a nerdy warmth. Yeah. Like.

[02:38:02] Like non-evil Keith Rennari. Right. Yeah. Right. Non-sexual, non-evil Keith Rennari. Yes. And tying it back to Edward's story, both of our stories happen around the same time in history. And as folks who were all alive at this time, I don't know if y'all were like me, but there was something about the year 2000 coming that made a lot of people stare at their mortality in ways that were unpredictable. Everyone has their Y2K story. Where were you?

[02:38:32] Oh, I was in my parents' bedroom watching the ball drop. That's it? That's it. It was me and my sister watching. You weren't in a bunker or? No. But I was really like. Did you turn the computers off? Yes. And I was very anxious about Y2K because I was an anxious kid who you and I have talked about this in the podcast, but you and I were both kids who were like aware that we were mortal beings that were going to die at ages that were developmentally inappropriate for that to happen. And what type of kid you become as a result of being aware I'm going to die and my parents

[02:39:01] are going to die and I'm going to have to watch my parents die. I was a highly anxious kid already. And the idea that I could die in my mid-teens because of this apocalypse. Yeah. Part of me was like, it's going to be fine. But part of me was like, but what if it's not? Oh, yeah. And so I can imagine that if I was doing that as a high schooler from the comfort of blue collar New Jersey, that all of these adults who might have had this same sort of mortal

[02:39:27] fear would do shit like what Teacher Chen was doing or what the Solar Temple was doing as a means of managing their terror about what happens when we die, what happens when this sim that we're in ends. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. So I think that some of what was happening with Teacher Chen was just that. Like someone who watched both parents die young be like, how do I sort this into boxes

[02:39:52] so that I can get up every day and use the bathroom and eat and brush my teeth? And what can I have hope for too? Because it felt like there was like a real searching for hope in a way, not so much with the Solar Temple perhaps. I'm not sure that they were very hope oriented group, it seems. Maybe it was the hope for what happens once you get to Sirius. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, it was also, they were the hope for mankind in terms of its continuation. Once the transit took place, like they had a responsibility from that point. Yeah.

[02:40:22] And then their goal shifted. But where were you, Y2K? I think I was probably also just in like- Live journal? A bedroom. Probably not on live journal because all the computers were turned off. Good for you. Yes. Well done. Smart girl. Yeah, because I would have been, let me think, 2000, I would have been in like ninth grade probably. And that would have been the year after my dad died. So it was kind of like probably a weird time for me generally. I was probably shut in a room just being like, oh God, the computer is my lifeline to the universe.

[02:40:51] What happens if computer no work no more? That's probably what I was worried about. I had yet to find the vampire cult. So we weren't there yet. Right. You didn't have a community of people to be like, what will we do? No Y2K vampires. Just a Y2K like anime message for you. Yeah. Right. A little different. We've had a few doomsdays kind of catch fire in our lifetime. Like the mind calendar. That was a big one for a while. You know, for sure. We were all like, what's going to happen? But I sort of feel like the Y2K thing not happening. Like I had it cleared out of my system.

[02:41:19] I was like, this is going to be a thing. People are going to say the world's going to end over and over again. And we're just going to have to deal with it. Where were you for Y2K? I was standing in a parking lot. I had played a show at a metal bar in Fat City called Zeppelins with Dax Riggs from Acid Bath. This is way cooler than either of our stories. They put what they thought was like two of the more popular bands together at the time.

[02:41:48] And we were going to have this massive Y2K. Where are you? Turned out to be quite gay. Sign me up. Finally. There was like no one there. There was like five people in the whole bar. Everybody was home. Freaking out. Afraid of the world ending. And I was just like, well, let's go watch the fireworks. And so we just stood out in the parking lot and that was it. We took photos and we were just like nothing, literally nothing is happening. And then we went back inside and got all our stuff and left.

[02:42:17] Aw, that's a good story. Yeah, yours is solid. Especially if Y2G. That would be great. If Y2G had just been like clock turns midnight and everybody who's straight is queer. What were we talking about in the car? Imagine how much easier my life would be. Oh my God. Like the world would be just, we, you know, we have these two cults happening around the same time. They both had Christ children. Yes, they did. Yes. Talk about centering yourself. Jesus.

[02:42:46] We both got Christ children. They both have space heaven. So we sort of like we did. I do think that there was something happening at this moment in time that these cults suggest. A lot of people were trying to manage, which is what is divine? What is mortality? What is going to come next? What is this next? How do we get off planet before the world ends? Because there's that little sneaking in of the sci-fi. Because I think we're also in that point in history, right?

[02:43:15] Where we were suddenly like, oh, hang on. We're breaking the earth. We are actively breaking the earth. When was Evansgate? That was like. It was around the same time. Just a couple of years prior. That's what I thought. I assumed they were going to do the same thing. Timu, Timu, Heavensgate. Yes. Yes. For sure. I mean, poor Teacher Chen having to like go on TV and be like, you know, we're our own thing and we're not going to do what they do. We're really not going to be drinking or eating any apple cider. We're not.

[02:43:45] There's no Reeboks. It's fine. We're good. We can't even kill bugs. You know, like we're not going to kill ourselves. Sweet Teacher Chen. Sweet Teacher Chen. I feel bad. The worst thing that happened was he burned his retinas. Yeah. How did you feel as a sort of disciple of cringe? Oh, yeah. I love that. That's going to go in my bio now. Disciple of cringe. How did you feel hearing about Teacher Chen's like staring into the sun and then making everybody shake their own hand and then be like, ta-da!

[02:44:15] The theater kid in me sees the theater kid in Teacher Chen. Right? Man, okay. Like, I just like, maybe it's bad, but my impulse is, I wanted to give that person a hug. I kind of did too. I'm just like, I'm sorry. Because there's so much making the best of it. Yes. And there's, it's an admirable quality in a way. Perhaps not applied in the way that it was applied. Right. But, you know, you got to hand it to someone who's, they're willing to admit they made a mistake. Yep. But they're still gonna try and kind of keep the dream alive. Yeah.

[02:44:45] You got, the show must go on. Yeah. The show must go on. And he completed the scene and then he was like, sorry guys, I know the play's garbage. But like, we did finish. We're doing our best. We're doing our best. Did you feel any, I feel like, I feel like we've all sort of mentioned like a little bit of empathy or like, you know, oh, come here guy about my cult leader. Did you feel any empathy for your cult leaders or were you just like these guys are fucking scale artists? No, not at all. No. No.

[02:45:12] And I'm, I'm usually looking for a space to feel empathy. There wasn't a much content available that would humanize these two assholes. And, you know, once you decide, okay, this guy who outed me named his kid the name I wanted for my kid. And so their kid's the Antichrist. Let's fly across the world and stab their baby. Like, you know. You lose some empathy at that point. Yeah.

[02:45:41] I'm just like, fuck your kidneys. Yeah. No. Yeah. If you believe in karma, this, this may actually be your karma coming back to me. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So getting into the judging portion of things a little bit. Celeste, what things did you like about story A? Was there anything that you were like, I hate this? Like any, any notes that help inform what your decision's going to be? Yeah. You know, it's so hard.

[02:46:07] The other times that I've, I've been a guest, not in the studio, but on this podcast, um, it's always tricky to judge because the stories are always good, you know, like, and you're both wonderful storytellers. Thank you. So it's, it's hard to make the decision. I think that what I'm looking for in a cult story, if I'm evaluating what is the better cult story, um, I'm looking for something that I can kind of relate to a little bit.

[02:46:34] You know, there's a, there's an in, um, and I think that weirdly, like there was sort of an in with Edward's story. Sure. Um, it's somewhat, you know, with your story also, but there's a sort of darkness to the solar temple. There's a, there's a deep mythos. It's connecting to this sort of Knights Templar stuff. Um, which I think also is why I was like, this doesn't feel like a nineties story. This feels very much like a weird Victorian Edwardian situation. Um, and so there's some texture there, which I really liked.

[02:47:02] Um, obviously I don't like the baby stabbing. No, like no one likes that. That's nice to hear. Thank you. Um, I'm not pro that. Great. Any of my haters want to try and suggest that I'm pro baby stabbing. It's not true, but I will say again, like when you're looking to evaluate how good a cult story was, you, you kind of want the guts, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately like picking a winner for any of our judges over the years, it's just which one resonated with you? Which one impacted you?

[02:47:32] Yeah. Even if it was uncomfortable. Which one freaked you out? You know? Like you don't have to actually like the story. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and the, none of this matters anyway. It's just like the, the. You say that now. I mean, you're not going to feed me to Gary the ghoul if I get the answer wrong. Well, and so, uh, same question for the, the Chantau story, like things that you liked, anything that you didn't like. Yeah. Well, I mean, so what I did very much like about the Chantau story was I just, I, it just felt like a fun little romp. Like, yeah.

[02:48:03] Sort of like a Muppet cult story. Pretty much. I was going to say it could have been like a Cartoon Network show. And I was like sort of into that. Yeah. Yeah. It, there was a sort of like hapless quality and, and it, and I wasn't expecting that. So it did kind of subvert my expectations as I'm listening to these files, you know? I'm like, Oh, okay. Right. This is adorable kind of. Yeah. And no one really had to get hurt. You know, some time was wasted. Uh, some people probably got a little bit pissed off, but you know, no babies were stabbed in the making.

[02:48:32] Right. Sure. Right. So those are the things I liked. Was there anything I didn't like? Um, I mean, you know, if I'm going to be brutally honest, it's good that no babies were stabbed, but the part of me that likes the visceral horror story was like, where's, where's the visceral? Something more salacious. Something scandalous. Which is, you know, it's weird. Cause I liked it. I liked that there wasn't that, but I was also like, you know, we got to the end and I was like, wait, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh. Everyone survived. I think that's fair.

[02:49:02] It was very funny though. Like you, you, you, you told it with humor. I feel like a story that needed to be told with humor. If people, if people didn't get the righteous gemstones, NIS of that moment on the Texas lawn of this man blinking into the sun, like you got to bring that to be, we all need that right now. So. Sure.

[02:49:50] Okay. And there were kids in these cults who had the entire world and framework for their future that they were taught just kind of yanked out from under them. And that has to be, Oh, it's very traumatizing. Like anyone who studied geometry understands that like, it only takes a small reposition to change the trajectory of something long enough timeline. Just a few degrees, you know? And like, Hey, you're not actually going to be rescued from this hellscape by a benevolent

[02:50:20] space God. Right. We're going to have to sit here and live in this shit with all of these shitty people. Yeah. Go get a job now. Yes. I mean, that was the story of my adolescence and my young adulthood. I was like, well, I'm probably going to be turned into a vampire pretty soon. So none of this matters. Yeah. And then I was like, Oh, and now I have to work at a call center. Oh, fuck. God damn it. Oh, yeah. Selling scam mobile phone plans to businesses. That was a real bad time. Oh, man. Jesus.

[02:50:50] You know, I do. I relate to that very much. Sure. And I did do not mean to minimize and say that that is not also horrific. No, we get it. I think we're doing as best as we can to sort of acknowledge like even within, you know, this gentler type of cult, like it's still a cult, which means these things happen. And again, like you said, one degree, two degrees. 100% change the trajectory of how you go on to exist. I would love to hear actually. I mean, I'm going to go do my research after. But what happened to these people? You know, where are they now?

[02:51:19] Language barrier is a big thing. If I could speak Taiwanese or, you know, anything other than English, I might have been able to find some more accounts. But the language barrier in some of the documentation, it does make it a challenge. I did like your gentle shade for like, but they had to all come to Texas. For some reason, we had to come here. It's just the idea that somebody else would adopt our American exceptionalism. And I was like, don't, don't encourage us. Like you're making this worse.

[02:51:48] Like, no, you, God will go other places. He in fact can be anywhere. That's kind of the God thing. Texas does not have a, we don't encourage Texas, please. They don't. They don't need the ego inflation. Yeah. The Texans seemed okay with it. They seemed like they were like, all right. Yeah. Sure. I mean, they pick up their shit. So, um, which cult would you have joined? You can only pick one. Oh, man. That's a tough one. I know. Oh, shit. Um, you know. Relative safety. Yeah. Or impending doom. Okay.

[02:52:18] So to be honest, if I'm really. Like scandal. If I'm putting myself in my head though, like, and I'm imagining being in the world at this time, both, both of these groups somehow come into my orbit. I got to say, I would probably wind up in the solar temple. Oh yeah. Because I think the pipeline is a little more. Yes. Like refined. You described yourself as a wilted rose emoji. Like, obviously, like it seems, sorry, not to like sorting hat you or anything, but like.

[02:52:46] No, but you're also a very intelligent person. And this, I think would have been a perfect mold, you know, just to kind of be a join to other intelligent people. And now you're all sharing this sacred knowledge. And yeah, it's the esoteric intellectualism will get me every time. Unfortunately, I still have to be hyper aware of that in every single conversation I have with an occultist. So yeah. Celeste, I have secret knowledge. It's very old.

[02:53:16] No, thank you. I'm good. But it would have worked on me. You know, it would have worked on me. Wilted rose emoji. Yeah. Edward, which cult were you joining? Definitely solar temple. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know, it's. Are you also a will to. They would have invited me to a hotel to listen to a lecture and then a dinner party. And, you know, they would have made me feel smart and made me feel chosen and made me feel like I was all the things that I already believe that I was. And I just needed a place for it.

[02:53:46] The world was built for me. Finally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's good for the ego. I wouldn't have been building fucking gazebos in Texas. That's for sure. Yeah. Sorry. Wearing 10 gallon hats. They are vegetarians though. They are vegetarians. That is where they would have got me for sure. I'd be like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Fuck meat eaters. Yeah. As much as I want to say that like, I like the kindness. I like the general idea of kindness of the Chantau cult.

[02:54:15] But I really am also like a wilted rose emoji. Was like desperate to find a group of people who were trying to build a better world. And I think the solar temple would have got me. Oh, man. Yeah. I'm also real bad at math. So like the numerology, sacred numerology part of the Chantau cult, I think I would have just flunked that entirely. So, yeah. Speaking of sacred numerology. Yeah.

[02:54:42] I read after I listened to your story, one of the things for whatever reason that inspired teacher Chen to pack up and move to Texas was that he saw the numbers 007 written into the sky. And he was like, fuck. Let's go. Turns out this was the summer that James Bond was released. And they were just doing a publicity stunt writing 007 in the sky.

[02:55:10] This guy, he either knew this or is just fucking crazy. They were so into chemtrails and clouds are sacred messages from Sky Daddy. Like, so. But yeah, it is an incredible detail. And like a little again, like you're saying, like, how did teacher Chen become this way? I don't believe that a college professor started this way. No.

[02:55:36] And you, Celeste, have seen this happen with people in a very real way that once you start becoming open to the idea that there are signs. Yes. From spirits and signs from the other side or other dimensions. Yeah. A certain type of person can start to see whatever they want, wherever they want in a way that is straight up, no shade. It's just delusion. Well, that's the thing I was about to say. It probably wouldn't even have mattered. Like, you probably could have gone up to teacher Chen and said, hey, my dude, here's the thing.

[02:56:06] 007's coming out. That's just a James Bond head. Here's Rosniss right over there. Like. And teacher Chen would have said, I don't. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Because the synchronicity, it doesn't matter what the practical, logical explanation is. The point is that at that moment in time, he saw that that means something in his cosmology. Correct. And it doesn't. Who fucking cares? Right. You know, and I mean, this is the thing and it's the problem with, with not the problem

[02:56:32] with magic, but like as a magic practitioner, as an occultist, you kind of have to live in a world that allows for that for, to understand how magic works and to make magic work. You have to be willing to say, yeah, that's a sign. But you have to ride that line where you're like, okay, it is a sign. It's meaningful to me. But maybe I don't make everybody go stand on a lawn in Texas. Right. You know, you gotta, you gotta ride the line.

[02:56:57] But it's also, it's not just the spiritualism or magic world because anybody who's into any major religion is similarly susceptible to like, and like you get into, you know, like say like a really devout Christian can get into the delusion of God's going to fix this for me. Jesus is going to take the wheel to the point where you're like, you know, it's like that old parable of like a man is drowning and he's asking for a boat and a boat comes by and he's like, no, no. And they're like, no, it's no good.

[02:57:23] And then a raft comes by and then a helicopter comes by and he's like, no, God's going to save me. And then God shows up and is like, I sent you a boat. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a helicopter. Like, what else do you want from me? I'm not pulling you out of the water myself. Like there's magical thinking. I think a good closing thought for this is that for anybody listening to Celeste story, listening to either cult story, any person, no matter how smart, rational, grounded, and logical they are at certain moments in their life are going to be susceptible to

[02:57:53] magical thinking through any framework. And that can be Christ is coming or Yahweh is coming or Allah is coming. You're my soulmate. Or Lestat is coming. You're my twin flame. Or you're my twin flame. Or like, and all of it is just mental gymnastics that we're all doing to try and manage the experience of being alive in a meat sack. Until it isn't. Until it isn't. Until we're on Sirius. There it is. Hopefully.

[02:58:22] And on that note, Celeste, please choose your winner for this episode. It's not going to shock you. I got to choose Solar Temple, man. It's all right. We've got to come. Two in a row. Two in a row. I keep putting my dead kids in the wrong episodes. I am not using my dead babies appropriately. Do you get like a prize if you hit like five in a row or something? Like is there a punch card situation? She takes me to Chipotle. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Yeah.

[02:58:52] All right. So I'm 0 for 2 this season. You're two in a row. I'm basking it. I'm going to fuck you up next episode. I can't wait. Celeste, thank you so much. Folks, please go to the show notes. You can find her TikTok, her Instagram, and her newly revamped website there. Revamped. And if you would like to work with this wonderful witch in any sort of way, spell work, tarot, maybe just talking about why you need to leave that vampire cult, she is available for said bookings. Yeah.

[02:59:20] Do not get a sock puppet account and slide into the DMs. Make sure you have an actual photograph. Yeah. Some history. Yeah. Voice verify. Yeah. Yeah. Please, please, please no more fake vampires. If you're a real vampire, I'm available. But no fake ones. We're done with that. Thank you. All right. Gary, turn off the VCR. And that's our show for this month. If you agree with Celeste's verdict, tell us why.

[02:59:48] And if you disagree, now's the time to make your appeal for a reversal. You can vote either way over at Human Fuckery Podcast on Instagram. If you like what you've heard and want to make sure we can keep making free content for your ear holes, please subscribe to the show itself or leave us a five-star review wherever you're streaming this audio from. It really does matter.

[03:00:19] And as always, if you hated what you've heard, my name is Andrew Tate and this has been another report from the inside of my prison cell. Until next episode, stay safe, keep it kind, and please stay weird.